THE "HEALTHY" AND THE "SICK" 1: a reversal of perspective

"I must confess that diabetes was a great sweetness to me."(Italo Svevo, ‘La Coscienza di Zeno’)

Italian version at the link Il 'sano' e il 'malato': un ribaltamento di prospettiva

"Life resembles a little bit the disease that proceeds by crisis and lysis and has the daily improvement and deterioration. Unlike other diseases, life is always fatal." With these provocative words, taken from his book 'The Consciousness of Zeno', our great Italo Svevo invites us to review the paradigm of 'health' and 'disease' that we generally take for granted. According to him, in times of crisis and change, it is not so much the 'healthy' who survives, as the 'sick'. Let us first clarify what this writer meant by these terms, within his panorama of ideas.

The 'healthy', in Svevo's eyes, was the person perfectly integrated into the social cog of his time who, at the time of the novel in question, could be embodied by the figure of the perfect productive and pragmatic bourgeois. Translated to our days, the 'healthy' is the person who never asks himself questions and identifies himself pedantically with the attitudes, expectations and above all with the roles of today's society: the ambitious manager, the perfect working mother-diligent worker, the rebel a priori, the model student, the radical-chic and so on. In themselves, none of these characters is totally negative or deleterious: negative is not leaving us a space of authenticity and questioning of these roles. If on the one hand identifying ourselves with a pre-established model brings a certain amount of security, on the other hand, when paradigms change and society collapses, we find ourselves in a panic and anguish.

On the contrary, for Svevo, the 'sick' is the one who, either because of circumstances or because of a greater awareness, cannot or does not want to identify with the models and ideologies imposed by the dominant power, by the media or by centuries of stereotypes and clichés. In him or her there is a space for questioning which, although it may imply a certain amount of suffering and isolation, nevertheless gives him/her the possibility to think critically, grow in authenticity and remain open to transformation.

It continues at the link The 'pandemic' inside

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