Ezra Pound’s Malatesta Cantos: From amor mundi to amor fati
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4:30pm-6:00pm Wednesday 17 September 2025
William Macmahon Ball Theatre, Old Arts Building
University of Melbourne, Parkville Campus
Abstract:
In this talk I propose a reading of Ezra Pound’s “Malatesta” Cantos, connecting them with Pound’s imagist and vorticist poetics and with questions of political philosophy. I argue that Pound’s approach to Malatesta reveals an original reception and working through of themes that characterize Tuscan political and philosophical thought, from the first reception of radical Aristotelianism in Cavalcanti and Dante to the subsequent reception of radical Platonism in Renaissance humanists. I contextualize Pound’s adherence to fascism both in relation to the motif of the Renaissance state as a “work of art” (Burkhardt, Nietzsche) and in relation to the civic republican tradition and its crisis from the 13th to the 15th centuries. My hypothesis is that the overall theme of the Malatesta Cantos is the Machiavellian one of the conflict between fortuna and virtù and its resolution in an astral theology whose central principle is amor fati.
Speaker bio:
Miguel Vatter is Professor of Politics at Deakin University since 2021. His areas of research are history of political thought, biopolitics, and political theology. His previous book is Living Law. Jewish Political Theology from Hermann Cohen to Hannah Arendt (Oxford 2021). His forthcoming book with EUP is Machiavelli and the Religion of the Ancients.
This talk will also be the launch of CRAM's newest research group on Philosophy and Poetry, to be introduced before the seminar by Professor Andrew Benjamin.