Performatività e poesia Ingeborg Bachmann: Die gestundete Zeit

Abstract

According to Christa Wolf, Ingeborg Bachmann’s whole work can be considered as a “battlefield” of words. Through this metaphor Wolf underlines the extremely dynamic and “pugnacious” character of Bachmann’s literary language. This dynamic peculiarity lends itself to an analysis based on the concept of “performativity”, that aesthetic category whose huge resonance in the cultural studies and literary criticism of the last forty/fifty years has been briefly discussed in the first part of this essay. The analysis of the poem Die gestundete Zeit is aimed to show the fundamental role played by Bachmann’s performative conception of lyrical language. In this enigmatic text, as well as in many others of her poems, all the acts of enunciation converge in the deconstruction of some founding myths of western civilisation (Orpheus, Ulysses). No other “meaning” is to be found here except a repeated detachment from all the mythic dimensions at once evoked and destroyed by the text. Performing the demolition of such important topoi of our cultural code, that is language, in which Bachmann sees the main cause of human discontent and alienation, gives language itself a chance of rebirth.