The Usefulness of the Useless

Contents Introduction by Nuccio Ordine Part One The Useful Uselessness of Literature 1. "He who has not is not” 2. Knowledge without profit is useless! 3. What's water? An anecdote from David Foster Wallace 4. Colonel Buendía's little gold fish 5. Dante and Petrarch: literature should not be subservient to profit 6. The literature of utopia and golden chamber pots 7. Jim Hawkins: treasure hunter or numismatist? 8. The Merchant of Venice: the pound of flesh, the kingdom of Belmont and the hermeneutics of Socrates 9. Aristotle: learning has no practical usefulness 10. Pure theorist or philosopher-king? Plato's contradictions 11. Kant: the pleasure of beauty is disinterested 12. Ovid: nothing is more useful than the useless arts 13. Montaigne: "nothing is useless,” "not even uselessness itself” 14. Leopardi the flâneur: the choice of the useless against the utilitarianism of a "proud and foolish age” 15. Théophile Gautier: "what is useful is ugly” as "the jakes” 16. Baudelaire: a useful man is a squalid one 17. John Locke against poetry 18. Boccaccio: "bread” and poetry 19. García Lorca: it is unwise to live without the madness of poetry 20. The madness of Don Quixote, the hero of the useless and the gratuitous 21. The Facts of Coketown: Dickens's criticism of utilitarianism 22. Heidegger: it is hard to understand the useless 23. Uselessness and the essence of life: Zhuang-zi and Kakuzo Okakura 24. Eugène Ionesco: the useful is a useless burden 25. Italo Calvino: the gratuitous is revealed to be essential 26. Emile Cioran and Socrates' flute Part Two The University as Company The Student as Client 1. The disengagement of the state 2. The student as client 3. Universities as companies and teachers as bureaucrats 4. Hugo: the crisis can be beaten not by cutting the culture budget but by doubling it 5. Tocqueville: "easy beauties” and the perils of commercial democracies 6. Herzen: timeless merchants 7. Bataille: the limits of utility and the vitality of the superfluous 8. Against the professionalizing university: John Henry Newman 9. What is the use of dead languages? John Locke and Antonio Gramsci 10. The planned disappearance of the classics 11. The encounter with a classic can change your life 12. Libraries at risk: the sensational case of the Warburg Institute 13. The disappearance of historic bookstores 14. The unexpected utility of the useless sciences 15. What do you get from a theorem? From Euclid to Archimedes. 16. Poincaré: "science does not study nature” to look for "utility” 17. "Knowledge is an asset that can be transmitted without becoming poor” Part Three Possession Kills: Dignitas Hominis, Love, Truth 1. The voice of the classics 2. Dignitas hominis: the illusion of wealth and the prostitution of knowledge 3. Loving in order to possess is the death of love 4. The possession of truth is the death of truth Bibliography