Autism, associated with very high levels of sociopathy, is the core of international late modernism. There is no room for a humanitarian/humanitarian vision of the world: the egopathic egomania of modernism’s aesthetic ontology undergoes, with late modernism, a shift toward hatred/resentment (anger as a declaration of identity) and aggression—as S. Tordjman argues (Aggressive behavior: a language to be understood, in L’Encéphale, XLVIII, 2022, 4-13)—toward readers and professionals, inadequate and ignorant (in the current statistical 90% of our sociological study on disinterest in all forms of other people’s art): subversion and desecration. The fierce battle. The “death of the reader”—beyond Berardinelli’s literary nonsense—was recognized by Bruno Gentili in 1984 (Poetry and the Public in Ancient Greece); the “death of poetry” has been recognized since 2000 by the millennial neo-avant-gardes and by business economics (unknown to professional literati) with constant reports on the hypertrophy of the publishing market for “poetry” and, subsequently, for fiction (resulting, in 2024, in a maximum of 1 copy/month sold by a minority of volumes promoted by marketing and literary agencies); the “anachronism of poetry” as a ποίησις has been recognized by artistic late modernism, which rejects every form of modernism prevalent among hundreds of mediocre writers (who emerge with the mafia-backed assistance of the Mondazzoli regime), epigones, of epigones, of epigones (epigonism cubed by Italian lyric/elegiac writers). Why the autistic choice? In autism, the εγώ is replaced by the αὐτός: “social interaction” does not occur and every emotion is erased from the neural chain; in late modernism, the εγώ is replaced by the αὐτός: “social interaction” occurs exclusively in the πρᾶξις (the seductive fascism of the old ποίησις is neutralized), with its riot-texts, and every emotion is erased in the financial/mathematical organization of its “art” form, without egomaniacal, romantic creationist drifts. For C. Silverman (Fieldwork on another planet: social science perspectives on the autism spectrum, in Biosocieties, III, 2008, 325–341), A. Harmon (How about not “curing” us, some autistics are pleading, in The New York Times, 20 December 2004) or E. Pellicano/J. den Houting (Annual Research Review: Shifting from “normal science” to neurodiversity in autism science, in Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, and Allied Disciplines, 63/4, 2022, 381-396): «[…] Autistic neurodiversity is another way of organizing and perceiving the world […]». We assert our “neurodiversity” toward the mental model of the modern aesthetic ontology of 21st-century modernists and our rejection of the neo-consumerist structure, founded on the concept of dissatisfaction of emotion/desire (Z. Bauman), the basis of the logic of epigonistic 21st-century modernism. We fail to understand how the (fake) Italian literary critic is unaware of M.K. Belmonte’s essay (“Does the Experimental Scientist Have a “Theory of Mind”?”, in Review of General Psychology, XII, 2008, 192-204) on the neuroscientific relationship between theory of mind and literature: […] The concept of a “theory of mind” was widely used in developmental and evolutionary psychology and neuroscience in the wake of Premack and Woodruff’s 1978 article “Does the Chimpanzee Have a Theory of Mind?” and Baron-Cohen, Leslie, and Frith’s 1985 follow-up “Does the Autistic Child Have a ‘Theory of Mind?” The subsequent confluence of cognitive science and narrative theory brought “theory of mind” to literary critics. Only a very small set of people, however, have read both the neuropsychological and the literary texts on “theory of mind”; as a result of this lack of interdisciplinary expertise, the term has acquired subtly differing senses in the literary and neuroscientific communities. Because of this terminological slippage, neuroscientists and literary critics who argue in terms of “theory of mind” may believe that they are speaking with each other when they actually are speaking past each other. If proponents of cognitive literary theory are to realize the interdisciplinary fusion to which we aspire, then we must ensure that we speak in the same idiom […]. Italian literary critics are trained to count the flaws in Pascoli’s asshole and to question the use of metaphor in the texts of artists who don’t understand the meaning of the word semiotics. Italian artists—with very rare exceptions—wonder, bewildered (citizens of Malawi), why another artist formulated an aesthetic theory before writing (inadvertently declaring that he wrote ad cazzum). International late modernism rejects ignorant literary criticism and artists unfit to participate in the dialogue of art assemblies, considered, beyond the “interpretation” of the term, to be a mere metaphor.

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Ivan Pozzoni

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