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On 17 October 1910, allegedly his mother’s birthday, Carlo Michelstaedter aged 23 put a pistol to his head and committed suicide. Only a few days before, he had completed a doctoral dissertation – the book here under review. In it, he rigorously dissects the human condition and arrives at his devastating conclusion about the path Western civilisation had embarked upon, prefiguring the horrors that would soon engulf Europe. “A hangman, when executing a man does not think that he, a man, is killing his own kind, and does so without knowing why he is killing him . . . the indifferent office that he holds and which one never discusses, a task which gives him the means to live and makes him an unconscious instrument” [author’s italics].

Reading Persuasion and Rhetoric is an adventure. At times, the experience reminds one of that recent movie, Gloomy Sunday, about a hit Hungarian song that leads to a wave of suicides. But Michelsteadter I suspect would have despised any claims to a tragic life.

Although portentous and solipsistic, it is also the work of a young man with a spirited imagination and a feisty wit. During the course of his painstaking analysis he describes chemical experiments and produces mathematical equations for such concepts as ‘security’ (lim c1x = ∞ ); we travel in a hot air balloon with Plato, and enjoy a bottle of wine after dinner with Hegel. Through the illustrations he chooses, it is clear Michelstaedter had a poet’s perspicacity and a painter’s eye (he was in fact working on a portrait of his mother when he killed himself).

Poetic in nature, acutely sensitised to language, exhorting us in the second person, he often reads more like Rilke than a conventional philosopher. Consider: “all men die with you – your death is a comet that does not falter. You turn to god? – there is no god, god dies with you”. It is a relentless process of logical reduction, a precursor to Jean-Paul Sartre’s quest for individual authenticity. His is a search for self-sufficiency that finds no sustainable answer. A terrifying loneliness stalks the book. As Joseph Conrad would later put it, “we live as we dream – alone”. What persuades us to keep on living are illusions; in Michelsteadter’s view these are surreptitiously dehumanising.

His writing is commonly described as idiosyncratic or iconoclastic, and it is devilishly difficult to translate. He often plays with the etymological root of a word, and the text is littered with references to Ibsen and Sophocles, and numerous Greek quotations and philosophical concepts for which there are no true translations. Despite several editions in Italian, German and French, it is only recently that Michelsteadter has entered English, and how extraordinary that it should be the University of Kwazulu-Natal Press that enjoy the honour.

Michelsteadter’s style, particularly in Part One: Of Persuasion strikes a pose full of youthful ostentation, as can be seen from how sharply the prose contrasts with the lucidity of his footnotes in the same section. He has a graduate’s fondness for the particularly cryptic pronouncements of Heraclitus.

Part Two: On Rhetoric is more accessible to the non-specialist reader, and eventually ascends into a mordant polemic on industrialised society. It is also still startlingly germane, touching with searing clarity on the position of women, the way children are educated and the concept of money.

Modern too, is his psychological method. “If the mouth no longer enjoys what it knows to be good for the body, but rather wants to repeat its enjoyment even if it is damaging to the body, then it is no longer my mouth, but a mouth that wants to live for itself” [author’s italics]. This could be from Deleuze and Guattari in the 1980s.

An Italian Jew in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Michelsteadter’s crisis is sometimes read as that of the assimilated alien. Whereas the oppressed and the oppressor know their place, those accepted – or at least tolerated, but who still do not belong, do not.

Written nearly a hundred years ago, for their stark relevance to today, given our own situation, it is worth quoting the following two passages

“socialism which, maintaining the forms, the name and the structure of arguments and all the phraseology of Marx, has reduced his negation of bourgeois society to an element to reform within bourgeois society . . . According to the degree to which the heads of the party needed bourgeois society and, taking advantage of the power that the party bestowed on them . . . is more bourgeois than the bourgeoisie itself”

“Must men love each other? Must each one of us sacrifice his future for his companion? Or must the bloody battle start again with each one having to conquer his own future for himself, even at the risk of losing it?
The insecure masters and the insecure freemen look at each other in terror, filled with nostalgia: the former for the assured dominion, the latter for the security of their chains.”

Michelsteadter’s treatise unfolds as a kind of hermeneutic nihilism. In the end, his creative genius could not withstand the rigours conclusions of his formidable intellect. It is a rewarding book, on many levels well worth reading; and as Giuseppe Stellardi says in his introduction, “We won’t die by doing so.”