Southern Friendships: Italian and Latin American Souths As Profaning Spaces in Literature

What is the relationship between reason and affection regarding identities? Is an always-reasonable identity possible? Or is it just an intellectual (Habermasian) utopia? Through the analysis of Leonardo Sciascia’s Il giorno della civetta (The day of the owl, 1960) and Jorge Luis Borges' "El Sur" ("The South", 1956), this essay performs an analytical reversal since it is not a theory (Giorgio Agamben’s What is an apparatus?) the analyzer of the novels; instead, the characters’ perspectives, from an Italian and Latin American southern situation, call into question Agamben’s ideas. This methodological reversal strives to give voice and visibilize the cultural agency of the Italian "Mezzogiorno" and the Latin American "Sur" instead of interpreting it, as Franco Cassano affirms, as the topos of backwardness or exoticness. The south(s) become(s) hence an analytical possibility instead of an entity to be analyzed. The article calls into question Agamben's notion of friendship as the “sharing of the sweetness of being” through the experiences of Sciascia's and Borges' characters; far from being only "sweet" and "unqualifiable" as Agamben suggests, southern friendships are, instead, hyper-qualifiable and it is through intense experience (sweet and bitter) that friendship is historically possible. In terms of comparative analysis and international politics, this article wants to put into contact the souths of the world through aesthetics (literature). One of the questions that guides this presentation is why don't the souths of the world get togehter instead of only complaining about their situations compared to the global norths and trying to imitate them?