Machinic Bodies and Tearing Fabrics: An Immanent Reading of the Opening Situation of La cognizione del dolore by Carlo Emilio Gadda

This article proposes an immanent and transcendental empiricist reading of a passage from the novel La cognizione del dolore by Carlo Emilio Gadda, drawing on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, particularly Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. Rejecting approaches that apply theory externally, the analysis begins from the internal functioning of Gadda’s language, including its rhythms, metaphors, ruptures, and assemblages, in order to demonstrate how the work produces a critique of normative structures, surveillance systems, and the desire for order. This critique operates not through representation but through the material composition of flows. The article examines the sensory and technical dispositifs of the ideal guard, the bodies that fail and resist functionalization, and the way language, like the social fabric, unravels through productive tears. The analysis reveals a structural affinity between Gadda’s language and Deleuzian concepts such as the body without organs, the desiring-machine, and the line of flight. It also proposes a methodological cartography that can be applied to immanent literary analysis.

Keywords:
Carlo Emilio Gadda; Gilles Deleuze; rhizome; body without organs; Italian literature; exception; transcendental empiricism