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Abstract

Engaging with the historical and social context of late nineteenth-century post-unification Italy, this article offers a re-interpretation of Carlo Collodi's The Adventures of Pinocchio through the lens of hybrid materiality. Collodi's text blends multiple elements from such genres as novel, fairy tale, and myth, while Pinocchio himself traverses the boundaries between plant and animal. The hybridity of both the character and the narrative challenges the social order being constructed by the emerging Italian nation-state. Within the context of the rapid development of Italy's educational and cultural industries after unification, Pinocchio, as an uncanny and bio-rebellious figure, embodies the internal fissures and dissonance of Italian modernity. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben's notion of “vivir desvivíendose” as well as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's concept of “body without organs,” this article interprets Pinocchio as a desiring and disorganized body propelled by an excess of vitality. Within this theoretical framework, Pinocchio ceases to function as an allegorical figure of moral transformation, but rather becomes an emblem of radical potentiality that resists the normative teleology of development and unsettles the established boundaries of species, genre, and subjectivity.

Keywords

Giorgio Agamben, Carlo Collodi, Pinocchio, body without organs, hybridity

First Page

147

Last Page

159

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