Alessio Musio ( Milan ) The crisis of substance and the difficulty of decision Musil ’ s subject

The crisis of substance and the difficulty of making decisions are fundamental cores in Musil’s conception of the subject. In The Man Without Qualities subjectivity is the consequence of a precise ontology which deconstructs, in the manner of Mach, the very structure of reality. But Musil is not Mach, and he does not merely translate his categories into literature. There is a philosophical originality in his thought revealing a design in which the dissolution of substance and the unsaveability of the ego turn into the development of a paralysing “sense of possibility”. This essay restores an image of Musil fascinated by the theme of the undecidable, but also an acute critic of all the forms of ethical-political decisionism. 1. Metaphysical dissolution, sense of possibility and indifference of qualities The aim of this paper is to highlight the fundamental cores of Musil’s philosophical thought following the literary deconstruction of the metaphysics of the transcendental portrayed in The Man without Qualities: the crisis of substance and the difficulty of decision. Development of the theoretical link between these two themes proceeds in Musil through metaphors and literary figures, but the connection is philosophically undeniable. In a context that has no substance – or only relative substantiality – deciding becomes difficult. Reality is reduced to a series of possibles, creating a situation in which decision is always lacking in support, lacking anything which can make it somehow definitive. 1 Robert Musil, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (Reinbeck-Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1952), hsg. Adolf Frisé, translated by Sophie Williams and Burton Pike: Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities (Picador, 2011). From now on we will refer to this text by the abbreviation: Der Mann. We will always indicate first the page number of the original German edition, and in square brackets the page number of the English edition. If there is no indication in square brackets, this means that the passage does not appear in the English edition.