“Nothing is more useful than this art that has no utility.” – OVID

“To know what is useful, we must know what is useless.” – ZHUANGZI

“Many times, the zeal that people put into activities that seem trivial, with no other purpose beyond entertainment or the satisfaction of solving a difficult problem, turns out to be essential in a context that no one had anticipated, with consequences that lead far away. This applies to poetry and art, just as it does to science and technology.” – ITALO CALVINO

Nuccio Ordine wrote the perfect book for a good year: We wish you a little uselessness! – J. BIRNBAUM, director of Le Monde des Livres, 4.1.2013

We are grateful to N. Ordine (an excellent editor, notably for his acclaimed works and the publication of the writings of Giordano Bruno) for his manifesto, The Utility of the Useless. – F. SAVATER, El Pais

It is not true, even in times of crisis, that only what is a source of profit is useful. In our commodity democracies, there are some kinds of knowledge that have the reputation of being “useless,” yet which in reality reveal an astonishing utility.

In this passionate text, Nuccio Ordine draws our attention to the usefulness of the useless and the uselessness of the useful. Through the reflections of great philosophers (Plato, Aristotle, Zhuangzi, Pico della Mirandola, Montaigne, Giordano Bruno, Campanella, Bacon, Kant, Tocqueville, Newman, Poincaré, Heidegger, Bataille) and great writers (Ovid, Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Alberti, Ariosto, Thomas More, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Milton, Lessing, Leopardi, Hugo, Gautier, Dickens, Herzen, Baudelaire, Stevenson, Okakura Kakuzō, García Lorca, Márquez, Ionesco, Calvino, Foster Wallace), Nuccio Ordine shows how the obsession with possession and the worship of utility ultimately drain the human spirit, destabilizing and jeopardizing schools and universities, art and creativity, as well as fundamental values such as dignita hominis, love, and truth.

Abraham Flexner, in his exciting text, which is translated for the first time in Greece, reminds us that only the sciences teach us the usefulness of the useless. Without the free and the pointless, suffocating those luxuries deemed unnecessary, it is very hard for homo sapiens to make humanity more humane.

“Observe the world bustling through the streets. They do not look right or left, anxious, with their eyes fixed on the ground like dogs. They move straight ahead, but always without looking in front of them, because they cover a route already known to them, mechanically. This happens in all the major cities of the world. The modern man, the cosmopolitan, is the busy man who has no time, who is imprisoned by necessity, who does not understand how a thing can be useless; who does not understand how in reality, the useful can be a useless, oppressive burden.

If we do not understand the usefulness of the useless, we will not understand art; and a country that does not understand art is a country of slaves or robots, a country of unhappy people, people who do not laugh and do not smile, a country without spirit; where there is no humor, where there is no laughter, there is anger and hatred.” – IONESCO

BIOGRAPHICAL DETAILS: Nuccio Ordine (Diamante, Italy, b. 1958) is a professor of Italian literature at the University of Calabria. His three studies concerning Giordano Bruno have been translated into eleven languages, including Chinese, Japanese, and Russian: La caballa dell ’ asino (1996), La soglia dell ’ ombra (2009), and Contro II Vangelo armato (2009). He has also published: Teoria della novela e teoria del riso nel Cinquecento (2009), Les rendez-vous des savoirs (2009), Trois couronnes pour un roi (2011, Bompiani, 2014), Les portraits de Gabriel Garcia Márquez (2012). He is a fellow at Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies and at the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung, and a visiting professor at various research centers and universities in the USA (Yale, NYU) and Europe (EHESS, ENS, Paris-IV Sorbonne, CESR in Tours, IEA Paris, Warburg Institute in London, Max Planck Berlin). In 2010, he was awarded honorary membership by the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and in 2012, he received an honors causa degree from the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul in Porto Alegre. In 2009, he was honored in France with the Academic Phoenix, and in 2012, the President of the French Republic awarded him the Legion of Honor. In 2010, the President of the Italian Republic appointed him a Knight of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic. In France, he co-directs with Yves Hersant three series of classics (Les Belles Lettres) and in Italy the series “Classics of European Literature” (Bompiani). He writes articles for Corriere della Sera.