The unprecedented catastrophe. From Svevo to Morselli, the narrow path of dystopia

The controversial closing scene of La coscienza di Zeno with an apocalyptic prophecy of the end of all civilization is the culmination of a long and complex self-diagnosis of social evil, of life as a material illness, pieced together by Svevo in his works. Guido Morselli in his Dissipatio H. G. seems to have drawn indirectly upon the tenets of Svevo's later thinking: analysis as a healing process, albeit deceptive and illusory, in relation to an existential malaise and the theory of explosive devices, including the denunciation of the destructive power of machines in an age of conflict and incessant war.