Stregato dalla luna. Note sul diario dal carcere di Oskar Panizza, poeta blasfemo

ABSTRACT - The article examines the diary written in the Bavarian prison of Amberg by the writer Oskar Panizza, who in 1895 was sentenced to one year of imprisonment for blasphemy under §166 of the 1871 German Penal Code. Through an exemplary trajectory – one that seems to anticipate Foucaultian figures such as the delinquent, the political monster, and the madman - Panizza offers an insider’s account of the mechanisms and practices of power. He does so within the German context, where the transition from the model of sovereignty to that of discipline and then to biopolitics appears rather uncertain, inconsistent, and ultimately incomplete. Yet it remains sufficiently operative that Panizza, who died in an asylum in 1921, could not escape its grip.