My essay aims to demonstrate that Neoliberalism exercises its art of government on forms of life turning their potentiality into adaptability. According with one of most influential reference thinker of Neoliberalism, Friedrich von Hayek, the spontaneous order of the market requests the constant adaptation of individuals to circumstances of which no one can be aware and can master. However, such adaptability – that could come from a certain negative philosophical anthropology – is the reverse side of the same potentiality theorized (...) by authors of Italian Thought like Agamben, Esposito and exponents of Post-Operaism. The paper aims to focus the condition for which such conversion of potentiality into adaptability is prevented. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to focus the use and development of some key concepts of the Italian contemporary thought – as, for example, General Intellect, Biopolitics, Political Theology, Economic Theology, Debt – in order to reflect on some critical moments and to identify new possibilities still open for the future. In this regard, in the final part of the text, particular attention is given to Giorgio Agamben’s thought. A critique of the current global order of neoliberalism is the (...) main purpose of this analysis, focused on very different reflections, which share the necessity to avoid theories separate from history. (shrink)

The critical note discusses the essay Italia senza nazione. Lingue, culture, conflitti tra Medioevo ed era contemporanea edited by Antonio Montefusco, by using the keyword «extroversion» to explore the central mechanisms defining the «Italian difference». After providing a critical review of the main theoretical standpoints of the essays collected in the book – all marked by the denial of strong identity pressures – I explored some paradigmatic figures that outline the main features of the Italian Thought. The note highlights some (...) political perspectives of Italian peculiarity, compared with a present time characterized by a rise of nationalism. (shrink)

In this article I will follow Agamben as he conceptualises the space of the threshold. I will do so by investigating Agamben’s reading of Paul in the book Il tempo che resta, with particular attention to hope and love. I will show how Paul’s understanding of hope leads Agamben to propose an experience of life the productivity of which is not based on the possession and conceptualisation of work as norm.

Nietzsche, who defined nihilism as “the most unwelcome guest”, traced its origin to Socratic intellectual ethics and Platonic idealism. In the works of some contemporary Italian philosophers, the arcane of nihilism can also be found in the theoretical and geopolitical structure of the Mediterranean: the proximity of the One and the Many, land and sea, the city and the archipelago. Perhaps nihilism is too ingrained in the Mediterranean’s inner structure to be eradicated, yet in the history of Mediterranean civilizations it (...) is possible to distinguish between active and passive nihilism. The active nihilism of Italian Renaissance, with its emphasis on fortuna, had had the same energizing effects that the doctrine of Grace would have on the Protestant Reformation. Conversely, the passive nihilism of today’s political, economic, or religious fundamentalism, which reduces human activity to the fulfillment of a totally transcendent and already perfected “plan”, turns the world, veritably, into nothing. (shrink)

The critical note aims to analyse the influence, the points of contact between Gilles Deleuze and what is now called Italian Thought. The discussion is developed starting from some precise issues taken from the book: Effetto Italian Thought, edited by Enrica Lisciani-Petrini e Giuseppina Strummiello, pub- lished in 2017 by Quodlibet. The main questions addressed are: 1. In what sense can the Italian Thought be defined as an actual thought? Collecting many ideas from the Enrica Lisciani-Petrini’s postface, we will try (...) to argue that an actual thought must be configured as a philosophy of dispositives. The Deleuzian work examined in this regard will be the text of a conference that Deleuze dedicates to Michel Foucault: What is a dispositive? 2. All the heterogeneity of Italian Thought will emerge from the comparison between Roberto Esposito and Toni Negri about what should be understood by affirmative biopolitics. (shrink)

This article discusses an interesting volume edited by Isabella Adinolfi and Laura Candiotto. According to the authors, emotions and philosophy are inseparable. In particular according to Marco For- tunato’s point of view, indignation is possible and necessary because it is based on the vocation of the man for the criticism of the existence. Like Bartleby, man is an animal which “would prefer not to”. Nevertheless, it would be better if we knew the reason of our opposition.

During his research, Agamben has always made an extensive use of authors such Walter Benjamin and Martin Heidegger, retrieving their lexicon, their speculative figures and their concepts. In his reflections on the relationship between history and language, Agamben comes to identify unusual comparisons between the two. Therefore the paper aims to retrace the speculative ground which makes such comparisons possible. More precisely it intends to show not only how these comparisons are hardly sustainable but, above all, how in the recent (...) development of Agamben’s thought the figure of Heidegger plays an increasingly marginal role. (shrink)

In recent years, Italian Thought has become an influential school of philosophical reflection. This explains the reputation of thinkers like Agamben, Negri, and Esposito far beyond the borders of Italy. Not only has Italian Thought called attention to the crisis of Derridian deconstructive thought in recent years and replaced it with a biopolitical approach, but it also attests to contemporary political issues of key urgency. I aim to clarify this diffusion process with the specific case of Belgium, where two extra (...) factors explain the rise of Italian Thought. The neoliberalisation of the university system renders Belgian universities particularly dependent on Anglo-Saxon research trends, while the political and economic developments of Belgium are a key example of the issues Italian Thought emphasizes. (shrink)

This essay analyzes different genealogies of the so-called Italian difference, highlighting the role of Niccolò Machiavelli’s thought. Through his work, indeed, different authors, such as Roberto Esposito, Antonio Negri and Remo Bodei, describe a different line of political thought, alternative to the modern Hobbesian one. The aim is to highlight, through the tensions among these different genealogies, the space for a renovated debate on the relation between thought and politics, theory and praxis.

This essay aims to demonstrate that the concepts of conflict and prophecy play a key role in the thought of Mario Tronti and Sergio Quinzio – even though they are interpreted in a different way. Tronti describes them as “extreme think- ing and careful acting”, remaining “within and against” the mainstream sociopolitical system. Quinzio, instead, interprets conflict and prophecy as spes contra spem, “hoping against hope” ; hence, he observes the present lucidly, remaining tenaciously faithful to the promise of the (...) Second Coming of Christ. Tronti, rethinking some fundamental aspects of the Quinzio’s reflections, connects clearly the Marxian conception of the world, on the one hand, with the theological-political one, and, on the other hand, with the messianic one; in this way, it reveals itself as a resource of meaning, from which even today we can draw. (shrink)

The starting point of this essay is what Massimo De Carolis called «anthropological paradox». It defines human condition in terms of an opposition between two antithetic sides: the openness to the contingency and the need to be protected from it. My purpose will be to analyse the anthropological paradox based on authors as Saussure, Benveniste, Barthes, in order to combine the structuralist conception of language with a theory of institutions and philosophical anthropology. To this end, I will refer to some (...) Italian authors such as Virno, Cimatti and Agamben. This debate will give us the opportunity of understanding the ambivalence of our institutions as a consequence of the ambivalence of the institution sans analogue: the “langue”. It will be shown how natural- historical languages allow for, on one hand, the emancipation from the reign of natural necessity and, on the other hand, the openness to the space in which the subjectivity freedom emerges and, at the same time, is limited. (shrink)

Starting point of the paper is the recent book titled Effetto Italian Thought. The paper discusses what it means for a philosophical theory to have an effect and proposes a distinction between ‘having’ an effect and ‘being’ an effect. Then, it considers Esposito’s thesis according to which the Italian Thought has produced a new turn in contemporary philosophy: from the linguistic turn of the Twentieth Century to a biological turn. The paper takes into account three different positions about the problem (...) of life. It suggests, in conclusion, that the Italian Thought has relevant effects on the philosophical development of this topic, but it is not an effect, because it is still challenging, as most of contemporary philosophy, with the still dominant language-centered paradigm inherited from the Twentieth Century. (shrink)

This paper aims to offer a discussion of concepts of “life” and “politics” as founding categories of the Italian Thought exposed by Roberto Esposito in his books Pensiero Vivente and Da Fuori. The analyses involve the concept of “cultural studies”, both from a content and methodological point of view. Regarding content, through the analysis of authors located in the Italian panorama of the second half of the nineteenth century, identified as a part of the “Early Italian Cultural Studies”, the paper (...) proposes a possible complement to the genealogical reconstructions of Esposito. At a methodological level, the paper discusses the possibility of integrating the concept of “cultural studies” to that of “politics” as a category through which to observe and analyze the Italian philosophical tradition “from outside”. (shrink)

Italian Thought is today a field of philosophical thinking crossed by various lines of research. Above a common base composed by machiavellian thought of political conflict and by studies around biopolitics, the main partition inside this theoretical space seems to concern the form of political subject and, even more, the relationship with power. In this way is pos- sible to recognize, on the one hand, the tradition of workerism that theorize, as the aim of political practice, the destitution of power’s (...) apparatuses, and on the other, a gramscian line of thought, which looks for new modes of articulation between conflict and institutions through a thinking of power as a factor of regulation and, perhaps, emancipation. (shrink)

Decostruzione o biopolitica? aims to bring to light both differences and affinities – in their problematic interplay – between deconstruction and biopolitics, thus lifting the smokescreen of French Theory as a unified field of research and revoking its role as an unambiguous and functional category of the history of philosophy. At the same time, this collected edition points towards the work that ITN has been doing for the past decade: retracing the roots of contemporary Italian philosophy and the emergence of (...) Italian biopolitics as a prominent topic in international debates. The struggle between deconstruction and biopolitics becomes then a symbol for the complex genealogies that can be re-activated towards the construction of a thought intended as a conflictual practice. (shrink)

The so-called “Italian Thought” is commonly supposed to be a philosophical tradition which has a contentious relationship with modernity. We should consider to what extent this relationship draws up an alternative. Is the Italian Thought another way to modernity, or another modernity itself? What is at stake here is the meaning of the idea of “modernity”. Talking about the Italian tradition as an “altermodernity”, we suggest to look at the modernity not as a mere time segment, but as such a (...) timing, in which several time models can co-exist. This theoretical shift aims to set the time free, acknowledging it is rooted in the irregular nature of the living being. At the same time, from this perspective, we are invited to re-consider the political vocation of the Italian Thought, due to its capacity to develop new meanings for the issues of the philosophical tradition in order to understand actuality as a living reality. (shrink)

The essay puts the concept of the world at the center of the Kantian foundation of cosmopolitanism. Since this concept is deeply analyzed in the critic of the cosmological idea, we analyze this criticism and highlight the logic of the idea of the world, which is based on concepts of relationship, dependence and series, but, at the same time, has an antinomic nature. The cosmological logic is also fundamental to the other meanings of the world, including the cosmopolitan one. This (...) logic is not just a conceptual analysis, but is rooted in the physical and psychic constitution of human existence, which opens up to the Whole, feels and thinks about an unlimited dimension around itself, but always from a determined and limited position. Reconsidering cosmological logic, on the analytical and existential level, can be a way of strengthening the philosophical foundations of cosmopolitanism. (shrink)

In this article I propose a conception of “civil religion” to bridge the tension between immanence and transcendence that has characterized Italian Theory to date. This tension is due to the two central components of Italian Theory, namely, the discourse on biopolitics and the discourse on political theology. In what follows I argue that this conception of “civil religion” originates with Machiavelli and is functional to his vision of democratic constitutionalism. I propose a new genealogy of this conception drawn from (...) the history of the reception of Alfarabi and Averroes in western political thought. The article explains that the difference between civil religion and political theology consists in the former maintaining the priority of worldly happiness over otherworldly salvation. The article concludes with a reflection on how this concept of worldly happi- ness can serve to contrast the “biopolitical” pursuit of private happiness. (shrink)

Reflecting on the Italian Thought between globalization and tradition implies thinking on the tension, spatial and temporal, which exists between these two terms. The first part of the article deals briefly with the spatial one, while in the other parts my aim is to reflect on the “temporal” boundaries of the Italian Thought. Starting with a brief consideration of two main critiques addressed to this category, I will outline a possible answer to the question on how is it possible to (...) keep the Italian Thought far from a “neutralization” both political and theoretical. (shrink)