Download or read book Radical Thought in Italy written by Paolo Virno and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides an original view of the potential for a radical democratic politics today that speaks not only to the Italian situation but also to a broadly international context. First, the essays settle accounts with the culture of cynicism, opportunism and fear that has come to permeate the Left. They then proceed to analyze the new difficulties and possibilities opened by current economic conditions and the crisis of the welfare state. Finally, the authors propose a series of new concepts that are helpful in rethinking revolution for our times. Contributors include Giorgio Agamben, Massimo De Carolis, Alisa Del Re, Augusto Illuminati, Maurizio Lazzarato, Antonio Negri, Franco Piperno, Marco Revelli, Rossana Rossanda, Carlo Vercellone and Adelino Zanini.
Download or read book Insubordinations written by and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Living Thought written by Roberto Esposito and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2012-12-31 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The work of contemporary Italian thinkers, what Roberto Esposito refers to as Italian Theory, is attracting increasing attention around the world. This book explores the reasons for its growing popularity, its distinguishing traits, and why people are turning to these authors for answers to real-world issues and problems. The approach he takes, in line with the keen historical consciousness of Italian thinkers themselves, is a historical one. He offers insights into the great "unphilosophical" philosophers of life—poets, painters, politicians and revolutionaries, film-makers and literary critics—who have made Italian thought, from its beginnings, an "impure" thought. People like Machiavelli, Croce, Gentile, and Gramsci were all compelled to fulfill important political roles in the societies of their times. No wonder they felt that the abstract vocabulary and concepts of pure philosophy were inadequate to express themselves. Similarly, artists such as Dante, Leonardo Da Vinci, Leopardi, or Pasolini all had to turn to other disciplines outside philosophy in order to discuss and grapple with the messy, constantly changing realities of their lives. For this very reason, says Esposito, because Italian thinkers have always been deeply engaged with the concrete reality of life (rather than closed up in the introspective pursuits of traditional continental philosophy) and because they have looked for the answers of today in the origins of their own historical roots, Italian theory is a "living thought." Hence the relevance or actuality that it holds for us today. Continuing in this tradition, the work of Roberto Esposito is distinguished by its interdisciplinary breadth. In this book, he passes effortlessly from literary criticism to art history, through political history and philosophy, in an expository style that welcomes non-philosophers to engage in the most pressing problems of our times. As in all his works, Esposito is inclusive rather than exclusive; in being so, he celebrates the affirmative potency of life.
Download or read book Italian Critical Thought written by Dario Gentili and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2018-08-24 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Italian philosophical and political thought has been receiving ever-growing attention in international debates. This has mainly been driven by the revival of the Italian neo- and post-Marxist tradition and of the Italian interpretation of French Theory, in particular of Foucault’s biopolitics. So, is it now possible to speak of an ‘Italian Theory’ or an ‘Italian difference’ in the context of philosophical and political thought? This book collects together leading names in Italian critical thought to examine the significant contributions that they are giving to contemporary political debates. The first part of the book draws a possible genealogy of the so-called ‘Italian Theory’, questioning the possibility of grouping together many authors, and political and theoretical approaches which are often reciprocally in conflict. The second part of the book presents certain categories that have become characteristic of Italian Thought for their original interpretation and use by some of the authors recognized as part of the Italian Theory tradition, from biopolitics and political theology to crisis and immanence.
Download or read book Italian Radical Social Movements 1968 78 written by Mark Andrew Howard and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis is a critical study of contemporary sociological accounts of the politics of radical social movements (RSMs). The study of this class of movement was revitalised by the general political and cultural upheaval across western democracies at the end of the 1960s, and remains relevant now in what is characterised as a movement society. The classical Anglo-American agenda post 1968 was to repopulate the territory of modern politics with a strategic and reasonable radical subject, specifically, one explicable within a framework of political rationalism; however, I contend that two fundamental properties of RSMs complicate this sociological project. Firstly, the practice and theory of radical communities disturb the existing order of society and politics. They exist in a space that is marginal to the political community. They act outside the established standards of behaviour and transgress the conventional limits of representation. Secondly, in so doing, these radical communities undermine the prevailing discourses on the connection of the radical community to politics. That is, RSMs disturb social order and the discourses that have that order as their object; therefore, I argue that a consequence of deploying a rationalist framework to model collective action is the effacing of the difference and specificity essential to the radical subject. My hypothesis, then, is that the politics of RSMs (the practice and theory of radical communities) are inexplicable through the aspect of instrumental rationality that indelibly marks contemporary sociological studies, in particular Anglo-American social movement theory (SMT). I defend this thesis in two main ways. Firstly, I engage the sociological accounts of RSMs in a case study of the Italian social movements 1968-78. This sector involved a diverse field of radical communities including those of the worker, student, counter-culture, and women. Unlike the trajectory of the events associated with 1968 in other western democracies, the Italian situation lasted for over a decade and involved unprecedented levels of political violence. Through the case study I review two established social movement theories, SMT (particularly the work of della Porta and Tarrow) and New Social Movement Theory (NSMT, Melucci), and engage critically with Italian radical thought (IRT, Bologna, Berardi, Negri, and Tronti). I utilise their respective efforts to repatriate the radical community to politics after the tumult of the 1960s, to diagnose and evaluate the rationalist framework in the sociological study of radicalism. The case study facilitates an inquiry into contemporary sociological thought on the nexus of politics and the radical community in western democracies and its implications for explicating the radical subject of the Italian social movements 1968-78. Secondly, I show that attention to recent movements in European philosophy, against the instrumentalist deficit and identitarian vision of sociological discourse, helps elucidate the logic of politics in the 'age of social movements.' To this end, I will discuss a contemporary aesthetic theory of social movements (Rancière). The intent of this engagement is to show how an alternative way of understanding the formation of a radical community can be put forth that retains essential characteristics of the radical subject (particularity and difference) and respects the epistemological work of this community. I will also outline the limits of such an approach for the analysis of political movements.
Download or read book Convention and Materialism written by Paolo Virno and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2021-08-03 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first English translation of the book that established Paolo Virno as one of the most influential Italian thinkers of his generation. With the 1986 publication of this book in Italy, Paolo Virno established himself as one of the most influential Italian thinkers of his generation. Astonishingly, this crucial work has never before been published in an English translation. This MIT Press edition, translated by Italian philosopher and Insubordinations series editor Lorenzo Chiesa, is its first English-language version. Virno here engages, in an innovative and iconoclastic way, with some classical issues of philosophy involving experience, singularity, and the relation between ethics and language, while also offering a profoundly transformative political perspective that revolves around the Marxian notion of the "general intellect." Virno reconsiders Walter Benjamin's idea of a "loss of the aura" (brought on, Benjamin argued, by technical reproducibility), and postulates instead the existence of a new experience of uniqueness that, although deprived of every metaphysical aura, resides in the very process of late-capitalist serial reproduction. Writing after the defeat of contemporary leftist revolutionary movements in the West, Virno argues for the possibility of a "good life" originating immanently from existential and political crises. Taking speculative detours through the thought of philosophers ranging from Aquinas and Berkeley to Heidegger and Wittgenstein, with a specific focus on Kant and Hegel, Virno shows how a renewed reflection on basic theoretical problems helps us to better grasp what is happening now. This edition features a preface written by Virno in 2011.
Download or read book The Golden Horde written by Nanni Balestrini and published by Italian List. This book was released on 2023-03-08 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Golden Horde is a definitive work on the Italian revolutionary movements of the 1960s and '70s. An anthology of texts and fragments woven together with an original commentary, The Golden Horde widens our understanding of the full complexity and richness of radical thought and practice in Italy during the 1960s and '70s. The book covers the generational turbulence of Italy's postwar period, the transformations of Italian capitalism, the new analyses by worker-focused intellectuals, the student movement of 1968, the Hot Autumn of 1969, the extra-parliamentary groups of the early 1970s, the Red Brigades, the formation of a radical women's movement, the development of Autonomia, and the build-up to the watershed moment of the spontaneous political movement of 1977. Far from being merely a handbook of political history, The Golden Horde also sheds light on two decades of Italian culture, including the newspapers, songs, journals, festivals, comics, and philosophy that these movements produced. The book features writings by Sergio Bologna, Umberto Eco, Elvio Fachinelli, Lea Melandri, Danilo Montaldi, Toni Negri, Raniero Panzieri, Franco Piperno, Rossana Rossanda, Paolo Virno, and others, as well as an in-depth introduction by translator Richard Braude outlining the work's composition and development.
Download or read book Radical written by Cindi Strauss and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-25 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This essential survey of Italian Radical design, a movement that interrogated modern living against the turbulent political climate of the 1960s, is lavishly illustrated with new photography, including rarely seen prototypes and limited-production pieces.
Download or read book A Female Activist Elite in Italy 1890 1920 written by Elena Laurenzi and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-11-30 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores and traces the progressive activism and radical ideas of several elite women in Italy beginning in the early 20th century. It discusses the shared political culture that shaped the thinking and the activity of these women, mainly oriented towards political philanthropy and work, seen as the cornerstone of a comprehensive redefinition of gender relations. It also discusses the connections linking them to an international network of women involved in similar political actions and economic initiatives addressing women’s' interests, as well as their legacy for the next generations. With essays from a range of scholars, this book provides an interdisciplinary framework for understanding these activists and deals with methodological and historiographical issues in reconstructing women’s contribution to history.
Download or read book Italian Operaismo written by Gigi Roggero and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2023-03-28 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An accessible, introductory presentation of operaismo, one of the most important revolutionary theories and praxes of the twentieth century. “Operaismo is a Machiavellian return to first principles: it is a return to Marx against Marxism, against its tradition of determinism, historicism, and objectivism. Operaismo isn’t a heresy within the Marxist family, it is a rupture with that family.”—extract from Italian Operaismo This accessible, introductory presentation of operaismo (or “workerism” in English) arms readers with a deeper understanding of the concepts, context, and history of one of the most important revolutionary theories and praxes of the twentieth century. While the ideas of some of its proponents—above all, Antonio Negri—have circulated widely in the English-speaking world over the past twenty years, rather less is known about the context from which (and against which) these perspectives originally emerged. Gigi Roggero here introduces that broader workerist project, and examines how its various analyses of modern social structures, and the possibility for changing them, related to a potent social movement in Italy during the 1960s and 1970s. Italian Operaismo provides a clear overview of the central moments in that tendency’s development—from the Italian labor movement’s crisis of direction in the 1950s, the encounter with the “new forces” within the working class at FIAT and elsewhere in the early 1960s, and the political journals Quaderni rossi and Classe operaia, to the experience of Potere Operaio and other organizations a decade later. For readers more familiar with this story, the book provides a rereading of operaismo that is both salutary and provocative, one that stresses above all the role within it of subjectivity and political engagement, demonstrating the continued relevance of its subversive method as a tool for reworking the categories of radical and revolutionary thought. This book will serve as a compact, essential work on how to go about eliminating the gap between theory and practice.
Download or read book Virtue Politics written by James Hankins and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2019-12-17 with total page 769 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Helen and Howard Marraro Prize A Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year “Perhaps the greatest study ever written of Renaissance political thought.” —Jeffrey Collins, Times Literary Supplement “Magisterial...Hankins shows that the humanists’ obsession with character explains their surprising indifference to particular forms of government. If rulers lacked authentic virtue, they believed, it did not matter what institutions framed their power.” —Wall Street Journal “Puts the politics back into humanism in an extraordinarily deep and far-reaching way...For generations to come, all who write about the political thought of Italian humanism will have to refer to it; its influence will be...nothing less than transformative.” —Noel Malcolm, American Affairs “[A] masterpiece...It is only Hankins’s tireless exploration of forgotten documents...and extraordinary endeavors of editing, translation, and exposition that allow us to reconstruct—almost for the first time in 550 years—[the humanists’] three compelling arguments for why a strong moral character and habits of truth are vital for governing well. Yet they are as relevant to contemporary democracy in Britain, and in the United States, as to Machiavelli.” —Rory Stewart, Times Literary Supplement “The lessons for today are clear and profound.” —Robert D. Kaplan Convulsed by a civilizational crisis, the great thinkers of the Renaissance set out to reconceive the nature of society. Everywhere they saw problems. Corrupt and reckless tyrants sowing discord and ruling through fear; elites who prized wealth and status over the common good; religious leaders preoccupied with self-advancement while feuding armies waged endless wars. Their solution was at once simple and radical. “Men, not walls, make a city,” as Thucydides so memorably said. They would rebuild the fabric of society by transforming the moral character of its citizens. Soulcraft, they believed, was a precondition of successful statecraft. A landmark reappraisal of Renaissance political thought, Virtue Politics challenges the traditional narrative that looks to the Renaissance as the seedbed of modern republicanism and sees Machiavelli as its exemplary thinker. James Hankins reveals that what most concerned the humanists was not reforming institutions so much as shaping citizens. If character mattered more than laws, it would have to be nurtured through a new program of education they called the studia humanitatis: the precursor to our embattled humanities.
Download or read book Political Uses of Utopia written by S. D. Chrostowska and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2017-03-21 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Utopia has long been banished from political theory, framed as an impossible—and possibly dangerous—political ideal, a flawed social blueprint, or a thought experiment without any practical import. Even the "realistic utopias" of liberal theory strike many as wishful thinking. Can politics think utopia otherwise? Can utopian thinking contribute to the renewal of politics? In Political Uses of Utopia, an international cast of leading and emerging theorists agree that the uses of utopia for politics are multiple and nuanced and lie somewhere between—or, better yet, beyond—the mainstream caution against it and the conviction that another, better world ought to be possible. Representing a range of perspectives on the grand tradition of Western utopianism, which extends back half a millennium and perhaps as far as Plato, these essays are united in their interest in the relevance of utopianism to specific historical and contemporary political contexts. Featuring contributions from Miguel Abensour, Étienne Balibar, Raymond Geuss, and Jacques Rancière, among others, Political Uses of Utopia reopens the question of whether and how utopianism can inform political thinking and action today.
Download or read book The Italian Difference written by Lorenzo Chiesa and published by re.press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together essays by different generations of Italian thinkers which address, whether in affirmative, problematizing or genealogical registers, the entanglement of philosophical speculation and political proposition within recent Italian thought. Nihilism and biopolitics, two concepts that have played a very prominent role in theoretical discussions in Italy, serve as the thematic foci around which the collection orbits, as it seeks to define the historical and geographical particularity of these notions as well their continuing impact on an international debate. The volume also covers the debate around OCyweak thoughtOCO (pensiero debole), the feminist thinking of sexual difference, the re-emergence of political anthropology and the question of communism. The contributors provide contrasting narratives of the development of post-war Italian thought and trace paths out of the theoretical and political impasses of the presentOCoagainst what Negri, in the text from which the volume takes its name, calls OCythe Italian desertOCO."
Download or read book Politics of the Many written by Benjamin Halligan and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-09-09 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Politics of the Many draws inspiration from Percy Bysshe Shelley's celebrated call to arms: 'Ye are many – they are few!' This idea of the Many, as a general form of emancipatory subjectivity that cannot be erased for the sake of the One, is the philosophical and political assumption shared by contributors to this book. They raise questions of collective agency, and its crisis in contemporary capitalism, via new engagements with Marxist philosophy, psychoanalysis, theories of social reproduction and value-form, and post-colonial critiques, and drawing on activist thought and strategies. This book interrogates both established and emergent formations of the Many (the people, classes, publics, crowds, masses, multitudes), tracing their genealogies, their recent failures and victories, and their potentials to change the world. The book proposes and explores an intense and provoking series of new or reinvented concepts, figures, and theoretical constellations, including dividuality, the centaur, unintentional vanguard, insomnia at work, always-on capitalism, multitude (from its 'voiding' to a '(non)emergence'), crowds, necropolitics, and the link between political subjectivity and value-form. The contributors to Politics of the Many are both acclaimed and emergent thinkers including Carina Brand, Rebecca Carson, Luhuna Carvalho, Lorenzo Chiesa, Jodi Dean, Dario Gentili, Benjamin Halligan, Marc James Léger, Paul Mazzocchi, Alexei Penzin, Stefano Pippa, Gerald Raunig, and Stevphen Shukaitis.
Download or read book Multitude between Innovation and Negation written by Paolo Virno and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2008-05-30 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The influential Italian thinker offers three essays in the political philosophy of language. Multitude between Innovation and Negation by Paolo Virno translated by James Cascaito. The publication of Paolo Virno's first book in English, Grammar of the Multitude, by Semiotext(e) in 2004 was an event within the field of radical political thought and introduced post-'68 currents in Italy to American readers. Multitude between Innovation and Negation, written several years later, offers three essays that take the reader on a journey through the political philosophy of language. “Wit and Innovative Action” explores the ambivalence inevitably arising when the semiotic and the semantic, grammar and experience, rule and regularity, and right and fact intersect. Virno unravels the infinite potential and wonders of everyday linguistic praxis and ambiguity. Wit, he argues, is a public performance, and its modus operandi characterizes human action in a state of emergency; it is a reaction, an articulate response, and a possible solution to a state of crisis. “Mirror Neurons, Linguistic Negation, and Mutual Recognition” examines the relationship of language and intersubjective empathy: without language, would human beings be able to recognize other members of their species? And finally, in “Multitude and Evil,” Virno challenges the distinction between the state of nature and civil society and argues for a political institution that resembles language in its ability to be at once nature and history. Few thinkers take the risks required by innovation. Like a philosophical entrepreneur, Virno is engaged in no less than rewriting the dictionary of political theory, an urgent and ambitious project when language, caught in a permanent state of emergency impossible to sustain, desperately needs to articulate and enact new practices of freedom for the multitude. Paolo Virno is the author of several books, including A Grammar of the Multitude (Semiotext(e), 2004).
Download or read book Adventures of the Symbolic written by Warren Breckman and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2013-06-18 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Warren Breckman critically revisits thrilling experiments in the aftermath of Marxism.
Download or read book Ambiguities of Activism written by Ingrid M. Hoofd and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-11-27 with total page 150 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume provides a critical and in-depth investigation of the relationship between alter-globalist thinking and practices and their popular discourses. It examines the ways in which several alter-globalist activist groups (like Indymedia, no-borders campaigns, and forms of climate change activism), as well as left-wing intellectuals and academics (like Michael Hardt, Al Gore, Antonio Negri, Hakim Bey, and Geert Lovink), mobilize problematic discourses, tools, and divisions in an attempt to overcome gendered, raced, and classed oppressions worldwide. The book draws out how these mobilizations and theorizations, despite (or possibly because of) their liberatory claims, are actually implicated in the intensification of global hierarchies by repeatedly invoking narratives of transcendence, connection, progress, and in particular of speed. Hoofd argues that the humanist ideals that underlie all these practices paradoxically trigger increasing disenfranchisements worldwide.
