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En los últimos años, la filosofía italiana está teniendo un papel central en el pensamiento contemporáneo. Situada entre la biopolítica y la teología política, proporciona una lectura otra de la modernidad a través de los conceptos vida-historia-política. El presente texto se enmarca dentro de la llamada Italian Theory para exponer sus dos posibles vías jurídicas: destituyente e instituyente. A partir del pensamiento de Giorgio Agamben y Roberto Esposito, se plantearán unas líneas generales de una filosofía del derecho a través de la Italian Theory.

Review of Literary Critique, Modernism and the Transformation of Theory by Mena Mitrano.

Some of the major theories of Italian biopolitical thought have strongly insisted on criticising the notion of sovereignty, interpreting it in the light of the logic of domination. This definition has unfairly ignored a special declination of sovereignty as animated by a 'figure of justice', thanks to which a community constitutes itself as a political body. The lack of consideration of the community horizon by this 'metaphysics of conflict', opposed to the sovereign order, makes it fragile against the current mechanisms of Biopower. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the contradiction between the generalised use of human rights’ protection within EU migration policy and the production of deaths at borders. Through an analysis of the EU’s migration policy, this article suggests using Esposito’s concept of immunitas to bridge inherentcontradictions. Protection of life and the production of death are constitutive mechanisms of Western modern politics. This argument implies thathuman rights and the protection of life metaphorically legitimise the EU’s control of migration from third countries, while blurring the underpinning logics of government, coloniality and racism. The article concludes that protection and the negation of (certain) lives are intrinsic to the EU’s migration policy.

Neoliberalism exercises its art of government on forms of life by turning human potentiality into adaptability. According to one of its most influential thinkers, Friedrich von Hayek, the market's spontaneous order requires the constant adaptation of individuals to circumstances that no one can be aware of and that no one can master. To achieve this, the human-animal's anthropological plasticity must be reduced to mere flexibility vis-à-vis market conditions. However, this adaptability – which could correspond to a specific negative philosophical anthropology – is the reverse side of the 'potentiality as such' theorised – albeit in different ways – by authors of Italian Theory like Agamben, Negri, Virno, and Esposito. This article aims to cast into relief the conditions needed to prevent such conversion of potentiality into adaptability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Environmental Justice (EJ) in Italy is still an underdeveloped topic by academics. Notwithstanding a narrow range of works in the frame of environmental justice has been published over the years, contributions are more likely to be isolated. The reasons giving evidence of that are: (1) the lack of a systematic survey of the literature; (2) the absence of an interpretative effort aimed at showing the major strength and key features of the environmental justice in Italy. The main goal of this article is to fill this gap by providing both the state-of-the-art related to the existing literature on EJ in Italy and an interpretation of the centrality of the conflict (and its positive evaluation) in the Italian discourse on EJ within the framework of the Italian theory.

In recent years, Italian philosophy is having enormous success in the United States, to the point that today we hear more and more of the “New Italian Thought”. The objective of this essay is to analyse this phenomenon from a historical point of view and see how and to what extent interest in Italian thought has grown in the USA, traversing the fundamental stages that have contributed to the acknowledgement of the “New Italian Thought”.

The article focuses on the so-called ‘Italian theory’, with special reference to its assessment in Roberto Esposito’s 2010 book Living Thought. The article puts forth three main arguments. First, there is an analogy between the ‘geo-philosophical’ strategy chosen by Esposito to address Italian thought and the strategy pursued by Stanley Cavell when he reflects on Emerson and the specificity of American philosophy. Second, the main traits attributed by Esposito to Italian thought show significant parallels with key concepts in Michel Foucault’s philosophy. Third, interpretations of Spinoza by authors such as Gilles Deleuze and Toni Negri have been instrumental for the flourishing of the philosophical debate that prepared Esposito’s elaboration of a canon of Italian thinkers. The article thus hints that Italian theory could be an interesting case study for the reflection on the relations between geography and philosophy.

The article discusses Roberto Esposito’s "Living Thought" from the point of view of "Italian Theory", a topic that Esposito introduces and analyzes in the first chapter. "Italian Theory" doesn’t aim to emphasize a "national difference" in philosophy in order to resist to the uniformity of Anglo-American globalization, but rather it represents a critical perspective within the "geophilosophy" of today, that would aim to think the difference of a particular philosophical tradition neither as "national" nor as the newest trend of the global academic market.

La recepción en los departamentos de Literatura comparada y Humanidades de las universidades estadounidenses, y en gran medida también en las universidades latinomaericanas, inglesas y australianas, del pensamiento de algunos filósofos italianos contemporáneos ha dado lugar a la etiqueta de Italian Theory o Italian Thought. Este fenómeno es particularmente evidente con respecto a autores como Giorgio Agamben, Toni Negri y Roberto Esposito, gracias a los cuales se está redescubriendo la tradición obrerista, desde Tronti hasta Cacciari. También en Italia, especialmente gracias al trabajo de Esposito y su grupo, se está debatiendo la existencia y la naturaleza de un campo de posiciones, en lugar de una corriente en sentido estricto, que gira en torno a lo que en Estados Unidos se define como la “biopolítica italiana”, una reflexión sobre la relación entre las formas de poder y la vida biológica como un carácter sobresaliente de nuestra ontología de la actualidad. Sobre esta base no solo se comparan diferentes tesis sobre la triangulación entre la vida, la política y la historia, sino también diferentes hipótesis sobre su génesis, para algunos relacionada a la historia del obrerismo italiano de los años 60, para otros a una larga duración, que se remonta a la primera génesis de un “pensamiento italiano” en autores como Maquiavelo, Bruno y Vico. Aquí pretendemos explorar los problemas teóricos e históricos planteados por la Italian Theory, en primer lugar, dando una visión general del debate contemporáneo, para centrarnos luego en las cuestiones teóricas abiertas y las consecuencias historiográficas que se derivan de ella.

Esse texto é um resultado parcial e provisório de uma pesquisa de Pós-doutorado em andamento na Scuola Normale Superiore de Pisa/Italia sobre a supervisão do filósofo Roberto Esposito. Observa-se que nessas primeiras décadas do século XXI o pensamento filosófico Italiano, por algumas das razões que tentaremos expor abaixo, tem sido objeto de um grande interesse mundial, tornando-se objeto de inúmeros seminários, livros e artigos. O texto tenta avaliar se existiria algo como uma “filosofia Italiana” para além da pertença nacional daqueles que contribuíram para a sua construção. Pode-se falar em uma Italian Theory? Se a resposta a essa questão for afirmativa, quais seriam as suas especificidades?

Italian contemporary philosophy is characterized by various forms of reaction to the “linguistic turn” which marked not only the analytic tradition, but also the continental one (structuralism, semiotics and hermeneutics). The philosophical (and anthropological) question that the “linguistic turn” leaves unanswered is: what is the nature of language? If language is the foundation of human nature, which is, in turn, the basis of language? The field that now opens itself is populated by those concepts that a philosophy centered on language completely has forgotten: body, life, animality. In this paper I try to delineate a philosophical route which starts from the “linguistic turn” and it arrives to the Deleuzian concept of “immanence”.

The conversation focuses on the social and political role of the philosopher nowadays. Pier Aldo Rovatti discusses about the growing philosophical movement called “Italian Theory” while revisiting his own recent intellectual path. The italian philosopher retraces the cultural experience of the “pensiero debole”, whereof he has been one of the two promoters, and underlines the intellectual and political fight, against all the so-called universal truths (and ideological violences), inspired by this philosophical trend at the beginning of the Eighties. The interview ends with a discussion about the dawning perspectives of the political-philosophical action in the post-modern age.

Starting from her last book Il Postumano. La vita oltre l’individuo, oltre la specie, oltre la morte, Rosi Braidotti outlines new modes of relation between zoe and bios, life and death, subject and technologically mediated societies, monism and differences. Rather than perceiving the post-human condition as a crisis or a loss, Braidotti argues that it is an opportunity and a challenge for new ethical and social forms of bonding.

The aim of this interview is to analyze, on the one side, the relationship between Franco Berardi’s thought and the most significant moments in his intellectual profile, with its permanent exchange with the political, intellectual and artistic milieu. On the other side, it is taken into account the relationship between Berardi’s thought and that group of theories and critical reflections that are currently known as Italian Theory.

Here we present a conversation among three of the leading representatives of the Italian Theory. Roberto Esposito, Dario Gentili and Giacomo Marramao talk about the philosophical meaning of the “Italian Theory”, its roots in the tradition and the expected results for the cultural debate in Italy and abroad.

The Italian thought is a philosophy of impure reason, which takes into account the conditions, imperfections and possibilities of the world. The core of his tradition consists in a civil vocation, choosing as objects of investigation life, history and politics, in search of “the effective truth of things” (Machiavelli). The audience of the italian philosophers are not the specialists, but all their compatriots, as well as everyone else. That also because they are often exiles, from Giordano Bruno to Antonio Gramsci, with a cosmopolitian vocation. Thus the question of the “common”, thematized by the contemporary italian philosophy, reverse itself in that of the “goodbye to community”, and to the irreversible past

We investigate the answer of the Italian Theory, from Roberto Esposito, to the political degeneration proposed in the critical authors of modernity, understood as a way out from politics and as a technification. We'll provide a clarification of these critical thoughts and the proposal of Esposito: an identity between technology and politics. With an hermeneutic-analytical paper, we will clarify what is technology in those authors and in Esposito's thought. This contemporary endeavor allows to claim a technical conception of political reality, and constitutes a new access to the question about humankind through technology, from a pure political activity point of view. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article is to explore how, and to what extent, Italian thought – by its focalization on pre-modern theoretical issues and its distance from classical modern topics, such as the philosophy of conscience or the transcendence of language – can offer a different insight on contemporary social theory and critical theory, after the dissolution of the idea of totality as a foundational concept of modernity. In the last decades, a frame named ‘Italian theory’ has started to circulate in international theoretical debates, often with the aim of replacing the exhausted paradigms of poststructuralism, postmodernism and deconstructionism. Indeed, ‘Italian thought’ seems to offer new insights, thinking about the ‘post-totality’ era in a different way. In the article we present a synthetic cartography of Italian thought and we analyse the way in which it can contribute to design new horizons for social theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Italian Theory has emerged as the result of the search for new conceptual frameworks in the face of a series of international political events concerning not only the proliferation of states of exception but also of new forms of politicization of life related to biomedical science and the biosecurization of spaces. In this essay, I consider how Italian Theory has come into existence in Western academia and beyond through its productive travels among area studies, the humanities, and the social sciences. In particular, I reflect on how US-based Italian Studies—joining forces with scholars in other fields on the two sides of the Atlantic—engage in practices of trans-lation that fundamentally contribute to the “packing” of contemporary Italian political philosophy as “Italian Theory”. Such practices have significantly impacted on Human Geography and the social sciences in general, and influenced how highly theoretical work originated outside the Anglophone “academic core” is (re)produced, legitimated, and circulated internationally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]