[NetBehaviour] The Italian Difference: Between Nihilism and Biopolitics.

[marc garrett]

The Italian Difference: Between Nihilism and Biopolitics
Lorenzo Chiesa and Alberto Toscano (eds.)

Download book as PDF (Open Access)
http://www.re-press.org/content/view/66/38/

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 ‘weak thought’ (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 present—against what Negri, in
the text from which the volume takes its name, calls ‘the Italian desert’.

Contents
Antonio Negri, 'The Italian Difference'
Pier Aldo Rovatti, 'Foucault Docet'
Gianni Vattimo, 'Nihilism as Emancipation'
Roberto Esposito, 'Community and Nihilism'
Matteo Mandarini, 'Beyond Nihilism: Notes Towards a Critique of Left-
Heideggerianism in Italian Philosophy of the 1970s'
Luisa Muraro, 'The Symbolic Independence from Power'
Mario Tronti, 'Towards a Critique of Political Democracy'
Alberto Toscano, 'Chronicles of Insurrection: Tronti, Negri and the
Subject of Antagonism'
Paolo Virno, 'Natural-Historical Diagrams: The ‘New Global’ Movement
and the Biological Invariant'
Lorenzo Chiesa, 'Giorgio Agamben's Franciscan Ontology'