text:
  1. Title Page
  2. Acknowledgements
  3. Introduction
  4. Genealogies
    1. German Philosophy, French Theory, Italian Thought
    2. Post-Operaism? No, Operaism
    3. Italian Theory? Elements for a Genealogy
    4. Italian Theory and Its Differences
    5. Old Courses in New Countries
  5. Categories
    1. A World to Gain
    2. Politics and Philosophy in Italian Radical Thought
    3. The Crisis Dispositive
    4. Inhabiting Immanence
  6. Selected Bibliography
  7. Index

Italian Critical Thought

New Politics of Autonomy

Series Editors: Saul Newman and Martina Tazzioli

In recent years, we have witnessed an unprecedented emergence of new forms of radical politics – from Tahrir Square, Gezi Park and the global Occupy movement, to Wikileaks and hacktivism. What is striking about such movements is their rejection of leadership structures and the absence of political demands and agendas. Instead, their originality lies in the autonomous forms of political life they engender.

The _New Politics of Autonomy_ book series is an attempt to make sense of this new terrain of anti-political politics, and to develop an alternative conceptual and theoretical arsenal for thinking the politics of autonomy. The series investigates political, economic and ethical questions raised by this new paradigm of autonomy. It brings together authors and researchers who are engaged, in various ways, with understanding contemporary radical political movements and who approach the theme of autonomy from different perspectives: political theory, philosophy, ethics, literature and art, psychoanalytic theory, political economy, and political history.

**Titles in the Series**

_Spaces of Governmentality_ , by Martina Tazzioli

_The Composition of Movements to Come_ , by Stevphen Shukaitis

_Foucault and the Making of Subjects_ , edited by Laura Cremonesi, Orazio Irrera, Daniele Lorenzini and Martina Tazzioli

_Italian Critical Thought: Genealogies and Categories_ , edited by Dario Gentili, Elettra Stimilli and Glenda Garelli

_In the Marxian Workshops: Producing Subjects_ , by Sandro Mezzadra

_Anarchisms, Postanarchisms and Ethics_ , Benjamin Franks

Italian Critical Thought

Genealogies and Categories

Edited by Dario Gentili, Elettra Stimilli and Glenda Garelli

Translated by Glenda Garelli

London • New York

Published by Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd.

Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB

www.rowmaninternational.com

Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd., is an affiliate of

Rowman & Littlefield

4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706, USA

With additional offices in Boulder, New York, Toronto (Canada), and London (UK)

www.rowman.com

Copyright © 2018 by Dario Gentili, Elettra Stimilli and Glenda Garelli

_All rights reserved._ No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

**British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information**

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: HB 978-1-78660-450-7

ISBN: PB 978-1-78660-451-4

**Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Is Available**

ISBN 978-1-78660-450-7 (cloth: alk. paper)

ISBN 978-1-78660-451-4 (pbk: alk. paper)

ISBN 978-1-78660-452-1 (electronic)

  TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

# Index

A

Accarino, Bruno,

Adorno, Theodor W., 1.1-1.2 ,  ,

Agamben, Giorgio,  , 2.1-2.2 ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  , 8.1-8.2 ,  , 10.1-10.2 ,  , 12.1-12.2 ,  , 14.1-14.2 ,  ,  , 17.1-17.2 ,  ,  , 20.1-20.2 ,  ,  , 23.1-23.2 ,  ,  ,

Agier, Michel,  ,

Alighieri, Dante,  , 2.1-2.2

Alquati, Romano,

Anderson, Perry,  ,

Ardovino, Adriano,

Arendt, Hannah, 1.1-1.2 ,

Aristotle, 1.1-1.2

Arrighi, Giovanni,

Asor Rosa, Alberto,

Assennato, Marco,

Averroè,  ,

B

Bachelard, Gaston,

Badiou, Alain,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  , 8.1-8.2

Balibar, Étienne,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,

bare life,  ,  ,

Bataille, Georges, 1.1-1.2

Baudrillard, Jean,  ,  ,  , 4.1-4.2 , 5.1-5.2

Bauman, Zygmunt,

Bayoumi, Moustafa,

Benjamin, Walter,  ,  ,  ,  , 5.1-5.2 ,  ,  ,

Bergson, Henri-Louis,  ,

Berlusconi, Silvio,

Bersani, Pierluigi,

biopolitics,  ,  ,  ,  ,  , 6.1-6.2 ,  ,  , 9.1-9.2 ,  ,  ,  ,  , 14.1-14.2 ,  , 16.1-16.2 ,  , 18.1-18.2 ,  ,  ,  , 22.1-22.2 ,  ,  , 25.1-25.2

biopower,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,

Bird, Greg,

Blanchot, Maurice,  ,  ,

Bobbio, Norberto,

Bologna, Sergio,  ,

Boltanski, Luc,  ,

Bono, Paola,

Bordoni, Carlo,

Borradori, Giovanna,

Bove, Arianna,  ,

Bruno, Giordano, 1.1-1.2 ,  ,  , 4.1-4.2

Buongiorno, Federica,

Burke, Edmund,

Bussoni, Ilaria,

Butler, Judith,  ,

Buttigieg, Joseph A.,

C

Cacciari, Massimo,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  , 9.1-9.2 , 10.1-10.2 ,  , 12.1-12.2 ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,

Calcagno, Antonio,

Campanella, Tommaso,

Campbell, Timothy,  ,

Canguilhem, Georges,

capitalism,  ,  ,  ,  ,  , 6.1-6.2 , 7.1-7.2 , 8.1-8.2 ,  ,  , 11.1-11.2 ,  ,  ,  , 15.1-15.2 , 16.1-16.2 , 17.1-17.2 ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  , 26.1-26.2 ,

capitalist accumulation,  ,  ,

fixed capital,  ,  ,  ,

neoliberal capitalism,  ,  ,

variable capital,  ,  ,  ,

Carrera, Alessandro,

Chakrabarty, Dipesh,  , 2.1-2.2 ,

Chiapello, Ève,  ,

Chiesa, Lorenzo,  ,  ,  ,

Chignola, Sandro,

Ciccarelli, Roberto,  ,  ,

class,  , 2.1-2.2 ,  ,  ,  ,  , 7.1-7.2 ,  ,

class composition,  ,  ,  ,  ,

class struggle, 1.1-1.2 ,  , 3.1-3.2 ,  , 5.1-5.2 ,  , 7.1-7.2 ,  ,

ruling class, 1.1-1.2 ,

working class,  ,  ,  , 4.1-4.2 ,  ,  ,  ,

_Classe Operaia_ (Journal),  ,  ,

Clausewitz, Carl von,

Codeluppi, Vanni,

common, 1.1-1.2 ,  ,  , 4.1-4.2 ,  , 6.1-6.2 ,  ,  ,

_communitas_ (community),  , 2.1-2.2 ,  ,  ,  ,  ,

conflict,  , 2.1-2.2 ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  , 10.1-10.2 ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  , 16.1-16.2 ,  , 18.1-18.2 ,  , 20.1-20.2 , 21.1-21.2 , 22.1-22.2 ,  , 24.1-24.2 ,  , 26.1-26.2

constituent power,  ,  ,  ,

Contarini, Silvia,  ,

Conti, Gregory,

crisis,  ,  , 3.1-3.2 ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  , 14.1-14.2 , 15.1-15.2 , 16.1-16.2 ,  , 18.1-18.2 , 19.1-19.2 ,  , 21.1-21.2 ,

Critchley, Simon,  ,

Croce, Benedetto,  ,  ,

Cusset, François,  ,  ,

D

Dardot, Pierre,  ,  ,

Davidson, Arnold,

De Cauwer, Stijn,

De Sanctis, Gaetano,

debt,  ,  , 3.1-3.2 ,  ,  ,  ,  ,

indebted man,  ,

indebtedness,  , 2.1-2.2 , 3.1-3.2

deconstruction,  ,  ,  ,  ,

Deleuze, Gilles,  ,  , 3.1-3.2 , 4.1-4.2 ,  ,  , 7.1-7.2 , 8.1-8.2 ,  , 10.1-10.2 ,  ,  , 13.1-13.2 ,  ,  , 16.1-16.2 , 17.1-17.2

Della Volpe, Galvano,

Derrida, Jacques,  ,  , 3.1-3.2 ,  ,

Diethe, Carole,

Dilthey, Wilhelm,

Dominijanni, Ida,

Duso, Giuseppe,

E

Eagleton, Terry,  ,

economic theology,  , 2.1-2.2 ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  , 10.1-10.2 ,  ,  ,

empire,  ,  ,

Empson, Erik,

Engels, Friedrich,

Esposito, Roberto, 1.1-1.2 ,  ,  ,  , 5.1-5.2 ,  , 7.1-7.2 ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  , 13.1-13.2 , 14.1-14.2 , 15.1-15.2 ,  ,  ,  , 19.1-19.2 , 20.1-20.2 ,  ,  ,  , 24.1-24.2 ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  , 30.1-30.2 , 31.1-31.2

F

Fadini, Ubaldo,

Fanon, Frantz,  ,

Farrington, Constance,

Feminism,  ,  , 3.1-3.2 , 4.1-4.2

Filippini, Michele,

Ford, Henry, 1.1-1.2

Fordism,  ,  ,  ,  , 5.1-5.2 ,  ,  ,  ,

form of life,  ,  ,  ,

Fortini, Franco,  ,

Foucault, Michel,  , 2.1-2.2 ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  , 8.1-8.2 , 9.1-9.2 ,  ,  ,  ,  , 14.1-14.2 ,  , 16.1-16.2 ,  , 18.1-18.2 ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  , 24.1-24.2 ,  ,  ,  , 28.1-28.2 ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  , 38.1-38.2 , 39.1-39.2

Frankfurt School,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,

Fraser, Nancy, 1.1-1.2

French Theory, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4.1-4.2 ,  ,

Freud, Siegmund,  ,  ,

Fumagalli, Andrea,  , 2.1-2.2

G

Galilei, Galileo,

Galli, Carlo,  ,

Gambino, Ferruccio,

Gamm, Gerhard,

Gasparri, Moris,  ,

Gatti, Roberto,

Gehlen, Arnold,

genealogy,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,

General Intellect,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  , 7.1-7.2 , 8.1-8.2 ,  ,

Genovesi, Antonio,

Gentile, Giovanni,  ,  ,

Gentili, Dario,  ,  , 3.1-3.2 ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  , 10.1-10.2 ,  ,  ,

globalization, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 ,  ,  ,  , 6.1-6.2 ,  ,  ,

governmentality,  ,  ,  ,

Graeber, David,  , 2.1-2.2

Gramsci, Antonio,  ,  ,  ,  ,  , 6.1-6.2 , 7.1-7.2 ,  ,  , 10.1-10.2 , 11.1-11.2 , 12.1-12.2 ,

grand narrative, 1.1-1.2 ,

Gribaldo, Alessandra,

Gros, Frédéric,

Guareschi, Massimiliano,  ,

Guattari, Félix,  ,  ,  , 4.1-4.2 , 5.1-5.2 ,  ,

Gutmann, Mathias,

H

Habermas, Jürgen,  ,

Hanafi, Zakiya,

Hardt, Michael,  ,  ,  ,  , 5.1-5.2 ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  , 15.1-15.2 ,  , 17.1-17.2 ,  ,  ,

Harvey, David,

Hayek, Friedrich von,  ,  ,  ,

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich,  ,  ,  ,

Heidegger, Martin,  ,  ,  , 4.1-4.2 ,  ,  ,

Hendrickx, Kim,

hermeneutics,  ,  ,

Hoare, Quentin,  ,

Hobbes, Thomas,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,

Hochroth, Lysa,

Horkheimer, Max,  ,  ,

Hurley, Robert,

Husserl, Edmund,

I

immanence,  ,  ,  , 4.1-4.2 ,  ,  ,  ,  , 9.1-9.2 , 10.1-10.2 , 11.1-11.2 , 12.1-12.2 , 13.1-13.2 , 14.1-14.2 , 15.1-15.2 , 16.1-16.2 ,

immaterial labour, 1.1-1.2 ,  ,

immunitas (immunity, immunization, immunitarian), 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3.1-3.2

Italian Communist Party (PCI),  ,  , 3.1-3.2 ,

J

Jameson, Fredric,  ,

K

Kant, Immanuel,

Kelsen, Hans, 1.1-1.2

Kemp, Sandra,

Koiré, Alexandre,

Kojève, Alexandre,

Koselleck, Reinhart,  ,

L

Laclau, Ernesto,

Lance, Theodore,

Lander, Edgardo,  ,

Lane, Helen R.,

Laval, Christian,  ,  ,

Lazzarato, Maurizio,  ,  ,  , 4.1-4.2 , 5.1-5.2

Legrand, Stéphane,

Leonardo Da Vinci,

Leonelli, Rudy M.,  ,

Leopardi, Giacomo,  ,  ,  ,

Lewis, Martin W.,  ,

Lisciani-Petrini, Enrica,

Lissitzky, El,

living labour,  ,  ,  ,  , 5.1-5.2 ,  , 7.1-7.2

Lordon, Frédéric,  ,

Lotringer, Sylvere, 1.1-1.2 ,  ,

Lucci, Antonio,

Luglio, Davide,  ,

Luhmann, Niklas,

Lukács, György,  ,

Luporini, Cesare,

Lyotard, Jean-François,  ,  ,  ,  , 5.1-5.2 ,

M

Macchiavelli, Niccolò,  ,  ,  , 4.1-4.2 , 5.1-5.2 ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  , 12.1-12.2 , 13.1-13.2 ,

Macherey, Pierre,  ,

Maltese, Pietro,

Mann, Thomas,  ,

Manzei, Alexandra,

Marazzi, Christian,  ,  , 3.1-3.2 ,  ,  ,

Marchesini, Roberto,

Marcuse, Herbert, 1.1-1.2

Mariani, Giorgio,

Marino, Mario,

Mariscalco, Danilo,

market,  ,  , 3.1-3.2 ,  ,  ,  , 7.1-7.2 ,  ,  ,  , 11.1-11.2 ,  ,  ,  ,

Marramao, Giacomo,  ,

Martuccelli, Danilo,

Marx, Karl,  ,  ,  ,  , 5.1-5.2 ,  ,  ,  ,  , 10.1-10.2 ,  ,  ,  , 14.1-14.2 ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,

Marxism,  ,  ,  ,  , 5.1-5.2 , 6.1-6.2

mass worker, 1.1-1.2 ,  ,  ,

McLellan, David,

Melandri, Lea,

Mendieta, Eduardo,

Mezzadra, Sandro, 1.1-1.2 ,  , 3.1-3.2 , 4.1-4.2

Mignolo, Walter D.,  ,

Milazzo, Fabio,

Milbank, John,

Mitrano, Mena,

Muraro, Luisa,  ,

Musil, Robert,

N

Nancy, Jean-Luc,  ,

national,  ,  ,  ,  , 5.1-5.2 , 6.1-6.2 ,  ,  ,  , 10.1-10.2

Nedow, Boštjan,

Negri, Antonio (Toni),  ,  ,  ,  ,  , 6.1-6.2 ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  , 17.1-17.2 ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,

Neilson, Brett,  ,  , 3.1-3.2 ,  ,

neoliberalism,  , 2.1-2.2 ,  , 4.1-4.2 ,  , 6.1-6.2 , 7.1-7.2 ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,

Nichols, James H.,

Nietzsche, Friedrich W.,  , 2.1-2.2 ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,

Novalis,

Nowell Smith, Geoffrey,

O

Operaism,  ,  ,  , 4.1-4.2 ,  , 6.1-6.2 , 7.1-7.2 , 8.1-8.2 , 9.1-9.2 , 10.1-10.2 ,  ,  , 13.1-13.2 ,  ,  ,  ,  , 18.1-18.2 ,  ,  , 21.1-21.2 ,  ,

Ortega y Gasset, José,

P

Panzieri, Raniero,

Pasquinelli, Matteo,  ,

Paul of Tarsus,  ,  ,

Piasentier, Marco,

political theology, 1.1-1.2 ,  ,  ,  , 5.1-5.2 ,  ,  ,  , 9.1-9.2 , 10.1-10.2 ,  ,  ,  , 14.1-14.2 , 15.1-15.2 , 16.1-16.2 ,

Ponzi, Mauro,

postcolonial studies,  ,  ,  , 4.1-4.2 ,

post-Fordism,  ,  ,  ,  , 5.1-5.2 , 6.1-6.2 ,

postmodernism, 1.1-1.2 ,  ,  ,  ,  ,

post-Operaism, 1.1-1.2 ,  ,  ,  , 5.1-5.2 ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,

post-structuralism,  ,

potentiality,  , 2.1-2.2 ,  ,  , 5.1-5.2 ,  ,  ,  , 9.1-9.2 ,  ,  ,  ,

production, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 ,  ,  , 5.1-5.2 ,  ,  ,  , 9.1-9.2 , 10.1-10.2 ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  , 17.1-17.2 ,  , 19.1-19.2 ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,

mode of production,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  , 7.1-7.2 , 8.1-8.2 ,

Q

_Quaderni Rossi_ (Journal),  ,  ,  , 4.1-4.2

Quintili, Paolo,

R

Rahola, Federico,  ,

Rawls, John,

Rebughini, Paola,

Rella, Franco,

reproduction,  ,  , 3.1-3.2 ,  ,  ,  ,  ,

revolution, revolutionary,  , 2.1-2.2 ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,

counterrevolution  ,

revolutionary subject,  ,

Rifkin, Jeremy,

Righi, Andrea,

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques,

Rubin, Andrew,

Rubin, Isaak, 1.1-1.2

S

Said, Edward W.,  , 2.1-2.2

Sakai, Naoki, 1.1-1.2

Schelling, Friedrich,

Schmitt, Carl,  ,  , 3.1-3.2 ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,

Schweppenhäuser, Hermann,

Seem, Mark,

Serra, Pasquale,

Serratore, Constanza,

Shakespeare, William,  ,

Sibertin-Blanc, Guillaume,

Simondon, Gilbert,

Sloterdijk, Peter,  ,

Smith, Adam,

Snowden, Dhara,

social worker, 1.1-1.2 ,  ,

Spengler, Oswald,

Spinoza, Baruch, 1.1-1.2 ,  ,  ,  ,

state of exception,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,

Stimilli, Elettra,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  , 8.1-8.2 ,  ,  ,  ,

Streeck, Wolfgang,

Strummiello, Giusi,

subjectivation,  , 2.1-2.2 ,  ,  ,  ,  , 7.1-7.2 , 8.1-8.2 , 9.1-9.2 ,  ,

T

Taylor, Charles,

technology,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,

Tiedemann, Rolf,

Togliatti, Palmiro,  ,

Toscano, Alberto,  ,

Tronti, Mario, 1.1-1.2 ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  , 17.1-17.2 ,  ,  , 20.1-20.2 ,

U

use,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  , 13.1-13.2 ,  , 15.1-15.2 ,  ,  ,

V

Valery, Paul,

value,  , 2.1-2.2 , 3.1-3.2 ,  , 5.1-5.2 ,  , 7.1-7.2 ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,

surplus value 1.1-1.2 ,

value-form, 1.1-1.2

Vanantwerpen, Jonathan,

Vanini, Giulio Cesare,

Vattimo, Gianni,

Vercellone, Carlo,  ,

Vico, Giambattista,  ,

Virno, Paolo,  ,  ,  ,  ,  , 6.1-6.2 ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,

W

Weber, Max,  ,  ,

Wigen, Kären E.,  ,

Wittgenstein, Ludwig,  ,  ,

Z

Zapperi, Giovanna,

Zedler, Johann Heinrich,

Ž

Žižek, Slavoj,  ,  ,  ,  , 5.1-5.2

# Acknowledgements

We are indebted to Michele Filippini, Theodore Lance and Dhara Snowden for their editorial wisdom. We would also like to thank the publisher DeriveApprodi and Ilaria Bussoni for allowing the publication of some of the essays of _Differenze Italiane_ in their English translation as part of this volume.

# Introduction

Dario Gentili and Elettra Stimilli

Alternative Narrative and Political Operation

The essays collected in this volume represent an overview of the debate that was spurred internationally by the so-called "Italian Theory"—understood as the horizon within which the authors and categories that characterize Italian philosophy and politics can be thought. "Italian Theory" is certainly a "provisional" expression, which—with a certain irony—was coined on the mould of "French Theory", an expression that usually labels the influence and the reception of French Thought in the United States—or anyway outside this thought's national boundaries—after World War Two. "Temporariness" characterizes the way in which the expression "Italian Theory" was acquired from the outset. The later proposed formulation, i.e., "Italian Thought" (Esposito, 2018), better accounts for such temporariness. It suggests the intention of not configuring a "theory" that would neutralize the discordances and antagonisms that characterize the different positions composing the field of contemporary Italian critical thought. As some of the essays in this volume demonstrate, Italian critical thought is in fact a field of tension whose territory is mapped and delineated exactly by differences and conflicts. Also the territory is hence irreducible to boundaries—be these boundaries those of an alleged "Italianness" or those of "theory". It is in fact constantly marked by "trespassings" or, as Deleuze would put it, crisscrossed by "deterritorialization" vectors.

Exactly because of this tension towards the "outside" of any national determination—a tension that defines a constitutive element of Italian philosophy (Esposito, 2012)—the essays here collected amount to a markedly different operation with respect to their publication in Italian in a volume this text draws from (Gentili and Stimilli, 2015). In the case of the collection we are presenting here, one should at least consider which "operation" one is about to undertake. We can talk about "operation" using the term that Alain Badiou utilizes to speak about the "moment of contemporary French philosophy" which took shape starting from the 1970s (Badiou, 2012). If, in fact, "French Theory" is an "American adventure in French theory", as François Cusset wrote in his successful 2008 book (Cusset, 2008: 9), then the question that could be asked to introduce this volume is: Is "Italian Theory" an analogous phenomenon to that of "French Theory"? Are we in the presence of an analogous operation?

The assimilation of rather different authors, such as Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Jacques Derrida—which is at the origin of the American creation of "French Theory"—was produced right after the years of student contestation when American universities found themselves having to face a decade characterized by a return to order, economic recessions, and the advent of neoliberal policies increasingly determined to set up learning and knowledge spaces after the model of the market. "French Theory" is hence invented in North American universities exactly at the time when an unprecedented alliance between knowledge transmission and the economic order was developing. It was a reaction, more than an action, which coincided with the isolation of humanities departments (where the phenomenon mainly developed), and with the affirmation of analytical philosophy in philosophy departments.

But the diffusion of "French Theory" was also produced at the threshold where university campuses and spaces of dissidence were both separated and connected. This was a zone where artistic experimentations resonated with avant-garde critical analyses. In the weakening process that characterized continental philosophy in the face of analytic philosophy's advancement, what also emerged is a new political and social role that continental theory could play and that was not limited to the classical statute of philosophical knowledge but instead took its shape exactly from the critique of metaphysics—a critique that the main representatives of "French Theory" carried out with an unprecedented radical approach which also carried philosophy outside of itself, so to speak, leading it towards the arts, literature, and politics.

Maybe "French Theory" didn't completely carry through the consequence of philosophy's exit out of the field where it was previously situated. Or, to put it better, this is possibly where "French Theory"—as a movement seen from the outside—did not function. Internal differences within "French Theory"—differences that were certainly present at the outset—were instead neutralized when they were passed through a gaze "from the outside", i.e., the North American gaze.

These differences emerge today more clearly, when biopolitics has ended up being the reference paradigm for some of the most relevant exponents of Italian contemporary thought (such as Toni Negri, Giorgio Agamben, and Roberto Esposito) whose American reception has tended to produce a phenomenon that is analogous to that of "French Theory". Hence the conversation about "Italian Theory" started. However, before this process produced its neutralizing effects—effects that are in many ways similar to what happened to "French Theory" in North America—the need to elaborate the phenomenon from the inside emerged as the attempt to strengthen the differences and the innovative elements that characterized it. But this need also emerged in order to re-weave together the threads of the narrative which was interrupted, shattered, later even dismissed (if not exactly misacknowledged) by the "counterrevolution" (Virno and Hardt, 1996) that came after the "Long Italian 1968" (1968–1977).

We could then say that "Italian Theory" is not an American invention but a way to reflect—within Italy—on the potentialities and the limits of the diffusion of some stands of Italian philosophy, strands that recently re-emerged and came to the forefront of the international debate at a time of crisis for those European philosophies—like, for instance, deconstruction, hermeneutics, critical theory, and post-structuralism—that were more renowned up to a few decades ago.

After the publication of a few edited volumes in the US where different Italian authors were presented either as isolated phenomena or in connection with global philosophy's trends (neo-Marxism, biopolitics, critical thought, and radical thought), Roberto Esposito's _Pensiero vivente: Origini e attualità della filosofia italiana_ [Living Thought: The origins and actuality of Italian philosophy] is published in 2010 and then, in 2012, Dario Gentili's book _Italian Theory: Dall'operaismo alla biopolitica_ [Italian Theory: From Operaism to biopolitics] comes out. Coming before these two volumes—which started the "narration" of "Italian Theory"—was the 2005 pamphlet _La differenza italiana_ [The Italian difference] by Toni Negri (published in 2009), which assumed the Italian "difference" with respect to other philosophical and political traditions as the most productive approach to characterize the Italian twentieth century.

A reflection on the meaning of the "Italian difference" and on the reasons for its diffusion has to go to the heart of the difficulties that contemporary philosophy has been facing in the past decades. The split between "analytic philosophy" and "continental philosophy" certainly did not lead to philosophy's strengthening. Instead, what we witnessed was philosophy's general weakening. The analytical tradition, the critical theory, and hermeneutics that characterized German thought, and the French deconstruction, were sort of blocked within an auto-referential path that had no grasp on the real. One could say that the interest in Italian philosophy by the contemporary international debate originated exactly from its being intertwined with history and politics from the outset.

It is certainly not by chance that the debate among the main exponents of Italian philosophy is strictly connected with recent Italian history and is always at the intersection of philosophy and politics. The Italian one is an anomalous story in the landscape of major Western democracies. Suffice it to say that during the thirty years of the economic boom—called "the glorious thirty-year period"—Italy could flaunt the biggest Communist Party of the Western world which, while holding a seat in the Parliament, never actually governed, and hence maintained an ambivalence that didn't lack some ambiguities. It is possible that it was exactly this anomaly—which is deeply intertwined with recent Italian philosophy—that opened up the possibility for a "different" reflection, a reflection that could engage the historical destiny of Western democracies because it contains an "outside" from within—that is, an excess that is potentially loaded with radical political alternatives. This seems to be what sparked the interest about the Italian philosophical thought in the international debate.

Even as globalization brought the advent of a world that was not anymore "divided" and even as this led to the proclamation of the end of a real alternative to the capitalist-liberal model, new divisions and new conflicts emerged that couldn't be ignored. Italian "radical thought" had already faced this issue during the 1960s and 1970s when it discussed the plausibility of a conflict within a system that tries to turn any antagonism into something functional to the system's own conservation. Yet, it positioned a conflictuality capable of constructing political alternatives "within and against" the economic system of production and reproduction (a Fordist system back then, and a post-Fordist system afterwards). Focusing now on the epoch's passage, it is exactly the constituent power attributed to conflict that enabled Italian Thought to grasp the political potentialities of the crisis of that globalization that in the 1990s had imposed the narrative of the "end of history" and of the end of politics as conflict—and to grasp these potentialities "from within" the crisis' own dispositives.

Mario Tronti's 1966 book _Operai e Capitale_ [Workers and Capital]—which represents the foundational and still unavoidable text of the quite variegated season of Italian Operaism—was taken on to introduce the thought of an alternative political practice that was different from the discussion which imposed itself at the international level with globalization. Bringing political praxis back in the field of ethical action—as in the case, for instance, of John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas—led to the neutralization of the conflicting character of politics which at any rate did not let itself be neutralized, as the contemporary outcomes of the global market demonstrate.

However, since the workers' subjectivity does not embody the antagonist dimension any longer—as Tronti thought—and any subjectivity form can instead originate conflict (as it is irreducible to the order of representation of the modern Political), the peculiar way in which Italian Thought introduced Michel Foucault's biopolitical paradigm allowed it to locate the fundamental conflict in life itself. While there are several configurations that life can take on with respect to power within Italian Thought—i.e., from biological life to the bare life of the _Homo Sacer_ , to the living labour of the post-Fordist mode of production—such broadening of the range of biopolitics in relation to the Foucauldian paradigm characterizes Italian biopolitics as the biopolitics of the era of globalization: on the biopolitical plane, life presents the same not-transcendable degree that the globalized world presents on the geopolitical plane. In both cases what's at stake in such immanence plane is the space of conflict's action-ability and, hence, the space of politics itself.

The approaches and the genealogies can be different. For instance, it is possible to trace, as it has in fact been already done (Esposito, 2012), such internal dynamic of Italian Thought back to Machiavelli and even Dante. This dynamic is, after all, the philosophical re-elaboration of the excess of politics with respect to the nation-state. It is hence possible to assert that what the main authors of "Italian Theory" have in common is exactly a re-appreciation of grand narratives. Such grand narratives are not, however, posited as new philosophies of history in response to the post-1989 end of history. They instead manifest themselves exactly as the meticulous and materialist grounding of _genealogy_ : that is, they are not at all inspired by Hegel but by Nietzsche and Foucault. They therefore don't fall back within those grand narratives of which Jean-François Lyotard decreed the end in the 1980s, hence giving rise to the philosophical season of postmodernism. Instead, the genealogies of "Italian Theory"—which often go back to the Greek and Roman times in order to trace the prefiguring of those philosophical, political, and juridical dispositives that are still present today—are capable of reading and interpreting the present moment exactly because they deliberately assume postmodernism's crisis and they position themselves _after_ and _beyond_ it. Such "genealogical grand narratives"—empire, state of exception, _communitas_ , General Intellect, economic theology—can moreover reveal the complicity of postmodern thought and analytical philosophies (this is a quite surprising complicity if we consider that the debates of the 1980s posited them as opposite terms). To put it sharply, maybe today we can say that the convergence against grand narratives represented the true "reaction" that involved "French Theory" in the 1970s—a reaction which then gained cultural hegemony with globalization in the 1990s.

While academic philosophy's debates concealed it for decades, the _political_ point of view of Italian Thought has instead brought this complicity to light today. While postmodernism and analytical philosophies both assumed the end of grand narratives—and, with them, the co-implication of philosophy and politics that was grand narratives' peculiar trait—a certain Italian Thought denounced that these grand narratives were far from being exhausted. Today grand narratives are rather the prerogative of neoliberal market capitalism and of its art of government: it is political economy that develops them today—that neoliberal economy which peculiarity consists in taking politics at its service. Together with the initiative in the production of grand narratives (globalization, free market, competition, meritocracy, and crisis), neoliberalism also took on their fundamental outcome: that is, the constitutive processes of life forms themselves. The self-entrepreneur and the indebted man hence turn out to be two sides of the same coin, the two possible and exemplary outcomes of the contemporary forms of neoliberal government (Lazzarato, 2012; Stimilli, 2017). What's at stake is certainly not anymore the 1970s' capitalism, which turned "French Theory" into a brand of the global market of knowledge.

At this point it may be worth asking if today—in the context of the neoliberal market— "Italian Theory" is susceptible to become the marketing operation for a "made in Italy" brand. Marketing is normally defined as that social and managerial phenomenon which intends to satisfy needs and necessities through processes of creation and exchange of products and values. It is the art of locating, creating, and providing value in order to satisfy the needs of a particular market. In a way, then, one could maybe provocatively assume that in the time of the supremacy of market over politics "Italian Theory" is a marketing operation—but that it is so in a rather specific way: i.e., in the sense of a proposal which, even within Italy, is meant to locate, create, and give value to a process that, while it comes from the fame of Italian philosophy abroad, could run the risk of losing its efficacy. One could maybe say that this is rather a political operation similar to the one that some liberation movements linked to gender theories put into play in the 1980s and 1990s—those movements that re-appropriated the active sense of some expressions used with a totally different meaning (suffice it to think of the word "queer", for instance). This wouldn't be enough though. The current phase of neoliberal capitalism is different from previous ones because it has already configured its own narrative. Italian Thought can maybe unmask this narrative's premises and conditions of possibility but it can't feed and strengthen it. This is because it actually doesn't share such premises and the conditions of possibility in any way. Rather, Italian Thought's genealogies can actually represent an alternative to this narrative. Leaving any ambiguity aside, Italian Thought posits itself as an alternative narrative to the narrative of "Italianness" offered by the global market. It also posits itself as an alternative to any "national difference" within a globalization process that, by building nationality's brand, in fact appropriates nationality (any nationality) beyond any possible political content and connotation. Italian Thought then interrogates an "Italian difference" that is not traceable—neither to political nationalism nor to a "made in Italy" product.

Therefore, the goal of this book is not to affirm a new thought's brand. Rather, its goal it to allow for the opening of a discourse whose boundaries are far from being pre-given or already defined. Instead, this discourse starts constituting itself as a net without an emanation centre and is capable of tying itself again wherever the occasion arises. What is at stake are not only the genealogies or the _damned_ historiographies—even as they are proposed in many of the relevant works we present here. At stake are also the "uses"—in different contexts, which are also always different from one another—of the categories and dispositives elaborated in Italian and that we propose here in order to show the effectiveness of a reflection that won't stay within the narrow confines of mere "theory".

## Works Cited

Badiou, A. (2012). _The adventure of French philosophy_. London: Verso.

Cusset, F. (2008). _French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. transformed the intellectual life of the United States_. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,

Esposito, R. (2012). _Living Thought: The origins and actuality of Italian philosophy_. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Esposito R. (2018). _From outside: A philosophy for Europe_. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press.

Gentili, D. (2012). _Italian Theory: Dall'operaismo alla biopolitica_. Bologna: Il Mulino.

Gentili, D., and Stimilli, E., eds. (2015). _Differenze italiane: Politica e filosofia: mappe e sconfinamenti_. Rome: DeriveApprodi.

Lazzarato, M. (2012). _The making of the indebted man: An essay on the neoliberal condition_. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).

Negri, A. (2009). The Italian difference. In L. Chiesa and A. Toscano (eds.), _The Italian difference: Between nihilism and biopolitics_. Melbourne: re.press, 13–23.

Stimilli, E. (2017). _The debt of the living: Ascesis and capitalism_. New York: SUNY Press.

Tronti, M. (2013). _Operai e capitale_. Rome: DeriveApprodi.

Virno, P., and Hardt, M., eds. (1996). _Radical Thought in Italy: A potential politics_. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
I

# Genealogies

Chapter 1

# German Philosophy, French Theory, Italian Thought

Roberto Esposito

We may have not reflected enough on the fact that European philosophy's reintroduction (after its apparent exhaustion in the 1930s and 1940s) happened through a sort of dislocation that pushed it "outside of itself". I use "outside" in a geographical sense, referring to the forced migration of some of its main representatives to America. But the notion of "outside" has also a conceptual meaning and indicates the putting at a distance of a paradigm that had characterized this philosophy in previous decades.

The paradigm that European philosophy left behind after the war can be traced back to the category of "crisis". As it is known, this paradigm was appropriated by a vast intellectual front, starting from Mann to Ortega, and from Spengler to Croce. But it found its most famous expression in the texts about the crisis of the spirit by Valéry, about the crisis of European sciences by Husserl, and about the crisis of the metaphysic tradition by Heidegger. Despite their internal differences, what brings these texts together is the premise that, in order to release itself from the mortal hold it is gripped by, European thought has to re-territorialize itself, to recover its Greek root and to reconstitute itself from it. Such reasoning—which links origin and end, _arche_ and _telos_ , in a circular movement—repeats itself with little variation in all of these authors' writings of that period: only if it will regain its original relationship with Greece (beyond the deviations that compromised its development) will European thought find its primacy over other cultures again and accomplish the civilization task that it has always been destined for. Whether these authors' keyword was "spirit", "being", or "transcendental ego" doesn't change the basic characteristics of the dispositive of the crisis, which dominates the great European philosophical thought up to the beginning of the Forties.

The outcome of the war doesn't only mark the failure of that project; it also forces European thought—exhausted as it was by the unsuccessful search of an origin that couldn't be found—to exit itself in order to reinvent itself along other trajectories. The migration of the entire German-Jewish intelligentsia to the United States when Nazism was rising constitutes the dramatic occasion for exodus, and this opened a first crossing towards the outside that seemed to give breath to European philosophy. This doesn't only free European philosophy from the regressive dispositive of the crisis but it also builds the condition for a rebirth that, in some cases, allows its protagonism to come back at a global scale. Even though the denomination of "critical theory" is commonly used to indicate the philosophers of the Frankfurt School, they, however, maintain a strictly philosophical lexicon—and this is especially the case for Adorno and Marcuse. It is true that, according to the project of the Institute for Social Research (the so-called Frankfurt School), philosophy has to blend with other languages—from sociology, to psychoanalysis, to aesthetics. But far from simply mimicking their procedures, philosophy inserts a theoretical dimension in them. And while it contests these other languages' pretence to autonomy, philosophy puts them in contradiction with themselves. It is hence possible to define this first dislocation of European thought outside its frontier as German Philosophy, without conferring any national accent to this expression, which in fact refers mainly to intellectuals with a Jewish background.

Thinking of the extraordinary influence that especially Marcuse—but also Adorno and Horkheimer—exerted on the political culture of that time (despite the difficult relationship of these latter two authors with the student movement), one could easily say that the American passage gave back some fresh air to European philosophy. One shouldn't underestimate the novelty of such an event. Maybe for the first time in modern history the expansion of a certain philosophy was directly proportional to its deterritorialization. Not only did the detachment from its homeland not produce the weakening outcomes that Heidegger and the philosophers of the crisis had diagnosed, it even determined a formidable expansion of European philosophy. As Deleuze and Guattari would later contend—when they inaugurated their discourse on "geophilosophy"—this is not a contingent outcome but a structural element of philosophical language: the deviation towards the outside is not only a historical-geographical element but a structural trait for philosophical discourse; only by exiting itself, by taking a leave from its own (presumed) matrix, can thought find the necessary charge for its own profound renewal.

The second passage towards the "outside" is performed at the beginning of the Seventies by the so-called French Theory. In this case it was a spontaneous movement, not a movement determined—as in the case of the German diaspora—by traumatic events, and it hence lacks any tragic resonance. It concerned a series of intellectuals who were already well known in their country and more generally in Europe—and who were for this reason invited to teach in American campuses. Yet, also in this case—even more so than in the previous one—the contamination that derived produced a diffusion of their thought that took on the character of a true hegemony in a series of disciplines ranging from literary criticism, to gender studies, to postcolonial studies. It is true—as it's been argued—that what was received across the Atlantic was not the "true" philosophy of Derrida, Deleuze, Lyotard, Foucault, and Baudrillard, but an amalgam where pieces of their thought were fused together in a new blend which took the polyvalent name of "theory" _._ Such theory responded to the renewal needs of the humanities practiced in American universities. At any rate, the extraordinary relaunch of French philosophy across the world is due to this hybridization: what was happening in New York, as well as in Chicago and in Los Angeles, was reproduced like wildfire not only all across the United States, but also in Tokyo, Toronto, Buenos Aires, and Sydney. Once again, a passage through the outside recreated the conditions for an unexpected expansion of European philosophical thought and reactivated French philosophy's primacy—a primacy this philosophy feared to have lost for good. It had never happened that a handful of European philosophers—all of whom had become true stars also in the cross-Atlantic media system—was influencing such vast territory exactly through an operation of deterritorialization in relation to their country of origin.

Is it possible to acknowledge an Italian Thought, after German Philosophy and French Theory? This is the question this conference was born from and that persistently circulates not only in Italy. The answer can't but be extremely cautious. In this case we can't certainly talk about hegemony or about a material dislocation; in fact, the success—at times, a clamorous success—of some Italian philosophers happened in America before it happened in Italy, and it was once again from America that it was transmitted to other countries. It is a process at the nascent state and it is for now less clearly identifiable than the processes it was preceded by. This is also due to the difference—at times, a pronounced difference—that characterizes the research laboratories opened by the better-known Italian philosophers abroad. Yet it is undoubtedly true that, even if in a latent way, an "Italian difference" has been taking shape in the past few years, as it is proven by the growing number of conferences, books, and essays devoted to it.

Let me start with a first observation about the name—i.e., about that "thought" that replaces German "philosophy" and French "theory". In the book I devoted to Italian philosophy entitled _Living Thought_ (2010), I gave that term a performative meaning. I meant "performative" in two ways: both in terms of that relationship between theory and praxis that has been characterizing Italian Thought already from its origins—a thought about praxis and, together, a practice of thought; and "performative" in the sense that this Thought's identification—including the one I am trying here—is an integral part of it. It is as if Italian Thought constituted itself in its own making, rather than after some preliminary theorizations. Italian Thought is not generated from the program of an institute, as was the case for the Frankfurt School. Neither was it generated from the complex theorizations that, just before the structuralist season, had characterized the first texts of French authors. It was born within the political dynamics of the first years of the 1960s in Italy—which merged only later, and not always, in the larger flux of the international student movement. In this way the praxis preceded the theory, hence interacting with it according to a further connotation of the "outside"—i.e., not so much an outside referred to a geographic dislocation or to the creation of new disciplinary sections, but an outside referred to the dimension of the "political". The "outside" mobilized by the Italian Thought is not German thinkers' "social" or French thinkers' "text", but the constitutively conflictual space of political praxis.

Such characteristic can easily be defined a long-term one, since it's linked to the originary history of Italian thinkers from the dawn of the modern world. The lack of the mediation of a unitary state situated Italian thinkers by the political and the ecclesiastic local power from the outset, in an ambivalent and often contrastive condition towards it. Outside this rather particular condition it would be impossible to understand the political destiny of authors such as Dante and Machiavelli who were exiled, Bruno and Vanini who were burned alive, Galilei and Campanella who were forced to abjuration, or Gramsci and Gentile who died at the opposite ends of the same line. If, as it has been argued, power generates resistance, the above overview shows that this is even more the case for philosophy under certain conditions. Italian philosophy was certainly more a philosophy of resistance rather than of power. It is not by chance that Gramsci is back at the centre of scholarly attention all around the world and that the germinal nucleus of Italian Thought is the 1960s' Italian Operaism in its various souls.

Another typical element of Italian Thought is represented by its tendency to contamination with other paradigms. This tendency is another way to practice exteriority as the form and also the content of thought. Also in this case we are dealing with a long-lasting characteristic. Italian thinkers have always made themselves available for an original re-elaboration of philosophical lexicons coming from other countries. The deterritorialization of Italian philosophers and works did not originate from a necessity, as was the case for German philosophers, or from a call coming from American universities, as it happened for French philosophers. Instead, it originated from an attitude to hybridization that can be traced back to the Renaissance. Such hybridization worked in both directions—from Italy to abroad, and from abroad to Italy—building on a custom that involved the entire European culture between 1400 and 1500. Something of this tendency persists to this day. The presence of German and French lemmas in the works of Italian Thought authors is so intense that they can't be bound to any national identification, while they nonetheless maintain a particular relationship with the philosophical language of Dante and Bruno, and of Vico and Leopardi.

But what characterizes Italian Thought is not only its nexus with praxis (its political soul) or the contagion with other traditions. What characterizes Italian Thought is its prevailing categorical axis on the one hand and, on the other hand, the way in which it is assumed. As for its prevailing categorical axis, a simple comparison with other philosophical traditions will allow to identify it. If the field of intervention chosen by the Frankfurt School was socio-cultural change, while that of French deconstructionism was the field of writing, the semantic horizon of Italian Thought is the category of life. I am not just thinking about biopolitics—which, however, found in Italy an interpretative quality that Foucault's pioneer researches of the 1970s didn't find elsewhere. I am thinking about the category of life in terms of an older and long-lasting presence that can be traced back to the origins—from Machiavelli, to Leonardo, to Bruno. This is the reason why Italy didn't need a specific philosophy of life—like the one that spread in Germany and France in the first decades of the 1900s. One could say that the entire Italian Thought has been a thought of life, conceived of in its tension with politics and history. Ours was not a philosophy of consciousness like classic French philosophy was; neither was it a metaphysical elaboration like German philosophy. But it wasn't a philosophy of logics and language either, as was the case for Anglo-Saxon countries' philosophy. It wasn't an analytics of interiority, of transcendence, of logical-linguistic structures; it was instead a knowledge about life, the body, and the world.

Also as far as Italian Thought's declination, it can be derived from a comparison with German Philosophy and French Theory. The Frankfurt School's typical modality was that of the negation. From this vantage point, Adorno's _Negative Dialectic_ does not only constitute the core work of German Philosophy, it is also its general key. Adorno doesn't only elaborate a radically negative position in terms of the theological dispositive of the crisis; he opposes it to the dialectic within which Hegel imprisoned the negation by forcing it to a conclusive outcome. By comparing the negation only to itself, Adorno turns it not only in the form of the concept but also in the concept's content, and hence precludes any positive landing place for it. While in a different way, Horkheimer gets to the same conclusions: the critical power of the negative is so acute that it turns against the same theory that activated it, hence negating any of its possible affirmative outcomes. What opened in Frankfurt was a struggle of the concept with itself, a struggle that is so inexorable it leads the concept to a self-contradiction. For Adorno what is at stake is a consequence—not an endured consequence but a theorized one—which is seen as the only possible option that philosophy can find after Auschwitz. This doesn't erase the impression of a theoretical block beyond which it is not possible to go any further within that way of thinking.

If the modal category of German Philosophy is the negative, that of French Theory is the neutral. The neutral is a category used by Blanchot and taken on by Derrida and Foucault in a different form and in a way that explicitly refers to a thought of the "outside".

But deconstruction as such is neutral—as it is not oriented towards anything in particular, as it is suspended between a yes and a no, and it is in fact situated exactly at their intersection point. It is from here that deconstruction's distance from both the paradigm of crisis and the paradigm of critique derives. The same program of the deconstruction of metaphysics elaborated by Derrida, far from negating the exclusionary mechanism of metaphysics, tends to suspend it by applying it also to itself in a movement of self-dissolution. And this is not because French Theory adheres to the existing state of being—none of its major thinkers do. French Theory instead always puts itself at the most radical distance from it. But this is so because such distancing—as it puts even itself at a distance—takes on an auto-ironic profile that, at some point, inhibits the possibility of any position, negative or affirmative that it may be. Even the movement of the difference (in all the modalities through which this term was used by Derrida, Deleuze, and Lyotard) coincides with its apparent opposite, i.e., with the repetition. Likewise, Deleuze's multiplicity can be read—by Badiou, for instance—even in terms of a metaphysics of the One.

If the outcome of German Philosophy was the negation and that of French Theory was neutralization, one could advance the hypothesis that Italian Thought's prevalent tonality is that of affirmation. By "affirmative thought" one can obviously mean two rather different things. The meaning I allude to refers to a philosophy of immanence that clearly goes well beyond Italian philosophy, to include a line of thought that connects Spinoza to Nietzsche, Bergson, and Deleuze. Without underestimating their differences—which are at times rather stark—one could say that Italian philosophers' prevalent effort has been that of thinking in a nonreactive way, and instead to be thinking in an active, productive, and affirmative way. Even Italian biopolitics was elaborated in a form that does not exclude an affirmative declination. Sure, one could argue about the meaning and outcomes of such affirmation, but the fact that it indicates an overall direction remains. Which direction? What does Italian philosophy as a whole affirm? The argument I would feel like advancing is that it affirms the critique of political theology. Such critique is in the cords of classical Italian Thought—along the secular tradition that links the thought of Machiavelli, Bruno, Genovesi, and Leopardi. Also, biopolitics is understood as the reverse side of political theology in contemporary Italy.

Of course, this presupposes a widespread interest for such category. It is a fact that most of Italian Thought's exponents—from Tronti to Cacciari and Agamben—reflected, even if with different perspectives, on the relationship between theology and politics. Also, the secularization theories elaborated in the 1980s and 1990s by Marramao and Vattimo refer to that relationship. Likewise, the opposition between the Machiavelli-Spinoza-Marx line and the Hobbes-Kant-Hegel one delineated by Negri already in the 1970s refers to that relationship as well, even if along different paths. What is at stake is the attempt to subtract the political both from the German semantic of the negation and from the French one of neutralization, as I was saying earlier. In order to fully grasp the meaning of what I am arguing here, the intended meaning of political theology should be indicated. As it is known, two different and even opposite definitions of political theology were given in the twentieth-century debate—i.e., from the religious legitimation of power, to the political use of theology; from tracing political categories back to theological ones, to the inverse derivation of the religious from the political. Personally, in _Two: The Machine of Political Theology and the Place of Thought_ (2013), I traced political theology back to something more than a simple concept, that is to say, to very long-term dispositive with effects that persist to these days. Referring to Heidegger and Foucault, I identified political theology as a sort of machine which functions by separating our life from itself—a separation understood both in the sense of negation and in the sense of transcendence. Born at the intersection of Christian theology and Roman law, political theology presents itself in different forms across time. Yet these forms can all be traced back to a dispositive of excluding inclusion. As the very lemma "political theology" indicates, what's at stake is the unification of two contrasting elements in the same category, as they are engaged in their reciprocal exclusion or submission. If we pay attention, we note that all the Western universals—including the idea of the West, which expresses a part that aspires to be a whole—obsessively reproduce this antinomic structure. The fact that this structure doesn't cease to function means that what's at stake is not an event or an ideology but the very way in which the order of Western Thought is thought. Political theology is to be understood as the recurring form through which a Two tends to makes itself One by excluding, or marginalizing, its other part.

The long struggle of the Church—against the Roman Empire first and against nation-states after—represents only its most obvious but far from unique expression. What is globalization, after all, if not the unification of the world along separation lines into different zones—zones that are incomparable in terms of resources and military power? The contemporary relationship between politics and the economy—which is governed by technology only in an apparently objective way—can be traced back to that same excluding mechanism. Each of them—the economy and politics—tends to catch the other within its own dispositives, hence leading to its weakening. But what matters at the structural level is their polemical connection, which originates in their common theological matrix. Giorgio Agamben argued that two distinct and complementary paradigms emerged from Christian theology and that the government of our society is produced at their convergence; these two paradigms are sovereign power's political theology and administrative government's economic theology. But one shouldn't be tricked by the prevalence that the second tends to have realized on the first. Instead of marking the end of political theology, such prevalence takes it to its apex and increasingly feeds the excluding inclusion's machine.

If this is the case, if the contemporary economic theology is nothing but a fold of political theology (which is in turn internal to the metaphysical horizon), I think that thought's task consists in trying to expose its outside—while being aware that it will be anything but an easy task for our conceptual language to be able to quickly set itself free from the politico-theological language because it has been largely and for too long corresponding to it. The categories of "secularization" and "profanation" were born within it, in its reverse side, even as they seem to oppose it. Even the concept of atheism—which seems to expand itself before our eyes in the Western world—can't be enunciated but starting from that idea of God, which it nonetheless repudiates. With this said, the attempt to exit political theology is at the heart of contemporary philosophy. I believe that Italian Thought has played and can play a relevant role in this research since—as we've seen—it is indeed a thought of the outside, a thought that has always been oriented towards the outside, and that has been antithetical to interiority, to transcendence, and to the separation. Naturally each author can interpret such orientation towards the outside in a different way. But it can be argued that all the main Italian categories go in this direction.

I am referring in particular to three categories, which tension with what defines them by contrast I will briefly touch on—i.e., the category of the "common" as opposed to "immunity"; the category of "potentiality" ( _potentia_ ) as opposed to "power"; and the category of "conflict" as opposed to "neutralization". Let me start from the first one. Already from the 1980s a theoretical research developed in Italy which had at its centre a paradigm of community that was radically deconstructive of the metaphysics modality through which such concept had been deployed earlier—by the German sociology of the _Gemeinschaft_ first, by different ethics of communication then, and finally by the American neo-communitarianism. It is true that such perspective had been anticipated in France by thinkers such as Blanchot and Nancy. But what qualifies Italian Thought's approach to the paradigm of community, and which confers it a political tonality (or rather and more precisely a biopolitical tonality which was absent in the French deconstruction) is the contrast with the notion of immunity, itself derived—in a negative form—from the Latin term _munus_ , which means the law of the reciprocal gift. If the _communitas_ is what binds its members through a giving commitment to one another, the _immunitas_ is the dispositive that exonerates from this obligation. This holds true at a juridical level, where immunity is conferred to whomever is not subject to common justice. But it is also true in the medical and biological sense, where an immune organism is the one that can resist an infection that came from the outside.

By overlapping the two semantics—the juridical and the biological one—we access the field of biopolitical semantics. Such field can't be accessed through the purely deconstructive notion of "inoperative" or "unavowable" community. When an immunitarian dispositive has increasingly become the syndrome of our time, the idea and practice of the community become the political form of resistance to such dispositive. The problem has to be faced at a double level: at the level of the deactivation of the immunization apparatuses and at the level of the activation of new common spaces. From this vantage point, the discussion on the commons ( _beni comuni_ ) and on the common as everybody's good ( _bene di tutti_ ) that opened in Italy before anywhere else, has contributed to shifting the conversation about the community in an even more political direction. With globalization, the modern trend that reduces the common to the public domain or to the private one reaches its apex. This becomes even more relevant when, as in the current biopolitical regime, each resource—material or immaterial that it may be—concerns the human body, and includes in it also the natural resources of language and intelligence. Now it is exactly on this terrain that the question of an affirmative biopolitics should be posited. The question of affirmative biopolitics has to break out of the public / private claws that risk crushing the common. And, in fact, the struggle against the privatization of the water, land, and air in the practice of Italian Thought crisscrosses the theory of a common intellect along a trajectory that from Averroè leads to Marx's General Intellect. The critique of the juridical category of personhood—which is central to the theological-political dispositive—in favour of a thought of the impersonal is linked to this same option.

The second category which, along different itineraries, unifies Italian Thought is that of "potentiality". This category has to be thought of in autonomy from—if not even in contrast with—the category of "act" on the one hand and of "power" on the other. Whether it refers to thought or to a form of multiple subjectivity, it is anyway internal to the affirmative biopolitics which we already mentioned a few times. As was the case for the common with respect to the immune and to the own, also the category of potentiality takes on its meaning from its two contrast poles. The antithesis that, in the Aristotelian tradition, dialectically links the potentiality to the actuality is well known: it is _in potentia_ what is not yet in actuality—but it is exactly the necessity of such passage from potentiality to actuality that the Italian Thought contests, favouring instead an un-actualized potentiality which is not necessarily destined to an activation and is not resolved in it.

But the category of potentiality has two other antonyms. These are "necessity" on the one hand and "power" on the other. As it is a possibility, potentiality is situated at the opposite pole of necessity. The possible is what can't be otherwise. It is what may also not be. And it is hence not necessary, unlike what is often believed according to a bitter philosophy of necessity. Think of how today's governmental policies shield themselves behind unbreakable, and hence undisputable, bonds, as Benjamin already understood when he talked about "capitalism as religion". Well, the category of the "possible"— understood in its creative, inventive, and innovative significance—is indeed what stands in opposition to such economic teleology, by contesting its metaphysical presuppositions. Here—on the side of economic theology—we crisscross the other polarity that is in contrast with potentiality ( _potenza_ ), i.e., a closed and excluding notion of power. Potentiality—be it the thought's potentiality or the multitude's—is what forces from within the power of that which exists. This is again an affirmative biopolitics, if potentiality is thought of in relation to the expansion of life. The same contraposition between constituent and constituted power, as it is in fact theorized by the Italian Thought and in particular by Negri, depends on the semantics of potentiality, understood as the creative capacity to grasp something that can't ever be definitely blocked without losing its vital energy. Such energetic _potential_ refers back to the classic author wherefrom Italian political thought is born, more than to the contemporary debate. I am obviously alluding to Machiavelli. The statement that Machiavelli is not, like Hobbes instead was, a thinker of the "State" (" _Stato_ ") has to be understood in the sense that he thinks of the political in its becoming—hence as what is never only what has "been" (" _stato_ "), and as what can't "stay" (" _sta_ ") if it doesn't also become.

Let us get to the last, and most political, figure of the Italian Thought, that is to say, the conflict paradigm. In order to at least face, if not unhinge, power, the potentiality has to presuppose the possibility of a conflict with whomever holds power at a particular time. As it is known, this is exactly the explosive novelty that Machiavelli instills not only at the origin of political thought but also of Italian Thought. The specific trait of his constitutive biopolitics—aimed at the creation of a constituent power—lies precisely in the revolutionary idea that order does not by itself exclude, but in fact includes, conflict. It is the idea that without conflict—understood in the political and not military meaning of the term—any order is destined to be drained and get extinguished. It means that the real enemy of potentiality is not conflict but neutralization. Far from wanting to line up conceptions that are too distant to be compared, the fact remains that the Italian Operaism of the 1960s recovers this thesis by translating it into political praxis. The argument that the worker's point of view is different from capital's—similarly to how the woman's gaze is different from the man's gaze in feminist thought—situates the semantics of the conflict in the genetic moment of Italian Thought. Also, from this angle the reference goes to the critique of political theology—I traced the comprehensive meaning of "Italian Thought" back to political theology. If the political-theological machine can't but reduce the Two into One through the exclusion of one of its parts, Italian philosophy claims that the Two is necessary in the political horizon. The Italian difference passes also through this, especially through this.

## Note

Paper presented at the international conference _L'_ Italian Theory _existe-t-elle?_ / _Does_ Italian Theory _Exist?_ , Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense / Université Paris-Sorbonne, January 24–25, 2014.

Chapter 2

# Post-Operaism? No, Operaism

Toni Negri

In recent Marxist theory literature, "Operaism" and "post-Operaism" are often evoked. It is known that Operaism was born in Italy at the end of the 1950s and found expression in the journals _Quaderni Rossi_ [Red Notebooks] and _Classe Operaia_ [Working Class] in the 1960s. Doubts exist about the continuity between Operaism's establishments in the 1960s, the 1970s (when it had a first expansive phase), and the twenty-first century when Operaism was received within the international debate. Some hence suggest to call Operaism only the "unrefined" one that characterized the 1960s; and to call "post-Operaism" what followed. But does a "post-Operaism" actually exist? If it does in fact exist, it was born from Operaist militants' debates, philosophical readings, and sociological reflections at the time when they were locked up in Italian jails in the 1980s and were interrogating the defeat endured in the struggles of the working class in the context of nascent neoliberalism. Hence, if post-Operaism has an origin, it is a noble origin—to be arising from the resistance is in fact a noble origin. If post-Operaism exerted an influence on those social struggles for the common that followed one another in the decades between the last two centuries, it was for its force in comprehending the defeat and in moving beyond it.

Before asking if it is indeed possible to speak of "post-Operaism" as a method or as a trend of ideas different from "Operaism", let us try to understand how the problem emerged or how a misunderstanding developed around that _post-_. What was Operaism in the 1960s? To put it shortly, it was a theory of class struggle grounded on a constituent ontology rather than on a dialectical ontology, on the subjectivation of living labour rather than on the Hegelian dialectic—no matter how "overturned" this dialectic might be in Marxian terms. Let us not get scared as we hear the word "ontology". It meant nothing more and nothing less than the priority of living labour with respect to capitalist domination, the constitutive productivity of labour in the face of its exploitation, the intransitive asymmetry between living labour and dead labour. Now, inside the jails and after a decade of struggles, ontology would mean that one is anyway inside a powerful reality, within a non-erasable, lived sequence of events and the depth of a resistance which is again and always insuppressible. Class struggle was there and couldn't be eradicated. The point was to perform an "update" of previous class-struggle practices based on the analysis of new forms of exploitation. The so-called post-Operaism moves from a radical rereading of the "value-form"; that is, it moves from the new social conditions wherein the techniques of domination of neoliberalism and the new resistance to exploitation developed. It moves from here and it posits these conditions as the gist of the analysis.

What was at stake was, on the one hand, a theoretical reflection on the "value-form"—which was heavily influenced by the reading of the work of Isaak Rubin. "Value-form" meant that when there was a change in the amounts of value (and as the law of labour value got to a crisis point as the measure of valorization) and the substance of value (that is, the relationship that bound the quality of productive labour—now increasingly immaterial—to capitalist command) what resulted was the modification of the general shell of capitalist domination. A historically mutating horizon—where the dialectic of "capital relation" couldn't function anymore on the triadic rhythm of affirmation-negation-overcoming (that is, in Operaist jargon, "struggle-crisis-restructuring")—was being opened up by different researches: first, the (uncompleted) inquiries on labour's socialization and on the consequent formation of a post-industrial order, which was highlighted by capitalist labour policies themselves; second, the advancement of capitalist totalization in philosophical critique, a line of research developed against the Frankfurt School which was operationalized already in the 1960s and was now taken up and deepened in the footsteps of French post-Structuralists. The rhythm of capital's relation had become linear; capital's relation was now insisting on a dualistic construction of antagonistic subjectivities. The transformation of labour power from "mass worker" to "social worker" was hence described on the "value-form's" parameters. That is to say, it was described not only in relation to the crisis of measure (size) of value or to the substance of labour's modification but as the transformation of the "production mode" itself—i.e., the whole of social structures and policies that "put" exploitation and domination "into shape". Hence labour was opening up to further powers: from the "social worker" to that figure that we would later call "productive multitude" which was placed on a biopolitical fabric. The space of capitalist exploitation and of social resistance was growing larger as it was configuring itself on the global space; exploitation was instead extending its hold on society as a whole ( _scilicet_ , as it was later called: "extraction" of value from social production).

The progressive "lexical revolution" that the so-called post-Operaism was producing (from the "mass worker" to the "social worker" to the "multitude") was mirroring the transformations of the real being, i.e., it was ontologically founded. Let us get back to that unspeakable word: "ontology". Why should one be scared of it, of this word—which indicates the analysis of the being as being—when it is evident that, within a materialist perspective, it doesn't declare anything else but the materialist lesson of the being as production? Who's scared of ontology when ontology is defined as ontology of production and hence of social antagonisms? Only those who can't be radically materialist can be scared of it. Now, the notion of "ontologically founded" means three things here. The first is that history—the determined being—is the inescapable basis of any liberation struggle and that the struggles of the proletariat (independently from their outcome of victory or defeat) remain in history, which in turn is differently composed by these determinations. This hard, historical foundation, which constitutes the materialist terrain of our analysis, is what is being defined in the "form" of value as per Rubin (but also in the analysis of the young Marx and of "historical materialism").

The second note on the notion of "ontologically founded" insists on the fact that this is a dualist ontology, an antagonist one. It develops through and as class struggle and, as such, it invests capital's relation along biopolitical dimensions. What's at stake here is the continuous clash between life put to work and life submitted to domination. Ontology is marked by and never resolved in this clash. From here derives the illusory nature of any "line of flight" that pretends to make the relation of capital explode in an instantaneous, evenemential ( _événementiel_ ) way, and in an imaginary _Jetzt-Zeit_. No, this relation needs to be worked with continuity in order to open it up for liberation. The socialization of production in fact mobilizes the entire field of reproduction. It is necessary to work on this ontology in order for those who are exploited, for workers, for poor people, and for those who are excluded to have the strength not only to subvert our world but also to reinvent it.

The third point concerning this ontology emerges here: it is the constituent dispositive. Subjective forces are produced through antagonism; subjectivity is produced in history, and because the production of subjectivity is "production of production", it is the development of history itself, seen from the vantage point of struggles and of its capacity to build—with subjectivities themselves—wealth and freedom. In this materialism, the being is never empty, it is never impotent; it is always crisscrossed by labour and by desire, that is, by the productivity of live labour. What stands out here is the main struggle of any history of metaphysics: the struggle between a materialist conception of the productive being and the mystical-transcendental conception of the negative being. Moreover, the necessary choice between Hobbes and Spinoza, between fascism and freedom, gets insisted upon here. The same "fear"—that, according to Hobbes, is at the basis of the sovereign transcendental—has in fact a second and more truthful definition and this definition is at the basis of our civilization: the constructive fear, the one remembered in 1000 AD, the fear that the European people were able to overcome as they emerged from the barbarity of the middle era by decisively countering the superstition and destructive myth that supports it. They did so by throwing themselves beyond the boundaries of fear, superstition, and domination—even if they were poor, exploited, and excluded people—in order to build civilization.

Post-Operaism? What is that _post-_ for? What was built in prisons and was then brought outside in order to organize struggles between the two centuries was actually a new version of Operaism, in continuity with its ontological foundation and method. The constructive conception of class struggles, the inquiry, and an antagonist analysis of the historical process were crucial to it (as they were in the Operaist practices of the 1960s). What was at stake was simply the adaptation of that matrix to a new reality—an "update" about the new "forms" of the historical condition. Operaism as an ontology? Yes, because ontology constitutes the only possibility to say what we are and what we want to be; yes, because ontology is the being productive and there is no life without production. In this way, there was a move out of "unrefined" Operaism as it was delineated between _Quaderni Rossi_ and _Classe Operaia_. In this way, moreover, as Operaism was being nurtured by the results of past struggles, it was also being opened up for future struggles.

How did Operaism come to adhere to the new class composition? How did it come to develop and update the "unrefined" approach of the 1960s? What were its fundamental concepts? Which contemporary thought's contaminations did it confront itself with, and by which was it fecundated? Here, we can't but make a list of the successive updates of this development, and hence of the capacity of Operaism to grasp the reality of class struggle with continuity and to progressively define changing subjects.

A first episode is that linked to the discovery of the factory-society. In the 1970s, however, this happened because society started to absorb the factory, not because the factory was stretching out to society, as would become the case at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The struggles of the 1960s significantly weakened capitalist command inside factories; workers' struggle was irrepressible. It was at that time that, starting from a strong capitalist counter-attack, factories were largely destructured and delocalized: industrial automation and strong reduction of the labour-power employed, externalization of secondary productive units, territories' reorganization in productivist terms. Factories' walls had crumbled, mobility and flexibility were becoming the qualities of a labour-power that was at this point completely socialized and forced to precarity (or condemned to be swallowed by unemployment). Industry was socializing, and the worker too: the worker became a "social worker" after having been "mass worker" and waiting to confuse itself with the "multitude" of singularities looking for a new collocation within productive social networks—searching between school and factory, service industry and unemployment. One had to recognize all of this when leftist forces—both political and union ones—were unable to do this and persisted in their fixation on old figures of labour (pretending to defend them in a corporative way, and hence losing any capacity to express and conduct the new technical composition of socialized labour-power through an attack action against the capitalist restructuring that was underway). Operaism thinkers tried to intervene on this conjuncture and were defeated. We'll never forgive political and union powers for not being on the side of workers at this juncture, and for choosing to be internal to capitalist "reforms" instead.

From a theoretical standpoint, the Marxian distinction between "formal subsumption" and "real subsumption" developed at this juncture—where the first designates labor's (and society's) relative subordination to capital, and the second indicates the total becoming of that subordination. The analysis of this passage characterized the first Operaism. But this dimension could already have been called into question from the 1970s since the "real" subsumption was shaken by the modification of the form of work—and particularly by the emergence of immaterial labour. What is meant by immaterial labour is intellectual, cooperative, and affective labour, as well as the work that is being carried out in a nonrepetitive way in the service and industrial sectors—hence, this includes material labour when it is organized by information technology or as a service to automation. Immaterial labour assumed society's "real subsumption" under capital as a precondition; it, however, envisioned a requalification of the overall framework in a new production regime, a post-industrial one which would be built on networks through the informatization of labour and society.

Secondarily, the analysis of the technical composition of labour was developed. That is, the following question arose: how was the labour force—that is, variable capital in its relation to constant capital—modified in the transition from an industrial to a post-industrial mode of production, from Fordist material labour to post-Fordist immaterial labour? The analyses of some of the comrades of _Quaderni Rossi_ (Romano Alquati and Ferruccio Gambino, in particular) had already glimpsed the answer in the beginning of the 1960s. By studying the development of struggles in the most advanced factories, these authors grasped the progressive prevailing of intelligence over bodies in the productive process. These first signs would be supported by the various readings of the "Fragment on Machines" in the _Grundrisse_. The Fragment allowed for Marx's General Intellect to become the object of the inquiry. New definitions developed from here: that is, the definitions of living labour's productivity as it pertains to its intelligent and/or affective (and so on and so forth) immateriality, and of the forms through which capital organizes labour. What emerged from here, however, were also the first experiences of the ways in which this new labour organized resistance; it wasn't true that massified intellectual work—i.e., "mass intellectuality"—was more easily subjugatable to capital. Actually, it contained an energy that matched resistance with the capacity to plan something "other". We'll talk about this later.

For now, we want to underline how important the analysis of work cooperation was at that time. It is known that the study of cooperation is indispensable for the definition of productivity—cooperation always determines an excess of value in the production process. Now, cooperation was tremendously incentivized by the fact that it was taking place through labour's immaterial expression. By becoming cognitive and networked, labour conquered a powerful transversability. The strong cooperation that was being established between these expressive powers showed a virtuality of autonomy and singularization, of "difference" and resistance, in front of and against capitalist command. It should be clear how the figures of "virtuality", expressive power, difference, and excess draw from Deleuze and Guattari's work. Starting from the discussion opened by _One Thousand Plateaux_ , in fact, an explicit contamination took place. As the social worker became a "cognitive worker", the social qualities of the first (mobility, flexibility, and so on and so forth) were complemented by the qualities of the second, i.e., transversability, linguistic cooperation, and so on and so forth. If the social worker introduced the factory in the social world, the cognitive worker built a communication social enterprise as the basis of production.

A shift had to be undertaken, namely the shift from intelligence to life. The question was then about where value was then created, once the cognitive worker was defined and once the capitalist attempt to subsume the General Intellect was registered. It was acknowledged that value clearly arose from the exploitation of social cooperation, of the reproductive networks of the social, from that common that the mode of production presupposed with respect to the "private" or "public" appropriation. Operaism had to be further updated on this point, when it became clear that productive socialization and cognitive work were investing life. The technical composition of labour was opening up to "life forms"; life forms were becoming crucial in the productive process. Life was put to work and this implied the fact that it was not only the world of production but also that of reproduction (which includes the reproduction of life) that was put to work. The new working subject—which was mobile, flexible, social, and cognitive—and this subject's life form turned out to be figures that were biopolitical, bioproductive, and reproductive of the _bios_.

The important role that feminist movements—as they were mobilized on the terrain of social reproduction—played in redefining social production and even "life form" itself as a decisive element of production is fully evident. Also on this terrain, the modification of the social (and maybe political) composition of proletariat was first articulated by struggles: the feminist movement didn't only have a pedagogical efficacy, it also had an epistemological one. Operaism turned the biopolitical understanding of value production into a new research axis. This research led Operaism to two results. The first was that any form of exploitation that was occurring on the social terrain could be accounted for under the antagonist definition of capital. In this way, Third-Worldism conceptions (conceptions that up to then were only capable of dramatizing the particular) were taken "under critique". In this were the emancipatory instances and the specificity of the anti-imperialist protest picked up and framed within the unity of the anti-capitalist project. The second result was, in fact, to give antagonistic dignity to social movements in their struggles, way beyond what the old socialist organizations were able to do—they, in fact, defined hypocritical "alliance" policies to this end. Moreover, it was possible to find here, in these struggles, the "point of view" that created Operaism and to reclaim it as a current one: this means giving a biopolitical intensity and a universal extension to the point of view whereby every historical development of the struggle for a liberation from work "from below" (from the class struggle of those who are exploited) could be seen. After the end of the centrality of the factory, class struggle re-earns here its revolutionary virtuality in its entirety.

As this point was reached, it was necessary to ask the question about the "political composition" of this new proletariat. It was like exposing it _ad experientiam crucis_ (to be exposed to crucial experience) in order for a new subjective figure to emerge, a figure that would have the shoulders to bear a constituent power; this was the "new" element that the series of updates made up to that point could graft into Operaism. This was not about turning it into a " _post-_ " ("post" is always a pejorative—if not corrupting—term) but turning it into a "new" Operaism—which could re-conquer the fresh approach and the theoretical power of what Operaism—the "old" Operaism— had been in the 1960s. There was a new element at stake here that was strongly innovating this new Operaism with respect to the old one; as we already mentioned, this was where an excess (of cooperative and/or cognitive work) was breaking the old triadic sequence "struggles-crisis-restructuring", which used to be the classic series. It was at this juncture—as this excess was understood within a new political composition of proletariat—that the level of political innovation could be reached and that the repetition of the triad "struggles-crisis-restructuring" could be broken. On the phenomenic background of the analysis, it was already clear that living labour contained _in nuce_ (in a nutshell) that constructive power that could fully express itself as "costituency" (in English in the original text). Moreover, living labour was recognized as an anxiety that was institutional, creative, and in no way imitative or parasitic (as was the case of the working-class energy in the old Operaism—an energy that was intimately adequate to and set back on the authoritative structures of third internationalism). If the inquiry revealed living labour co-essentiality with social cooperation, if the grafting of cooperation onto communication showed the extraordinary productivity of its immaterial dimension, and if the genealogy of the General Intellect offered a seminal paradigm for these theoretical developments, it was now possible to move even further: it was now possible to immerse this living labour in history and to identify the processes of subjectivation and "costituency" that made of living labour a political subject.

Could this hypothesis about a possible constitution of the political composition of proletariat—which was in strict continuity with the definition of technical composition—be criticized? As if a necessary and impelling connection could be established between the one and the other? Yes, of course. The insistence on political subjectivity gave the impression of an ideal abstraction and of an improper ontological fixation. It looked as if the conclusion of this reasoning was implicit in its premise, simply by virtue of pure logical force. Clearly it was necessary to move forward and to describe those processes of subjectivation that were able to dis-identify any presupposition and to give them entirely back to the _Praxis_.

Getting back in touch with history was, at this point, necessary and it was essential to confront hypotheses with the historical process. The danger of an abstract codification of experience could only be escaped by historicizing the analysis that had been carried out so far and by intending to describe the subjectivation of living labour in the materiality of its realization. Foucault was extremely helpful here because he provided the means to translate the historical analysis into constituent experience through a genealogical approach and a definitive and new articulation of politics and ethics. In sum, this translation was possible through a coming back of militancy as the basis of any "truth", a coming back of collective resistance as the basis of any behaviour and political conquest. This immersion in struggles' historicity was by no means an individualist operation; the conditions for a collective constitution of the subject were in fact given. One abides by these conditions when militancy is recognized as the digging out of the "We", as individuality's destitution, and when a strong attention is put toward "making truth". Clearly, we return to Operaism as the place wherefrom it is possible to build a political movement and to recognize ourselves in liberation's political movement.

This is not only an ethical-political decision. This passage is also a means to knowledge. The first consequence of what we have tried to show so far is, in fact, that the new historical ontology of the working class against exploitation forces us to confront ourselves with command—it forces us to put ourselves as living labour in front of capital. This is a history that is "internal" to class struggle, which each of us is forced to live and wherefrom each of us seeks liberation. How should we organize our life in this clash? How can we position ourselves within/against capitalist command as we recognize that we have no alternative, and as we fight it by blocking its power to exploit the individual and its power of collective "extraction" of value? How can we forcefully take away its knowledge and power instruments? I believe these questions constitute the heart of Operaism. These were the questions that the mass worker asked himself in the factory when he organized its resistance. These are the questions that we ask in our struggle to liberate ourselves at the level of the domination imposed on us by the General Intellect. We are inside capitalist command: we live within it; we put our desire for liberation to work within these ontological conditions; this is where a postmodern Machiavelli situated himself in order to build a revolutionary alternative.

I believe I should stop here in my attempt to signal the categories that characterize Operaism in its progressive updates. Here, I will only sketch some topics that are at the centre of Operaist discussions today. The first is, evidently, the topic of globalization. Some groups of comrades have been working on this topic: they strictly link the analysis of geopolitical relations to the analysis of the global labour market's new structure and movements. The problem of migration, understood as one of the contemporary forms of class struggle, is at the centre of this chapter. Moreover, I would like to sketch the topic of the common—that is, of the radical critique of private and/or public property. At the basis of the conditions of production, a third element introduced itself in the relationship between productive forces on and relations of production (where productive forces are always assigned to exploited living labour and relations of production to the organization and command functions). This third element is the common subjectivation of the way in which production occurs. In class struggle, workers' strength has moved forward through the appropriation of shares of fixed capital—or, to put it better, it has moved forward by taking away margins of power over the organization of production to fixed capital. This is the common that here appears as the ontological depository and that today opens up to new conquests. This opening represents another terrain for analysis which deals with the new forms through which revolutionary struggle organizes it these days. We live _within_ capital and we are _against_ its command: in these conditions, the struggle will always be a combination of exodus and desertion. Desertion from command and exodus beyond command are the two lines that Operaism always keeps in mind in the theory of organization. This is only a taste of the topics that Operaism is concerned with today. We got very far, while maintaining a method!

What is post-Operaism then? It simply does not exist. It was only in the second decade of the 2000s that we got to that strange way of calling theoretical and political work that autonomous and communist militants had started in the 1960s, that was massified in the 1970s, then developed in the prisons of the Republic, and finally became an international corpus of research. Paradoxically, it was the people who didn't want to have anything to do with Operaism anymore who started to say _post-_ already from the end of the 1960s. Since then, these comrades abandoned Operaism and developed their thought by reconnecting with the reactionary trend of modern political thought, from Hobbes to Carl Schmitt. They implanted old socialist orientations on their "unrefined" Operaism, which finally allowed them to be inhabited by sovereignist and populist options. Maybe the conclusion is that at this point the only _post-Operaist_ (who is at times in bad company) is Mario Tronti and that, instead, the thought of those thousands of comrades who developed the "unrefined" principle of the working-class' "point of view" can legitimately take on and defend the name "Operaism"—"Operaism" like that, without rouges and tonic treatments.

Let me say something to conclude. This narrative is signed by only one of those thousands. He doesn't want to represent them. With some of them, he shares almost the totality of everything that was said here; with others, he is in an open colloquial disagreement on some or several points. But there's something that unites them all, the Operaists: it is the fact Operaism is the method for reconstructing a class strength that, as soon as possible, will revolutionize this idiotic world—made of exploitation and injustice—where we live.

## Note

Talk given to the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages, Italian Section, Cambridge University, April 25, 2017.

Chapter 3

# Italian Theory? Elements for a Genealogy

Sandro Chignola

> Consider well the seed that gave you birth.
>
> _—The Inferno_ , XXVI, 118

1. I was asked to intervene on the circulation of Italian Theory, if I well understood. However, the preliminary necessary operation is to ask if an Italian Theory does in fact exist, what its statute is, and to which theory and "Italianness" we refer to when the terms "Italian" and "Theory" are evoked. When, in the mid-1990s, Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt published _Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics_ , the "difference of Italian Thought" that they brought to the fore—and, in a way, claimed—didn't pertain to the specificity of a tradition or to a particular orientation in the philosophical debate: it rather pertained to a _style_.[1] It pertained to a style of thought conceived of as collective practice and revolutionary militancy, two options that impose a determined _experimental attitude_ to intellectual work.

It would be easy to recall how this style forged itself in struggles and how it was challenged in jails—i.e., how it wasn't produced on reflection's flyover line but through an immersion in the real that allowed to impose and to register discontinuities and ruptures. It may be less obvious to ask to what extent this style is "Italian"—that is, inscribed in a specific praxis and in a determined series, i.e., the short twentieth century's series of the "long Italian 1968" (the university and Operaist year), which stretched into March 1977 and which constituted the Italian difference _against_ the Gramscian tradition of the Italian Communist Party.

Likewise, it wouldn't be as obvious to ask to what extent Italian thought instead derives this style from the "outside", in what—so it seems to me—can actually be understood as one of the lines of circulation where Italian Theory does not feature as a subject but, rather, in a modality that is at the same time active, receptive, experimental, and transformative.

It is from here that I derived the angle I chose for my paper—I like to justify my choices. I could have addressed the thesis that imposed the brand of Italian Theory to global attention—in what was certainly an effective market strategy. I don't impute Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt with anything that has to deal with this whole situation. The ample reception that, starting from the first years of the 2000s and in the aftermath of the Genoa days, both _Empire_ and, almost concurrently, Agamben's volumes (starting from _Homo Sacer_ ) received, allowed for a vast project of translations. It is in the wake of this project that conferences, anthologies, journals' special issues, and PhD dissertations situated themselves.[2] It may be worth analyzing this phase—as others did in relation to French Theory's domination within US cultural studies and, building on that, in the Anglophone part of the globe. What is at stake is still the embryonic phase of an institutionalization that, also in this case, is mainly happening _outside_ of philosophy departments. The risk of such institutionalization, however, is to homogenize—with a clear work of simplification—productions and expressions that are completely different from one another and that are supported by openly divergent intentionalities.[3] But I am not interested in doing this here. Suffice it to note how even the Italian Theory logo—which was mimetically reproduced by moulding French Theory's one—gets adopted as denotative of a politics of philosophy (the genitive here has to be understood in an _objective_ sense). Such philosophy aims at imposing—always on the verge of subalternity—themes and authors that are otherwise eccentric to the media system's attention. But I am not a sociologist of culture. What I am interested in is a politics of philosophy—now understood in the _subjective_ form of the genitive—for which the experimental attitude of radical "Italian" Thought (radical thought " _in_ Italy", as Virno and Hardt put it on the title, alluding to a trajectory, a territorialization, a stage, not a repetition, to a moment not a "tradition") maintains a certain relevance. It is from here, I was saying, that I derive the structure of my intervention. I'll try to trace a double movement: the decentring one—the movement based on which Italian Operaism absorbs and re-elaborates the defeat by renewing its theoretical and conceptual heritage in discussion with French philosophy (nothing of its own, hence), whereas it was Italian academic philosophy's own thing during those years to close itself up in an auto-referential and dull debate which is still unexhausted to these days—and the coming back to itself movement, a coming back that doesn't define any identity but only hints at the re-launch of a style, that is what I called an _experimental attitude_ earlier. This attitude is capable of putting back into motion an analysis at once theoretical and political, which gets to be discussed and received on a global scale because it is programmatically situated on the plane of immanence of the becoming-world of capital.

What are the authors and the times of this reception, transformation, and re-launch dynamics through which the Operaist tradition renews itself? How does Italian Theory—I call Italian Theory, by convention, the radical thought that grafts itself on the global circulation of struggles and that territorializes contemporary French philosophy on the field of Italian _beyond-Marxism_ —impact on the linguistic turn and how does it renew itself as it clashes with the rhetoric about the end of history? What will be defined as post-Operaism has nothing to do with a disavowal or an abjuration; and it has even less to do, despite its many imputations in this direction, with a decentring of the inquiry on capital's pure circulation and on the contradictions—which can be politically valorized as a last chance in a time of post-politics—of civil society. The opposite is true. And this is one of the things that my paper intends to reiterate: if a continuity between Operaism and post-Operaism is at play on the plane of theoretical and political elaboration—the two terms can't be separated without reducing post-Operaism (I apologize for the brutal simplification) to an internal, neutralized, minor figure of a pathetic and sad history of Italian philosophy—such continuity has nothing to do with the passing on of a tradition or of a testimony. It has to do with an ethics and a vocation instead. It is that politics as a vocation that Max Weber identifies with the _dennoch_ (in spite of all) of a form of obstinacy that imposes to keep on searching for the impossible also after the sharpest defeat.[4]

While I am aware of the simplification risk I am running, I think I can say that there are four thought machines that Italian radical thought (and not only Italian) confronts itself with in order to transform itself between the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s. The interdiction of the bureaucratic apparatuses that oversee Italian cultural and academic politics looms over these four dispositives. Speaking to this, suffice it to mention the position that Cacciari adopted writing in _aut aut_[5] against Foucault and against Deleuze. It is worth reaffirming this: post-Operaism develops mostly _outside_ and _against_ the Gramsci-Togliatti tradition and by openly breaking up with the nationalization of the masses project that was started after World War Two in Italy. Four thought machines, as I was saying. Among these machines and beyond the already-mentioned names of Foucault and Deleuze-Guattari, I would also include—even if in a less prominent and more contingent position—Baudrillard and Lyotard. To be thinking the present—and hence the becoming, the transformation—necessarily implies to continually reopen the inquiry and the conceptualization. Together with that, it also means to reopen the tracing of resistances and of subjectivation processes that orient the very transformation of the capture forms that chase them.

2. Let us start from Foucault. Two Foucauldian instances immediately enter the post-Operaist toolbox. The first reiterates a principle—resistances force power to reinvent itself along other modalities and profiles; the second engages this principle with a diagnosis. After Leonelli and Macherey's books,[6] it may not be the case to insist too much on Foucault's proximity to Marx. As an analyst of power, Foucault sees the functioning of industrial society as grounded on subjection ( _assujettissement_ ) dispositives that match internment-exploitation tactics with training-organization ones.[7] The first line is what allows for the transformation of lifetime into work-time: a dry extraction of absolute surplus value, as Marx would call it. The second directly invests individual bodies as its object by shaping their attitudes, selecting their qualities, correcting their flaws, and strengthening their compatibility with organizational schemes. Here, the anatomo-politics of disciplines—where power's productivist connotation (and not the interdiction-repressive connotation) is confirmed—transforms bodies into labour power. The congenital plasticity of life is bridled, organized, bent, and thus transformed into productive force. A series of specific dispositives—which are functional to what Marx would call the extraction of relative surplus value—work to produce production's dispositions. What this means is the fabrication of labour power as a subjective disposition that is objectively conformed to production's conditions,[8] if we follow the perspective that Foucault will explicitly claim as the constant focus of his theoretical work, i.e., not an analytics of power and its types but "a history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects".[9]

When Foucault eventually moved the barycentre of his analysis on biopowers, his aim was to trace the genealogy of those dispositives of government and discipline that don't limit themselves to simply perimeter productive spaces directly organized and crisscrossed by a command function but also situations where the regulatory instance lowers itself down as an overall social intervention—"sur la société elle même dans sa trame et son épaisseur",[10] writes Foucault—with the aims of installing other attitudes and other subjective dispositions. From here a double order of consequences derives. The first one concerns the notion of power and its statute. Foucault doesn't think of power as a property but as a strategy. And, in addition, he thinks of it as a strategy that is constantly contrasted, anticipated, challenged by processes that tend to escape it. Between the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s to be thinking with Marx _beyond_ Marx[11] essentially means to read the organization of biopowers as a consequence of the exit from Fordism and as the installation of a different system of valorization that extends command and its subsumption schemes to society as a whole. The second order of consequences concerns the statute of the subject. Hence, it concerns its constitutive excess, the excess that marks the subject in relation to the factory system once the production and extraction of surplus value move away from the closed walls of the factory. It is not disciplinarily commanded gestures, times, and rhythms that are put to work now, but the species-specific characteristics of man as a human being: language, the faculty to cooperate, and the attitude towards relations.[12] It is important to note that this is not an extrinsic observation in relation to Marx. In the first book of _Capital_ , Marx defines labour power in the following terms: "sum of all physical and intellectual attitudes contained by a living body" ("Inbegriff der _physischen_ _und_ _geistigen_ Fähigkeiten"[13]), and hence labour power is not only what is mechanically put to work in production relations that are independent and extrinsic with respect to the subject. What enters the scene here is the notion of labour power as _dynamis_ , as power ( _potentia_ ) , as a power that is inherent to human nature and that only with post-Fordism—i.e., when the processes linked to putting life to value exceed the perimeter of the factory and the measure of the working day—can be thought of as being up to its concept. At the centre of the exchange between the capitalist and the worker is not labour but the generic faculty of labour. While not applied yet, the generic faculty of labour does, in fact, inhere to human nature and its physical part can't be distinguished from the _geistige_ , intellectual, and linguistic part.[14] It is by grafting Foucault on this Marx that the terms _biopower_ and _biopolitics_ enter the lexicon and the political praxis of Italian Theory. Resistances are biopolitical since they are immanent to the social relation that the system or biopowers tries to capture into an order of valorization different from the factory one. This indicates the _power of_ life against _power over_ life. Biopolitics exists where what pertains to _dynamis_ , to the potential dimension of human life, emerges into focus; it exists where what escapes calculation and accounting emerges: not what was said, but the faculty of speaking; not the work actually supplied but the generic capacity to produce; not the disciplinary that prescribes the rhythm of a gesture but the plasticity and the indeterminacy that preside over the anthropogenesis by reproducing its creativity. [15] That putting to value of that _Unfestgestelltheit_ that—from Nietzsche to Gehlen—characterizes the living human[16] characterizes the dispositives of post-Fordist production. Labour power can only be flexible, organized on the just-in-time algorithm, continuously adaptable, and not performed or disciplined as long as its valorization power is immediately subsumed to capital avoiding that this latter's command functions can trace its times and spaces of action back to the measure of the working day. It is life itself—here understood as nature, the immediate capacity for cooperation, language, and intelligence—to be captured by the extractive machine of biopowers.[17] Exactly like in Foucault, this machine works in depth and at large on the entire weave of the social relation and radically modifies the terms of class composition. The productive space is now the metropolis: the multitude's biopolitical resistance—that is, rooted on desires and needs that exceed the alary relation—gets organized in the total social factory.

I believe that the renewal of thought and practice—that only many years later would be labelled Italian Theory—originates mainly by building on the valorization of this gap and of this break between accumulation regimes and the different forms of subjectivity that correspond to them. If radical thought gets renewed in Italy, it is because here there is more willingness to integrate the theoretical Operaist tradition with analyses and structures that problematically impact on the present and that take the present as the field for the emergence and the organization of new forms of antagonism. Such willingness is part of the Italian context for political reasons and is rooted in the perceived need to re-launch a liberation process that would live up to subjectivity's new figures—cognitarian and precarious figures. It is on the basis of a praise of the lack of memory that it is possible to take a leave from the past and to look at the present for what, within it, anticipates the future.[18] No tradition's continuity: thought is living only if it gets to hunt those thoughts that, as Deleuze said, force to think ever again.

3. As I was saying in the opening, beyond Foucault and Deleuze, it was Baudrillard and Lyotard who—in this foundational conjuncture between the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s—provided precious indications. Lyotard defines as postmodern condition that form of life wherein grand narratives cease to be active and where the meaning and functions of knowledge are re-modulated.[19] The cultural logic of informational society is postmodern in the same way as the accumulation apparatuses that disclose themselves on knowledge and on language are post-industrial. Here, however, no nostalgia for the organic is wrapped in the prefix _post_ ; no complaint on the end of history or on the sunset of possibility is linked to it. What's at stake is the understanding of how language and knowledge take on an immediately productive function. This productive function plays out at two levels: on the one hand, at the level of production and of the legitimation of decisions in the context of technologies of government which decentre their Operativity away from the classical frame of parliamentary democracy; and, on the other hand, it plays out at the level of an economy that puts information and language to value. It may be worth restating this for the second time: post-Operaism is interested in the sphere of circulation and of reproduction of capital only to highlight—especially starting from the end of the dollar's convertibility into gold—the immediately productive role taken on by the sign, the currency, and finance. The turn to the plane of immanence that is circumscribed in these terms (postmodern society is conceived as the result of real subsumption, as the inherence of structures and superstructures—an inherence where systemic rationalities and juridical functionalisms take an increasingly central role) is also in this case a re-elaboration of a Marxian topic. "Fragment on Machines" in the _Grundrisse_[20] speaks to this point. In this text Marx advances the thesis that abstract knowledge—the new basis of accumulation, i.e., the automatized system of machines created by the large-size industry—becomes the main productive force, and relegates the parcelled and repetitive work (to which bodies and gestures are forced) to a limited position. The image that is evoked to indicate the complex of knowledges that come to constitute the centre of social production is the "General Intellect": "the development of fixed capital indicates to what degree general social _knowledge_ has become a _direct force of production_ ",[21] and how, hence, it exceeds the measure of the working day and of the value law it is referred to. What produces value is social cooperation expressed in the terms of an overall social knowledge. This trend opens an imbalance wide, the imbalance between the role knowledge takes on and the decreasing importance of labour-commanded time. It is here that Marx prefigures—with the crisis of the law of value—the overcoming of the capitalist form of social relations. Well, post-Fordism realizes this trend—the trend that imposes the productivist centrality of knowledge and cooperation; however, this result does not come with any emancipatory result.[22] It is this contradiction that we have to insist on. On the one hand, what's at stake is the linguistic-communicative circuit where the power of social knowledge accumulates; on the other hand—and this is something that can be learned from Lyotard's report on postmodernism—at stake is also the valorization of a system of diversified intersections which turn the individual into a nexus of that same circulation, rather than an irrelevant residue of it. This is the form through which Lyotard corrects the more naively technocratic versions of systems theory: if language takes on an unrenounceable centrality in the systems through which the system reproduces itself—and even more so as this acquires its legitimacy in merely operational and efficiency-driven terms in the void left by grand narratives—it can't be reduced to a simple binary code of inputs and outputs. Lyotard refers to a pragmatics of language that valorizes the performativity and antagonism of linguistic games. That of information is a mobile system within which relations are continuously re-positioned: the nodes' height where information is exchanged prevents thinking of postmodern space as a smooth space. The local and specific linguistic games that grant its reproduction are continuously crisscrossed by innovation.

In a text of these same years— _La philosophie analytique de la politique_ (1978)—Michel Foucault traces his analytic of power back to the terms of the second Wittgenstein: power is not a thing, it does not have an origin or an outside, and it must be thought of as a pure instance of circulation. About power, as well as about language, it is only possible to say that it exists. Its application foci—as a chemical reagent could do—are only revealed by the resistances that crisscross them.[23] In a not-too-dissimilar manner, post-Operaism's reading of Lyotard enhances what he says about the dissonance and dissent elements that, as they distribute themselves on the plane of immanence of knowledge, they produce pragmatic combinations that keep it in tension and disturb its tendency to an equilibrium (or to a separation) that is anyway impossible. What in fact characterizes the post-Fordist living labour is the fact that it is the repository of competences (linguistic and communicative ones) that are not objectifiable in the system of machines. A clear contradiction hence crosses the scenery of real subsumption. The General Intellect is the social potentiality of living labour, the communicative and immediately interactive cooperation of intelligence; it is not the system of machines. And yet the destructuration of the Fordist system of accumulation—that destructuration that progressively extinguishes the centrality of the state as the monopolist of decision and coercion, as welfare institution, as agent of economic planning, the destructuration through which the logics of systemic governance are implanted—does not imply any exit from the society of salary. On the contrary, a system of biopowers grafts itself on that cooperation to continuously intercept its innovation.

As a reader of Luhmann, Lyotard exactly understands this passage when he points to how the system can't function but by reducing the complexity of the context—that is, by causing the adaptation of individual expectations to its own reproduction. The neoliberal governmentalization of power pursues a similar goal: it does not create the conditions for freedom (which is already there) to be. Instead, through the use that singularities will make of freedom, it locates the economic space in each subject and at the same time it governs the risks that this same exercise poses to the reproduction and expansion of the market. The neoliberal machine of government succeeds in making subjective dispositions uniform with the conditions of a production that becomes eminently symbolic, linguistic, and communicative. It is from here that the work of Italian radical thought on the multitude's "dark side"—that is, the side functional to command—develops and addresses only one of the sides of the matter: the cognitive flexibility translated into opportunism, the adaptability that pertains to the _Unfestgestelltheit_ of human nature when it turns into cynicism.[24] On the other hand, we find the possibility to imagine a biopolitics of desire and autonomy: the multitude as the subject of a happy exodus from the society of labour, a subject that is driven by the constituent _dynamis_ of its General Intellect.[25]

4. Earlier, I claimed a third "foreign" contribution for radical Italian thought. This is a radical thought which I see—as it should be clear by now—as developing in a particular condition, that of the end of the 1970s, _exactly because_ it is capable of escaping the cage of the Italian discussion and to actively receive—by adapting and transforming them—the discourses that allow for radical thought's circulation. After Foucault and Lyotard, I am now referring to Jean Baudrillard. How does Baudrillard impact the theoretical and political process of post-Operaism when his thought was received within it? How can we read this in what I am trying to build as a "materialist"—and not historical-philosophical—genealogy of Italian Theory? In the first pages of _L'échange symbolique et la mort_ (1976), Baudrillard thematized the "disarticulation" of value functions. Of the two dimensions of the value-sign, the first anchors it to a good, the second to all the other signs that circulate within the system. In one respect, the relation of each signifier with its meaning is assumed as central, like the relation of money with what one can obtain in exchange for it; in another respect (which is articulated with the first one), instead, signifiers (and monetary values) are made valuable by what differentiates them and opposes them to all other signifiers. Money and the _langue_ 's terms are subject to the same "economy". Baudrillard openly speaks of a "revolution that has put an end to the 'classical' economics of value". The two dimensions I mentioned earlier are now openly disconnected and disarticulated. The reference value is cancelled in favour of total relativity, of general commutation, of the pure combinatorial art of signs . The sign gets emancipated. It releases itself from the reference to the real, from the need to signify something: a radical indeterminacy supplants the old rule of determined equivalence. What substitutes the law of value—and it is clear how this passage receives the abandonment of the gold standard which triggers the monetarist—is the pure indeterminacy of the code: a "political economy of the sign" replaces the theory of value-representation. The sovereignty of indeterminacy is another way to say postmodernism, i.e., the _ex-termination_ of the real (which here I understand as and call the "dis-termination" of production's reals, of the real of signification). This is the end of work, the end of production, and the end of political economy.[26] Moreover, this is the end of the exchange value / use value dialectics. Does Baudrillard stop himself here? He does not, of course. The end of Fordist production and the exhaustion of the classical theory of value-work don't mark the end of history. To the contrary; if in the mobile system of commodity and money circulation the distinction between productive and unproductive labour, between structure and superstructure, between use value and exchange value definitively disappear, the situation that determines itself is one where all the circulation space (information, money, and finance) is immediately re-determined as productive. What is in fact put to value—and even more than that: what is put to value without necessitating a command or a function of external organization with respect to the immanence plane where signs circulate—is the pure working of mobility and flows. This is the undetermined interchangeability of positions, the fading of the difference between life-time and labour-time, the impossibility of a measure of value anchored to something that is not the reference (devoid of any reality check) to the general system of signs and to the contingent variability of their reciprocal positioning. If the real of the factory disappears, it is because the entire society assumes the semblances of the factory. The factory must disappear as such, labour must lose its specificity and its places, "in order that capital can ensure the extensive metamorphosis of its form throughout society as a whole".[27]

What Italian radical thought deduces from this position is the pure mystification that is concealed in the form of the salary. It is a position that is still pertinent in some respects and allows to assume financialization as the distinctive feature of capital's global phase to expose the meaninglessness of socialist rhetoric that opposes the supposed "real economy" (to which employment policies should be anchored) of the stock exchange capital. Once labour ends, according to Baudrillard, the salary changes function and meaning: at most it enables a "status" with a symbolic function. The worker is internal to the circuit of the commodity and not to that of production and exploitation; the wage earner becomes a _consumer_. And more: he is seen as the service provider for a circuit that is made of services' supply and users. With the loss of the production-referent, it is the entire plane of circulation that becomes "productive" in a different way. Relations are productive, mobility is productive, information is productive, consumption—and it is not at all paradoxical that this is so—is productive. In this respect, it is especially on the crisis of the law of value that the post-Operaist analysis focuses it. To bring to exhaustion the law of value-work time—a crisis of the measure of the wage that Italian Theory reads as the answer to the centrality that the General Intellect (the multitudinous cooperation of living labour) is gaining in the system of the economy of knowledge that succeeds the Fordist machinism—means at least two things: the exhaustion of the progressive power of capital and its taking on an increasingly evident, parasitic character. The "becoming-rent of profit" formula, forged to describe this process, is used to allude to dispositives of value capture that are external to the organization of production and to the pure extractivism of financial capital.[28] The rupture of the law of value, in fact, has at least another relevant consequence. With it, something is lost, i.e., the social relation that turns commodity's logic into the progressive principle of the production of use values and of the satisfaction of needs. This rupture entails the rupture of the positivity of the relation between value and wealth. From this a further consequence derives. If the principle of capitalist property persists—alongside the logic of valorization in terms of exchange—then property increasingly tends to be grounded on the artificial creation of scarcity of resources and/or on the destruction of (common) non-renewable resources.[29] Calling this valorization principle "extractivism" means keeping together the two sides of financial capital's operability: on the one hand, its investing itself and betting on extinguishing resources (be they fossil fuels, water, or farming lands), on the other hand, its parasitic gaining a rent from the produced scarcity (e.g., with patents and copyrights) on the otherwise incremental mass of goods and services produced by the free cooperation of the multitude. The post-Operaist use of the term "biopower" refers to this transformation.[30]

5. The attempt to think a new theory of the subject up to these processes belongs to Italian radical thought. This is the last thing on which I will linger. What mainstream rhetoric could read as "the end of the society" of work is instead treated as the time of the multiplication of the figures of living labour by Italian radical thought. When political and social theory don't see work anymore, work (i.e., the General Intellect that coordinates information flows, organizes the web, incorporates fundamental sections of fixed capital into the individual; that cooperation that vibrates through potentiality's gradients and through intensities) becomes the common substance. From here I derive the evocation of the last author of the four that Italian theory incorporates into its order of discourse at the beginning of the 1990s: Deleuze. Or, better to say, the thought machine Deleuze-Guattari. It may be worthwhile to restate this one last time. There is no concession to vitalism in post-Operaist biopolitics. It is again the fragment on the General Intellect in the _Grundrisse_ that evokes the political figure of the common and of direct democracy as absolute political formula. Here, the General Intellect is not the abstract knowledge that coagulates in the machines' system: rather, it corresponds to the potential class composition of a living labour that makes of free cooperation the reverse side of the pure parasitic character of command—a command that shows itself to be completely unnecessary because it is unable to organize it and that is active only in capturing the value that is produced in international, affective, and linguistic circuits.

It is an unheard-of truth, the one at the basis of the discourse on the _common_ : living labour organizes itself independently from the capitalist organization of labour.[31] And it is not only that. Outside of any dialectics—but nevertheless still thinking with Marx—what must be assumed is the process of construction of subjectivity as a constant hybridization between the subject and the machine. The subject and history don't disappear in the becoming-world of capital. On the contrary, it is exactly at the level of real subsumption that subjectivity—understood outside of any naturalism, of any metaphysics of reflection, and understood instead as the engine of a transformation through work, and as the index of the power of being—imposes itself as the reopening and the re-signification of the problem of liberation. What radical thought recovers from Deleuze and Guattari is exactly the topic of subjectivation as composition of multiplicity, _agencement_ , and war machine. What's at stake is thinking and organizing the dimension of becoming that postmodernist thought dealing with the end of history relegates to the plane of capital's development plan. The more valorization's axiomatic seduces the world in global finance strategies, the more important it becomes to be thinking the subject as the crossing of borders, as the gradient of intensities. Universality practices and potentiality compositions correspond to the universalization of capital. What Deleuze and Guattari refer to is an _intensive_ universality: a universality that doesn't refer to common interests and identities (least of all class interests and identities—those to which social theories of transition traditionally refer to), but to processes of immanent _co-transformation_. These processes mark both the becoming of singularity[32] ("un dégré, une individu est un individu, _Heccéité_ , qui se compose avec d'autres intensités pour former un autre individu"[33]) and the becoming of the _agencements_ that invent ("un agencement . . . est une véritable invention"[34]) the desiring machines that compose them.

Becoming does not mean achieving something that has become. What Deleuze and Guattari call the becoming-animal doesn't imply progress or regression on any evolutionary series. Rather, it means an immersion in the tangle of intensities, gradients, and affects that introduces to the singularity of the position. And hence it introduces to the order of the multiple and of the alliance.[35] The use that Italian radical thought makes of the term _multitude_ —the pure multiple that backs out from the representative unit of the people or of the class—attempted to translate this same intentionality. The term _multitude_ is a compositionist term. It designates a social subject who is active on the plane of immanence that corresponds to it and who acts on the basis of what singularities have in _common_.[36] "Common" means both the prerequisite (the cooperation of the cognitarian, General Intellect) and the effect (the value that is produced) of immaterial production. This corresponds to the auto-valorization of living labour once the _dynamis_ that inheres to it does not correspond to a command or to a measure. It is true that the concept of multitude is a class concept. However, it is a _stipulative_ , not an identitarian concept—it results from a constituent process and from hybridization—and it is fit for the pure form of becoming understood as incessant trans-formative dynamic. For radical thought in Italy, biopolitics is this tension: the constant subtraction of the _subiectum_ from the _subiectus_ ,[37] which becomes a concrete possibility with the end of the society of work and with desires' machinic _agencement_. Cyborgs, posthuman packs, postgenomic hybrids are at the basis of Italian Theory—not natures, and least of all human natures. Hence, there is no vitalism. What's at stake instead is a most material immanence. It is on this point that I would like to add a few last words.

In the opening of this piece I said that it is possible to talk about an Italian Theory only in a very weak way, as historians (or accountants) of philosophy. All I tried to say here speaks of the way in which, starting from the end of the 1970s and going into the first half of the 1990s (in the aftermath of the struggles and following the problem of their organization), some of French thought's paths got acclimated in Italy and produced positive effects of hybridization. I believe we can say that as much as it is important to recognize the correct relevance to this genealogy (Nietzsche, Foucault, Deleuze, to say this through a series; Machiavelli, Spinoza, Marx, to say this through another series[38]), it is equally important to underline what Italian radical thought actively and concretely pursued in terms of dissemination. Not for proselytism, of course, but because the function of a war machine is that of being disassembled and reassembled everywhere it may be of help. An entire seminar would be necessary to reconstruct the political subjectivation paths that this beyond-Marxism activated at a global level. And also to think about how this same beyond-Marxism, which thinks the subject as the crossing of borders, is continuously re-crossed by the effects of truth that are consigned to it by the translation of the multiple dialects that inflect it. But this is another story. It doesn't coincide—or at least not directly, not only, not mainly—with conferences, journal issues, or translations. It rather coincides with the truth of what is coming.

## Notes

1.

See P. Virno and M. Hardt, eds. (1996). _Radical Thought in Italy: A potential politics_. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

2.

See M. Hardt and A. Negri. (2001). _Empire_. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; G. Agamben. (1998). _Homo Sacer: Sovereign power and bare life_. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

3.

See F. Cusset. (2008). _French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. transformed the intellectual life of the United States_. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

4.

M. Weber. (1949). _Politics as a vocation_. Oxford University Press open source, https://archive.org/details/weber_max_1864_1920_politics_as_a_vocation: "Only he has the calling for politics who is sure that he shall not crumble when the world from his point of view is too stupid or too base for what he wants to offer. Only he who in the face of all this can say 'In spite of all!' has the calling for politics".

5.

See M. Cacciari. (1977). "Razionalità" e "irrazionalità" nella critica del politico in Deleuze e Foucault, _aut aut_ , _161_ , 119–33; but see also M. Cacciari. (1977). Il problema del politico in Deleuze e Foucault (sul pensiero di 'autonomia' e di 'gioco'), in F. Rella, ed., _Il dispositivo Foucault_. Venezia: Cluva, 57–69.

6.

See R. M. Leonelli, ed. (2010). _Foucault—Marx: Paralleli e paradossi_. Rome: Bulzoni; P. Macherey. (2015). The productive subject. _Viewpoint Magazine_ , October. https://viewpointmag. com/2015/10/31/the-productive-subject.

7.

See M. Foucault. (2016). _The punitive society: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1972–1973_. Springer.

8.

See S. Legrand. (2004). Le marxisme oublié de Foucault. _Actuel Marx_ , _36_ : 27–43.

9.

M. Foucault. (1982). The subject and power. _Critical Inquiry, 8_ (4), 777–95, esp. 777.

10.

M. Foucault. (2008). _The birth of biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979_. Springer, 151.

11.

As I mentioned above, Foucault also helps develop a diagnostics, imposing a sagittal gaze on a present that is always mobile and evolutionary.

12.

See C. Marazzi. (1999). _Il posto dei calzini:_ _La svolta linguistica dell'economia e i suoi effetti nella politica_. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri; M. Lazzarato. (2005). Biopolitics/bioeconomics: A politics of multiplicity. Trans. Arianna Bove and Erik Empson. _Multitudes_ , _22_ ; C. Vercellone, ed. (2007). _Capitalismo cognitivo: Conoscenza e finanza nell'epoca postfordista_. Rome: manifestolibri; A. Fumagalli. (2007). _Bioeconomia e capitalismo cognitive: Verso un nuovo paradigma di accumulazione_. Rome: Carocci.

13.

K. Marx. (1962). _Das Kapital_ , I, 2, in _Marx Engels Werke_ , hrsg. von Institut für Marxismus-Leninismus beim ZK der Sed, Dietz Verlag, Berlin, Bd. 23, 181.

14.

P. Virno. (2003). _A Grammar of the Multitude_. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), from 82.

15.

Virno, _A Grammar of the Multitude_ , 86–88.

16.

See B. Accarino, ed. (1998). _Ratio Imaginis:_ _Uomo e mondo nell'antropologia filosofica_. Firenze: Ponte alle Grazie; R. Marchesini. (2002). _Post-human: Verso nuovi modelli di esistenza_. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri; G. Gamm, M. Gutmann, and A. Manzei. (2005). hg., _Zwischen Anthropologie und Gesellschaftstheorie: Zur Renaissance Helmuth Plessners im Kontext der modernen Lebenswissenschaften_. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag; M. Marino. (2008). _Da Gehlen a Herder: Origine del linguaggio e ricezione di Herder nel pensiero antropologico Tedesco_. Bologna: Il Mulino; U. Fadini. (2013). _Il futuro incerto: Soggetti e istituzioni nella metamaorfosi del contemporaneo_. Verona: ombre corte.

17.

See M. Hardt and A. Negri. (2009). _Commonwealth_. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

18.

See A. Negri. (2013). _Fabbriche del soggetto: Archivio 1981–1986_. Verona: ombre corte, 153–60.

19.

See J. F. Lyotard. (1984). _The postmodern condition: A report on knowledge_ , vol. 10. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

20.

See K. Marx. (1953). _Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (Rohentwurf) 1857–58_. Berlin: Dietz Verlag; English transl. D. McLellan. (1980). _Marx's Grundrisse_. London: Macmillan, vol. II.

21.

Marx, _Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (Rohentwurf) 1857–58_ , 403.

22.

See Virno, _A Grammar of the Multitude_ , 107.

23.

See M. Foucault. (1978). _La philosophie analytique de la politique_ , in DEII, 554–51, see in particular, 540–42. On Foucault and Wittgenstein, see F. Gros and A. Davidson, eds. (2011). _Foucault, Wittgenstein: de possibles rencontres_. Paris: Kimé.

24.

See G. Agamben et al. (1990). _Sentimenti dell'aldiqua: Opportunismo, paura, cinismo nell'età del disincanto_. Rome: Theoria.

25.

See M. Hardt and A. Negri. (1994). _Labor of Dionysus: A critique of the state-form_. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

26.

See J. Baudrillard. (2016). _Symbolic exchange and death_. London: Sage; J. Baudrillard. (1981). _For a critique of the political economy of the sign_ (Vol. 262). St. Louis: Telos Press.

27.

Baudrillard, _Symbolic exchange and death_ , 40.

28.

See C. Marazzi. (2011). The becoming-rent of profit. _European Journal of Economic and Social Systems_ , _24_ (1–2): 181–93; A. Fumagalli and S. Mezzadra, eds. (2010). _Crisis in the global economy: Financial markets, social struggles, and new political scenarios_. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).

29.

See C. Vercellone. (2008). Finance, Rente et travail dans le capitalisme cognitif, _Multitudes, 32_ , 1/2008, 27–38; C. Vercellone. (2010). The crisis of the law of value and the becoming-rent of profit, in Fumagalli and Mezzadra, eds., _Crisis in the global economy_ , 85–117.

30.

See S. Mezzadra and B. Neilson. (2013). _Border as method: Or, the multiplication of labor_. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 86–87; S. Mezzadra and B. Neilson. (2013). Extraction, logistics, finance: Global crisis and the politics of operations. _Radical Philosophy_ , _178_ : 8–18.

31.

See Hardt and Negri, _Labour of Dionysus_ , 103.

32.

See G. Sibertin-Blanc. (2013). _Politique et État chez Deleuze et Guattari: Essai sur le matérialisme historico-machinique_. Paris: PUF, from 223.

33.

G. Deleuze and F. Guattari. (1988). _A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia_. London: Bloomsbury, 310.

34.

Deleuze and Guattari, _A thousand plateaus_ , 506.

35.

Deleuze and Guattari, _A thousand plateaus_ , 506.

36.

See M. Hardt and A. Negri. (2005). _Multitude: War and democracy at the age of empire_. London: Penguin Books, Part 2.

37.

See É. Balibar. (2016 [1991]). Citizen subject, _E-Flux,_ 77, http://worker01.e-flux.com/pdf/article_77371.pdf, accessed October 2017.

38.

See A. Negri. (1999). _Insurgencies: Constituent power and the modern state_ , vol. 15. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Chapter 4

# Italian Theory and Its Differences

Judith Revel

Subjectivation, Historicization, Conflict

Speaking of Italian Theory means, from the outset, to interrogate the complexity of an operation of nomination that distinguishes itself from other such operations and which in return posits the question of its specificity.

Italian Theory is not the product of a reception, as was the case, for instance, for French Theory. North American readings of French post-structuralist thought allowed for the paradoxical homeland return of an array of approaches, fields of problematization, and theoretical assumptions. Such approaches, problematizations, and assumptions—as they were not always mindful of the importance of their concepts of origin and hence forced a series of conceptual shifts and specific interpretations in their _detour_ across US universities—allowed nonetheless for their irruption "by return", so to speak, of a coherent set on the scene of French thought. Paradoxically, this had to be discovered by French theorists and only then became an object of study in itself. That transatlantic bustle and its outcome wagered the production not only of a corpus (i.e., French authors gathered under the name of French Theory, while of course they pre-existed it) but also of an approach, which was born at the priming of that corpus onto the theoretical (and at times also political) necessities of North American _cultural studies_ departments. Nothing like this happened in the case we are interested in here: Italian Theory was not built out of readings which, sifting Italian thought through other socio-cultural contexts, would then re-send their newly moulded "double" to Italian philosophers, i.e., a double also built by following non-original traits.

But Italian Theory did not even originate from an operation of retrospective identification—which would be anyway problematic in itself—of a certain configuration of thought pertaining to researches that were different but pooled together. Indulging on a transalpine example, I would say that it is clear that the construction of the "structuralist" moment as an episode in the history of contemporary French thought was largely nurtured by two elements. On the one hand, a transversal gaze with respect to disciplines emerged from a community rooted in a shared methodological approach. On the other hand, such construction was nurtured by a shared opposition to the phenomenological and historicist traditions—or to a certain psychologization of human and social sciences. To sum up: what characterized this construction was a community of method, a community of intent—and, maybe one should add, almost as a natural consequence of the first two—a clear awareness of common "enemies". All of this, however, did not emerge right away: it is mostly the product of an _ex post_ reconstruction, which was allowed by more tardive intellectual history works which, while generally attributed directly to the moment (and to the protagonists) of the 1960s, were instead produced later.

Finally, Italian Theory can't be reduced to what its adjective ("Italian") seems to imply: a thought for which the national specificity would actually be the keystone of the whole, the true reason for its perimeter and for its identity. To what degree does it matter that authors as different as—and I deliberately quote the names randomly—Mario Tronti, Giorgio Agamben, Luisa Muraro, Massimo Cacciari, Franco Fortini, Alberto Asor Rosa, Lea Melandri, or Roberto Esposito are Italian? Obviously, it matters a lot if one considers each of these figures as the singular product of a certain history—in general that of the Italian post-war time and in particular that of the "Long Italian 1968". But it matters nothing if one assumes a general gaze on those authors. Doing so means assuming a simple historical-geographical denomination as the smallest common denominator that forcefully unifies a complex landscape. It is instead their differences, as much as their similarities, which must be accounted for. If the principle of "national" identification is not further specified by some historical, social, cultural, economic, or political specifications, it becomes extremely dangerous: not only because it is in itself ambiguous (let us be wary of nationalisms, be they even only philosophical ones: this, unfortunately, is the big lesson of the 1900s), but also because it runs the risk to erase the richness that a certain context (and a certain "moment") actually produced in the name of a presumed _identity_. Moreover, when the works of Roberto Esposito are read abroad or when Toni Negri writes _Il potere costituente_ from his French exile, are we really sure that these texts are immediately identified as _Italian_? Or, to put it differently: how French is Nancy and how Italian is Agamben?

It is clear after all: to speak of Italian Theory means first of all to indicate what Italian Theory is not. And, in return, it also means to determine an openly dishomogeneous space, which lacks a common methodological approach, shared analyses, and a space for which the "national" brand appears to be not only reductive but also even presents itself as an obstacle to the "fine" understanding of a season that, exactly because it is entirely Italian, implies way more elements than its simplistic "Italiot" characteristic. This Italian season was a season of crossroads, of theoretical and political decisions, of choosing sides—but also of very concrete effects, directly produced by postures and thoughts which must be fully situated, each for itself, in their specific history.

It may be possible to restore the real image of a "moment" of the thought which may be really worth investigating only on the basis of a complex reconstruction of that thought's landscape. This means starting the analysis from the differences and frictions, the divergences and opposite choices, the clashes and discrepancies within this thought, rather than starting from a "common heritage", which is as reassuring as it is a false premise.

And yet, from a mere historical and cultural standpoint, the post-war period presents a double characteristic in the Italian political-philosophical landscape.

The first is tied to the absolute dominance of German Thought (in philosophy as well as in the human and social sciences). This dominance stood as a "matrix"—both model and first matter—for the Italian intellectual production. The German tradition—its authors, approaches, but also a certain tradition of textual practice which forces a philological reading at the centre of thinking—was, and still is, way more important in Italy than in contexts where the cultural distance with the German tradition was broader (and generally linked more simply to the non-knowledge of the language: it is well known, for instance, that French people were reluctant to learn foreign languages, and that this contributed to their dependence on the translations of twentieth-century German texts—which were often very tardive translations, and even more often questionable translations).

When the reference to French authors bursts into Italy after 1968—in the wake of the events of the Parisian May and, more generally, in the name of a will to politicize philosophical discourse—this happened by priming some particular authors on the typically Italian omnipresence of contemporary German thought: hence Bataille _and_ Heidegger, or Heidegger _and_ Foucault, or Foucault _and_ Schmitt, or Simondon _and_ Wittgenstein, or Nietzsche _and_ Deleuze. . . . That continuous contamination of philosophy arrived in Italy in a cultural context where the reading of Dilthey, Weber, Lukács, Heidegger, Schmitt, Benjamin, or of the Frankfurt School thinkers was deep-rooted and extremely refined. In France, instead, the contamination of philosophy with historiography (particularly the school of the _Annales_ ), critical epistemology (along the path of Bachelard-Koyré-Canguilhem), and more generally with the social sciences was very common already in the 1960s and 1970s.

Hence, the first characteristic: Italy enacts an actual graft—a hybridization between a persistent German model and the new contributions of French thought—around 1968 (and probably even earlier—think of a figure like Franco Fortini). The "novelty" of French contributions can in some cases even be traced back to the Collège de Sociologie and to Bataille's writings: even as this is a return to the 1930s, the gaze is new. To sum up: one reads Bataille, Blanchot, and Foucault (while also at the same time reading Heidegger). And it is clear that one of the problems that this grafting presents is that of the co-possibility, not always evident, of its references. Another problem presented by this grafting is the subtle game of displacements in the perception of French thought and in the types of readings and uses of the German corpus—which continued to remain a central reference in Italy.

The second characteristic has to do with the simultaneous emergence in Italy—between the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s—of a heterodox Marxist thought and of forms of struggle that anticipated what 1968 will then bring forth, something that will extend beyond May 1968. The frequent reference to Operaism that emerges when talking about Italian Theory, is, I believe, the name for this simultaneity between political practices and a new theoretical understanding of the Marxian text. What was at stake was a reading of Marx that would rise to the occasion of the present, which—between the end of the 1950s and the start of the 1960s—demanded to record fundamental discontinuities (be they historically realized or only politically desired). In brief: it was a simultaneity that was at the same time philosophical and political, interpretative (of Marx but also of the present itself) and practical (on the terrain of struggles).

One could say that the reference to Operaism is completely instrumental and essentially serves to posit a _post-Operaism_ and to situate the whole of the Italian philosophical-political production after the end of the 1970s. After all, if the focus is on Italian Theory, one would just need to posit a simple element of chronological definition which would not aim to measure itself with the quality of the Operaists' propositions but would simply require to be chronologically situated _after_. This argument could even be considered valid: after all, the French so-called post-structuralism doesn't necessarily imply to tie all its figures to what immediately preceded it, i.e., structuralism.

But I think that the implications of this argument would be much different in the Italian case: to reduce the _post_ -(Operaism) to a mere "posterior" position on the temporal line means to want to ignore that Operaism is not only a "before" with respect to what came chronologically after. It also means to deliberately ignore what Operaism _also_ (and most prominently) was, i.e., the expression of a necessary and precise taking side—both theoretically and practically (if such distinction even makes sense here)—a taking side that the entire Italian philosophical and political landscape of the beginning of the 1960s was forced to record exactly because of Operaism.

Operaism represents in itself the moment of _decision_ on thought and on practices, and hence directly on the present. To detach post-Operaism from Operaism implies to ignore (voluntarily or not) the "turning point" it explicitly inaugurated in that moment: a drastic alternative in fact, whose impossible re-articulation was later verified in the season of the 1970s (not to mention its further verification in the next repression season of the 1980s).

Now, what was the focus of the Operaist proposition? To put this in a clearly schematic and swift way, I would say that Operaism brought in two differences with respect to the orthodox Marxism of the time (and with respect to the ways struggles were organized and lived at that time). First, the insistence on subjectivation and, second, the claim that it is necessary to historicize one's analysis both in relation to the Marxian "text", and in relation to the cartography and analysis of one's own present (a present that should be seen in its mutations and new elements, so that these mutations and elements could to be understood and "put into play" in the struggles).

What was at stake was first of all the refusal of any undisputed assignment of unity and identity to political subjectivities—that is, the intuition that political subjectivities emerge _by subjectivation_ , i.e., as the result of a historical process of self-constitution. Such process—which is fundamentally linked to the dimension of conflict—allowed to shift the focus away from "the class" (and away from the fundamental role that the party—understood as _class party_ —played in the "conduct" of the proletarian push, and which allowed no other possibilities to be inscribed in the class struggle) and instead to shift the focus towards the particular class _composition_ that could be registered at a particular time. The class was obviously still present in this horizon but instead of being posited as the condition of possibility of class struggle, it was posited as its product—a product that was always historically determined and literally shaped by the conflict itself. In the Operaist proposition, the stake was to make workers' subjectivation the engine of capital's transformations while at the same time reaffirming capital as a _relationship_ and reaffirming the asymmetry between constant and variable capital—exactly because variable capital could be posited as an independent variable. What followed was a double problem: on the one hand, the goal was to take on the question of the relationship between class and modes of political organization and, on the other hand, the goal was to put the question of the transformation of the labour force (or, rather, a labour force that was undergoing a complete re-definition, as was the case in the 1960s) into a working class.

But that was not all. What was at stake was also the historicization of the description and interpretation of this subjectivation. This was a powerful turning point, both from a philosophical standpoint and from a political one: from that moment on, any analyses had to start from an accurate investigation not only of the class' technical composition but also of its political composition.

This is all well documented in the first three issues of _Quaderni Rossi_. Moreover, Tronti's book _Operai e Capitale_ [Workers and Capital] represents a powerful synthesis of this debate in 1966. From a philosophical point of view, what happened in France a few years later (departing from slightly different roots) can be linked also to such double front—first, framing subjectivation as struggles' engine (and as capital's own development); and second, assuming historicization as the philosophical and political method whereby the present could be grasped or, in other words, looking for transformations and discontinuities rather than continuities and teleologies. Subjectivation and historicization are the two assets along which Foucault's thought, for instance, re-defines itself in the shift that leads to the 1970s. It is only by following this double thread that one can understand why Foucault was so broadly read in Italy—in the way he was read, i.e., politically—and also how much such reading bothered those who needed constituted subjects, subjects who were wholes, who were organized and represented by the party, while also bothering those who needed a model of history which pre-emptively assigned—in the name of historical dialectic—all the steps of a becoming that was already determined or that had to fix the face of power (the state) once and for all as well as the face of the revolutionary subject (the party, indeed).

It may be here where all the problems had begun. In fact, the history (or prehistory?) of Italian Theory—understood as the Italian theoretical and political production of the last forty years—tells us that the year 1966, when _Operai e Capitale_ [Workers and Capital] was published, is also, paradoxically, the year that determines the deep internal split in what had been defining itself as Operaism. In fact, everything happened on the background of another split: the break of the editorial board of _Quaderni Rossi_ —which happened between the second and the third issues; and the starting of " _classe operaia_ ". Yet, what was at stake in 1966 was to understand if one should remain an Operaist or join (or even rejoin) the Italian Communist Party (PCI).

It seems to me that this fracture is critical in order to understand what happened in Italy in the 1960s and obviously what followed, and particularly what happened starting from the Hot Autumn of 1969. It is not a matter of giving a political evaluation of that fracture but to restore it historically for what it was. The 1966 fracture is the pivot of a fundamental choosing of a battlefield—which is both theoretical and practical—for which the figure Mario Tronti was the crystallization point. Tronti was, in fact, at the same time the author of _Operai e Capitale_ [Workers and Capital] and someone who decided to switch from Operaism to the Italian Communist Party.

The hypothesis that I would like to present here, after this (too) long premise, is the following. Roberto Esposito characterized Italian thought as a configuration which persistent "monogram" from the 1500s onwards has been consisting of a triangulation between life, history, and politics. This way of defining Italian Theory is different than the one I have been using so far. It makes Italian Theory emerge not from the past fifty years but from the past five centuries. I should maybe explain now what exactly changes after Operaism's internal break, the break that I swiftly tried to reconstruct above. This change is what I think prevents Esposito's "long term" from affirming itself as the grand continuity of Italian philosophical and political thought. What changes are the relationships among the three terms of the triangulation. It seems to me that the increasingly insistent reference to life in the recent Italian production often masks the giving-up on the double dimension of subjectivation and historicization. But it is not only that. Such insistent reference to life serves to obliterate and to remove that deep fracture of 1966—and more generally the crossroads' violence (to put it shortly: _either_ with the movements _or_ with the Italian Communist Party) that was about to hit the long Italian year of 1968.

Esposito symbolically marks with the figure of Machiavelli the beginning of its long-term periodization. And he is right. Machiavelli's construction always occurs in history (that is to say: it always goes through a process of historicization). More specifically, this happens through a double interrogation: an interrogation on the past's shapes and on the possible difference that the present may introduce, on the one hand; and, on the other, on the forms of subjectivities (the forms they take, have taken, may take). Hence, to be saying life, politics, history means immediately—and maybe here lays Machiavelli's greatness—the historicization of the political diagnosis and the interrogation on subjectivities' modes of subjectivation and organizational shapes.

But it is precisely that Machiavellian language that gets interrupted—or anyway differently weaved—as soon as a strong trend towards the de-historicization of concepts and political diagnosis emerges in Italian thought, together with the complete overturning of the topic of subjectivation into de-subjectivation—a de-subjectivation posited as the only possible lever point for resistance.

The topic of life has become so pervasive in Italian thought that it has become synonymous with immanence itself ( _the_ life). It seems to me that such centrality of the topic of life is exactly what fills the double void of historicization and subjectivation in Italian philosophical-political thought, or, if you will, their double expulsion from the domain of Italian thought. In this way, what constituted Operaism's importance is forgotten and an astonishing _tour de passe-passe_ is enacted as post-Operaism comes to stand for what erases Operaists' propositions; moreover, along this path Tronti keeps being considered the tutelary figure of the most recent _post_ -Operaism. Hence, there is no problematization of the rupture of 1966, i.e., the choice of the Italian Communist Party _against_ that Operaist tradition which Tronti contributed to, thinking in the formidable way we know.

So, life. And I mean life here as this concept has taken centre stage in some Italian dominant theorizations of these past few years and particularly in the wake of Foucault's biopolitical analyses. It is a markedly different life, however, than the one Foucault considers as the correlate object of his late 1970s inquiries on power relations' own reorganization between 1700 and 1800 (i.e., in the turn that leads to industrialization becoming the productivist paradigm and to liberalism becoming the bedrock of political economy). In these Italian theorizations, life is never historically situated and it is never crossed by material determinations (which are always immediately social, political, and epistemic). In Foucault's thought, instead, "biopolitics"—the complexity of powers over life—means doubling the governmental level, whereby bodies are put to work (the "moment" of disciplines) with a second one, i.e., one that is not anymore individual but massified and that has "populations" as its object. Such populations are mere productions, constructions of power itself: they are—at least this is how Foucault accounts for their historical emergence—homogeneous wholes of individuals who are considered as _living_ , in that they are defined by building on one or more traits that are presented as "natural". Actually, life becomes governmentality's stake for two different but intertwined reasons. First, as _existence_ , life is seen as the condition of possibility for the productivity of bodies as they are put to work (the preoccupation with workers' health, for instance, becomes a way to grant the maximization of surplus extraction, uphill of the production process). Second, the reference to life becomes a new and powerful control dispositive when life is posited as biological life though a process that is far from natural.[1] Such dispositive allows for both the exponential increase of _governmental effects_ and the drastic decrease of _governmental practice's costs_. Hence there would be no biopolitics if it weren't for the pinpointing of a precise historical moment; if it weren't for the will to obtain what Foucault calls "productive _prestazioni_ " from men and women; if it weren't for the reorganization of the productive process and work itself around a new idea of wealth (which at that point includes the commodification of a labour force understood as variable capital); if it weren't for the need to double the governmental level of disciplines with that of biopowers, or of individuals' government with that of populations, or the use of the juridical rule with that of the norm. Finally, there would be no biopolitics if "life" weren't naturalized and understood as a powerful (and new) governmental dispositive built on the necessity of minimizing costs and maximizing social control (hence: built on the import of liberal economy's criteria and evaluation approaches into the domain of the arts of government).

Italian readings of biopolitics maintain very little of the Foucauldian description: one can find no historical contextualization, no subjects in the flesh, no economic dimension. _Life_ simply disappears from these readings, that life which Foucault would find in events and "short stories", those stories he would pursue in archives, in anonymous people's "dark legend", in the stories of "infamous men", and in the words of the Groupe d'information sur les prisons (GIP) detainees when they would speak, or in the stories that he would directly experience as a resistance ground-building on his participation in the gay movements at the end of the 1970s and which he problematized much later in terms of "modes of life". All of this disappears in Italian readings of biopolitics. What exists in these readings is only the distinction between _Bίos_ and _Zoé_ , which is portrayed as circulating in history as a structural invariance. More, such a distinction is doubled in a biologization of life which is actually presented as a given (life _is_ the biological life). Biopolitics is what takes biological life as its own object. Amen.

On such a de-historicization machine, five elements intervene to characterize, even if in their own distinct way, such as in the two Italian readings of Foucault that I am talking about here—i.e., the readings of Roberto Esposito and Giorgio Agamben. These two readings are precisely built by concealing what Operaism posited as its foundation (or, to say this _with and against_ Esposito and borrowing from the long _dur_ _é_ _e_ he refers to: these readings build on that break from Machiavelli's trajectory that Esposito himself considers the hallmark of modern and contemporary Italian thought). I can simply list them here due to space constraints, postponing their in-depth development to a future discussion.

The first element is the overturning of the form of subjectivation into constitutive absence, the affirmation of community's always lacking part, the _munus_ —i.e., the inscription of the negative, or of the privative, in the midst of a process whose stake was (for Operaism as well as for Foucauldian thought) to be thought as pure positivity, as _production_ , as ontological excess. From here a series of thoughts on the common emerge which, when they succeed in departing from thinking about the community (i.e., when they give up considering the community as the condition of possibility of political praxis to instead frame the community as a necessarily provisional result; or when they accept thinking of the common as the product of a constituent process), they nonetheless think the common on the background of a _common loss_ or of a common incompleteness.

The second element is the overturning of the topic of subjectivation—or, better, the overturning of its conflict and resistance traits. Such traits derive from the excess of subjectivation in relation to power, an excess that resides entirely in the asymmetry between total and variable capital, between power over lives and the power of lives. Such overturning moves result in the substitution of the topic of subjectification with de-subjectivation, which in turn corresponds to either a de-singularization, an impersonal form, a third person, or a forceful suppression of subject's predicates. In sum, being-subject is posited as a being always crossed by power relations (being variable capital means after all to be taken in a _relationship_ with capital because capital is in itself always a social relation) and hence de-subjectivation would be the only way out. This seems to suggest that an outside from power relations could exist, that a giving up on conflict could be, once and for all, taken into account. It is like throwing out the baby with the bath water, instead of aiming for inserting an asymmetry between powers ( _poteri_ ) and power ( _potenza_ ), or between subjugation and subjectivation.

The third element is the cancellation of any reference to _production._ The term "production" is, of course, highly reversible—production is what nurtures capital, but it is also a subjectivation process. The entire problem resides in the insertion of an element of asymmetry between the two faces of this Janus, an element that could characterize the _production of_ _subjectivity_ as the production of an ontological excess (an _invention_ as Foucault puts it), and to be doing this in a context where _the production of commodities_ and its consequent value extraction characterize capital's logic. But neither of these two faces is interesting if one doesn't look at subjectivation and if the analysis is not situated in a precise historical moment (the one of the birth of liberal political economy). On the contrary, _being inoperous_ would mean a supposed subtraction from the logic of capital: it would not mean to struggle against the organization of production and labour, against workers' exploitation and alienation, or against value extraction; instead, it would mean that _not producing_ is a revolutionary gesture. A sort of persistence of aristocratic thought in contemporary times?

The fourth element is the proposition that only the symbolic order is alternative to patriarchy, whereas—Luisa Muraro _dixit_ —sexual difference is a mere _empty signifier._ And even if we should hold such a proposition true, what kind of politics may proceed from the symbolic order? It is actually very hard to think such a politics if one does not insert a constituted subject ("the women") that is both defined in biopower's own language (the "womb" as the natural constitutive trait of the population of women) and charged to redeem society from injustices and violence, while such subject stubbornly refuses to consider classist, racial, cultural traits, and their intersectionality. Indeed, it is very hard to think of a politics also when the possibility of subjectivation (which always implies the becoming and the invention of the self) is foreclosed from the beginning because the assignment of (sexual) difference excludes in itself the possibility of gender's _constituent_ _process._

Finally, the fifth element consists in thinking about life exclusively as biological life. This is the last refuge of materialism once history, conflict, and the material dimension of existence are given up on. The flattening of _Bίos_ and _Zoé_ is accomplished (it is hence clear that in order to allow such reduction the preventative positing of the dichotomy was necessary).

So, whatever happened to the power of existence and to the concreteness of those relationships without which life—which is always already historical, social, political, qualified—is just the empty name attributed to the refusal to think subjectivation processes in history? And whatever happened to the coming "we" that so obsessed Foucault in the last years of his life? Italian Theory is also the name for all of this _._ It may be time to reconsider the violence of a theoretical gesture, which paradoxically deletes its traces and that appeals itself to philological analysis (where both Foucault and Benjamin are reduced to footnote material) or to a fascinating long _durée_ (Italian thought from Machiavelli to us) in order to avoid thinking about what happened in 1966, something that was—in this case we can say it— distinctly Italian.

## Note

1.

Foucault describes the reference to "nature" as a governmental strategy that characterizes liberal political economy and is hence likened to a specific historic determination, not as the proposition that a _natural life_ exists by itself which all of the sudden would attract the interest of power.

Chapter 5

# Old Courses in New Countries

Mario Tronti

> This speech is for the leftist intellectuality to come, if it will come. Politics, in its autonomy, can indirectly—very indirectly—consider it.
>
> —Mario Tronti

I should warn you that I did not write a text; I am following a loose script. But I would like to start by expressing a desire: let us allow for the following ideas—which I know to be controversial—to sediment for a while. We should write about them and, on the basis of written texts, I would like to have the discussion that can't happen today. I chose a title that is definitely evocative and speaks in the linguistic form I opted for here: somehow metaphorical, somehow allusive, and working through hints. I find that this form allows escaping the traps of easy communication that troubles all of us.

In order to get to the gist of the matter, I shall say that those who define our epoch as a "dictatorship of the present" have very good reasons. I shall also add an adjective that I hope will be unsettling for you: our epoch is a "democratic" dictatorship of the present. Our present time aims at a position of domination with respect to the past: it actually holds this position of domination because it has conquered it. I therefore take the opportunity to centre my speech on this point: do not leave this domination over the past in the hands of those who have it today; intend, take it back. Hence my title draws from one of Shakespeare's verses in _King Lear._ The Duke is exiled and, as he leaves, he addresses the court: "Thus Kent, O princes, bids you all adieu; He'll shape his old course in a country new". What does this mean?

It means exactly what follows: the new world exists; we shouldn't deny that the New exists. The New exists; it's rip-roaring, dominating. Yesterday's world is over—yesterday's world was also our world, it was also my world; but the traces of the ancient world remain in the new one. We have to go and look for them and we have to use them. It's not anymore just about positioning oneself, it's about one's existence. It's not just about how to be located in this world, but how one must live in it. The underlying diagnosis is that what lies ahead of us is not just a mere crisis of politics or a simple crisis of society, but instead a real crisis of civilization. We need to put under the claw of criticism that way of life which used to be called American and that now has become Western and tends to become global or worldwide. A conflict opened up between the forms of an alternative political action and the dominant forms of life. This conflict needs to be brought up, brought to consciousness—both the individual and collective consciousness. It is hence necessary to take on a body of analysis, a thought style, a way of spreading the word in order to reinstate the correct old/new dialectic, or, dare I even say, antique/modern dialectic. Allow me to note a fact that is not at all paradoxical, actually it is quite logical: the cantors of the "everything has changed" slogan—and hence "everything must change"—are those who most resist this change in research perspective.

I am saying that a move should be operated today—at the intellectual level, at the level of culture, theory, and thought—in order to close a phase, an all-defensive phase, which was only based on an answering mode, which in turn was an overall subaltern phase. It is time to inaugurate a sort of reaction. "Reaction" is a word that does not belong to us, but when the revolution comes from the outside and comes against us, you can't but operate in the terms of a reaction. If action is not in your hands any longer, you can't but intend to react.

The fight for hegemony is a rather political fact and, like everything political, it must be fought in the contingency. A warning is due: right now, this kind of reaction is best—if not exclusively—expressed at a theoretical level, at the level of intellectual work, of cultural work. It is not advisable that a practical initiative—with its movement laws—should take this route. The contingency is different, it responds to other parameters—and one needs to stay within it with other aims and different behaviours. To such contingency can't correspond in this phase a practical-political way of reacting because the power relationship is organized in a way that doesn't allow for such reaction. For an operation of this kind it is hence necessary to isolate this ground of, say, the theoretical and of thought. It is important to keep in mind that, according to an ancient dictum of ours, it is only in the state of exception that thought and politics, theory and praxis are intertwined, respond to one another, and determine each other. When the state is normal, the two planes stretch apart and become almost independent from one another. This independence must be concretely realized. I expressed this through an expression I am fond of because it synthesizes what I think is the most appropriate behaviour: extreme thoughts, wary actions. It all just comes down to that. Thought has to be pushed to the boundaries available for possible overturnings—one must fly with it up to the skies of visions. Instead, what's at stake in practice is to proceed by improvising, to keep the route by avoiding rocks and keeping the winds into account. The "extreme thoughts, wary actions" is a principle that I try to practice on a daily basis: when I am at home studying, when I am in the Senate voting.[1] I know and recognize two dimensions here that don't correspond to one another, that are not on the same plane, that shouldn't be on the same plane. It is what allows you to be in the contingency, free from it: in a condition of vigilant freedom.

In the years of the CRS (Centre for the Reformation of the State), in this past decade, I also tried—at times, in a clumsy way—to hold together culture and politics. I remember that the first report to the CRS Assembly in 2004 was exactly entitled "Politics and Culture". I was starting from the theses of Bobbio, and from Togliatti's polemic with Bobbio, in order to launch a new intellectual engagement with the goal of a practical comeback. The aim is: giving culture to politics, giving politics to culture. I thought I saw the possible conclusive outcome in the contribution to the generous program of Pierluigi Bersani where an overcoming of the two lefts was envisioned in order to arrive at the construction of a unitary large political force of the Italian and European Left. Then history stepped between politics and culture, the present and contingent history. I don't use "present" in the sense of an irruption of innovations, as people love to say. Instead, I use it to mean the repetition of the always-identical, with its powerful force that obliges and is contingent; with the game of immediate, unforeseen, and unforeseeable variables—that is, that load of non-reason that conditions action. This may be the key point. History as a contingency is a very important thing because it is what politics in particular has to deal with—politics is, after all, the management of contingency; it is always and in every case about the management of contingency.

That is, I don't see any immediate possibility for overturning this contingency today but only a clever—as much clever as possible—use of it. I am following with a distanced fondness how some positions that contest the entire system logics are settling in. I reached the conclusion, however, that these positions won't regain a true power and a trustworthy efficacy without laying a hand on those fundaments of thought that have elaborated them in the past. This is what's at stake with the mutated relationship between politics and culture for how I see it today. From here I derive the advice that, as you can see, I myself am already following: slow down on the curve of praxis, speed up on the rectilinear of theory.

The practical that is expressing itself in the steel-world within which we are closed in (and that is made of the objective development of things, facts, and events; the necessities and compatibilities that chain up reality; the excessively unbalanced power relation in favour of those who are in command) impedes any serious, articulate, and credible perspective for an immediate rupture. This perspective is impeded unless one opts for going to live on the island of utopia. In the immediate it is impossible to accept this world and it is impossible to build another one: this is the _condition humaine_ [human condition] we are concerned with today. To be acknowledging this is an engagement of intellectual honesty. In the "meantime" (a middle time that is always a decisive time), an awake-wait stage should support the reorganization of a struggle front with a New Model Army, which means a new organized social power, more realistically audacious than the one of the past. This—not the improbable, useless illusions of movements—is the long-term vigorous work that has to be assigned to young generations.

In this situation of a contingent, practical block, a favourable moment of theoretical initiative stands out and enlists that intellectual move of reaction that I was referring to earlier. Why? What happened on this ground? Let me premise that I am about to express a very personal opinion, like all the ones that are shaking within this speech. What happened is that the philosophy of praxis broke. Philosophy of praxis was the name that used to be given to Marxism. Gramsci in particular used this expression not only to overcome the hurdle of jail censorship but also because for him it was the most proper definition of Marx's thought. Well, that philosophy of praxis fell down and broke into two: on the one hand philosophy, on the other praxis. This is not bad. What is bad instead is the immediatistic identification of philosophy and praxis. What is bad is the identification mode that fixed theory and praxis to a rigid, deterministic, and vulgarly materialistic relation. What's at stake is not an attic for Marx's thought. Conversely, we are pushed by, we are held together by, the ethico-political obligation to save Marx from the shipwreck of the twentieth century. And this is particularly true in the Italian tradition.

I am referring to something that we experienced intellectually in the past decades in Italy, from the second post-war period onward. With Pasquale Serra—an intellectual who has a great sensitivity for these topics—we are working on a de-structuring attempt for what concerns this eminently Italian horizon. What is this horizon about? First, it is about a certain Gramscism; it is not so much the one derived from Croce, which also caused damages to our battle for ideas in my opinion. Instead, this horizon is about the Gramscism that was derived—maybe without being aware of it—from Gentile. It is this composite of historicism and actualism that characterized Italian Marxism. And note that Italian Marxism is a very serious thing, very important, also on an international terrain. We realize it today at the world level. There are two subjects that eminently feature in many universities in the U.S., in Australia, in Latin America, in addition to Europe: they are Gramscism and Operaism. This is what led to the conversation about an Italian difference, and about "Italian Theory" in different essays and books. It is from here that the necessity to reopen the chapter of the cultural tradition of the Italian workers' movement moves. It would be very interesting to entrust young intellectual forces with a research aimed at comprehending how and to which extent this theoretical composite influenced—in positive and negative ways—the political practice of Italian communists, from the birth and up to the suicidal of the "new party". We would gain enlightening judgement criteria on our uncertain, troubled present. What are the axes along which that kind of intellectual reaction would develop? I will mention only three. This is the first research axis: today we should engage in a forceful gesture to raise the flag for a proud claim of our history. Which history? I am referring to the history of our workers' movement, as I always like to call it. We made the mistake of letting this history be closed within tight horizons: a part of the twentieth century, i.e., those 1970s that revolved around the attempt of a communist construction of socialism. Hence, when that project crumbled, that entire sequence of events was archived. But what's at stake is a long history—not a long-term one since that is something that can only be measured in millennia, but certainly a medium-term history. It starts from the end of the eighteenth century with the first industrial revolution, it marks its presence throughout the nineteenth century with struggle and organizing experiences that should be revisited, and it reaches the twentieth century by traversing that century as a protagonist and dictating the political agenda. It managed to do so because it was coming from afar and was aiming to go very far. The workers' movement was born with manufacturing, with industrial capitalism. It is in that context that the shift from proletariat to working class, from class in itself to class for itself, from class to class consciousness happened by means of organizing. In order to overcome its own internal contradiction, industrial capitalism had to overcome itself: it had to approach the new contradictions that are afflicting it today. It is on these latter ones that the conflict should be centred today. But this will be possible only for those who become aware heirs of that history—its struggle forms, collective experiences, "solidarity forever", mutualism, cooperation; the union and then the party, and even the attempt to become state. Also, the ideal heritage needs to be re-approached by each of us, i.e., the conception of the world and of life, two dimensions elaborated with passion and realism as part of that tradition. This is a bright path that can't be darkened by the shades that accumulated over the years. I don't understand—I really can't understand—why we didn't put it this way, at least in the long years that followed, if not in the moment of the dramatic breakdown. I don't want to hide a problematic point. That history is dead. What is the use—I mean, politically—of resuming it in a time that doesn't recognize it? It is useful—as we said—to learn how to struggle. But it is not only that. Memory is a weapon. And the past is stronger than the future for fighting the present. The past has been, it is something real. The future is a fiction, it can be told as one pleases. Benjamin's sixth thesis, _On the Concept of History_ , says it all: "Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that _even the dead_ will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious" [emphasis added]. Here is these years' and decades' guilt, our guilt: we have not secured our past. And so the beginning of a method to work on could be the following: given current power relations, memory has an antagonistic charge today, an explosive power that is stronger than any utopia.

So, we were saying, it is not just about the twentieth century—the history of the workers' movement goes further back. What emerges here is a powerful theoretical-political theme: the relationship between the workers' movement and modernity, the Workers' Movement and the Modern, both with capital letters because they have equal dignity. The irruption of that historical subject changed the destiny of the modern age; it gave it another meaning, another form, another direction. It picked up the flag from the dust, the flag that was left fallen, i.e., the flag of human liberation that the Modern magnificently planned for at its outset. The modern age's last two centuries—the centuries of its maturity—were the important battlefield for the conflict between capitalism and the workers' movement and staged the indication of two alternative destinies for the future of the human being, at least in the West. The fact that of these two alternative destinies one won and the other lost—one is still present and dominant and the other disappeared and is forgotten—has been a tragedy for humanity. We had not yet said that but it needed to be said. The simple fact of the struggle between the two fields gave history a meaning. After that struggle was over, history seemed to have lost any other meaning.

It is within this medium-long history context that the final outcome of these events has to be placed. We can understand little or nothing at all of the 1989–1991 period if that historical date is not positioned within this context. Outside of this collocation nothing can be seen—and, in fact, nothing was seen. The catastrophe that also took place behind the event of the liberation was, in fact, not seen. The winners write history only when the losers give up on writing their own history. When I arrived at the CRS, I suggested changing the logo and picked the famous "Hit the Whites with the Red Wedge" artwork by El Lissitzky. Today we know that the red wedge shattered on that white circle. We can't simply be aware of that mourning, we have to elaborate it, otherwise we'll keep bringing it with us in our subconscious where it conditions (as it has immensely been conditioning already!) our thinking and our actions of these years. The  year 1989 was a tragic passage—this is what it was; and 1991 was even more so. It seems to me that this tragic dimension of human history is frighteningly absent today from the judging sensitivity of the left, of all of the left. Lightness was theorized exactly at the time when the historic course was heavily turning onto itself and when it stabilized the old order, also introducing—as it should be acknowledged—the necessary novelties exactly along this route. The mass political disorientation that can be seen in wild consensus-flows and that affects the ruling classes and the people altogether has its deep origins there, that is, in the context of 1990s theorizations of lightness. Here, in the relationship between the old and new orders, we can find the second research guideline. Today's situation is characterized by a world order, not anymore by the international arena that used to be. What's at stake are not nations any longer but continents. I won't touch on the anyway intriguing topic of whether this is an order or a disorder. It would cost a long geopolitical discourse that unfortunately doesn't fit these notes. What I mostly care about is the following: we need a grandiose comeback of a system critique, which is exactly what we have lost. We need to return to conceptually owning the _Gesamtprozess_ [whole process]. This is Marx's path in the three books of _Capital_ : mode of production, mode of circulation, and the process of capital production as a whole. This is still a _Prozess_ [process], a system's movement with its own laws.

I don't know if we realize that the reality of capitalism has been disappearing under the expression _neoliberalism_ , not just in the past few years but also in recent decades. It is like when we use the noun "globalization" and forget to add the adjective "capitalist".

These are words that seem to be revealing; in reality, they hide a lot. Capitalism disappeared behind neoliberalism. The capital-world disappeared behind globalization. Class struggle as a power relation disappeared behind the critique of inequalities.

The outcome is the contestation of degenerate forms, a contestation that doesn't question the substance-subject that generated them. There are undoubtedly bright and interesting recent readings of these processes—good that such readings exist! But what's missing? Politics is missing. What's missing is an analysis of those power relations that allow these processes. The slogan of the one percent against the ninety-nine percent is a lucky one and it must be utilized in denouncing inequalities. But there is a political problem—alongside and maybe above an economic problem—in this process. This is a process that sees the relative distance between poor and rich people grow, and where also traditional social strata and class boundaries shift. The point is that those who command those processes—indeed, processes are something that are commended!—have their hands free, completely free, and no force can contrast them. The glorious thirty years, 1945–1975—as it's by now been established—were a parenthesis, a typically twentieth-century state of exception in the long history of capitalism. The power relation between capital and labour was unusually balanced back then. The war had happened, the liberation struggle took place, people's masses had entered the field as protagonists being organized and oriented by big parties. A little, important detail should not be forgotten, i.e., that the power balance between capital and labour was a power balance between capitalism and socialism. These were the years of the cold war, with a two-power bloc that symbolized, despite all, a class struggle at the world scale. Capitalism had to respond to a challenge—it did it with the economic miracle, full occupation, welfare policies, and representative democracy. But let us get back to the above discourse. When this balance collapsed—let me restate this, also among the clapping of our audiences—we got back to the normal state, pre- or post-twentieth century characterized by the hegemony of one part over the other, with no alternatives, no economic-social models, and no politico-theoretical projects. When I hear talking about liquid society, risk society, society of the indebted man, I always ask this question: are we still in a capitalist society or did we come out of it without realizing it? I ask because this is a crucial decision point, which is again a political decision. What's at stake is not to negate underway transformations but to understand them.

It is also important to help understanding in which context and on which direction these transformations are positioned. But the passage I intend to underline most vigorously is the following—I have already said this and I repeat it: a critique of society is not enough any longer, we need a critique of civilization. Given the current condition experienced by individuals and by peoples, what emerges—or better, what bursts in—is an anthropological emergency, which opens fields up where the initiative for a battle of ideas can take place. This happens exactly here, in Europe and in the West, places invested by the big crisis of modernity without being aware of it. It's important to resume the discourse—which has been completely abandoned—on the new unprecedented forms of human alienation. We should reopen toolboxes which tools have suddenly ceased to be used: reading history also as a history of mentality, an anthropology of the individual, a mass psychology; geopolitics used to decrypt the word; and, most importantly for me, political theology as a way to start glimpsing a "beyond" again. The tragic challenge that fundamentalism brings to civilization today has also to be fought on this ground. Who, if not a left that's the heir of the workers' movement, can be the protagonist of this overall critique of civilization? This obsession with consensus should be reconsidered in light of less emergency-driven times: it is certainly important to conquer consensus but also to consolidate it by rebuilding a reference field that can be frequented, not day by day but year after year. A confused movement seizes social strata. The Marxian prediction of a growing proletarization was too rational to be entirely true. The human being, as well as the movement laws of society, is not all under the light of reason. The social elevator goes up starting from below (hence the true gentrification processes) and it goes down from above (bringing the same number of proletarization processes). It's no big news if not for the massified character these processes take on. The anomaly lies in the fact that, in the current context, gentrification processes are intercepted from the left, and proletarization processes are intercepted from the right. It's a problem that should at least be brought to consciousness in order to know what has happened. Politics has to mark its presence here with the necessary attention and the indispensable vision.

I will just briefly touch on the third axis of research. It is a very important subject: you'll find it better developed, even if with an unfinished approximation, in my book _Dello spirito libero_ [Of the Free Spirit].

In order for that reaction move we were talking about to be effective, we need a deliberately, politically incorrect analysis of the historical defeat of the workers' movement. Such an analysis—in this form—has not been proposed yet. We have to tell the truth about ourselves, we should not take the truths told us by others. Thought's thread here consists of confronting again—with updated instruments of analysis—the deep meaning of the nexus between tradition and revolution, i.e., the relation that binds memory and action. Such nexus is not fracture but continuity, not leap but passage. This is why we need a Marxian _Zur Kritik_ —I want to call it like that—of Marxism. What should we, the heirs, make of this theoretical heritage? Before reinvesting it, we should valorize it. But we should valorize it—and this is the main point—by means of overcoming it. The _Aufhebung_ is the critique that doesn't annul but preserves, it tears down the negative and holds the positive. We got rid of dialectical materialism when we were young; by trial and error, we reached the conclusion that this is the time to set ourselves free—maybe with a bit more prudence—of historical materialism. Marx is not the recipe book for the cuisine of the theoretical future. Marx is the point of view—a partisan point of view—on society, on the world, on man. This is what needs to be jealously preserved today; actually, this is what needs to be rediscovered and restored. The task for a political intellectuality that takes on that historical heritage is that of bringing that point of view up to date with the time we are living. So one of the operations that is most urgently needed now, after the twentieth century, is the critical revisitation of the three classical sources of Marxism: German classical philosophy, English political economy, and French political thought. These were real sources, despite the catechism that characterized the way in which they have been told.

Marx was not a good reader of Hegel; and Hegel must be read again at every epoch's turn. Marx didn't have the fortune that we have had of knowing that mine of thought that developed within and around the training of the "young Hegel", which was given to us as a gift by the twentieth century. Here in Italy in particular some heretical Marxists like Della Volpe and Luporini put us on the right track. We still have to travel this path. We partly touched on political economy already: the economicism of Marxism allowed us to see many things but it also hid many others. Outside of the economical one there are several vital worlds which don't depend on it, but these are left unexplored exactly by those people who would like to subvert or at least change the world and life. Political economy and the critique of political economy both ended up being trapped in mystical supremacy of numbers over people, of figures over needs. Today we see balance sheets' compatibility where there are quotidian lives. Politics must stop following the revenue office. This issue with politics is the most delicate point, as well as the strategic junction to recompose an overall discussion. A tiger's leap may be necessary here. We have to definitely emancipate ourselves from a bourgeois democratic horizon. These sound like ancient words. They are not. They are becoming tremendously relevant again. Today the democratic field lives and operates through the undisputed bourgeois-progressist hegemony. On the other hand, this results in the irruption of explosive demagogic-populist impulses and this impedes the establishment of a liberal-democratic right.

This is a complicated and blocked condition that needs to be solved. We need to redefine the two camps, to separate them from one another and to reunite each of them to their inside. I realize this is all very abstract, but abstraction helps bring clarity to thought when the concreteness of action has become confused. On my part, I rubric this part of the political-cultural discourse under the name of "critique of the French Revolution". We need to start again from there, and from the context that prepared the French Revolution because it is at that time that the ideological apparatus that deviated the fate—at least the ideal fate—of the workers' movement developed. It is on this ground—not exactly a theoretical ground but rather a cultural ground—that a doubt has been crossing my mind for many years now: we did not get where we wanted because we took the wrong way. We have to critique not Rousseau's world but maybe the world of Burke who, as Novalis put it, wrote "a revolutionary book against the revolution" with his 1790 _Reflections on the Revolution in France_. One can't understand the French Revolution if one doesn't deal with the Restoration's important thinkers. Listen to me even if what I am about to say will sound absurd: if we don't free ourselves from the progressist mentality, we won't get out of cultural subalternity. I want to gift you with a pearl by Musil. We started with Shakespeare, we end with Musil. _The German as Symptom_ was recently published in Italian—it is a short text made of notes that Musil took in contemporaneity with the composition of _The Man without Qualities._ One of these notes talks about progress as something rather similar to a dream. You dream to be on a horse, the horse walks, trots, gallops, runs, and at some point you don't know any longer how to get off it and it becomes a nightmare. Progress makes sense only if has an end. If it does not have an end—and I add, if you don't give it an end—it becomes meaningless. Progress to go where? To do what? The old question requires a new answer. I should add a warning—an unusually closing warning rather than an opening one. It is only after having listened and read that, I imagine, the question about the meaning of discourse emerges—not of progress this time but of discourse. Also discourse needs to have an ending, or ends, in order to make sense. In case this was not well understood, I'll try to say it again in the clearest possible way. This is certainly not the discourse of a democratic reformist; rather, it is the discourse of a revolutionary conservative. Truthfully, I am looking for new weapons for an old war. Intellectual weapons, of course, to fight that war, that civil war—"civil" in the sense of civilized—that used to be a class war. The culturally correct—with its close cousin, the politically correct—together realized that unilateral disarmament that secured what, for good reasons, was called the constituted order, that is the normal state of present things. I am looking for the way out of the siege, by improvising sorties through topics, authors, memories, thoughts—it doesn't matter if already thought and by whom; what matters is that they allow to keep the battle for ideas alive and autonomous. The indication of things to come will result from the originary accumulation of all the capital that is necessary for the critique of the present day. Just looking at this world as it stands is enough to hate it. For now, we have to hold the gaze on this object. A warning: have lucid eyes, but fire in your mind.

## Notes

Lecture to the Centro per la Riforma dello Stato (Centre for the Reform of the State) annual meeting, June 11, 2015.

1.

Mario Tronti was the senator of the Republic for the Democratic Party of the Left (PDS) from 1992 to 1994 and for the Democratic Party (PD) from 2013 to 2018.
II

# Categories

Chapter 6

# A World to Gain

Sandro Mezzadra

On the Borders of "Theory"

1. Proximity and distance: This is how I would summarize—in two words and without having to inconvenience Freud's "uncanny"—my relationship to Italian Theory. My political and intellectual training developed in the context of one of the currents usually associated with the label "Italian Theory", i.e., Operaism. Moreover, in the second half of the 1980s, the debates surrounding the founding of the journal _Filosofia Politica_ —and particularly the work of Carlo Galli, but also of Roberto Esposito and Giuseppe Duso—were crucial to my academic training and to catalyzing my research activities. Hence, my proximity to Italian Theory—but also my distance from it. If I were to indulge in a few autobiographical notes, I would refer to the encounter with the migration movements of the early 1990s, which was a crucial turning point in my intellectual path. Some old friends and I—a group who had been discussing and practicing politics for a long time—almost immediately realized that the city we lived in, Genoa, had radically changed in the course of only a few years: new faces, new ways of inhabiting public space, and new tensions and conflicts were surrounding us. Our "discovery" was certainly characterized by plenty of provincialism and not a small amount of ingenuity, as certain newer friends would later point out to me—friends from France, England, and the US, for instance. Such provincialism and ingenuity, however, corresponded to the specificity of the history of migration in Italy, a topic that I cannot fully indulge here.

Anyway, the encounter with migration in the early 1990s was truly a "discovery" for me (and certainly not only for me) that filled with absolutely concrete meanings that rather generic term of "globalization", which had recently made its first appearance in public and academic debate. A series of "displacements" resulted from this encounter, both in my political practice and in my research agenda. I like to think of them as productive displacements which have not ceased to be the "engine" of my theoretical reflection. My work on migration intersected my encounter with "postcolonial" studies, leading me to focus my research on the topic of "the border" which, in a recent book co-written with Brett Neilson, I tried to undertake not only as an object of study but also as a "method" (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013). Such displacements and research—which I can necessarily only briefly mention here—have decisively taken me away from Italy. This is not only because they led me to multiply the dialogues with intellectuals and collective realities in other parts of the world but also because they made me aware of a series of problems related to what, drawing from Latin American "decolonial" debates, I would call the "geopolitics of knowledge", i.e., the spatial coordinates of the production and circulation of knowledge (e.g., Lander 2000; Mignolo 2002). The particular positioning of Europe and the West (and hence Italy) in the context of these spatial coordinates has progressively become a crucial theoretical question for me, also building on my discussion with Dipesh Chakrabarty on the project—which characterizes a large part of subaltern and postcolonial studies—of "provincializing" Europe (Chakrabarty 2000).

Thus explains my aforementioned "distance" from Italian Theory. It seems to me that the bulk of these issues has remained completely outside the debate of these past few years on the topic of Italian Theory. The "extroversion into the world" that Roberto Esposito presented as the distinctive trait of the "Italian tradition" (Esposito 2012a, p. 263) has, however, not challenged this tradition's own borders and "model". The problem here is not only the national designation of a "theory", but also the way in which this national designation is situated in a specific way of thinking—or assuming—the world (in the cartographic sense of the term). The problem here lies with the fact that the wide partition lines (geographical and "meta-geographical"), which give the world its shape and structure its legibility, also deeply influence both the production and the circulation of knowledge.

The Italian way of thinking about "conflict" is certainly "largely original", to borrow again from Esposito, when situated in a field of tension with the "normative models" elaborated by Anglo-Saxon philosophy, with German hermeneutics, and with a certain French tradition "focused on the relationship between the word and writing" (2012b). Note, however, how clearly defined is the geography wherein this originality emerges and defines itself. I would like to restate that what is at stake is not the accusation of a sort of "philosophical nationalism" or of a "properly national declination of philosophy": Esposito defuses these charges eloquently in just the first chapter of _Living Thought_. His advocacy for a "geophilosophy" necessarily calls for a confrontation with the topics I was referring to with the notion of a "geopolitics of knowledge", and also for a confrontation with what Martin W. Lewis and Kären E. Wigen defined as "metageography" (1997, p. ix): "the set of spatial structures through which people order their knowledge of the world: the often unconscious frameworks that organize studies of history, sociology, anthropology, economics, political science, or even natural history".

2. What is at stake when confronting these topics is the very statute of "theory". Naoki Sakai (2011) has convincingly shown how, in the global history of modernity, first Europe and then the West have materially asserted their monopoly on the terrain of "theory" production by organizing a "centripetal movement" in which "raw data" and information on the rest of the world were gathered (hence anticipating that figure of the "native informant" familiar to anthropologists).

The universality of "theory"—which was defined in opposition to the particularity of the non-Western world's knowledge—found expression in the production of _norms_ that not only guided and legitimized colonial expansion but also demanded (with some success) a general reorganization of how global economic, political, and social dynamics were understood at the "epistemic" level. These are all topics familiar within the postcolonial studies debate and on which I could expand at large. Let me just attend to a shorthand recollection here. Allow me first to point out that my perspective is distinctly distant from a merely "culturalist" critique of "Euro-centrism", as well as from any apology for "cultural relativism", and from those moralizing tones that are not infrequently the outcome of that same debate in postcolonial studies. Instead, I think it is essential to ask if all the landslides, the crises, the very earthquakes that are hitting the world in which we live have perhaps not already called into question the Eurocentric architecture of modernity described by, among others, Sakai. Thinking about the consequences that derive from this situation may well be the most pressing _theoretical_ question of our moment.

Let me be clear on this: there is nothing reassuring in the analyses of the decline of US global hegemony carried out by Giovanni Arrighi (1994; 2007) and by other exponents of the "world system" theory starting from the late 1990s of the twentieth century. Nor do I think that these analyses have to be taken literally, especially when they go to the extent to hypothesize linear scenarios for a "hegemonic transition": we are not seeing the profile of any new world order emerging, an order organized around one or more emerging powers and that could "succeed" the United States just as the United States picked up the heritage of Great Britain.

Moreover, I do not think that we need to discuss the precision of this or some other diagnosis about the crisis of Western hegemony from a "structural" standpoint here. What's important is first of all to acknowledge that in many parts of the world people already live as if this crisis was a fait accompli. New regionalisms, new geometries and allegiances of economic penetration, and territorial processes of fragmentation and recombination—with their social and cultural repercussions—are currently drawing a rather different world than the one that emerged in the aftermath of 1989, in the context of the different discourses on the "Westernization of the world", which were hoping for or dreading this outcome. Powerful pushes towards a homologation are certainly present, in connection with the global-scale expansion of the circuits of capitalist accumulation, which has been reorganizing itself around financialization processes. However, the deep heterogeneity of the geographies where these hegemonic forces are taking hold is a fundamental trait of the global contemporary condition. This heterogeneity defines, to recall Reinhart Koselleck's categories (2004), our "space of experience". And this necessarily carries deep consequences for our "horizon of expectation". One could even say that it is exactly the nexus between these fundamental categories of historical experience to be powerfully invested by an upheaval of our experience's spatio-temporal coordinates. The one presenting itself to us—challenging our work's geographical and "metageographical" assumptions on the terrain of "theory"—is a new "world".

The "displacement" and "decentring" of the gaze—which has long been the prerogative of anthropologists—cease to be preliminary conditions for understanding "distant" peoples and lands and turn into general premises for any exercise of critical thinking (see, for instance, Agier 2013). The "style" resulting from this kind of theoretical work is necessarily suspicious of the borders that bound theoretical formations and that organize the production of theory. This style instead persists _on_ these borders in order to allow for the encounters, contaminations, and conceptual frictions that are necessary in order to gain a radically renewed world for thinking. The essential task, in fact, is not to study "other", more or less exotic, traditions of thought, but to force our concepts' very limits in situations that radically challenge them, maybe even contesting their universal statute, unveiling their historical and geographical particularity and challenging ourselves to reinvent them. This is the case, for instance, with concepts such as "freedom" and "equality". I repeat: these issues are theoretically crucial for me. My impression is that an emphasis on the "national" delimitation of a theory, as is the case with Italian Theory, ends up disguising these issues, or at least does not contribute towards opening a space where they can be productively thought.

3. Freedom and equality, I wrote. It's probably not particularly original but I keep using these concepts—in the constitutive nexus that binds them (see Balibar 2010)—to indicate the horizon wherein I try to understand the struggles and the movements that, in several parts of the world, rise up to oppose forms of domination and exploitation linked to capitalist globalization. Are they "universal" concepts? It's hard to answer in a linearly affirmative way after having crossed the critique of European universalism carried out first by anticolonial thought and struggles and then by postcolonial studies. Universalism, however, remains the name of a challenge for me, i.e., the challenge of producing _common notions_ which can build a platform for communication and exchanges among different struggles, experiences of critical thinking, and "counter-knowledges" developing through spatial, political, and cultural coordinates that are radically heterogeneous. It is on this edge that the universal opens up, epistemologically and politically, towards the "common", to mention a topic on which many of the authors associated with Italian Theory have worked. It seems to me that it is easy to see how we are confronted with the task of rethinking—once again as a challenge—internationalism, i.e., that formidable Marxian anticipation that, as Jacques Derrida reminded us (2012, p. 47), inaugurated "the space that is not ours and that today is reaching its limits, the limits of the earth and the limits of the political".

Frantz Fanon used to say that Marxist analyses needed to be slightly modified, broadened, and stretched ( _distendre_ is the French verb he used) "every time we have to do with the colonial problem" (Fanon 1963, p. 7). Here we find a methodological indication still valuable today on how to approach the concepts and methods of European and Western critical thought in order to confront the postcolonial condition, which coincides in many ways with the global condition (Mezzadra 2008). The very project of Europe's "provincialization", after all, is far from implying a "shunning of European thought". Chakrabarty (2000, p. 255) talks about a provincialization of this thought "in an anticolonial spirit of gratitude". He also underlines the "'political' need" of thinking in terms of "totality", putting into play categories and experiences that destabilize any totality and force a redefinition of the categories through which totalities are articulated (pp. 21–23). Even putting aside Chakrabarty's specific perspective, it is still within the discrepancy he indicates from which we should work in order to produce the common notions I was referring to before. The gaze's displacement and decentring hence become theoretically constructive postures for a thought of the common that can both pick up the homologizing vectors that shape the world in which we live and the deep heterogeneity that characterizes the world's conditions. Far from being in contradiction with those vectors, such heterogeneity represents the continuously renewed outcome of their action.

Italian Thought certainly doesn't lack greatly important contributions that could be mobilized on this front. In _Border as Method_ , Brett Neilson and I, for instance, returned to and further developed Antonio Gramsci's work on translation and the "translatability of scientific and philosophical languages" (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013, 270–76). One of Gramsci's observations about the status of the "universal" seemed particularly valuable to us. _Notebook 9_ reads: "every truth, even if it is universal, and even if it can be expressed by an abstract formula of a mathematical kind (for the sake of the theoreticians), owes its effectiveness to its being expressed in the language appropriate to specific concrete situations" (Gramsci 1996, p. 1932). We are again faced with a discrepancy, which translates itself into a continuous collision between concepts that claim to have a "universal" validity and the materiality of "particular concrete situations". It is within this discrepancy, in the attempt to make this collision productive, that Gramsci himself situates the conceptual work of translation and his theory of translatability. It is a formidable opening that the Gramscian page hands over to us. I find it more helpful to engage in a reading that aims to "detach" that Gramscian fragment of theory from the continuity of Italian thought so that it "travels" to eventually meet, for instance, the outcomes of the postcolonial critique of Chakrabarty's thought (as I proposed here).

4. Ample literature exists on "travelling theories", prompted by a well-known essay by Edward Said. He himself felt compelled to write about it practically two times (Said 1982; 1994) in order to fully express the ambivalence of the process (which can either trivialize a theoretical formation or cause happy encounters and "hybridizations") and the complexity of the problems it posits, both on the theoretical and the methodological levels. Brett Neilson explicitly referred to Said when he talked about the need for "provincializing the Italian effect" in 2004, when he took part in a conference by that title and that represented a crucial stage in the emergence of a new "global" interest in contemporary Italian thought. "To assess the legacy and utility of the thought that has emerged from 'laboratory Italy' in a distant context", Neilson stated,

> is to ask questions about the limits and qualities of that thought, to 'provincialize' it, to identify both its possibilities for contagion with other theories and practices and its shortcomings in responding to questions and problems that are foreign to the Italian context. Such a process must always involve translation, not only in the linguistic sense but also in the wider political and cultural senses. And, as with all translation, there is something to be gained as well as lost. (Neilson 2005, p. 13)

Particularly, Neilson was referring to Operaism, which, after the publication of _Empire_ by Michael Hardt and Toni Negri (2000), found considerable fortune globally. By doing so, Neilson brought forwards some of the questions which would later underpin our collaboration in the years that followed. Even if in different ways, we both hold Operaism's legacy to be fundamental and continue to write and think within that legacy in many ways. We tried to mobilize a centrifugal reading, so to speak, methodically choosing to follow those lines of flight that led us to open a series of dialogues that were essential for us, such as—to quote just a few examples—the dialogues with black radicalism, the new historiography of global labour, anticolonial and postcolonial thought, several strands of radical feminism, and the protagonists of the Latin American movements and philosophical debates. It is within the field of strength sketched by these lines of flight that we immersed some of the concepts of Operaism, such as the concept of "class composition", which ended up deeply changing this concept's theoretical status. It is important to recall that, after all, even Operaism in its origins—while certainly well rooted in the "Italian laboratory" of the big workers' struggles of the Sixties—actually took shape through a multiplicity of encounters and dialogues that were not particularly Italian. In the midst of the strong repression of autonomous movements, which started on April 7, 1979, Sylvere Lotringer and Christian Marazzi powerfully underlined this aspect in their introduction to a volume that diffused widely throughout the Anglophone world ( _Autonomia: Postpolitical Politics_ ). Talking about the importance of US and French research and struggle experiences, they wrote:

> What can be considered the most original theoretical contribution to Italian Workerism originated abroad. . . . There is nothing "Italian" about the class warfare in Italy. . . . To erect a monument to Italy is to play the game of the Italian State: to misrepresent as specific ("the production of certain intellectuals") what was in fact rooted in the worker's history, rooted, above all, in its international dimension. (Lotringer and Marazzi 1980, p. 12)

I am convinced that also in terms of historiographic work it is extremely important to pay attention to the transnational entanglements and connections that characterize theoretical development—which may also be historically specific—in order to identify the lines of flight that are necessary to follow in the present. With this said, it is also evident that there are many elements of Operaism that are also specifically Italian, such as its history. It is not only legitimate but also undoubtedly very helpful to trace the conditions that led Italy to be a formidable laboratory for political experimentation in the Sixties and Seventies. Likewise, genealogical excavation of the many heresies that have characterized the history of Italian thought—particularly at a moment when thousands of young Italians are forced to leave the country to have a future as researchers. Such a project of genealogical excavation could even become a practice of resistance, and certainly a reference point, for these young people. I hope that this work does not take on any "identitarian" traits, that it will not hence become essentially auto-referential, or "centripetal"—as I could say in opposition to the centrifugal reading of the same theoretical legacy of Italian Operaism I was referencing earlier.

Should this happen, philosophy's "extroflexion in the world", which Esposito talks about, would run the risk of being reduced to a merely academic exercise. And Italian Theory would remain a theory of the world of yesterday.

## Note

Contribution to the international conference _L'_ Italian Theory _existe-t-elle?_ / _Does_ Italian Theory _Exist?_ , Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense / Université Paris-Sorbonne, January 24–25, 2014. A French translation of the text was published in S. Contarini and D. Luglio, eds., _L'_ Italian Theory _existe-t-elle?_ Paris: Mimesis, 2015.

## References

Agier, M. (2013). _La condition cosmopolite: L'anthropologie à l'epreuve du piège identitaire_. Paris: La Découverte.

Arrighi, G. (1994). _The long twentieth century: Money, power, and the origins of our times_. London: Verso.

Arrighi, G. (2007). _Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the twenty-first century_ , vol. 3. London: Verso.

Balibar, É. (2010). _La proposition de l'égaliberté_. Paris: PUF.

Chakrabarty, D. (2000). _Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial thought and historical difference_ . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Derrida, J. (2012). _Specters of Marx: The state of the debt, the work of mourning and the new international_. London: Routledge.

Esposito, R. (2012a). _Living Thought: The origins and actuality of Italian philosophy_. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Esposito, R. (2012b). La nostra filosofia del conflitto, _La Repubblica_ , 11 March. http://ricerca.repubblica.it/repubblica/archivio/repubblica/2012/11/03/la-nostra-filosofia-del-conflitto.html.

Fanon, F. (1963). _The wretched of the Earth_. Trans. Constance Farrington. New York: Grove, 146.

Gramsci, A. (1996). _Prison notebooks_ , vol. 2. Trans J. A. Buttigieg. New York: Columbia University Press.

Hardt, M., and A. Negri. (2000). _Empire_. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Koselleck, R. (2004). _Futures past: On the semantics of historical time_. New York: Columbia University Press.

Lander, E., ed. (2000). _La colonialidad del saber: eurocentrismo y ciencias socials: Perspectivas lationamericanas_. Buenos Aires: Clacso.

Lewis, M. W., and K. E. Wigen (1997). _The myth of continents: A critique of metageography_. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Lotringer, S., and C. Marazzi. (1980). The return of politics, in _Autonomia: Postpolitical Politics_. New York: Semiotext(e).

Mezzadra, S. (2008). _La condizione postcoloniale: Storia e politica nel presente globale_. Verona: Ombre Corte.

Mezzadra, S., and B. Neilson. (2013). _Border as method, or, the multiplication of labor_. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Mignolo, W. (2002). The geopolitics of knowledge and the colonial difference. _South Atlantic Quarterly, 101_ , 1: 57–96.

Neilson, B. (2005). Provincializing the Italian effect. _Cultural Studies Review, 11_ , 2.

Said, E. W. (2000 [1982]). Traveling theory, in M. Bayoumi and A. Rubin, eds., _The Edward Said Reader_. New York: Vintage Books.

Said, E. W. (2000 [1994]). Traveling theory reconsidered, in _Reflections on exile and other essays_. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Sakai, N. (2011). Theory and the West, _Transeuropéennes_. Retrieved from http://www.transeuropeennes.eu/en/articles/316/Theory_and_the_West.

Chapter 7

# Politics and Philosophy in Italian Radical Thought

Elettra Stimilli

Between the beginning of the 1960s and the end of the 1970s, the Italian extra-parliamentary Left gave rise to a formidable production of ideas, strategies, and organizations. Such production hinged on the extra-parliamentary Left's independence and radicalism with respect to the Communist Party, and represented an anomaly in the European and American landscape. After some of Antonio Negri's[1] texts came out in English, also the volume edited by Michael Hardt and Paolo Virno was published in the United States in 1996, clearly speaking to the interest that the "laboratory Italy"[2] spurred across the ocean.

The history of this "laboratory" mostly coincides with the history of Italian Operaism. Some of the most widespread theoretical and political analyses that have widely circulated internationally in these past few years were elaborated in Italian. Their spread is mainly due to their interpretative grasp on the present time. This Italian context added to the variegated and diversified production of Operaism—which was both a theoretical and political production—and to its debate (and at times its conflict) with the feminist movement.

What brings together rather different experiences like Operaism, feminism, and post-Operaism is their shared capacity to think about their time in a radical way, while keeping the tension open with what escapes an exclusively theoretical inquiry. Such capacity lays the groundwork for a renewed central role for philosophy. My objective is to try to sketch—in a necessarily partial way—this common path without erasing the differences that existed within it. Bringing into focus the use and the developments of some of this path's categories and defining the specificity of its diversity can contribute to also reflect on defeats, losses, and critical moment, while retaining the research for different possibilities.

## 1. From Technology to Biopolitics

The object of the first Operaist analyses was the industrial capitalism of the economic boom, a capitalism that sought a redistributive model for plus-value in order to increase workers' purchasing power. It was a capitalism that would manage to overcome—so the dominant paradigm went—the internal problems of the productive process. In the eyes of many interpreters, the new configuration capitalism had taken on starting from the mid-1950s didn't seem to pose a dialectical contradiction as the Marxian perspective would instead have contended. It is not by chance, for instance, that the theoretician of the "end of history", Alexandre Kojève, stated exactly in these years—with a certain irony—that Henry Ford was the only great authentic Marxist of the twentieth century.[3]

The first "Operaist" analyses focus exactly on the massive social and productive process which took the Fordist factory organization as its model. The main goal of these works was to unhinge the neutralizing interpretation of this process that was being established back then. The Operaist subject emerges from these analyses not as a subaltern element but as the explosive power that is capable of fully carrying the weight of social production, and that also represents its intrinsic strength.[4] The Fordist work at the assembly line becomes, in the Operaist analysis, the terrain for the formation of a new revolutionary subject—the mass worker. This subject emerges from the reversed footprint of Fordism, and hence overturns any pretence—ironic or otherwise—of seeing Ford as the true "prophet" of Marx.

This is far from being a merely theoretical work. It originated two of the most incisive extra-parliamentary political movements of the second half of the twentieth century: "Potere operaio" and "Autonomia Operaia". In this context, the mobilization of a new "autonomous" political subject originates from the political need to posit the "refusal of work" at the origin of the intrinsic conflictuality of capitalist modes of production. In conjunction with dominant political forces' implicit bonds, capitalist production modes' internal mutations sanctioned a harsh defeat—possibly a failed revolution—that might not have been completely processed yet. What remains is a powerful, theoretical-political work, which builds on a critical Marxist perspective and on the robust legacy of a dialogue with the most advanced currents of the European philosophy of the twentieth century, as well as with new engagement practices that verified on the terrain the intrinsic nexus between theory and political praxis. It is from this context that extra-parliamentary political movements proceed.

Just think of the "co-research" and "militant investigation" practices carried out in factories that turned out to be among the most innovative instruments in those years' international context—a context where new interpretations for underway mutations were pursued. The Operaist analysis turned out to be an actual litmus paper for advanced capitalism's transformations. Through "co-research" and "militant investigation" practices, militants "learnt" from workers by listening to them and verifying together the plausibility of their inquiries. These practices are only one example of the way in which Italian radical thought is characterized by a singular inclination towards what the tradition has usually considered the "non-philosophical", something that was instead pinpointed as essential already starting from the origins of the most innovative Italian theoretical production.[5]

Technology __ is the first aspect of the new capitalist system that Operaism's fieldwork paid attention to. The question of technology [ _Technik_ ], as it was developed by Heidegger and by the Frankfurt School's discourse, was taken up in the Operaist debate—at times in harshly critical ways.[6] Building on Raniero Panzieri's reading of Marx's _Fragment on Machines_ , the Operaists argue that "science", "technology", "reason", and "progress" don't exist as such; it is only their _historical determinations_ that exist. These determinations mutate with the mutation of underway processes, and in turn change the conditions of possibility for a radical upheaval of power structures themselves.

It is by building on this argument and on an inquiry from below—an inquiry that continues and changes through the mutation of its conditions of possibility, while also going through confrontations and internal ruptures[7]—that the Operaist perspective is posited as a thought that can grasp changes as they emerge. As Paolo Virno stated in a recent interview, this thought "was not just a reflection in retrospective" but "it happened in real time".[8] What was at stake was what Virno defines as "the emotion of 1977", "a strong emotion", because it was linked to a "cognitive content" and above all because it was produced from the real experience of a "paradigm shift", i.e., the shift from the Fordist to the post-Fordist model.

As Sergio Bologna puts it, "perhaps the decisive reason for which Operaism was easily able to understand the nature of post-Fordism was its Italian origin. Among all the advanced capitalist countries, it was Italy that brought forwards in the most radical manner the disintegration of the large factories. Italy was the vanguard of the so-called decentralization of production, with the fragmentation of firms into so many small and "minuscule handicraft enterprises".[9] Italy's vanguard position in terms of the economy's material conditions spurred a theoretical and political vanguard as well, which left a mark also internationally. In fact, "the experiments of laboratory Italy" were seen as "experiments on the political conditions of an increasing[ly] large part of the world",[10] where a radical change was taking place and was having a planetary reach.

The Operaist experience offered new analyses for understanding both the huge transformation in terms of modes of production that started to take place from the mid-1970s, and the ways in which the world of labour was progressively adapting to new technologies. The Marxian category of "General Intellect"—understood as fixed capital building on General Intellect's identification with science and with the contents of automated machines' technical system—was instead deployed to interpret that "lived labour" which, as "variable capital", grounded post-Fordist production. The worker's labour time did not feature as the main source of surplus value any longer, since surplus value was increasingly derived from "immaterial labour" which, by its nature, is the outcome of a cooperative interaction and is mobilized as part of the human animal's general faculties and not as part of a particular performance or of particular knowledges.

However, the lucidity of the Operaists' analyses was not met by a correspondent political theory which could entirely translate the social reality of the "General Intellect" into an actual subversive political process. One could point to many elements to understand the causes of this missing link. What's worth noting is that the need for a radical confrontation with the deep changes that were affecting the political, economic, and social landscapes at a global scale spurred a new interest for analytical instruments deployed in the Operaist context starting from the beginning of the 1990s. The "post-Operaist" season hence developed and was characterized by a strong international echo. The peak of this development's expression coincided with the 2000 publication of a fortunate volume by the title of _Empire_ , a volume where Hardt and Negri offer an analysis of the global world and the free market that acknowledges the deep mutations of the past few decades in a definite way. These mutations did not only involve modes of production but also institutional, political, and social forms to the extent that even the frontiers of traditional nation-states were overwhelmed.

Greeted by the international press as "the most important interpretative work of our times", the book moves from the need to understand how "a global order, a new logic and structure and rule" has emerged "along with the global market and global circuits of production".[11] What's at stake is a radical change where "Empire is the new political subject".[12] It is not simply a "centralized construction of norms" or a new way of "production of legitimacy spread out over world space".[13] Rather, what is at stake is a "biopolitical production" global dispositive, in which "what is directly at stake . . . is the production and reproduction of life itself ".[14]

Michel Foucault's last works are hence placed side by side with the Marxian toolbox, which has always characterized the basis of Operaist research. Post-Operaist inquiries on the "new nature of productive labor"[15] in advanced capitalism intersect with the Foucauldian category of "biopolitics" to come to a definition of the new imperial power as the "new biopolitical economic and institutional system"[16] that functions worldwide.

The aim of Hardt and Negri's work is not only analytical. Their aim is also to "identify the new figure of the collective biopolitical body" ("a multitude of singular and determinate bodies" that constantly "seek relation"[17]) and that expresses itself "in its will to be-against and its desire for liberation" and that, pushing "through Empire", tries "to come out the other side".[18] _Empire_ hence quickly became the reference for the new global international movement that attracted media attention starting from Seattle in 1999. A first and terrible interruption to this movement was marked in Italy by the well-known events of the 2001 G8 summit in Genoa, and by the tragic 2001 Twin Towers attacks in New York City.

Much still remains to be understood about these past fifteen years, which saw the planetary establishment of neoliberal policies. In particular, further analyses are needed to confront the economic crisis without overshadowing the "desire for liberation" that the new global movement re-awoke at the end of the 1990s and that, however, wasn't once again capable of translating itself in a really subversive political process.

## 2. Political Theology and Economic Theology: A Power over Life

Giorgio Agamben opened his exploration of the biopolitical paradigm introduced by Michel Foucault when he published _Homo Sacer_ in 1995. Agamben's work aroused international interest, also building on his effective grasp of the exceptionalist lexicon which emerged after the 9/11 attacks in New York City and which is regaining centre stage after the Paris events of November 2015.

The book's content is identified as pushing beyond the confines of metaphysical elaboration, in line with the peculiar attitude of the best Italian philosophical thought. Yet, the project of the _Homo Sacer_ series is, in its entirety, a tight confrontation with the Western philosophical tradition—and with this tradition's forms and internal articulations—which the project never actually really wants to fully escape.

It is not by chance, for instance, that in the first volume of _Homo Sacer,_ human life is defined after Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt who, even if in different ways, have both undertaken a similar attempt in the direction of critiquing metaphysics. Through this move Agamben is able to pinpoint the clearest dispositive for implicating life in the political sphere as per Schmitt's theory of sovereignty,[19] and hence he deepens and maybe even corrects the very definition of biopolitics that Foucault proposed.[20]

Arendt's re-elaboration[21] of the Aristotelian distinction between _bios_ and _zoe_ and Benjamin's notion of _bare life_[22] are the two paths followed by Agamben in the itinerary that from Schmitt leads to Foucault and the other way around. Through these paths Agamben highlights the "point of intersection between the juridico-institutional and the biopolitical models of power".[23] The state of exception described by Schmitt is, according to him, the dispositive upon which the Western juridico-political machine is grounded. It is through the division and the capture of the living human—through the mechanism of the exception—that life takes on the form of "bare life", that is, of a life that, while divided and separated from its form, works at the same time as the threshold for the articulation between natural life ( _zoe_ ) and politically qualified life ( _bios_ ).

When the first volume of the _Homo Sacer_ series was published, Foucault's last lectures at the Collège de France[24] had not come out yet and the turn from "biopolitics" to "governmentality", which Foucault undertakes there, had not fully come to light yet. In _Homo Sacer_ , in fact, Agamben refers to the closing part of _The Will to Knowledge_ ,[25] where Foucault summarizes the process whereby, in the modern age, natural life— _zoe,_ in Agamben's terminology—starts to be included in state power's mechanisms and evaluations, hence turning politics into "biopolitics". At that point, he feels the need to make a "correction", or at least to bring an "addition" to the Foucauldian thesis.

As it became clear in the years after the attacks on the Twin Towers, the decisive fact is that "together with the process by which the exception everywhere becomes the rule, the realm of bare life—which is originally situated at the margins of the political order—gradually begins to coincide with the political realm, and exclusion and inclusion outside and inside, bios and zoē, right and fact, enter into a zone of irreducible indistinction"[26] as Agamben contends.

The second volume of the _Homo Sacer_ series came out in 2003 and was entirely devoted to the "state of exception"[27] for how Schmitt elaborated it as the basis of state sovereignty. This is the dispositive that articulates and holds together the two aspects that constitute the entire Western juridico-political machine: the normative and juridical aspect ( _potestas_ ) and the anomic and extra-juridical aspect ( _auctoritas_ ). The juridico-normative element is by itself apparently more effective. However, for Agamben, it is only through the intervention of the antinomic aspect that the normative and juridical one effectively applies to life. On the other hand, the normative and juridical aspect only acquires meaning in relation to the existence of the other element. _Nomos_ and anomie, law and life, are co-implicated from the origin hence, but their dialectic works as long as they remain distinct from one another. When the state of exception—where these two aspects co-exist—becomes the rule (as is the case in the new imperial order described by Negri and Hardt), the juridico-political system is subject to a deep transformation that is still underway. Agamben seeks to investigate such transformation's contours.

It is also by building on some of the conclusions of Agamben's work that Negri and Hardt confront the constitution of the new world order in _Empire_. In this context, however, they give particular relevance to the " _productive_ dimension of biopower",[28] as the material condition of new institutional, political, and social forms—which imply power's immediate relationship to life. In this context the hermeneutic advantage that Roberto Esposito managed to derive from the immunitarian paradigm—which he intersects with Foucault's biopolitical paradigm—appears to be particularly relevant.[29] It is in this context that law emerges as the entire societal system's immunitarian paradigm _par excellence_ , building on its positioning in the zone of indistinction between life's conservation and exclusion. To counter the "negative biopolitics" emerging from his formulation of an immunitarian paradigm as a "politics _over_ life", Esposito—unlike Agamben—explicitly posits an "affirmative biopolitics" as a "politics _of_ life",[30] which in many respects is close to the "biopolitics" Negri opposes to "biopower", seeing it as a resource that belongs to the human person from the beginning.

An inquiry on "the point of intersection between the juridico-institutional and the biopolitical models of power" is at the heart of the first part of the Agambenian project of the _Homo Sacer._ series[31] In Esposito's work on biopolitics, the law emerges as the immunitarian dispositive _par excellence_ of the entire social system. Yet, both in Agamben's and Esposito's works, economy's semantic and political vector—which is central in Operaists' analyses—runs the risk of remaining marginal and of not fully grasping the gravity of underway changes.

With _The Kingdom of Glory_ —which came out in 2007 in Italy—Agamben starts to directly confront the changes that affected power mechanisms, starting from the moment when economy imposed itself on all of the domains of political and social life. In this way he also deals with the meaning of the governmental shift that characterizes Foucault's late work on biopolitics.[32] It is here, in fact, that he intends to define the ways through which an "economic government" imposed itself on a global scale. In order to do so, Agamben traces back "the paths by which and the reasons why power in the west has assumed the form of an _oikonomía_ , that is, a government of men".[33]

In his attempt to define this passage, Agamben explicitly picks up the paradigm of "political theology", which he had already used to delineate the power over life that is at stake with juridical power. In this context, however, "political theology" is connected to "economic theology"—that is, to the idea that characterizes Christian theological thought and that makes history coincide with a providential development. _Oikonomía_ is the Greek word that the first Fathers of the Church used and that Agamben picks up to interpret the currently reigning economic government.

According to Agamben, political theology "founds the transcendence of sovereign power on the single God", while the "economic theology" "replaces this transcendence with the idea of an _oikonomía_ ", that is, of a government conceived as "an immanent ordering".[34] Political philosophy and the modern theory of sovereignty derive, according to Agamben, from the first paradigm; modern biopolitics—up to the current triumph of the economy and of the government on every other aspect of social life—derives instead from the second paradigm.

The goal of his work is thus to show how these two paradigms, while "antinomical", are "functionally related to one another".[35] The _oikonomía_ is, in fact, the strategic operator through which the perfection of divine authority—which political authority refers to in its capacity as political theology—relates to God's action in the world. This second aspect is fundamentally connected to the economic government according to Agamben, both in the sense of modern political economy—think of Smith's idea of the "invisible hand" and its "providential" government of the market—and in the sense of the current market predominance on every other aspect of the social world. This is an aspect that, according to Agamben, remained concealed in the most famous twentieth century discussions about this topic in favour of a political theological paradigm—a paradigm that was more clearly connected to the dispositive of state sovereignty (where an interest in preserving it was at stake).

It is not by chance, for instance, that the theological-political paradigm was picked up as a vantage point on the modern Political also within the Italian debate by Mario Tronti, or Massimo Cacciari, for instance, who were working from somehow equal and opposite positions.[36] Hence, to be returning to the paradigm of political theology today and in this horizon means to rethink the meaning and the role of state sovereignty as its end has been decreed, or, at least, as this sovereignty has been profoundly undermined from within as a result of economic governance's dominance. Also, the recent attempts to resume old forms of nationalism as a remedy actually seem to be a negative and resentful reaction with respect to the supremacy of economic power . The current reflexion around the theological paradigm hence implies a new consideration of this complex power mechanism that is at the heart of Western politics.[37] This is also the goal of Roberto Esposito's recent work on the topic[38]—which is particularly significant for our itinerary as it develops around the problem of generalized indebtedness, on which I intend to return.

For Esposito, the politico-theological machine is fundamentally a juridical dispositive, which he compares with power's current economic drift. The fundamental problem for him is that what is at stake with "political theology" is not a conceptual category or the simple indication of a historical phenomenon. Instead, what is at stake is a "dispositive": "a performative mechanism that acts on what it takes hold of".[39] The fundamental performance of "the machine of political theology" is, according to him, that it separates "what it purports to join" and to unify "what it divides, by submitting one part to the domination of the other".[40]

"Political theology", Esposito writes, "is the compulsion—one that has persisted into our times—to repeat the tendency to unify a compound through the exclusionary inclusion of its subaltern part".[41] This is the dispositive that grounds the formation of the nation-state. But he points to a line of continuity between the politico-theological mechanism of state sovereignty and the power dispositive that feeds the economy's current planetary predominance. According to Esposito, "one can well say that both the _ius publicum europaeum_ and the bipolar world of the postwar period as well as the globalized world (also structured along exclusionary division lines) all lie within the political-theological horizon".[42] Also, the global generalized indebtedness pertains, from his point of view, to the political-theological logic of exclusionary inclusion.

"Universal indebtedness", Esposito writes,

> is the consequence of power relations between unequal parties that were instituted, and continuously reactivated, by the political-theological machine—with the difference that in the society of generalized debt, the fate of subservience at one time reserved for just one part, now seems to have been extended to all. . . . The point of arrival for economic-political theology is identity, with no remainders, between inside and outside, whole and part.[43]

A red thread links the political-theological dispositive with the political-economic one for Esposito, as well as for Agamben. This proximity induces to underline the points of contact between these two dispositives, more than their differences. However, there is also a profound discontinuity between recent neoliberal policies and past political forms connected with the juridical structure of the national sovereignty. Such discontinuity is becoming increasingly visible these days, and I suggest that it is necessary to keep interrogating it in order to understand the mechanisms that allowed for such a capillary relationship between the current economic power and individual lives—so capillary that it engages them in its internal workings in unprecedented ways.

## 3. Neoliberalism and Debt Economy

Starting from the 1980s, neoliberalism imposed itself as the new global politics, opening a new course—an actual economic, political, and social turn. It has been a complex phenomenon. Its consequences are maybe starting to be fully understood only now, in light of its failure and even of the difficulties faced in the attempt to find an alternative to it.

The "virtuous" connection between mass production and consumption—which underpinned the dominant vision of the model of industrial growth after World War Two—showed its weak spots already at the end of the 1970s. Italian Operaists' and post-Operaists' analyses pointed out the huge mutation that was unfolding at its outset. The Fordist productive structure's crisis showed the difficulties in containing the connection between production and mass consumption within the national circuit. New political and economic strategies (aimed at the global scale expansion of the market economy) rapidly led to a re-definition of the roles and functions of both politics and the economy.

A detailed analysis of this crucial passage has increasingly become the object of important works.[44] Two essential junctures characterize this turn. The first has to deal with the radical change that capitalist modes of production underwent in the past forty years. This was not simply the time of the "end of work",[45] as we were often led to believe. What we witnessed instead was the expansion of _administrative and entrepreneurial rationality_ to every working domain, as well as to the social and political ones, an expansion that invested each individual existence in entirely unprecedented ways. The enterprise form became the prototype for all of classical economy's main figures: the "worker", the "producer", and the "consumer".

The second problematic junction at the heart of the neoliberalist turn is the progressive transformation of nation-states into " _managerial states_ ". The new governmental paradigm did not only imply a deep transformation of classical modes of production; it also facilitated the institution of more flexible states, grounded in the market and geared towards the consumer. _Management_ —conceived as a "universal" managerial process, which applies to any possible field—was entirely transposed also in the public sector. This transformation brought about radical change in politics and institutions.

In this context a Marxist, strictly "economic" reading of neoliberalism has so far focused its critique on the changes that affected capitalist modes of production and new labour forms. In many ways, these changes spoke of less constricting and more individualizing modalities. Such modalities were not devoid of forms of exploitation and alienation and, in fact, they aroused the attention of the post-Operaist critique.

However, the economy's predominance on every domain of political and social life, which characterized the past thirty years, leads us to reflect in a broader sense on the unprecedented relation that this process established between the ways of individual existences and the management of global economy. It must be acknowledged that the capitalist economy has always been instituting an intimate bond with individual lives—which in the past was fundamentally grounded on the exploitation of specific skills in the form of labour. What has changed today, however, is essentially the fact that what is at stake is not so much or not only specific performances that could be clearly situated in the productive sector; or a "work" of "immaterial" nature which, however radically transformed as its role and structure within the economic system, still, however, pertains to the production sphere. What is at stake instead is life in its entirety and the human capacity to give it value—this is something connected with domains that, while far from classical economy, seem to intimately belong to it.

From this vantage point, the perspective opened by the feminist discussion within the post-Operaist debate is particularly relevant. Already in 1971 the Italian group "Rivolta femminile" forcefully denounced in its manifesto the shortcomings of a Marxist, purely "economic", point of view, with its inclination not to see the political strength of long-neglected domains.[46] Instead, with neoliberalism, the eminently political function of these domains came into focus and solicited two reactions. On the one hand, "second-wave feminism, which emerged as a critique of the first",[47] was received as "the handmaiden of the second"[48] by many of the historic Anglo-Saxon feminists.

On the other hand, however, the intensity of the feminist experience—and particularly of Italian feminism challenged by its confrontation with the Operaist debate—allowed for a clearer identification of the new approaches to the valorization of capital that exceeded the strictly productive domain and that were largely nurtured by an investment on care capacities and by the attribution of value to individual lives—a domain which in the past used to be tied to the domestic sphere. The feminist interpretation, for instance, clarified the role of "veline" (showgirls) and "cover girls" in the context of the new forms of democratic power which were cutting-edge in Italy during the years of the Berlusconi government.[49] These were "spectacular incarnations" of a more capillary form of valorization and were the clear expression of an attitude that characterizes contemporary capitalism, i.e., the attitude of putting subjective, affective, and emotional components to value. This form of valorization does not only group the "velina" (showgirl) with various female worker figures—from the housewife, to the migrant domestic worker, to the knowledge worker—but it also characterizes all these women for the same investment capacity that is also at stake in any financial operation, just to make an example.[50]

This is an unprecedented investment over life that engages individual existences in the construction of a global enterprise today, and that finds in the financial market its extreme apex. The "entrepreneur of oneself" is the prototype of this phenomenon, where a permanent transformation's instance—towards a continuous betterment—characterizes the strengthening movement we are all engaged in as we attempt to constantly perfect our performances.

All of this became particularly evident following the process of markets' financialization, which occurred at the beginning of the current economic crisis. In the past thirty years, the domain of finance didn't only start to relate to the production of goods and services and hence to the world of labour conceived in a classical sense—a world in which internal structure was overturned in many ways by finance. What has been happening is a total involvement of individual lives in the financial world—through the rerouting of domestic economies' savings onto stocks. This is what allowed new forms of indebtedness to become the engine of the world economy.[51]

In the context of life's insertion into finance, debt continually finds new investment forms that reveal its implicit non-extinguishability and the necessity of its continuous reproduction. Value's new accumulation forms find debt—a debt that shouldn't be extinguished—to be the privileged mechanism for its own fuelling. A planetary indebtedness is at the basis of the world economy's gears and of a new type of power.

The process of the financialization of the economy is the most explicit manifestation of the deep change produced by neoliberal policies. But the debt economy also contributed to shed light on some truths that maybe remained veiled in the past.

On the one hand, the phenomenon of generalized debt radically challenged the substantial equality in the value of goods, services, and work performances—the equality that was at the basis of the exchange paradigm, which grounded the classical institution of the market as well as the Marxist critique. Exchange is the result of a late "invention",[52] and hence loses that perceived centrality in terms of market's functioning.

On the other hand, the debt economy brought to light the fact that the coin—the direct precursor of finance—is not simply the vehicle for the exchange; it is instead an "owed credit" or, better, "the measure of one's trust in other human beings".[53] This is a complex phenomenon, which illuminates why the relation between the debtor and the creditor precedes the relation of exchange, as Nietzsche argues,[54] and how it absorbs the social process of capital valorization in a domain that is larger than the productive one.

It is not by chance that some interesting analyses on the performative value of the coin in relation to language also emerged within the post-Operaist debate in these past few years.[55] The coin emerges here as the institution through which the evaluation process is constituted as a social communicative phenomenon. Some recent works by Maurizio Lazzarato on the topic of debt take the same direction.[56]

Fully agreeing with Graeber, Lazzarato identifies the asymmetric relation between creditor and debtor—and not the equal relation that is usually presented as grounding the practice of exchange—as the fundamental element of the social relation. This is a relation that—as Lazzarato acknowledges—historically and theoretically precedes the relation between production and waged worker. The nexus between credit and debt hence emerges as the economic relation that can't be disassociated from the constitution of the subject and from its condition as a "moral" subject. Lazzarato explicitly states that, in the debt economy, work—understood in the classical meaning of the term—definitely becomes "work on the self" and economic problems can't anymore be faced in the "objective" terms of real economy (production organization, labour division, etc.[57]).

Similarly, in a recent text, Virno recognizes how the capitalist accumulation process is grounded on the particular bond between _poiesis_ and _praxis_ , work performance and political action, and how this is the identification mark of the "use"—"use" is not by chance the focus of Virno's last work.[58] While it is re-discussed and transformed, the category of labour remains nonetheless central in the post-Operaist analysis, to the extent that the critical action indicated by Lazzarato, for instance, continues to be that of the "refusal of work" towards an exit from the productive model, which is posited as an urgent political task more than as one of the most evident pieces of data of the present.

While this is a stretch, the critique that Agamben moves against Heidegger—where the problem of technology ( _Technik_ ) is again connected to the question of production—could be helpful here in order to reflect on this problem. At the end of the _Homo Sacer_ series, Agamben explicitly takes distance from Heidegger's perspective, despite its centrality in his work. According to Agamben, Heidegger shed light on technology as a dominant metaphysical dispositive (in a way that is undoubtedly opposite to the Marxian reading of this same phenomenon, which is highlighted in the Operaist analyses). According to Agamben, however, in his attempt to think "the essence of technology as production and disposition", Heidegger "was not able to see what has today become perfectly obvious, and that is that one cannot understand the metaphysics of technology if one understands it only in the form of production. It is just as much and above all governance and _oikonomía_ , which in the last analysis can even provisionally put causal production between parentheses in the name of a more refined and diffuse form of management of human beings and of things".[59] Likewise, one could say that the Operaist perspective—where production maintains a central position—runs the risk of blurring the form that economic power takes on these days. One could draw this parallel even if there are differences that can't be ignored and which repercussions—as I will try to show—involve also Agamben's path.

It is this particular type of power that Agamben and Esposito have tried to re-define. Starting from Aristotle, Agamben performs a tight confrontation with Christian theology. Through a genealogical analysis of the theological-political dispositive, Esposito reached the heart of Western metaphysics.

In particular, for Agamben, the administrative dispositive developed by the Christian theology is the archetype of contemporary and more refined forms of economic management of the world. "The operativity" that characterizes it empties the distinction between "action" and "production" from within. In modern time, this distinction allowed for the relegation of the economy in the productive domain, while also isolating, on the other hand, the praxis as politics' specific domain. Agamben instead underlines how today that "operosity"—which, starting from Aristotle, has been the common thread of these two domains rather than the origin of their difference—has come to light. This has left unexplored the field of "inoperosity", a field that, according to Agamben, is instead essential to characterize human life.

Politics is, for Agamben, that form of life that "deactivates" and "makes inoperative" the operativity dispositive that has been dominant up to today. The modalities of "deactivation" remain, however, unclear. They are often identified in forms-of-life that are finally unrepeatable—like Bartleby's[60] life—or in forms-of-life that are characterized by an "original purity", as is the case of early Christianity[61] or of monastic rules.[62] These modalities tend to completely free themselves of power relations defined in predominantly juridical terms, and engage in a face-to-face match with the law that does not always help to find real alternatives in the complex situation in which we live today. Connecting economic dynamics to economic theology dynamics hence ends up being functional to the conservation of a nexus between juridical and economic power, a conservation that seems to go in the same direction: one and only domain of operativity corresponds to only one form of reaction—its own deactivation.

Despite his critique of Heidegger, Agamben doesn't finally go too far from a univocal metaphysical definition of operativity which—in the same way as technology in Heidegger's discourse—runs the risk of appearing insufficient for a critique of the present time, if it stays away from a confrontation with historically determined—and subject to change—power mechanisms. In the context of such a confrontation, it also becomes hard to highlight some fields that would be completely unrelated to one another, as if they were a _pure origin_ or _another horizon_ one could look at, and that—following Heidegger—seem to be the final outcome of Agamben's perspective.

I wonder, for instance, which role his project envisions for new forms of capital accumulation that are mainly based on the common and individualized _use_ of affective resources, and linguistic and knowledge capacities. These resources and capacities are inappropriable and, in this sense, they are problematically close to the notion of "use" that he envisions as "the relation to the inappropriable"[63] and as a form of deactivation of operativity's dominion which is currently ruling. More than aiming for a complete "deactivation" of the operative dispositive, which is finally what Agamben tends to do (in his attempt to recover an "inoperosity" that, in the pursuit of its "purity", runs the risk of seeming fundamentally impolitical), it may instead be appropriate to analyze the particular historical conditions which in each situation allowed for this operative dispositive to be. This would permit to reach—from a properly political point of view— the reversibility of its movement and hence allow a different activation of what is currently stiffened in the planetary economic dominion.

Highlighting the differences, limits, and potentialities of some of the categories utilized within contemporary Italian radical thought could maybe help strengthen their effectiveness towards a critical contest with the present aimed at—as much as possible—changing its political course.

## Notes

1.

See, at least, Negri, A. (1989). _The politics of subversion: A manifesto for the twenty-first century_ Cambridge: Polity Press; Negri, A. (1991). _Marx beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse_. New York: Autonomedia.

2.

See Hardt, M. and Virno, P. (1996). _Radical Thought in Italy: A potential politics_. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

3.

See Nichols, J. H. (2007). _Alexandre Kojève: Wisdom at the end of history_. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, p. 90. This text is actually a reworked version of a conference paper given in Germany in 1957.

4.

See Tronti, M. (2013 [1966]). _Operai e capitale_. Rome: DeriveApprodi.

5.

See Esposito, R. (2012). _Living Thought: The origins and actuality of Italian philosophy_. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

6.

See Assennato, M. (2015). BĺOS/TÉCHNE: Per una critica della macchinazione, in D. Gentili e E. Stimilli (eds.), _Differenze italiane_ , _Politica e filosofia: mappe e sconfinamenti_. Rome: DeriveApprodi, pp. 171–83.

7.

Clearly the reference is particularly to Mario Tronti's and Massimo Cacciari's break with Potere Operaio and to their subsequent theoretical caesura with the Operaist approach, where Tronti's thesis about the _autonomy of the political_ originated.

8.

See the interview _Language, politics, and "human nature": An interview with Paolo Virno_ , by F. Milazzo, at https://tirchhispelling.wordpress.com/2013/01/29/language-politics-and-human-nature-an-interview-with-paolo-virno/.

9.

Bologna, S. _Workerism beyond Fordism: On the lineage of Italian workerism_ , at https://viewpointmag.com/2014/12/15/workerism-beyond-fordism-on-the-lineage-of-italian-workerism/

10.

Hardt and Virno, _Radical Thought in Italy_ , p. 4.

11.

Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2000). _Empire_. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, xi.

12.

_Ibidem_ , p. xi.

13.

_Ibidem_ , p. 30.

14.

_Ibidem_ , p. 24.

15.

_Ibidem_ , p. 28.

16.

_Ibidem_ , p. 41.

17.

_Ibidem_ , p. 30.

18.

_Ibidem_ , p. 218.

19.

See Schmitt, C. (1985). _Political theology: Four chapters on the concept of sovereignty_. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

20.

See Foucault, M. (1998). _The history of sexuality_ , vol. 1: _The Will to Knowledge_. New York: Penguin Books.

21.

See Arendt, H. (1958). _The human condition_. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

22.

See Benjamin, W. (1921). _Zur Kritik der Gewalt_ , in _Gesammelte Schriften_ , Bd. II, p. 1, ed. R. Tiedemann and H. Schweppenhäuser. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.

23.

Agamben, G. (1988). _Homo Sacer: Sovereign power and bare life_. Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics, p. 6.

24.

See Foucault, M. (2007). _Security, territory, population: lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–78_. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

25.

Foucault, _The history of sexuality_ , p. 141.

26.

Agamben, _Homo Sacer_ , p. 9.

27.

See Agamben, G. (2005). _State of exception_. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

28.

Hardt and Negri, _Empire_ , pp. xiii, 27.

29.

See Esposito, R. (2011). _Immunitas: The protection and negation of life_. New York: Polity; Esposito, R. (2008). _Bios: Biopolitics and philosophy_ , vol. 4. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

30.

Esposito, _Bios: Biopolitics and philosophy_ , pp. 32–38.

31.

Agamben, _Homo Sacer_ , p. 6.

32.

See, at least, Foucault, _Security, territory, population_ ; Foucault, M. (2008). _Birth of biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–79_. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

33.

Agamben, G. (2011). _The kingdom and the glory: For a theological genealogy of economy and government_. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, xi.

34.

_Ibidem_ , p. 1.

35.

_Ibidem_.

36.

On political theology in Tronti and Cacciari, see, at least, Cacciari, M. and Tronti, M. (2007). _Teologia e politica al crocevia della storia_. Milan: M. Gasparri, AlboVersorio; and the most recent Cacciari, M. (2017) _The withholding power: An essay on political theology_. London: Bloomsbury.

37.

See Galli, C. (2013). Editoriale. Teologia politica, teologia economica, filosofia politica, _Filosofia Politica_ , n. 3, 2013: 387–90, and other contributions contained in the issue.

38.

See Esposito, R. (2015). _Two: The machine of political theology and the place of thought_ , trans. by Z. Hanafi. New York: Fordham University Press.

39.

Esposito, _Two_ , p. 72.

40.

Esposito, _Two_ , p. 3.

41.

Esposito, _Two_ , p. 81.

42.

Esposito, _Two_ , p. 81.

43.

Esposito, _Two_ , p. 208.

44.

See, at least, Harvey, D. (2005). _A brief history of neoliberalism_. New York: Oxford University Press; Dardot, P. and Laval, C. (2014). _The new way of the world: On neoliberal society_. London: Verso Books.

45.

See Rifkin, J. (1995). _The end of work:_ _The decline of the global labor force and the dawn of the post-market era_. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons.

46.

See "Manifesto" in Bono, P. and Kemp, S., eds. (1991). _Italian feminist thought: A reader_. Oxford: Blackwell.

47.

Fraser, N. (2013). How feminism became capitalism's handmaiden—and how to reclaim it. _Guardian_ , 14 October. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/14/feminism-capitalist-handmaiden-neoliberal

48.

Fraser, How feminism became capitalism's handmaiden.

49.

See Dominijanni, I. (2014). _Il trucco: Sessualità e biopolitica nella fine di Berlusconi_. Rome: Ediesse.

50.

See Gribaldo, A. and Zapperi, G. (2012). _Lo schermo del potere: Femminismo e regime della visibilità_. Verona: Ombre Corte, p. 52.

51.

See Stimilli, E. (2017). _The debt of the living: Ascesis and capitalism_ , trans. by Arianna Bove. New York: SUNY Press; Stimilli, E. (2018). _Debt and Guilt_ , London: Bloomsbury.

52.

See Graeber, D. (2011). _Debt: The first 5,000 years_. New York: Melville House, p. 34.

53.

Graeber, _Debt: The first 5,000 years_ , p 47.

54.

See Nietzsche, F. W. (2006). _On the genealogy of morality_ , trans. by Carole Diethe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

55.

See Marazzi, C. (2008). _Capital and language: From the new economy to the war economy_ , trans. Gregory Conti. Los Angeles: Semiotext[e]; Marazzi, C. (2014). Sulla natura linguistica della moneta, in M. Pasquinelli, ed., _Algoritmi del capitale: Accelerazionismo, macchine della conoscenza e autonomia del comune_. Verona: Ombre Corte, pp. 158–82. See also Virno, P. (2017). _Essay on negation: Toward a linguistic anthropology_. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

56.

See Lazzarato, M. (2012). _The making of the indebted man: An essay on the neoliberal condition_. Los Angeles: Semiotext[e]; Lazzarato, M. (2015). _Governing by debt_. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).

57.

See Lazzarato, _The making of the indebted man_ , p. 33.

58.

See P. Virno, L'uso della vita, in Virno, P. (2015). _L'idea di mondo: Intelletto pubblico e uso della vita_. Macerata: Quodlibet, p. 159.

59.

Agamben, G. (2013). _Opus Dei: An archaeology of duty_. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, p. 61.

60.

Agamben, G. (1999). Bartleby, or on contingency. In Agamben, G., _Potentialities: Collected essays in philosophy_. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

61.

See Agamben, G. (2005). _The time that remains: A commentary on the letter to the Romans_. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

62.

See Agamben, G. (2013). _The highest poverty: Monastic rules and form-of-life_. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

63.

Agamben, G. (2016). _The use of bodies_. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, p. 92.

Chapter 8

# The Crisis Dispositive

Dario Gentili

Political Theology and Biopolitics

## 1. Crisis Dispositive: The Politico-Theological Use

Italian Thought has been receiving considerable attention in the international contemporary debate. This is mainly due to the original reading and declination of the biopolitical discourse opened up by Michel Foucault in the 1970s that some of Italian thought's most prominent authors were able to offer (each of them with different inflexions). It is for this reason that in my book _Italian Theory_[1] I prioritized biopolitics as the outcome of Italian thought's trajectory that I was tracing. Yet, there is also another trajectory that is equally relevant and that was crisscrossed by most of the authors my book considered; actually, for some of these authors this particular trajectory even represented their privileged reference point. I am referring to the reflection—at times even a critical one—on political theology. This reflection conquered centre stage in the Italian thought of the 1980s and today it represents one of the outcomes of Italian theory, building on the most recent production of Tronti, Cacciari, Agamben, and Esposito. It is a parallel outcome to that of biopolitics, and it even ends up building a field of tension with it. That the biopolitical and political-theological trajectories finally meet and even crisscross becomes evident when—and this is how this chapter opens—they have to face the topic of the crisis. Their interpretation of the crisis "dispositive" inevitably diverges—and such divergence becomes a radical one in light of the nature of the recent crisis and of the use that neoliberal capitalism is making of it.

On a global scale and particularly in the so-called critical thinking conversation, we are witnessing the coming back in great style of political theology—this may even be an actual novelty in some cultural and political contexts—at times re-declined along the lines of economic theology: Badiou, Žižek, Sloterdijk, Eagleton, and even Simon Critchley's _The Faith of the Faithless_ are cases in point for a first appraisal of this debate's undergoing expansion.[2] It is not by chance that the debate about political theology registered a significant increase in conjunction with the 2007–2008 crisis, when the theological dispositives that permeate neoliberal economy's art of government came in full light (i.e., the issue of debt, first of all, but also the austerity policies that derived from debt in the European context[3]). In this context, the economic theology plane became a possible field for comparison and conflict. Yet, as I was saying, the adoption of political theology by the Italian left-wing thought goes back at least to the 1980s. At a "philological" level, so to speak, a big influence on such adoption derived from the advanced reception that Carl Schmitt's thought received in Italy in comparison with other cultural contexts, and from the equally important prominence of the political interpretation of Walter Benjamin's messianism in Italy during the 1970s. For instance, Benjamin's brief fragment _Capitalism as Religion_ has become a reference text today.[4] But I would argue that such early adoption of political theology was particularly rooted in a certain interpretation of the crisis, which characterized the passage to the 1980s.

In the 1970s, in fact, in line with Marx's interpretation of the crisis in the _Grundrisse_ , post-Operaism asserted the possibility of a "political" use of the capitalistic crisis in an antagonistic way; starting from the 1980s, instead, the dispositive of the economic crisis first starts taking on a "restoration" character and then, little by little, it assumes that "governmental" character that defines its use by neoliberalism today. It is during this passage—from the antagonistic to the governmental use of the crisis—that the first season of political theology ripens in the context of a left-wing Italian thought that was getting progressively on the defensive. I won't focus on this juncture though. I will instead focus on the present phase, on the new season of political theology and on _the_ crisis this thought claims to interpret and for which—and this is the gist of the matter—the season of political theology tries to configure a government.

### 1.1 _Katéchon_

In _Our Operaism_ —which is a sort of assessment of Operaism's forty years after the end of its first phase—Mario Tronti adopts the lexicon of political theology in order to offer a possible interpretative key to Operaism:

> Using the language of political theology—which, despite what people say about it, is the most relevant for telling the truth about the last century—we can say that when Operaism expressed itself during the early 1960s it had an eschatological mark: its aim was not to close the history of salvation at best but, more modestly, it aimed for a political outcome of workers' struggles. In reading Operaism again today what comes to the foreground is its active oppositional function, which consisted in retaining and delaying the philanthropic-humanitarian drift of the figure of the factory worker, himself the last _casamatta_ [fort] left for bourgeois universalism's conquest.[5]

For Tronti then, if in the 1960s Operaism seemed to be the advocate of a political force of eschatological type (a force which could break the yoke of the Fordist factory and allow workers to get out of the economic domination imposed on the working class by capital), in retrospect instead working-class politics turned out to be the force that contrasted, broke, and slowed down the encroachment and globalization of that post-Fordist capitalism we witnessed later.[6] Leaving the different interpretations that one can have about Operaism aside, here I am interested in the separation between the economic and the political, and in the relationship that the use of a political-theological dispositive builds between them. In fact, an understanding of politics as either _éschaton_ (as a potentiality, _potentia_ , that breaks the capitalist economic power) or as _katéchon_ (as a power, _potestas_ , that retains the expansion of economic potentiality), or, in other words, an understanding of politics as either "potentiality" or "power" is equally rooted in a conflict that presupposes the radical distinction between the economy and politics. In another text, _Politica e Destino_ [Politics and Destiny], Tronti traces a better accomplished and clearer _katechontic_ function within his elaboration of the "autonomy of the political".[7] Tronti was writing in the thick of the crisis of the 1970s. In this context, the _katéchon_ 's functions had to be taken on by the state when the working class would conquer it: "When I look back to the Operaist phase I see an extra bit of 'éschaton' that the autonomy of the political phase will correct with an extra bit of 'katéchon'".[8] While today Tronti does not think any longer that the state is the custodian of the "autonomy of the political", he still holds that it is nonetheless crucial to preserve a certain margin, however minimal, to defend the autonomy of politics—of "modern" politics, since for Tronti there is no other one—in relation to the encroachment of democratic society and of the economy. And it is only political theology that can grant such margin of autonomy. The conflict—which remains anchored in Carl Schmitt's friend-enemy principle—is hence playing out between the immanence of the social and of the economic on the one hand, and the transcendence of the political and the religious on the other. There, in this conflict, politics and theology end up finding themselves on the same "side".

Political theology is called upon to preserve the dualism and the dichotomy between politics and the economy. Yet, in times of crisis, politics can take on the function of the _katéchon_ —of the strength that contains a dominant and bridled power—since the economy denied politics' primacy and subjugated it. Here are Tronti's words again: "through a well-conceived practical-ideological operation, [neoliberal fundamentalism] didn't abolish politics; it subjugated it, it overturned its primacy, and suppressed its autonomy. And this is not the least motivation for its crisis of these years".[9] In sum, this short _excursus_ on Tronti clearly shows how the call for a political-theological thought becomes even more insistent when the cracks of a crisis—the cracks that would be precursory of a revolutionary exit—reduce. Politics' task hence becomes the katechontic one of containing and stemming, and politics becomes exclusively the art of government: "Political theology is not liberation theology. It doesn't assault power from the outside, or from below. It aims at managing power through the exercise of authority. Nothing is able to settle the relationship between _potestas_ and _auctoritas_ like political theology".[10]

Massimo Cacciari holds a complementary and opposite position with respect to Tronti's.[11] For Tronti, political-theological thought knows the power to govern the crisis; it is from here that its authority to overthrow the economy's current domain over politics derives. While political theology is certainly fundamental to understand and govern the crisis also for Cacciari, he, however, refers to the crisis for how this used to operate in the twentieth century. The current crisis is of a different nature; while it also plays a governmental function, no _katéchon_ can contain or govern it any longer. In a way, Cacciari brings to completion the debate about the crisis that had opened up in Italy during that sort of restoration era of the 1980s and that, even from back then, found its reference in the tradition of political theology. The main difference—as I am about to show—is that the crisis as governmental power is not anymore the prerogative of the "organization" of the Political[12]—be it the organization of nation-states or of European political institutions. It is instead the prerogative of the economy understood as "administration".

As was the case for Tronti, Cacciari's reference in _The Withholding Power_ is the _Second Letter to the Thessalonians_ by Paul of Tarsus. The enemy, the Antichrist that the power of the _katéchon_ must withhold, is the "anomie" which deviates and is "de-lirious" (literally, "out of the furrow, of the limit"), and for which the _katéchon_ has to provide a political _nomos_ : boundaries, shape, order—in sum, _government_. The crisis is hence the governmental form of the _katéchon_. But this is so only if one thinks of such governmental form according to the "modern" paradigm of the Political. The premise is that the "anomie" doesn't have a government, that it can't self-govern itself. And it is exactly this premise that _this_ crisis doesn't contemplate:

> From this crisis there emerges neither the absolute and simple absence of law and command, nor anarchy. . . . Anomie is a new order; it is a new _nomos_. . . . [Antichrist] works to "de-substantialize" all political power. But such work remains political praxis! The energy that moves it is spurred by intolerance of any _auctoritas_ deriving "from above", of any "super-ordained" command, and the law which propels his activity ever further springs from his own nature. It does obey but always obeys itself.[13]

Cacciari names "technico-political administration" this self-governing anomie that is indifferent to any _katechontic_ pretence of the Modern Political. The neoliberal crisis is ungovernable by the modern Political because it has _its own_ politics of government. Such politics doesn't present the opportunity for power's takeover through the forms of the Political because it doesn't contemplate the level of the Political. But this is what one of the most influential reference thinkers of neoliberalism, Friedrich von Hayek, maintained almost fifty years ago, when he refused to define the spontaneous order of the market simply as "economy" and instead preferred to define it as " _catallaxy_ ", a word whose meaning includes not only the notion of "exchanging" but also two political prerogatives, i.e., "to admit into the community" and "to change from enemy into friend".[14]

As the dualism between economy and politics disappears, the _katéchon_ loses its reason to be and maybe the same happens to the Italian debate about political theology, which interrogated political theology's own capacity to govern the crisis. Cacciari leads this debate to a conclusion by finally acknowledging the conservative function of the crisis: "The _katéchon_ is as strong in containing as it is impotent in foreseeing. . . . He fears the threat of the _exception_ rather than the reproduction of the ever-same, of which this very moment of crisis is an essential element. What he cannot realize is that it is precisely the energy that conserves".[15]

### 1.2 _Éschaton_

In _The Mystery of Evil_ Agamben offers a reading of Paul of Tarsus' interpretation of political theology which is in some way alternative to the one that—with opposite outcomes—both Tronti and Cacciari offer. It is obviously not my intention to reduce Agamben's reflection on political theology—which takes on different facets and shades in his thought, all accounted for in the _Homo Sacer_ project _—_ to a brief occasional text as this one is. It is, however, interesting to note how, through the figures of the _éschaton_ and the _katéchon_ , also Agamben directs his argument towards the relationship that currently exists between the economy and politics. Agamben, however, shifts the focus from the power of the _katéchon_ to the potentiality of the _éschaton_ ; it is, in fact, the _éschaton_ that has to find a political expression today—in the same way as Operaism did for Tronti in the 1960s:

> From the perspective of the laissez-faire ideology that is dominant today, the paradigm of the self-regulating market has taken the place of that of justice and pretends to be able to govern an ever more ungovernable society according to exclusively technical criteria. Once again, a society can function only if justice (which corresponds to eschatology in the Church) does not remain a mere idea, entirely inert and impotent in the face of law and economy, but succeeds in finding political expression in a force capable of counterbalancing the progressive levelling out onto a single technico-economic plane of the two coordinated but radically heterogeneous principles—legitimacy and legality, spiritual power and temporal power, _auctoritas_ and _potestas_ , justice and law—that constitute the most precious patrimony of European culture.[16]

For Agamben, the eclipse of the eschatological dimension is what allows for today's uncontested domination of mundane economy. The mundane economy has, in fact, become "properly infinite, which is to say interminable and aimless". These are the same traits that define the technico-administrative structure also for Cacciari—but for him these traits differently derive from the fact that such structure took on an eschatological profile. In fact, while Cacciari identifies the fundamental reason behind elimination of the _katéchon_ in the exhaustion of the _éschaton_ (conceived of as the "Ultimate Aim"), he, however, attributes an eschatological power—a de-lirious one, because it has no orientation in its meaning—to the technico-economic structure.[17]

If these two interpretations seem to align with the analysis of the economic in the neoliberal epoch, the political theologies that derive from them are instead opposite to one another. For Agamben, in fact, what is being withheld is that political action's eschatological power which is able to reveal the illegitimacy of that power that is withholding it. That eschatological power's art of government substantially consists in moving from one crisis to the other with the only function to defer the decisive crisis—the "final" crisis, the eschatological crisis.[18] Agamben therefore contemplates the possibility of a political alternative able to "counterbalance" neoliberal economy's supremacy, an alternative that must be put into play at the politico-theological level. This can't certainly happen at the modern Political's katechontic level but can instead be put into play on the eschatological one. The main goal is hence the reactivation of the dualism and the conflict between economy and politics, in a way that will subtract political initiative to the economy. If it is true—as per Tronti and Cacciari—that the contemporary crisis has a governmental function, its nature can, however, be ascribed to economic theology, while it is political theology—understood as "eschatological politics"—to be the bearer of the "final, decisive crisis". I am referring to that "decisive crisis" which, according to what Agamben argues in an interview, is deferred by the contemporary crisis (understood as a "governmental instrument") and hence carries out an eminently katechontic function:

> The concept of "crisis" has by now become modern politics' motto and has long been part of all the spheres of social life. The actual word expresses two semantic roots: a medical one, referring to the development of a disease; and a theological one, referring to the Universal Judgment. However, both meanings have transformed today, and their relationship with time has been canceled. "Crisis" meant judgment in ancient medicine; it meant the decisive moment when the doctor understood if the patient was going to survive or not. Instead, today's interpretation of the notion of crisis is referred to a permanent state. Such uncertainty extends to the future in an indefinite way. The same is true for the crisis' theological meaning: it was not possible to separate the Universal Judgment from the end of time. Today instead the judgment is separated from the idea of an ending and is continuously postponed. Hence the perspective of a decision is endless, it is an interminable decision-making process.
> . . . The crisis has become an instrument of government today. It serves to legitimize political and economic decisions, which actually deprive citizens of any possibility to make a decision.[19]

### 1.3 Economic Theology

Whether the _katéchon_ takes on a political or an economic connotation (and, consequently, whether the _éschaton_ takes on the opposite connotation, i.e., a political or economic one), the problem of these two moments' separability within the political-theological horizon persists. And this is the problem that Roberto Esposito faces in _Two_ :

> one can well say that both the _ius publicum europaeum_ and the bipolar world of the postwar period as well as the globalized world (also structured along exclusionary division lines) all lie within the political-theological horizon, still subject to the restraining force of the _katechon_. If this is the case, a fundamental question still remains to be answered concerning the possibility—but also the absolute difficulty—of exiting that horizon. . . . This question, which has been asked and answered in the negative every time the threat of revolution looms up in the West, resounds once again when the crisis takes on a global aspect, that is apparently unresolvable using mechanisms of a technical nature. . . . A question to start with concerns how Paul viewed the status of that mysterious _anomie_. It is something that is frontally opposed to the nomos or to one of its excessive modes, which views the norm not as a simple secularization of the law, but rather as a different and, up until that point, unprecedented form of the nomos?[20]

For Esposito each dichotomy and contraposition so far encountered is part of the politico-theological dispositive. Within this dispositive any distinction between politics and economy configures a declination of political theology itself in the terms of an economic theology. Economic theology hence characterizes the dispositive through which political theology operates within the neoliberal ideology. This is how Esposito puts it:

> instead of talking about the end of political theology, we should be talking about its transformation into an economic theology, one that is itself endowed with political attributes, including the supreme one of deciding on the possible survival of subjects. The . . . two paradigms of political theology and economic theology are not opposites, and they should not be ordered in a chronological sequence but integrated into a single meaningful block.[21]

If this were the case—if economic theology were indeed characterizing the current configuration of political theology—the political economic dispositive would not only be limited to the distinction between economy and politics, but it would _at the same time_ institute a symmetrical relationship between them, a relationship where one subjugates and disposes of the other. What results is a _politics_ of neoliberal economy that invests the crisis with a conservative and governmental function. In sum, that end of a _katechontic_ political theology that Cacciari had announced—i.e., the affirmation of the "anomie" of the "technico-economic administration"—does not so much configure a new eschatology; instead, it configures an economic theology that remains a political theology in all respects because it shares its dispositive.[22]

## 2. Crisis Dispositive: The Biopolitical Use

What if an alternative to this crisis—which governmental art consists in not leaving any alternative—were not to present itself at the political-theological level at all? Maybe the Italian debate about political theology which started in the 1980s—and which today, as I mentioned, has been picking up globally—has actually concluded that political theology doesn't offer alternatives but instead it governs them as an economic theology. Ten years later, during the 1990s, the debate about biopolitics got a foothold in Italy; today, biopolitics and political theology stand as the outcomes of the so-called Italian Thought—and they divide the camp of a philosophical and political conflict that crisscrosses Europe at the very least. We are hence required to ask if the neoliberal crisis, _this_ crisis, is not better apprehensible when considered as "biocapitalism crisis" and if it is hence on the biopolitical level that possible alternatives might be found.[23] In fact, as Antonio Negri maintained in "From the end of national Lefts to subversive movements for Europe", it is the technico-administrative government of the crisis that does not leave any alternative.[24] One should therefore ask what this crisis produces, on what it has an impact—is it on the forms of the Political or on the forms of life? I would say that it is on the forms of life since, as we have seen, the crisis subjugates and uses the forms of the Political—be these forms those of the party, the state, or the European Parliament.

In sum, while political theology profiles—through the forms of the Political—a _government of the crisis_ , biopolitics configures _the crisis as the government_ of lives. The modality of _judgement_ that political theology and biopolitics refer to and execute is equally different—since, as Agamben reminds us, the crisis is a form of judgement. While political theology conceives of judgement through the model of the Final Judgement (i.e., of that properly "eschatological" judgement which deferral has to be governed by _katechontic_ power), biopolitics takes its judgement modality from medicine (i.e., its judgement is aimed at keeping the patient who's affected by an illness alive, at re-establishing the health conditions that preceded the organic conflict between life and death[25]).

This is not the right context to fully develop this discussion. For now, I'll leave it at the reference to an interpretation of capitalism's crisis that resorts to a biopolitical lexicon in order to comprehend the governmental dispositive. I am referring to Antonio Gramsci here. If it is true that on the background of Gramsci's interpretation one can glimpse Machiavelli's analogy between the political and the organic body, one should also remember that Marx himself belongs to an epoch when the term "crisis" still has an eminently medical connotation and that, when he describes capitalist crises, he defines them as "spasms".[26] And yet, for Marx, the spasms caused by crises—together with the death of capital's sick body—can announce the birth of a new social life. This is not exactly the same for Gramsci.

For Gramsci the crisis represents a "mortal danger" that threatens the social body. He attributes the crisis' "use" to those in power: while it is not necessarily their prerogative, such use is easily something at their disposal. Gramsci defines as explicitly "organic" the crisis that, while governed by the ruling class, doesn't call this class' hegemony into question. On the contrary, the crisis ends up offering this class the opportunity—in the face of a "mortal danger"—to direct the social body "under the banner of a single party", what I shall later propose to call "the party of life":

> The crisis creates situations that are dangerous in the short run, since the various strata of the population are not all capable of orienting themselves equally swiftly, or of reorganizing with the same rhythm. The traditional ruling class, which has numerous trained cadres, changes men and programs and, with greater speed than is achieved by the subordinate classes, reabsorbs the control that was slipping from its grasp. Perhaps it may make sacrifices, and expose itself to an uncertain future by demagogic promises; but it retains power, reinforces it for the time being, and uses it to crush its adversary. . . . The passage of the troops of many different parties under the banner of a single party, which better represents and resumes the needs of the entire class, is an organic and normal phenomenon. . . . It represents the fusion of an entire social class under a single leadership, which alone is held to be capable of solving an overriding problem of its existence and of fending off a mortal danger.[27]

The "organic" crisis could correspond to what Antiquity doctors would denominate "perfect crisis"[28] because it allows the ruling class or those in power to re-establish and strengthen their hegemony _from within_ the crisis itself. Gramsci envisages also another use for the crisis, a use that we could define "imperfect" since it is not organic. It is in fact _from the outside_ that the "mortal danger" is governed and order is re-established when the charismatic leader takes centre stage (here Gramsci refers to the establishment of fascism—today one could recognize some of the traits of contemporary populisms): "When the crisis does not find this organic solution, but that of the charismatic leader, it means that a static equilibrium exists . . . ; it means that no group, neither the conservatives nor the progressives, has the strength for victory, and that even the conservative group needs a master".[29]

Differently from what Marx argues in the _Grundrisse_ , for Gramsci the hegemony crisis of the ruling class does not spontaneously imply the generation of a new life, and therefore the possibility of a political alternative use of the crisis. It also does not manifest the symptom of a new social life that pushes from within to affirm itself as the cure to the illness. The crisis instead configures a _suspension between an incumbent death and a new life that cannot be born yet_ ; hence, it is not "within" the crisis that the possibility of a new life is produced: "the crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear".[30] The function of the crisis is defined according to the "use" of its dispositive. Gramsci had the economic crisis of 1929 in mind, alongside the political crisis that brought about the establishment of fascism in Italy. He defines the particular character that the crisis takes on as part of the use that capitalism makes of it. With the notion of "interregnum",[31] in fact, he introduces an indeterminate time duration within the analysis that Marx offered of the crisis dispositive; the crisis is hence "a complex process . . . and not a unique 'fact' repeated in various forms through a cause having one single origin".[32] "Since we are dealing with a process and not an event",[33] the crisis doesn't inexorably lead to an end—whether of salvation or passing—but the suspension between life and death can last endlessly. Hence the crisis does not eschatologically announce "the end of times", but neither does the interregnum (that defines its temporality) simply define a transition period. Instead it defines the art of government that the capitalist use of the dispositive of the crisis employs: "government of the interregnum" could actually be a good definition of _katéchon_ , provided that what's at stake is biopolitical governmentality.

This of the interregnum is an art of government and it consists in mortgaging the future by neutralizing its discontinuous and break-driven traits. It hence consists in procrastinating the precarious equilibrium of the present, a precarious equilibrium that results from the treatment of the diseases (or from the presumption to know the recipe for taking care of them) that keep following one another:

> the development of capitalism has been a "continuous crisis", so to speak, i.e., a very rapid movement of elements which balance and immunize each other. At some point, in this movement, some elements took over, others disappeared or became inept in the general picture. Hence some events suddenly developed; to these events we gave the specific name of "crisis". These can be more or less serious, as they depend on the major or minor elements of equilibrium that develop.[34]

Crises are not what will lead to the death of capitalism. They are, however, in the absence of an alternative to it, of a new life, what keeps "immunizing" capitalism against the diseases and the imbalances which it constantly incurs given its moribund condition.

The governmental dispositive of the neoliberal crisis consists exactly in not leaving any alternative; the biopolitical paradigm it corresponds to, in fact, doesn't allow for a real choice, for a final decision, if the alternative to preserving the existing order alive is a death which threatens to be unavoidable: the choices that seem available within this biopolitical dispositive are actually always obliged ones. Hence, as part of this crisis, one accepts governments, debts, and precarious jobs because there is no alternative if the alternative is posited as one between life and death. Lined up on the side of life—or, according to Gramsci, of the disease treatment—we find Hayek when, already from back in the day, he had to look for a winning alternative to the "class party" and to the possibility of an antagonistic use of crisis. In fact, as Foucault underlined.[35], when Hayek was looking for a name that would distinguish his concept of liberalism from the ones formulated before him, he wrote: "What I should want is a word which describes the party of life, the party that favors free growth and spontaneous evolution".[36]

## Notes

This essay draws from and further develops the following text: Gentili, D. (2015). _Il dispositivo della crisi: Antagonismo e governamentalità_ , in D. Gentili and E. Stimilli, _Differenze italiane: Politica e filosofia: mappe e sconfinamenti_. Rome: DeriveApprodi, pp. 140–49.

1.

See Gentili, D. (2012). _Italian Theory: Dall'operaismo alla biopolitica_. Bologna: Il Mulino.

2.

See, at least, Žižek, S. (2011). _Living in the end times_. London: Verso; Žižek, S. and Milbank, J. (2010). _Paul's new moment: Continental philosophy and the future of Christian theology_. Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos; Badiou, A. (1997). _Saint Paul: The foundation of universalism_. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press; Sloterdijk, P. (2015). _God's zeal: The battle of the three monotheisms_. New York: John Wiley & Sons; Eagleton, T. (2010). _On evil_. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press; Mendieta, E. and Vanantwerpen, J., eds. (2011). _The power of religion in the public sphere_. New York: Columbia University Press (with essays by Judith Butler, Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, and Cornel West); Critchley, S. (2012). _The faith of the faithless: Experiments in political theology_. London: Verso.

3.

On the debate revolving around the issue of debt, see Stimilli, E. (2017). _The debt of the living: Ascesis and capitalism_. New York: SUNY Press.

4.

Among the many different interpretations, see Gentili, D., Ponzi, M., and Stimilli, E. (2014). _Il culto del capitale, Walter Benjamin: Capitalismo e religione_. Macerata: Quodlibet.

5.

Tronti, M. (2009). _Noi operaisti_. Rome: DeriveApprodi, pp. 63–64.

6.

Today Tronti resorts once again to the political-theological motives of the _éschaton_ and the _katéchon_ in order to characterize his position with respect to post-Operaism and to characterize the most substantial difference between him and Toni Negri: "The difference between me and Toni Negri isn't necessarily traceable back to Spinoza or Hobbes; it is of a different type. Toni maintains an eschatological paradigm; I, instead, assume a _katechontic_ one". Tronti, _Noi operaisti_ , p. 111.

7.

For the first and most influential elaboration of Tronti's topic of the "autonomy of the political", see Tronti, M. (1977). _Sull'autonomia del politico_. Milan: Feltrinelli.

8.

Tronti, M. (2006). _Politica e Destino_. Rome: luca sossella editore, p. 27.

9.

Tronti, M. (2013). _Per la critica del presente_. Rome: Ediesse, p. 82.

10.

Tronti, M. (2011). _Dall'estremo possibile_. Rome: Ediesse, p. 86.

11.

For a comparison between Tronti's and Cacciari's political-theological approaches, see also Cacciari, M. and Tronti, M. (2007). _Teologia e politica al crocevia della storia_ (edited by M. Gasparri). Milan: AlboVersorio.

12.

See Gentili, _Italian Theory_ , pp. 80–93.

13.

Cacciari, M. (2018). _The Withholding Power: An Essay on Political Theology_. London: Bloomsbury, pp. 69–71.

14.

"The spontaneous order of the market, based on reciprocity or mutual benefits, is commonly described as an economic order. . . . But it is exceedingly misleading, and has become one of the chief sources of confusion and misunderstanding, to call this order an economy as we do when we speak of a national, social, or world economy . . . I propose that we call this spontaneous order of the market a catallaxy in analogy to the term 'catallactics', which has often been proposed as a substitute for the term 'economics'. (Both 'catallaxy' and 'catallactics' derived from the ancient Greek verb _katallattein_ which, significantly, means not only 'to barter' and 'to exchange', but also 'to admit into the community' and 'to turn from enemy into friend')". Hayek, F. A. (1966). The principles of a liberal social order, reprinted in _Studies in philosophy, politics and economics_ , 160–77; p. 164. On catallaxy, see also Hayek, F. A. (2013). _Law, legislation and liberty: A new statement of the liberal principles of justice and political economy_. London: Routledge, pp. 107–32.

15.

Cacciari, _The Withholding Power_ , pp. 76–7.

16.

Agamben, G. (2017). _The mystery of evil: Benedict XVI and the end of days_. Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics, pp. 17–18.

17.

According to Cacciari, eschatological power today corresponds to the technico-economic administration. Yet, the end of the _éschaton_ can't be "represented" and can't prefigure the "Final Judgment" (this would be the condition for the _katéchon_ to become "withholding power") but is an end in itself and hence is aimless: "As it has lost any eschatological meaning, the power [of the _katéchon_ ] won't be able to confront the eschatological power which is instead certainly constitutive of the Anti-Christic _auctoritas_. It will hence cease to be withholding-containing power. It hence appears to be destined to 'liquefy' within the dimensions _which deferral it supported_ ". See Cacciari, M. (2015). "Ancora sul 'potere che frena'" [Again on the "withholding power"]. In dialogo, in _Jura Gentium: Rivista di filosofia del diritto e della politica globale_ , vol. XII, special issue: _Il potere che frena: Saggi di teologia politica_ in dialogo _con Massimo Cacciari_ , 2015, p. 282. For an in-depth discussion on Cacciari's _The Withholding Power_ , see the essays in the _Jura Gentium_ special issue I just referenced above.

18.

In _Stasis_ , in fact, Agamben argues that even Hobbes' State-Leviathan doesn't cover a _katechontic_ function, differently from what a long tradition, culminating in Carl Schmitt, contends. It is instead inscribed in the eschatological dimension and will hence disappear when God's kingdom on Earth will be realized, to which Hobbes attributes a concretely political dimension. Hence what withholds is not politics but what has yet to come. See Agamben, G. (2015). _Stasis: Civil war as a political paradigm_. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, pp. 33–77.

19.

Agamben, G. (2013). La crisi perpetua come strumento di potere: Conversazione con Giorgio Agamben, _il lavoro culturale_ , 2 October: http://www.lavoroculturale.org/la-crisi-perpetua-come-strumento-di-potere-conversazione-con-giorgio-agamben/.

20.

Esposito, R. (2015). _Two: The machine of political theology and the place of thought_. New York: Fordham University Press, pp. 80–81.

21.

Esposito, _Two_ , p. 204.

22.

Esposito highlights this difference in an exchange with Cacciari himself: "Probably the difference between Massimo Cacciari and me is the following: I believe that also the last step—that for him corresponds to the crisis or to the end of the Political-theological—can, despite everything, still—be interpreted in this dispositive's terms. I mean that the domination of technology or of the economy is itself susceptible to be interpreted as a theological-political 'figure'". Cacciari, M. and Esposito, R. (2014). Dialogo sulla teologia politica (edited by A. Ardovino), _MicroMega_ , 2/2014: pp. 7–8.

23.

Post-Operaist thought has particularly reflected on the notion of "biocapitalism". See, for instance, Marazzi, C. (2010). _Il comunismo del capitale: Finanziarizzazione, biopolitiche del lavoro e crisi globale_ , Verona: ombre corte. See also Codeluppi, V. (2008). _Il biocapitalismo: Verso lo sfruttamento integrale di corpi, cervelli ed emozioni_. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri.

24.

See Negri, A. (2013). From the end of national Lefts to subversive movements for Europe, _Radical Philosophy_ , n. 181, 2013, p. 26–32. For a broader and more articulated discussion of the relationship between neoliberal crisis, biopolitics, and new movements, see Hardt, M. and Negri, T. (2012). _Declaration_ , E-book. _Scribd_. N. p. Web, 13.

25.

The distinction between the theologico-political crisis' modality of judgement and the biopolitical crisis' one leads me to not assigning the "state of exception's" attributes (particularly in Carl Schmitt's theorization) to the crisis, understood as art of biopolitical government, since it is evident that what determines the state of exception is the judgement of theologico-political matrix.

26.

See Marx, K. (1973). _Grundrisse_. New York: Vintage, pp. 749–50.

27.

Gramsci, A. (1999). _Selections from the prison notebooks of Antonio Gramsci_ , ed. Q. Hoare. New York: International Publishers, pp. 210–11 [Q 4, 69].

28.

See Zedler, J. H. (1733). _Grosses vollständiges Universal-Lexicon_. Halle-Leipzig, 1733, pp. 1652–53.

29.

Gramsci, _Selections from the prison notebooks of Antonio Gramsci_ , p. 211.

30.

Gramsci, A. (1971). _Selections from the prison notebooks_ , ed. and trans. Q. Hoare and G. Nowell Smith. New York: International Publishers, p. 276.

31.

The Gramscian notion of "interregnum" was recently taken up by Zygmunt Bauman, Étienne Balibar and Wolfgang Streeck to interpret our present. See Bauman, Z. (2010). _44 letters from the liquid modern world_. Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 135–38; Bauman, Z. and Bordoni, C. (2014). _State of crisis_. Cambridge: Polity Press; Balibar, É. (2015). The relations Greece and Europe need, Verso Blog: https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/1987-etienne-balibar-the-relations-greece-and-europe-need; Streeck, W. (2016). _How Will Capitalism End? Essays on a Failing System_. Verso: London. See also Marramao, G. (2008). _La passione del presente: Breve lessico della modernità-mondo_. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, pp. 181–86.

32.

Gramsci, A. (1995). _Further selections from the prison notebooks_. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 351–52.

33.

Gramsci, _Further selections from the prison notebooks_ , p. 352

34.

Gramsci, A. _Quaderni del carcere_ , vol. III. Torino: Einaudi, pp. 1756–57 [Q 15, §5] (our translation from Italian).

35.

See Foucault, M. _The birth of biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979_. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

36.

Hayek, F. A. (2011 [1960]). Why I am not a conservative. _The constitution of liberty:_ The definitive edition. London: Routledge, p. 530.

Chapter 9

# Inhabiting Immanence

Roberto Ciccarelli

The Logic, History, and Politics of an Italian Thought's Concept

Italian political thought ("Italian Theory" and "Italian Thought", or "Italian Radical Thought" and "the Italian Difference") did not accompany the creation of a nation-state, differently from what happened in other European countries like Spain, England, France, or Germany. Italian political thought did not build its apologue, nor did it celebrate its end. Politics, like history, was thought by Machiavelli and Bruno, Vico or Leopardi, beyond the constitution of a state, and as a critique of both political authority and of "Italians' character"—a character that is impatient towards the political statist bond and is instead prone to community and family bonds. Suspended between the state and society—between their respective bonds—this tradition, which has been defined as "living thought" (Esposito 2012), didn't choose solipsism, nor did it limit itself to an exodus. It instead continued to practice the desire of possible worlds. In order to comprehend such desire, it is necessary to refuse its identification with the national tradition that anticipated the constitution of the unitary nation-state, the century-old harbinger of modern authority's embodied agnition.

The absence of a national vocation was considered a curse, which the De Sanctis-Croce-Gentile trinity tried to remedy by imposing an identitarian, territorial canon. The living thought proposes a counter-explanation. What grew in the separation between the state and society—a separation which also brought as its outcome the separation between the intellectual, society, and the masses, as the analyses of Antonio Gramsci on Italian "cosmopolitism" indicate—was a materialistic and stateless thought, that was not foreign to the Spinozian reflection and that was cultivated in Europe for over a century and is today acknowledged under the name of "radical Enlightenment", i.e., a materialist, alternative, laic, and proto-communist alternative with respect to the European moderate and God-fearing Enlightenment (Israel 2001). With Machiavelli in particular, "Italian thought"—and particularly its political reflection—can actually be considered as the demonic forerunner of this kind of "Enlightenment".

This "Italian Thought's" thesis is that the being in the world is an industrious activity that doesn't aim for survival or obedience but for the creation and the autonomy of the individual or of the collective. Despite the adjective, which highly connotes it, "Italian" thought is the expression of a de-territorialization that pushes this thought to consider the conflict beyond the nation-state's boundaries and to inflect a reasoned hostility towards the sovereign with an idea of democracy as common power where the world is considered, after Gramsci, in its unsolvable bind between local and global, regional and continental, national and international.

## The Revolution's Echoes

Something else to consider is the political and philosophical context in which the debate about "Italian Thought" is situated. What stirs international attention is the idea of resistance. Such resistance translates the need of taking sides, a need that has to be considered as the first movement of a history that situates itself in a different direction than that of modern political philosophy—a philosophy that worked to neutralize conflict, or to make it unthinkable or powerless. Resistance shouldn't be understood as an imposition from the outside, nor as a unilateral or preconceived opposition—preconceived in relation to the repression exerted by a blind and deft power. Resistance should also not be understood as a voluntaristic obstinacy in the form of a negation or a refusal of power.

"Italian Thought" talks about conflict and assumes the thesis of an active ontology, which is both social and political. It is a reflection on the efficacy of politics as the product of the separation between radical thinkers, bourgeoisie, and working and popular classes. Still to these days, in a moment when we record a growing interest for authors like Gramsci or Leopardi all across the world, the brain-teaser remains that of melding social and political conditions that could put thought in relation with praxis.

This line of thinking took shape in the years when public education was transformed from a mass institution to an institution grounded on the neoliberal management of public goods and of the state. In this context the freedom of research—either as a profession and as a social activity—as well as individual and collective autonomy were penalized or even denied. The practice of philosophy, of intellectual work, and of a profession—or more generally, to the escape from the precariat's oppression that characterizes cultural, artistic, and cognitive work—has become an exercise in political struggle, in addition to being an exercise in personal survival. Reflecting on these topics offered the opportunity to keep one's distance from the state and from the dominant classes who run the neoliberal counterrevolution and to assert one's independence. These problems found a favourable echo at the international level in the critical reflection about evaluation practices and the university, and, more generally, in the critique of "neoliberal governmentality" (AA.VV, 2013. "Italian Thought" must hence be considered as a new actualization of this tension: the tension that Foucault defined as the art of "not to be governed quite so much" (Foucault 1997, 29). His main intuition consists in observing the philosophical and literary tradition through a genealogy that politicizes it in the present.

In this scenario, one must also consider the positions of those who sought an alternative in political theology rather than in one of the paths of a radically materialist thought. We've been witnessing an attempt to contrast the economic theology of austerity with political theology since at least the last decade of the twentieth century. This has been happening not only in Italy but also in the United States, England, France, and Germany. Since life is ruled by the economic theology of austerity and by its imperative of sovereign debt, with its mortgage on the future (Agamben 2011; Stimilli 2016), resistance should be sought at the edges, on the margins, or on the unthought cuffs of the history of Christian political theology.

The problem today is not if one should or should not believe in God, but if there could be a way to let the revolution speak within theology. It's been a long time since Benjamin used the puppet of materialism to make speak the dwarf of theology. Theology has taken over all the space today and has become the language of politics and the economy. Those who desire the revolution can do it on the condition that they remain within theology's setting and that they use its categories. In the context of this role's overturning—revealing the current political hegemony—only political theology seems to be able to express a desire for radical discontinuity. It would seem that only in political theology's folds the subject and the life-forms capable of practicing it could emerge.

Some preach a messianic theology of liberation, some an apocalyptic one. From Laclau to Žižek and Badiou, and from Butler to Agamben, many male and female authors took these topics on, looking for a possible way out with respect to the dilemmas of contemporary subjectivity. Such rediscovery of transcendence marked a giving up on the conjunction between immanence, history, and politics, that is, to the inspiring topic of "Italian Thought". In this attempted re-launch, subjectivity is linked to the stock of the economic theology that dominates our horizon.

But there is an underground thought trend that establishes itself beyond "Italian Thought" and it is that of a non-theological, materialistic immanence. The range of possible alliances is very wide: together with Italian thinkers, we find Averroé, Spinoza, Schelling, Marx, Nietzsche, and Bergson. The objective of those who composed this philosophical score is to strengthen life and show that thought is not God's but it belongs to an anonymous and collective potentiality, which is expression of a human intelligence that is constituted by the interaction of the individual minds with the unity of social brain. What should our common thinking efforts be destined to do? They should be destined to overthrow the oppressive chain of debt by means of and towards a circuit of solidarity and commonality.

The conflict could be virtuous, as per Gilles Deleuze's invitation to believe in this world and in this life. It's not an easy task, since all theologies teach to be wary of life and to despair about one's own impotence. Once the love for the world—as creation of infinite possibilities—is re-conquered, then a crack can open towards a way of existence that coincides with the freedom to exist.

## The Problem of Dualism

By and large, this is the argumentative, cultural, and social vision of the "anti-canon" that Roberto Esposito elaborated as an alternative to contemporary political thought's grounding on political theology (Esposito 2012, 2015a, 2015b). This reflection rediscovered the centrality of immanence. In this article, we intend to comprehend the multiple uses, limits, and resources of the concept of immanence, which is instead usually analyzed only in one of its meanings.

The vision that Italian Thought has articulated up to these days is based on a dualistic idea of immanence. The number of politics is Two, not One. This statement corresponds to the complete secularization of politics and picks up the legacy of the conflict between an idea of modern politics based on conflict and the transcendent authority of the state, both aimed at neutralizing any possible antagonism. For Machiavelli, whose political thought is the bedrock of this theory of conflict, the Two would be composed by a dualism between order and conflict.

For Machiavelli, Esposito writes, politics is in itself conflictual. When it doesn't degenerate in civil war, conflict is ordered by institutional mechanisms and expresses its potentialities in the institution of a new order. Hence the necessity of a transcendent authority is maintained, an authority that would impose peace and create an order where conflict is neutralized. The philosophical contrast lies between a political geometry dominated by the primacy of the centre as embodied by the state—which interprets the role of a third instance in a trinitary vision of a world divided between two irreconcilable parts—and another geometry that reduces the parts from three to two. Such contrast inspires the modern philosophies of political conflict. Resistance answers power, and repression is opposed to resistance, in an endless circuit. In order to overcome this oppositional dynamic, conflict shouldn't be neutralized; rather, it should be urged to express its regulatory function by virtue of its contrastive mechanism. In this way difference is reduced to an antinomy.

Not to mention the fact that state politics was born from a political use of conflict and particularly of war. It is only by virtue of the monopoly of the war that the modern state governs conflict and allows for the birth of modern sovereignty. Its "decision" interrupts the immemorial continuity of the natural law and allows for the creation of a new order that is posited as "neutral", but that is instead actually fed by political and social conflict. The sovereign exists to prevent the antonymic relation between antagonism and immanence to explode. This is the sovereign's function to contain and repress conflict, a function that is reworked—starting from the "katechontic" power of the Catholic Church—into what was called "science of the police".

On this particular point the philosophy of conflict that inspires Italian Thought answers as follows: it is only by liberating the contraries from the sovereign unity (the One) that a new political order is produced (the Two). This split reveals the nature of politics—that is, its being "Two". Power, in fact, is not founded on an eternal principle that applies to everyone but on the continuous research of a different institution that has priority over any instituted moment. Unity is always fictitious; the truth of politics must be re-conquered. In order to interrupt the enchantment of the One, a decision must be made. Such decision is a leap in the dark that allows to reactivate the "power of the origin" that is contained in the One but that must express itself in the Two. On its part, sovereignty intends to bring the Two back to the One, through an equal but opposite movement to that of the One that must express itself in the Two. These are visions that could co-exist in the unity of contraries that is asserted by immanence.

Such antinomic vision of immanence could also reveal a tragic implication: the tension between the One and the Two is, in fact, irresolvable. Their conflict produces the antithesis and proceeds endlessly. The nucleus of this reasoning is inspired by the reconstruction of Giordano Bruno's thought, who identifies the principle of the One in "life". Life is the indistinguishable whole of form and content, soul and matter, spirit and nature. What connects God to the world and sweeps over all parts of reality is an inexhaustible power. In this peculiar ontology—the first to enhance difference and plurality—we witness the enhancement of multiplicity as such, but this is on the condition that multiplicity is considered as the expression of the living potentiality of the One. This is a strength that shatters the circle of the subject's auto-reflexivity on itself—the originary moment of the entire modern philosophical thought in its French, English, and German matrix, but not of the Italian one—and that subordinates the expression of the multiplicity to the explication of an originary potentiality. For Giordano Bruno the coincidence between the over-prominence of the One in relation to the multiplicity, and its simultaneous insistence on the multiplicity, is one of the characteristics of immanence.

With respect to Bruno's framing, the discourse of living thought brings the co-existence of the One and the multiplicity back to the dualistic scheme between immanence and conflict. Life, conceived as One, is an "impulse" that conjoins and disjoins reality on the plane of immanence. Within this frame, difference is reduced to the contrariety between opposite poles or to an articulation of a unity of contraries. Antinomy loses its neutralizing vocation only by virtue of the overabundant potentiality of life to the point where Bruno considers death as part of such potentiality, another form of the same living substance. Also, the immanence developed in this dualism asserts a life that is very far from the Christian vision.

What remains to be understood is whether the integration of Bruno's neo-Platonic vision (an emanation-ist philosophy of the One) into a Machiavelli-inspired philosophy of conflict (an immanentist philosophy of dualism) reinstates "the logic of immanence". The first is a thinker of the One, the second of the Two. In both of their works one can recognize an ontology of the difference and of the multiple. In Esposito's anti-canon, such ontology is traced back to the inherence to a principle. For Bruno the One descends from above and is in every thing, while its energy gushes from a source spring consisting in pure inexhaustible energy. For Machiavelli such energy is produced by the conflict and is subordinated to the valorization of a constituent dualism. Immanence remains a secondary function of an eminent power or the effect of a conflict between subjects.

## Taking Sides In / Being Part of the Conflict

In Italian political thought, as Dario Gentili (Gentili 2012) puts it, politics means taking sides. To be taking a side is the premise of a mortal struggle for hegemony, souls' direction, culture, and government. This tension between conflict and order, life and form, constitution of the subject and its determination as part of a conflict, is the explication of a dualism. What's at stake is a very dynamic dualism because it realizes itself in the mechanism of decision and of separation. Within this frame, in fact, politics means to part, collide with, make a decision against an order for creating a new form.

The originary moment implies the split of the One and the sprouting of the Two. Anyway, this crisis happens as the One divides itself and generates another form—the Two—and aspires to the re-composition of a new unity. The newly conquered multiplicity is resituated in the originary mould of the One, of which it is a historically tangible manifestation. Nothing can happen as long as the One remains in itself. The problem arises when the direction of the movement outside of itself is established. The scission exists in order to recompose the lost unity into a historically new form that will inevitably create new scissions and re-compositions. Within the utmost alterity, the Identical goes back to the Same.

This movement is defined as a "tension field" between opposed forces within an undecidable conflict. Such positivity is defined as _sinisteritas_ , from the Latin word that indicates the "damned side", the one that induces "errors" and, more generally, that induces to "be mistaken" ( _errare_ , to wander _)_ and to "deviate" from the line and from the "righteous" line—the right side—which, in the history of ideas represents rectitude, righteousness, or the norm (Gentili 2012, 12–13). In this case, the etymology clears up the sky of a "left" that is identified with its opposite, revealing another aspect: the conflict between taking a side and the being part of something.

Taking sides, lining up within a field already broken into two parts, also means to be fighting against one's party. This is the history of the European Left ( _Linke_ , _Gauche_ , _Izquierda_ , _Sinistra_ ) that has been divided by different trends, heresies, expulsions, events, which occurred between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when—bringing the etymology that Gentili indicates to its extreme consequences—the _left-hysterical_ ( _sinisterici_ ) custodians of the party line, of its straightness and righteousness, ended up crossing over to the right-wing field. These, however, are only the outcomes—which a political sociology can measure—of a movement that was more radical. The "damned side" won't allow for its reduction to the logic of political alignments, to a membership—a membership which in Italy is usually divided between local, professional, and familiar identities that tend to conflict against the state or among themselves. Siding with something or being part of something are two distinct and contemporary moments of the One that divides itself and gets back to itself.

The movement, with its erratic and constituent aspects, keeps proposing a permanent deferral of potentialities and the evocation of an impossible totality. In the Italian Theory context, to be within the political order equals not being against it and hence not taking sides. To be taking part in a conflict, instead, means to be against a political order and hence to invoke a finality for the conflict. This siding reproduces the taking sides of politics and doesn't institute a totality that is immune to new conflicts. The creation of a new totality corresponds to the negation of the possibility to make it actually act. In this way, the totality presents itself in history as always split and the conflict is conceived as the form of the negation of totalization. The premises of this reasoning are part of negative thought. This is also the conclusion of Adorno and Horkheimer of the Frankfurt School, of the thinkers of the impolitical from Thomas Mann to Cacciari, or of the "weak thought" tradition. In these cases, conflict is the manifestation of a transcendental principle that doesn't allow for the coincidence of the principle with itself. The premise of this negation is the impossibility for thought to reunite itself with subject's will.

This scenario comes back in the analysis about Operaism carried out by Mario Tronti and in the analysis about the Marxian dialectic between class, party, and the state. Immanence is in opposition to conflict and particularly to the idea of the part that aims to become the whole: the working class struggles as long as it recognizes itself as a political power. That of the working class is a struggle against the modern form of political representation, where the relationship between the I and the Self (i.e., one's own) and the relationship between the I and the Other are an internal contradiction. Taking the working class as an example of the politics of immanence, its conflict is directed against the bourgeois form of political representation that embodies the contradiction. Its finality is to break the subject by forcing it to pinpoint political synthesis where its two parts co-exist (the Two in the One, the One in the Two).

In this formulation the struggle for the auto-representation of the part as a whole clashed with the antinomy that characterizes the sovereign subject: the identity between the compliance with the laws and their transgression. The opposition between immanence and conflict refers to the originary problem of the modern Subject: on the one hand, a new principle is stated; on the other, this new principle can't be practiced if not in the form of its reversal. A new principle can't exist without a contestation from within it (Balibar 2016).

## Outside of Postmodernism, Away from Its Critics

A power that out-spreads its strengths in the world and that is the condition of possibility of any activity is identified within living thought. This is the thesis about an "excess" that can't be integrated in the system and that, in fact, founds the system. It is the constituent power freed from the philosophical-juridical scheme of modernity that imposes a large-scale rethinking. Its excess should allow immanence to overcome the negativity that characterizes the philosophy of totality. Also in this case, the emanation of the force that all encompasses in itself registers an internal recoil; it deviates, or arrests itself. On the one hand, the necessity of an exceeding potentiality is asserted; on the other, the impossibility to make it actually historical is ascertained. The problem is summarized in the dispute between immanence and conflict. Can one be _within_ and _against_ power, a story, a production model like the capitalist's one? If everything is re-absorbed in what exists, where can one found the alternative foundation, an alternative principle, a life that is acted upon in a different way? The necessity of the conflict and the institution of a different power clash with power oppression and with the being kept in check of liberation instances.

When it is evoked and then kept in check, conflict loses its immanence—the idea of taking part against something—and, with that, it loses its efficacy: the idea that conflict produces a different order from the current one. It is within the same antinomic frame that we should place both the emphasis on the Subject (the political, psychoanalytical, or metaphysical Subject) that dominates the contemporary debate and the analyses on the present time; and the opposite emphasis on the philosophy of the "subjects". From the 1970s onward, they both have not been managing to solve the problem of the unification in one Subject. In this antinomic vision the idea of an impossible totality returns. Conflict remains undecidable, and its declinations never show a flight path away from dualism.

When Italian Theory refers to conflict, it links it back to a politics that finds its "virtue" and rationality in the negotiation of power relations. "Negotiation" is, for instance, Marx and Engels' class struggle (or war) that, as Foucault clarified, has been the instrument used to govern the terrible reality of modern politics from below. This means continuing the war with the instruments of social conflict. Turning General von Clausewitz's famous motto over, one could say even today that peace is the continuation of war with other means (Guareschi and Rahola 2011). The antinomy of Italian thought is another of these means, which also allows to show how this "peace" is also the result of conflict.

While feeling the necessity of rethinking resistance within a philosophy of conflict, Italian thought has not yet carried out a coherent critique of the concept of repression. This seems to be the reason why it has traced the idea of conflict back to the classical scheme of opposition in relation to power. This difficulty derives mainly from bringing the conflict back to a dualistic horizon, which is the horizon of sovereignty.

Differently from the philosophies of political obligation inspired by Hobbes, or from the theoretical models like liberalism which aim at neutrality and universality, "Italian Thought" intends to set the sovereign unit's opposites free and to produce a new political order. The problem starts at this point: isn't the order to be instituted the reproduction of the old one, possibly mitigated and linked to the idea of more equality, but still antinomic?

The historico-political background of this question clearly links to one of the problems of the twentieth century that also manifested itself in the transformation of the Soviet revolution into a terrible despotism. This was the primordial broth where all the historical revisionisms were born, the revisionisms that justified the quite unlikely advent of the "end of history" embodied in neoliberalism and in its armed democracies which promoted wars in the name of freedom and security.

The horizon of Italian Thought today is certainly different from the poor, acrimonious, and mournful one of neo-conservative revisionisms, and it is likely that the only partial comprehension of the concept of immanence (understood to be in contradiction with the concept of conflict) grounds such horizon. This interpretation of immanence is more in conformity with the one offered by the "radical" critiques of postmodernism like Boltanski and Chiapello (2005), Anderson (2007); or with Žižek's critique of subjectivity (2000, 2012), or with Badiou's critique (2000; 2012) of Deleuze; or with Jameson (2005); or in the original and more trustworthy reconstruction by Dardot and Laval (2014).

In all these versions, a philosophical dignity is denied to immanence, which is invariably linked back to a naïve Platonism, or to the neoliberal capitalism grounded on desire and nihilism. The transfiguration of this concept reaches the peak when it's treated as synonymous with the reality produced by the new financial-speculative mode of production. And this transfigured picture is completed by the closure of the Nietzsche Renaissance in the 1960s, wherefrom the thoughts of Foucault and Deleuze, for instance, arose. According to Lukàcs' _The Destruction of Reason_ , the "irrationalism" of these philosophies seemed to have prepared the ground for the success of nihilism, fascism, or neoliberalism.

## Infallible Antinomy?

Italian Theory is far from this tribunal register also because it deduces its paradigm from Foucault's "political use" of history and is strongly influenced by Deleuze's thought of immanence. The reduction of immanence to an antinomy could be understood as the heritage of Esposito's thought on the impolitical (Esposito and Ciccarelli 2008). There is, however, an internal tension that doesn't allow immanence to adapt to this reduction. A vocation towards emancipation is at stake when, for instance, the necessity to distance the body from the irreducible dichotomies (person/thing, public/private, subject/object, thought/extension) is asserted—the dichotomies that are imposed on the body by the theologico-political dispositive in conflict with the thought of immanence (Esposito 2015b).

The glimpsed immanence is a becoming that can't be closed within couples such as the Freudian ego–super ego, the juridical couple of law/crime (legality/illegality); or the political blind obedience/pact. Least of all can immanence be grounded on symbolic substitutes: the father, the mother, or the conscience. "Italian Thought" hence aspires to project itself beyond the imposing and excluding dialectics between subjectivation and subjugation, outside of the logic of the subject and its aporias. Moreover, it intends to inhabit a different space from that of the ambivalence of the antinomy.

Actually, the same need is clearly present in psychoanalysis as well and particularly in its idea of the "clinical". The problem, however, is that the "treatment" ends up pointing to the return of the suppressed dichotomy as the healing. For Freud the Oedipal situation establishes the unity of the opposites between the ambivalent and simultaneous effects of love and hate. The same problem can be observed in the juridical positivism of Kelsen. According to him, a law exists that prescribes obedience and transgression at the same time and that, consequently, imposes the awareness of what it sanctions (Balibar 2016).

Immanence can't be reduced to an _antinomysm_ , i.e., to a theological concept that puts the problem of the origin of law and sin in relation with a subject who obeys a law. The antinomy is the radicalization of the idea according to which the subjugation to the law is obtained by means of an originary guilt that is implied in the mere enunciation of the law as prohibition, as something that is banned, or that is a taboo or a crime. This is a symmetry that also the positivist Kelsen allows when he talks of a "theodicy" which is not foreign to Jewish culture and which is the heritage of the Pauline genealogy which Nietzsche deconstructs in _On the Genealogy of Morality_.

The subject of modern philosophy, like the legal person and the subject of psychoanalysis, is the result of a paradoxical injunction that constitutes the rule of subconscious functioning as well. It's not enough to recognize the "contradiction" at work in its constitutive act. And it's not enough to punish the crime by putting the law tribunal to work, if the goal is to re-establish the aporetic dynamic of a dispositive that finds its grounding on the re-stating of an antinomic structure which is closed in itself. In each of these cases, one reaches a known political truth: the paradoxical equivalence between intentions and acts, between a conduct inspired by obedience and the aspiration to a permanent transgression. It is the desire to be governed by a master.

This is the monster that the philosophy of conflict discovers in itself: power is not only outside; power is also hidden in the soul. It is the "malaise" that, however, constitutes the Subject and against which Freud and the philosophy of the impolitical try to immunize themselves with the tools of analysis and rationality. "If the juridical order is 'founded' on something, it would rather be upon the permanent possibility of its decomposition and thus upon the very conflict that it sustains through repression" (Balibar 2016, 255).

This heritage falls into contradiction with the political tension with theses that were contiguous with those of Foucault on power, while having developed in a completely different geo-philosophical context. Italian Thought, in fact, develops a knowledge that is conflicting and situated in a political discourse that is different from the philosophical-juridical models that aspire to neutrality or to universalism like liberalism; from those like psychoanalysis which reduce politics to the individual, psychological level; or from those which celebrate the melancholy for the disappearance of a Subject (the working class or the Communist Party).

## Beyond Power Lines, Inside Immanence

Conflict or power ( _potentia_ ) are not to be understood as the capricious, irregular, magmatic expression of an impulsive drift for the Subject to govern, but as an "auto-affection" process that involves society as a whole (Lordon 2010, 125). Such process can't be assigned to a subject because it is without an end, without a centre, and collective. _Chaosmosi_ is one of the possible definitions suggested by Félix Guattari. Or another one is the body without organs that Deleuze and Guattari talk about in _Anti-Oedipus_ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983).

What is being discussed is not a process without a subject, but an absolutely determined level that constitutes (or undoes) the subject while it connects the multiplicity wherein the subject lives. Contemporaneity is an assertion, not a negation; a potentiality, not an origin; a concept, not the accident of a sur-determined substance. With this being said, it is now a matter of understanding how the _non-contemporaneous_ is composed in a process that develops on the same immanence plane, and how it imposes the development of unforeseen links—while still contained within the immanence—in relation to a direction given by the government, that is by the molecular power expressed by capital or by the neoliberal enterprise.

This is the philosophical frame where the need to think the conflict today arises. The multiplicity generated on the level of immanence is a fearsome condition, which doesn't lack traumas and violences. Life outside of the Subject is disproportionate in relation to the measure of the human. There isn't, in fact, any measure that can contain this bottomlessness. And yet this power is not a privation, an absence, a reference to a norm or to a substance.

Immanence embraces these terrible worlds that are linked and attempts to live in the whirlpool by looking for connections, by experimenting norms, by peopling life with an affirmative attitude. It is here, after all, we find the deep meaning of the Spinozian expression, which is the epitome of the thought of the immanence: life is a thought of life, not a meditation of death ( _Ethics_ , IV book, proposition 67). Power is the multiplicity of relationships or of the potential or instituted relations that get altered, by differentiating or cancelling themselves as they move from one subject to the other. The reduction of the possibility of these multiple transformations to a pact, a symbol, a symptom, or to a governmental rationality; or the passage from activity to passivity and hence to the community of the becoming is the norm, that is, the reduction to the contemporaneity of the process. To the contrary, the expression of the non-contemporaneous, and hence of the multiple, is the sign of the not contemporaneous. Immanence is the thought that faces this double conflicting movement that develops on the same level. The conflict, then, is not only _against_ the normalization of potentiality or of the pathological identification of the subject; but it is also _for_ the alternative norms which Foucault defined "counter-conducts" (Balibar 2016, 372).

One can hence understand the familiar echo produced by "Italian Thought" within the contemporary political thought. Both are confronted with the same problem, a problem that Foucault summarizes as follows in a passage from _The Life of Infamous Men_ : "It shall be said to me: that's just like you, always with the same incapacity to cross the line, to pass over to the other side, to listen and make heard the language which comes from elsewhere or from below; it is always the same choice, for the side of power, for what power says or of what it causes to be said" (Foucault 1979).

Crossing the line of power means to reach a terrain where existence is already given but what is not given is the way in which it is determinable. It can't be determined by power, which can't catch everything. It is, on the contrary, necessary to speak of power by starting from a terrain that is nobody's but is instead everybody's. Supposing that up until _Discipline and Punish_ Foucault re-established a totalizing image of power, with the history of sexuality and with the history of truth in Greece, Rome, and early Christianity, which he developed starting from the 1980s in the lectures at the Collège de France (now in print), Foucault interrogated the existential link between ethics and politics. His thought was geared towards a space where the subject is engaged with defining its self through the mediation of norms to be respected and of actions to be fulfilled. Such space takes on a constituent dimension ("ethopoiein"[1] writes Foucault) when the subject matures the strength to transform its way of life, by creating practices and models that can be judged and where an autonomy from power emerges. This is truer in neoliberal societies where power cultivates freedom, while subjects can develop an autonomy that is also the site for a possible contestation.

Another characteristic of "Italian Thought" is that it intertwines ethics and politics. This mirrors the need to have a transformation that would not only be the prerogative of those who know—philosophers or intellectuals—but that would also respond to the praxis of the many, of the subalterns, of those who express a thought that is not compliant with that of the sovereign. In reference to the necessity of distributing authority, ethics allows to wish for the development of a will not to be governed quite as much and to establish a politics of ourselves, that is a politics that would not replicate the transcendental model of the One and that would not reiterate the necessity of a transcendent instance in order to justify what happens in the world as a result of human action. The expressions I used above are Foucault's but analogous ones could be found in many other Gramscian spaces, especially where the communist thinker talks about a "politics of immanence". In general, one could say that the ethico-political attitude of thought is part of one of the characteristics of what Deleuze defined the Spinozist moment of contemporary political thought (Deleuze 1988b, 1992).

More than imposing the values of "man", hence respecting "morality's" principles, politics is the expression of a potentiality that manifests itself according to infinite modalities and gradations. It is from here that the need to experiment with roles arises. This implies moving away from the idea that the distinction between those who command and those who obey is irreversible. Such distinction is variable. Politics is not a game which is be forever fixed by the decision of a sovereign or by the contract among the parts. It is a permanent negotiation on laws, power, and norms. Foucault faced the challenge from the vantage point of the individual and the individual's relationship with the government. Deleuze instead started from a multiplicity of which both the government and the individual are an expression, and tries to articulate the potentiality of the many and not the power of the few (Deleuze 1988a). Unlocking the antinomy—either in these or other directions—is already a political act which would allow "Italian Thought" to proceed on the plane it chose to inhabit.

## Note

## Works Cited

AA.VV, 2013. All'indice: Critica della cultura della valutazione, _aut aut_ , no. 360.

Agamben, G. 2011. _The kingdom and the glory: For a theological genealogy of economy and government_. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Anderson, P. 2007. _Spectrum: From right to left in the world of ideas_. London: Verso.

Badiou, A. 2000. _Deleuze_ (Vol. 16). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Badiou A. 2012. _L'aventure de la philosophie française, depuis les années 1960_. Paris: La Fabrique.

Balibar, E. 2016. _Citizen subject: Foundations for philosophical anthropology_. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Boltanski, L., and Chiapello, E. 2005. _The new spirit of capitalism_. London: Verso.

Ciccarelli R. 2009. _Immanenza: Filosofia, diritto e politica della vita tra il XIX e il XX secolo_. Bologna: Il Mulino.

Dardot, P., and Laval, C. 2014. _The new way of the world: On neoliberal society_. London: Verso Books.

Deleuze, G. 1988a. _Foucault_. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Deleuze, G. 1988b. _Spinoza: Practical philosophy_. San Francisco: City Lights Books.

Deleuze G. 1992. _Expressionism in philosophy: Spinoza_. New York: Zone Books.

Deleuze, G., and Guattari, F. 1983. _Anti-Oedipus_ , trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Esposito, R. 2012. _Living Thought: The origins and actuality of Italian philosophy_. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Esposito, R. 2015a. _Two: The machine of political theology and the place of thought_. New York: Fordham University Press.

Esposito, R. 2015b. _Persons and things: From the body's point of view_. New York: John Wiley & Sons.

Esposito, R., and Ciccarelli, R. 2008. La politica al presente. In AA.VV., _Impersonale: In dialogo con Roberto Esposito_. Milan: Mimesis.

Foucault, M. 1979. The life of infamous men. In M. Foucault, _Power, Truth, Strategy_. Sydney: Feral.

Foucault, M. 1997. What is critique?, trans. L. Hochroth. In S. Lotringer and L. Hochroth, eds., _The politics of truth: Michel Foucault_. New York: Semiotext(e), 23–82.

Gentili, D. 2012. _Italian Theory: Dall'operaismo alla biopolitica_. Bologna: Il Mulino.

Guareschi, M., and Rahola, F. 2011. _Chi decide? Critica della ragione eccezionalista_. Verona: ombre corte.

Israel J. 2001. _Radical enlightenment: Philosophy and the making of modernity, 1650–1750_. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lordon, F. 2010. _Capitalisme, désir et servitude_. Paris: La Fabrique.

Jameson, F. 2005. _Archaeologies of the future: The desire called utopia and other science fictions_. London: Verso.

Stimilli, E. 2016. _The debt of the living: Ascesis and capitalism_. Albany: SUNY Press.

Žižek, S. 2000. _The ticklish subject: The absent centre of political ontology_. London: Verso.

Žižek, S. 2012. _Organs without bodies: On Deleuze and consequences_. New York: Routledge.

1.

"Ethopoiein" means producing or transforming an individual's way of being.

# Selected Bibliography

## Books

Bird, Greg. (2016). _Containing community: From political economy to ontology in Agamben, Esposito, and Nancy_. Albany: SUNY Press.

Chignola, Sandro. (2018). _Da dentro: Biopolitica, bioeconomia,_ Italian Theory. Rome: DeriveApprodi.

Esposito, Roberto. (2012). _Living Thought: The origins and actuality of Italian philosophy_. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Esposito, Roberto. (2018). _From outside: A philosophy for Europe_. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Gentili, Dario. (2012). Italian Theory: _Dall'operaismo alla biopolitica_. Bologna: Il Mulino.

Righi, Andrea. (2011). _Biopolitics and social change in Italy: From Gramsci to Pasolini and Negri_. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

## Edited Books

Borradori, Giovanna. (1988). _Recording metaphysics: The new Italian philosophy_. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

Calcagno, Antonio. (2015). _Contemporary Italian political philosophy_. New York: SUNY Press.

Chiesa, Lorenzo, and Alberto Toscano. (2009). _The Italian difference between nihilism and biopolitics_. Melbourne: re.press.

Gentili, Dario, and Elettra Stimilli. (2014). _Differenze italiane_ _:_ _Politica e filosofia: mappe e sconfinamenti_. Rome: DeriveApprodi.

Lisciani-Petrini, Enrica, and Giusi Strummiello. (2017). _Effetto_ Italian Thought. Macerata: Quodlibet (Materiali IT Serie).

Luglio, Davide, and Silvia Contarini. (2016). _L'_ Italian Theory _existe-t-elle?_ Paris: Mimesis-France.

Maltese, Pietro, and Danilo Mariscalco. (2016). _Vita, politica, rappresentazione_ _:_ _A partire dall'_ Italian Theory. Verona: ombre corte.

Stimilli, Elettra. (2017). _Decostruzione o biopolitica?_ Macerata: Quodlibet (Materiali IT Serie).

Virno, Paolo, and Michael Hardt. (1996). _Radical Thought in Italy: A potential politics_. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

## Special Journal Editions

Buongiorno, Federica, and Antonio Lucci. (2014). La differenza italiana. _Lo Sguardo: rivista di filosofia_ , no. 15: 2.

Campbell, Timothy. (2009). Contemporary Italian thought. _Diacritics_ , no. 39: 3–4.

Carrera, Alessandro. (2011). Italian critical theory. _Annali d'Italianistica_ 29.

Chiesa, Lorenzo. (2011). Italian thought today: Bio-economy, human nature, Christianity. _Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities_ 16.

Chiesa, Lorenzo, Boštjan Nedoh, and Marco Piasentier. (2016). Italian biopolitical theory and beyond: Genealogy, psychoanalysis, and biology. _Paragraph: A Journal of Modern Critical Theory_ 39, no. 1.

De Cauwer, Stijn, and Kim Hendrickx. (2017). Immunity, society, and the arts. _Configurations: A Journal of Literature, Science, and Technology_ 25, no. 3.

Gatti, Roberto. (2015). Sulla filosofia italiana. _Cosmopolis: rivista di filosofia e teoria politica_ 12, no. 1.

Quintili, Paolo. (2015). Philosopher en Italie aujourd'hui. _Rue Descartes: La revue du Collège international de philosophie_ , no. 87: 4.

Serratore, Constanza. (2013). La "vida" y la "política": Una genealogía del pensamiento político italiano contemporáneo. _Revista Pléyade_ , no. 12.

## Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Campbell, Timothy. (2012). "Italian Theory," i rischi di un nome. _Il manifesto_ , 15 March 2012.

Martuccelli, Danilo, and Paola Rebughini. (2017). Italian Thought and social theory: Thinking with "pre-modernity" beyond "post-modernity." _Thesis Eleven_ 140, no. 1.

Mitrano, Mena. (2017). American studies as Italian Theory. _Review of International American Studies_. Special Issue: _International American Studies and the Question of World Literature_ (10th Anniversary Issue), edited by Giorgio Mariani, vol. 10, no. 1 (Spring–Summer).

Negri, Antonio. (2017). On "Italian Theory." In A. Negri, _Marx and Foucault: Essays_. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Pasquinelli, Matteo. (2011). Mappe italiane. L'ascesa in cattedra di un pensiero critico. _Il manifesto_ , 13 April 2011.

## Website

"Italian Thought Network." www.italianthoughtnetwork.com.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaBook