26 research outputs found
Foreword to Alberto Asor Rosa, The Writer and the People, Seagull, London-Mumbai 2016
No full textThe introduction to the first English version of Alberto Asor Rosa's celebrated essay, Writers and the People, reconstructs the genesis of the volume and above all the political and cultural context in which this work took shape: post-World War II Italy between the Cold War and the economic boom; communist culture and the heretical socialist tradition; the birth of operaismo. The introduction also analyses the theoretical limits of this text of political criticism of literature; in particular, in the improper critique of two classics of the Second Twentieth Century in Italy: Pasolini and Calvino
"Deconstructing Postmodernism and the Mainstream Developmental Discourse of Women's Empowerment in the (South) Asian Context"
No full textThis paper starts with an initial gesture accepting the validity of many of the criticisms of modernity by some leading postmodern thinkers. From this initial position, it then evaluates the postmodernist positions themselves with regards to democracy, women's empowerment and justice by paying careful attention to the arguments of these leading postmodernists. It then develops a theory of deep democracy and radical subjectivity which can be used to deconstruct the rhetoric of international organizations on women's empowerment. However, shallow and self-serving as this rhetoric is, it nevertheless can lead to a limited improvement in women's status contrary to the claims of the conservatives. Furthermore, the theory can also be used to de/reconstruct the liberal and social democratic positions on women's empowerment. Such a deep democratic perspective in South Asia focuses attention on enhancing social capabilities through all means, but most importantly through the political self-activities of the multitude---- particularly the radical subjectivities and actions of the most oppressed women who can and will increasingly take leading roles in overcoming the rule of global capital.
The Italian Difference: Between Nihilism and Biopolitics
No full textThis volume brings together essays by different generations of Italian thinkers which address, whether in affirmative, problematizing or genealogical registers, the entanglement of philosophical speculation and political proposition within recent Italian thought. Nihilism and biopolitics, two concepts that have played a very prominent role in theoretical discussions in Italy, serve as the thematic foci around which the collection orbits, as it seeks to define the historical and geographical particularity of these notions as well their continuing impact on an international debate. The volume also covers the debate around ‘weak thought’ (pensiero debole), the feminist thinking of sexual difference, the re-emergence of political anthropology and the question of communism. The contributors provide contrasting narratives of the development of post-war Italian thought and trace paths out of the theoretical and political impasses of the present—against what Negri, in the text from which the volume takes its name, calls ‘the Italian desert’
Efficient material-abstraction : towards a critical materialist pragmatics
No full textMarx's critique remains the most incisive analysis of capitalism to date, though the
transformations which capitalism has undergone require that his conceptual apparatus
be radically overhauled. I have attempted to do so through a topological twisting of his
conceptual assemblage, highlighting new elements and relations. In this way I am lead
to questions of time already highlighted by Marx, in relation to an immanent and
constitutive ontology. However, my primary concern remains with the contemporary
strategies of capitalist command, and the new conditions and strategies of resistance it
demands.
Concrete/Abstract: or. The German Ideology - i)The question of ideology, the failure
of its problematic, and the initial step beyond: fetishism as 'dissimulation objective'
(Deleuze); ii) the function of money and the emergent 'truth in practice' of an ontology
of efficient material-abstraction.
Total Critique is a Pragmatics - i) The transformation of Critique from partial to Total,
and the emergence of a differential materialist ontology, ii) the critique of the labour
theory of value, and the transformation of capitalism into a project of heterogeneity
management (fundamental ontology).
Subsumption - i) An account of Braudel's notion of the anti-market, and a critique of the
reduction of the anti-market to capitalism; ii) an account of real subsumption in terms of a
temporal ontology.
Time and Resistance - i) A re-reading of 'historical determinism' in the light of Marx's
letters to Vera Zasulich on the Russian commune; ii) the question of becoming as
opposed to history through a diagramming of masses rather than the contraposing of
classes; iii) temporality as motor of flight/control: the syntheses of time as a
diagramming of efficient capitalist material-abstraction, and of the strategies of a
critical materialist pragmatics
Beyond Nihilism: Notes Towards a Critique of Left-Heideggerianism in Italian Philosophy of the 1970s
No full textA Betrayal Retrieved: Mario Tronti’s Critique of the Political
No full textA reappraisal of Tronti's "scandalous", The Autonomy of the Politica
A Betrayal Retrieved: Mario Tronti’s Critique of the Political
No full textA reappraisal of Tronti's "scandalous", The Autonomy of the Politica
Critical Thoughts on the Politics of Immanence
No full textAbstractThis intervention aims to question the opposition between a ‘politics of immanence’ and a ‘politics of transcendence’ through a critical assessment of some contemporary philosophical approaches to politics and a reappraisal of Mario Tronti’s account of the autonomy of the political. I shall argue that the contrast between immanence and transcendence is ultimately politically disabling, as it fails to provide an adequate position from which to situate a political thinking and practice.
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Beyond Nihilism: Notes Towards a Critique of Left-Heideggerianism in Italian Philosophy of the 1970s
No full text
