Italian Thought Today

Bio-economy, Human Nature, Christianity

Lorenzo Chiesa

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780415748742
• eBook ISBN: 9781317750550
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This collection provides English readers with a critical update on current debates on biopolitics in and around Italian thought. More than a decade after the publication of seminal books such as Agamben's Homo Sacer and Hardt and Negri's Empire, the names of, among others, Roberto Esposito, Paolo Virno, Christian Marazzi, and Andrea Fumagalli have recently been brought to the attention of Anglophone scholars and political activists. Several authors have rightly emphasised the evanescent character of biopolitics, and the difficulty in providing a definition of it that could embrace all the conflicting theories of its most celebrated critics and supporters. The present collection is structured around the basic contention that bio-economy, human nature, and Christianity are the three visible contemporary manifestations of the theoretical object/problem of biopolitics in, respectively, Italian post-workerist economics, post-Marxist philosophical anthropology, and post-structuralist ontology.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Angelaki.

lorenzo chiesa

BIOPOLITICS IN EARLY TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY ITALIAN THEORY

The main aim of this collection of essays is to provide English readers with a critical update on current debates on biopolitics in and around Italian thought. More than a decade after the publication of seminal books such as Agamben’s Homo Sacer and Hardt and Negri’s Empire the contemporary scene is incredibly more complex than is usually assumed. On the one hand, the works of these prolific authors continue to be translated at an incredible rate and still stand firmly at the centre of most discussions concerning the redefinition of radical international thought at the time of an alleged global “War on terror,” the concomitant identification of a new figure of enmity, but also the resurgence of a “communist hypothesis” that resists such an ideology. On the other hand, several new names have recently been brought to the attention of anglophone scholars and political activists: in the last few years, major American and British publishing houses have released volumes by thinkers such as Esposito, Virno, Marazzi, and Fumagalli.

One of the basic presuppositions of this collection is that these more recent works have so far been received through an interpretative lens that is to some extent obsolete. For instance, Esposito’s work is all too often relegated to occupying a sort of median position between the supposedly opposed readings of biopolitics – negative and affirmative, respectively – advanced by Agamben and Negri, and to a doxastic, parochial and ultimately sterile problematisation of the Foucauldian understanding of the relation between biopower and sovereignty. What this misses out is Esposito’s courageous return to the much broader theoretical question concerning human nature and the human animal. Despite post-structuralism’s and deconstruction’s extensive critique of the notion of “man” and its humanist biases, early twenty-first-century Italian thought is experiencing a resurgence of interest in this classical philosophical issue. Esposito’s project (but also, in different guises, Virno’s and Agamben’s) proposes not only an enquiry into the relation of dependence between different figures of the subject and their material substratum, or into the ways in which subjectivity opens up an unsurpassable gap in nature, but also and especially an identification of the subject as irreducible to nature with its own animality. As witnessed by Tarizzo’s essay, this issue is itself inextricable from a more general survey of the notion of life and the metaphysical and theological – Christian – biases that still permeate both its speculative and scientific understanding.

Similarly, the philosophical and economical work of the so-called post-workerists has so far, for the most part, been confined to the vague, almost eschatological, Negrian notions of multitude and exodus,¹ thus omitting to emphasise their timely analysis of the new economy and the financial crises dictated by cognitive capitalism (as is the case with Marazzi and Fumagalli) or their persistent interaction with analytic philosophy, formal logic and cognitive sciences (as is the case with Virno and other thinkers collaborating with him).² Having said this, the present collection also starts off with the assumption that these reductive readings are to a certain extent promoted by the very authors in question. For example, as shown by Bianchi’s essay, it is indeed the case that both economical and philosophical post-workerism rely on the quasi-apocalyptic assumption that the current phase of capitalism is truly exceptional and irreversible – to put it bluntly, a certain extreme notion of epochality, if not of the end of history, is taken for granted in so far as the contemporary form of accumulation is deemed to cancel the distinction between biology and history. It is also incontrovertible that Esposito’s own insistence on a “third way” for biopolitics, epitomised by the inextricability of immunitas and communitas, runs the risk of falling back into a pre-Foucauldian metaphysics of life and man that his very insights into a truly materialist overcoming of the divide between human and natural sciences attempt to refute.

This special issue does not claim to be exhaustive. Essays by other significant authors, who are as yet mostly unknown outside of Italy, have not been included for reasons of space.³ Most importantly, we must stress that discussions on biopolitics are far from being hegemonic in contemporary Italian academia; with specific regard to philosophy, in the last fifteen years we have rather increasingly witnessed the strengthening of a watered-down adaptation of Anglo-American analytic speculation and the more than dubious transformation of vast sectors of “weak thought” (in short, the local version of postmodernism that prospered throughout the 1980s and 1990s) into consulenza filosofica (that is, the bleak idea that the contemporary task of the philosopher is to act as a consultant to businessmen and corporations).⁴ The decision to call a patent minority by the name of “Italian thought” can nevertheless be motivated by the fact that it is precisely the investigation into biopolitics that has established the names of a number of Italian thinkers worldwide, especially in the last decade, and that, paradoxically, what remains at an international level a predominantly academic, and hence restricted, phenomenon has started being broadly covered in Italy by journalists and cultural analysts from major national newspapers which are usually indifferent to theoretical debates and innovations.⁵ Without necessarily going as far as arguing that the link between life and politics has always been the privileged target of Italian philosophy – from Machiavelli to Croce, Bruno to Gentile, Vico to Pasolini⁶ – we can cautiously suggest that, perhaps more than any other speculative European tradition, Italian thought has time and again been able to connect theory with praxis, as well as be truly open to other disciplines, in ways that have given rise to unforeseeable short-circuits. The latter are very diverse and include, for instance, not only the hermeneutic possibility of convincingly revisiting Gramsci’s thought by means of the concept of bio-economy in order to prove its topicality⁷ but also, more concretely, in the domain of current affairs, that of a prime minister adopting and distorting Pasolini’s idea of “anthropological difference” to distinguish between right-wing and left-wing Italians and attack the judges who intend to prosecute him, or conversely, that of a prominent Lacanian psychoanalyst writing and speaking on television about the same prime minister as the paradigm of a new post-human epoch of “monadic enjoyment.”⁸

The contributors to this collection of essays are active in at least five different official disciplines: philosophy, economics, sociology, psychoanalysis, and Italian Studies. When dealing with biopolitics, I would argue that we should understand interdisciplinarity on the basis of Althusser’s theory of discourses, that is, not as an “‘interdisciplinary theme’, but [as] a theoretical object, a fundamental theoretical problem which, while it may well touch on the domains of several existing disciplines, will not necessarily appear in person in any of them.”⁹ Several authors have rightly emphasised the evanescent character of biopolitics, the difficulty in providing a definition of it that could embrace all the conflicting theories of its most celebrated critics and supporters. The present collection is structured around the basic contention that bio-economy, human nature, and Christianity are the three visible contemporary manifestations of the theoretical object/problem of biopolitics in, respectively, Italian post-workerist economics, post-Marxist philosophical anthropology, and post-structuralist ontology. It is around these areas of research that original investigations belonging to the disciplines mentioned above seem to coalesce and almost fuse.

The first two essays of this issue share the bio-economic thesis that contemporary capitalism directly extracts value from the generic faculty of language, the invariant species-specific features of the human animal. While Fumagalli’s programmatic manifesto outlines the way in which the contemporary form of capitalism may be defined as a “cognitive biocapitalism,” Marazzi’s text focuses in detail on dyslexia, which he considers to be a symptomatic expression of the digital dimension of the same economy. On his part, in the third essay, Recalcati moves from a contiguous socio-economic assessment to psychoanalytically examine anorexia as an emblematic consequence of the structural illusions promoted by the contemporary discourse of the capitalist. Bianchi’s essay then closes the first section dedicated to bio-economy by challenging from a more classical Marxist perspective the post-workerist substantialist assumption – present in both Marazzi’s investigation of bio-economy and Virno’s political philosophy – that there is such a thing as a “common behaviour of mankind” which current capitalism would immanently control and put to work.

The second group of essays opens with Tarizzo’s analysis of how our scientific notion of “life” is still biased by metaphysical assumptions and, more specifically, by a vitalist ontology that regards life as a “secret force” and thus strongly influences our comprehension of the human animal, especially after the biopolitical turn. The two contributions that follow, by Virno and Esposito respectively, converge on the claim that a proper understanding of Homo sapiens as a political animal should overcome the spurious divide between natural and social sciences. On the one hand, Virno scrutinises the anthropological meaning of the logical category of infinite regression – to be seen as a paradigm of what he calls the “naturally artificial disposition of the human animal” – within the more general framework of a new materialist Marxist anthropology that remains faithful to the theory of evolution. On the other hand, Esposito returns to the question of humanism, in particular twentieth-century philosophy’s failed attempt to dispose of it, and concludes that the overbearing entrance of biological life into socio-political dynamics is not necessarily a danger from which we have to protect ourselves in the name of a self-centred purity of the individual and the species. In the concluding essay of this section, Sforza Tarabochia unfolds precisely this aspect of Esposito’s thought by taking into account Basaglia’s anti-psychiatric notion of human nature and the possibility of developing an affirmative biopolitical psychiatry that would continue his successful dismantling of the old mental health disciplinary apparatus.

The third and final section of this collection is arguably the most critical. Chiesa’s essay considers Esposito’s notion of birth as an affirmative biopolitical category and shows that, in spite of its originality and the possibility it offers to dismantle the thanatopolitical drift of Pasolini’s considerations on abortion, it still implicitly presupposes the taking of a stance on the transcendent differentiality of life and the legal obligation towards it that closely follows the dogmas of the Roman Catholic Church. In similar fashion, Toscano uncovers the shortcomings of Agamben’s recent work on the theological genealogy of the economy and government,¹⁰ especially regarding his notion of failed secularisation, which Toscano thinks is the consequence of a Christian historical substantialism that clashes with any claim to be engaging in a genealogy. Agamben’s own contribution responds to Toscano’s critique by expanding on the genealogy of the link between the modern notion of government and angelology that he carried out in The Kingdom and the Glory by means of a comparative analysis of this connection in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. His conclusion that “the government of the world is still today in the hands of the Christian Occident” since “Christianity is the only one of the three monotheistic religions that has turned the government of the world into an internal articulation of divinity and has, thus, divinised angelic power” will no doubt ignite new debates. For her part, Šumič dwells on Agamben’s treatment of Christian theology, paying particular attention to the themes of salvation and of the messianic subject; after deconstructing his position, she agrees with him in identifying the truly emancipative and redemptive kernel of politics in the act that “decreates the decreation,” which she associates with both the figure of Bartleby as – in Deleuze’s own words – “the new Christ,” and the practice of Lacanian psychoanalysis.

The two remaining essays should be regarded as divergent attempts to contextualise Agamben’s essay and the articles on his appropriation of Christianity contained in the third section within his overall ontology and notion of political agency.¹¹ While Nedoh maintains that, in spite of the evident limitations of the Agambenian theory of the – essentially passive – subject, we can detect a sort of Agamben beyond Agamben in the character of land surveyor K. from Kafka’s The Castle (of which the Italian philosopher has recently offered a brilliant interpretation), Chiesa and Ruda dispute this and identify the ultimate embodiment of a bio-theo-politics sutured to a vitalist ontology of language in the unsettling figure of the pervert.

It goes without saying that the tripartite division I adopt to introduce this collection is far from being rigid. Most essays explicitly deal with more than one of the general themes that I refer to in the title of the collection. Agamben’s and Chiesa’s contributions from the third section talk as much about Christianity as about bio-economy and human nature, while the articles by Marazzi and Fumagalli from the first do not deal with the question “what is the speaking being?” any less extensively than does Esposito’s piece from the second. More importantly, readers are invited to make these essays dialogue in alternative ways and, in so doing, increase their awareness of the multiple “interdisciplinary” bridges that unify the field of the theoretical object/problem that contemporary Italian thought calls “biopolitics.” Thus, for example, Sforza Tarabochia’s considerations regarding the dangers or emancipative potentiality of a biopolitical approach to psychiatry echo Recalcati’s psychopathology of everyday life at the time of the full disclosure of a form of capitalism increasingly based on a consumerism that directly targets the very life of the species. This in turn reiterates the centrality of the identification of consumption and production found in key passages of Fumagalli’s, Marazzi’s, and Chiesa’s contributions,¹² which then resonates with Tarizzo’s warning against reading these social phenomena through the filter of a metaphysics of life, and so on.

notes

1 This is confirmed by the deceptive English title – Multitude: Between Innovation and Negation (Cambridge, MA: Semiotext(e), 2008) – given to a recently published collection of Virno’s essays which deals only in part and diagonally with the question of the multitude. The main topics of the book are, quite tellingly, the notion of evil, jokes, and mirror neurons.

2 A clear example of this is the journal Forme di vita, edited by Virno, De Carolis, Cimatti, and Catucci (as well as, initially, Agamben) between 2003 and 2007, which regularly featured interviews with leading cognitive scientists and articles on and by, among others, Wittgenstein, Chomsky, and Bolk. The editorial of its sixth issue was significantly entitled “In Defence of Analytic Philosophy.”

3 Other noteworthy Italian authors who work on biopolitics and related issues include Laura Bazzicalupo in political philosophy (ll governo delle vite. Biopolitica ed economia (Rome and Bari: Laterza, 2006)), Massimilano De Carolis in philosophical anthropology (ll paradosso antropologico (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2008)), Franco Lo Piparo in philosophy of lang...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Biopolitics in Early Twenty-First-Century Italian Theory
• 2. Twenty Theses on Contemporary Capitalism (Cognitive Biocapitalism)
• 3. Dyslexia and the Economy
• 4. Hunger, Repletion, and Anxiety
• 5. The Word and the Flesh: Postworkerism and the Biopolitics of Language in Paolo Virno and Christian Marazzi
• 6. The Untamed Ontology
• 7. The Anthropological Meaning of Infinite Regression
• 8. Politics and Human Nature
• 9. Affirmative Biopolitics and Human Nature in Franco Basaglia’s Thought
• 10. The Bio-Theo-Politics of Birth
• 11. Angels
• 12. Divine Management: Critical Remarks on Giorgio Agamben’s The Kingdom and the Glory
• 13. Giorgio Agamben’s Godless Saints: Saving What Was Not
• 14. Kafka’s Land Surveyor K.: Agamben’s Anti-Muselmann
• 15. The Event of Language as Force of Life: Agamben’s Linguistic Vitalism
• Index