Gentili Dario - Italian Critical Thought

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

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

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

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Printed in the United States of America

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.

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 Theoryunderstood 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, whichwith a certain ironywas coined on the mould of French Theory, an expression that usually labels the influence and the reception of French Thought in the United Statesor anyway outside this thoughts national boundariesafter 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 boundariesbe 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 determinationa 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 Franois 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 Derridawhich is at the origin of the American creation of French Theorywas 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 philosophys 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 metaphysicsa 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.