Paolo Virno - Convention and Materialism: Uniqueness Without Aura

Insubordinations are creative and innovative double negations. They occur when an existing negative condition, the state of being sub or under a given order and thereby having an inferior rank, is countered by negating this very subjection. In our current late capitalist predicament such a reversal acquires a more complex meaning. The ordering authority is in fact no longer simply in crisis and exposed to resistance but profoundly disordered in its own operative structure. Today, powers traditionally devoted to regulation perpetuate and reinforce their effectiveness by continuously deregulating themselves. Orders become more and more oppressive precisely as they unveil the inconsistency on which they rest. As Pier Paolo Pasolini presciently put it almost fifty years ago, by now, nothing is more anarchic than power. In this desolate scenario, actual insubordination cannot but arise as the tentative search for a new kind of order. Its long-term and admittedly ambitious mission is the establishment of a society without subordinates, called communism. Its first and more realistic task is a taxonomic critique of an Order that resolves itself into myriad conflicting, yet no less tyrannical, suborders.

The present series aims to dissect the contemporary variant of the double negation involved in insubordination through the privileged prism of Italian radical thought. Starting from the late 1970s, Italy emerged as a laboratory for test-piloting the administration of the state of exception we are now living on a planetary level, both geopolitically and in our everyday lives. A brutal repression put an abrupt end to an intense season of social and political emancipations. But the theoretical elaboration of that defeat, which should not be confused with a grieving process, has managed to promote Italian radical thought to the center of a series of international debates that endeavor to define a new function and field of revolutionary politics. The series moves from the assumption that while so-called Italian Theory remains a vague and awkward category and attempts at hegemonizing it run the risk of resurrecting the idea of a national philosophy, it is beyond doubt that a growing number of left-wing Italian authors have, for good reasons, become very popular worldwide.

Drawing on philosophy, political theory, psychoanalysis, architecture, art history, anthropology, sociology, economics, and other fields, this interdisciplinary series intends to both further investigate consolidated Italian theories of emancipation and introduce authors (both present and past) who still remain largely unknown among Anglophone readers. Insubordinations: Italian Radical Thought will also foster original critical readings that pinpoint the tensions inherent to the oeuvre of prominent progressive thinkers and develop novel dialogues with various strands of post-World War II militant thought (such as heterodox Marxism, biopolitical theory, feminism of difference, social psychoanalysis, anti-psychiatry, and theories of Fascism). The series will also translate works by seminal earlier Italian authors who may be regarded as forerunners or critics avant la lettre of current trends in Italian radical thought.

It is my hope that, by delving into the titles of this series, readers will be able to appreciate the disciplined indiscipline they all share.

Lorenzo Chiesa