Italian Thought Today Bio-economy, Human Nature, Christianity

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.

1. Introduction Lorenzo Chiesa 2. Twenty Theses on Contemporary Capitalism (Cognitive Biocapitalism) Andrea Fumagalli 3. Dyslexia and the Economy Christian Marazzi 4. Hunger, Repletion, and Anxiety Massimo Recalcati 5. The Word and the Flesh: Postworkerism and the Biopolitics of Language in Paolo Virno and Christian Marazzi Pietro Bianchi 6. The Untamed Ontology Davide Tarizzo 7. The Anthropological Meaning of Infinite Regression Paolo Virno 8. Politics and Human Nature Roberto Esposito 9. Affirmative Biopolitics and Human Nature in Franco Basaglia’s Thought Alvise Sforza Tarabochia 10. The Bio-Theo-Politics of Birth Lorenzo Chiesa 11. Angels Giorgio Agamben 12. Divine Management: Critical Remarks on Giorgio Agamben’s The Kingdom and the Glory Alberto Toscano 13. Giorgio Agamben’s Godless Saints: Saving What Was Not Jelica Šumic 14. Kafka’s Land Surveyor K.: Agamben’s Anti-Muselmann Boštjan Nedoh 15. The Event of Language as Force of Life: Agamben’s Linguistic Vitalism Lorenzo Chiesa Frank Ruda

Lorenzo Chiesa is Professor of Modern European Thought and co-director of the Centre for Critical Thought at the University of Kent, UK. His most recent publications include Subjectivity and Otherness (2007), The Italian Difference: Between Nihilism and Biopolitics (2009) (co-edited with Alberto Toscano), and the English translation of Agamben’s The Kingdom and the Glory (2011).