This essay returns to Jacob Taubes’s messianism in order to short-circuit a contemporary political and conceptual impasse between left- and right-wing Schmittianisms. It first seeks to expose the limits of both Schmitt’s originary political theology and post-war Italian Marxist rehabilitations of Schmitt, which, it is argued, remain caught in the same political-ontological matrix. To answer the question of what (if anything) might come after political theology, the essay turns to Jacob Taubes’s “counter-political theology” in order to find an alternative genealogy (...) for modern democracy, not in Schmitt’s Christian conservative hierarchy, but in the antinomian and heretical elements within the Judaeo-Christian tradition. In conclusion, the essay argues that Taubes transforms the political theological impasse and makes possible a new reading of the contemporary political false choice we face between democracy and authoritarianism, liberal pluralism and populism. (shrink)

An analysis of theological and philosophical understandings of debt and its role in contemporary capitalism. Max Weber’s account of the rise of capitalism focused on his concept of a Protestant ethic, valuing diligence in earning and saving money but restraint in spending it. However, such individual restraint is foreign to contemporary understandings of finance, which treat ever-increasing consumption and debt as natural, almost essential, for maintaining the economic cycle of buying and selling. In The Debt of the Living, Elettra (...) Stimilli returns to this idea of restraint as ascesis, by analyzing theological and philosophical understandings of debt drawn from a range of figures, including Saint Paul, Schmitt and Agamben, Benjamin and Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, and Foucault. Central to this analysis is the logic of “profit for profit’s sake”—an aspect of Weber’s work that Stimilli believes has been given insufficient attention. Following Foucault, she identifies this as the original mechanism of a capitalist dispositif that feeds not on a goal-directed rationality, but on the self-determining character of human agency. Ascesis is fundamental not because it is characterized by renunciation, but because the self-discipline it imposes converts the properly human quality of action without a predetermined goal into a lack, a fault, or a state of guilt: a debt that cannot be settled. Stimilli argues that this lack, which is impossible to fill, should be seen as the basis of the economy of hedonism and consumption that has governed global economies in recent years and as the premise of the current economy of debt. Elettra Stimilli is research fellow of theoretical philosophy at Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, Italy. Arianna Bove is the translator of many books, including Factory of Strategy: Thirty-Three Lessons on Lenin, by Antonio Negri. (shrink)

When stressing how ‘Christian pastoral power’ defined the specificity of ‘governmental power’, Foucault never explicitly acknowledged the German debate on modernity or theological-political issues. My hypothesis is that – whatever the actual reasons for this omission might be – this oversight is symptomatic of Foucault’s unique interpretation of the role of Christianity in Western culture and of his different approach to the theme of power. After analysing the positions of two of the leading exponents of the German debate, Karl Löwith (...) and Carl Schmitt, the essay substantiates this hypothesis by looking at Foucault’s investigations of pastoral power. In particular, the essay aims to demonstrate how the latter’s apparent omissions are linked to Foucault’s challenge to two central questions in the 20th-century debate on modernity, namely: (1) the possibility of interpreting modern political revolutions as expressions of a linear and secularized vision of history; and (2) the centrality of the category of sovereignty in the definition of Western power. (shrink)

Immanence is a key concept in Gilles Deleuze's thought. It emerges in 1968, in the book Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza and it is a focus until his last text. Immanence is a concept steeped in theological resonances, which disturbs Western metaphysics and politics. But, according to Deleuze, immanence is not really a concept, rather it is a ‘plan’. ‘The plan of immanence’ is the ‘prephilosophical’ working plan of philosophy. The point is that, according to Deleuze, philosophy cannot be understood only (...) conceptually, although it begins with the creation of concepts. Here, rather, what is at stake is a prephilosophical origin of philosophy itself. This relationship between the plane of immanence and philosophy is the most important aspect that some of best-known exponents of contemporary Italian philosophy have inherited from Deleuze. The focus of this essay is on three expressions of the plane of immanence in the sense of Deleuze that have been developed in contemporary Italian Thought: the ‘constituent power’ of politics in Antonio Negri; the ‘impersonal’ in Roberto Esposito; and the ‘potentiality’ in Giorgio Agamben. (shrink)

El artículo desentraña la relación entre Carl Schmitt y Jacob Taubes en sus interpretaciones sobre el Leviathan de Thomas Hobbes y la teología política. El jurista del nazismo y el rabino mantienen posiciones opuestas sobre el filósofo inglés hasta el punto de encontrar Taubes en Spinoza una alternativa aún por desarrollar. Frente a la interpretación de Schmitt que situaba a Spinoza como origen de la enfermedad que condujo a la muerte del Leviatán, Taubes lo sitúa en Pablo de Tarso (“primer (...) judío liberal”) y la separación entre interino y externo en el mesianismo paulino. (shrink)

This article focuses on a religious structure that is intrinsic to the contemporary mechanisms that have enabled the global domination of economic power: faith in the market. Following Foucault’s transition from biopolitics to governmentality, this article articulates the mechanism that generates the ability for human beings to give shape and value to their lives. Through a reading of Schmitt and Hayek, as well as an updated reading of Weber’s thesis on the origin of capitalism, this article argues that we must (...) turn our attention to the Christian motifs that shape our contemporary understanding of the ‘economy’. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to focus the use and development of some key concepts of the Italian contemporary thought – as, for example, General Intellect, Biopolitics, Political Theology, Economic Theology, Debt – in order to reflect on some critical moments and to identify new possibilities still open for the future. In this regard, in the final part of the text, particular attention is given to Giorgio Agamben’s thought. A critique of the current global order of neoliberalism is the (...) main purpose of this analysis, focused on very different reflections, which share the necessity to avoid theories separate from history. (shrink)

First authoritative testimony of the debate that has characterized contemporary Italian critical thought, which has recently caught the attention of an international audience.

Decostruzione o biopolitica? aims to bring to light both differences and affinities – in their problematic interplay – between deconstruction and biopolitics, thus lifting the smokescreen of French Theory as a unified field of research and revoking its role as an unambiguous and functional category of the history of philosophy. At the same time, this collected edition points towards the work that ITN has been doing for the past decade: retracing the roots of contemporary Italian philosophy and the emergence of (...) Italian biopolitics as a prominent topic in international debates. The struggle between deconstruction and biopolitics becomes then a symbol for the complex genealogies that can be re-activated towards the construction of a thought intended as a conflictual practice. (shrink)

"In this paper, my purpose is to take into serious consideration Adorno’s explicit conception of the artwork as a force field. With this expression he intends to emphasize the inner constitution of the artwork as a movement of antagonistic tensions, a dynamic of elements that are not simply juxtaposed, but dialectically interacting with one another. In a similar configuration, the aesthetic experience of the artwork consists in letting their friction explode to its extreme, achieving a balance which remains nevertheless substantially (...) precarious and inconclusive, ready to be immediately set in motion again. Thanks to the aesthetic trait of the force field, these tensions are brought to unity in a way that it does not suppress the enactment of antagonisms, but keeps their multiplicity alive: Homer’s tale of Penelope as an allegory of art. Keywords: Adorno – force field – antagonisms". (shrink)

After the so-called Hegelian verdict, Adorno is the first philosopher who devotes such an intense attention to natural beauty within his aesthetic speculations. This central – although unfairly bypassed – moment could be fruitfully analysed through the figure of landscapes, thematized throughout Adorno’s constellation of texts. In this framework, the landscape represents more than a mere backdrop, but rather a significant theoretical spot to concretize the connection between the aesthetic performativity and the beauty of nature. Therefore, by means of a (...) careful reading of Adorno’s various formulations on the topic, this paper aims to show how the philosopher overcomes the traditional and immediate antithesis between nature and culture or even technique. More importantly, it will be investigated how a genuine aesthetic experience of nature – also in the image of a landscape – should be configurated, in order to hopefully feel its now mutilated silence again. (shrink)

En el panorama actual de la filosofía ético-política, la ascesis ha sido una de las nociones más influyentes, tomando un lugar determinante a partir de la empresa de Nietzsche en su tratamiento sobre los ideales ascéticos. Ciertamente, con la herencia foucaultiana de este concepto como prácticas de sí, filosofías como la de Judith Butler, Peter Sloterdijk, Elettra Stimilli, entre otros, han admitido como supuesto ontológico central que el cómo los humanos se relacionan consigo mismos es clave para comprender (...) las maneras en que nuestras realidades son configuradas, y que dicha relación tiene lugar en las prácticas que realizamos día a día. No obstante, en diversas religiones y filosofías de la antigüedad, la ascesis ocupaba un rol aparejado con otras nociones, como la de gnosis (que se instaura como un conocimiento especial de la manera en que la realidad está organizada), con vistas a asegurar que los individuos pudiesen ascender a formas de vida que procurasen su salvación. Frente a esta diferencia tan radical en uno y otro momento de la historia de la filosofía, intentaremos trazar ciertas notas que nos permitirían comparar una y otra interpretación de la ascesis, sacando así a luz los aspectos que caracterizan la concepción contemporánea de la ascesis misma. _Palabras clave: _ascesis, vida, educación, filosofía contemporánea, práctica. (shrink)

This article is a review of two recently translated books by Italian philoso­pher Elettra Stimilli: The Debt of the Living: Ascesis and Capitalism and Debt and Guilt: A Political Philosophy. The essay critically engages with Stimilli’s interpretation of the nexus between ascesis and capitalism; her account of the ascetic dimensions of contemporary economies of debt; her reflections on the subversive potential of ascesis in the context of contemporary regimes of neoliberal governance.

Si en un primer momento se intuía que el monumental proyecto de Homo sacer (1995-2015) consistía en una crítica acotada a la lógica de la soberanía y al estado de excepción, ahora podemos ver con claridad que el pensamiento de Giorgio Agamben desplegó una arqueología de la potencia con el fin de hacer legible y pensable la destitución del aparato de la economía y la ontología que han ordenado el mundo de la vida en Occidente. La arqueología sobre diversas zonas (...) de nuestra tradición política no puede sino tener consecuencias decisivas para el devenir de una forma de vida en apertura a la musicalidad propia de todo pensamiento. Giorgio Agamben - Jorge Álvarez Yágüez - Cristina Basili - Alejandra Castillo - Andrea Cavalletti - Emanuele Coccia - Rodrigo Karmy Bolton - François Loiret - Alberto Moreiras - Miguel Morey - Gerardo Muñoz - Elettra Stimilli - José Luis Villacañas. (shrink)

This paper analyzes and discusses related passages of Euripides’ „Electra“ and Aristophanes’ „Wasps“ in order to suggest a date for the performance of the „Electra“. Particularly interesting are: Ar. „Wasps“ 615 and Eur. „Electra“ 985; „Wasps“ 1490, 1492, 1530 and „Electra“ 860-861, which seem to reveal more complex dynamics of dependence in the Aristophanic attempt to mock the language excessively hyperbolic of Euripides. In my opinion these puns and innuendos may endorse the dating of Euripides’ „Electra“ at the Great Dionysia (...) of 423 b. C. one year before the performance of Aristophanes’ „Wasps“. (shrink)

The Warburg Institute, founded in the 1920s in Hamburg by art and cultural historian Aby Warburg, is a pioneering institution that has greatly shaped the fields of art, myth, religion, medicine, philosophy, and intellectual history. When, in 1933, the institute was moved to London to escape the Nazis, its research and legacy were protected and further developed by a network of researchers dispersed throughout the UK, the US, and Canada. The first interdisciplinary study of the Warburg network as an arena (...) of intellectual transmission, transformation, and exchange, this volume reveals the dynamics, agencies, and actors at play in the development of the Warburg Institute's program and output, with a specific focus on the role of Raymond Klibansky in the institute's major ventures. Among these collective projects of the institute are the famous Saturn and Melancholy, which blends art history with philosophical and cultural history, and the Latin and Arabic Corpus Platonicum Medii Aevi series, which contributed to research on the continuity of Platonic thought. Consulting published and unpublished sources including correspondences, memories, and diaries of affiliated scholars, the essays explore the history of the Warburg Library as a vital cultural institution and the personal and intellectual relationships of the researchers devoted to it. From Hamburg to London to Montreal, Raymond Klibansky and the Warburg Library Network takes readers on a journey into more than forty years of intellectual life at one of the most prestigious cultural research institutes. Contributors include Philippe Despoix, Georges Leroux, Eric Méchoulan, Elisabeth Otto, Elizabeth Sears, Davide Stimilli, Jillian Tomm, Martin Treml, Jean-Philippe Uzel, Regina Weber, Claudia Wedepohl, and Graham Whitaker. (shrink)

TOC -/- 0. Introduction (SN/CW) -/- I. Revisiting vitalist themes in 19th-century science -/- 1. Guido Giglioni (Warburg Institute) – Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and the Place of Irritability 2. in the History of Life and Death 3. Joan Steigerwald (York) – Rethinking Organic Vitality in Germany at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century 4. Juan Rigoli (Geneva) –The “Novel of Medicine” 5. Sean Dyde (Cambridge) – Life and the Mind in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Somaticism in the Wake of Phrenology. -/- II. Twentieth (...) century debates on vitalism in science and philosophy -/- 6. Brian Garrett (McMaster) – Vitalism versus Emergent Materialism 7. Christophe Malaterre (Paris) – Life as an Emergent Phenomenon: from an Alternative to Vitalism to an Alternative to Reductionism 8. Sebastian Normandin (Montreal) – Wilhelm Reich: Vitalism and Its Discontents 9. Chiara Elettra Ferrario (Wellington) and Luigi Corsi (Pisa) – Kurt Goldstein: Vitalism and the Organismic Approach 10. Giuseppe Bianco (Paris/Warwick) – The Origins of Canguilhem’s “Vitalism”. Against the Anthropology of Irritation -/- III. Vitalism and contemporary biological developments -/- 11. William Bechtel (UCSD) — Dynamic Mechanistic Explanation: Addressing the Vitalists’ Objections to Mechanistic Science 12. John Dupré and Maureen O’Malley (Exeter) – Varieties of living things: Life at the intersection of lineage and metabolism 13. J. Scott Turner (Syracuse) – Homeostasis and the forgotten vitalist roots of adaptation -/- . (shrink)