Here we present a conversation among three of the leading representatives of the Italian Theory. Roberto Esposito, Dario Gentili and Giacomo Marramao talk about the philosophical meaning of the “Italian Theory”, its roots in the tradition and the expected results for the cultural debate in Italy and abroad..

The conversation focuses on the social and political role of the philosopher nowadays. Pier Aldo Rovatti discusses about the growing philosophical movement called “Italian Theory” while revisiting his own recent intellectual path. The italian philosopher retraces the cultural experience of the “pensiero debole”, whereof he has been one of the two promoters, and underlines the intellectual and political fight, against all the so-called universal truths (and ideological violences), inspired by this philosophical trend at the beginning of the Eighties. The interview ends with a discussion about the dawning perspectives of the political-philosophical action in the post-modern age.

The aim of this interview is to analyze, on the one side, the relationship between Franco Berardi’s thought and the most significant moments in his intellectual profile, with its permanent exchange with the political, intellectual and artistic milieu. On the other side, it is taken into account the relationship between Berardi’s thought and that group of theories and critical reflections that are currently known as Italian Theory.

Starting from her last book Il Postumano. La vita oltre l’individuo, oltre la specie, oltre la morte, Rosi Braidotti outlines new modes of relation between zoe and bios, life and death, subject and technologically mediated societies, monism and differences. Rather than perceiving the post-human condition as a crisis or a loss, Braidotti argues that it is an opportunity and a challenge for new ethical and social forms of bonding.

In this interview we asked Professor Severino, one of the major contemporary Italian philosophers, to investigate aspects of his research regarding the relationship between ontology and philosophy of language. From his theoretical point of view we have investigated some of the central themes of the philosophical speculation suche as the nature of will, the structure of identity and the matter of what is the truths.

What is Topology? The interview revolves around this concept, which first of all - according to Vitiello - points to a practice of thinking before than an hermeneutic theory. “Which ethos belongs to topology?” is the question which Vitiello raises. This point concerns the status of this prospective: which is the responsibility of philosophy if not to focus on the relationship of philosophical, moral and political thought with its own limit?

The Italian thought is a philosophy of impure reason, which takes into account the conditions, imperfections and possibilities of the world. The core of his tradition consists in a civil vocation, choosing as objects of investigation life, history and politics, in search of “the effective truth of things” (Machiavelli). The audience of the italian philosophers are not the specialists, but all their compatriots, as well as everyone else. That also because they are often exiles, from Giordano Bruno to Antonio Gramsci, with a cosmopolitian vocation. Thus the question of the “common”, thematized by the contemporary italian philosophy, reverse itself in that of the “goodbye to community”, and to the irreversible past

In this paper, I discuss some of Esposito’s reflections on biopolitics in order to contribute to a better understanding of this matter. In my view, Roberto Esposito’s theorization on this subject cannot be fully understood without taking into consideration his view on modern political philosophy, the need to deconstruct the hegemonic immunitary paradigm that negates life in order to protect it, and the persistence of theologico-political apparatuses that separate life in zones of different value. Therefore, Esposito will deconstruct political philosophy and develop a genealogical research on modern biopolitics that has immunization as hermeneutic key. Furthermore, theologico-political dispositives like personhood imply a form of violent immunization. Now, if life has to be immunized in order to be preserved, it is also on this ground that a new philosophy of the common can emerge. In this sense, Esposito elaborates a philosophy of the third person or the Impersonal, both within Life and Thought, as a way out from the Immunitarian stance that sacrifices Life to its own preservation. The reach of this proposal will be discussed in the last part of the paper.

Taking the cue from a reading of Agamben’s essay Nudity (2009), the text analyses the most famous notion of his vocabulary, «bare» or «naked life», and attempts to understand the meaning of life’s ‘nudity’ within the whole project begun with Homo Sacer. By attempting to disclose and deactivate the theological signature that determines, in our culture, the concept of ‘nudity’ in exclusively privative terms, Nudity provides both an instrument for the analysis of life’s nudity in the sovereign ban, and the model for a philosophical practice structured on a ‘denudation’ of the signatures and apparatuses which determine and imprison our life

Italian contemporary philosophy is characterized by various forms of reaction to the “linguistic turn” which marked not only the analytic tradition, but also the continental one (structuralism, semiotics and hermeneutics). The philosophical (and anthropological) question that the “linguistic turn” leaves unanswered is: what is the nature of language? If language is the foundation of human nature, which is, in turn, the basis of language? The field that now opens itself is populated by those concepts that a philosophy centered on language completely has forgotten: body, life, animality. In this paper I try to delineate a philosophical route which starts from the “linguistic turn” and it arrives to the Deleuzian concept of “immanence”.

The aim of this paper is to illustrate the difference between Emanuele Severino’s philosophical discourse and that of Massimo Cacciari by analyzing those fundamental concepts – such as “Destino”, “Elenchos” and the Principle of non-contradiction (PDNC) – which are the core of their philosophies. We also propose this essay as an introduction to the complex interview with Emanuele Severino, also published on this issue, since it investigate the same range of philosophical themes.

In this paper we illustrate some of the theoretical fundamentals of the route nodes speculative Massimo Cacciari. How can you define the absolute singularity of the thing; what implies that the mere possibility is that from which it comes; what relation is given between the One and the negative of the world; what are the limits of logos: these and other issues are addressed from the last work of Cacciari, Maze philosophical, and in dialogue with thinkers like Heidegger and Severino, of which we show the similarities and differences with the theses of the Venetian philosopher.

In the original Italian philosophical adventure of the last fifty years, the figure of Carlo Sini is certainly one of the most profound and fascinating. His education, begun following  the Milanese teaching of Giovanni Emanuele Barié and then of Enzo Paci, therefore between Kant, Hegel and Husserl, opens furthermore to various influences, from American Pragmatism to Nietzsche’s Genealogy, up to contemporary Hermeneutics. Starting from that, Sini has developed the perspective of the thought of the practices that, in the light of the difference between event and meaning, contemplated in an ethical sense, leads to  a result that doesn’t exclude the truth, in a relativistic direction. This instead opens up to difference and to the relationship of the future of the «errant planet» (the earth), accepting its Copernican fate. This perspective, provided by great theoretical sharpness, identifies Sini as one of the most interesting contemporary philosophers, and not only at a national level.

The aim of the paper is to suggest a new ethical and individual form of political resistance. After a review of DarioGentili’s book "Italian theory. Dall’operaismo alla biopolitica", the essay retraces in its first part the political genealogy of the italian philosophical trend called “pensiero debole”, comparing it besides with the political and philosophical season of post-operaism. This comparison focuses in particular on the relation between the different positions of Pier Aldo Rovatti and Antonio Negri during the Seventies and the early Eighties. The second part of the essay expands some of the main philosophical themes of Rovatti’s “pensiero debole”, concentrating especially on the political aspects of Jacques Lacan’s and Michel Foucault’s thought. The philosophical question of the subject, according to the thought of the named authors, emerges at the end of the paper in its very political dimension.