Italian Critical Thought by Gentili Dario; Stimilli Elettra; Garelli Glenda

Author:Gentili, Dario; Stimilli, Elettra; Garelli, Glenda
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
Published: 2012-02-27T16:00:00+00:00

Notes

Lecture to the Centro per la Riforma dello Stato (Centre for the Reform of the State) annual meeting, June 11, 2015.

1. Mario Tronti was the senator of the Republic for the Democratic Party of the Left (PDS) from 1992 to 1994 and for the Democratic Party (PD) from 2013 to 2018.

II

Categories

Chapter 6

A World to Gain

Sandro Mezzadra

On the Borders of “Theory”

1. Proximity and distance: This is how I would summarize—in two words and without having to inconvenience Freud’s “uncanny”—my relationship to Italian Theory. My political and intellectual training developed in the context of one of the currents usually associated with the label “Italian Theory”, i.e., Operaism. Moreover, in the second half of the 1980s, the debates surrounding the founding of the journal Filosofia Politica—and particularly the work of Carlo Galli, but also of Roberto Esposito and Giuseppe Duso—were crucial to my academic training and to catalyzing my research activities. Hence, my proximity to Italian Theory—but also my distance from it. If I were to indulge in a few autobiographical notes, I would refer to the encounter with the migration movements of the early 1990s, which was a crucial turning point in my intellectual path. Some old friends and I—a group who had been discussing and practicing politics for a long time—almost immediately realized that the city we lived in, Genoa, had radically changed in the course of only a few years: new faces, new ways of inhabiting public space, and new tensions and conflicts were surrounding us. Our “discovery” was certainly characterized by plenty of provincialism and not a small amount of ingenuity, as certain newer friends would later point out to me—friends from France, England, and the US, for instance. Such provincialism and ingenuity, however, corresponded to the specificity of the history of migration in Italy, a topic that I cannot fully indulge here.

Anyway, the encounter with migration in the early 1990s was truly a “discovery” for me (and certainly not only for me) that filled with absolutely concrete meanings that rather generic term of “globalization”, which had recently made its first appearance in public and academic debate. A series of “displacements” resulted from this encounter, both in my political practice and in my research agenda. I like to think of them as productive displacements which have not ceased to be the “engine” of my theoretical reflection. My work on migration intersected my encounter with “postcolonial” studies, leading me to focus my research on the topic of “the border” which, in a recent book co-written with Brett Neilson, I tried to undertake not only as an object of study but also as a “method” (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013). Such displacements and research—which I can necessarily only briefly mention here—have decisively taken me away from Italy. This is not only because they led me to multiply the dialogues with intellectuals and collective realities in other parts of the world but also because they made me aware of a series of problems related to what, drawing from Latin American “decolonial” debates, I would call the “geopolitics of knowledge”, i.

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