Biopolitics and Social Change in Italy (PDF)

ANDREA RIGHI Assistant Professor of Italian and Humanities at the University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez.

"Andrea Righi offers a compelling, energetic mapping of the vicissitudes of biopolitics in the work of Italian philosophers from Antonio Gramsci to Antonio Negri. He provides a critique of modern political theory and its application that need not be viewed in restrictive terms as valid only for contemporary Italy. Written with appealing brio and evident pedagogical lucidity, this book easily could be used in any graduate seminar or advanced undergraduate class on modern and contemporary Italian history, philosophy, political thought, or anthropology. In addition, it could be made a stimulating focus of any course on Marxism, post-Marxism, globalization, ecology, biopolitics, or contemporary women s studies." - Alessia Ricciardi, associate professor, department of French and Italian and program in Comparative Literature, Northwestern University"How and when did we forget the biological being? As societal relations began to define biological bodies in terms of use, labor, and commodities, the living politics of being seemed to disappear. However, the intricacies of social transformation, and the involvement of those same "disappeared" groups, are as multifaceted as the living organisms that they involve; this is the ground that biopolitics treads. Finding support in the rich tradition of Italian political philosophy, Righi makes of Italy a relevant and illustrative case for the formation, rise and elaboration of the biopolitical. By extending a network of political philosophical work that finds renewed energy in Antonio Gramsci, makes a case for the innovative strategies of Italian neo-feminists of Lotta femminista, and reviews Pasolini s revolutionary pessimism, Righi suggests an Italy that has been a fertile ground for the elaboration of late Foucauldian thought by philosophers such as Giorgio Agamben, Antonio Negri, Paolo Virno and Roberto Esposito. Righi s book is valuable addition not only to Italian Studies but also to the contemporary discourse on biopolitics