Lorenzo Chiesa

THE BIO-THEO-POLITICS OF BIRTH

In this article I aim to show that, in their discussion of the possible biopolitical implications of the notion of birth, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Roberto Esposito share a similar vitalist notion of life. Both authors start off from the very same premise: before and outside of any symbolic (political and legal) constraining imposition on life, life is in itself a life as a unity of difference – a place of blind forces or a primordial intensity – that is as such sacredly blessed. On the one hand, Esposito’s analysis of birth as an affirmative biopolitical category can help us unveil the thanatopolitical implications of Pasolini’s critique of Italian legislation on abortion in so far as he resolutely condemns any discourse on the alleged degeneration of life. On the other, this very analysis is compromised by Esposito’s own Christian stance on life. In the final part of this paper, I argue that inasmuch as Esposito conceives birth as “the actual place in which a life makes itself two,” such a blessed One of difference presupposes a stance on the transcendent differentiality of life and legal obligation towards it that follows closely John Paul II’s encyclical letter Evangelium Vitae.

“Le ressort de l’amour”: Lacan's theory of love in his reading of plato's symposium

I don’t think I’m exaggerating if I say that that [ … ] which we concluded [ … ] had thus far been neglected by all the commentators of the Symposium and that, for this reason, our commentary is a date in the continuation of the history of the development of the virtualities which are concealed by this dialogue.  Lacan, Seminar VIII, lesson of 1 March 1961

The event of language as force of life: Agamben's linguistic vitalism

The aim of this paper is threefold. Firstly, we intend to emphasise the systematic nature of Agamben’s project and its insistence on the creation of a supposedly new definition of philosophy as such. Secondly, we mean to show how such an endeavour is first and foremost ontological, not political, and explicitly inscribes itself within the legacy of twentieth-century philosophy’s (especially Heidegger’s) attempt to overcome metaphysics. Thirdly, we seek to problematise the all too often taken-for-granted proximity between Agamben’s ontological politicisation of philosophy and Badiou’s and Žižek’s re-launching of a “communist hypothesis” that is inextricable from a positive re-evaluation of materialism and dialectics. Our central claim is that Agamben’s thought relies on a vitalist ontology that thinks the event of language as the force of life and, consequently, that his – ultimately theological – recuperation and critique of dialectics can only be understood in this framework, that is, outside, if not against, any return to Marx.

BIOPOLITICS IN EARLY TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY ITALIAN THEORY

The main aim of this collection of essays is to provide 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 contemporary scene is incredibly more complex than is usually assumed. On the one hand, the works of these prolific authors continue to be translated at an incredible rate and still stand firmly at the centre of most discussions concerning the redefinition of radical international thought at the time of an alleged global ‘‘War on terror,’’ the concomitant identification of a new figure of enmity, but also the resurgence of a ‘‘communist hypothesis’’ that resists such an ideology. On the other hand, several new names have recently been brought to the attention of anglophone scholars and political activists: in the last few years, major American and British publishing houses have released volumes by thinkers such as Esposito, Virno, Marazzi, and Fumagalli. One of the basic presuppositions of this collection is that these more recent works have so far been received through an interpretative lens that is to some extent obsolete. For instance, Esposito’s work is all too often relegated to occupying a sort of median position between the supposedly opposed readings of biopolitics – negative and affirmative, respectively – advanced by Agamben and Negri, and to a doxastic, parochial and ultimately sterile problematisation of the Foucauldian understanding of the relation between biopower and sovereignty. What this misses out is Esposito’s courageous return to the much broader theoretical question concerning human nature and the human animal. Despite post-structuralism’s and deconstruction’s extensive critique of the notion of ‘‘man’’ and its humanist biases, early twenty-first-century Italian thought is experiencing a resurgence of interest in this classical philosophical issue. Esposito’s project (but also, in different guises, Virno’s and Agamben’s) proposes not only an enquiry into the relation of dependence between different figures of the subject and their material substratum, or into the ways in which subjectivity opens up an unsurpassable gap in nature, but also and especially an identification of the subject as irreducible to nature with its own animality. As witnessed by Tarizzo’s essay, this issue is itself inextricable from a more general survey of the notion of life and the metaphysical and theological – Christian – biases that still permeate both its speculative and scientific understanding. EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION

Aristotle's dream1

One differentiates between the object and the representation. We know this is in order to represent it mentally. It suffices to have words which, as we say, ‘‘evoke,’’ or ‘‘summon,’’ representation. How does Aristotle conceive of representation? We only know it by means of what has been retained by a certain number of disciples from his time. Disciples repeat what the master says. But only on condition that the master knows what he is saying. Who is the judge of this, beside the disciples? Thus, it is they who know. Unfortunately – here I must bear witness as a psychoanalyst – they also dream. Aristotle dreamed, like everyone else. Was it he who felt obliged to interpret Alexander’s dream of besieging Tyrus? Satyros – Tyrus is yours. A typical interpretation-game. Does the syllogism – Aristotle practised it – proceed from the dream? It must be said that the syllogism is always lame; in principle it is triple, but in reality it is an application of the universal to the particular. ‘‘All men are mortal,’’ so one among them must be too. Freud gets to this point and says that man desires it. What proves it is the dream. There is nothing so dreadful as dreaming that we are condemned to live repeatedly [à répétition]. Whence the idea of the death drive. By putting the death drive at the head, the Freudo-Aristoteleans suppose that Aristotle articulates the universal and the particular, that is to say they turn him into something like a psychoanalyst. Occasionally, the psychoanalysand syllogizes, that is to say he aristotelizes. In this way, Aristotle perpetuates his mastery. Which is not to say that he lives; he survives in his dreams. In each and every psychoanalysand, there is a disciple of Aristotle. But it must be said that the universal realizes itself occasionally in jabbering. It is certain that man jabbers. He does it with considerable complacency. This is what is shown by the fact that the psychoanalysand goes back to the psychoanalyst at a fixed time. He believes in the universal, it is not clear why, since it is as a particular individual that he abandons himself to the care of what is known as a psychoanalyst. It is insofar as the psychoanalysand dreams that the psychoanalyst is to intervene. Is it a matter of waking the psychoanalysand? But he does not want to be awoken, under any circumstances; he dreams, that is to say, he sticks to the particularity of his symptom. jacques lacan translatedbylorenzo chiesa

Selections from Theorie du sujet on the Cultural Revolution

A definition: We will call subjective those processes relative to the qualitative concentration of force. Let me emphasize that these are practices, real phenomena. The party is something subjective, taken in its historical emergence, the network of its actions, the novelty it concentrates. The institution is nothing but a husk. Correlatively, we will call objective the process whereby force is placed and is thus impure. Inasmuch as it concentrates and purifies itself qua affirmative scission, every force is therefore a subjective force, and inasmuch as it is assigned to its place, structured, splaced,1 it is an objective force.

Agape and the Anonymous Religion of Atheism

ion swayed the minds of the Mahometans. Their object was to establish an abstract worship, and they struggled for its accomplishment with the greatest enthusiasm. This enthusiasm was Fanaticism, that is, an enthusiasm for something abstract – for an abstract thought which sustains a negative position towards the established order of things. It is the essence of fanaticism to bear only a desolating destructive relation to the concrete. The reason for this depiction of Islam as an ontologically ‘‘fanatical’’ religion is, of course, that the singular or concrete form of subjectivity, qua freedom, is absent. There is a sense in which, of course, this repeats the racist commonplaces that pepper contemporary discourse so satisfied in its knowledge that the Muslim world has never truly experienced the charms of ‘‘freedom and democracy.’’ And it does seem that this vision of Islam as the abstract and expansionist universalism of the One turns it into the non-dialectical counterpart of a ‘‘Christian’’ atheism of singular universality, all of whose tropes, duly inventoried by Žižek for the sake of an ethics and politics of the act and the exception (sacrifice, incarnation, a split, impotent God, the theology of the Trinity), appear absent from the ideational repertoire of Islam. At this point, Žižek might indeed agree with the Italian judge, who, faced with the protest of a Finnish mother who wished to have the crucifix removed from public classrooms, described it as a ‘‘symbol of secularism.’’ And yet, if we turn to the 1824 Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, there is a further twist in the spiralling movement of the dialectic, which, taking our cue from the image of Islam as a fanatical religion of destruction (for and by the One), might provide a basis for viewing it not simply as a post-dialectical offshoot, devoid of resources for a materialist theory of the subject. For the abstractive fanaticism of Islam is isomorphic to the abstract egalitarianism of the French Terror: In the Islamic doctrine there is merely the fear of God: God is to be venerated as the One, and one cannot advance beyond this abstraction. Islam is therefore the religion of formalism, a perfect formalism that allows nothing to take shape in opposition to it. Or again in the French Revolution, liberty and equality were affirmed in such a way that all spirituality, all agape

Further Selections from Theorie du sujet on the Cultural Revolution

If belief poses the possibility of salvation, and consequently the potential eternity of the subject in a splacement that is finally real, confidence is concentrated in the fidelity to courage, conceived as the differential of a recomposition that is more porous to the real, less exposed to the law. At the two extremities of Marxism, you will find the following theses: “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on