Rethinking the Change: Italian Feminism Between Crisis and Critique of Politics

I think of the kinds of questions that I’ve heard female researchers and students ask of Italian feminism in Sydney, Melbourne and Auckland. I think of a certain ease of dialogue between men and feminists that is less suspicious than what we’re used to in Italy. There is an openness to the other and to otherness, which might derive from Australia being a multicultural society. The relativisation of Europe, and even more so of Italy, happens spontaneously when looked at from Australia with Asia in between. All this adds up to an ‘Australian Effect’ that has profoundly changed me and that in turn changes my way of talking about the ‘Italian Effect’. I am therefore writing from within a relationship to this context that already marks me, questions me and dislocates me, and my intention is to yield not so much a thought as a practice of thought, born and bred in close proximity to a political practice

Post-truth politics and indebted sovereignties.

Moving from a critical reading of Hannah Arendt’s view of the relationship between truth and politics, this essay reframes the relationship between post-truth and politics within contemporary democracies, where a) truth acquires the same status of radical immanence as neoliberal governmentality and the same status of equivalence and exchangeability as commodities and the market, b) the imperative of transparency redefines the public sphere, c) the theatre of representation transforms into the set of presentification, without any border between the visible and the invisible, the sayable and the unsayable. Within such a framework the parresiastic practice of saying one’s own truth must be reconsidered, alongside and beyond the foucauldian proposal, as a relational and political practice rather than an individual and ethical style of life.Partiendo de una lectura crítica de la perspectiva de Hannah Arendt acerca de la relación entre verdad y política, este ensayo redefine la relación entre posverdad y política dentro de las democracias contemporáneas, donde a) la verdad adquiere el mismo estatus de inmanencia radical de la gubernamentalidad neoliberal y el mismo estatus de equivalencia e intercambiabilidad de las mercancías y del mercado, b) el imperativo de la transparencia redefine la esfera pública, c) el teatro de la representación se transforma en el escenario de la presentificación, sin ninguna frontera entre lo visible y lo invisible, lo decible y lo indecible. Dentro de este marco, la práctica parresiástica de decir la verdad propia de cada cual debe ser reconsiderada, junto con y más allá de la propuesta foucaultiana, como una práctica relacional y política más que como un estilo de vida individual y ético

Fare e disfare il popolo. Un’ipotesi sul caso italiano

In the current context of the populist explosion which is spreading across Euro­pe, the US and all over the world, Italy is the only western country that has been experiencing, for thirty years, four different kinds of populist politics, from both the side of the government and the opposition: Northern Lega’s ethnic populism, Silvio Berlusconi’s telecratic populism, Matteo Renzi’s institutional populism, Five Stars Movement’s Web populism. This article analyses therefore the «Italian aboratoryl» as a case study which shows the reconfiguration of the whole political field as a populist one, where the new populisms arise on the ruins of the sovereign demos undone by the neoliberal governmentality. Comparing the main interpretations of populism as a shadow, a symptom or a spectre of democracy, the author wonders moreover if the populist strategies may be in Italy a wake-up call to address the crisis of representation or are rather doomed to widen the gap between the people and the political and economic oligarchies. Finally, the article discusses whether Ernesto Laclau’s «populist reason» can be considered really as the straight way toward a radical democracy or is compromised by the centrality that it bestows to the leader’s role, which in turn, in western democracies, is reshaped, by the mass-media system and by post-oedipal modes of subjectivation

El nuevo choque de civilizaciones

Al alba del noveno día de guerra, la actuación de las tropas rusas en la central nuclear de Zaporiyia expresa mejor que cualquier otra cosa qué está en juego en esta partida global, biopolítica más que geopolítica, que se está dirimiendo en Ucrania. Y lo peor aún está por llegar –anunció Macron justo después de que Putin se reafirmara en su voluntad de no detener su ataque hasta ocupar todo el país–.At the dawn of the ninth day of war, the action of Russian troops at the Zaporiyia nuclear power plant expresses better than anything else what is at stake in this global game, biopolitical rather than geopolitical, that is being played out in Ukraine. And the worst is yet to come," Macron announced just after Putin reaffirmed his determination not to stop his attack until he had occupied the entire country

Venus’s Strabismus: A Look at the Crisis of Politics From the Politics of Difference

One of the main features of Italian feminism of “difference”, seen from an international perspective, is its clear political vocation. This vocation is not only, or not specially, limited to the boundaries of gender politics, but is rather to be found in the radical critique or reconsideration of the traditional political categories, in the invention of new practices, in the redefinition of the sphere itself of politics and in the forms of its transformation. The Italian case, insofar as feminism is concerned, is also characterized by the fact that this feminist political critique has been kept up for over three decades alongside the crisis of traditional politics. The objective of this article is two-fold: on the one hand I analyse the relationship between the political crisis and the critique of politics seen from within the wider framework of the relationship between the disappearance of the patriarchy and the end of modern politics; on the other, I look at the resources that may derive from a feminist thought and be put into practice at the present time, which, in Italy, seems to be marked not only by a crisis, but also by the collapse of democracy