Beyond Nihilism: Notes Towards a Critique of Left-Heideggerianism in Italian Philosophy of the 1970s

This article provides a much-needed introduction to the philosophical debates around nihilism and negative thought which preoccupied many Italian left intellectuals in the seventies, and which still have important repercussions today. In order to present the principal stakes of the ‘Left Heideggerian’ current, the article undertakes a close reading of Massimo Cacciari’s 1976 book Krisis, and of Antonio Negri’s critical response to it—first in a review of the book, and then in a number of texts from the seventies and eighties, closely analysed by Mandarini, in which Negri develops a positive political metaphysics. This contrast between Cacciari and Negri allows Mandarini to investigate the significance of seemingly recondite philosophical issues to the development of Italian radical political thought, and to identify some of the key stakes of this debate: the status of politics and the political, the role of ontology, the place of dialectics and, crucially, the opposition between Cacciari’s formalistic understanding of negativity and Negri’s link between negativity and antagonism

A Betrayal Retrieved: Mario Tronti’s Critique of the Political

A reappraisal of Tronti's "scandalous", The Autonomy of the Politica

Planning for Conflict

Planning is widely perceived as an approach to economic life which both subordinates decisions about production and distribution to a supposedly objective Science and as an illegitimate subjection of economic laws to a commanding political Will. This article excavates two key phases in the Soviet experiment with a planned economy - namely, the New Economic Policy under Lenin and the Stalinist institution of the five-year plan - to explore the way in which planning could be thought of as directly incorporating a dimension of social and class conflict. This archaeological reconstruction of an antagonistic politics of planning is contrasted with the disavowed elements of planning within contemporary business logistics but also to efforts within critical Marxist theory after 68 to push against the depoliticizing dimensions of the plan

Efficient material-abstraction : towards a critical materialist pragmatics

Marx's critique remains the most incisive analysis of capitalism to date, though the transformations which capitalism has undergone require that his conceptual apparatus be radically overhauled. I have attempted to do so through a topological twisting of his conceptual assemblage, highlighting new elements and relations. In this way I am lead to questions of time already highlighted by Marx, in relation to an immanent and constitutive ontology. However, my primary concern remains with the contemporary strategies of capitalist command, and the new conditions and strategies of resistance it demands. Concrete/Abstract: or. The German Ideology - i)The question of ideology, the failure of its problematic, and the initial step beyond: fetishism as 'dissimulation objective' (Deleuze); ii) the function of money and the emergent 'truth in practice' of an ontology of efficient material-abstraction. Total Critique is a Pragmatics - i) The transformation of Critique from partial to Total, and the emergence of a differential materialist ontology, ii) the critique of the labour theory of value, and the transformation of capitalism into a project of heterogeneity management (fundamental ontology). Subsumption - i) An account of Braudel's notion of the anti-market, and a critique of the reduction of the anti-market to capitalism; ii) an account of real subsumption in terms of a temporal ontology. Time and Resistance - i) A re-reading of 'historical determinism' in the light of Marx's letters to Vera Zasulich on the Russian commune; ii) the question of becoming as opposed to history through a diagramming of masses rather than the contraposing of classes; iii) temporality as motor of flight/control: the syntheses of time as a diagramming of efficient capitalist material-abstraction, and of the strategies of a critical materialist pragmatics

The kingdom and the glory: For a theological geneology of economy and goverment

Stanford, Californiaxiii. 303 p.: bibl.ref.; 23 c

Foreword to Alberto Asor Rosa, The Writer and the People, Seagull, London-Mumbai 2016

The introduction to the first English version of Alberto Asor Rosa's celebrated essay, Writers and the People, reconstructs the genesis of the volume and above all the political and cultural context in which this work took shape: post-World War II Italy between the Cold War and the economic boom; communist culture and the heretical socialist tradition; the birth of operaismo. The introduction also analyses the theoretical limits of this text of political criticism of literature; in particular, in the improper critique of two classics of the Second Twentieth Century in Italy: Pasolini and Calvino

Whither Marx in the business school?

In this thesis I read critical studies of management reading Marx. I explore the inheritance of Marx in the business school through a symptomatic reading of labour process theory and critical management studies. In Part I I explore the conditions of this thesis. The university-based business school is introduced as the context in which this thesis is written, and as an institution concerned with management as object of theory and its relation to capital. I outline a symptomatic reading which explores how particular theories or problematics focus on particular objects, such as management or capital. In Part II I read works in labour process theory to demonstrate how Marx is inherited in these discourses and how labour process theory seeks to constitute a study of management within a Marxist problematic, before abandoning the Marxist problematic and establishing a new problematic of management. In Part III I read works in critical management studies to demonstrate the ways in which Marx and a problematic of management is established. Here a variety of both theoretical and political positions emerge, from a Marxism to anti-Marxism in theory, and a for and against management in politics. The symptomatic reading demonstrates that overall a particular reading of Marx leads critical studies of management away from a clear position within a Marxist problematic, to moments in which Marx is no longer read and in which capital emerges as a symptom that is not accounted for theoretically. This is followed by a return to a reading of Marx in the business school, which seeks to account once again for capital. This thesis contributes to the work of inheritance in the business school, and the conclusion points to current moments in this work, which leave the question "whither Marx in the business school?" contested.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Dancing amidst the flames: Imagination and self-organization in a minor key

Drawing from Deleuze and Guattari's (1986) formulation of the concept of a 'minor literature' and Nick Thoburn's extension of this into a 'minor politics' (2003a) this paper examines the relation between the workings of the imagination and forms of self-organization found within anticapitalist organizing of the Industrial Workers of the World and related movements. This paper explores the modulations of the social imaginary found within these particular examples as indicative of a more general process of minor composition. Rather than affirming an already existing and known subjective position (of the people, the workers), it will be argued that rather such campaigns have playfully and strategically redirected and appropriated the social energies found within pop culture to articulate their demands. Copyright © 2008 SAGE Publications