Cfp: "Italian Social Theory from Antonio Gramsci to Giorgio Agamben," 8th Annual Social Theory Forum, University of Massachusetts, Boston, April 13-14, 2011.

We invite proposals addressing the span of modern Italian social theory, including but not limited to thinkers such as Galvano Della Volpe, Norberto Bobbio, Paolo Virno, Giovanni Arrighi, Antonio Negri, and Umberto Eco.  Relevant themes may include: hegemony, culture wars, neo-Gramscianism and international relations, globalization, shifts in global capitalism; biopolitics, homo sacer, immigration, ethnicity and the war on terror, resistance, state sovereignty and power, nationalism, propaganda and agitation, Negri’s theory of “exodus”; technology experience, social media, digital labor, and Agamben’s “bare life.” Conference organizers also welcome topics bearing on the relevance of Italian Social Thought for the understanding of cultural studies, semiotics, textual analysis, linguistics, structuralism, psychoanalysis, and literary criticism in contemporary scholarship and scientific research.

For further information, email: SocialTheoryAbstracts@libraryofsocialscience.com.

Cfp: "Commonalities: Theorizing the Common in Contemporary Italian Thought," a DIACRITICS Conference, Cornell University, September 24-25, 2010.

Over the last decade contemporary Italian thought has enjoyed enormous intellectual and editorial success in the United States. The work of Giorgio Agamben, Antonio Negri writing with Michael Hardt, Paolo Virno, Adriana Cavarero, and more recently Roberto Esposito and Rosi Braidotti, have placed Italian thought at the heart of current debates on topics as wide-ranging as bioengineering, globalization, and feminism. In ways that recall the success of French poststructuralism in the 1980s, Italian thought today appears increasingly to be setting the terms of both philosophical and political debates in this country. Yet such success raises a number of questions, in particular about the very features of Italian philosophical tradition that might account for such a result. In other words, if asked to sketch the principal features of Italian thought that join together philosophers as different as Cavarero, Agamben, and Negri, how might one reply? What is it that separates Italian thought from other philosophical traditions, and what might account for its importance today? As Negri asks, where does the Italian difference lie?

Although there are many possible responses, one undeniable feature linking some of the most powerful exponents of contemporary Italian thought is the decisive weight afforded the notion of the “common.” Certainly, Giorgio Agamben’s quasi-manifesto The Coming Community from 1994 merits attention, as does Hardt and Negri’s theorization of the coming together of commonality and singularity in the figure of the multitude in Empire and Multitude. So too does the “common” run through Adriana Cavarero’s reading of “horrorism” in terms of the body politic, Paolo Virno’s emphasis on the shared capacities of labor, Rosi Braidotti’s displacement of communal bonds in favor of a Deleuzian nomadology, and more recently Roberto Esposito’s analysis of the reciprocal relation between community and immunity. One common ground (though clearly not the only one) of recent Italian philosophical iterations will be found in a shared orientation towards reconceptualizing the common.

It is in this context that the diacritics conference “Commonalities: Contemporary Italian Thought and Theorizing the Common” will take place. . . .

For further information, visit: http://commonconf.wordpress.com/about/.

Cfp: ITALIAN CRITICAL THEORY. ANNALI D'ITALIANISTICA 29 (2011).

Twenty-one years ago, the publication of Giovanna Borradori’s anthology Recoding Metaphysics (1988) and of Gianni Vattimo’s The End of Modernity (1988) signaled that the post-war generation of Italian philosophers was ready to join the theoretical debate that was going on in the English-speaking world. The translation of other works by Vattimo generated an interest that went way beyond the boundaries of Italian Studies. A few years later, the English publication of Giorgio Agamben’s The Coming Community (1993), immediately followed by other volumes, made the Italian philosopher a household name in comparative literature departments and continental philosophy programs. The philosophical geography of the North-American universities was indeed opening up to new territories. The appearance of Carlo Sini’s Images of Truth (1993), Massimo Cacciari’s Necessary Angel (1994), Mario Perniola’s Enigmas (1995), Adriana Cavarero’s In Spite of Plato (1995), Antonio Negri’s Marx Beyond Marx (1996) — not to mention the books of the same authors that came after, culminating in the best-selling status of Antonio Negri’s and Michael Hardt’s Empire, 2001 — made clear that contemporary Italian philosophy was now a strong presence in the post-modern theoretical landscape of the American and British universities. Recently, Brian Schroeder’s and Silvia Benso’s anthology Contemporary Italian Philosophy (2007) has charted an exceptionally varied land, whose richness is second to none in terms of theoretical ambition and hermeneutical subtlety.

Seeking to situate itself within this theoretical context, the 2011 AdI volume intends to address the relevance of Italian critical theory today. It will be divided in two parts. The first section will include invited papers only. Some of the most prominent Italian philosophers have been invited to contribute and they have all accepted the invitation. The second section will be open to the contributions of scholars who wish to engage in this theoretical debate and will answer this call for papers. As a mere suggestion, submissions may be organized around keywords such as aesthetics, bioethics, biopolitics, cognitive approaches, deconstructionism, difference and identity, existentialism and phenomenology, feminism, geopolitics, genealogy, gender, GLBTQ studies, elites and multitudes, Europe and Empire, grammatology, hermeneutics, humanism and anti-humanism, Idealism and its legacy, metaphysics and its destiny, Marxism and post-Marxism, modernity and post-modernity, North/South dichotomy, otherness and sameness, philosophy and religion, political theology, traveling theories, semiotics, style and the philosophical discourse. In additional to the theorists who have already been mentioned, Annali d’Italianistica will welcome papers on other relevant figures of the Italian thought in the last sixty years. As Annali d’Italianistica intends to make Italian critical theory available to the English-speaking world, all contributions will be in English.

For more information, visit: http://www.ibiblio.org/annali/upcoming.html#adi_2011.

Pub: Chiesa, Lorenzo, and Alberto Toscano, eds. THE ITALIAN DIFFERENCE.

Chiesa, Lorenzo, and Alberto Toscano, eds. The Italian Difference: Between Nihilism and Biopolitics. Sydney: Re.Press, 2009. Description: This volume brings together essays by different generations of Italian thinkers which address, whether in affirmative, problematizing or genealogical registers, the entanglement of philosophical speculation and political proposition within recent Italian thought. Nihilism and biopolitics, two concepts that have played a very prominent role in theoretical discussions in Italy, serve as the thematic foci around which the collection orbits, as it seeks to define the historical and geographical particularity of these notions as well their continuing impact on an international debate. The volume also covers the debate around ‘weak thought’ (pensiero debole), the feminist thinking of sexual difference, the re-emergence of political anthropology and the question of communism. The contributors provide contrasting narratives of the development of post-war Italian thought and trace paths out of the theoretical and political impasses of the present—against what Negri, in the text from which the volume takes its name, calls ‘the Italian desert’. Contents: Antonio Negri, 'The Italian Difference' Pier Aldo Rovatti, 'Foucault Docet' Gianni Vattimo, 'Nihilism as Emancipation' Roberto Esposito, 'Community and Nihilism' Matteo Mandarini, 'Beyond Nihilism: Notes Towards a Critique of Left-Heideggerianism in Italian Philosophy of the 1970s' Luisa Muraro, 'The Symbolic Independence from Power' Mario Tronti, 'Towards a Critique of Political Democracy' Alberto Toscano, 'Chronicles of Insurrection: Tronti, Negri and the Subject of Antagonism' Paolo Virno, 'Natural-Historical Diagrams: The ‘New Global’ Movement and the Biological Invariant' Lorenzo Chiesa, 'Giorgio Agamben's Franciscan Ontology' Further information may be found here: http://www.re-press.org/content/view/66/38/.

CFP: "Italian Thought Today: Biopolitics, Nihilism, Empire," School of European Culture and Languages, University of Kent, April 5-6, 2008.

Against the background of a recent and widespread resurgence of Italian contemporary thought, and Italian leftist political theory in particular, the aim of this conference is twofold. First, the conference intends to explore the notions of biopolitics, Empire, and nihilism as elaborated in the recent works of some of the most important Italian living philosophers. Secondly, and more importantly, this conference aims to assess the impact of these notions on academic fields as diverse as political theory, economics, cognitive science, sociology, and literature. "Italian Thought Today" therefore aspires to promote an interdisciplinary dialogue across the humanities and social sciences that should at the same time also problematise the philosophical notions mentioned above in light of their application to a non-philosophical domain. Is Negri's idea that the globalisation of world markets has led to a progressive decline in the sovereignty of nation-states useful to explain the Realpolitik of today's diplomacy? How can Vattimo's emancipatory concept of "active" nihilism be challenged by the "passive" nihilism that seems to pervade much of contemporary Italian popular culture? Shouldn't Agamben's analyses of the politics of life be expanded in order to include detailed economical considerations? Although the notions investigated in this conference have lately been the object of much attention, the novelty of this conference lies in its intention to contextualise them beyond the boundaries of philosophical discourse. This conference will bring together some of the protagonists of today's Italian philosophical scene, a number of well-established critics of their work, as well as a number of leading scholars from across the humanities and social sciences who, in their recent research, have been confronting themselves with the concepts of biopolitics, Empire, and nihilism. Confirmed speakers:

• Professor Gianni Vattimo (Professor of Theoretical Philosophy, University of Turin, Italy): [title t.b.a.]
• Professor Roberto Esposito (Professor of Theoretical Philosophy, Istituto Scienze Umane, Naples, Italy): Totalitarianism and Biopolitics
• Dr Sergio Benvenuto (Psychoanalyst and Senior Researcher, Institute for Cognitive Sciences and Technologies, Italian Council for Scientific Research, Rome, Italy): Return to the Real: Philosophy in the Epoch of Bio-Technologies and Bio-Politics
• Professor Andrea Fumagalli (Associate Professor of Economics, University of Pavia, Italy): Ten Theses on Bioeconomy and Cognitive Capitalism
• Professor Timothy Campbell (Associate Professor, Italian Studies, Cornell University, USA): From the Impolitical to the Impersonal: Roberto Esposito's Politics of Life
• Professor Timothy Murphy (Associate Professor, English, University of Oklahoma, USA): Pedagogy of the Moltitude: Negri on Stage
• Dr Jelica Sumic Riha (Senior Researcher, Institute of Philosophy, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia): Giorgio Agamben's Politics of the Remnant
• Dr Matteo Mandarini (Lecturer in Management in the Cultural Industries, Queen Mary University, University of London): Not Fear But Hope in the Apocalyspse
• Dr Alberto Toscano (Lecturer in Sociology, Goldsmiths College, University of London): Abstract Life: The Biopolitical Logic of Capitalism and Empire
• Dr Ozren Pupovac (Researcher in Sociology, Open University / Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, The Netherlands): Machiavelli, Negri, Althusser: Encounters and Detours
• Dr Shane Weller (Reader in Comparative Literature, University of Kent): The Art and Ethics of Distortion: Heidegger, Derrida, Vattimo
• Dr Lorenzo Chiesa (Lecturer in Critical Theory, University of Kent): Homo Sacer: A Franciscan Ontology

Further details are here: http://www.kent.ac.uk/secl/italian/news/index.html.