Biopolitics and Social Change in Italy From Gramsci to Pasolini to Negri [Paperback]

By placing the social dimension of labour at the base of the discourse of life, this book engages with the work of key intellectual figures and reconstructs a critical genealogy of the notion of biopolitics from the point of view of twentieth and twenty-first century Italy.Introduction: The Biopolitical and Its Biopolitics? Factory Councils, Fordism, and Gramsci: a Workers' Biopolitics and Its Demise? The Personal is (Bio)Political! Italian Marxist Neo-feminism and its Historical Trajectory? Pasolini and the Politics of Life of Neocapitalism? 1968-1977: the Movement and its Biopolitical ?lan? A Biopolitical Multitude and its Planet: Antonio Negri and Paolo Virno

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 politilór