Jacques Rancière: Aesthetics and Its Discontents (2009)

Only yesterday aesthetics stood accused of concealing cultural games of social distinction. Now it is considered a parasitic discourse from which artistic practices must be freed. But aesthetics is not a discourse. It is an historical regime of the identification of art. This regime is paradoxical, because it founds the autonomy of art only at the price of suppressing the boundaries separating its practices and its objects from those of everyday life and of making free aesthetic play into the promise of a new revolution. Aesthetics is not a politics by accident but in essence. But this politics operates in the unresolved tension between two opposed forms of politics: the first consists in transforming art into forms of collective life, the second in preserving from all forms of militant or commercial compromise the autonomy that makes it a promise of emancipation. This constitutive tension sheds light on the paradoxes and transformations of critical art. It also makes it possible to understand why today’s calls to free art from aesthetics are misguided and lead to a smothering of both aesthetics and politics in ethics.

Translated by Steven Corcoran
Publisher Polity, 2009
ISBN 074564631X, 9780745646312
176 pages

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Lorenzo Chiesa, Alberto Toscano (eds.): The Italian Difference: Between Nihilism and Biopolitics (2009)

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’

Publisher: re.press, Melbourne, July 2009
ISBN 0980544076, 9780980544077
Transmission series
Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 2.5 license
180 pages

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Paul Virilio: Speed and Politics (1977/2006)

“Speed and Politics is the matrix of Virilio’s entire work. Building on the works of Morand, Marinetti, and McLuhan, Virilio presents a vision more radically political than that of any of his French contemporaries: speed as the engine of destruction. It presents a topological account of the entire history of humanity, honing in on the technological advances made possible through the militarization of society. Parallel to Heidegger’s vision of technology, Virilio sees speed—not class or wealth—as the primary force shaping civilization. In this ‘technical vitalism,’ multiple projectile—inert fortresses and bunkers, the ‘metabolic bodies’ of soldiers, transport vessels, and now information and computer technology—mutually prosthetize each other in a permanent assault on the world and, through it, on human nature. Written at a lightning-fast pace, Virilio’s landmark book is an split-second, overwhelming look at how humanity’s motivity has shaped the way we function today, as well as a view into what might come of it.”

Keywords and phrases
glacis, total war, Vauban, Gyrovagues, deterritorialization, bourgeoisie, fascist, Clausewitz, dromocratic, Michel Poniatowski, Paris Commune, totalitarian, prosthesis, Alfred Wegener, ancien regime, Marxist, logistical, Sun Tzu, war machine

Originally published as Vitesse et Politique, Editions Galilee, Paris, 1977.

Translated by Mark Polizzotti
Introduction by Benjamin Bratton
Publisher Semiotext(e), 2006
ISBN 1584350407, 9781584350408
174 pages

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