Italian Theory: Crisis and Conflict

Abstract

My paper aims to trace the Italian radical thought from the Sixties to the present day, from the first operaism to biopolitics, using the Crisis and Conflict categories as a interpretative criteria. Indeed, the nature of each crisis evolved over the period of time considered has set a specific concept and practice of conflict and, therefore, a specific process of political subjectification. It is paradigmatic, for example, the transition from the subject-people to the antagonistic subject of the working class, developing in Italy during the Sixties and Seventies. Unlike the past, today the predominant apparatus of crisis has a biopolitical nature and so it implies the neoliberalism’s axiom that “there is no alternative”, and therefore tends to neutralize the conflict and to marginalize in the precariousness the forms of life that could be constituent expression of it.