Books in the The Italian List series

A philosophical exploration of what capitalistic societies truly mean for the individual. A short vade mecum for unrepentant materialism, The Idea of World collects three essays by Italian philosopher Paulo Virno that are intricately wrapped around one another. The first essay, "Mundanity," tries to clarify what the term "world," as referred to as the perceptual and historical context of our existence, means-both with and against Kant and Wittgenstein. How should we understand expressions such as "worldly people," "the course of the world," or "getting by in this world"? The second, "Virtuosity and Revolution," is a minor political treatise. Virno puts forward a set of concepts capable of confronting the magnetic storm that has knocked out the compasses that every reflection on the public sphere has relied on since the seventeenth century. The third, "The Use of Life", is the shorthand delineation of a research program on the notion of use. What exactly are we doing when we use a hammer, a time span, or an ironic sentence? And, above all, what does the use of the self-of one's own life, which lies at the basis of all uses-amount to in human existence? Presenting his ideas in three distinct vignettes, Virno examines how the philosophy of language, anthropology, and political theory are inextricably linked.

Kore, also called Persephone and referred to poetically by the Greeks as "the unspeakable girl," was the daughter of Demeter and Zeus who was abducted by Hades and made queen of the netherworld. This title presents three richly detailed treatments of the myth of Kore.

From the idyll of his Sardinian childhood to the transformative experience of the anti-Fascist resistance, and from postwar militancy to the dismal regression of Italian culture, the author captures memories that are intensely personal and inseparable from political and intellectual experience.

A translation of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben's work, in which the author notes that academic research has lingered on the "pagan goddess," while the concept of "elemental spirit," ignored by scholars, is vital to the history of iconography.

An introduction to Franco Fortini, a Jewish communist and a major figure in postwar Italian intellectual life. It is against those who love to rush to the aid of the victors, against the widespread and racist contempt for Arabs, and against the celebration of modern civilization and technology that Israel embodies.

A collection of essays on the mysteries of the body from one of Italy‿s leading postwar communist intellectuals. Politician, translator, and journalist Rossana Rossanda was the most important female left-wing intellectual in post-war Italy. Central to the Italian Communist Party‿s cultural wing during the 1950s and ‿60s, she left an indelible mark on the life of the mind. The essays in this volume, however, bring together Rossanda‿s reflections on the body‿how it ages, how it is gendered, what it means to examine one‿s own body. The product of a decades-long dialogue with the Italian women‿s movement (above all with Lea Melandri, a vital feminist writer who provides an afterword to the current volume), these essays represent an honest and raw meeting between communist and feminist thought. Ranging from reflections on her own hands through to Chinese cinema, from figures such as the Russian cross-dressing soldier Nadezhda Durova to the Jacobin revolutionary Theroigne de Mericourt, here we see Rossanda‿s fierce intellect and extraordinary breadth of knowledge applied to the body as a central question of human experience.

Originally published in 1965, this volume was immediately judged to be one of the main contributions to the intellectual life of the Italian Sixties. Three years later, in 1968, it became clear that it had anticipated many of the themes of the New Left and the student revolt. Ex-partisan, poet, literary critic and teacher, Fortini had been immersed for more than twenty years in the cut and thrust of ideological debate. In these pages, besides discussing problems of cultural organization and the consciousness industry, he described the end of militant anti-fascism and the alliance between progressivism and literature, the end of the social mandate of writers and the beginning of a 'revolution of civilization'. In writing, Fortini did not intend to speak to the young but the young, perhaps in the spirit of contradiction, listened to him. Apart from some of the crucial interventions into the literary and critical debates of the Sixties, the volume includes essays on Kafka, Pasternak, Spitzer, Auerbach, Lukacs, Lu Xun, Proust and Brecht.