Italian Reactionary Thought and Critical Theory ─ An Inquiry into Savage Modernities

In the last decade or so, a wave of Italian thinkers has broken ground for new theoretical inquiries that poignantly interpret the turn to life that characterizes present philosophical research. Italian Reactionary Thought offers a critical intervention into this trend by investigating the centrality of the concept of origin in twentieth-century Italian culture from a feminist perspective. In the wake of the crisis of Western culture, Italy gave rise to fascism as a savage vitalism that incorporated the archaic as it expropriated the feminine dimension of origin. With a critique of the works of theorists Giovanni Papini, Romano Bilenchi, Curzio Malaparte, and a novel appraisal of Carlo Levi, Andrea Righi boldly suggests that it may be possible to understand mortality without turning it into a technology of oppression.

Andrea Righi is the author of Biopolitics and Social Change in Italy: From Gramsci to Pasolini to Negri (2011) and Assistant Professor of Italian and Colorado College, USA.