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  • Introduction:Franco-Italian Political Theory
  • Janell Watson

The American engagement with late twentieth-century French philosophy and criticism initially focused on questions of language and text. Barthes, Derrida, and Bataille became the darlings of literary studies, then of emerging disciplines such as film, media, and cultural studies. As Bourdieu and Foucault, and subsequently Deleuze and Badiou, moved toward center stage, the Anglo-American locus of French theory expanded into the humanistic social sciences. With this social and political turn in the American appropriation of French theory, Italian thinkers have risen to prominence. Machiavelli and Gramsci have of course been canonical figures for some time, but they have more recently been joined by Italian counterparts such as Giorgio Agamben and Antonio Negri. Radical politics (at least in its Europhile version) has at the same time expanded beyond May 1968 and the Situationists to embrace Potere Operaio and Autonomia. These epochal activist events brought together Negri, Deleuze, and Guattari, both in writing projects and in political interventions in Bologna, Paris, and elsewhere.

The "Franco-Italian Political Theory" section in this issue of the minnesota review highlights recent expressions of this evolving Franco-Italian political dialogue. We begin with a conversation between Roberto Esposito and Jean-Luc Nancy, who discuss the future of philosophy in general as well as of political philosophy in particular; both have become leading thinkers of Biopolitics, as inaugurated by Foucault and continued by Agamben and Negri. Next are commentaries by Esposito and Nancy on the occasions of, respectively, the French and Italian translations of each other's works—Esposito's on community and Nancy's on deconstructing Christianity. The Franco-Italian dialogue concludes with an interview in which Federico Luisetti and Timothy Campbell (Esposito's English-language translator) discuss the past and future of Italian and French philosophy, with an emphasis on Italy's centrality in the elaboration of a political philosophy of life.

The activist dimension of Franco-Italian political theory is discussed by Jason Smith, who examines the critique of Italian workerist and autonomist movements by the contemporary French political collective Tiqqun. Giuseppina Mecchia examines the cultural specificity of the Anglo-American reception of the Empire trilogy by Negri and Michael Hardt, who wrote an Italian Studies [End Page 69] dissertation on Passolini, published a first book on Deleuze, and met Negri in Paris, where the latter was living in exile. Although this special feature section is entitled "Franco-Italian Political Theory," it is perhaps really about the Franco-Italian-American theory triangle. [End Page 70]

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