The Poetics of (Italian) Theory

The purpose of this contribution is to understand Italian Theory as a new wave of the Anglophone genre of discourse that, especially in the US, has gone by the name of “theory.” Discussion takes its cue from Roberto Esposito’s own account of theory at the start of Pensiero Vivente (2010), where he questions the Anglophone assimilation of parts of national philosophical traditions in a linear temporal sequence and, emphasizing geographical and intellectual displacement, disperses theory on a wider plane of circulation where new ideas no longer appear from rupture. When put to the test of the plane of circulation, the impersonal (Terza Persona 2007), which is both a departure from the dominant deconstructive brand of theory and, perhaps, the most controversial notion of Italian Theory, reveals strands of feminist-psychoanalytic thought that have so far been neglected in prevailing views of Italian Theory. Approached from the thinkers of Antigone – Adriana Cavarero, María Zambrano, and Angela Putino – the impersonal salvages and retrieves a thought that understand life in its corporeal dimension, always in relation and in tension with history and context, one that is furthered in the name “living thought.”