Living Thought: The Origins and Actuality of Italian Philosophy

By Roberto Esposito and Zakiya Hanafi

The work of contemporary Italian thinkers, what Roberto Esposito refers to as Italian Theory, is attracting increasing attention around the world. This book explores the reasons for its growing popularity, its distinguishing traits, and why people are turning to these authors for answers to real-world issues and problems. The approach he takes, in line with the keen historical consciousness of Italian thinkers themselves, is a historical one. He offers insights into the great "unphilosophical" philosophers of life—poets, painters, politicians and revolutionaries, film-makers and literary critics—who have made Italian thought, from its beginnings, an "impure" thought. People like Machiavelli, Croce, Gentile, and Gramsci were all compelled to fulfill important political roles in the societies of their times. No wonder they felt that the abstract vocabulary and concepts of pure philosophy were inadequate to express themselves. Similarly, artists such as Dante, Leonardo Da Vinci, Leopardi, or Pasolini all had to turn to other disciplines outside philosophy in order to discuss and grapple with the messy, constantly changing realities of their lives.

For this very reason, says Esposito, because Italian thinkers have always been deeply engaged with the concrete reality of life (rather than closed up in the introspective pursuits of traditional continental philosophy) and because they have looked for the answers of today in the origins of their own historical roots, Italian theory is a "living thought." Hence the relevance or actuality that it holds for us today.

Continuing in this tradition, the work of Roberto Esposito is distinguished by its interdisciplinary breadth. In this book, he passes effortlessly from literary criticism to art history, through political history and philosophy, in an expository style that welcomes non-philosophers to engage in the most pressing problems of our times. As in all his works, Esposito is inclusive rather than exclusive; in being so, he celebrates the affirmative potency of life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Release date: Dec 31, 2012
• ISBN: 9780804786485

Roberto Esposito

Roberto Esposito is Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa. His many books in English include Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy and Two: The Machine of Political Theology and the Place of Thought (Fordham).

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Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

English translation ©2012 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.

Living Thought: The Origins and Actuality of Italian Philosophy was originally published in Italian under the title Pensiero vivente: Origine e attualità della filosofia italiana ©2010, Giulio Einaudi Editore S.p.A.

The translation of this work has been funded by SEPS—SEGRETARIATO EUROPEO PER LE PUBBLICAZIONI SCIENTIFICHE. Via Val d’Aposa 7, 40123 Bologna, Italy. Email: [e-mail]. Web site: http://seps.it/.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Esposito, Roberto, 1950-author.

[Pensiero vivente. English]

Living thought : the origins and actuality of Italian philosophy / Roberto Esposito ; translated by Zakiya Hanafi.

pages cm. -- (Cultural memory in the present)

Originally published in Italian under the title Pensiero vivente: Origine e attualità della filosofia italiana.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-0-8047-8155-8 (cloth : alk. paper) --

ISBN 978-0-8047-8156-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-8047-8156-5 (e-book)

1. Philosophy, Italian.   I. Hanafi, Zakiya, 1959-translator.   II. Title.   III. Series: Cultural memory in the present.

B3551.E8713 2012

195--dc23

2012032595

Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 11/13.5 Adobe Garamond

LIVING THOUGHT

The Origins and Actuality of Italian Philosophy

Roberto Esposito

Translated by Zakiya Hanafi

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

STANFORD, CALIFORNIA

Cultural Memory in the Present

Mieke Bal and Hent de Vries, Editors

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

Note on the Book’s Title

I. The Italian Difference

Italian Theory

Italian Geophilosophy

Another Modernity

PASSAGE I: THE VERTIGO OF HUMANISM

II. The Power of the Origin

The Order of Conflict

The Infinite Life

The Body of History

PASSAGE II: IN THE VORTEX OF THE BATTLE

III. Philosophy/Life

History and Unhistory

Nothing in Common

Science and Life

PASSAGE III: INFERNO

IV. Thought in Action

Philosophy and Resistance

In interiore homine

Thought-World

PASSAGE IV: THE UNBEARABLE

V. The Return of Italian Philosophy

Immanence and Antagonism

Origin and History

The Mundanization of the Subject

Illustrations

1. Leonardo da Vinci, study of a horseman from the Battle of Anghiari

2. Leonardo da Vinci, study of battle with horsemen and foot soldiers for the Battle of Anghiari

3. Leonardo da Vinci, study for the head of two warriors for the Battle of Anghiari

4. Leonardo da Vinci, study for the head of a soldier for the Battle of Anghiari

5. Anonymous, copy of the Battle of Anghiari (Tavola Doria)

6. Peter Paul Rubens (based on an anonymous drawing from the late sixteenth century), copy of the Battle of Anghiari

Note on the Book’s Title

The Italian term attualità does not have a single equivalent in English. We have chosen to use the cognate actuality in the title due to the difficulty of finding another English term that contains the multiple meanings of the Italian word. Attualità not only refers to contemporariness and to matters of current relevance, but also to something that is in atto, meaning underway or in progress. It further calls to mind the notion of action (praxis) and the name of Giovanni Gentile’s philosophy (Attualismo), which has been translated historically as Actualism. What Esposito seeks to convey is the fundamental character of Italian philosophy as un pensiero in atto: a thought in action that is also a philosophy of action and which is relevant to its time. This usage of actuality is also consonant with its standard meaning in the context of Scholastic philosophy: Italian thought is real, effectual, and effective rather than potential or virtual. In the text, these different nuances are rendered variously depending on the context.

First Chapter

The Italian Difference

Italian Theory

1. After a long period of retreat (or at least of stalling), the times appear to be favorable again for Italian philosophy. The signs heralding this shift, in a way that suggests something more than mere coincidence, are many. I am not just referring to the international success of certain living authors, among the most translated and discussed writers in the world, from the United States to Latin America and Japan to Australia, leading to a resurgence of interest in Europe as well. There have been other cases of this sort in the past, but they have involved individuals instead of a horizon: a group that in spite of its diversity of issues and intentions somehow remains recognizable by its common tone. This is precisely what has been taking shape in recent years, however, with an intensity that recalls the still recent landing of French theory on the coasts and campuses of North America.¹ Like what happened with other philosophical cultures—in the early decades of the twentieth century in Germany, between the 1960s and 1980s in France, and in the last two decades of the twentieth-century in the English-speaking world—Italian philosophy is now entering into an analytical and critical relationship with the dominant features of our time, to a greater degree than other traditions of thought. Of course, as often happens in the circuit of ideas, what appears to distinguish a given conceptual horizon as independent also arises out of a process of contamination and elaboration of currents previously set in motion elsewhere, but which only in this new tonal register take on the thematic stability and conceptual force necessary to expand beyond their national confines onto a much wider scene.

However that may be, the perception of Italian philosophy outside Italian borders has changed in a matter of a few years. If we take as a point of comparison three anthologies of Italian contemporary thought appearing in English over the last twenty-five years, the perspective they point to appears to be on a continual rise. In the first, published in the late 1980s with the title Recoding Metaphysics: The New Italian Philosophy, the Italian difference that the editor rightly stresses in comparison with analytic philosophy as well as other strands of continental thought is attributed to two deficiencies, one linguistic and the other historical:² first, to the meager expansive capacity of the Italian language compared to English (and to French for a long time as well); and second, to the autarkic closure of Italian culture during fascism. Even after the Second World War, when an attempt was made to be less provincial by absorbing foreign-derived concepts and vocabulary, it was precisely due to this eclectic attitude that Italian thought is said to have demonstrated insufficient theoretical independence and originality. Its only distinguishing feature, dating back to the work of Giambattista Vico, later taken up and developed mainly by Benedetto Croce, would seem to be a kind of conservatively toned historicism, recognizable in its tired, weakened form in the post-Heideggerian hermeneutics of Gianni Vattimo. Even Vattimo’s polemical confrontation with Emmanuele Severino, which the editor of the anthology sees as the most significant outcome of the Italian philosophical debate, somehow remains conditioned by this historicist cast, resolving itself in an opposing stance on the nature of becoming. In a nutshell, rather than opening up a new set of problems, Italian philosophy is judged to merely translate into its historicist vocabulary hermeneutic or metaphysical questions inherited from European thought.

Already in the second anthology, which appeared in the mid-1990s with the less neutral title Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, the change in interpretative framework is evident not only from the choice of predominantly political philosophy topics and writers—in itself symptomatic of a different perception of the specificity of Italian thought—but also by a different assessment of its role.³ Directly influenced by the political and social struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, but also by the reflux that followed in the next decade, for the editors, Italian theory is a sort of privileged laboratory that other cultures lacking in these experiences, and therefore further behind in their development of political theory, can tap into for innovative paradigms. The implicit conclusion that follows from this view turns the previous assessment on its head: precisely because Italy has lagged behind in completing its process of modernization due to the cultural blockade erected by fascism, Italian thought is now better equipped than others to deal with the dynamics of the globalized world and of the immaterial production that characterizes the postmodern era.

The title of the third, most recent anthology reflects a focus that is increasingly honed on The Italian Difference Between Nihilism and Biopolitics. The line of difference is shifted still further forward, based not only on the often antagonistic relationship with the unique political landscape of contemporary Italy but also on specific topics.⁴ Nihilism and biopolitics are presented by the editors as the two axes along which Italian philosophy tends to enter into critical confrontation with its time and, at least in some ways, to guide international debate. While it is true that they both originated elsewhere—nihilism in Germany and biopolitics in France—the fact remains that the work of Italian thinkers on these subjects is precisely what allowed, or caused, their growing diffusion. This is especially true for the category of biopolitics, now permanently installed at the heart of international philosophical, political, and juridical discussion.⁵ Coined in the mid-1970s by Michel Foucault, only at the end of the late 1990s did it achieve the broad currency that has made it one of the world’s major themes in the philosophy of the new century. Why? Why, after twenty years of latency, during which it remained largely inactive, did this paradigm have to go through a number of Italian interpretations (albeit diverging or even at odds with each other) to find such transnational resonance? The editors of the anthology respond by referring to the particular capacity of Italian thought to situate itself at the point of tension between highly determined historical-political events and philosophical categories of great conceptual depth. The peculiarity of contemporary Italian thought resides precisely in this unprecedented double vision: a split gaze focused on the most pressing current events [attualità] and at the same time on the dispositifs that come with a long or even ancient history. Nihilism and biopolitics, in the unsettling, antinomic way they are articulated, are an exemplary distillation of this principle. While they stand on the shifting line of contemporariness, they overlook a metapolitical ridge that makes them adaptable to a wide variety of contexts. Although they come with a sophisticated theoretical apparatus, they have become part of such diverse disciplines as cultural studies and the domain of aesthetics, legal hermeneutics, and gender discourses. By projecting the archaic onto the heart of the present [l’attuale], or by exposing the present to the archaic, these categories diagonally connect knowledge and power, nature and history, technology and life. From this point of view, the Italian difference appears less as the recurring typology of a given tradition than a sort of semantic commutator that cuts across the entire panorama of contemporary thought, altering it in the process.⁶

2. But to get a feeling for the Italian difference and to understand the reasons behind its growing reception we need to start outside it—namely, from the general difficulty that contemporary philosophy is experiencing at this stage. It has been widely accepted that contemporary philosophy has been showing signs of uncertainty and even weariness for some time now. A radial look at its most traveled trend lines provides immediate confirmation of this impression. The analytic tradition, in its various branches and internal transformations, is engaged in a complex process of replacing its paradigms due to an obvious inability to expand its audience beyond a narrow circle of specialists. Critical theory, the dominant producer of German thought along with hermeneutics, does not appear to be in any better condition, an impression that is also confirmed by a quick comparison between the earliest and latest productions of the glorious Frankfurt school. But even the health of French deconstruction in its poststructuralist and postmodern versions doesn’t look any rosier. Still mourning the death of its most prestigious members, from Jean-François Lyotard to Jacques Derrida, although continuing to produce texts of some importance, it tends to shut itself up in a circuit of formulations that are often brilliant but ultimately repetitive and even self-referential. This is not to say, of course, that these schools are entirely devoid of vital elements or that one or both of them cannot reinvigorate their themes and conceptual lexicons. But it seems to me undeniable that something more than a setback is involved.

What is the underlying cause? I don’t think it is just a question of communication difficulties or generational change; rather, it is something deeper, something that in a certain sense, despite the glaring differences, unifies these currents into the same transcendental horizon that, for reasons we will now examine, is foreign to much of Italian philosophy. I am referring to the dominant role the sphere of language plays—in different ways, of course—in all three of these traditions. While analytic philosophy was created explicitly for the critical analysis of philosophical language—of its improper deviations from ordinary language, or at least from given procedural rules that were definable from time to time—hermeneutics views the interpreting subject as always immersed in a pregiven linguistic situation which determines all its types of practices. Similarly, deconstruction, as it was intended by Derrida in particular, also starts from the assumption of the linguistic nature of all experience and seeks in writing the original key to dismantle the founding categories of Western knowledge by calling into question their hegemonic potential. At issue in each of these strands of thought is the problem of meaning in its relation to a possible and, to some extent, inevitable metaphysical closure: for analytic philosophy this is caused by logical-linguistic errors that threaten logical thought; for hermeneutics by the alleged transparency of a truth that by its very nature evades simple evidence; while for deconstruction it is ultimately coextensive with the entire history of thought. From this point of view, the three fundamental vectors of contemporary philosophy are all strongly marked, and possibly even constituted, by the linguistic turn that surreptitiously connects seemingly disparate or even contrastive conceptual chunks like those of Gottlob Frege and Martin Heidegger. For analytic philosophers, the original content, the raw material, is the set of linguistic statements; hermeneutics locates the possibility of interpretation at the heart of a given language; while deconstruction situates itself at the point of intersection and tension between speech and writing. Whether expressed more in an ontological sense, in an epistemological sense, or in a textual sense, the primacy of language is presumed in all these perspectives. Even the most recent shift toward cognitive psychology and the neurosciences that analytic philosophy has been making while going through its identity crisis remains essentially in the same field, extended now to the language of the brain, understood in its turn as a form of natural hardware. Regardless of which perspective you have on the philosophical quadrant of our time, from logic to phenomenology and pragmatics to structuralism, language appears to be the epicenter where all the trajectories of thought converge. In a perspective that pushes forward even beyond Heidegger’s ontology to involve the spheres of action (in Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas, but also in John Austin and John Searle), subjectivity (in Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur), and the unconscious (in Jacques Lacan), language can even be considered the dwelling of Being. Lacan is not the only thinker who believes that language is what speaks in human beings—and not the other way around—since the signifier precedes and determines the signified. Language is not our tool; rather, it is the only access through which we can connect ourselves to the occurrence of Being, the very place where we dwell, or to use different but equivalent wording, toward which we are always on the way.

But as far as the incipient crisis of all these various linguistic or meta-linguistic philosophies are concerned, even more important is the antiphilosophical (or at least postphilosophical) consequence they simultaneously presuppose and entail. The fact that the entirety of contemporary philosophy (in some respects from Hegel onward, certainly beginning with Wittgenstein and Heidegger, continuing along a bumpy track that arrives at Theodore Adorno, Richard Rorty, and Vattimo) places itself in the self-confuting framework of its own end,⁷ yielding to that attraction for the post- that dominates the entire semantics of late modernity, is precisely connected with its subordination to the linguistic sphere. Once language, given its irremediable fragmentation into dialects or families of expressions, declares its partial nature—namely, a structural inability to formulate models of universal or universalizable rationality—the only room left to philosophy is its own self-negation or weakening pursuit. Reading in succession three influential texts that are largely symptomatic of this skeptical attitude of contemporary philosophy—Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition, Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, and La crisi della ragione (The crisis of reason), a collection of essays published in Italy in the wake of similar tendencies—provides a significant cross-section: the present task of philosophy is apparently a self-critical refutation of its own hegemonic claims to a Real that is located outside its reach.⁸ Whence its necessarily negative tones, in both a general sense and a technical sense: contemporary philosophy affirms itself only by negating itself. Because any hold on its object is elusive in principle, contemporary philosophy can only grasp it through a reverse approach, through its unsaid or unthought. Which is why, according to a dialectical formula that has become a commonplace, everything that is utterable presupposes silence, just as every representation presupposes a point of invisibility lying behind it. Far from creating its own concepts, a philosophy of this sort must confine itself to dismantling them or hunting them down without ever being able to reach them, in a chase at the end of which looms its own dissolution.⁹ For this reason philosophical criticism regarding the outside world can only be expressed in the form of its own internal crisis. Once the possibility of thought, and therefore also of action, becomes dependent on the transcendentality of language, it is as if the philosophical experience were continuously sucked into the same entropic vortex it seeks to escape.

3. If this is indeed the horizon in which contemporary thought experiences both its depth and its limit, then a large part of Italian philosophy can be said to lie outside it. This is not to suggest that the sphere of language doesn’t constitute a terrain of philosophical investigation in Italy. On the contrary, starting from its origins with Dante and then throughout the period of Humanism up to Vico, language has been one of its privileged topics of reflection, contemplated from a unique angle that sometimes interweaves thought and poetic experience, as in the case of Giacomo Leopardi. Hermeneutics and semiotics have also found fertile ground in Italy, with authors like Luigi Pareyson, Umberto Eco, Carlo Sini, Enzo Melandri, and Diego Marconi. Moreover, the most recent Italian thought takes language as a given that is so constitutive of the human being that it can be identified as the point of suture between nature and mutation, invariance and difference, biology and history. In this last formulation, however, a movement can be discerned that shifts the terms of the discourse in a new direction: rather than being examined in its autonomous structure, language is situated within a broader horizon, described in terms of biology,¹⁰ or of ontological realism.¹¹ The same shift that analytic philosophy has made toward the sciences of the brain expresses a need that in some respects is similar. Likewise, Italian feminism, initially engaged in a rediscovery of symbolic language, has begun to sense the inadequacy of the linguistic horizon with respect to something irreducibly corporeal that protrudes outside its confines, whether viewed as metaphorical or metonymic in nature.¹² It is as if at some point it began to occur to people, or it simply occurred, that there was a new turn coming after the linguistic one—in some ways encompassing it—that as a whole belonged to the paradigm of life. Already in the 1960s, after all, remarkably ahead of his times, Foucault had set out to problematize the transcendental primacy of language. He began by identifying two other a priori notions making up the post-Classical episteme, namely, labor and life. But above all, he transformed them from simple transcendentals, in the Kantian sense of the term at least, into something slightly different because of their deep implication in the historical dimension. Of course life, labor, and language were the conditions of possibility for the formation of the nascent disciplines of biology, economics, and linguistics. And yet they were not located in the sphere of subjectivity; rather, they stood in a complex relationship with the world of history, one marked by inherence and tension. For example, with regard to life, it is obvious that Georges Cuvier was still far from formulating what with Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and then Charles Darwin would later become evolutionary theory. Yet, with Cuvier, for the first time, historicity penetrated deeply into the language of nature and into the constitution of the living being:

It is true that the Classical space, as we have seen, did not exclude the possibility of development, but that development did no more than provide a means of traversing the discreetly preordained table of possible variations. The breaking up of that space made it possible to reveal a historicity proper to life itself: that of its maintenance in its conditions of existence. Cuvier’s ‘fixism’, as the analysis of such a maintenance, was the earliest mode of reflecting upon that historicity, when it first emerged in Western knowledge.¹³

Therefore, not only did history intervene in the definition of life—as its mode of expression—history was what, in its concreteness, made possible the new epistemic importance of life. History turned out to be a presupposition of what it presupposed: it was immanent to its own transcendental condition of experience. The result of this paradox (in semantic terms as well) that inscribed the a priori within its a posteriori was the transcendental-historical, a notion used by Foucault as a genuine oxymoron.

Without pursuing the matter to the extent it deserves, and indeed, taking another tack altogether, it can be said that contemporary Italian philosophy pushes the dialectic of the quasi-transcendentals, as Foucault himself called them,¹⁴ to its densest point of synthesis. The act of questioning the transcendental primacy of language—assumed as such by the two strands of hermeneutics and analytic philosophy—is not meant to deny its importance, but rather to reconstruct the relationship that binds the primacy of language on the one hand to the biological substratum of life and on the other hand to the shifting order of history. To this end, however, another passage is required, situated precisely at the point of intersection between life and history that is constituted by politics. In this case, too, it is necessary to pass by way of Foucault, not only via the archeological route, but also via the genealogical one opened up before him by Nietzsche. From this point of view, not only are the conditions of possibility of the various disciplines of knowledge at stake, but also their performative effects. If human life, including the function of language that defines it as such, has become entirely historical, this means it is subject to political practices intended to transform it, and thus, inevitably, it is a matter for conflict. Coming from this angle, contemporary thought—still stuck in the postmodern celebration of its own end—may just find some leverage to resume functioning in an affirmative mode. Of course the opening referred to here is only one of the possible exits out of the long-standing impasse of contemporary thought. A number of thinkers who have already embarked on this path, in North America as well as in Europe, have achieved significant results. But Italian theory, as expressed by individuals and as a whole, seems more prepared to follow it to the end, if only because in some way the route is already familiar to them, imprinted as it is in their genetic heritage. The impact force of contemporary Italian philosophy also stems from its deep rootedness in a tradition constructed from its beginnings around the categories under discussion. Since its inception between the early sixteenth and the first half of the eighteenth centuries, life, politics, and history have been the axes of flow for a reflection that has largely remained extrinsic to the transcendental fold in which the most conspicuous, influential area of modern philosophy remains enveloped to this day. Unlike the tradition between Descartes and Kant, which was founded in the constitution of subjectivity or theory of knowledge, Italian thought came into the world turned upside down and inside out, as it were, into the world of historical and political life.

This movement toward the outside has long been identified by critics as the most consistent trait of the Italian philosophical tradition. Both the characteristics usually attributed to it, the epithet of civil philosophy¹⁵—elaborated upon primarily by Eugenio Garin and his school—and its artistic or literary style,¹⁶ are premised on it. The point of tangency between them, it could be said, lies in the unique propensity of Italian philosophy for the nonphilosophical.¹⁷ Both its civil commitment and its contamination from other styles of expression result in a rupture with the specialized, self-referential lexicon that characterizes the philosophical discourses of other traditions. While the privileged object of these traditions is philosophy itself—its internal forms and structurations—the content of Italian thought is what presses up against its exterior, somehow urging it to step outside itself to look onto the external space.¹⁸ Remo Bodei has rightly talked about impure reason, meaning thought that is not inward-looking but open to the influences of people and the force of circumstances.¹⁹ In this tendency can be discerned the terms of a singular contradiction: by opting for engagement with the outside world instead of examination of consciousness or the interior dialogue, Italian philosophy has always appeared poised to cross over its own boundaries; but this overstepping is precisely what allows it to achieve a perspective that would otherwise be unattainable. The impression we get from the works of Vincenzo Cuoco, Giacomo Leopardi, and Francesco de Sanctis (and, in other respects, from the earlier ones of Machiavelli and Vico as well) is that in order to express an object that is unrepresentable in the professional jargon of philosophy, Italian thinkers employ a lexicon culled variously at different times from politics, history, and poetry, which is then reconstituted in each of these disciplines but in an inverted form. The need to step outside for all these writers arises from the difficulty they come up against when using abstract or logical-metaphysical thought to grasp something that, being effectively in motion, inevitably tends to elude them.

Italian Geophilosophy

1. Before attempting a definition, though, we need to address a preliminary question, suspended until now, since the plausibility of our entire inquiry depends on it. Does such a thing as Italian philosophy exist? Even before answering that, is it legitimate to think of philosophy as belonging to a nation or, at least, to a territory? Or would it be more accurate to say that philosophy, like mathematics, medicine, or music, has no local features because the indispensable element of its performance lies in a universal dimension? Leaving open for the moment the most controversial problem, that of nationhood, I think it is undeniable that some connection exists between philosophy and territory. What I mean by territory is not so much a specific geographical area encompassed within stable boundaries, as a set of environmental, linguistic, tonal characteristics connoting a specific mode that is unmistakable when compared to other styles of thought. Thinking, writes Gilles Deleuze, is neither a line drawn between subject and object nor a revolving of one around the other. Rather, thinking takes place in the relationship of territory and the earth.²⁰ Deleuze actually goes farther. Not only is geography internal to philosophy, to the point that it overlaps to form a lexical compound that can be dubbed geophilosophy, it spreads open a horizontal, or more precisely, a diagonal plane that dissects the vertical, more canonical one formed by historical sequence. Not in the sense of abstractly opposing it from an ahistorical attitude, but in the sense of modeling history itself into a geohistorical form, as Fernand Braudel termed it in his studies on the Mediterranean. What does this mean? That geography is not limited to providing history with elements, features, localizing foci—it is not only history’s spatial component—but something less obvious and more incisive. Geography is what tears history away from the claim of simple progression but also from the regressive cult of origins, to trace out lines of flight, undiscovered passages, and sudden diversions that tamper with the order of time by overturning the usual relationships. What we are referring to are the effects, at first sight elusive—the incidence of a milieu, a climate, an atmosphere, alluded to earlier by Nietzsche while seeking the key to the various European philosophies—that Deleuze calls becoming, intending them as something that enters back into history but does not belong to it. Of course, since becoming stands outside the pillars of history, it should remain indeterminate; it should literally lose its conditions of existence. But it is not, in essence, historical: it obeys a different logic, one of unpredictability and surprise, deviation and infringement. Here, following on Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditations, Deleuze picks up on something we will come across again in the course of our study, having to do with the presence of a nonhistorical element in history, like a sort of limit or point of resistance that, precisely by its untimely presence, challenges the process of historicization, though without interrupting it.

If the geophilosophical gaze breaks up the straight line of historical sequence, then historicity, in its turn—understood as the continuous proliferation of unrepeatable events—is refracted, and destabilizes geographical localization. This is because Deleuze’s reference to the earth does not allude to the fixity of a picture frozen in time, or to the inevitability of ethnic or even anthropological roots. On the contrary, it implies a complex dialectic in which the territory is only one pole, opposed by a corresponding, simultaneous movement of deterritorialization: an outwardly-turning movement that breaks up territorial boundaries. Outside this double-pulsed oscillation, going from the center to the periphery and vice versa, there can be no true philosophy. All modern thought from Hegel to Heidegger, through Hölderlin, Fichte, and Husserl, has played a decisive role in a circuit of appropriation and expropriation in which ancient Greece has constituted the privileged object.²¹ Without being able to retrace these events, we know the fatal outcome to which continental philosophy was led by the predominance of territorialization over the principle of decentralization, when Heidegger himself went so far as to state that since German is the only modern language of thought, if the French want to think, they have to do it in German.²² In this case, the movement of belonging to the earth was absolutized over the opposite course, in the end circumscribing it within the closed borders of the national state. In his Addresses to the German Nation (1806), on the other hand, Johann Gottlieb Fichte had connected the viability of the Deutschtum to the defense of the Ursprache that sprang from the deep powers of the earth, united to them by an original bond, which alone would enable a true national destiny. This assumption is what allowed him to say, foreshadowing Heidegger’s claim, that

the German, if only he makes us of all his advantages, can always be superior to the foreigner and understand him fully, even better than the foreigner understands himself, and can translate the foreigner to the fullest extent. On the other hand, the foreigner can never understand the true German without a thorough and extremely laborious study of the German language, and there is no doubt that he will leave what is genuinely German untranslated.²³

Contrary to this regressive and exclusive circle inside of which European philosophy has remained trapped on more than one occasion, we must keep a firm grasp of the semantic difference between territory and nation. Geophilosophy, the territorializing—and therefore, also always deterritorialized—characterization of thought is no way identical to philosophical nationalism—or even to a strictly national variety of philosophy. I would go even further: nothing like the constant oscillation between inside and outside—brought to its greatest intensity by Hölderlin, when he identified difference from oneself as the principle that modernity needs to absorb from ancient Greece—is more opposed in principle to all forms of philosophical nationalism. All the more curious, then—curiously lazy—the evaluation that Deleuze cursorily provides of Italian philosophy compared to English, French, and German thought. It may even be dramatically true that Italy and Spain lacked a ‘milieu’ for philosophy, so that their thinkers remained ‘comets’; and they were inclined to burn their comets.²⁴ But a negative response does not follow from this, in the case of Italy, unless the different natures of territory and nation are confused when defining that lack, as Deleuze seems to do: Italy in particular presented a set of deterritorialized cities and a maritime power that were capable of reviving the conditions for a ‘miracle.’ It marked the start of an incomparable philosophy. But it aborted, with its heritage passing instead to Germany (with Leibniz and Schelling).²⁵ What is clear, in this brief description, is the original plurality and ultimate extroversion of Italian thought. We can agree with both these passages, but not with the judgment that connects them. The least we can say is that what resonates in Deleuze’s assessment is an undue identification between estrangement and exhaustion: according to this view, the move into Europe would signal the end of Italian philosophy. But what if this escaping outside itself—its continual deterritorialization—is the most originally living feature of Italian thought?

2. The most striking thing about Deleuze’s assessment is not so much the idea that Italian philosophy experienced an interruption at the end of the early modern period as that it was transferred to Germany via the direction that runs from Leibniz to idealism. Far from being original, this idea continues an interpretative tradition that culminated in the thesis championed by Bertrando Spaventa