The Italian Cultural Institute, in collaboration with l’École de Langues dell’Université Laval and the Québec Committee of the Dante Alighieri Society, are pleased to present the conference given by the Italian philosopher Diego Fusaro, entitled “Antonio Gramsci: the dissent of thought“.
Thursday January 17, 2019 at 7pm
Université Laval
Pavillon Charles De Koninck, Hall 3155
Québéc
The conference will be held in Italian
Antonio Gramsci is, above all, a fruitfully “untimely” author who is dissonant with respect to the spirit of our time. Indeed, what underlies the view that the present time of economic fanaticism has of Gramsci is the desire to remove his revolutionary passion, the ideal of the creation of a “future city” that is detached from the nightmare of capitalism and of its universal commodification. His timely untimeliness is the very reason for the failure of every perspective that today aspires to lay claim to Gramsci’s thought and to assimilate his message.
Diego Fusaro (Turin, 1983) teaches History of Philosophy at the Institute for Superior Strategical and Political Studies in Milan, of which he is also a member of the scientific steering committee. Graduated in Turin in History of Philosophy, he gained a PhD in Philosophy of History at the San Raffaele University of Milan in 2011 with a thesis on Reinhart Koselleck. He has been doing research at the University of Bielefeld in Germany. In 2017 he obtained the national academic teaching qualification as associate professor in History of Philosophy. Trained by Costanzo Preve and Gianni Vattimo in Turin, he is a Philosophy of History’s scholar; structures of historical temporality, focusing in particular on Fichte, Hegel, Marx’s thoughts and German “Conceptual history” are also his favorite subjects. He deepens the verbalization and praxis of a “critical history of ideas” as a discipline that, diachronically, takes into considerations rifts and discontinuities that arise in the transmission of the cultural and symbolic forms of given Culture; and that, synchronously, looks carefully to the connection coming at every historic moment between currents of thought and cultural codes on one hand, and the objective conditions of production and power, on the other. In order to picture out a grid rich in co-implications, he assumes as a privileged subject of analysis, the “exchanging zone” between ideas and reality, between conceptual and socio-political systems.
For this reason, in his research he focuses on the galaxy of authors (Foucault, Blumenberg, Koselleck) who have tried to elaborate a methodology for the history of ideas, metaphors and concepts, nevertheless the origins, formation and the semantic slipping of concept of “History” from ancient times to today, are complementary subjects of analysis. Fusaro’s attentions are directed to German idealism, its preparatory thinkers (Spinoza) and its followers (Marx), with particular attention to the Italian currents of thought (Gramsci, Gentile). In July 2013, the daily paper La Repubblica has qualified him as one of the three most promising young European philosophers. He’s in charge of the philosophical series I Cento Talleri edited by Il Prato Publishing and is curator of the internet project Philosophy and its Heroes (www.filosofico.net). In addition, he is in charge for the Library of Philosophy of History, series by Mimesis Publishing and the philosophical magazine Koine. From 2008 to 2012 he was in the editorial office of Bompiani series in History of Philosophy directed by Giovanni Reale (Pensiero Occidentale – Classics of Western Thought and Testo a Fronte – Parallel Texts). He is columnist for La Stampa and Il Fatto quotidiano, both daily Italian papers. He likes to describe himself as an “independent student of Hegel and Marx”. In 2014, he had a speech on Simmel at the POMS International conference at the University of Singapore. In 2016 he held a seminar on Gramsci at Harvard University. Several of his works are translated in different languages. In 2017 he founded the association and magazine L’Interesse Nazionale (www.interessenazionale.net). Among his most famous books: Bentornato Marx! (Bompiani, 2009), Essere senza tempo. Accelerazione della storia e della vita (Bompiani, 2010), Minima mercatalia. Filosofia e capitalismo (Bompiani, 2012) Il futuro è nostro. Filosofia dell’azione (Feltrinelli, 2014), Idealismo e prassi. Fichte, Marx e Gentile (Melangolo, 2013), Antonio Gramsci, La passione di essere nel mondo (Feltrinelli, 2015), Pensare altrimenti. Filosofia del dissenso(Einaudi, 2017).