Suchergebnisse

AbstractMcCormick's book engages with the theoretical and political positions discussed by the Italian philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli about five centuries ago, and, in particular, the creation of the tribunes of the plebs. In ancient Rome, plebeian power had been institutionalised through the creation of tribunes. According to McCormick, a similar institution would offer a legitimate forum for expression to the people in modern democracies. In fact, following Machiavelli's suggestions, this would contribute to the implementation of a new form of democracy, more respectful of the people and more eager to defend values such as freedom and independence from the influence of the powerful and the rich. In this review, Filippo Del Lucchese comments on McCormick's book from a Marxist point of view. One of the strongest points of the book is the discussion of the opposition between democracy and republicanism. Over the last decades, the latter has in fact been absorbed into the sphere of influence of the Cambridge School, and neutralised, or at least defused its most interesting and radical aspects. McCormick's attempt to repoliticise the Machiavellian discourse is indeed praiseworthy, yet, by mainly focusing on the 'institutionalisation' of popular power, McCormick fails to discern the most radical elements of Machiavelli's thought. From this angle, the review discusses McCormick's use of the category of 'class' and offers a different perspective on the revolutionary dimension.

Starting with Gilbert Simondon's theory of the individual (singular and collective) and its genesis, developed in his book L'individuation psychique et collective, this article discusses the principle of individuation and the critique of finalism. Simondon distinguishes and yet strictly binds together the two individuations that he calls psychique and collective, which is necessary, he argues, to avoid the double failure of psychologism and sociologism, by which he means the doctrines that assign a fixed (ontological) identity to man and his mind, on the one hand, and to society, on the other. Both psychologism and sociologism, according to Simondon, fail to understand their only reality, which is first and foremost relational. Influenced by Simondon's ontology, Gilles Deleuze's concept of nomadism is taken up in order to develop the idea of a principle of individuation intended as a critique of teleology. The question of individuation is thus referred to its ontological roots in the conflict between Aristotelian metaphysics (priority of act over power [potentia] and of final cause over efficient and material causes) and Spinozist metaphysics (power [potentia] existing only in act, absolute immanence, radical criticism of every teleology). This essay shows what is at stake between the two authors and what Deleuze could not have derived from Simondon, which Del Lucchese calls a Spinozistic problematic.

In Spinoza, what I call (adapting a phrase from J.-L. Nancy) the 'Being Individual Multiple' is the multitudo. Its form of life is Democracy, understood as the autonomous and conflictual organization of collective dynamics and not one form of government among others. Combining an original mode of argumentation with a critical discussion of opposing interpretations, I maintain that democracy is the translation into politics of the third and highest kind of knowledge in Spinoza, intuitive science. I argue moreover that the multitudo self-organized in a democracy has the capacity to experiment and express a different rationality with respect to the singular individual. Wisdom and democracy thus converge to give life to something unknown and original in western political modernity.

Résumé Entre la construction d'une monstruosité étatique absolue, censée anéantir toute rébellion par la crainte et la menace (d'un côté) et la monstrification de la part du Pouvoir de tout «autre» rebelle, hérétique, contestataire (de l'autre), l'auteur indique la possibilité d'un troisième concept de la monstruosité. Une monstruosité qui échappe à cette alternative pour affirmer son altérité radicale, monstrueuse non pas par son apparence mais par sa revendication d'autonomie par rapport à toute norme transcendante et finaliste, dans l'immanence absolue de sa condition actuelle et puissante.

Preliminary Material -- Introduction /Filippo Del Lucchese , Fabio Frosini and Vittorio Morfino -- 1 Il genere e il tempo delle parole: dire la guerra nei testi machiavelliani /Jean-Louis Fournel -- 2 'Uno piccolo dono': A Software Tool for Comparing the First Edition of Machiavelli's The Prince to Its Sixteenth Century French Translations /Jean-Claude Zancarini -- 3 Of 'Extravagant' Writing: The Prince, Chapter IX /Romain Descendre -- 4 'Italia' come spazio politico in Machiavelli /Giorgio Inglese -- 5 Machiavelli the Tactician: Math, Graphs, and Knots in The Art of War  /Gabriele Pedullà -- 6 Lucretian Naturalism and the Evolution of Machiavelli's Ethic /Alison Brown -- 7 Corpora Caeca: Discontinuous Sovereignty in The Prince  /Jacques Lezra -- 8 The Five Theses of Machiavelli's 'Philosophy' /Vittorio Morfino -- 9 Tempo e politica: Una lettura materialista di Machiavelli /Sebastián Torres -- 10 Imitation and Animality: On the Relationship between Nature and History in Chapter XVIII of The Prince  /Tania Rispoli -- 11 Prophetic Efficacy: The Relationship between Force and Belief /Thomas Berns -- 12 Prophecy, Education, and Necessity: Girolamo Savonarola between Politics and Religion /Fabio Frosini -- 13 'Uno Mero Esecutore': Moses, Fortuna, and Occasione in The Prince  /Warren Montag -- 14 Machiavelli and the Republican Conception of Providence /Miguel Vatter -- 15 Machiavelli, Public Debt, and the Origin of Political Economy: An Introduction /Jérémie Barthas -- 16 Plebeian Politics: Machiavelli and the Ciompi Uprising /Yves Winter -- 17 Machiavelli's Greek Tyrant as Republican Reformer /John P. McCormick -- 18 Essere Principe, Essere Populare: The Principle of Antagonism in Machiavelli's Epistemology /Etienne Balibar -- 19 The Different Faces of the People: On Machiavelli's Political Topography /Stefano Visentin -- 20 Machiavelli Was Not a Republicanist – Or Monarchist: On Louis Althusser's 'Aleatory' Interpretation of The Prince  /Mikko Lahtinen -- 21 Lectures machiavéliennes d'Althusser /Mohamed Moulfi -- 22 Machiavelli after Althusser /Banu Bargu -- 23 Gramsci's Machiavellian Metaphor: Restaging The Prince  /Peter D. Thomas -- Index /Filippo Del Lucchese , Fabio Frosini and Vittorio Morfino.

Alexandre Matheron is considered one of the most important interpreters of Spinoza's philosophy in the 20th century. These 20 essays, translated into English for the first time, focus on ontology, knowledge, politics and ethics in Spinoza, his predecessors and his contemporaries.