Karl Baldacchino reviews An Introduction to Contemporary Italian Thought

Tim Christiaens, Joost de Bloois, and Stijn De Cauwer. An Introduction to Contemporary Italian Thought: From Posthumanism to Cyberfascism. New York: Bloomsbury, 2025. 248 pp.

Review by Karl Baldacchino

11 June 2026

If the first half of the twentieth century was shaped by the intellectual dominance of German thought, and the later decades by the global influence of French thought, the turn of the twenty-first century has seen the growing international prominence of what is now commonly called Italian thought. This development, however, had been taking shape for decades in the shadow of those earlier traditions. Figures such as Giorgio Agamben, Toni Negri, Roberto Esposito, Adriana Cavarero, and Silvia Federici have become central interlocutors in debates on biopolitics, labor, identity, and political subjectivity. Still, the elusiveness of Italian thought as a category is a familiar point within the tradition. Is it a coherent philosophical formation, a retrospective label applied to disparate thinkers, or merely a publishing phenomenon that followed the global success of a handful of authors?

An Introduction to Contemporary Italian Thought enters this terrain with the ambition of offering an orientation to a tradition that, even as it has grown in influence, has also become conceptually diffuse. The authors, Tim Christiaens, Joost de Bloois, and Stijn De Cauwer, position the book as an introduction to this diverse landscape, highlighting both the significance and productive deployment and progress of Italian theory in contemporary debates. At the same time, the book stands as a contribution to the field in its own right, as the authors frequently offer original readings of key arguments and, in doing so, subtly extend the boundaries of established theories and concepts.

The book is structured around five themes, and an introduction that immediately grapples with the question of what Italian thought is by arguing that it can be deemed as a “practice,” or better still an “interventionist thought” (p. 2). This is the essence of the “Italian Difference,” which authors such as Lorenzo Chiesa and Alberto Toscano have long termed a distinctive way to treat politics, society, and life as inseparable.[1] In other words, unlike traditions centred on epistemology or language, the Italian strand tends to treat life, political praxis, and conflict as primary philosophical problems that it engages with through an array of different fields and academic disciplines. Never confined by the borders of philosophy, the authors write that “Italian thought often ventures further into pathways open by other traditions, transforming and recontextualizing ideas in the present” (p. 24).

Chapter 1 focuses on the well-known theme of biopolitics in the context of the not-so-distant global pandemic. The authors primarily examine the disappearance of this concept from the debates and analyses surrounding the pandemic at the time, arguing via Esposito that the term may have been exhausted, thereby producing a desensitizing effect. Chapter 2 draws on the work of Rosi Braidotti and more recent Italian thinkers such as Emanuele Coccia and Federico Luisetti to offer an alternative reading of biopolitics that, while recognizing the importance of classical formulations, takes a more contemporary and holistic approach attentive not only to human life but also to the environment and nonliving entities.

Chapter 3 turns to the Marxist-inspired notion of the general intellect, a concept that, not without controversy among Marxist scholars, has continued to animate the work of several Italian thinkers since the years leading to and following the lungo Sessantotto (long ’68) period. The authors foreground both Karl Marx’s reflections and later interventions by Italian thinkers such as Negri and Maurizio Lazzarato on the reappropriation of machines from instruments of control to potential weapons of resistance. Here the discussion might have benefited from the notably absent Algorithms of Resistance: The Everyday Fight against Platform Power (2024) by Tiziano Bonini and Emiliano Treré, which would have complemented the chapter’s concerns in highlighting contemporary forms and potentialities of resistance within platform capitalism.

Chapter 4 and 5 are closely related insofar as they address, respectively, what the authors term cyberfascism and the intertwined questions of identity, migration, and postcoloniality. In the contemporary context, fascism and social media appear increasingly entangled, giving rise to what the authors describe in detail as a cyberfascist ecosystem that generates new tensions and challenges around the politics of identity and subjectivity. In particular, the authors adopt a critical stance towards the populist resonances that occasionally surface in Agamben’s work, which are indeed reminiscent of certain current conservative political discourses. Against this backdrop, the authors assert how Italian thought must seek out “new alliances and constellations” but still praise it for its openness to new ideas and responsiveness to emerging global challenges, exemplified by the work of Franco “Bifo” Berardi and Sandro Mezzadra (p. 168).

Italian thought has often emerged from moments of crisis, and it is precisely this dynamic that the book captures with particular clarity. If it has become an indispensable reference point for thinking politics and life in the twenty-first century, as Christiaens, de Bloois, and De Cauwer remind us, this is largely due to its remarkable Entwicklungsfähigkeit, or its capacity to renew itself in response to shifting historical conditions. For readers of social, political, and critical theory, the book serves both as a concise guide to some of the most influential conceptual innovations of recent decades and as an invitation to keep one’s pulse on ongoing debates and emerging ideas out of the Italian peninsula.

[1] The Italian Difference: Between Nihilism and Biopolitics, ed Lorenzo Chiesa and Alberto Toscano (Melbourne, 2009)