Franco Palazzi
New School for Social Research, Philosophy, Graduate Student
- Intergenerational Ethics, Human extinction, Climate change ethics, Feminist Philosophy, Political Philosophy, Ethics, and 46 moreGlobal Justice, Intergenerational justice, Reification, Comedy, Tragedy (Philosophy), The Morality of Procreation, Democracy, Philosophy, Environmental Sustainability, Feminism, Social Justice, Children and Families, Environmental Ethics, Normative Ethics, Future Generations, Climate Change, Political Theory, Obligations to Future Generations, Anti-Natalism, Consequentialism, Poverty and Inequality, Utilitarianism, Philosophy Of Climate Change, Immigration, Hannah Arendt, Eichmann, Forgiveness, Philosophy of Forgiveness, Natality, Populism, Parrhesia, Judith Butler, Moral Demandingness, Giorgio Agamben, Biopolitics, Émmanuel Lévinas, Capitalism, Necropolitics, Post-Colonialism, Postcolonial Studies, Decoloniality Thought, Border Studies, Visibility/invisibility, Anthropocene, Mourning, and Black Lives Matteredit
On January 25th, 2016 Giulio Regeni, a young Italian graduate student at Cambridge, was kidnapped by local security forces, who later tortured and killed him. Right after, a transnational campaign asking for truth and justice was launched... more
On January 25th, 2016 Giulio Regeni, a young Italian graduate student at Cambridge, was kidnapped by local security forces, who later tortured and killed him. Right after, a transnational campaign asking for truth and justice was launched by Regeni’s fellows at Cambridge, his family, and the Italian Section of Amnesty International, while Rome and Cairo attorneys began their investigations — which are now stuck in the mud: two years later, the call for truth and justice has yet to be answered.
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Reflections on Little Rock (RLR) is one of Hannah Arendt’s most controversial writings. Read from the perspective of the political philosopher, it appears even more contentious than her famous remarks in Eichmann in Jerusalem. In the last... more
Reflections on Little Rock (RLR) is one of Hannah Arendt’s most controversial writings. Read from the perspective of the political philosopher, it appears even more contentious than her famous remarks in Eichmann in Jerusalem. In the last two decades, a number of critical contributions have been published addressing this essay, highlighting how it casts serious doubts on the correctness of Arendt’s dealing with the racial question and, more generally, on the tenability of central elements of her political thought – e.g., her distinction between the political and the social. However, only occasional – and, as I will try to demonstrate, quite imprecise – analyses of the implications of RLR for an understanding of Arendt’s view of judgment have been produced. The aim of the present article is to reread what both Arendt’s position on judgment and its main contemporary reformulation, advanced by Linda Zerilli, imply for the making of political choices in pluralistic societies. Special attention will be also paid to the relation between the particular and the universal in Arendtian thought. In the first section I will reconstruct the main (factual and argumentative) weaknesses of RLR, while in the second a detailed assessment of the criticisms relating RLR and Arendt’s view of judgment will be provided. Finally, in the last section I will discuss at length Zerilli’s conception of feminist judgment.
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This article deals with the intricate relationship between mourning and politics through a close rereading of the role played by the first in Greek tragedy. By showing the constitutive ambiguity of tragic mourning, always oscillating... more
This article deals with the intricate relationship between mourning and politics through a close rereading of the role played by the first in Greek tragedy. By showing the constitutive ambiguity of tragic mourning, always oscillating between inclusive and exclusive effects, the text also offers a critical engagement with the way in which mourning is analyzed in contemporary political theory, especially in the works of Judith Butler. Following some intuitions contained in the writings of the renowned classicist Nicole Loraux, the author claims that, in order to be a radical rather than reactionary political force, mourning should be conceived tragically, as a conflictual element aimed at the disruption of the norms denying grievability to some lives. In this view, mourning's universalizing potential for political solidarity should be read more as a matter of political practice than as the existential substratum of a purported human condition.
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Starting from the recent assassination of Timothy Caughman by a white supremacist in Manhattan and the subsequent demonstrations by anti-racist activists, this article deals with the ways in which the humanity of black lives is being... more
Starting from the recent assassination of Timothy Caughman by a white supremacist in Manhattan and the subsequent demonstrations by anti-racist activists, this article deals with the ways in which the humanity of black lives is being reclaimed in the US. The first section provides a factual background of Caughman's life and death, as well as a focus on the racializing dynamics implicit in some forms of surveillance and violence. In the second section the author offers some critical considerations about analyzing racial violence from the white scholar's perspective, asking what would mean for a white person to join the struggle for the end of racial discrimination. The third section is devoted to an examination of Black Lives Matter as movement turning mourning for ungrievable lives into a politically productive anger that challenges the so called 'respectability politics'. The final part of the essay reconsiders the notion of universality in the light of both the political praxis of Black Lives Matter and its theoretical implications.
Research Interests:
Almost a year ago, Giulio Regeni, a young Italian scholar, was found dead in Cairo, likely killed by local security forces. A year of investigations and red herrings later, the call for truth and justice has yet to be answered. The... more
Almost a year ago, Giulio Regeni, a young Italian scholar, was found dead in Cairo, likely killed by local security forces. A year of investigations and red herrings later, the call for truth and justice has yet to be answered. The purpose of this essay, is to investigate responsibility in this case, while considering the interconnections among strategic factors, economic interests, diplomacy, and the violation of human rights, on both the Italian and the Egyptian sides. We then discuss the political role of memory and remembrance, placing Regeni's story within the broader framework of the Egyptian regime with its (thousands of) victims of torture — asking whether there are ways to remember (and talk about) Regeni's case without obliterate the less visible or completely invisible others, or even to make his story an input for a radical exercise of collective memory, through what we call the logic of exemplarity. Re-narrating Regeni's story, set at the crossroad of different memories and public spheres, can therefore radically undermine our (Western, hegemonic) way of looking at the world and shed light on the murky mapping of responsibilities.
Research Interests: Political Philosophy, Ethics, Human Rights, Postcolonial Studies, Mourning, and 12 moreGiorgio Agamben, Torture, Memory Studies, Social and Collective Memory, Cultural Memory, Judith Butler, Collective Memory, Egyptian Politics, Death, Grief, and Mourning, Italian foreign policy, Exemplarity, and Transnational/Multidirectional Memory
Questo articolo ricostruisce la visione del giudizio formulata da Hannah Arendt in un arco di opere che va da Understanding and Politics (1953) a Willing (apparso postumo nel 1978). Tesi centrale della presente analisi è che, diversamente... more
Questo articolo ricostruisce la visione del giudizio formulata da Hannah Arendt in un arco di opere che va da Understanding and Politics (1953) a Willing (apparso postumo nel 1978). Tesi centrale della presente analisi è che, diversamente da quanto sostenuto dalla maggioranza degli interpreti, il contributo dell'autrice in questo ambito sia di matrice primariamente filosofico-morale. Nel primo paragrafo viene rigettata l'ipotesi di una cesura all'interno della produzione arendtiana sul judging, mentre nel successivo si indagano gli effetti su quest'ultima del processo al burocrate nazista Adolf Eichmann. I paragrafi terzo e quarto ricostruiscono il tortuoso percorso che portò Arendt ad individuare nel giudizio una possibile risposta ad alcuni drammatici interrogativi etici, mentre nel quinto si tenta di dimostrare che le Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy non costituiscono, come solitamente si crede, il nucleo del volume non scritto di The Life of the Mind - il quale avrebbe dovuto avere come tema proprio l' Urteilskraft. L'ultimo paragrafo, infine, sonda alcune possibili implicazioni della lettura delineata sino a quel punto per le ricerche successive.