Flower of the desert / Antonio Negri ; translated by Timothy S. Murphy.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Negri, Antonio, 1933-2023, author.

Contributor:

Murphy, Timothy S., 1964- translator.

Series:

SUNY series in contemporary Italian philosophy.

SUNY series in Contemporary Italian Philosophy.

Standardized Title:

Lenta ginestra. English

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Leopardi, Giacomo, 1798-1837--Philosophy.

Leopardi, Giacomo.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (450 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Albany, New York : SUNY Press, 2015.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Antonio Negri, one of Italy's most influential and controversial contemporary philosophers, offers in this book a radical new interpretation of the nineteenth-century Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi. For Negri, Leopardi is not the bitter, idealistic individualist of conventional literary history, but rather a profoundly materialist thinker who sees human solidarity as the only possible solution to the catastrophes of history and politics. Negri traces Leopardi's resistance to the transcendental idealism of Kant and Hegel, with its emphasis on reason's power to resolve real antagonisms into abstract syntheses, and his gradual development of a sophisticated poetic materialism focused on the constructive power of the imagination and its "true illusions." Like Nietzsche (who admired him), Leopardi provides an alternative to modernity within modernity, expressing a force of rupture and recomposition—a uniquely Italian one—that is as relevant now as it was in the nineteenth century, and which connects to the theory of Empire as the political constitution of the present that Negri has elaborated in collaboration with Michael Hardt.

Contents:

Contents; Translator's Note and Acknowledgements; Translator's Introduction: Leopardi and Us; Notes; Preface to the French Translation (2006); Preface to the First Edition: The European Leopardi; Chapter 1: The Catastrophe of Memory; Time of the Dialectic; Experimenting with the Infinite; The Critical Question; Chapter 2: The Web of Sense; Solid Nothingness; Pain and Desire; Imagining; Chapter 3: Poetics of True Being; Metaphysics of Morals; The Sense of True Being; Grasping Nothingness; Chapter 4: Dialects of Illusion; Irony; or Concerning the Psyche; Deception; or Concerning Knowledge

Sarcasm or Concerning Politics; Chapter 5: A Lyric Machiavelli; The Event of Critique; Ethics as Foundation; Materialism and Poetry; Notes; Index of Leopardi's Works; Index of Names and Terms

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9781438458489

1438458487

OCLC:

927169032