Lorenzo Chiesa

Lorenzo Chiesa (born 25 April 1976) is an Italian political philosopher, critical theorist, translator, and professor whose academic research and works focus on the intersection between biopolitics, ontology, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and political theory.

Biography

Chiesa currently serves as Lecturer in Philosophy at Newcastle University in the United Kingdom.[1] Since 2014, he has been Visiting Professor in the M.A. program in Socio-Political Philosophy[2] of the European University at Saint Petersburg and at the Freud's Dream Museum of the East European Institute of Psychoanalysis in Saint Petersburg. Additionally, he serves as Director of the Genoa School of Humanities at the University of Genoa.[3] Previously, he taught at the University of Kent (2006-2014), where he was Professor of Modern European Thought and founded and directed the Centre for Critical Thought. He also held visiting positions at the University of New Mexico, the Institute of Philosophy of Ljubljana, the Italian Institute of Human Sciences of Naples, the American University of Beirut, and Jnanapravaha Center for Cultural Studies of Mumbai.

He is best known for his monographs on the French psychoanalist Jacques Lacan published by MIT Press,[4] and translations into English of essays and other works written by the Italian political philosopher and critical theorist Giorgio Agamben, published by Stanford University Press.[5][6][7] He has also written widely on contemporary French and Italian philosophy, existentialism, biopolitics, Marxism, materialism, atheism, and nihilism.[8][9][10]

Chiesa's philosophical treatise Subjectivity and Otherness (2007), which focuses on Lacan's theory of the subject, has been described as setting "a new benchmark of conceptual rigour within the realm of introductory texts on Lacanian thought".[11] His treatment of the implications of psychoanalytic theory for materialism and atheism in The Not-Two (2016) has been extensively discussed by the Slovenian philosopher and Freudo-Marxist theorist Slavoj Žižek in his monograph Disparities.[12][13] According to the Italian academic and political philosopher Roberto Esposito, Chiesa is "one of the rare philosophers capable of making Lacan’s psychoanalytic apparatus interact with the various languages of continental thought".[14] He has also been referred to as "the leader of a new generation of ‘young Lacanians’, for whom Lacan is primarily a text that needs to be read".[15] Chiesa argues that "psychoanalysis is not intrinsically political" while it is needed to "criticise classical ontology, think new ways in which to approach the question of ontology, and then, from that standpoint, think progressive politics".[16]

Selected bibliography
Authored books and edited volumes
  • The Not-Two. Logic and God in Lacan (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2016)
  • The Virtual Point of Freedom. Essays on Politics, Aesthetics, and Religion (Evanston IL: Northwestern University Press, 2016)
  • Biopolitical Theory and Beyond: Genealogy, Psychoanalysis, Biology, special issue of Paragraph, Volume 39, Issue 1 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016) [edited with Bostjan Nedoh and Marco Piasentier]
  • Italian Thought Today: Bio-economy, Human Nature, Christianity (London and New York: Routledge, 2014) [edited]
  • Lacan and Philosophy: The New Generation (Melbourne: Re.press, 2014) [edited]
  • The Italian Difference: Between Nihilism and Biopolitics (Melbourne: Re.press, 2009) [edited with Alberto Toscano]
  • Subjectivity and Otherness. A Philosophical Reading of Lacan (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2007) [Korean translation, Seoul: Nanjang Publishing (2012), with a new preface] [Chinese translation, Changsha: Hunan University Press (2017)]
  • Antonin Artaud. Verso un corpo senza organi (Verona: Ombre Corte, 2001)
Translated books
  • Giorgio Agamben, What Is Philosophy? (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 2017)
  • Paolo Virno, An Essay on Negation. For a Linguistic Anthropology (London: Seagull Books, 2017)
  • Giorgio Agamben, The Fire and the Tale (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 2017)
  • Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and The Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 2011) [with Matteo Mandarini]
  • Slavoj Žižek, America Oggi: Abu Ghraib e altre oscenità del potere (Verona: Ombre Corte, 2005)
  • Slavoj Žižek, Dello sguardo e altri oggetti. Saggi su cinema e psicoanalisi (Udine: Campanotto, 2004) [with Damiano Cantone]
  • Slavoj Žižek, Il soggetto scabroso – Trattato di ontologia politica (Milan: Raffaello Cortina Editore, 2003) [with Damiano Cantone]

References
  1. Chiesa’s homepage at NU
  2. MA in Socio-Political Philosophy, European University at Saint Petersburg
  3. Chiesa’s faculty page at the Genoa School of Humanities
  4. Lorenzo Chiesa's homepage at the MIT Press
  5. The Kingdom and the Glory
  6. What Is Philosophy?
  7. The Fire and the Tale
  8. WorldCat Identities
  9. Jstor: Lorenzo Chiesa
  10. ScholarGoogle
  11. Derek Hook, “Annual Review of Critical Psychology”, issue 7 (2009)
  12. Slavoj Žižek, Disparities. London – New York: Bloomsbury
  13. Žižek also discusses Chiesa’s work also in The Parallax View. Cambridge MA: MIT Press
  14. Esposito, endorsement for “The Virtual Point of Freedom”
  15. Nobus, endorsement for “Subjectivity and Otherness”
  16. Chiesa, interview by Critical4group, 29 April 2016
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