The category of life is considered central to the heterogeneous field known as Italian thought or Italian theory. Its centrality helps explain the outsized role that Italian thinkers like Giorgio Agamben, Rosi Braidotti, Roberto Esposito, and Toni Negri play in international conceptualizations of biopolitics. Scholars have attempted to trace the roots of this emphasis on life back to thinkers such as Vico and Croce, Italian Marxist traditions such as workerism, “imports” like Heideggerian ontology and Foucauldian critique, and even Italy’s geography. These histories fail to interrogate the paradox that Italian thought usually deals with life in abstract terms, rather than with real, embodied lives. Styles of Existence, Italy 1961–1982 offers an alternative genealogy of Italian thought that focuses on the role that philology played in transforming conceptions of life and self in postwar Italy. It argues that the poet and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini and art critic and feminist Carla Lonzi show us what living looks like by applying the tools and concepts of interpretation and criticism they acquired as artists and critics to their own lives. It makes the case for their inclusion in the unofficial canon of Italian thought, and for acknowledging the debts that later philosophical treatments of life owe to Pasolini and Lonzi’s existential attempts to overcome the distance between theory and praxis. Pasolini and Lonzi, both well-known for their polemical contributions to debates about politics, gender, and sexuality in Italy’s long 1968, are discussed here together for the first time. Styles of Existence lays out the theoretical tenets, preferred methodologies, and historical arcs of their life philologies, tracing them across an array of sources including diaries, screenplays, television talk shows, and newspaper columns. Both authors’ projects are examined from a comparatist perspective, which means that they are situated in Pasolini and Lonzi’s cultural and discursive contexts as Marxist and feminist intellectuals, respectively, and in relation to contemporaneous domestic and international trends and debates. Responding to a request by Pasolini that his works be read philologically, chapter one proposes a philological rereading of his corpus that takes into account his love for space and dedication to the irrational. Proposing the notion of “lunar hermeneutics” as a conceptual frame, it demonstrates that Pasolini incorporates tools from philology and stylistic criticism in his social critique and filmmaking in response to changing global and national political landscapes in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and especially the developments of the space race. Chapter two elaborates the features of Pasolini’s project of “Marxist linguistics” in the mid-1960s as a political answer to rapid industrialization and globalization, demonstrating that Pasolini expands the scope of lunar hermeneutics with contributions from semiotics and insights from his work as a filmmaker. Close readings of Pasolini’s aesthetic writings in Empirismo eretico (1972) and his film Uccellacci e uccellini (1966) illustrate the importance of cinema to his revised theory of language and understanding of self. Chapter three examines Pasolini’s collection of political writings, Scritti corsari (1975), as an example of Auerbachian-inspired Weltliteratur, showing that the work is designed as a philological exercise dedicated to the critical preservation of human forms of life threatened with extinction. Turning to Lonzi, chapter four provides the first theoretical and historical account of autocoscienza or self-consciousness making, the feminist, relational practice that Lonzi developed with other members of the group Rivolta femminile in the early 1970s. Lonzi formulates autocoscienza as a subversive mediation of critical and postcolonial theory as well as of modern art, and envisions an “unforeseen subject” who refuses to comply with the misogyny and inequalities inherent to prevailing models of liberational subjectivity. Chapter five reassesses Lonzi’s rejection of Hegelian and psychoanalytic theories of recognition, and her engagement with Alexander Kojève’s anthropomorphizing rendition of Hegel, to argue that autocoscienza provides its own affirmative feminist theory and practice of recognition focused on listening and responsiveness among equals. Chapter six considers the diary’s central role in Lonzi’s philological project of self by linking it to autocoscienza and her theory of clitorality. It argues that the sexed dimension of autocoscienza is what makes viable a transition from theory to praxis, and from emphasis on the collective to the self. By focusing on the diary, it restores the contributions of “Sara,” another Rivolta member, and the influence of hagiographical writings on Lonzi’s conception of female freedom. Finally, chapter seven unearths Lonzi’s obsessive “dialogue” with Pasolini in her “feminist diary” Taci, anzi parla [Hush, No Speak] (1978) as a case study in the practice of autocoscienza. Lonzi’s disagreements with Pasolini about culture, sexuality, and women’s rights, and their largely overlapping views on freedom and expression, are situated in the context of Italian debates about abortion in the mid-1970s. This chapter argues that Lonzi’s relation to Pasolini transforms her understanding of self and helps her refine and recalibrate the goals of autocoscienza. In conceiving of the self and selfhood in philological rather than philosophical terms, Pasolini and Lonzi challenge theories of the subject predominant in critical theory and offer precursors to contemporary concepts like Agamben’s homo sacer. Their aesthetics of existence require a reconsideration of the scope of philology in the twentieth century, the parameters of political theory, the legacy and historiography of Italy’s long ’68, and our understanding of what it means to live a meaningful human life. The detailed recovery of Lonzi’s intensive engagement with Pasolini and his work, finally, points to an unlikely source of influence on radical Italian feminism.

Present Perfect is part intellectual history of the discourse of humanism in twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century Russian culture, and part cultural history of the New Man in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia, looking primarily at works of Soviet and post-Soviet fantastika (science fiction and fantasy). The study employs a critical posthumanist methodology drawn from the work of Jean-François Lyotard, and his concept of “rewriting” modernity (here transformed into “rewriting humanism”), and the posthumanist theorization of scholars like Rosi Braidotti and Stefan Hebrechter. The first chapter covers the pre- and post-revolutionary periods, the second chapter the post-Stalinist period, and the third the post-Soviet. The first chapter looks at critiques of humanism in the non-fictional works of religious philosophers and writers (Fedorov, Berdiaev, Ivanov, Merezhkovsky), Soviet ideologues and writers (Lunacharsky, Trotsky, Bukharin, Gorky), and some writers who fall between the two poles (Blok, Mandelshtam, Lezhnev), and covers texts published between 1906 and 1934. The second chapter deals with the works of the Strugatsky brothers’ Noon Universe series (1961-86) and the figure of the “Progressor” as the New Man. The third chapter looks at novels by three authors: Petrushevskaya’s Nomer Odin (2004), Pelevin’s S.N.U.F.F. (2011), and Sorokin’s Ice trilogy (2002-05). These works attest to the inextricable interpenetration of the posthuman with the human, of posthumanism with humanism, of the post-Soviet with the Soviet. The study demonstrates how humanism and posthumanism function dialectically: in the best-case scenario, they negate one another to come to a more whole understanding of the human; in the worst-case scenario, this dialectic creates an increasingly more exclusive humanism that reserves the title of ideal subject for fewer and fewer. Moreover, Present Perfect argues that the New Man (that “ideal subject”) in Soviet and post-Soviet fiction is best conceptualized as a field of competing discourses, which fall along three lines of development: the animal-man, the machine-man, and the god-man, each with their own critical orientation toward humanism. In both the Soviet and post-Soviet context, writers like the Strugatsky brothers, Petrushevskaya, Pelevin, and Sorokin employ a critical posthumanism to demonstrate, on the one hand, how the New Man is used as a tool for discursive domination that denies otherness, and on the other, how the New Man can be reconceptualized as a tool for a liberatory ethics that affirms it.

This study focuses on the investigation and deconstruction of the phenomena of the South African dystopian society, as reflected in the novels of Lauren Beukes and films by Neill Blomkamp. The characteristics and signifiers of a uniquely South African dystopian society are established and investigated through a posthuman lens. The theoretical framework of this study is principally concerned with the critical posthuman writings of Rosi Braidotti, Donna Haraway and, to a lesser extent, Cary Wolfe. Feminism and post-colonialism, and their influences on posthuman theory, are applied as the secondary theoretical framework, in this study. The study is practice led, with the study of the literature serving as mutually informative to the execution of a body of work centred on the dystopian theme. The paintings are intended to be metonyms for the wide range of manifestations of social decline evident in contemporary South African narratives. / Arts and Music / M.A. (Visual Arts)