The materiality of the post-national: “Europe” in contemporary Italian radical thought (1995-2004)

Abstract

This article reconstructs the European project boosted in the last years by groups of intellectuals who make up the spectrum of contemporary, post-operaista, radical Italian Left. This project constitutes one of the principal motives for political and cultural combat. In dispute with euro-sceptic, retro national-statist visions, and with moderate Europeism still being represented by figures such as Habermas and Derrida, this idea of Europe is characterized by its parting from a reading of the contemporary processes of recomposition of the lines of class conflict centered in the emergency of a new subject: the multitude of migrants, precarious and workers of intellect. On the basis of these material processes, these circles found the horizon of the post-national. In all other respects, this idea of Europe is only possible – we are once more reminded of it by the material process of the circulation of migrant labor – on the condition that it is constituted as a “minor Europe”, a space that only acquires meaning in the interior of a world oriented to also display a post-national matrix.