Ten Theses for an Aesthetics of Politics is an invitation to culture makers, political thinkers of all kinds, and everyday spectators to reconsider their love of the world of appearances. Inspired by Jacques Rancière’s Ten Theses on Politics and work by Hannah Arendt, Stanley Cavell, and Roland Barthes, Davide Panagia offers conceptual provocations that emphasize the sense of conviction one has when facing the frictions of aesthetic experience. Rooted in varied and variable experiences of border crossings, Panagia invites readers to reflect on the relational practices that appearances engender. Forerunners: Ideas First is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital publications. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.
In Rancière’s Sentiments Davide Panagia explores Jacques Rancière’s aesthetics of politics as it informs his radical democratic theory of participation. Attending to diverse practices of everyday living and doing—of form, style, and scenography—in Rancière’s writings, Panagia characterizes Rancière as a sentimental thinker for whom the aesthetic is indistinguishable from the political. Rather than providing prescriptions for political judgment and action, Rancière focuses on how sensibilities and perceptions constitute dynamic relations between persons and the worlds they create. Panagia traces this approach by examining Rancière’s modernist sensibilities, his theory of radical mediation, the influence of Gustave Flaubert on Rancière’s literary voice, and how Rancière juxtaposes seemingly incompatible objects and phenomena to create moments of sensorial disorientation. The power of Rancière’s work, Panagia demonstrates, lies in its ability to leave readers with a disjunctive sensibility of the world and what political thinking is and can be.
The taste of chocolate, the noise of a crowd, the visual impressions of filmic images—such sensory perceptions are rarely if ever discussed in relation to democratic theory. In response, Davide Panagia argues that by overlooking sensation political theorists ignore a crucial dimension of political life. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s and Jacques Rancière’s readings of Kantian aesthetics, Panagia posits sensation as a radical democratic moment of aesthetic judgment. He contends that sensory experience interrupts our perceptual givens, creating occasions to suspend authority and reconfigure the arrangement of a political order. Panagia claims that the rule of narrative governs our inherited notions of political subjectivity and agency, such that reading and writing are the established modes of political deliberation. Yet the contemporary citizen-subject is a viewing subject, influenced by film, photos, and other perceptual stimuli as much as by text. Challenging the rule of narrative, Panagia analyzes diverse sites of cultural engagement including the visual dynamics portrayed in the film The Ring, the growth of festival culture in late-fifteenth-century Florence, the practices of convivium espoused by the Slow Food movement, and the architectural design of public newsstands. He then ties these occasions for sensation to notable moments in the history of political thought and shows the political potential of a dislocated subjectivity therein. Democratic politics, Panagia concludes, involves a taking part in those everyday practices that interrupt our common modes of sensing and afford us an awareness of what had previously been insensible.
Davide Panagia’s Impressions of Hume: Cinematic Thinking and the Politics of Discontinuity is volume fifteen of Modernity and Political Thought, the Rowman & Littlefield series in contemporary political theory. Through close attention to Hume’s theories of sensation, Davide Panagia conceptualizes the modern even more radically (though also more literally) than many of the previous authors in this series. While devoting attention to how a historical thinker such as Hume is read and misread, used and abused in the modern intellectual world, Panagia also focuses on developing a theory of Humean perception and by so doing emphasizes the contemporaneity of Hume’s thought. In what at first seems to be an anachronistic as well as wildly curious claim about a philosopher of the eighteenth century, Panagia holds that Hume was a cinematic thinker.
DIVInvestigates the ways in which thinking and judgment have been represented in political philosophy from Thomas Hobbes to Jacques Ranciere, with an emphasis on the relationship between aesthetic and political representation./div
Understanding democracy through film philosophy and political theory Shining new light on our understanding of cinema’s ways of political thinking, Intermedialities: Political Theory and Cinematic Experience puts modern political theory in conversation with the philosophy of film. Davide Panagia argues that there are no natural laws of association that can guarantee a template for democratic participation, as democracy is predicated not on stabilizing foundations but rather on the formation of expansive collectivities and institutions that are responsive to alterability. Instead, democracy requires a relational ontology, one that he elucidates by turning to philosophers of film like Stanley Cavell, Gilles Deleuze, Miriam Hansen, and Jean-Luc Godard—all of whom have articulated a political aesthetic of cinematic experience that is at once aspectual and compositional. Panagia reads these thinkers alongside a countertradition of modern political thought, represented by David Hume, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Gilbert Simondon. His articulation of cinematic experience thus allows for a political aesthetic that is rooted in the migratory realities of undetermined relations.
The taste of chocolate, the noise of a crowd, the visual impressions of filmic images—such sensory perceptions are rarely if ever discussed in relation to democratic theory. In response, Davide Panagia argues that by overlooking sensation political theorists ignore a crucial dimension of political life. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s and Jacques Rancière’s readings of Kantian aesthetics, Panagia posits sensation as a radical democratic moment of aesthetic judgment. He contends that sensory experience interrupts our perceptual givens, creating occasions to suspend authority and reconfigure the arrangement of a political order. Panagia claims that the rule of narrative governs our inherited notions of political subjectivity and agency, such that reading and writing are the established modes of political deliberation. Yet the contemporary citizen-subject is a viewing subject, influenced by film, photos, and other perceptual stimuli as much as by text. Challenging the rule of narrative, Panagia analyzes diverse sites of cultural engagement including the visual dynamics portrayed in the film The Ring, the growth of festival culture in late-fifteenth-century Florence, the practices of convivium espoused by the Slow Food movement, and the architectural design of public newsstands. He then ties these occasions for sensation to notable moments in the history of political thought and shows the political potential of a dislocated subjectivity therein. Democratic politics, Panagia concludes, involves a taking part in those everyday practices that interrupt our common modes of sensing and afford us an awareness of what had previously been insensible.
Understanding democracy through film philosophy and political theory Shining new light on our understanding of cinema’s ways of political thinking, Intermedialities: Political Theory and Cinematic Experience puts modern political theory in conversation with the philosophy of film. Davide Panagia argues that there are no natural laws of association that can guarantee a template for democratic participation, as democracy is predicated not on stabilizing foundations but rather on the formation of expansive collectivities and institutions that are responsive to alterability. Instead, democracy requires a relational ontology, one that he elucidates by turning to philosophers of film like Stanley Cavell, Gilles Deleuze, Miriam Hansen, and Jean-Luc Godard—all of whom have articulated a political aesthetic of cinematic experience that is at once aspectual and compositional. Panagia reads these thinkers alongside a countertradition of modern political thought, represented by David Hume, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Gilbert Simondon. His articulation of cinematic experience thus allows for a political aesthetic that is rooted in the migratory realities of undetermined relations.
DIVInvestigates the ways in which thinking and judgment have been represented in political philosophy from Thomas Hobbes to Jacques Ranciere, with an emphasis on the relationship between aesthetic and political representation./div
Davide Panagia’s Impressions of Hume: Cinematic Thinking and the Politics of Discontinuity is volume fifteen of Modernity and Political Thought, the Rowman & Littlefield series in contemporary political theory. Through close attention to Hume’s theories of sensation, Davide Panagia conceptualizes the modern even more radically (though also more literally) than many of the previous authors in this series. While devoting attention to how a historical thinker such as Hume is read and misread, used and abused in the modern intellectual world, Panagia also focuses on developing a theory of Humean perception and by so doing emphasizes the contemporaneity of Hume’s thought. In what at first seems to be an anachronistic as well as wildly curious claim about a philosopher of the eighteenth century, Panagia holds that Hume was a cinematic thinker.
In Rancière’s Sentiments Davide Panagia explores Jacques Rancière’s aesthetics of politics as it informs his radical democratic theory of participation. Attending to diverse practices of everyday living and doing—of form, style, and scenography—in Rancière’s writings, Panagia characterizes Rancière as a sentimental thinker for whom the aesthetic is indistinguishable from the political. Rather than providing prescriptions for political judgment and action, Rancière focuses on how sensibilities and perceptions constitute dynamic relations between persons and the worlds they create. Panagia traces this approach by examining Rancière’s modernist sensibilities, his theory of radical mediation, the influence of Gustave Flaubert on Rancière’s literary voice, and how Rancière juxtaposes seemingly incompatible objects and phenomena to create moments of sensorial disorientation. The power of Rancière’s work, Panagia demonstrates, lies in its ability to leave readers with a disjunctive sensibility of the world and what political thinking is and can be.
Ten Theses for an Aesthetics of Politics is an invitation to culture makers, political thinkers of all kinds, and everyday spectators to reconsider their love of the world of appearances. Inspired by Jacques Rancière’s Ten Theses on Politics and work by Hannah Arendt, Stanley Cavell, and Roland Barthes, Davide Panagia offers conceptual provocations that emphasize the sense of conviction one has when facing the frictions of aesthetic experience. Rooted in varied and variable experiences of border crossings, Panagia invites readers to reflect on the relational practices that appearances engender. Forerunners: Ideas First is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital publications. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.
This 2006 book is a controversial reappraisal of the Italian occupation of the Mediterranean during the Second World War, which Davide Rodogno examines within the framework of fascist imperial ambitions. He focuses on the European territories annexed and occupied by Italy between 1940 and 1943: metropolitan France, Corsica, Slovenia, Croatia, Dalmatia, Montenegro, Albania, Kosovo, Western Macedonia, and mainland and insular Greece. He explores Italy's plans for Mediterranean expansion, its relationship with Germany, economic exploitation, the forced 'Italianisation' of the annexed territories, collaboration, repression, and Italian policies towards refugees and Jews. He also compares Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany through their dreams of imperial conquest, the role of racism and anti-Semitism, and the 'fascistization' of the Italian Army. Based on previously unpublished sources, this is a groundbreaking contribution to genocide, resistance, war crimes and occupation studies as well as to the history of the Second World War more generally.
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