Davide Tarizzo's Books

The Morals of Life

Biology, Biopolitics, Bioethics

By: Davide Tarizzo

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The Morals of Life

Biology, Biopolitics, Bioethics

By: Davide Tarizzo

A theory of biopolitical power that updates Foucault, illustrating the moral implications of modern evolutionary theory. In our day, the individual has become “a life,” the singular of the plural noun “population.” From this new understanding of what it means to be human comes a new form of biopolitical power with a new set of moral rules. In The Morals of Life, moral philosopher Davide Tarizzo presents a theoretical framework for understanding this transformation of the old-fashioned “government of living beings,” as Michel Foucault characterized biopolitics, into a new government of modular living beings, as well as a template for making sense of biopolitical power that operates on the scale of populations rather than individuals. Tarizzo traces population thinking, the notion of modular optimization, and other conceptual keystones of the current biopolitical regime (an “ethopolitical regime,” in the author’s terms) to their origins in twentieth-century biological thought—more precisely, and critically, evolutionary theory. Neo-Darwinism, Tarizzo argues, should be seen not only as a scientific paradigm but also as a philosophy per se, because it is evolutionary theory that today provides an answer to the old philosophical question: What is man? This new kind of philosophy, his book suggests, largely determines the way in which people look at themselves and society. Not only does it contribute to designing new technologies of power, but it also fosters subjection to the new ethopolitical regime.

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285

Publisher

MIT Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0262549034

ISBN 13

9780262549035

Political Grammars

The Unconscious Foundations of Modern Democracy

By: Davide Tarizzo

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Political Grammars

The Unconscious Foundations of Modern Democracy

By: Davide Tarizzo

Do we need to be a "people," populus, in order to embrace democracy and live together in peace? If so, what is a populus? Is it by definition a nation? What exactly do we mean by nationality? In this book, Davide Tarizzo takes up the problem of modern democratic, liberal peoples—how to define them, how to explain their invariance over time, and how to differentiate one people from another. Specifically, Tarizzo proposes that Jacques Lacan's theory of the subject enables us to clearly distinguish between the notion of personal identity and the notion of subjectivity, and that this very distinction is critical to understanding the nature of nations whose sense of nationhood does not rest on any self-evident identity or pre-existent cultural or ethnic homogeneity between individuals. Developing an argument about the birth and rise of modern peoples that draws on the American Declaration of Independence of 1776 and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen of 1789 as examples, Tarizzo introduces the concept of "political grammar"—a phrase that denotes the conditions of political subjectification that enable the enunciation of an emergent "we." Democracy, Tarizzo argues, flourishes when the opening between subjectivity and identity is maintained. And in fact, as he compellingly demonstrates, depending on the political grammar at work, democracy can be productively perceived as a process of never-ending recovery from a lack of clear national identity.

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328

Publisher

Stanford University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1503615324

ISBN 13

9781503615328

Life

A Modern Invention

By: Davide Tarizzo

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Life

A Modern Invention

By: Davide Tarizzo

The word “biology” was first used to describe the scientific study of life in 1802, and as Davide Tarizzo demonstrates in his reconstruction of the genealogy of the concept of life, our understanding of what being alive means is an equally recent invention. Focusing on the histories of philosophy, science, and biopolitics, he contends that biological life is a metaphysical concept, not a scientific one, and that this notion has gradually permeated both European and Anglophone traditions of thought over the past two centuries. Building on the work undertaken by Foucault in the 1960s and ‘70s, Tarizzo analyzes the slow transformation of eighteenth-century naturalism into a nineteenth-century science of life, exploring the philosophical landscape that engendered biology and precipitated the work of such foundational figures as Georges Cuvier and Charles Darwin. Tarizzo tracks three interrelated themes: first, that the metaphysics of biological life is an extension of the Kantian concept of human will in the field of philosophy; second, that biology and philosophy share the same metaphysical assumptions about life originally advanced by F. W. J. Schelling and adopted by Darwin and his intellectual heirs; and third, that modern biopolitics is dependent on this particularly totalizing view of biological life. Circumventing tired debates about the validity of science and the truth of Darwinian evolution, this book instead envisions and promotes a profound paradigm shift in philosophical and scientific concepts of biological life.

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Page Count

280

Publisher

U of Minnesota Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1452955875

ISBN 13

9781452955872

Life

A Modern Invention

By: Davide Tarizzo

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Life

A Modern Invention

By: Davide Tarizzo

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280

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U of Minnesota Press

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ISBN 10

1452955875

ISBN 13

9781452955872

An Absurd Vice

A Biography of Cesare Pavese

By: Davide Lajolo

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An Absurd Vice

A Biography of Cesare Pavese

By: Davide Lajolo

An Absurd Vice, the critical biography of Cesare Pavese by his friend and fellow-writer Davide Lajolo, has been celebrated in italy since its publication there in 1960. With well-balanced affection and blame, it presents a portrait of the prize-winning author of The House on the Hill, Work Wearies, and other books of fiction and poetry, dedicated editor at the Einaudi Publishing House, and renowned translator of such classics as David Copperfield and Moby-Dick, who was yet unable to shake what he ruefully called his 'absurd vice'-a lifelong obsession with suicide. e

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Page Count

300

Publisher

New Directions Publishing

Published Date

ISBN 10

0811208508

ISBN 13

9780811208505

Political Grammars

The Unconscious Foundations of Modern Democracy

By: Davide Tarizzo

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Political Grammars

The Unconscious Foundations of Modern Democracy

By: Davide Tarizzo

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Solve jigsaw puzzle

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Page Count

328

Publisher

Stanford University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1503615324

ISBN 13

9781503615328

The Morals of Life

Biology, Biopolitics, Bioethics

By: Davide Tarizzo

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The Morals of Life

Biology, Biopolitics, Bioethics

By: Davide Tarizzo

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Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

285

Publisher

MIT Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0262549034

ISBN 13

9780262549035

Book's by Davide Tarizzo

The Morals of Life

The Morals of Life

Political Grammars

Political Grammars

Life

Life

Life

Life

An Absurd Vice

An Absurd Vice

Political Grammars

Political Grammars

The Morals of Life

The Morals of Life

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