At a moment when Anglo-American academic institutions were facing a deep crisis, Italian political philosophy was gaining renewed attention across universities, conferences and cultural institutions. The work of Antonio Negri, Paolo Virno, Christian Marazzi, Sandro Mezzadra, Maurizio Lazzarato, Franco Berardi and many others became central reference points for discussions of labour, biopolitics and the common.
This intellectual circulation was connected to the earlier repression of the Italian autonomist movements and to the resulting diaspora of researchers. Under the broad label Italian Theory, scholars revisited operaismo, biopolitics and the history of collective research. Conferences and publications placed these approaches in conversation with debates on the common, cognitive capitalism and new forms of political organisation.
Yet this reception remained double-sided. Concepts such as cognitive capitalism, co-research, multitude and precarity could be absorbed by academic institutions without necessarily challenging their hierarchies. The history of political repression in Italy, including the trials surrounding Autonomia from 1979 onward, also formed part of the background to the displacement of critical knowledge beyond its original institutional setting.
Genealogy of autonomist materialism
The term Italian Theory was coined in English-speaking academia in analogy with the earlier construction of “French Theory”. One important point of transmission was the 1996 anthology Radical Thought in Italy, while earlier collections had already introduced autonomist writing to readers outside Italy.
The later discussion brought together several lines of thought. One emphasised constituent power and the persistence of antagonism; another examined nihilism, biopolitics and the idea of living thought. Across these differences, Italian philosophy was presented as a tradition attentive to conflict, material conditions and the relation between thought and collective practice.
The crisis of the philosophy of language
The rise of this debate was also linked to the changing place of language in contemporary production. From Marx’s notes on machines to theories of cognitive capitalism, autonomist analysis treated language not only as a philosophical question but also as a productive force within the economy of knowledge.
This perspective helped explain why Italian Theory travelled widely: it offered a materialist account of networked work, communication and the institutions that organise knowledge. It also opened a dialogue with analytical philosophy, continental materialism and newer attempts to understand reality beyond inherited divisions between subject and object.
The ideology of capitalist realism
Other currents interpreted capitalism primarily through ideology, desire and the symbolic structures that shape political perception. This approach was useful for analysing how economic arrangements appear as unavoidable facts, but it could also distance political theory from the concrete organisation of labour and collective struggle.
The contrast between these perspectives was visible in debates on populism and political imagination. A politics of invented enemies could not substitute for attention to the real movements crossing Europe and the Mediterranean. The question was how collective imagination might support organisation without becoming detached from material conditions.
Co-research and the crisis of cognitive capitalism
Italian Theory has also met postcolonial studies, queer theory, network culture and legal research. These encounters suggest that its future cannot be reduced to the canonisation of a national school. The important task is to provincialise every intellectual centre and follow the networks through which concepts are translated, contested and transformed.
Co-research names this effort to rethink the relation between theory and praxis. It questions the fixed separation between the observer and the observed, the specialist and the participant, the university and the movements around it. In an era of financialised education and precarious academic labour, knowledge becomes a field of struggle rather than a neutral resource.