Davide Tarizzo

Davide Tarizzo (1966) is an Italian philosopher and professor, notable for his academic research and works on political theory and Post-Kantian European philosophy, with particular attention to biopolitics, psychoanalysis(Freud, Lacan), and French theory. He currently serves as professor of moral philosophy at the University of Salerno.

Among his main publications: Introduzione a Lacan (2003), ''Il pensiero libero. La filosofia francese dopo lo strutturalismo (2003), Giochi di potere. Sulla paranoia politica (2007) La vita, un'invenzione recente (2010; translated as Life: A Modern Invention. Minnesota University Press, 2017), and Political Grammars. The Unconscious Foundations of Modern Democracy'' (Stanford University Press, 2021).

His contributions have been featured in several significant publications on contemporary Italian philosophy that have been released in the recent years, including but not limited to: Italian Thought Today (Routledge, 2014), Italian Biopolitical Theory and Beyond (Paragraph, 2016), and The Bloomsbury Italian Philosophy Reader (Bloomsbury, 2022).

Life: A Modern Invention
The book, originally published in Italian, explores the meaning and the history of "a new concept of life in modern era." In particular, "Tarizzo offers a philosophical supplement to what he deems Foucault's general tendency to default to the scientific field when tracking life's enunciation. His monograph thus collates around the discourse of life philosophy that remains at the margins of Foucault's archaeology." The idea behind the work is that this concept is typically modern, and that therefore it sees the light at a certain point in the history of Western thought together with the theory that studies its properties: biology. "Tarizzo is not calling for a philosophy of organism, or a phenomenology of embodiment. Rather, he wants to engage with a less specifically biological, more metaphysical, articulation of Life and Modernity." Tarizzo decrypts the semantics of modern 'life' and widen the frame, which Foucault partially sketched, of the ontology of life. The book therefore first investigates the genesis of the concept of life (defined in the Italian title as "a recent invention" (invenzione recente), like man according to Michel Foucault's famous formula). In other words, Tarizzo's "main focus of analysis is the essence of modernity, and he goes as far as to say that the modern period represents not only the political capture of life but also the "moment of invention of life itself." Secondly, the book also advances the thesis (right from the preface) that the ontology of life constitutes an example of what Charles Taylor calls "implicit moral ontology", i.e. a set of assumptions that orient moral judgment and very definition of values without ever being clearly explained. On this basis, the book presents, in the last chapter, some considerations on the morality, or on the axiological system, which lies behind the theory and practice of biopolitics from Nazism to the present day. According to the Italian philosophers Roberto Esposito and Remo Bodei, the book marks a crucial step in the understanding of the modern concept of life thanks to a critical inquiry that connects metaphysics, science and politics. According to Marco Piasentier, "Tarizzo is the philosopher who has most clearly argued for the necessity of such an approach to biopolitics."

Political Grammars. The Unconscious Foundations of Modern Democracy
This book addresses the following question: 'what's a political subject?' According to Tarizzo, "shedding light on this concept means providing a definition for the two words of which it is comprised — political and subject: hence the need to outline a study at the crossroads between psychoanalysis (the 'subject') and political theory (the 'political'). Political Grammars: The Unconscious Foundations of Modern Democracy (2019) fills this gap by proposing a theory of modern political subjectivities." In particular, Tarizzo proposes that Jacques Lacan's theory of the subject enables us to think of a political subject as a subject of enunciation. Moving from the Lacanian definition of  speech beings (parlêtre), Tarizzo argues that political speech is what ties individual subjects together into a single political community. Hence, it is thanks to speech that a political subject emerges and exists. In light of these considerations, Tarizzo introduces the notion of "political grammar"—an expression that denotes the conditions of political subjectification that permit the enunciation of an emergent 'we'. Tarizzo further elaborate his argument by wondering the way in which a given political subject emerge. He answer this question by outlining a genealogy of 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. This theoretical and historical inquiry into the problem of modern democratic, liberal peoples allows Tarizzo to traces some conclusions about contemporary politics and the difference between old and new fascism. Tarizzo writes that both old fascism and new fascism undermine the fundamentals of modern democracy, but he is also careful in explaining the essential characteristics that distinguish these phenomena both in Europe and United States (See also Trumpism). According to the professor of the University of Chicago and political theorist John P. McCormick, the book is a "brilliant psychoanalytic exploration of the unconscious communities that undergird the nationalist democracies of our contemporary world."

Monographs

 * Introduzione a Lacan. Bari: Laterza, 2003 [Introduction to Lacan].
 * Il pensiero libero. La filosofia francese dopo lo strutturalismo. Milano: Raffaello Cortina Editore, 2003 [Free Thinking: French Philosophy after Structuralism].
 * Homo Insipiens. La filosofia e la sfida dell'idiozia. Bari: Laterza, 2004 [Homo Insipiens: Philosophy and the Provocation of Idiocy]
 * Giochi di potere. Sulla paranoia politica. Bari: Laterza, 2007 [Games of Power: On Political Paranoia].
 * La vita, un'invenzione recente. Bari: Laterza, 2010. Translated in English by Mark William Epstein as Life: A Modern Invention. Minnesota University Press, 2017.
 * Political Grammars. The Unconscious Foundations of Modern Democracy (Stanford University Press, 2021).