Franco Palazzi, Author at Public Seminar

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Choose Your Pill

Operations of Capital, Psychiatry, and the Construction of Gender

June 27, 2018 • by Franco Palazzi

I In his book Testo Junkie , Paul B. Preciado provides us with a provocative, original reading of contemporary capitalism, conceived as a pharmacopornographic regime. This term refers to “the processes of biomolecular (pharmaco) and semiotic-technical (pornographic) government of sexual subjectivity” that, although possibly rooted in the nineteenth century, became visible as a new ...

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Giulio Regeni

Toward a Radical Use of Memory

January 24, 2017 • by Franco Palazzi and Michela Pusterla

“A highly promising young scholar of social and economic development in the Middle East,” as his obituary reads, Giulio Regeni was a PhD candidate at Cambridge, who moved to Cairo for his fieldwork, researching independent trade unions, especially that of street vendors, in post-Mubarak and post-Morsi Egypt. After disappearing on ...

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Renzi’s Right Way

Italy’s Constitutional Reform Vote

December 3, 2016 • by Franco Palazzi and Moreno Stambazzi

On Dec. 4th, Italian citizens will cast their ballot to approve or reject a vast Constitutional reform firmly put forward by the so-called "center-left" government headed by Mr. Matteo Renzi. If the votes in favor prevail, a third of the articles of the Italian main law will change. This would ...

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Populism, Representation, and Sanders

A Reply to Mueller

February 26, 2016 • by Franco Palazzi

In a recent article published on Public Seminar, Jan-Werner Mueller affirmed that populism is by its very nature not only anti-elitist, but also anti-pluralist: “Populists claim that they, and only they, represent the people.” He then attacked the undemocratic tendency populist politicians show when they lose the elections: they “begin to ...

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Representative Thinking, Paternalism, and Invisibility

Expanding Ganji’s Reading of Arendt

February 5, 2016 • by Franco Palazzi

In a recent article published on Public Seminar, Rezvaneh Ganji criticized Republican Party presidential candidates from an Arendtian perspective, attacking "the GOP candidates’ minimal or non-existent capacity for what Arendt called 'representative thinking', which includes the ability to inhabit other standpoints." Immediately after, she qualifies her criticism by making reference ...