italian-studies: Scholarly discussions in any field of Italian studies

Dear colleagues,

with apologies for cross-posting, please find below the call for paper for the fourth issue of "K. Revue trans-européenne de philosophie et arts"  devoted to Sparacus as a political author. The deadline for submitting a proposal is 15 june 2019 (2,500 max characters).

"Spartacus: a century after. The infinite uprising"

In 73 B.C., Spartacus, a Roman slave condemned to fight in the arena as a gladiator, managed to escape his captors and became the leader of a massive uprising. At the head of a huge rebel army – who were mostly slaves and deserters – Spartacus and his companions showed themselves to be unexpectedly astute military strategists, capable of sophisticated warfare, and managed to make life extremely difficult for many of the Republic’s Legions before they were finally defeated. This story of rebellion has presented more than a few problems for professional historians over the years.
Nevertheless, the story of Spartacus merits more than a simple historical analysis (from the various sources, archives and testimonies that describe his exploits). He also embodies a powerful conceptual figure in a Deleuzian sense: de-subjectified, he becomes a name capable of finding its way into a web of relationships, to become a concept that condenses the power of a gesture or a reason for existing.
As a result, Spartacus becomes the name of a ghost who illustrates the value of political gesture, who shows that the impossible is actually possible and that, at any moment, it can be repeated. In this sense, his story radiates beyond history, perhaps even suspends it, giving those on the outside the opportunity to access it. Who knows, perhaps this is the reason why, in a letter to Engels, dated 1861, Marx wrote such a flattering appraisal of the rebel: Spartacus is «one of the cleverest men described in the whole of ancient history. A great general (hardly a Garibaldi), with a noble personality, a true representative of the ancient proletariat».
Under the leadership of Spartacus, the rebels’ ability to organize the rebellion, to resist the constant attack of the Roman troops, and, thanks to their victories, to increase the number of slaves joining their cause, has survived throughout history. Ultimately, this story is probably an example of the importance of memory in politics, in the same way that Walter Benjamin believed that a fundamentally important revolutionary task was to invent a tradition of the oppressed so that their defeat would not be in vain; rather, it should prove the importance of insurgency. These thoughts were probably in the minds of a group of pacifist socialist communists, who established the Spartacist
League in 1914.
A hundred years ago, in 1919, when the horrors of the Great war had finally come to an end, the story of the foreign slave’s rebellion against the excessive power of Rome seemed to emerge once again, embodied in the uprising of the Spartacist League in Berlin (January 1919). The failure of the rebellion revealed how democracy had been murdered by democracy, as the newly formed Weimar Republic had omitted to take into account the militarist and authoritarian legacy of the Second Reich. In his On the Concept of History (1940), Benjamin was to clarify this: social democracy is unable to resist fascism because ultimately it shares the same dimensions of time and history. On the contrary, during the Berlin uprising, when even the leaders lost control of the situation, politics makes experience of another temporality; or rather, seems to experience time directly, outside any logic of historical continuity.

The issue of K. dedicated to Spartacus identifies a series of studies that help determine and define the logic, genealogy and topicality of insurgent rebellion, which embodies the spectral power of the political example. Our hypothesis is that this leads to forms of protest such as those of the French Gilets jaunes movement and the insubordination of migrant workers rebelling against their horrific
living and working conditions:

1) The figure of Spartacus merits further historical investigation within the context of Roman history, with a series of questions that can help to identify the precise juridical nature of his radical insubordination in the eyes of Roman law. This would also highlight a series of important questions, such as the comparison between the destitutio and the constitutio, in order to understand how classical analytical categories can also influence the present.

2) The name of Spartacus calls for a reconsideration of the relationship between revolt and the collective violence of rebellious acts. If a rebellious event creates a rupture, or a rejection of existing living conditions, as well as the power relations that maintain these conditions, then it is impossible to deny the common nature of this rupture, and to revoke even the legitimacy of what it opposes. As the Italian Germanist Furio Jesi wrote in his book “Spartacus”, published posthumously in 2000 (but written around 1968) «when the time comes to rebel we are no longer alone in the city». However, this kind of solidarity does not depend only on collective trajectories of subjectivation, but rather on personal and intimate forms of complicity, capable of uniting any gesture that might call into question the logic of injustice. Here, we are thinking of the recent events concerning the French Gilets jaunes movement and of the questions raised by this type of popular insurgence.
After all, the figure of Spartacus might accompany contemporary political action through a dense discursive network, and imaginary and aesthetic constellations (in the wake of Kubrick's Spartacus).

3) Spartacus was a slave, a foreigner rebelling against his destiny by instigating collective rebellion that could, at any moment, turn into social revolt. As a non-man, a zero-cost worker who actively rebelled, he managed to gain access to the truly human condition of politics. Clearly, his political goal was not to gain power, but to overturn the situation completely.

Is it possible to see the condition of migrant workers today as a new form of slavery, and one that might possibly give rise to rebellion at any moment, without any kind of representation or mediation? However effective, does the discourse that describes the migrant workers employed as farm labourers in southern Europe as “new slaves” show, from an analytical point of view, any weaknesses? Excepting those cases in which enslavement is verified in the condition of physical detention, the image of these “new slaves”, and the incredible scope that derives from this, tends, probably, to obscure the practices of resistance exercised by agricultural workers in this sector of the work market. This aspect might emerge more, however, if we are willing to consider the “everyday” as a conceptual category, one that can be interpreted as the succession of the processes of routinization that affect subjects at work. From the “everyday” point of view, even the smallest gestures showing a subtraction of power or market logic can take on the features of an unparalleled exceptionalism and become political actions of revolt.

*** 
Proposal Submission by 15 june 2019 (2,500 max. characters). Specify if the contribution is for the essays or readings section.

Send to the address: [log in to unmask]

If the proposal is accepted, the delivery of the elaborate must come by september 30, 2019. If the contribution should come after this date, its automatic exclusion is provided.

For more information please go to the web site: https://revue-k.univ-lille.fr/

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