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Carlo Galli, Carl Schmitt, and contemporary Italian political thought
Political Geography 31 (2012) 250–253
Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect
Political Geography journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/polgeo
Review essay Carlo Galli, Carl Schmitt, and contemporary Italian political thought Political Spaces and Global War, C. Galli. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis (2010). Ich verliere meine Zeit und gewinne meinen Raum: ‘I lose my time and win my space’. With this quote from Carl Schmitt, Carlo Galli tellingly opens Political Spaces and Global War. This reference to Schmitt is indeed revealing of the ways in which Galli understands space in relation to ‘the political’, an understanding that marks, directly or indirectly, all of his considerations on ‘the spatial’ found in this volume. To be sure, Political Spaces and Global War consists of three short books in one. It includes the translation of two essays published by Galli in Italian at the beginning of the past decade (Spazi Politici, 2001, 133 pp. and La Guerra Globale, 2002, 54 pp.), and a long introductory essay penned by Adam Sitze (75 pp.), a sort of book-within-the-book, both in terms of content and aims. The choice to publish this volume can be interpreted in several different ways. On the one hand, it must certainly be welcomed, since it represents the first translation, at least in the form of a book, of the work of one of the most prominent contemporary Italian historians of political thought. So introducing Galli’s contribution to the analysis of modern European thought is, indeed, a much needed intervention in the contemporary debate concerned with the redefinition of ‘the political’. On the other hand, the sudden ‘discovery’ of Galli’s work on the part of English speaking academia (and the related publishing industry) may be possibly linked to a growing and more general interest, internationally, for Italian political philosophy, an interest largely sparked by the enormously influential work of philosophers like Giorgio Agamben and Antonio Negri, but also by the increasing popularity of scholars like Roberto Esposito, Paolo Virno, Gianni Vattimo, Mario Tronti, Christian Marazzi, and many others (as recently illustrated by Chiesa and Toscano in their The Italian Difference, 2009; see also Esposito, 2010). The analysis of this impact is beyond the scope of this short essay, but it is useful to keep this background in mind when considering the appearance of Political Spaces and Global War. More specifically, the potential interest for Galli’s work can be linked to the growing international literature on Carl Schmitt, a topic on which Galli has in many ways an unparalleled expertise (p. xi). Geographers should thus pay attention to the appearance of a book of this kind outside of geography, since some of its tenets engage directly, albeit often in a rather problematic way, with the spatialization of politics. Nonetheless, the contribution of what Galli defines as ‘political geography’ is deliberately kept at the margins of his argument – a ‘decision’ that per se deserves further scrutiny and engagement.
doi:10.1016/j.polgeo.2011.10.004
The Bologna effect As explained in the Editor’s Introduction, Galli teaches Storia delle dottrine politiche at the University of Bologna, a key site for the production of European political thought. Sitze insists at length on the ‘power of place’ (Bologna) in presenting Galli’s work and political context. Introduced as a student to the Frankfurt School, Galli demonstrated already in his early writings to be a sophisticated connoisseur of German philosophy and political thought (1973). In particular, all along his very successful career, he established himself as a widely respected ‘schmittologist’: Galli is not only probably the most authoritative ‘interpreter’ of Schmitt’s relationship to Italian academia (1981), but his monumental Genealogia della Politica. Carl Schmitt e la crisi del pensiero moderno (1996, 939 pp.) is possibly the most comprehensive interpretation of Schmitt in relation to modern European political thought ever published. Galli is also the editor-in-chief of Filosofia Politica – a highly influential journal in Italian political philosophy (Roberto Esposito is one of the other editors) – and a very active political commentator for La Repubblica, Italy’s highest circulation national newspaper. All in all, Galli is today a very well known public intellectual, now also directly involved in politics, with his collaboration with the Partito Democratico. Galli’s biography is well illustrated by Sitze’s comprehensive review (again, a sort of book-within-the-book), which has the merit to introducing the Anglophone readership not only to Galli’s work, but also, at least in part, to the Italian political context of the 1970s, in which Galli was trained and during which the crisis of the state was deeply felt by many intellectuals of the left, giving life to different forms of experimental political thought (pp. xvi–xx). This brief contextualization, I trust, provides a clear sense of the ambition and, at the same time, the complicated intellectual (and genealogical) implications of an editorial operation such as this one. Before spending some time on the content of the book(s), I would like to submit three brief critical notes in this respect. The first has to do with the choice of translating these two ‘minor’ books, instead of Galli’s seminal work on Schmitt. This latter is not only much more indicative of his personal and professional trajectory, but it includes possibly the most original elements of his scholarly contribution, something that would have made a significant impact on the contemporary literature on the German legal theorist. The books translated here are neither the best part of his production, nor particularly important for the present day debate on the relationship between space and politics. Global War in particular reads very much like a collection of materials published elsewhere, missing clear references to the key literature, something of very scarce academic interest. The relative marginality of these two books is somewhat implicitly confirmed by Sitze’s introduction, which largely focuses on ‘Galli the schmittologist’,
Review essay / Political Geography 31 (2012) 250–253
and in particular on his seminal Genealogia, and less than one would expect on the books included in this volume. Second, Sitze’s commentary – the kind of introduction that possibly authors like Agamben and Esposito should have had and did not have when they first appeared in English – spends quite of bit of time in emphasizing the relevance of the Bologna experience and Italian politics of the 1970s as the intellectual context for Galli’s work. While this is certainly helpful, what is less convincing is the way in which Sitze seems to link Galli to the work of some key radical thinkers in 1970s Italy, as if they were similarly the by-product of the political momentum that the country was experiencing. This association is potentially problematic – although Sitze is clear about their distance in reading Schmitt (p. xxi) – since the relationship between Galli (his political stance but also his work) and, for example, the so-called post-workerist left, that is, scholars like Tronti, Negri, but also Venetian philosopher Massimo Cacciari (see p. xxi, but also Lotinger and Marazzi, 2007; Chiesa & Toscano, 2009) is only mentioned but never fully explained. More should be said, for example, about how the atmosphere of those years, dominated as it was by the so-called ‘strategy of tension’, affected Galli’s work – if it did – while in the meantime clarifying his relationship to the most radical versions of Italian political thought of those very years. Third, Bologna is presented by Sitze as an almost mythical site of production and circulation of political thought. However, we are told very little about the contemporary context in which Galli works, and in which he published both of the two books here translated and, more importantly Genealogia. For example, Galli never mentions Franco Farinelli, a prominent geographer and intellectual figure working in Bologna at the same university, whose work has extensively – and very convincingly – analyzed the relationship between Western (also political) thought and space (1992, 2001, 2008). Farinelli has also famously theorized the cartographic reasoning that seems to be at the foundations of (at least part of) Galli’s understanding of the artificial nature of capitalist and rationalist spatial thinking. How is it possible that Galli ignores someone who literally works next door on very similar topics? Also, why does Sitze’s criticism engage only with the Bologna of the 1970s, but not the contemporary political context (the ‘Berlusconi years’, so to speak) in which Galli’s more recent work was elaborated? My point here is that, while recognizing the ‘power of Bologna’ as a site where political thought was and remains strongly linked to the tradition of its university and to its political history as a stronghold of the Italian Left is important and helpful, what emerges here is a rather partial picture that may induce the reader to see facile links between different streams of progressive or radical Italian political thought that remain, instead, to be fully investigated. Spazi Politici Of the two Galli essays included in Political Spaces and Global War, the first, Spazi Politici (Political Spaces) is beyond doubt the more original and interesting. While Spazi Politici presents a thorough, if rather linear and conventional, ‘history’ of the relationship between space and politics, Guerra Globale is a 2002 reflection on globalization and the events of 11 September 2001 that adds little to the large body of popular and semi-academic literature already existing on the topic. In Guerra Globale, Galli borrows heavily from other thinkers (e.g. Appadurai, Luttwak, Sassen), ignores others (e.g. Castells and a huge body of related literature on space, identity, and postmodernity), introduces glaring factual errors (at one point the Taliban is conflated with Al Qaeda), has some mistranslations (‘stato sociale’ is consistently translated as ‘social State’ when Galli is referring to the welfare state), and overall displays a disconcerting tendency to indulge in unsubstantiated
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grand claims – sadly, something typical of certain popularpseudo-academic literature in Italy. In short, this piece does little but detract from the insights of Spazi Politici which, while flawed and perhaps not the best representative of Galli’s writings, nonetheless can make a significant contribution for English speakers who seek to engage with contemporary Italian political theory. In Spazi Politici, Galli engages – albeit sometimes with a degree of superficiality – with the huge bulk of literature that has made European political thought as we know it. Traveling across the continent, he touches upon, in a somewhat genealogical fashion, many of the key protagonists of that tradition, while showing how it was always inherently associated to a specific idea of space, or, more generally, of the spatial: The space that shall interest us is specifically political space. It is even more precisely, the space of the implicit political representations in which and through which political thought supports itself. Our first hypothesis in this work, in fact, is that space is one of the inescapable dimensions for politics; it is through specifically spatial representations [.] that political theories form their concepts, arrange their actors, and devise the aims of politics in terms of collaboration and conflict, order and disorder, hierarchy and equality [.] in our emphasis we are dealing with a dimension that is much less conspicuous than time; there have been many more methodical and sophisticated reflections on progress, secularization, or the end of history than on the relationship between space and politics (p.4). Galli’s understanding of space is in many ways very ‘Schmittian’, as is his take on ‘the political’. His very broad historical analysis stretches across the centuries, from the ancient Greeks to the Modern era, via Medieval and Christian spatialities, to illustrate the links that connect, in a rather complicated but fascinating way, Machiavelli to Thomas Moore, Hobbes to Rousseau and all the other ‘founding fathers’ of European political thought to follow. His genealogical reconstruction of these political spatialities places particular emphasis on Hegel and Kant, and on their ways of understanding the question of space in relation to modern politics. While Marx is briefly mentioned and quickly dismissed (pp. 73–76), Galli grants a surprising degree of attention to Ernst Jünger and his idea of ‘total mobilization’, which is put into relation with the explosive tensions of the 1900s between, on the one hand, ideas of universal and flat space (the spaces of the State and of capitalism, but capitalism, again, is only in the background of this reconstruction), and, on the other, the parallel return of ‘place’, especially but not only in German thought (pp. 94–96; pp. 143–145). While Galli must be praised for engaging with Jünger – a forgotten source in English speaking academia, possibly because of his totalitarian leanings during the 1920s and 1930s – one wonders why no mention is made here of Foucault and his highly influential speculations on power and space. Sitze’s essay reflects at length on how Galli positions himself as a ‘non schmittian schmittologist’ and on how from this position he famously argues that engaging with Schmitt in order to understand globalization and postmodernity is of no use. For Galli, reading the present through a schmittian lens is deceiving for two main reasons: first, because we are presented today with an a-spatial regime (p. 156), while Schmitt’s understanding of the political is based on a specific, solid and concrete conception of space. Second, because Schmitt was eminently a man of his time, and only in that perspective should we read both his political leanings and his spatial thinking. This explains why Galli proposes his ‘analysis of modern political space’ as an analysis that ‘will allow us a first comprehension, in the negative, of global political space’ (Italics added). In this perspective, a key element that Spazi Politici develops historically is the (also spatial) tension between the universal and the particular, something that some geographers would probably
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Review essay / Political Geography 31 (2012) 250–253
read as the tension between Euclidian, or better, ‘cartographic’ space and place (Farinelli, 2008). Galli often refers to the space produced by the modern secular state as a form of ‘geometry’, a geometry inherently in tension with the ‘return of the local’ and with the question of place – especially as formulated within German thought of the 1800s and 1900s. While Galli’s understanding of place (pp. 76–82) is superficial and seems oblivious of all that has been written on it in the past century or so, and while, again, he seems to ignore the influential work done on the same topic by his Bologna colleague Franco Farinelli, at the same time, his insistence on this tension is helpful in addressing the crisis of the modern state also as a spatial question. Regrettably, there is no room here to expand on this. However, it may suffice to say that in Spazi Politici the universal-particular dialectic is also linked – although this link is not fully developed – to the question of the immanence–transcendence dialectic in the constitution of modern politics, a set of tensions at the origin of the permanent crisis of the state, a crisis that Galli invites us to investigate in spatial terms. In my view, the best part of the book is where Galli put these questions in relation to Kant (p. 86) and Hegel and their respective real and imagined ‘world political spatialities’. This is possibly the terrain where Galli can provide the most fruitful contribution to the contemporary discussion on space and the political, also in relation to Schmitt’s place within that same discussion. This is also where Galli explicitly links (again, without further developing his argument) Hegel’s geographies to the founding fathers of modern geography: .in Hegel’s lectures on the philosophy of history, meanwhile, the universality of the Spirit’s space is even more explicitly determined by particularity. Relying on the historically based geography of Karl Ritter, and in (mutual) opposition to the physical geography of Alexander von Humboldt, Hegel describes the journey of logos in geographically determined and spatially limited ways. The historio-geographical linearity of the path taken by Spirit – which proceeds along the privileged Mediterranean vector from the east to the west, from Asia to Europe – implies a verdict of exclusion for Africa and America [.] from this geographical foundation of Weltgeschichte (world history) (p.72) Despite this rather superficial presentation of 19th century German thought (and in particular of the erdkunde project, Minca, 2007), what is of interest here is the suggestion that the history of geographical thought – and of the spaces of the political – should be read in connection with Hegel and Kant, a suggestion (and a link) that geographers should probably engage within full (see Farinelli, 2001; also Olsson, 2004). The main problem with this otherwise fascinating excursus, however, is Galli’s rather confused conceptualization of space, presented in the first pages of the book (pp. 5–6): our second hypothesis is that the spatial representations that are implicit in political thought derive from the concrete perception and organization of geographic space as experienced by a given society. The implicit spatial representations of political thought, in other words, refer back to the explicit displacement of space realized by the concrete articulations of power and powers on the world stage our third hypothesis [.] is that modernity entertains a particularly difficult relationship with space, in which the dominant element is political (centered on the Subject, State and Society), and not space understood in a natural sense finally, our fourth hypothesis [.] is that the politico-spatial categories of the Modern are no longer usable today. For Galli, space seems to be sometimes a ‘measure of the real’, that is, a theory of space – while at other times, he refers to
space as something ‘out there’, something very concrete. It may well be that Galli thinks that space is both – but then this should be made clear in the first place. The result is that after reading Spazi Politici three times I am not yet sure what ‘kind of space’ he is conceptualizing in relation to politics. This perplexity gets even greater when Galli discusses the ‘a-spatial’ condition of globalization (p. 157). Or, when he refers to the artificiality of spatial thinking (compared to place thinking?) (see pp. 85). This is an important point, since the entire collection (the three books/essays that make Political Spaces and Global War) is marked by this lack of clarity about the conceptualization of space. I am left with the impression that this is also the result of the confusion/overlapping between terminologies of space and territory – two concepts normally kept clearly distinct in both Italian and Francophone geography– that dominates Galli’s account. What is also missing is a clear definition of power, in relation to space. How can space be related to politics with no clear conceptualization of power? I would like to suggest, with the risk of falling into the trap of disciplinary parochialism, that some of these problems could have possibly been avoided Galli had been interested in engaging with some of the literature in critical geography of the past few decades where those very concepts are discussed at length and in rather sophisticated ways. Interestingly, Galli does refer to geography in several passages of Spazi Politici, but he seems to get most of the references wrong. And when he compares his project with that of ‘political geography’, it is not at all clear what the nature of this latter project is supposed to be. At the same time, despite Sitze’s warnings to the reader about the fact that this book does not follow the academic canon, Galli’s reference to other disciplines (and to geography in particular) is indeed present but rather unconvincing (p. 9): the category that allows us to render premodern spaces intelligible is political geography. With this term, we certainly do not refer to the scientific discipline we know today, but to the political quality of geography or, better, the intrinsic politicity of space that unites and separates human groups made different, as if by fate, because of their natural geographical location. We will outline this originary of space with a brief excursus that runs from the large scale to the small scale (from Indo-European spatiality, to Europe, to the City and its internal struggle) and then returns again to the large scale (to Empire and Christian universalism). There are at least two other striking examples of Galli’s rather superficial approach to geographical thought. Not only is there no reference to Geopolitik (or to Haushofer), but when discussing geopolitics his main source appears to be General Carlo Jean and his largely journalistic account entitled Geopolitica (1996). The second, which is even more surprising considering Galli’s deep knowledge of German theory and philosophy, is the complete absence of Frederic Ratzel as a theorist of space and politics. These conspicuous absences are complemented by a banal approach to the question of borders, again a topic extensively discussed in recent years in geography and beyond (see for instance Rumford, 2010; Vaughan-Williams, 2009). When these absences are compiled with the numerous gaps in Guerra Globale, one is struck as much by the lacunae in Galli’s thoughts as by his contributions. This is surely not what the editor intended, and it serves as an unfortunate introduction for readers who are not familiar with Galli, as his contributions in his other writings are significant. However, for experienced readers this presentation of some of Galli’s lesser known works, and Sitze’s introduction to them, are revealing.
Review essay / Political Geography 31 (2012) 250–253
Conclusions I conclude with a few remarks in order to complement a rather harsh critique with a few positive considerations on the contribution that Political Spaces and Global War may bring to the contemporary discussion on these topics. The first one is the question of contextualization. Despite my perplexities about how the ‘Bologna effect’ is presented by the editor, I believe this to be one of the best introductions to a new (at least for a specific audience) author that I have encountered. Sitze’s long essay is precisely the kind of introduction that is sorely needed when a new academic context together with a set of ideas are ‘translated’ and brought to different intellectual shores, and I do believe that both the author and the publisher must be praised for that. A second positive element is the fact that Sitze’s introduction deliberately focuses more on Galli’s oeuvre and, as a reflection of that, on Schmitt and Schmittian studies, than on these two books. This was a very wise decision, I believe, since the reader is left with the desire and the curiosity to engage more in depth with Galli’s work, well beyond the somewhat deluding experience of the present two essays. Thirdly, Galli dedicates the final pages of Spazi Politici to readings of ‘the global’ on the part of several contemporary scholars: Beck, Hoffe, Habermas, Held, Rawls, Nussbaum, etc. but also Nancy, Negri and Hardt. This account would have been potentially very fruitful – albeit not entirely original – had only Galli decided to critically engage with that debate and the related authors, but what we get instead is a rather a-critical account of the same. This is a real pity, also because, again, his discussion seems to marginalize key thinkers like Heidegger, Foucault (barely mentioned), Bataille (completely absent) and many others. While this is obviously a missed opportunity, Galli’s reflections on the spaces of the global hint in a few passages at perspectives and materials that the readership of this journal may find of interest. His considerations on space and movement, following Jünger, and his brief discussion of greater spaces a la Schmitt – but in this case contra Schmitt – are certainly potentially profitable areas to explore
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for the contemporary political geographer, together with the connections that he traces between Hegel and Kant and modern geography. In conclusion, this volume could be read as a missed opportunity to rethink the spaces of politics, but also, at the same time, as an invitation to explore new venues by engaging with long standing but sometimes forgotten (by geographers at least) lines of thought. This last comment deliberately intends to be an invitation to the publisher to consider a more comprehensive engagement with Galli’s work – and to the reader to not be put off by this rather odd attempt at an ‘anthology’. References Chiesa, L., & Toscano, A. (2009). The Italian difference. Melbourne: re.press. Esposito, R. (2010). Pensiero vivente. Turin: Einaudi. Farinelli, F. (1992). I Segni del Mondo. Florence: Nuova Italia. Farinelli, F. (2001). Geografia. Turin: Einaudi. Farinelli, F. (2008). La Ragione Cartografica. Turin: Einaudi. Galli, C. (1973). Alcune interpretazioni italiane della Scuola di Francoforte. il Mulino, 22, 648–671. Galli, C. (1981). Carl Schmitt in Italia. In G. Duso (Ed.), La Politica oltre lo Stato: Carl Schmitt (pp. 169–181). Venice: Arsenale. Galli, C. (1996). Genealogia della Politica. Carl Schmitt e la Crisi del Pensiero Politico Moderno. Bologna: il Mulino. Galli, C. (2001). Spazi Politici. Bologna: il Mulino. Galli, C. (2002). La Guerra Globale. Bari: Laterza. Jean, C. (1996). Geopolitica. Bari: Laterza. Lotinger, S., & Marazzi, C. (Eds.). (2007). Autonomia. Post-political politics. Cambridge: MIT Press. Minca, C. (2007). Humboldt’s compromise: or, the forgotten geographies of landscape. Progress in Human Geography, 31(2), 179–193. Olsson, G. (2004). Abysmal. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rumford, C. (Ed.). (2010). Global borders [Special issue]. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 28. Vaughan-Williams, N. (2009). Border politics. Edimburgh: Edimburgh University Press.
Claudio Minca Cultural Geography Department, Wageningen University, Droevendaalsesteeg 3, 6708 PB Wageningen, The Netherlands E-mail address: [email protected]
Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect
Political Geography journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/polgeo
Review essay Carlo Galli, Carl Schmitt, and contemporary Italian political thought Political Spaces and Global War, C. Galli. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis (2010). Ich verliere meine Zeit und gewinne meinen Raum: ‘I lose my time and win my space’. With this quote from Carl Schmitt, Carlo Galli tellingly opens Political Spaces and Global War. This reference to Schmitt is indeed revealing of the ways in which Galli understands space in relation to ‘the political’, an understanding that marks, directly or indirectly, all of his considerations on ‘the spatial’ found in this volume. To be sure, Political Spaces and Global War consists of three short books in one. It includes the translation of two essays published by Galli in Italian at the beginning of the past decade (Spazi Politici, 2001, 133 pp. and La Guerra Globale, 2002, 54 pp.), and a long introductory essay penned by Adam Sitze (75 pp.), a sort of book-within-the-book, both in terms of content and aims. The choice to publish this volume can be interpreted in several different ways. On the one hand, it must certainly be welcomed, since it represents the first translation, at least in the form of a book, of the work of one of the most prominent contemporary Italian historians of political thought. So introducing Galli’s contribution to the analysis of modern European thought is, indeed, a much needed intervention in the contemporary debate concerned with the redefinition of ‘the political’. On the other hand, the sudden ‘discovery’ of Galli’s work on the part of English speaking academia (and the related publishing industry) may be possibly linked to a growing and more general interest, internationally, for Italian political philosophy, an interest largely sparked by the enormously influential work of philosophers like Giorgio Agamben and Antonio Negri, but also by the increasing popularity of scholars like Roberto Esposito, Paolo Virno, Gianni Vattimo, Mario Tronti, Christian Marazzi, and many others (as recently illustrated by Chiesa and Toscano in their The Italian Difference, 2009; see also Esposito, 2010). The analysis of this impact is beyond the scope of this short essay, but it is useful to keep this background in mind when considering the appearance of Political Spaces and Global War. More specifically, the potential interest for Galli’s work can be linked to the growing international literature on Carl Schmitt, a topic on which Galli has in many ways an unparalleled expertise (p. xi). Geographers should thus pay attention to the appearance of a book of this kind outside of geography, since some of its tenets engage directly, albeit often in a rather problematic way, with the spatialization of politics. Nonetheless, the contribution of what Galli defines as ‘political geography’ is deliberately kept at the margins of his argument – a ‘decision’ that per se deserves further scrutiny and engagement.
doi:10.1016/j.polgeo.2011.10.004
The Bologna effect As explained in the Editor’s Introduction, Galli teaches Storia delle dottrine politiche at the University of Bologna, a key site for the production of European political thought. Sitze insists at length on the ‘power of place’ (Bologna) in presenting Galli’s work and political context. Introduced as a student to the Frankfurt School, Galli demonstrated already in his early writings to be a sophisticated connoisseur of German philosophy and political thought (1973). In particular, all along his very successful career, he established himself as a widely respected ‘schmittologist’: Galli is not only probably the most authoritative ‘interpreter’ of Schmitt’s relationship to Italian academia (1981), but his monumental Genealogia della Politica. Carl Schmitt e la crisi del pensiero moderno (1996, 939 pp.) is possibly the most comprehensive interpretation of Schmitt in relation to modern European political thought ever published. Galli is also the editor-in-chief of Filosofia Politica – a highly influential journal in Italian political philosophy (Roberto Esposito is one of the other editors) – and a very active political commentator for La Repubblica, Italy’s highest circulation national newspaper. All in all, Galli is today a very well known public intellectual, now also directly involved in politics, with his collaboration with the Partito Democratico. Galli’s biography is well illustrated by Sitze’s comprehensive review (again, a sort of book-within-the-book), which has the merit to introducing the Anglophone readership not only to Galli’s work, but also, at least in part, to the Italian political context of the 1970s, in which Galli was trained and during which the crisis of the state was deeply felt by many intellectuals of the left, giving life to different forms of experimental political thought (pp. xvi–xx). This brief contextualization, I trust, provides a clear sense of the ambition and, at the same time, the complicated intellectual (and genealogical) implications of an editorial operation such as this one. Before spending some time on the content of the book(s), I would like to submit three brief critical notes in this respect. The first has to do with the choice of translating these two ‘minor’ books, instead of Galli’s seminal work on Schmitt. This latter is not only much more indicative of his personal and professional trajectory, but it includes possibly the most original elements of his scholarly contribution, something that would have made a significant impact on the contemporary literature on the German legal theorist. The books translated here are neither the best part of his production, nor particularly important for the present day debate on the relationship between space and politics. Global War in particular reads very much like a collection of materials published elsewhere, missing clear references to the key literature, something of very scarce academic interest. The relative marginality of these two books is somewhat implicitly confirmed by Sitze’s introduction, which largely focuses on ‘Galli the schmittologist’,
Review essay / Political Geography 31 (2012) 250–253
and in particular on his seminal Genealogia, and less than one would expect on the books included in this volume. Second, Sitze’s commentary – the kind of introduction that possibly authors like Agamben and Esposito should have had and did not have when they first appeared in English – spends quite of bit of time in emphasizing the relevance of the Bologna experience and Italian politics of the 1970s as the intellectual context for Galli’s work. While this is certainly helpful, what is less convincing is the way in which Sitze seems to link Galli to the work of some key radical thinkers in 1970s Italy, as if they were similarly the by-product of the political momentum that the country was experiencing. This association is potentially problematic – although Sitze is clear about their distance in reading Schmitt (p. xxi) – since the relationship between Galli (his political stance but also his work) and, for example, the so-called post-workerist left, that is, scholars like Tronti, Negri, but also Venetian philosopher Massimo Cacciari (see p. xxi, but also Lotinger and Marazzi, 2007; Chiesa & Toscano, 2009) is only mentioned but never fully explained. More should be said, for example, about how the atmosphere of those years, dominated as it was by the so-called ‘strategy of tension’, affected Galli’s work – if it did – while in the meantime clarifying his relationship to the most radical versions of Italian political thought of those very years. Third, Bologna is presented by Sitze as an almost mythical site of production and circulation of political thought. However, we are told very little about the contemporary context in which Galli works, and in which he published both of the two books here translated and, more importantly Genealogia. For example, Galli never mentions Franco Farinelli, a prominent geographer and intellectual figure working in Bologna at the same university, whose work has extensively – and very convincingly – analyzed the relationship between Western (also political) thought and space (1992, 2001, 2008). Farinelli has also famously theorized the cartographic reasoning that seems to be at the foundations of (at least part of) Galli’s understanding of the artificial nature of capitalist and rationalist spatial thinking. How is it possible that Galli ignores someone who literally works next door on very similar topics? Also, why does Sitze’s criticism engage only with the Bologna of the 1970s, but not the contemporary political context (the ‘Berlusconi years’, so to speak) in which Galli’s more recent work was elaborated? My point here is that, while recognizing the ‘power of Bologna’ as a site where political thought was and remains strongly linked to the tradition of its university and to its political history as a stronghold of the Italian Left is important and helpful, what emerges here is a rather partial picture that may induce the reader to see facile links between different streams of progressive or radical Italian political thought that remain, instead, to be fully investigated. Spazi Politici Of the two Galli essays included in Political Spaces and Global War, the first, Spazi Politici (Political Spaces) is beyond doubt the more original and interesting. While Spazi Politici presents a thorough, if rather linear and conventional, ‘history’ of the relationship between space and politics, Guerra Globale is a 2002 reflection on globalization and the events of 11 September 2001 that adds little to the large body of popular and semi-academic literature already existing on the topic. In Guerra Globale, Galli borrows heavily from other thinkers (e.g. Appadurai, Luttwak, Sassen), ignores others (e.g. Castells and a huge body of related literature on space, identity, and postmodernity), introduces glaring factual errors (at one point the Taliban is conflated with Al Qaeda), has some mistranslations (‘stato sociale’ is consistently translated as ‘social State’ when Galli is referring to the welfare state), and overall displays a disconcerting tendency to indulge in unsubstantiated
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grand claims – sadly, something typical of certain popularpseudo-academic literature in Italy. In short, this piece does little but detract from the insights of Spazi Politici which, while flawed and perhaps not the best representative of Galli’s writings, nonetheless can make a significant contribution for English speakers who seek to engage with contemporary Italian political theory. In Spazi Politici, Galli engages – albeit sometimes with a degree of superficiality – with the huge bulk of literature that has made European political thought as we know it. Traveling across the continent, he touches upon, in a somewhat genealogical fashion, many of the key protagonists of that tradition, while showing how it was always inherently associated to a specific idea of space, or, more generally, of the spatial: The space that shall interest us is specifically political space. It is even more precisely, the space of the implicit political representations in which and through which political thought supports itself. Our first hypothesis in this work, in fact, is that space is one of the inescapable dimensions for politics; it is through specifically spatial representations [.] that political theories form their concepts, arrange their actors, and devise the aims of politics in terms of collaboration and conflict, order and disorder, hierarchy and equality [.] in our emphasis we are dealing with a dimension that is much less conspicuous than time; there have been many more methodical and sophisticated reflections on progress, secularization, or the end of history than on the relationship between space and politics (p.4). Galli’s understanding of space is in many ways very ‘Schmittian’, as is his take on ‘the political’. His very broad historical analysis stretches across the centuries, from the ancient Greeks to the Modern era, via Medieval and Christian spatialities, to illustrate the links that connect, in a rather complicated but fascinating way, Machiavelli to Thomas Moore, Hobbes to Rousseau and all the other ‘founding fathers’ of European political thought to follow. His genealogical reconstruction of these political spatialities places particular emphasis on Hegel and Kant, and on their ways of understanding the question of space in relation to modern politics. While Marx is briefly mentioned and quickly dismissed (pp. 73–76), Galli grants a surprising degree of attention to Ernst Jünger and his idea of ‘total mobilization’, which is put into relation with the explosive tensions of the 1900s between, on the one hand, ideas of universal and flat space (the spaces of the State and of capitalism, but capitalism, again, is only in the background of this reconstruction), and, on the other, the parallel return of ‘place’, especially but not only in German thought (pp. 94–96; pp. 143–145). While Galli must be praised for engaging with Jünger – a forgotten source in English speaking academia, possibly because of his totalitarian leanings during the 1920s and 1930s – one wonders why no mention is made here of Foucault and his highly influential speculations on power and space. Sitze’s essay reflects at length on how Galli positions himself as a ‘non schmittian schmittologist’ and on how from this position he famously argues that engaging with Schmitt in order to understand globalization and postmodernity is of no use. For Galli, reading the present through a schmittian lens is deceiving for two main reasons: first, because we are presented today with an a-spatial regime (p. 156), while Schmitt’s understanding of the political is based on a specific, solid and concrete conception of space. Second, because Schmitt was eminently a man of his time, and only in that perspective should we read both his political leanings and his spatial thinking. This explains why Galli proposes his ‘analysis of modern political space’ as an analysis that ‘will allow us a first comprehension, in the negative, of global political space’ (Italics added). In this perspective, a key element that Spazi Politici develops historically is the (also spatial) tension between the universal and the particular, something that some geographers would probably
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read as the tension between Euclidian, or better, ‘cartographic’ space and place (Farinelli, 2008). Galli often refers to the space produced by the modern secular state as a form of ‘geometry’, a geometry inherently in tension with the ‘return of the local’ and with the question of place – especially as formulated within German thought of the 1800s and 1900s. While Galli’s understanding of place (pp. 76–82) is superficial and seems oblivious of all that has been written on it in the past century or so, and while, again, he seems to ignore the influential work done on the same topic by his Bologna colleague Franco Farinelli, at the same time, his insistence on this tension is helpful in addressing the crisis of the modern state also as a spatial question. Regrettably, there is no room here to expand on this. However, it may suffice to say that in Spazi Politici the universal-particular dialectic is also linked – although this link is not fully developed – to the question of the immanence–transcendence dialectic in the constitution of modern politics, a set of tensions at the origin of the permanent crisis of the state, a crisis that Galli invites us to investigate in spatial terms. In my view, the best part of the book is where Galli put these questions in relation to Kant (p. 86) and Hegel and their respective real and imagined ‘world political spatialities’. This is possibly the terrain where Galli can provide the most fruitful contribution to the contemporary discussion on space and the political, also in relation to Schmitt’s place within that same discussion. This is also where Galli explicitly links (again, without further developing his argument) Hegel’s geographies to the founding fathers of modern geography: .in Hegel’s lectures on the philosophy of history, meanwhile, the universality of the Spirit’s space is even more explicitly determined by particularity. Relying on the historically based geography of Karl Ritter, and in (mutual) opposition to the physical geography of Alexander von Humboldt, Hegel describes the journey of logos in geographically determined and spatially limited ways. The historio-geographical linearity of the path taken by Spirit – which proceeds along the privileged Mediterranean vector from the east to the west, from Asia to Europe – implies a verdict of exclusion for Africa and America [.] from this geographical foundation of Weltgeschichte (world history) (p.72) Despite this rather superficial presentation of 19th century German thought (and in particular of the erdkunde project, Minca, 2007), what is of interest here is the suggestion that the history of geographical thought – and of the spaces of the political – should be read in connection with Hegel and Kant, a suggestion (and a link) that geographers should probably engage within full (see Farinelli, 2001; also Olsson, 2004). The main problem with this otherwise fascinating excursus, however, is Galli’s rather confused conceptualization of space, presented in the first pages of the book (pp. 5–6): our second hypothesis is that the spatial representations that are implicit in political thought derive from the concrete perception and organization of geographic space as experienced by a given society. The implicit spatial representations of political thought, in other words, refer back to the explicit displacement of space realized by the concrete articulations of power and powers on the world stage our third hypothesis [.] is that modernity entertains a particularly difficult relationship with space, in which the dominant element is political (centered on the Subject, State and Society), and not space understood in a natural sense finally, our fourth hypothesis [.] is that the politico-spatial categories of the Modern are no longer usable today. For Galli, space seems to be sometimes a ‘measure of the real’, that is, a theory of space – while at other times, he refers to
space as something ‘out there’, something very concrete. It may well be that Galli thinks that space is both – but then this should be made clear in the first place. The result is that after reading Spazi Politici three times I am not yet sure what ‘kind of space’ he is conceptualizing in relation to politics. This perplexity gets even greater when Galli discusses the ‘a-spatial’ condition of globalization (p. 157). Or, when he refers to the artificiality of spatial thinking (compared to place thinking?) (see pp. 85). This is an important point, since the entire collection (the three books/essays that make Political Spaces and Global War) is marked by this lack of clarity about the conceptualization of space. I am left with the impression that this is also the result of the confusion/overlapping between terminologies of space and territory – two concepts normally kept clearly distinct in both Italian and Francophone geography– that dominates Galli’s account. What is also missing is a clear definition of power, in relation to space. How can space be related to politics with no clear conceptualization of power? I would like to suggest, with the risk of falling into the trap of disciplinary parochialism, that some of these problems could have possibly been avoided Galli had been interested in engaging with some of the literature in critical geography of the past few decades where those very concepts are discussed at length and in rather sophisticated ways. Interestingly, Galli does refer to geography in several passages of Spazi Politici, but he seems to get most of the references wrong. And when he compares his project with that of ‘political geography’, it is not at all clear what the nature of this latter project is supposed to be. At the same time, despite Sitze’s warnings to the reader about the fact that this book does not follow the academic canon, Galli’s reference to other disciplines (and to geography in particular) is indeed present but rather unconvincing (p. 9): the category that allows us to render premodern spaces intelligible is political geography. With this term, we certainly do not refer to the scientific discipline we know today, but to the political quality of geography or, better, the intrinsic politicity of space that unites and separates human groups made different, as if by fate, because of their natural geographical location. We will outline this originary of space with a brief excursus that runs from the large scale to the small scale (from Indo-European spatiality, to Europe, to the City and its internal struggle) and then returns again to the large scale (to Empire and Christian universalism). There are at least two other striking examples of Galli’s rather superficial approach to geographical thought. Not only is there no reference to Geopolitik (or to Haushofer), but when discussing geopolitics his main source appears to be General Carlo Jean and his largely journalistic account entitled Geopolitica (1996). The second, which is even more surprising considering Galli’s deep knowledge of German theory and philosophy, is the complete absence of Frederic Ratzel as a theorist of space and politics. These conspicuous absences are complemented by a banal approach to the question of borders, again a topic extensively discussed in recent years in geography and beyond (see for instance Rumford, 2010; Vaughan-Williams, 2009). When these absences are compiled with the numerous gaps in Guerra Globale, one is struck as much by the lacunae in Galli’s thoughts as by his contributions. This is surely not what the editor intended, and it serves as an unfortunate introduction for readers who are not familiar with Galli, as his contributions in his other writings are significant. However, for experienced readers this presentation of some of Galli’s lesser known works, and Sitze’s introduction to them, are revealing.
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Conclusions I conclude with a few remarks in order to complement a rather harsh critique with a few positive considerations on the contribution that Political Spaces and Global War may bring to the contemporary discussion on these topics. The first one is the question of contextualization. Despite my perplexities about how the ‘Bologna effect’ is presented by the editor, I believe this to be one of the best introductions to a new (at least for a specific audience) author that I have encountered. Sitze’s long essay is precisely the kind of introduction that is sorely needed when a new academic context together with a set of ideas are ‘translated’ and brought to different intellectual shores, and I do believe that both the author and the publisher must be praised for that. A second positive element is the fact that Sitze’s introduction deliberately focuses more on Galli’s oeuvre and, as a reflection of that, on Schmitt and Schmittian studies, than on these two books. This was a very wise decision, I believe, since the reader is left with the desire and the curiosity to engage more in depth with Galli’s work, well beyond the somewhat deluding experience of the present two essays. Thirdly, Galli dedicates the final pages of Spazi Politici to readings of ‘the global’ on the part of several contemporary scholars: Beck, Hoffe, Habermas, Held, Rawls, Nussbaum, etc. but also Nancy, Negri and Hardt. This account would have been potentially very fruitful – albeit not entirely original – had only Galli decided to critically engage with that debate and the related authors, but what we get instead is a rather a-critical account of the same. This is a real pity, also because, again, his discussion seems to marginalize key thinkers like Heidegger, Foucault (barely mentioned), Bataille (completely absent) and many others. While this is obviously a missed opportunity, Galli’s reflections on the spaces of the global hint in a few passages at perspectives and materials that the readership of this journal may find of interest. His considerations on space and movement, following Jünger, and his brief discussion of greater spaces a la Schmitt – but in this case contra Schmitt – are certainly potentially profitable areas to explore
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for the contemporary political geographer, together with the connections that he traces between Hegel and Kant and modern geography. In conclusion, this volume could be read as a missed opportunity to rethink the spaces of politics, but also, at the same time, as an invitation to explore new venues by engaging with long standing but sometimes forgotten (by geographers at least) lines of thought. This last comment deliberately intends to be an invitation to the publisher to consider a more comprehensive engagement with Galli’s work – and to the reader to not be put off by this rather odd attempt at an ‘anthology’. References Chiesa, L., & Toscano, A. (2009). The Italian difference. Melbourne: re.press. Esposito, R. (2010). Pensiero vivente. Turin: Einaudi. Farinelli, F. (1992). I Segni del Mondo. Florence: Nuova Italia. Farinelli, F. (2001). Geografia. Turin: Einaudi. Farinelli, F. (2008). La Ragione Cartografica. Turin: Einaudi. Galli, C. (1973). Alcune interpretazioni italiane della Scuola di Francoforte. il Mulino, 22, 648–671. Galli, C. (1981). Carl Schmitt in Italia. In G. Duso (Ed.), La Politica oltre lo Stato: Carl Schmitt (pp. 169–181). Venice: Arsenale. Galli, C. (1996). Genealogia della Politica. Carl Schmitt e la Crisi del Pensiero Politico Moderno. Bologna: il Mulino. Galli, C. (2001). Spazi Politici. Bologna: il Mulino. Galli, C. (2002). La Guerra Globale. Bari: Laterza. Jean, C. (1996). Geopolitica. Bari: Laterza. Lotinger, S., & Marazzi, C. (Eds.). (2007). Autonomia. Post-political politics. Cambridge: MIT Press. Minca, C. (2007). Humboldt’s compromise: or, the forgotten geographies of landscape. Progress in Human Geography, 31(2), 179–193. Olsson, G. (2004). Abysmal. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rumford, C. (Ed.). (2010). Global borders [Special issue]. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 28. Vaughan-Williams, N. (2009). Border politics. Edimburgh: Edimburgh University Press.
Claudio Minca Cultural Geography Department, Wageningen University, Droevendaalsesteeg 3, 6708 PB Wageningen, The Netherlands E-mail address: [email protected]