Lorenzo Chiesa
Lorenzo Chiesa (born 25 April 1976) is an Italian political philosopher, critical theorist, translator, and professor whose academic research and works focus on the intersection between biopolitics, ontology, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and political theory. Biography. Chiesa currently serves as Lecturer in Philosophy at Newcastle University in the United Kingdom. Since 2014, he has been Visiting Professor in the M.A. program in Socio-Political Philosophy of the European University at Saint Petersburg and at the Freud's Dream Museum of the East European Institute of Psychoanalysis in Saint Petersburg. Additionally, he serves as Director of the Genoa School of Humanities  at the University of Genoa. Previously, he taught at the University of Kent (2006-2014), where he was Professor of Modern European Thought and founded and directed the Centre for Critical Thought. He also held visiting positions at the University of New Mexico, the Institute of Philosophy of Ljubljana, the Italian Institute of Human Sciences of Naples, the American University of Beirut, and Jnanapravaha Center for Cultural Studies of Mumbai. He is best known for his monographs on the French psychoanalist Jacques Lacan published by MIT Press, and translations into English of essays and other works written by the Italian  political philosopher and critical theorist Giorgio Agamben, published by Stanford University Press. He has also written widely on contemporary French and Italian philosophy, existentialism, biopolitics, Marxism, materialism, atheism, and nihilism. Chiesa's philosophical treatise "Subjectivity and Otherness" (2007), which focuses on Lacan's theory of the subject, has been described as setting "a new benchmark of conceptual rigour within the realm of introductory texts on Lacanian thought". His treatment of the implications of psychoanalytic theory for materialism and atheism in "The Not-Two" (2016) has been extensively discussed by the Slovenian philosopher and Freudo-Marxist theorist Slavoj Žižek in his  monograph "Disparities". According to the Italian academic and political philosopher Roberto Esposito, Chiesa is "one of the rare philosophers capable of making Lacan’s psychoanalytic apparatus interact with the various languages of continental thought". He has also been referred to as "the leader of a new generation of ‘young Lacanians’, for whom Lacan is primarily a text that needs to be read". Chiesa argues that "psychoanalysis is not intrinsically political" while it is needed to "criticise classical ontology, think new ways in which to approach the question of ontology, and then, from that standpoint, think progressive politics". Lorenzo Chiesa Lorenzo