Italian political philosopher, critical theorist, and professor (born 1976)
Lorenzo Chiesa (born 25 April 1976) is a philosopher, critical theorist, translator, and professor whose academic research and works focus on the intersection between ontology, psychoanalysis, and political theory.
Biography
Chiesa is currently a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Newcastle University in the United Kingdom.[1] He also teaches at the European Graduate School.[2] Previously, he taught at the University of Kent (2006-2014), where he was a Full Professor of Modern European Thought and founded and directed the Centre for Critical Thought. He was also visiting professor in the MA programme in Socio-Political Philosophy of the European University at Saint Petersburg and at the Freud's Dream Museum in Saint Petersburg. Additionally, he served as Director of the Genoa School of Humanities in Italy.[3]
He held visiting positions at the Freud Museum, London, 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 psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan published by MIT Press,[4] and translations into English of works by the Italian political philosophers Giorgio Agamben and Paolo Virno, published by Stanford University Press and MIT Press.[5][6][7][8][9] He serves as editor of the Insubordinations series at MIT Press.[10] He has also written widely on contemporary French and Italian philosophy, biopolitics, Marxism, materialism and atheism.[11][12][13]
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".[14] 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.[15][16] 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".[17] 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".[18] 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".[19]
