Itinerari - Issue 2026

Power, Potentiality, Possibility. Perspectives from Italian Thought

Editors: Daniela Calabrò, Giulio Goria, Massimo Villani

Starting from the late 1980s and early 1990s, when Italian Thought became a vector of the contemporary philosophical landscape, it highlighted two specific characteristics. Firstly, a clear tendency toward contamination with other perspectives and paradigms (starting with the Foucaultian biopolitical paradigm). Additionally, and perhaps most importantly, a permanent attention to the intertwining of life, politics and history, what is the ‘outside’ of thought. In addition to these main aspects, a further expansion has profoundly impacted the horizon of Italian Thought. In summary, in authors such as Machiavelli and Bruno, Vico and Leopardi, Gramsci and Gentile, as well as de Martino, Pirandello, and Pasolini (to name just a few) it has identified a reflection capable to rediscover in the contemporary dimension an archaic 'repressed' element and thus to reintroduce, in a new light, the question of origin. Categories such as imperium (Negri), sacertas (Agamben), communitas and immunitas (Esposito) represent the most significant outcomes offered by contemporary Italian thought.

Remaining within the historical-theoretical framework of Italian Thought briefly outlined, the 2026 issue of the journal Itinerari is dedicated to power, potentiality and possibility (potere, potenza, possibile). The aim is to understand how these categories - even while acting within the entire Western philosophical tradition - have become ingrained in the Italian Thought and culture and, at the same time, how they can be re-examined and made effective again. The reason for revisiting this conceptual triad lies, once again, in a characteristic of the Italian Thought as a 'thought in action', always actual and active (Esposito, 2016). In this way, if affirmation is the mode that most defines Italian thought, then the category of potentiality (dynamis), inseparable from actuality (energheia), is the spring from which this affirmative capacity is established. This reference to power and potentiality allows us to clarify how that thought in action is permeated by a 'negative' element, which constitutes it and from which it germinates.

Already in the 1980s, Giorgio Agamben identified the idea of power as the significant theoretical resource for inaugurating a 'political archaeology' that, tracing back to the Aristotelian notions of power and potency, questioned the paradigm of sovereign power and, along this path, proposed a re-evaluation of the category of  'impotentiality'. This project is characterized by a radical transition concerning the theme of potentiality, which is assumed within an ontological and political perspective. This is a significant paradigm shift within the contemporary Italian debate (besides Agamben, one might consider Cacciari and Vitiello too), which maintains even today, despite different developments, analogies and partial continuities that deserve to be identified and considered in their theoretical and critical profile. The theme of this issue presents at least four levels of discussion.

1) An ontological dimension: consider how the category of potentiality, understood in this case as 'potency always in action,' can articulate the semantics of the real in terms of an entirely 'modal' and 'transitional' dynamics, not foundational or consciousness-focused, according to a theoretical strategy that finds antecedents in both Spinoza's and Bergson's philosophy. In this case, one focus of investigation could be how life (one of the main issues of Italian Thought) relates to power and potentiality; and how this cluster should be approached today. This line of studies is currently fruitful in Italy (Ronchi) and deserves to be valued.

2) A philosophical-political dimension. To consider political conflict as a power not reducible to a synthetic principle, to a unique and sovereign 'act’, represents a conceptual resource to rethink the profile of the philosophical-political categories of modernity, at first, sovereignty. Starting from this point, it is possible to highlight a genealogy of political modernity that opposed the 'sovereign' line of Hobbes, Rousseau, and Hegel to a different trend that traces from Machiavelli, through Spinoza, at least to Marx, intending to deconstruct and overthrow the theological-political supremacy of the principle of sovereignty. Even in the case of the relationship between order and conflict, between constituted power and constituting power (Negri), what is at stake here is the affirmative autonomy of power, its relationship with the negative (Virno), and thus the nature of the instituting (Esposito) and emancipatory (Cavarero) praxis. On this semantic and political dimension, to which Italian Thought has made an original contribution, it is possible to raise some pressing questions regarding the present. For example, how can we consider the relationship between political conflict and the capacity of institutional forms to express it? Which political and democratic mediations could preserve the charge of 'power' without this descending into power assuming isolationist and nationalistic aims?

3) Biopolitics is another paradigm to which Italian Thought has given specific emphasis (Agamben, Esposito, Negri) and that could be profitably revisited through the triad 'power, potentiality, possibility'. The question then becomes: what aspect does power assume today in its relationship with life? Considering such pressing ecological events on the public agenda as the Covid-19 pandemic or the ongoing global climate change, power seems to be undergoing a profound transformation. In this regard, it is worth asking: is it possible a biopolitics that is not merely the dominance of life and biopower, but rather a biopolitics in the 'affirmative' sense of an inexhaustible potentiality beyond the frameworks of power?

4) One final dimension is the anthropological one. On the level of the relationship between history and nature, human faculties such as 'creativity' and 'language,' which have always been decisive in defining the human enclosure, can once again be thematized through the category of power, potentiality and possibility. What does it mean that human faculties have the character of historical praxis, of potential and transitioning faculties? How can these features be maintained in the confrontation between human and artificial intelligence, human and machine production system? At the same time, feminism and gender-oriented questions are involved: how can we investigate which possibilities historically traverse 'human nature' and why they must be explored and cultivated?

In conclusion, starting from the typical coordinates of Italian Thought, categories like power, potentiality and possibility can highlight a framework of open questions in the present debate in ontological, political, anthropological, and aesthetic dimensions. Therefore, while on one hand the issue aims to host contributions focusing on those three categories from a critical-reconstructive perspective, on the other, its leading goal is to revitalize their theoretical interplay through an autonomous philosophical exercise.

Proposals must be sent via email to the editorial board and editors (rivistaitinerari@gmail.com; dacalabro@unisa.it; ggoria@unisa.it; mvillani@unisa.it) by July 15, 2025, and should take the form of a concise presentation (within 3000 characters, including spaces) of the investigation. Accepted proposal notifications will be communicated by July 30, 2025.

Accepted contributions should adhere to the following criteria:

- They must be original;

- They should be written in Italian, French, Spanish, German, or English following the journal's guidelines;

- They should have a length ranging between 25,000 and 40,000 characters, including notes and spaces;

- Contributions must be submitted via email to the editor by March 1, 2026, accompanied by an abstract (between 250 and 500 characters) in English and five keywords in English. All contributions will undergo anonymous evaluation. The publication will incur no costs for the authors.