Massimo Cacciari (; born 5 June 1944) is an Italian philosopher, politician and public intellectual.
Biography
Born in Venice, Cacciari graduated in philosophy from the
University of Padua (1967), where he also received his
doctorate, writing a thesis on Immanuel Kant's ''Critique of Judgment''. In 1985, he became professor of
Aesthetics at the Architecture Institute of Venice. In 2002, he founded the Department of Philosophy at the University of Vita-Salute San Raffaele in
Milan, where he was appointed Dean of the Department in 2005. Cacciari has founded several philosophical reviews and published
essays centered on the "negative thought" inspired by authors like
Friedrich Nietzsche,
Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger (; ; 26 September 188926 May 1976) was a German philosopher who is best known for contributions to phenomenology, hermeneutics, and existentialism. He is among the most important and influential philosophers of the 20th centur ...
and
Ludwig Wittgenstein.
In the 1980s, Cacciari also worked with the Italian composer of avant-garde contemporary/classical music
Luigi Nono. Nono, a political activist whose music represented a revolt against bourgeois cultural constructs, collaborated with Cacciari, who arranged the philosophical lyrics on such works of Nono's as ''
Das Atmende Klarsein
Das or DAS may refer to:
Organizations
* Dame Allan's Schools, Fenham, Newcastle upon Tyne, England
* Danish Aviation Systems, a supplier and developer of unmanned aerial vehicles
* Departamento Administrativo de Seguridad, a former Colombian ...
'',
''Io'', and the opera ''
Prometeo''.
After a brief affiliation with
Potere Operaio, a radical left-wing worker's party, Cacciari joined the
Italian Communist Party (PCI). In the 1970s he was responsible for industrial politics for the PCI
Veneto section and, in 1976, he was elected to the
Italian Chamber of Deputies, where he was a member of the
Parliamentary commission for industry (1976–1983).
After the death of
Enrico Berlinguer (1984), Cacciari left the Communist Party and switched to more moderate positions, although he never left the centre-left coalition. In 1993 he was elected mayor of Venice, a position he held until 2000. He was also put forth as the future national leader of the coalition, later named
The Olive Tree, but his defeat in the 2000 election as governor of the Veneto region made this occasion wane. However, in a surprise move in 2005, Cacciari again ran for mayor of Venice, and was elected by a slight majority against former magistrate
Felice Casson
Felice Casson (born 5 August 1953 in Chioggia, Province of Venice) is an Italian magistrate and politician, who discovered the existence of Operation Gladio, a "stay-behind" NATO anti-communist army during the Cold War, while investigating on the ...
, the very magistrate who years earlier had famously indicted Mayor Cacciari for criminal negligence arising out of the 1996 fire at Venice's
La Fenice
Teatro La Fenice (, "The Phoenix") is an opera house in Venice, Italy. It is one of "the most famous and renowned landmarks in the history of Italian theatre" and in the history of opera as a whole. Especially in the 19th century, La Fenice beca ...
opera house. Mayor Cacciari was later acquitted of all charges in that case.
Works with English translations
*''Architecture and Nihilism: On the Philosophy of Modern Architecture'', Yale University Press, 1993
*''The Necessary Angel'', State University of New York Press, 1994
*''Posthumous People: Vienna at the Turning Point'', Stanford University Press, 1996
*''The Unpolitical. Essays on the Radical Critique of Political Reason'', Yale University Press, 2009
*''Europe and Empire: On the Political Forms of Globalization'', Fordham University Press, 2016
*''The Withholding Power. An Essay on Political Theology'', Bloomsbury Academic, 2018
External links
Interview with Massimo Cacciari: “‘I am many’, says Europe. We have to be capable of being many” ''Barcelona Metropolis'', 2010.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Cacciari, Massimo
1944 births
Living people
Italian Communist Party politicians
The Democrats (Italy) politicians
Democracy is Freedom – The Daisy politicians
Democratic Party (Italy) politicians
21st-century Italian politicians
Members of the Chamber of Deputies (Italy)
Politicians of Veneto
Mayors of Venice
Writers from Venice
Italian essayists
20th-century Italian philosophers
21st-century Italian philosophers
20th-century Italian politicians
Male essayists
20th-century essayists
21st-century essayists
20th-century Italian male writers
21st-century Italian male writers
Italian male non-fiction writers
Italian philosophers