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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 ''
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'', ''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