Diego Fusaro

Biography

After undergraduate studies in Turin (M.A., Philosophy cum laude, with a dissertation on Karl Marx e la schiavitù salariata: uno studio sul lato cattivo della storia that awarded him the Premio filosofico di Siracusa 2007), he went on to obtain a Ph.D at the Università Vita-Salute San Raffaele di Milano, Milan, Italy in 2011. His thesis, co-supervised by the Istituto Italiano di Scienze Umane, Italian Institute of Human Sciences, tackled Reinhart Koselleck’s thinking and was written under the direction of Pier Paolo Portinaro and Andrea Tagliapietra. Fusaro graduated cum laude and with the honour to publish.

Since 2004, Fusaro has been working with Giovanni Reale and Giuseppe Girgenti in the translation and editing of the ancient Greek atomists’ texts for Bompiani, a publishing house. Since 2006, he is the director of the philosophical library “I Cento Talleri” of the publishing house “Il Prato”. Since 2007 he is also co-director of the philosophical journal “Koiné”, edited by Petite Plaisance, a publishing house in Pistoia. Since 2008, he is an editorial secretary for the philosophical collections “Testi a fronte” and “Il pensiero occidentale” of the publishing house Bompiani, Milan, Italy; both directed by Giovanni Reale. Since the same year, he sits un the scientific committee of philosophical journal “Arché”. In 2008, Fusaro was appointed as “cultore della materia” - an unpaid teaching and research assistantship - , and since October 2008 has worked as a teaching assistant to professor Andrea Tagliapietra, especially for the classes of Hermeneutics, History of modern and contemporary philosophy, and History of Ideas.

In 2009, he had a stint at the Reinhart Koselleck’s Begriffsgeschichte at the University of Bielefeld (Bielefeld, Germany).

He founded and to date directs one of the most substantial Italian websites on philosophy (“La filosofia e i suoi Eroi”, www.filosofico.net), which purports to be a reference point for the philosophical Italian debate on the internet. Since the spring of 2011, Fusaro has been an untenured lecturer at the Università Vita-Salute San Raffaele in Milan. Since the autumn of 2012, he is a member of the teaching staff of “Dottorato in Metafisica” at San Raffaele University. In 2012, Fusaro also held a featured public lecture on Karl Marx’s Capital at “Festival della Filosofia” in Modena.

Since 2000, Fusaro has been editing the website Filosofico.net. On 20 June 2015 he started blogging for the online version of the Italian newspaper, Il Fatto Quotidiano.

Themes

In his writings, Fusaro tackles Marx’s thought from a Neo-Hegelian, neo-Idealist perspective. He combines criticism of the capitalist system with elements drawn from the communitarian and souverainism currents. He seeks to bring to the fore the contradictions inherent in the capitalist system and the postmodern human condition. He also addresses History of Ideas issues. He follows in the footsteps of the Italian philosopher Costanzo Preve. The authors he principally studies are Reinhart Koselleck, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci and Giovanni Gentile.

His research interests gravitate toward a formulation and the practice of a “critical history of ideas”, understood as a discipline which diachronically focuses on the discontinuities which originate in the transmission of the cultural and symbolical forms of a certain culture, and, synchronically, on the connection which is distinctive of every historical period between cultural codes and thought on the one hand, and material conditions of the production and power on the other. This discipline's aim is to show this complex web of connections, mainly focusing on this “exchange zone” between ideas and reality, conceptual and socio-political constellations. In this regard, Fusaro’s research involves, on the one hand, the study of authors who attempted to elaborate a method for the history of ideas, of metaphors and concepts (Foucault, Blumenberg, Koselleck), and, on the other hand, the origins and the semantic modifications of the concept of history from Classical antiquity onward. Currently, he is also focusing on German idealism, its harbingers (Spinoza) and its followers (Marx).

Publications

MONOGRAPHS AND ESSAYS:

EDITED BOOKS:

He is also the author of several essays in many philosophical journals (“Filosofia politica”, “Giornale Critico di Storia delle Idee”, “Teoria politica”, “Rivista di Storia della Filosofia”, “La società degli individui”, “Koiné”, and many others).