Carlo Sini’s interpretation of Spinoza’s thought represents a very important passage for the Italian thinker, from different point of views. Sini understands Spinoza as a chance to raise again the archaelogical and hermeneutical questions regarding the sign and the symbol, as well as the philosophizing Self and the meaning of modern science starting from Spinoza’s abyssal thought towards a new ethics of the subject.

In this review the author discusses the latest interpretations of Giacomo Leopardi’s philosophical thought, with special regard to two books that both focus, from different points of view, on the Leopardian concept of desire. On the one hand, Alessandra Aloisi’s book relates this concept to that of “assuefaction”, in order to provide a coherent frame of Leopardi’s anthropology and ontology; on the other hand, Georgia Schiavon’s book compares Leopardi’s and Epicurus thoughts, showing the distance (especially regarding the ethical plane) between their two forms of materialism.

The essay aims to show that the fundamental speculative knots of Giorgio Colli’s thought can be interpreted as the conscious result of a radical rethinking of a theoretical praxis, more specifically as the result of the philological praxis, in whose philosophical rearticulation the metaphysical understanding of the world as expression is already decided and configured. Following the philosophical turn of philology opened by Nietzsche, Colli considers philology as decipherment of the “discourse” of life, as science of expression in general: this science is deeply connected to a philosophical-metaphysical perspective that discloses the expression as general medium, in which the interiority is at the same time shown and concealed. The concept of philology thus appears as a powerful hermeneutical key capable of opening some features both characteristic and spring-fed in Colli’s thought.

The paper deals with the questions of the so-called “Italian Theory” and “Italian Thought”. The author outlines a brief outlook on the main perspectives about the identity of Italian philosophy, from Vico to Carlo Antoni and Giovanni Gentile, and considers the relationship between the reform of the Hegelian dialectic and the Marxist philosophy of the praxis.

Starting from his 2013 book about Dante, Pasolini and Morante, in this interview Manuele Gragnolati discusses his own interpretation of Dante’s work with the help of some leading concepts and categories taken from the queer theory, and suggests the possibility to re-think Dante’s writings in comparison to Pasolini and Morante, namely by a deep consideration of the role played by sexuality, body and desire.

Starting from his last book Un parricidio compiuto. Il confronto finale di Marx con Hegel, Roberto Finelli recounts his way of interpreting and developing Marx’s thought. Focusing on the relationship between Marx and Hegel, Finelli critically reviews some of the most influential Marxist scholars of the Twentieth century, with particular regard to the italian Marxist tradition.