At the limits of politics: Italian autonomia and the World Social Forum

This thesis explores the interrelation between an organic crisis and a state of exception and their effect upon subjectivity and the structure of the state through a historical analysis of Italy from 1969 to 1979. I argue that rapid industrialization of Italy weakened its institutional framework, creating the conditions necessary for an organic crisis. The Italian state responded by declaring a state of exception and unleashed a campaign of terrorism against its own population. In these circumstances a unique political configuration, Autonomia, emerged that not only astutely analyzed the political and economic changes occurring in Italy, but created new forms of resistance that further ruptured the fabric of Italian society. In the final chapter I argue that the Italian experience of the 1970s prefigures, in many ways, our present epoch of neoliberalism, post-political politics, and empire; with the World Social Forum sharing a number of characteristics with Autonomia.