“Lack of political will and corruption of the ruling class are certainly enormous obstacles but do not (fully) explain the widespread inaction against our current multidimensional crisis (ecological catastrophe, failing democracies, permanent and more destructive wars, etc.).” So opens Andrea Righi’s Three Economies of Transcendence, which takes a deep philosophical dive into the fundamental dimensions of subjectivity, society, and time through the lens of transcendence. Here, Righi is joined in a wide-ranging conversation with Michael Lewis about finitude, infinitude, evolution, neoliberalism, and radical change.

Andrea Righi is a cultural theorist and professor of European studies and Italian at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. Righi is author of Three Economies of Transcendence; The Other Side of the Digital: The Sacrificial Economy of New Media; and coeditor with Cesare Casarino of Another Mother: Diotima and the Symbolic Order of Italian Feminism.

Michael Lewis is senior lecturer in philosophy at University of Newcastle Upon Tyne and editor of the Journal of Italian Philosophy.

EPISODE REFERENCES:

René Girard

Adriana Cavarero

Emanuele Severino

Hannah Arendt

Paolo Virno

Jacques Lacan

Ministry for the Future / Kim Stanley Robinson

Fredric Jameson

Hardt and Negri

Three Economies of Transcendence by Andrea Righi is available from University of Minnesota Press. This book is part of the Forerunners series, and an open-access edition is available to read free online at manifold.umn.edu.