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Alessandra Tarquini, an expert on Italian Fascism, untangles the complicated relationship between the Italian left and Jews since the late nineteenth century. Due largely to indifference, and sometimes to antisemitism, Italian leftists consistently overlooked Jews in their visions for a collectivist future. Yet, from the birth of the Socialist Party in 1892 until 1992, when the heirs of the Marxist tradition dispersed or set out on a new path, questions continually arose in revolutionary efforts to remake the Italian state: Should Jews be seen as oppressed, and therefore welcome to participate in the struggle that would lead to the advent of a new civilization? Or might they hinder the realization of socialism because of their attachment to a religious identity? 

Tarquini’s research fills an important lacuna by analyzing the antisemitism of twentieth-century socialist movements. Crucially, however, Tarquini makes important distinctions between antisemitism on the Italian left and right, and identifies the relationship between leftism and antisemitism as a distinct formation.

A thought-provoking exploration of the fragility of bourgeois identity.

Vienna, 1825. News of a sickly, listless boy is making the rounds. In broad daylight, he falls into deep sleep and his personality changes dramatically. While sleeping, he reads, writes, plays cards, challenges his doctors with amusement, and accomplishes the most astonishing of exercises with his eyes closed. A new subject has appeared, a second “I” has now supplanted the first.

Andrea Cavalletti carefully registers the disquieting appearances of this second “I” in the literature and psychology of the past two centuries. In a context dominated by amnesia and somnambulism, hallucinations and wakeful dreams, the bourgeois subject, whose identity seemed so stable, turns out to be inhabited by masks that elude every grasp, at the mercy of a doubling that can no longer be recomposed. Personalities multiply and do battle, as even life and death exchange roles. And, ultimately, the identity of the Western subject reveals itself as a shade-like, constitutively double figure, that only lives in its weakness and forgetting, in its losses and distractions.