Dr Matteo Mandarini

Profile

Roles:

• Teaching Innovation Lead on the UG Transformation Project
• Member of the Department of Business and Society

Teaching

Undergraduate:

• BUS156: Contemporary Challenges in Business and Management I
• BUS352: Global Business and Democracy

Research

Research Interests:

I am engaged in an ongoing exploration of the shifting forms assumed by conflict and its representation at a time when the concepts and structures foundational of political modernity are increasingly eroded by the dynamics of global capital.

I am presently looking into the changing forms of the organisation of conflict in post-war Italy in two key areas: shifting forms of workplace conflict and the transition from forms of workplace conflict to political conflict. Building upon theories of conflict that I have already begun to explore in several articles, I am interested in challenging approaches to conflict that seek its domestication, drawing on the Italian example illustrates a practice and thinking of conflict that is wary of conflict resolution and develops practices and forms of organising aiming to resist any forms by which conflict is contained.  Part of the aim of this work seeks to reactivate a concept and thinking of conflict that, drawing upon a range of thinkers ancient and modern, presents conflict not as something to be guarded against but as ontologically foundational to social organisation. Developing such a notion of conflict allows me to advance a critique of the easy dichotomy between direct and indirect democracy about which I have written in ('The Vicissitudes of Representation', Jus Cogens, 2020), but that I hope to develop further. Bringing together organisational practices and concepts from the Italian post-war period (e.g. ‘open’ conflict and ‘class composition’), with the notion of ‘self-representation’ (drawing on the work of Stefan Jonsson), I hope to advance this notion as one that combines an engagement with the concrete analysis of class composition with the organisational notion and practice of ‘open’ conflict. 

I have recently completed and wish to extend a discussion of planning in the 20th Century, taking the experience of the 'industrialisation debates' in the period of the New Economic Policy in the Soviet Union, and considering the disavowal of politics in contemporary discussions of logistics.

• political representation 
• politics of logistics
• how to think conflict without domesticating it
• organising conflict against its management
• memories of conflict 

Centre and Group Membership:

• Member of the Centre on Labour and Global Production (CLGP)

 

Publications

Articles

• ‘The Left out of History’, with A. Toscano, Etica e politica – Ethics and Politics (forthcoming 2020)
• ‘The Vicissitudes of Representation’, Jus Cogens: A Critical Journal of Philosophy of Law and Politics (2020)
• ‘Periphery and Centre in Comparative Perspective: opportunities for accounting praxis’, with S. Harney and G. Hanlon, Critical Perspectives on Accounting (online May 2020)
• ‘A Betrayal Retrieved: Mario Tronti’s Critique of the Political’, with Andrew Anastasi. Viewpoint (February 2020)
• ‘Planning for Conflict’, with Alberto Toscano, South Atlantic Quarterly, 119, 1, 2020 (January).
• ‘Notes on the Political Over the Longue Durée’, in Viewpoint, 4, 2014 
• ‘Critical Thoughts on the Politics of Immanence’, in Historical Materialism, 18.4, 2010
• ‘Beyond Nihilism: Notes Towards a Critique of Left-Heideggerianism in Italian Communist Thought,’ in Cosmos & History, vol. 5, no. 1, 2009 and in The Italian Difference, edited by A. Toscano and L. Chiesa, Melbourne: re.press
• ‘Not Fear but Hope in the Apocalypse’ in Ephemera, 8.2, May 2008
• ‘Marx and Deleuze: Money, Time, and Crisis’ in Polygraph, 18, January 2007
• ‘Antagonism vs. Contradiction: Conflict and the Dynamics of Organisation in the Thought of 
• Antonio Negri’ in The Sociological Review, Oct. 2005, vol. 53, s.1 and in Contemporary Organization Theory, ed. C. Jones and R. Munro, Blackwell, Oxford, 2005

 

Edited collections

• The Bewitched World of Capital: Economic Crisis and the Morphology of the Political, by Giacomo Marramao, edited with extensive critical introduction by M. Mandarini, Brill / Haymarket Books (forthcoming 2021)

 

Handbook chapters / Book chapters / Scholarly introductions

• ‘Politics Against History’ in The Twilight of the Political, M. Tronti, Seagull Books (a Chicago University Press imprint), London/Chicago (forthcoming 2021)
• ‘The Marxism of Crisis and the Political Morphology of Capital’ in the The Bewitched World of Capital: Economic Crisis and the Morphology of the Political, by G. Marramao, edited with extensive critical introduction by M. Mandarini, Brill / Haymarket Books (forthcoming 2021)
• ‘Il recupero di un tradimento: la critica del politico di Mario Tronti’ (with A. Anastasi), in La rivoluzione in esilio. Scritti su Mario Tronti, edited by A. Cerutti, G. Munoz and M. Tarì. Quadlibet, Bologna (forthcoming 2020).
• ‘On the impossibility of Business Ethics: leadership, heterogeneity, and politics’ (with G. Hanlon), in The Routledge Companion to Ethics, Politics and Organization, ed. A. Pullen and C. Rhodes (2015)
• ‘Organizing Communism’ in Communists like Us by F. Guattari and A. Negri, Autonomedia, New York (2010)
• ‘Beyond Nihilism: Notes Towards a Critique of Left-Heideggerianism in Italian Communist Thought,’ in The Italian Difference, edited by A. Toscano and L. Chiesa, Melbourne: re.press and in Cosmos & History, vol. 5, no. 1, 2009 
• ‘Towards a Worker’s Society?: New Perspectives on Work and Organization’ (with P. Fleming) in Handbook of Critical Management Studies, edited by H. WIlmott, M. Alvesson, and T. Bridgman, Oxford University Press, 2009
• ‘Antonio Negri and the Antinomies of Bourgeois Thought’ (with A. Toscano) in The Political Descartes: Reason, Ideology and the Bourgeois Project, by A. Negri, Verso, London, 2007
• ‘Antagonism vs. Contradiction: Conflict and the Dynamics of Organisation in the Thought of Antonio Negri’ in Contemporary Organization Theory, ed. C. Jones and R. Munro, Blackwell, Oxford, 2005 and in The Sociological Review, Oct. 2005, vol. 53, s.1
• ‘Translator’s Introduction’ in Time for Revolution, A. Negri, Continuum, London, 2003
• ‘Neoliberalism or Totalitarianism: a Reply to Malcolm Bull’ at http://www.generation-online.org/p/pnegri.htm 2003 
• ‘From Epidermal History to Speed Politics’ in Virtual Futures, ed. J. Broadhurst Dixon and E. J. Cassidy, Routledge, London, 1998

 

Translations

• Hamletica, M. Cacciari, edited, translated introduced by M. Mandarini, Seagull Books (a Chicago University Press imprint), London/Chicago (forthcoming 2022)
• The Twilight of the Political, M. Tronti, edited, translated introduced by M. Mandarini, Seagull Books (a Chicago University Press imprint), London/Chicago (forthcoming 2021)
• A Heterodox Marxist and his Century: Lelio Basso, edited C. Giorgi, co-translated by M. Mandarini, Brill, Nijhoff and Haymarket, Chicago (forthcoming 2020) 
• Writers and the People, A. Asor Rosa, edited and translated M. Mandarini, Seagull Books (a Chicago University Press imprint), London (forthcoming 2020) 
• ‘Introduction’ by M. Tronti to Il Politico, for Viewpoint, issue 4, 2014.
• The Passage West: Philosophy and Globalisation, G. Marramao, Verso, London, August 2012
• The Kingdom and the Glory, G. Agamben, translated with L. Chiesa, Stanford University Press, 2011
• The Labour of Job, A. Negri, Duke University Press, 2009
• The Political Descartes: Reason, Ideology and the Bourgeois Project, A. Negri, edited and introduced M. Mandarini and A. Toscano, Verso, London, 2007
• ‘Giorgio Agamben: The Discrete Taste of the Dialectic’, A.Negri, in Sovereignty and Life: Essays on the Work of Giorgio Agamben, edited by M. Calarco and S. DeCaroli, Stanford University Press, 2007 
• ‘Reading Gilbert Simondon: Transindividuality, Technical Activity and Reification’, P. Virno, Radical Philosophy 136, March/April 2006
• ‘On the political ontology of the subject’, A. Negri, in Ontology in Practice: Radical Secular and Religious Politics, Duke University Press, 2004
• ‘The Postcolonial Condition’, S. Mezzadra & F. Rahola. John Douglas Taylor Conference, ‘The Politics of Postcoloniality: Contexts and Conflicts’, McMaster University, Ontario, Canada, October 24, 2003
• ‘Empire and the Multitude. A debate on the new order of globalisation’, D. Zolo & A. Negri, translated with A. Bove, Radical Philosophy June-July, 2003
• Time for Revolution, edited and introduced M. Mandarini, Continuum, London, 2003

Supervision

Areas of Supervision Expertise:

Dr Mandarini has supervised PhDs in political theory and philosophy, and in heterodox political economy.

He is interested in supervising PhD candidates with an interest in questions of political, socio-economic, and workplace conflict and with the strategies developed and implemented to produce systemic change.

Current Doctoral Students:

2nd Supervisor

• Kallum Pembro, ‘Worker Organisation in the UK: A Taxonomy of Struggle in the “Gig Economy”.’

PhD Supervision Completions:

• Clair Quentin, 'A materialist political economy of international corporate tax reform’. Awarded 2020.
• Bue Hansen, 'Atoms organised : on the orientations of theory and the theorisations of organisation in the philosophy of Karl Marx.' Awarded 2015.
• Rashné Limki, 'Postcolonial excess(es) : on the mattering of bodies and the preservation of value in India.' Awarded 2015
• Toni Prug, 'Hacking the economy and the state: towards an egalitarian and participatory conception of production and allocation.' Awarded 2014 (With Laws, Queen Mary University of London)
• Clayton Chin, 'Pragmatism, liberalism and the conditions of critique : the connection between philosophy and politics in the work of Richard Rorty. Awarded 2012. (With the School of Politics and International Relations, Queen Mary University of London)

Public Engagement

He has translated numerous books and essays in contemporary continental political thought and from the tradition of Operaismo. Most recently he has completed the translation of the only monograph of the early Operaista tradition: Alberto Asor Rosa's The Writer and the People (Seagull Books).

Member of the International Scientific Committee of the Centre for Critical Theory and Politics, Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage, Ca' Foscari University of Venice.