Profile
Roles:
Biography
Matteo is a senior lecturer in Organisation and Politics at the School of Business and Management, which he joined in 2007. He holds a degree in Philosophy from University College London, an MA in Continental Philosophy and a PhD from the University of Warwick. His research focuses on conflict as a conceptual lens through which to grasp social, political, and cultural change. Following his PhD on the concept of time, his focus for over two decades has been on Italian Workerism and the relations between political action and business organisation. He has translated numerous articles and books by the principle theorists of this tradition, as well as written extensively about it. He is working on a monograph focused on the period that runs from Italian post-war reconstruction to the 1980s, tracing the interaction between anti-systemic movements and Italian industrial organisation and the state. He is now in the early stages of exploring relations between anti-systemic movements and disciplinary and institutional change since the 1960s in Italy, with particular focus on changes in the shifts in the treatment of “mental health”.
Research
Research Interests:
Conflict in social, political, and economic organisation
His research over the last two decades and more has involved a focus on conflict as a lens to grasp the way social order is managed, sustained, and transformed. His work has sought to show how order is always precarious and that its very precarity, always already marked by its own end, calls upon ways to manage its dissolution through the proliferations of practices of control accompanied by ideological forms that dissemble the precarity that the ever-presence of conflict engenders. He has explored the aporias of action and of order itself through original research and numerous translations of theoretical writings.
Centre and Group Membership:
Publications
Selected Publications
- ‘Mario Tronti, 1931-2023’, Radical Philosophy, 2.17, winter 2024
- ‘Translator’s Introduction’ to M. Tronti, The Twilight of Politics, Seagull (Calcutta 2023)
- ‘The Aporias of Action’, in M. Cacciari, Hamletics: Shakespeare, Kafka, Beckett, Seagull (Calcutta 2023)
- ‘Devils’ in The Repeater Book of Heroism, Repeater Books, London (2022)
- ‘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, January 2020
- ‘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 (2021)
Selected Translations
- The Labour of Spirit, M. Cacciari, edited, translated, and introduced by M. Mandarini, Seagull Books, London/Chicago (2025)
- The Twilight of the Political, M. Tronti, edited, translated introduced by M. Mandarini, Seagull Books, London/Chicago (forthcoming 2024)
- Hamletics, M. Cacciari, edited, translated, and introduced by M. Mandarini, Seagull Books, London/Chicago (2023)
- A Heterodox Marxist and his Century: Lelio Basso, edited C. Giorgi, co-translated by M. Mandarini, Brill, Nijhoff and Haymarket, Chicago 2020
- Writers and the People, A. Asor Rosa, edited and translated M. Mandarini, Seagull Books, London/Chicago 2020
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
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.
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)
Grants
Leverhulme Small Grant 2025:
The challenges of effecting systemic change in advanced economies: the case of Italy in the 1970 and
‘80s
The aim of this research is to grasp the structural limitations (e.g., institutions of government, party structures, economic interests, etc.) that hinder systemic change at a time when radical change is necessary. This project takes a historical case study of a modern European economy to explore the ways political groups formed
outside or in the margins of mainstream parliamentary parties have attempted to bring about structural change. My focus will be on the role, in the 1970s, of Italian Workerists (Operaismo) within the Italian Communist Party (the PCI was the second largest parliamentary party in Italy from 1947-1991), their aims, activities, and what ultimately stood in the way of effecting the changes they sought.
