Review essay Carlo Galli, Carl Schmitt, and contemporary Italian political thought Political Spaces and Global War, C. Galli. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis (2010). Ich verliere meine Zeit und gewinne meinen Raum: ‘I lose my time and win my space’. With this quote from Carl Schmitt, Carlo Galli tellingly opens Political Spaces and Global War . This reference to Schmitt is indeed revealing of the ways in which Galli understands space in relation to ‘the political’, an understanding that marks, directly or indirectly, all of his considerations on ‘the spatial’ found in this volume. To be sure, Political Spaces and Global War consists of three short books in one. It includes the translation of two essays published by Galli in Italian at the beginning of the past decade (Spazi Politici, 2001 , 133 pp. and La Guerra Globale, 2002, 54 pp.), and a long introductory essay penned by Adam Sitze (75 pp.), a sort of book-within-the-book, both in terms of content and aims. The choice to publish this volume can be interpreted in several different ways. On the one hand, it must certainly be welcomed, since it represents the first translation, at least in the form of a book, of the work of one of the most prominent contemporary Italian historians of political thought. So introducing Galli’s contri- bution to the analysis of modern European thought is, indeed, a much needed intervention in the contemporary debate con- cerned with the redefinition of ‘the political’. On the other hand, the sudden ‘discovery’ of Galli’s work on the part of English speaking academia (and the related publishing industry) may be possibly linked to a growing and more general interest, internation- ally, for Italian political philosophy, an interest largely sparked by the enormously influential work of philosophers like Giorgio Agamben and Antonio Negri, but also by the increasing popularity of scholars like Roberto Esposito, Paolo Virno, Gianni Vattimo, Mario Tronti, Christian Marazzi, and many others (as recently illus- trated by Chiesa and Toscano in their The Italian Difference, 2009; see also Esposito, 2010). The analysis of this impact is beyond the scope of this short essay, but it is useful to keep this background in mind when considering the appearance of Political Spaces and Global War . More specifically, the potential interest for Galli’s work can be linked to the growing international literature on Carl Schmitt, a topic on which Galli has in many ways an unparalleled expertise (p. xi). Geographers should thus pay attention to the appearance of a book of this kind outside of geography, since some of its tenets engage directly, albeit often in a rather problematic way, with the spatialization of politics. Nonetheless, the contribution of what Galli defines as ‘political geography’ is deliberately kept at the margins of his argument – a ‘decision’ that per se deserves further scrutiny and engagement. The Bologna effect As explained in the Editor’s Introduction, Galli teaches Storia delle dottrine politiche at the University of Bologna, a key site for the production of European political thought. Sitze insists at length on the ‘power of place’ (Bologna) in presenting Galli’s work and political context. Introduced as a student to the Frankfurt School, Galli demonstrated already in his early writings to be a sophisti- cated connoisseur of German philosophy and political thought (1973). In particular, all along his very successful career, he estab- lished himself as a widely respected ‘schmittologist’: Galli is not only probably the most authoritative ‘interpreter’ of Schmitt’s rela- tionship to Italian academia (1981), but his monumental Genealogia della Politica. Carl Schmitt e la crisi del pensiero moderno (1996, 939 pp.) is possibly the most comprehensive interpretation of Schmitt in relation to modern European political thought ever published. Galli is also the editor-in-chief of Filosofia Politica – a highly influen- tial journal in Italian political philosophy (Roberto Esposito is one of the other editors) – and a very active political commentator for La Repubblica, Italy’s highest circulation national newspaper. All in all, Galli is today a very well known public intellectual, now also directly involved in politics, with his collaboration with the Partito Democratico. Galli’s biography is well illustrated by Sitze’s comprehensive review (again, a sort of book-within-the-book), which has the merit to introducing the Anglophone readership not only to Galli’s work, but also, at least in part, to the Italian political context of the 1970s, in which Galli was trained and during which the crisis of the state was deeply felt by many intellectuals of the left, giving life to different forms of experimental political thought (pp. xvi–xx). This brief contextualization, I trust, provides a clear sense of the ambition and, at the same time, the complicated intellectual (and genealogical) implications of an editorial operation such as this one. Before spending some time on the content of the book(s), I would like to submit three brief critical notes in this respect. The first has to do with the choice of translating these two ‘minor’ books, instead of Galli’s seminal work on Schmitt. This latter is not only much more indicative of his personal and professional trajectory, but it includes possibly the most original elements of his scholarly contribution, something that would have made a significant impact on the contemporary literature on the German legal theorist. The books translated here are neither the best part of his production, nor particularly important for the present day debate on the relationship between space and politics. Global War in particular reads very much like a collection of materials pub- lished elsewhere, missing clear references to the key literature, something of very scarce academic interest. The relative marginal- ity of these two books is somewhat implicitly confirmed by Sitze’s introduction, which largely focuses on ‘Galli the schmittologist’, Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect Political Geography journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/polgeo Political Geography 31 (2012) 250–253 doi:10.1016/j.polgeo.2011.10.004