Forms of Radicality

This lecture explores the rich history and the variety of meanings of radicality, a term that connects roots and left-wing politics. Its etymology leads to the Latin radix or root, inviting associations with origins, anchoring, sustenance, and the subterranean. In the civic realm, the term is often associated with an extreme politics that departs from tradition and moderation. Relying on European examples, this lecture tracks various deployments of the term in politics and philosophy from the 18th century to present and shows the breadth of meanings radicality has acquired through the centuries.

Christy Wampole is Professor of French at Princeton University, where she works at the intersection of literature and philosophy, with particular interests in feminism, ecology, and media. Her research spans nineteenth-through twenty-first-century French, Francophone, and Italian literature, with a focus on the novel and the essay. She is the author of Rootedness: The Ramifications of a Metaphor (University of Chicago Press, 2016) and Degenerative Realism: Novel and Nation in 21st-Century France (Columbia University Press, 2020). Her work has also appeared in journals such as MLN, The Modern Language Review, L’Esprit créateur, Small Axe, The French Review, Magazine littéraire, Quaderni del ‘900, and Yale French Studies, as well as in The New York Times and The New Yorker. She is coeditor of The Cambridge History of the American Essay (2024).

Federica Di Blasio is a postdoctoral Fellow at ICI Berlin. She is completing a monograph on metaphors of rootedness in Italian modern and contemporary Italian literature. She has published on the ‘rooted’ aesthetics of Cesare Pavese, migration, translation, and geophilosophical representations of the Mediterranean. In Fall 2026, she will join Brown University as Visiting Assistant Professor of Italian Studies.

Christy Wampole

Moderated by Federica Di Blasio

Organized by Federica Di Blasio

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