GCAS: We are celebrating your latest publication, In Circolo: Rivista di filosofia e culture. Can you share more about this project?
Filippo Scafi: Anthropo-fiction is the primary positive proposal coming out of what I elaborate in my PhD dissertation, and I wanted to contribute to this issue of In Circolo (thanks again to Christian Frigerio and Camilla Zani!) on the inheritance of Bruno Latour exactly because the question I raise is one of inheritance and borrowing of knowledge in the case of a discipline, like anthropology, which has a long history with the problem of borrowing. The idea is that a theory’s descriptive power and its legislative power are not the same thing, and you can take the first without the second. The theory becomes an occasional material, and it’s used the way a writer uses a genre, thus seriously and skillfully, but without believing the genre legislates reality.
GCAS: You completed your PhD at GCAS this year, in February. How would you describe your experience and journey in the program, from first discovering GCAS to graduating?
Filippo Scafi: It was a great journey, one that, thanks also to my supervisor Rocco Gangle, gave me all the instruments to commit seriously to the kind of work I always wanted to do, that is, to do philosophy. The fact that GCAS has also quite a “practical” direction in the way philosophy and psychoanalysis are understood (and I refuse the idea that “philosophy for the sake of philosophy” is a proposition bearing any meaning at all), offered me a posture I internalized, for “servitude” and humility. Philosophy always responds to something, never only to itself and to its objects, and its task is to hold the responding in place. GCAS has been for me a nurturing place.
GCAS: Over the years, you have become deeply involved in GCAS, teaching in the philosophy program and supervising students. How would you describe your approach as a lecturer and mentor?
As a lecturer, my approach is very classical, coming more from my Italian BA background rather than from my MA, in England. I think that philosophy is a rigorous discipline, one that needs a great amount of effort especially because it is subjected to multiple pressures and muddlings. Philosophy without rigor is even dangerous, as it gives instruments through which a person can find herself subjugated by their own knowledge, to the authority of philosophical discourse itself. The thing I value the most is a strong background in the history of thought, one that does not aim at “weaponizing” or criticize right away the thinkers or the notions one engages, but sits with them, even in total confusion, and takes them seriously and starts from them. When I was in my BA or MA, I was much more aggressive against what I was reading, and the personal stake of the discipline where reversing completely the relationship: in my attempt to do philosophy, philosophy was much more doing me. The goal of something like philosophical enquiry should be to acquire a certain calmness, and gentleness, perhaps even elegance, in engaging with others. Mentorship tries to follow these same ideas: I try to push students to engage with curiosity toward thinkers and philosophies, without making philosophy a war machine of opinions. The calmer one is when engaging with, say, Plato –– even if the stakes are present –– the more one is really able to do something with what he thought and wrote, and to relate, as much as possible, with him. The philosopher is also a translator, of words as much as of lives.
GCAS: You are also co-editing the GCAS Review. What is the vision behind this publication?
Filippo Scafi: GCAS is populated with people that are highly curious and sincerely driven by a desire for knowledge that serves other. To have a venue that expresses our commitments and the way we see this operation, I think is absolutely crucial. Me, Francisco Gonzalez, Jamie Davies, Sofia Galli and Amy Gorissen, Mahmoud Elaifi are trying to create something, between the Journal (which will have a new name starting from September!), the Magazine (which will be on substack), and the Open Access Library, something that is able to make GCAS speak, and hopefully that attracts external researchers to contribute.
GCAS: What would you say to someone considering GCAS as a prospective student?
Filippo Scafi: GCAS is a place that nurtures intellectual pursuits, and values personal histories. GCAS’ capacity to allow for research freedom –– which reads as trust in the person’s capabilities and motives –– is something that does not overlook, anyway, rigor and respect. One cannot be nurtured if it’s not trusted. If I feel confident in the job that I’m doing now, and in the hope to become always a better writer, philosopher, maybe teacher, it’s because someone trusted and trusts me and what I am doing.
GCAS: Finally, could you tell us more about your own research and current projects? What are you focusing on now, and what lies ahead?
Filippo Scafi: My work is deeply indebted to that of François Laruelle and his non-philosophy/non-standard philosophy; I think that what I take from him is the concern of sufficiency and authority that philosophy self-produces, but generalized to knowledge as a whole. My broader project is that of a general theory of what any knowledge-formation must foreclose in order to constitute itself as knowledge at all, and anthropo-fiction is an exemplary, however local, case. The question that moves my work is pretty straightforward: what should we do with knowledge?
Filippo Scafi is a lecturer in philosophy and anthropology at GCAS. He teaches in the BA program and is the principal mentor in the MA philosophy program. He is an affiliated researcher at the School of Materialist Research.
His work engages the intersections of philosophy, anthropology, and psychoanalysis, with particular emphasis on epistemology, alterity, and the critique of representation. His dissertation focuses on the philosophical and epistemological limits of the Ontological Turn in anthropology, examining how concepts of Difference and alterity function as both pharmakon and impasse, and advancing François Laruelle’s non-philosophy as an alternative framework. Beyond his research, he has taught introductory philosophy courses at GCAS, with a focus on ancient Greek philosophy, truth and discourse, and the legacy of Socratic critique in relation to writing and democracy. His broader interests include media theory, critical theory, and the relationship between philosophy and lived experience.