Born in
Venice, Cacciari graduated in philosophy from the University of Padua (1967),
where he also received his doctorate, writing a thesis on Immanuel Kant’s Critique
of Judgment. In 1985, he became professor of Aesthetics at the Architecture
Institute of Venice. In 2002, he founded the Department of Philosophy at the
University of Vita-Salute San Raffaele in Milan, where he was appointed Dean of
the Department in 2005. Cacciari has founded several philosophical reviews and
published essays centered on the “negative thought” inspired by authors like Friedrich
Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
In the 1980s, Cacciari also worked with the Italian composer of avant-garde
contemporary/classical music Luigi Nono. After a brief affiliation with Potere
Operaio, a radical left-wing worker’s party, Cacciari joined the Italian
Communist Party (PCI). In the 1970s he was responsible for industrial politics
for the PCI Veneto section and, in 1976, he was elected to the Italian Chamber
of Deputies, where he was a member of the Parliamentary commission for industry
(1976–1983). After the death of Enrico Berlinguer, in 1984, Cacciari left the
Communist Party and switched to more moderate positions, although he never left
the centre-left coalition. In 1993 he was elected mayor of Venice, a
position he held until 2000. He
was also put forth as the future national leader of the coalition, later named The
Olive Tree, but his defeat in the 2000 election as governor of the Veneto
region made this occasion wane. However, in a surprise move in 2005, Cacciari
again ran for mayor of Venice, and was elected by a slight majority against
former magistrate Felice Casson, the very magistrate who years earlier had
famously indicted Mayor Cacciari for criminal negligence arising out of the
1996 fire at Venice’s La Fenice opera house. Mayor Cacciari was later
acquitted of all charges in that case.