Giacomo Marramao – författare

This book addresses the current crisis of democratic politics and its phase of ‘interregnum’ – in which the past finds it hard to die and the future finds it difficult to be born – by proposing a radical redefinition of the concept of the Political.

Drawing on the thoughts of Antonio Gramsci and Walter Benjamin among others, it explores the meaning of the lemma auctoritas – the opposition between authority and power – and offers a comparison of the Frankfurt School’s radical critique of power with Georges Bataille’s critique of political economy and consumerist productivism, demonstrating how the two ultimately converge. Based on an ontology of the present that is critical of ‘identity obsession’ and advances instead a universalism of difference, the author proposes a new understanding of politics founded not on ‘vertical’ domination but on a ‘horizontal’ recomposition of subjectivities, allowing interaction and acting-in-common between different forms of life.

This book will therefore appeal to scholars of social and political theory.

This book addresses the current crisis of democratic politics and its phase of ‘interregnum’ – in which the past finds it hard to die and the future finds it difficult to be born – by proposing a radical redefinition of the concept of the Political.

Drawing on the thoughts of Antonio Gramsci and Walter Benjamin among others, it explores the meaning of the lemma auctoritas – the opposition between authority and power – and offers a comparison of the Frankfurt School’s radical critique of power with Georges Bataille’s critique of political economy and consumerist productivism, demonstrating how the two ultimately converge. Based on an ontology of the present that is critical of ‘identity obsession’ and advances instead a universalism of difference, the author proposes a new understanding of politics founded not on ‘vertical’ domination but on a ‘horizontal’ recomposition of subjectivities, allowing interaction and acting-in-common between different forms of life.

This book will therefore appeal to scholars of social and political theory.

This book offers a geneaological understanding of the condition of our time by reconstructing the complex story of the transition from the "cyclical time" of the classic era to the "linear and infuturant time" of the modern world. Time is therefore understood not as a simple vector, but as a trans-political form par excellence, which involves the fundamental philosophical and political categories of the modern constellation: beginning with the concepts of progress, revolution, liberation, and alternative.

Arguing that the process of secularization (in its broadest sense) is dependent on the modern notion of cumulative and irreversible time—together with the temporalization of history—Power and Secularization constitutes a conceptual history that will appeal to scholars of social and political theory and philosophy with interests in intellectual history and the genealogical method.

This book offers a geneaological understanding of the condition of our time by reconstructing the complex story of the transition from the "cyclical time" of the classic era to the "linear and infuturant time" of the modern world. Time is therefore understood not as a simple vector, but as a trans-political form par excellence, which involves the fundamental philosophical and political categories of the modern constellation: beginning with the concepts of progress, revolution, liberation, and alternative.

Arguing that the process of secularization (in its broadest sense) is dependent on the modern notion of cumulative and irreversible time—together with the temporalization of history—Power and Secularization constitutes a conceptual history that will appeal to scholars of social and political theory and philosophy with interests in intellectual history and the genealogical method.