Giacomo Marramao - Böcker

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 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.

Shedding new light on the fundamental philosophical problem of time, leading Italian philosopher Giacomo Marramao offers a solution to today’s 24/7 culture. If we were asked to name the social syndrome of our age under capitalism, it would no doubt be “rush”. Intentional animals as we are, we experience the meaningless acceleration of time, which devours instants and misses its target just like its opposite, undue hesitation. For Marramao, rush and slowness or rashness and hesitation are two mirror forms of untimeliness: two unsuitable ways of seizing time. Through engagement with sources including Heidegger, Bergson, Saint Paul the Apostle, Newtonian physics, and postmodern theory, Marramao calls for a change to how we perceive time. Delving into the Greek and Roman concepts of tempus, chronos, and aión, he argues that there should be no opposition between the scientific-objective time and the existential-subjective one. As such, he introduces his own theory of kairós, or “due time”, as the notion of fertile and decisive timeliness. A timely decision, Marramao advances, is generated by the productive tension between opposites: a tension created equally by swiftness and caution, promptness and conformity with the action’s purpose. Originally published in 1992, this updated edition of Kairós: In Defence of “Due Time'' includes a new preface speaking to today’s social and political climate, as well as an introduction by Marramao himself, in which he reflects on his long engagement with temporality from Power and Secularization up until today.

Shedding new light on the fundamental philosophical problem of time, leading Italian philosopher Giacomo Marramao offers a solution to today’s 24/7 culture. If we were asked to name the social syndrome of our age under capitalism, it would no doubt be “rush”. Intentional animals as we are, we experience the meaningless acceleration of time, which devours instants and misses its target just like its opposite, undue hesitation. For Marramao, rush and slowness or rashness and hesitation are two mirror forms of untimeliness: two unsuitable ways of seizing time. Through engagement with sources including Heidegger, Bergson, Saint Paul the Apostle, Newtonian physics, and postmodern theory, Marramao calls for a change to how we perceive time. Delving into the Greek and Roman concepts of tempus, chronos, and aión, he argues that there should be no opposition between the scientific-objective time and the existential-subjective one. As such, he introduces his own theory of kairós, or “due time”, as the notion of fertile and decisive timeliness. A timely decision, Marramao advances, is generated by the productive tension between opposites: a tension created equally by swiftness and caution, promptness and conformity with the action’s purpose. Originally published in 1992, this updated edition of Kairós: In Defence of “Due Time'' includes a new preface speaking to today’s social and political climate, as well as an introduction by Marramao himself, in which he reflects on his long engagement with temporality from Power and Secularization up until today.

In his latest book in the study of power, Giacomo Marramao focuses on the work of two great Central European writers, Elias Canetti and Herta Müller, each of whom, in different periods and contexts, offered a philosophical genealogy of forms of domination and a radical diagnosis of power, command and law. To grasp the meaning of the transformations of power, it is necessary to go to the roots: to the arche that originated it as a factor common to all human cultures and all historical periods. Power cannot be suppressed: any attempt to ‘overcome’ it (by eliminating one or another form of its exercise) has done no more than strengthen it. Power must, however, be ‘uprooted’ or subverted in its logic of identity, which is activated in the boundless character of desire and the paranoid scene of fearand the death of the Other. In the midst of today’s global world, to trace a line of opposition to power means to free ourselves from the alibi of objectivity and to focus instead on subjects and their potential for metamorphosis/regeneration. This is possible only if we detach ourselves from the ground noise of actuality and recover the broken thread of solitary and extreme works.