Massimo Cacciari – författare

Friedrich Neitzsche imagined himself belonging to a society of visionaries, thinkers, architects, poets, musicians, and artists running ahead of the mainstream. They were condemned to be misunderstood or ignored in the present, but their work would become significant in the future. To them he addressed the aphorism from which Massimo Cacciari's book takes its name, saying "It is only after death that we will enter our life and come alive, oh, very much alive, we posthumous people!"Cacciari isolates Vienna as the European capitol of posthumous people at a crucial turning point in Western thinking, as the nineteenth century ended. There he finds Ludwig Wittgenstein, together with Peter Altenberg, Robert Walser, Lou Andreas-Salomé, Adolf Loos, Martin Buber, Egon Schiele, Karl Kraus, Gustav Klimt, and many others. Cacciari treats this extraordinarily rich concentration of activity as the hub upon which European culture wheeled into the twentieth century. He reaches directly to the intellectual content in each of the various figures he discusses.

The European Union and the single currency have given Europe more stability than it has known in the past thousand years, yet Europe seems to be in perpetual crisis about its global role. The many European empires are now reduced to a multiplicity of ethnicities, traditions, and civilizations. Europe will never be One, but to survive as a union it will have to become a federation of "islands" both distinct and connected.Though drawing on philosophers of Europe's past, Cacciari calls not to resist Europe's sunset but to embrace it. Europe will have to open up to the possibility that in few generations new exiles and an unpredictable cultural hybridism will again change all we know about the European legacy. Though scarcely alive in today's politics, the political unity of Europe is still a necessity, however impossible it seems to achieve.

The first English translation of his work, The Withholding Power, offers a fascinating introduction to the thought of Italian philosopher Massimo Cacciari. Cacciari is a notoriously complex thinker but this title offers a starting point for entering into the very heart of his thinking. The Withholding Power provides a comprehensive and synthetic insight into his interpretation of Christian political theology and leftist Italian political theory more generally. The theme of katechon - originally a biblical concept which has been developed into a political concept - has been absolutely central to the work of Italian philosophers such as Agamben and Eposito for nearly twenty years. In The Withholding Power, Cacciari sets forth his startlingly original perspective on the influence the theological-political questions have traditionally exerted upon ideas of power, sovereignty and the relationship between political and religious authority.With an introduction by Howard Caygill contextualizing the work within the history of Italian thought, this title will offer those coming to Cacciari for the first time a searing insight into his political, theological and philosophical milieu.

Friedrich Neitzsche imagined himself belonging to a society of visionaries, thinkers, architects, poets, musicians, and artists running ahead of the mainstream. They were condemned to be misunderstood or ignored in the present, but their work would become significant in the future. To them he addressed the aphorism from which Massimo Cacciari's book takes its name, saying "It is only after death that we will enter our life and come alive, oh, very much alive, we posthumous people!"Cacciari isolates Vienna as the European capitol of posthumous people at a crucial turning point in Western thinking, as the nineteenth century ended. There he finds Ludwig Wittgenstein, together with Peter Altenberg, Robert Walser, Lou Andreas-Salomé, Adolf Loos, Martin Buber, Egon Schiele, Karl Kraus, Gustav Klimt, and many others. Cacciari treats this extraordinarily rich concentration of activity as the hub upon which European culture wheeled into the twentieth century. He reaches directly to the intellectual content in each of the various figures he discusses.

Massimo Cacciari is one of the leading public intellectuals in today's Italy, both as an outstanding philosopher and political thinker and as now three times (and currently) the mayor of Venice. This collection of essays on political topics provides the best introduction in English to his thought to date. The political focus does not, however, prevent these essays from being an introduction to the full range of Cacciari's thought.The present collection includes chapters on Hofmannstahl, Lukács, Benjamin, Nietzsche, Weber, Derrida, Schmitt, Canetti, and Aeschylus. Written between 1978 and 2006, these essays engagingly address the most hidden tradition in European political thought: the Unpolitical. Far from being a refusal of politics, the Unpolitical represents a merciless critique of political reason and a way out of the now impracticable consolations of utopia and harmonious community. Drawing freely from philosophy and literature, The Unpolitical represents a powerful contribution to contemporary political theory.A lucid and engaging Introduction by Alessandro Carrera sets these essays in the context of Cacciari's work generally and in the broadest context of its historical and geographical backdrop.

Massimo Cacciari is one of the leading public intellectuals in today's Italy, both as an outstanding philosopher and political thinker and as now three times (and currently) the mayor of Venice. This collection of essays on political topics provides the best introduction in English to his thought to date. The political focus does not, however, prevent these essays from being an introduction to the full range of Cacciari's thought.The present collection includes chapters on Hofmannstahl, Lukács, Benjamin, Nietzsche, Weber, Derrida, Schmitt, Canetti, and Aeschylus. Written between 1978 and 2006, these essays engagingly address the most hidden tradition in European political thought: the Unpolitical. Far from being a refusal of politics, the Unpolitical represents a merciless critique of political reason and a way out of the now impracticable consolations of utopia and harmonious community. Drawing freely from philosophy and literature, The Unpolitical represents a powerful contribution to contemporary political theory.A lucid and engaging Introduction by Alessandro Carrera sets these essays in the context of Cacciari's work generally and in the broadest context of its historical and geographical backdrop.

The European Union and the single currency have given Europe more stability than it has known in the past thousand years, yet Europe seems to be in perpetual crisis about its global role. The many European empires are now reduced to a multiplicity of ethnicities, traditions, and civilizations. Europe will never be One, but to survive as a union it will have to become a federation of "islands" both distinct and connected.Though drawing on philosophers of Europe's past, Cacciari calls not to resist Europe's sunset but to embrace it. Europe will have to open up to the possibility that in few generations new exiles and an unpredictable cultural hybridism will again change all we know about the European legacy. Though scarcely alive in today's politics, the political unity of Europe is still a necessity, however impossible it seems to achieve.

The first English translation of his work, The Withholding Power, offers a fascinating introduction to the thought of Italian philosopher Massimo Cacciari. Cacciari is a notoriously complex thinker but this title offers a starting point for entering into the very heart of his thinking. The Witholding Power provides a comprehensive and synthetic insight into his interpretation of Christian political theology and leftist Italian political theory more generally. The theme of katechon - originally a biblical concept which has been developed into a political concept - has been absolutely central to the work of Italian philosophers such as Agamben and Eposito for nearly twenty years. In The Withholding Power, Cacciari sets forth his startlingly original perspective on the influence the theological-political questions have traditionally exerted upon ideas of power, sovereignty and the relationship between political and religious authority.With an introduction by Howard Caygill contextualizing the work within the history of Italian thought, this title will offer those coming to Cacciari for the first time a searing insight into his political, theological and philosophical milieu.

Nine masterful essays on Dante's Divine Comedy and his political theology by one of today's leading Italian philosophers.Among today's Italian philosophers, Massimo Cacciari is perhaps the most assiduous commentator of Dante. Philosophy, Mysticism, and the Political collects all of Cacciari's writings on Dante to this day, from his masterful analysis of St. Francis of Assisi in Dante's Paradiso and Giotto's frescoes to a new consideration of Dante's "European" idea of empire as a federation of nations, peoples, and languages. Cacciari does not force Dante into any philosophical straitjacket. Rather, he walks with Dante, takes notes, asks questions, raises issues, and tries to understand the Divine Comedy in Dante's terms. Cacciari approaches Dante's Ulysses and the theologico-philosophical vertigo of Paradiso not as a critic but from the point of view of a faithful, assiduous, perceptive, sometimes perplexed, and sometimes worshipful reader. Cacciari's analysis shows once more that Dante does not belong to the past. Dante creates his own age and stays with us whenever we wish to follow his path.

Nine masterful essays on Dante's Divine Comedy and his political theology by one of today's leading Italian philosophers.Among today's Italian philosophers, Massimo Cacciari is perhaps the most assiduous commentator of Dante. Philosophy, Mysticism, and the Political collects all of Cacciari's writings on Dante to this day, from his masterful analysis of St. Francis of Assisi in Dante's Paradiso and Giotto's frescoes to a new consideration of Dante's "European" idea of empire as a federation of nations, peoples, and languages. Cacciari does not force Dante into any philosophical straitjacket. Rather, he walks with Dante, takes notes, asks questions, raises issues, and tries to understand the Divine Comedy in Dante's terms. Cacciari approaches Dante's Ulysses and the theologico-philosophical vertigo of Paradiso not as a critic but from the point of view of a faithful, assiduous, perceptive, sometimes perplexed, and sometimes worshipful reader. Cacciari's analysis shows once more that Dante does not belong to the past. Dante creates his own age and stays with us whenever we wish to follow his path.

One of Italy's best-known contemporary philosophers and leftists offers a literature-informed take on our contemporary political situation.During the dramatic course of the twentieth century, amid the clash of the titans which marked that era, humanity could still think in terms of partisan struggles in which large masses took sides against one another. The new millennium, by contrast, appears to have opened under the guise of generalized insecurity, which pertains not only to the historical and social situation, or to one’s personal psychological predicament, but to our very being. The Earth’s current faltering and the twilight of every convention that might govern it—where roles, images, and languages become confused by a lack of direction and distance—were already powerfully prophesied in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and later in the works of Kafka and Beckett. In Hamletics, Massimo Cacciari, one of Italy’s foremost philosophers and leftist political figures, establishes a dialogue between these fateful authors, exploring the relationship between European nihilism and the aporias of action in the present.

A provocative examination of the fate of autonomous, creative labor under capitalism.Between 1917 and 1919, Max Weber delivered two lectures titled Die geistige Arbeit als Beruf, which we might translate as The Labour of Spirit as Vocation. This weighty formula represented the hope that animated the world of bourgeois culture from the likes of Kant, Goethe, Schiller, Fichte, and Hegel and would later form the earliest threads of revolutionary thought from Feuerbach and Marx. The “labor of spirit” is creative, autonomous labor—human labor understood in its fully effectual power. To press for its realization is to liberate all activity from the condition of commanded or alienated work. But the dissolution of the labor of spirit into the capitalist form of production, into the universal machinism that swallows up that science which remains the true engine of development, also ends up delegitimating political authority, whose own foundation lies in the “promise of liberation.”Massimo Cacciari takes up old questions and confronts them anew: Is the “iron cage” fated to imprison that “labor of spirit” that is political praxis? Will the spirit of capitalism end up completely undermining the space of the political? Or are relations between science and politics still thinkable that might free us from our “debt” as we proceed without means or ends within the techno-economic system?

A breathtaking philosophical journey through angels, art, and language, where Massimo Cacciari reveals the Angel as the radiant, paradoxical key to understanding transcendence, meaning, and the limits of human speech.In this luminous and daring work, Massimo Cacciari traces the figure of the Angel across theology, philosophy, literature, and art to reveal a profound meditation on language itself. From Judaic, Islamic, and Christian angelology to the visionary poetics of Dante Alighieri, Rainer Maria Rilke, Franz Kafka, and Walter Benjamin, Cacciari follows the Angel as a being "suspended between all the axes of creation." In dialogue with the art of Paul Klee and Franz Marc, he uncovers an arresting metaphor for the paradox at the heart of the human condition: absolute freedom and absolute determination, transcendence and finitude, silence and speech. The Angel, Cacciari argues, is not merely a religious symbol but a philosophical figure—an intermediary presence that discloses the world while remaining itself elusive and unsayable. Through a sweeping, poetic approach to phenomenology, he confronts the defining concerns of modern thought: nihilism, representation, intelligibility, and the fragile status of language in a fractured age. Erudite yet incandescent, rigorous yet imaginative, The Necessary Angel is a tour de force—an original vocabulary for thinking the limits of meaning and the mystery at the core of human expression.