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.

Towards a New Concept of the Political (Critiques and Alternatives to Capitalism)

Politics & Social Sciences

Marramao, Giacomo

Sociology

Routledge

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 archē 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 fear and 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.

Against Power: For an Overhaul of Critical Theory

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

John Cabot University Press

In this ambitious work, Giacomo Marramao proposes a radical reconceptualization of the world system in our era of declining state sovereignty. He argues that globalization cannot be reduced to mere economics or summarized by phrases such as ‘the end of history’ or the ‘westernization of the world’. Instead, we find ourselves embarking on a passage to a new, post-nation state age destined to transform all civilizations – and to disrupt Western geopolitical dominance. To confront the challenges of this interregnum one must think in terms of a new and radical universalism, a universalism of difference able to revitalize politics and to demythologize identity. Building on the great interwar discussion between Spengler, Junger, Schmitt and Heidegger, Marramao’s new work engages with Habermas, Derrida and post-colonialism. Arguing against the classic Western pretension to universal norms of democracy and reason, he develops instead the idea of a ‘universal politics of difference’.

The Passage West: Philosophy After the Age of the Nation State

Verso

The core argument of this book is that this century’s philosophy — precisely in its would-be most radical formulations — has relinquished its original function, by neutralizing those paradoxes of the nature of time that, conversely, science has taken as both the premise and the condition of its work. The aim of the reflection proposed here, however, is not limited to describing the constant elements (or the innumerable metamorphoses) of the modern and post-modern ‘visions’ of time; neither is it to ‘reinstate’ — sic et simpliciter — the neglected dimension of space. Its aim is an attempt at identifying the dimension, that is, the space, of ‘our’ time, starting from the cosmic disorientation that the new scientific image of the universe has transmitted to our experience.

Kairos: Towards an Ontology of 'Due Time'

Philosophy

The Davies Group, Publishers

Las estrategias de calumnia y deslegitimación son una constante en el debate político contemporáneo. Versiones últimas de la falacia ad hominem, aunque reconocidas como el argumento parlamentario por excelencia, contaminan el espacio público y constituyen el síntoma esencial del peor síndrome de que se aqueja hoy la democracia: el síndrome populista. Esta forma vaga de neopopulismo reduce al ciudadano a opinador y hace, de la comunidad, una masa acrítica y hastiada de espectadores. Giacomo Marramao se alza en esta obra contra la inquietante fuerza de despolitización del neopopulismo mediático, y recupera el pensamiento crítico de Ernesto Laclau y Chantal Mouffe para repensar el problema de la legitimación política y reinventar el concepto de autoridad. Solo una democracia centrada en hacer pueblo y desprendida de fetiches identitarios logrará promover la acción colectiva y el debate social, un augmentum de la potencia simbólica desde la que un espacio de lo común se vuelve pensable.

Sobre el síndrome populista: La deslegitimación como estrategia política (Spanish Edition)

EDITORIAL GEDISA

Poder y secularización (HOMO SOCIOLOGICUS) (Spanish Edition)

Edicions 62

The Bewitched World of Capital: Economic Crisis and the Metamorphosis of the Political (Historical Materialism Book, 273)

Anthropology

Brill Academic Pub

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