Towards a New Concept of the Political: A Defence of Universalism and Difference [Hardcover]

Prologue? 1. Our Present as an Interregnum? 2. The Other Scene: On Populist Syndrome: Delegitimzation as a Political Strategy? 3. State of Exception: From Political Theology to History: Walter Benjamin's Messianism Without Waiting??4. Interlude: The Other Side of the Mirror: Sovereign?D?pense: The Scandal of the Gift??5. Easts and Wests??6. Epilogue: The New World Scene??Afterword

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 Schools radical critique of power with Georges Batailles 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.

Giacomo Marramao is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the Roma Tre UniversitlÓ)