Power and Secularization by Marramao, Giacomo;

Short description:

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.

Long description:

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.

Table of Contents:

1. In lieu of an introduction: modernity of time

2 . Time and revolution

3. Politics and secularization: the problem of the modern Weltbild

4. Power, structure, time: the dimensions of rationality from Weber to Luhmann

5. The kairological timing of the decision: unfoundedness of Entscheidung and ghost of the state in Carl Schmitt

6. Time of the norm and time of the exception: for a metacritique of the systemic paradigm

7. Left and secularization: massification, instability, and sociocultural antagonism