Author: Gareth (Gareth Williams)

Giacomo MarramaoUniversity of Rome iii Volume 8, 2015 Let me start by saying that the essays about my book The Passage West that are collected in this issue of Política Común encompass such a wealth of observations that I can only recall the Spinozian tenor of Hegel’s famous dictum on freedom: Einsicht in die Notwendigkeit, the awareness of necessity. Rather than...

Andy LantzTexas A&M University Volume 8, 2015 In the final chapter of The Passage West, Giacomo Marramao invokes an analysis of the 2006 Alejandro Gonzáles Iñárritu film Babel in order to provide a final backdrop to a description of our modern world. The film presents the contemporary globalized world as a “mosaic, at once materially heterogeneous and culturally differentiated,”...

Martin JayUniversity of California, Berkeley Volume 8, 2015 Giacomo Marramao’s The Passage West is such a whirlwind of a book, so filled with provocative ideas and startling theoretical juxtapositions, that it is impossible to approach it as a whole in the space I have here. Rather than attempt a general response, let me focus on just one theme,...

Hayden WhiteUniversity of California, Santa Cruz Volume 8, 2015 It is a daunting task, certainly, to try to grasp the intrinsic character of the present: to identify its logic and structure beyond the hubbub of contemporary events and to conceptualise this logic and structure in an adequate and appropriate fashion. (Marramao, 2012, 221) The present presents...

Peter BakerNewcastle University Volume 8, 2015 The Passage West (2012) by the Italian philosopher Giacomo Marramao, translated from the original Passaggio a Occidente (2003), is a remarkable contribution to understanding the new global paradigm we, as both westerners and non-westerners, inhabit, elaborating on the meaning of globalization and political modernity in our times with an eye to both reinterpreting...

Stefano FranchiTexas A&M University Volume 8, 2015 1 Universalism, Difference, and Glocalism: A Call to Action In The Passage West, Giacomo Marramao joins a penetrating analysis of the transformations currently shaping the contemporary socio-political landscape to a powerful argument about the new shape that contemporary thought must take in order to cope successfully with the changed face of...

Carlos RodríguezTexas A&M University Volume 8, 2015 La situación coyuntural de la globalización exige productividad intelectual. Durante más de veinte años la globalización ha sido el concepto geopolítico y económico que más teorizaciones ha producido en el debate de las ciencias humanas. Mucho se ha escrito sobre la globalización como sistema mundial (Wallerstein), como choque de...

Pedro Ángel PalouTufts University Volume 8, 2015 Upon complaining about seeing everything the same way [George Bernard] Shaw was told the following by ophthalmologists: “Take comfort, my friend. You see everything in a singular way, because you have normal eyes”. “What do you mean?” “It´s easy; normal eyes are as difficult to find as normal things”....

Alberto MoreirasTexas A&M University Volume 8, 2015 The Preface to the third edition of Giacomo Marramao´s Dopo il Leviatano. Individuo e comunitá (2013), published only a few months after The Passage West came out in English, explains that the questions that have occupied its author over the last years have essentially to do with an understanding of “the political” after...

Manuela MarchesiniTexas A&M University Volume 8, 2015 In today’s globalized world, at the crepuscule of the age of the nation-states, “[w]e are on the brink”, Marramao writes, “of a passage to modernity destined to produce profound transformations in the economy, society, life-styles and codes of behavior not only for ’other’ civilizations but of Western civilization itself”...