Giacomo Marramao

Giacomo Marramao (born 1946) is an Italian philosopher who teaches theoretical philosophy and political philosophy at the University of Rome III in Rome.

Marramao studied at the University of Florence where he graduated in philosophy under Eugenio Garin's guidance in 1969, and he was Fellow Scholar on behalf of the Italian CNR and the Humboldt Foundation at the Goethe University Frankfurt (1971–1975).

Between 1976 and 1995, he was professor of Philosophy of politics and of History of Political Doctrines at Naples Eastern University.

He was a visiting professor at various European and American universities: Paris (Sorbonne, SciencesPo, Nanterre), Berlin (Freie Universität), London (Warburg Institute), Vienna, Madrid (Complutense), Barcelona, Santander, Oviedo, Murcia, Granada, Maiorca, Sevilla, New York (Columbia University), Berkeley, Irvine, Texas A&M University, Mexico City (Unam), Buenos Aires (Uba), Rosario, Cordoba, Rio de Janeiro (Universidade Federal), San Paolo (Unesp), Brasilia, Porto Alegre (Unisinos), Belo Horizonte.

At the beginning of the 1980s he was co-founder of influential magazines such as Laboratorio politico and Il Centaur.

He is now professor of Theoretical and Political Philosophy at the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy of the University of Rome III, member of the Collège International de Philosophie of Paris, professor honoris causa at the University of Bucharest and Visiting Professor of Political Theory in Paris (Sciences Po.). He is Director (with Silvana Borutti) of "Paradigmi" - a magazine of critical philosophy - and Director of the Fondazione Basso in Rome. Many of his books have been translated into foreign languages, such as Kairos: Towards an Ontology of Due Time (Davies), The Passage West: Philosophy After the Age of the Nation State (Verso), Against the Power: Philosophy and Writing (John Cabot University Press), The Bewitched World of Capital (Brill - forthcoming).

Awards: in 2005, the Presidency of the French Republic has awarded him with the "Palmes Académiques". In 2009, he received the International Price of Philosophy "Karl-Otto Apel", and in 2013 the title of Doctor honoris causa by the Universidad Nacional de Cordoba (Argentine).

In his book Marxism and Revisionism in Italy (1971) he regards Gentile's thought as the philosophical keystone of Italian Marxism. He is the author of The Political and the Transformations (1979) and Power and Secularization (1985). He has been one of the most important re-discoverers of Carl Schmitt's thought and of decisionism.

In 2006 a collection of essays was published to celebrate his 60th birthday (Figure del conflitto, Valter Casini Editore, Roma), with international contributions by, among others: Remo Bodei, Massimo Cacciari, Franco Rella, Manfred Frank, Jean L. Cohen, Adriana Cavarero, Homi K. Bhabha, Antonio Negri, Rüdiger Bubner, Axel Honneth, Marc Augé, Manuel Cruz, Jorge E. Dotti, and Salvador Giner.

Starting from the study of Italian and European Marxism (Marxism and Revisionism in Italy, 1971; Austro-Marxism and left wing Socialism between the two Wars, 1977), Marramao has analysed the political categories of modernity suggesting – on the same wavelength as the Frankfurt School (The political and its transformations, 1979) and Max Weber (The disenchanted order, 1985)– an innovative symbolic-genealogical reconstruction of them. According to this view, which recovers Karl Löwith's historical-philosophical hypothesis, in modern forms of social organizations there are settled meanings deriving from a process of secularization of religious contents – that is, the re-proposal of the Christian symbolic horizon inside a worldly dimension. In particular, secularization finds its centre in a process of "temporalization of history" thanks to which the categories of time (that translate Christian eschatology into a generic opening to the future: progress, revolution, liberation, etc.) gain an increasing centrality in the political representations of Modernity.

Based on these reflections, also exposed in After the Leviathan, 1995 (third edition in 2013) and The Passion of the Present, 2008, a clear thematization of the philosophical problem of time has grown up. In opposition to Henri Bergson's and Martin Heidegger's views, which delineate with different shades a pure form of temporality, more original than its representations and spatializations, Marramao declares that the link time-space is inseparable and, also connecting to contemporary Physics, he asserts that the structure of Time possesses an aporetic and impure profile, compared to which the dimension of space is the formal reference necessary to think its paradoxes (Minima temporalia, 1990, new edition in 2005; Kairos: Towards an Ontology of Due Time, 1992, new edition in 2005).