Giacomo Marramao


Giacomo Marramao is an Italian philosopher who teaches theoretical philosophy and political philosophy at the Roma Tre University in Rome.

Education

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.

Early career

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, Berlin, London, Vienna, Madrid, Barcelona, Santander, Oviedo, Murcia, Granada, Maiorca, Sevilla, New York, University of California, Berkeley, University of California, Irvine, Texas A&M University, Stony Brook University, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Rosario, Cordoba, Rio de Janeiro, San Paolo, Brasilia, Porto Alegre, Belo Horizonte.
At the beginning of the 1980s he was co-founder of influential magazines such as Laboratorio politico and Il Centauro. He is currently director of the philosophical journal Paradigmi.

Current activities

He is now professor of Theoretical and Political Philosophy at the Department of Philosophy, Communication and Performing Arts of the Roma Tre University, 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. He is Director of Paradigmi - a magazine of critical philosophy – and Director of the Fondazione Basso in Rome. He is also a supporter of the Campaign for the Establishment of a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly, an organisation which campaigns for democratic reform in the United Nations. Many of his books have been translated into foreign languages, such as Kairos: Towards an Ontology of Due Time, The Passage West: Philosophy After the Age of the Nation State, Against the Power: Philosophy and Writing, The Bewitched World of Capital.
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 National University of Córdoba.

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 National University of Córdoba.

Works

In his book Marxism and Revisionism in Italy he regards Gentile's thought as the philosophical keystone of Italian Marxism. He is the author of The Political and the Transformations and Power and Secularization. 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, 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.
In 2015, to Marramao's thesis on the "philosophy of globalization" was devoted an entire issue of the US magazine "Politica Común": On Giacomo Marramao's "The Passage West", University of Michigan Library, Ann Arbor. Of this volume was published an Italian edition: Filosofia dei mondi globali. Conversazioni con Giacomo Marramao, ed. by Stefano Franchi and Manuela Marchesini, Bollati Boringhieri, Torino 2017.

Philosophical stance

Starting from the study of Italian and European Marxism, Marramao has analysed the political categories of modernity suggesting – on the same wavelength as the Frankfurt School and Max Weber – 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 gain an increasing centrality in the political representations of Modernity.
Based on these reflections, also exposed in After the Leviathan, 1995 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.