The Unnamable Present by Roberto Calasso
Tourists, terrorists, secularists, hackers, fundamentalists, transhumanists, algorithmicians: in this book Roberto Calasso considers the tribes that inhabit and inform the world today. A world that feels more elusive than ever before. This book, the ninth part of a work in progress, is a meditation on the obscure and ubiquitous process of transformation happening in societies today, where distant echoes of Auden's The Age of Anxiety give way to something altogether more unsettling.
Surprising, illuminating. . one of the many pleasures of reading Calasso is to follow the bumper-car ride of his thinking, as he caroms off this and that totemic figure dotted about the intellectual fairground * The New York Times Review of Books *
The ninth in Mr. Calasso's kaleidoscopic series of investigations into the spiritual biography of the secular West . . . the two long essays in The Unnamable Present examine the effects of novel and often dangerous mythologies-democracy, nationalism, Darwinism, race theory- in 20th-century Europe . . . he handles the events of the past with the reverence of a priest, rather than the dispassion of a historian. Material facts are the tangible aspect of hidden truths -- Dominic Green * The Wall Street Journal *
A public intellectual in the great European tradition, whose new book attempts to define the era we're currently living through * Irish Times *
I love Roberto Calasso's writing: it's rigorous, elusive, and expansive. The Unnamable Present continues his austere, zigzagging history of the world, but the difference is that now he's examining the supermodern - and this shift would I guess be a moment for pure celebration, were his conclusions not so inescapable and so terrifying
Calasso's erudition is dazzling . . . his assertions come in short, verbless sentences, darting from historical moment to historical moment, alighting on a person, a place, a topic, before moving briskly on * Times Literary Supplement *
This slim but wide-ranging philosophical inquiry extends the Italian author's series on the roots of modernity, with particular attention to moral relativism * The New York Times *
Even when you have no idea where he's going, it's a thrill to follow this singular writer on his eccentric path through our political and cultural reality. -- Mark O'Connell * New Statesman *
The ninth in Mr. Calasso's kaleidoscopic series of investigations into the spiritual biography of the secular West . . . the two long essays in The Unnamable Present examine the effects of novel and often dangerous mythologies-democracy, nationalism, Darwinism, race theory- in 20th-century Europe . . . he handles the events of the past with the reverence of a priest, rather than the dispassion of a historian. Material facts are the tangible aspect of hidden truths -- Dominic Green * The Wall Street Journal *
A public intellectual in the great European tradition, whose new book attempts to define the era we're currently living through * Irish Times *
I love Roberto Calasso's writing: it's rigorous, elusive, and expansive. The Unnamable Present continues his austere, zigzagging history of the world, but the difference is that now he's examining the supermodern - and this shift would I guess be a moment for pure celebration, were his conclusions not so inescapable and so terrifying
Calasso's erudition is dazzling . . . his assertions come in short, verbless sentences, darting from historical moment to historical moment, alighting on a person, a place, a topic, before moving briskly on * Times Literary Supplement *
This slim but wide-ranging philosophical inquiry extends the Italian author's series on the roots of modernity, with particular attention to moral relativism * The New York Times *
Even when you have no idea where he's going, it's a thrill to follow this singular writer on his eccentric path through our political and cultural reality. -- Mark O'Connell * New Statesman *
Roberto Calasso is the author of many books including the international bestseller The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony and The Ruin of Kasch, both parts of a work in progress of which The Unnamable Present is part nine.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780241344637 |
| ISBN 10 | 0241344638 |
| Title | The Unnamable Present |
| Author | Roberto Calasso |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | Penguin Books Ltd |
| Year published | 2019-04-09 |
| Number of pages | 208 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |