Genealogie della modernità: prospettive critiche

Abstract

The essays collected in this volume provide investigations into the nodes of modernity and its representations from a critical-genealogical perspective. This approach is often in a complex relationship with the decolonial challenging of the great Eurocentric narratives and focusses on the potential uses of concepts and tools that have emerged in the tensions and anxieties of the processes of self-understanding within European cultural history. By doing so, it seeks to uncover the flaws in dominant paradigms, dwelling on uncertainties, criticalities and discrepancies. It is a work carried out in the interstices, through a philological engagement with the texts (as well as with the contexts), without any claim to definitiveness and with an awareness of the perspectival limits within which it operates. The contributions in this book, which gathers the proceedings of three seminar cycles held between Naples and Paris from 2019 to 2023, aim to address specific issues and figures connected to the debate on modernity. This includes thinkers such as Weber, Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin, Heidegger and Sartre, who questioned the specificities and the genealogy of the modernity, showing that it is constituted through a non-linear, polysemantic process, rooted in a plurality of factors.