The Government of Time: Theories of Plural Temporality in the Marxist Tradition
Editors: Vittorio Morfino and Peter D. Thomas
Can the Marxist tradition still provide new resources for thinking the specificity of historical time? This volume proposes to transform our understanding of Marxism by reconnecting with the ‘subterranean currents’ of plural temporalities that have traversed its development. From Rousseau and Sieyès to Marx, from Bloch to Althusser, from Gramsci to Pasolini and Postcolonialism, the chapters in this volume seek both to valorise neglected resources from Marxism’s contradictory history, and also to read against the grain its orthodox and heterodox currents. Privileging not the single time of historical development, but the plural temporalities that intertwine in and constitute any given historical conjuncture, and arguing against merely subjectivist theories of temporal multiplicity, this volume studies the articulation of the real, plural temporalities of mass political action. Comprehending their dynamics is a necessary precondition for a renewed politics of emancipation.
Contributors include: Luca Basso, Stefano Bracaletti, Mauro Farnesi Camellone, Fabio Frosini, Augusto Illuminati, Nicola Marcucci, Vittorio Morfino, Luca Pinzolo, Peter D. Thomas and Massimiliano Tomba.
Vittorio Morfino, Ph.D. (1998), University of Paris VIII Saint Denis, is a Senior Researcher in the History of Philosophy at the Università di Milano-Bicocca. He is the author of Plural temporality: Transindividuality and the aleatory between Spinoza and Althusser (Brill, 2014) and Genealogia di un pregiudizio: L’immagine di Spinoza in Germania da Leibniz a Marx (Georg Olms Verlag, 2016) among other titles. He is an editor of Quaderni materialisti and of Décalages.
Peter D. Thomas, Ph.D (2008), University of Amsterdam, is Senior Lecturer in the History of Political Thought at Brunel University London. He is the author of The Gramscian Moment: Philosophy, Hegemony and Marxism(Brill, 2009) and co-editor of Encountering Althusser: Politics and Materialism in Contemporary Radical Thought (Bloomsbury, 2012) and In Marx’s Laboratory: Critical Interpretations of the Grundrisse (Brill, 2013).
