Gianni Vattimo and Santiago ZabalaOctober, 2011
Cloth, 256 pages,
ISBN: 978-0-231-15802-2
$27.50 / £19.00
Having lost much of its political clout and theoretical power, communism no longer represents an appealing alternative to capitalism. In its original Marxist formulation, communism promised an ideal of development, but only through a logic of war, and while a number of reformist governments still promote this ideology, their legitimacy has steadily declined since the fall of the Berlin wall.Separating communism from its metaphysical foundations, which include an abiding faith in the immutable laws of history and an almost holy conception of the proletariat, Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala recast Marx’s theories at a time when capitalism’s metaphysical moorings—in technology, empire, and industrialization—are buckling. While Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri call for a return of the revolutionary left, Vattimo and Zabala fear this would lead only to more violence and failed political policy. Instead, they adopt an antifoundationalist stance drawn from the hermeneutic thought of Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, and Richard Rorty.Hermeneutic communism leaves aside the ideal of development and the general call for revolution; it relies on interpretation rather than truth and proves more flexible in different contexts. Hermeneutic communism motivates a resistance to capitalism’s inequalities yet intervenes against violence and authoritarianism by emphasizing the interpretative nature of truth. Paralleling Vattimo and Zabala’s well-known work on the weakening of religion, Hermeneutic Communism realizes the fully transformational, politically effective potential of Marxist thought.
The following is an interview with Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala, authors of Hermeneutic Communism: From Heidegger to Marx. The interview took place in January, 2011.
Question: How does one manage to write a book with another author?
Santiago Zabala: It’s all about collaboration. Over the past several years, we have edited five book series for Italian and American publishers and also written several forewords and book reviews; this is not the first time we actually wrote together. Before one of us writes the first draft, we have a long conversation in order to decide the themes of each section. After this first draft is finished, the other checks it through and makes modifications where necessary.
Gianni Vattimo: Although most of the time Santiago wrote the first draft after our talk, there are occasions where I wrote it; either way, it’s very difficult now to recognize which parts each of us originally wrote not only because of the modifications and edits that came afterward but also because we decided together beforehand what each part was to be about. I’m very happy with the whole book, which managed, among other things, to cover many things I was forced to leave out in my Ecce Comu...Leggi tutto