“In this essay, Donatella Di Cesare … retraces the paths of great philosophers who “got their hands dirty” and effectively describes Marx’s achievement as that of a scholar who – after repeated defeats –
“withdrew more and more into himself to discover prematurely the law of history that was to lead up to the last leap prior to the kingdom of freedom”. She issues … an outmoded challenge to those who (for some years now) have preached the end of history and the end of thought (“of ideologies” according to half-educated parrots), that is (supreme stupidity) the end of the perpetual motion of history. And in a “anarchic postscript”, she defends as a way out an indomitable denial of arche, command.”
——Luciano Canfora, Corriere della Sera

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“Vocation” is a charged word, especially in times like our own, where multifaceted strategies of unburdening and exemption prevail. But Donatella Di Cesare has always operated against both blatant and disguised conformism, be it Heidegger’s metaphysical anti-Semitism, the connection between torture and democracy, or the philosophy of migration. In this new book she engages in a political and existential reflection on the role of philosophy in the era of liberal governance.

If philosophy discovered its political vocation when Socrates first addressed the polis – although from an eccentric position and a disconcerting one for power –, in present times its political power is no less than astounding. The world today is sucked into a “saturated immanence” that seems to preclude all exits, to be immune to non-condescending cognitive regimes, and to slide in a perpetual virtuality that resembles a state of exhausted numbness.

Because to think makes us strangers, displaces us and puts us against our time. It urges us to renounce all pretence of sovereignty, forces us to be alert. So philosophy today can be qualified through three Greek words, all starting with a privative prefix: atopy, uchronia, anarchy. And in today’s polis – locked up in a phobia of the outside – philosophy has to assume the responsibility to preserve existence (the existere that has the word outside in its very etymology) and bring justice to the living.

Donatella Di Cesare is a professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the Università La Sapienza in Rome and of Philosophical Hermeneutics at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa. She is one of the most active voices in the contemporary public debate and a regular contributor to L’Espresso (Repubblica). Her books have also been translated and talked about abroad. Her most recent publications are: Terrore e modernità (Terror and Modernity) (2017) and Marrani. L’altro dell’altro (Marranos. The other of the other) (2018). With Bollati Boringhieri she published Israele. Terra, ritorno, anarchia [Israel. Land, returning and Anarchy] (2014), Heidegger e gli ebrei. I “quaderni neri” [Heidegger and the Jews. The “black books”] (2014 and 2016), Heidegger & Sons. Eredità e futuro di un filosofo [Heidegger & Sons. Legacy and future of a philosopher] (2015), Tortura [Torture] (2016) and Stranieri residenti. Una filosofia della migrazione [Resident Strangers. Philosophy of migration] (2017), Sulla vocazione politica della filosofia [On the political vocation of philosophy] (2018), Virus sovrano? L’asfissia capitalistica [Sovereign virus? Capitalist asphyxia] (2020) and Il tempo della rivolta (The Time of Revolt) (2021).