One of Italy’s greatest living philosophers and a great Italian artist. Both have garnered worldwide acclaim. For more than 25 years, Giacomo Marramao and Fabio Mauri interpreted each other in a dialogue that explored the essence of art and thought. Rare vintage material, unpublished readings, introductions to various art exhibitions, which all might have gone lost were it not for this book. Testimony to precious moments in Italian culture over the past few decades. Art and philosophy. Or should we say, art as philosophy? For Giacomo Marramao, the two converge in Fabio Mauri, a leading Italian avant-garde author and playwright whose work incorporated painting, collage, theater, installations (including the famed Il Muro occidentale (The Western Wall) and Del Pianto ed Ebrea (The Crying Jewess), performance art, and writing and theory as different aspects of a single expressive act. “For Mauri, art is a form of doing although confined to the frame of a screen, or to a performance in a workshop, or even live. It’s all about action.” That means gaining experience in the world. It becomes the “deconstruction/reconstruction of the sign machine that swallows up the realities we live in.” When artistic representation incessantly deciphers and rewrites the codes, Marramao, with penetrating clarity, seizes upon that which drives his friend Mauri to go beyond the purely aesthetic dimension. As for Mauri, in Marramao he sees someone whose thoughts are as if “tangible objects”. Marramao, the philospher who “like a Calabrian healer… digs in with his fingers and works on society’s vital organs”, was given a key part in Mauri’s most renowned performance piece, What Philosophy Is. Heidegger and the Germans – Table Concert (world premiere 1989 in L’Aquila, Italy; performed four more times, the latest in 2012 at dOCUMENTA in Kassel, Germany).

Fabio Mauri is one of the most prominent voices of the Italian avant garde of the post-war period. He lived between Bologna and Milan until 1957, when he moved to Rome. In 1942, he started the magazine Il Setaccio [The Sieve] with his friend Pier Paolo Pasolini. He taught Aesthetics of experimentation at the Academy of Fine Arts of L’Aquila for 20 years. He was invited several times to the Venice Biennale between 1954 and 2015, and to dOCUMENTA(13) in Kassel in 2012. The performances of 1971, Ebrea [Jewess] and Che cosa è il fascismo [What fascism is] are emblematic of his work. The latter was first composed in Rome and it then arrived in Venice (1974), New York (1979), Prato (1993) and Klagenfurt (1997).
In 1968, together with Balestrini, Sanguineti, Eco, Porta, Barilli, Filippini, Arbasino, Colombo, Manganelli, Giuliani, Costa, Celli, Guglielmi, Pagliarani, Mauri is one of the founders of the magazine “Quindici” [Fifteen]. In the ‘70s, Mauri’s work focused on ideology as subject/object of the expressive acts. In 1976, Mauri started the art magazine “La Città di Riga” [The City of Riga] with Alberto Boatto, Maurizio Calvesi, Jannis Kounellis, Umberto Silva.

Giacomo Marramao teaches Theoretical Philosophy and Political Philosophy at the University of Roma Tre. He is Director of the Fondazione Basso in Rome and member of the Collège international de philosophie in Paris. Among his essays, translated into many languages: Minima temporalia. Tempo, spazio, esperienza [Minima temporalia/ Minimum Temporalia: Tiempo, Espacio, Experiencia, Gedisa 2009], Kairós. Apologia del tempo debito [Kairós. Toward an Ontology of “Due Time”, The Davies Group, 2007 and Gedisa 2009], Cielo e terra. Genealogia della secolarizzazione [Cielo Y Tierra/ Sky and Earth: Genealogia de la secularizacion, Paidos 1998] and Contro il potere. Filosofia e scrittura [Against Power. For an Overhaul of Critical Theory, John Cabot University Press 2016] (Bompiani, 2011). With Bollati Boringhieri he has published: Potere e secolarizzazione. Le categorie del tempo [Power and Secularization. Categories of Time] (2005), Passaggio a Occidente. Filosofia e globalizzazione [Passage to the West. Philosophy and Globalization, Katz editores 2006, Verso Books 2012] (2003, new edition 2009, winner of the Pozzale Luigi Russo Prize) and La passione del presente. Breve lessico della modernità-mondo [The Passion for the Present. A Short Lexicon of Modernity-World, Gedisa 2011] (2008).