“With this dense, pressing reflection, Marramao leads us back onto his voyage in Time, a dethronement of contemporary philosophy precisely from one of its ‘noblest’ fields of speculation, from Husserl to Bergson to Heidegger.”
- L’Espresso

“[…] kairos, the opportune time, the ability to grasp the opportune moment – this is what matters most. For us today, it means above all resisting the hurry-up syndrome, the anxiety of controlling everything that projects us increasingly forward – it’s not clear where to – thereby reducing the space of our present experiences.”
- Corriere della Sera

“The philosopher questions the notion of time, not only in the light of ancient thinkers but also on the basis of relativity and beyond, identifying in Kairos more than in Cronos the momentum of the critical, resolutive, fecund instant.”
- Left

“One of the Italian philosophers who most resembles Habermas in his constant effort to practise a philosophical interpretation of the present, while taking concrete account of contemporary political and institutional events […] Marramao is not prepared to forgo the pursuit of a rationality that can be shared, and in its own way universal.”
- Gianni Vattimo, Il saggio

★World English and French rights are sold!
★Originally published in 1992, this updated edition includes a new preface speaking to today's social and political climate, as well as an introduction by Marramao himself, in which he reflects on his long engagement with temporality from Power and Secularization up until today.
★English translation available.

If we were asked to name the social syndrome of our age under capitalism, it would no doubt be “rush”. Intentional animals as we are, we experience the meaningless acceleration of time, which devours instants and misses its target just like its opposite, undue hesitation. For Marramao, rush and slowness or rashness and hesitation are two mirror forms of untimeliness: two unsuitable ways of seizing time.

Through engagement with sources including Heidegger, Bergson, Saint Paul the Apostle, Newtonian physics, and postmodern theory, Marramao calls for a change to how we perceive time. Delving into the Greek and Roman concepts of tempus, chronos, and aión, he argues that there should be no opposition between the scientific-objective time and the existential-subjective one. As such, he introduces his own theory of kairós, or “due time”, as the notion of fertile and decisive timeliness. A timely decision, Marramao advances, is generated by the productive tension between opposites: a tension created equally by swiftness and caution, promptness and conformity with the action's purpose.

Giacomo Marramao is Professor of Political and Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Rome III, Italy and Director of the Fondazione Basso. His publications available in English include The Passage West: Philosophy After the Age of the Nation-State (2012), Against Power: For an Overhaul of Critical Theory (2016), Interregnum: Between Biopolitics and Posthegemony (2020) and The Bewitched World of Capital Economic Crisis and the Metamorphosis of the Political (2023).