Hamletics Format: Paperback

One of Italy's best-known contemporary philosophers and leftists offers a literature-informed take on our contemporary political situation.

During the dramatic course of the twentieth century, amid the clash of the titans which marked that era, humanity could still think in terms of partisan struggles in which large masses took sides against one another. The new millennium, by contrast, appears to have opened under the guise of generalized insecurity, which pertains not only to the historical and social situation, or to one’s personal psychological predicament, but to our very being. The Earth’s current faltering and the twilight of every convention that might govern it—where roles, images, and languages become confused by a lack of direction and distance—were already powerfully prophesied in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and later in the works of Kafka and Beckett. In Hamletics, Massimo Cacciari, one of Italy’s foremost philosophers and leftist political figures, establishes a dialogue between these fateful authors, exploring the relationship between European nihilism and the aporias of action in the present.

Massimo Cacciari is one of Italy’s foremost philosophers. He has been a member of parliament for the Italian Communist Party as well as the mayor of Venice. A professor emeritus of aesthetics at the University of Venice, Cacciari is the author of numerous books, including Philosophy, Mysticism and the Political: Essays on Dante and Hamletics: Shakespeare, Kafka, Beckett. 

Matteo Mandarini is a senior lecturer in politics and organization at Queen Mary University of London. He is the translator of several books, including Hamletics by Massimo Cacciari, The Twilight of Politics by Mario Tronti, and The Writer and the People by Alberto Asor Rosa.