Making Communism Hermeneutical: Reading Vattimo and Zabala (Contributions to Hermeneutics)

This book aims to provide fresh perspectives on Vattimo and Zabala’s groundbreaking foundational text, Hermeneutic Communism, from 2011. The contributors to this collection of essays explore various facets of Vattimo and Zabala’s “anarchic hermeneutics” and “weak communism” in order to investigate the concepts resulting from them, such as “framed democracies,” “armed capitalism” and “conservative impositions.” Vattimo and Zabala’s text is one of the most innovative contributions to the current debate on Communism, in which authors such as Badiou, Negri, and Rancière have been the protagonists so far. al, hermeneutical form, which is achieved by inserting Vattimo and Zabala’s personal reactions to each essay in the book. By responding to each chapter in turn, Vattimo and Zabala establish a hermeneutic dialogue with the contributors. Thus hermeneutics will not only be a central topic, but also an epistemological, concrete application of Vattimo and Zabala’s theories. 

Silvia Mazzini is an Assistant Professor at the Humboldt University Berlin. She is the author of Für eine mannigfaltige mögliche Welt. Kunst und Politik bei Ernst Bloch und Gianni Vattimo (For a Many-fold Possible World. Arts and Politics in Ernst Bloch and Gianni Vattimo), 2010 and of numerous articles on aesthetics, political philosophy, cultural studies and theatre sciences.

Owen Glyn-Williams is currently completing a dissertation in the department of philosophy at DePaul University. His research concentrates on the historical and conceptual development of civil society in modernity, and examines the relationship between imperatives of civility and political antagonism.