Crisis dominates the present historical moment. The economy is in crisis, politics in both its past and present forms is in crisis and our own individual lives are in crisis, made vulnerable by the fluctuations of the labor market and by the undoing of social and political ties we inherited from modernity. Yet, traditional views of crises as just temporary setbacks do not seem to hold any longer; this crisis seems permanent, with no way out and no alternatives on the horizon.

Reconstructing a political genealogy of the term crisis from the Greek world to today’s neoliberalism, The Age of Precarity demonstrates that crisis, understood as a “choice” between revolution and conservation, is a peculiarity of the modern era that does not apply to the present day. However, since its origin, the trope of crisis has proven to be one of the most effective instruments of social discipline and administration. The analytical trajectory followed by this book – which spans from Plato to Hayek, from the juridical and medical science of antiquity to the current technocracy, passing through the “weapons of criticism” of Marx and Gramsci – finally identifies, following Benjamin and Foucault, precariousness as the “form of life” that characterizes crisis understood as an art of government.

But we still need to answer the question: “How can we recreate the possibility of political alternatives?” – this question, among others, will be addressed by the upcoming seminar with the author.

Dario Gentili (Naples, 1975) is Associate Professor in Moral Philosophy at the Department of Philosophy, University of Roma Tre. He has a PhD in Ethics and Political-Legal Philosophy from the University of Salerno. He did his postdoctoral research in Philosophy and the History of Ideas at the Sum (Italian Institute of Human Sciences), Florence, and received a DAAD post doctorate grant to work at the Walter Benjamin Archive in Berlin. He became a Research Fellow at the Sum (Italian Institute of Human Sciences) and in Autumn 2014 he was Visiting Researcher at Heinrich-Heine-University of Düsseldorf.

Monographs: Il tempo della storia. Le tesi “sul concetto di storia” di Walter Benjamin, Guida, Napoli 2002; Topografie politiche. Spazio urbano, cittadinanza, confini in Walter Benjamin e Jacques Derrida, Quodlibet, Macerata 2009; Italian Theory. Dall’operaismo alla biopolitica, Il Mulino, Bologna 2012. His essays are translated into English and other languages.

Participants: Petar Bojanić, Srđan Prodanović, Igor Cvejić, Marjan Ivković, Đorđe Hristov, Milan Urošević, Aleksandra Knežević, Damir Zejnulahović, Andrea Perunović and author.