New Book

The Government of Time: Theories of Plural Temporality in the Marxist Tradition

6th Apr 2019

The Government of Time: Theories of Plural Temporality in the Marxist Tradition

Edited by Vittorio Morfino and Peter Thomas

• $28 / £24.99 • 9781608460175 • 291 Pages

Historical Materialism, new in paperback catalogue: https://we.tl/t-DNvshoI187

This volume seeks to provide new resources for understanding the specificity of historical time by studying the articulation of the real, plural temporalities of mass political action. 

This volume proposes to transform our understanding of Marxism by reconnecting with the “subterranean currents” of plural temporalities that have traversed its development. From Rousseau and Sieyès to Marx, from Bloch to Althusser, from Gramsci to Pasolini and postcolonialism, the chapters in this volume seek both to valorise neglected resources from Marxism’s contradictory history, and also to read against the grain its orthodox and heterodox currents. Privileging not the single time of historical development, but the plural temporalities that intertwine in and constitute any given historical conjuncture, and arguing against merely subjectivist theories of temporal multiplicity, this volume studies the articulation of the real, plural temporalities of mass political action. Comprehending their dynamics is a necessary precondition for a renewed politics of emancipation.

Contributors include: Luca Basso, Stefano Bracaletti, Mauro Farnesi Camellone, Fabio Frosini, Augusto Illuminati, Nicola Marcucci, Vittorio Morfino, Luca Pinzolo, Peter D. Thomas, and Massimiliano Tomba.

Customers in North America can order the book direct from Haymarket’s website at a 30% discount, with free postage: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1199-the-government-of-time

We encourage customers elsewhere to order through independent bookstores where possible, particularly the Alliance of Radical Booksellers in the UK: http://www.radicalbooksellers.co.uk/  

Vittorio Morfino, PhD (1998), University of Paris VIII Saint Denis, is a senior researcher in the history of philosophy at the Università di Milano-Bicocca. He is the author of Plural temporality: Transindividuality and the aleatory between Spinoza and Althusser andGenealogia di un pregiudizio: L’immagine di Spinoza in Germania da Leibniz a Marx among other titles. He is an editor ofQuaderni materialisti and ofDécalages.

Peter D. Thomas, PhD (2008), University of Amsterdam, is senior lecturer in the history of political thought at Brunel University London. He is the author ofThe Gramscian Moment: Philosophy, Hegemony and Marxism and coeditor ofEncountering Althusser: Politics and Materialism in Contemporary Radical Thought andIn Marx’s Laboratory: Critical Interpretations of the Grundrisse.

For publicity requests or any other queries, contact uk@haymarketbooks.org (Europe) or john@haymarketbooks.org (US, rest of world).