Theorising the Contemporary / Pensare il contemporaneo
Combines the expertise of philosophers, anthropologists, literature specialists and art theorists to explore the idea of the ‘contemporary’.
The volume contains the proceedings of an international conference exploring the concept of 'contemporaneity' from different perspectives and in reference to different disciplinary fields (philosophy, literature and art theory). In the chronological motion of historiography, contemporaneity is conceptualised as simply being the present era, one that follows modernity. Such thinking overlooks a more complex understanding of the contemporary, which is, in its original meaning, the co-presence of different times, a disconnection of temporal continuity, a rupture in the present, which becomes a meeting point where the past and the future intersect. The contemporary is untimely and, in this sense, is just in time, as it relates to time through anachronism. It is more present than the present of actuality.