The Unnamable Present

The Unnamable Present

<p><b>A decisive key to help grasp some of the essential points of what is happening around us. </b></p><p>The ninth part of Roberto Calasso’s work in progress, <i>The Unnamable Present</i>, is closely connected with themes of the first book, <i>The Ruin of Kasch</i> (originally published in 1983, and recently reissued by FSG in a new translation). But while <i>Kasch</i> is an enlightened exploration of modernity, <i>The Unnamable Present</i> propels us into the twenty first century.</p><p>Tourists, terrorists, secularists, fundamentalists, hackers, transhumanists, algorithmicians: these are all tribes that inhabit the unnamable present and act on its nervous system. This is a world that seems to have no living past, but was foreshadowed in the period between 1933 and 1945, when everything appeared bent on self-annihilation. <i>The Unnamable Present</i> is a meditation on the obscure and ubiquitous process of transformation happening today in all societies, which makes so many previous names either inadequate or misleading or a parody of what they used to mean.</p><p>Translated with sensitivity by Calasso’s longtime translator, Richard Dixon, <i>The Unnamable Present</i> is a strikingly original and provocative vision of our times, from the writer <i>The Paris Review</i> called “a literary institution of one.”</p>