What does it mean today to be pagan? Is the conceptual and affective heritage of ancient polytheism still valid? What messages can the cults of the gods of Africa or Oceania convey to us?
The will to put an end to the existing separation between the way of feeling of the West and that of the first cultures, has led some anthropologists and theologians at the beginning of the 20th century to elaborate the notion of sacred. His works deserve to be recovered and radicalized: the new dimensions of what is more than sacred and what is more than profane introduce the thought of rite and ceremony that dissolves the barrier between religion and the world.
The eight scattered essays gathered here present a critical and transcendent vision of the essential debates of the second half of the 20th century, and invite us to reread the work of powerfully suggestive and radical thinkers and writers in their conceptions of modern man, literature , radical politics and art, as are Derrida, Debord, Blanchot, Beckett and Pareyson. Perniola also unravels some fruitful hypotheses about the peculiarities of Italian philosophical culture within the broad Western philosophical tradition.