One of Italy's most original philosophers aims to connect the problem of pure possibility, potentiality, and power with the problem of political and social ethics in a context where the latter has lost its previous religious, metaphysical, and cultural grounding.

Human rights must be profoundly reconstructed, if not reinvented, if they are to confront successfully the challenges posed by the rise of political theologies and their rival conceptions of human dignity.

This book uses the writings of T. S. Eliot and Walter Benjamin to examine the fraught relationship between literary and historical form during the modernist period.