Mapping the Glocal and Deciphering the Asymmetry of Economies of Code in Giacomo Marramao's The Passage West

Abstract

First paragraph: The Passage West (2012) by the Italian philosopher Giacomo Marramao, translated from the original Passaggio a Occidente (2003), is a remarkable contribution to understanding the new global paradigm we, as both westerners and non-westerners, inhabit, elaborating on the meaning of globalization and political modernity in our times with an eye to both reinterpreting the heritage of the west and proposing possible political horizons for the future. As the title of the work already suggests, central to Marramao´s proposals is the figure of the West itself, though perhaps it is more accurate to say a certain history of the West, or even of the West as history. If this is the case, this place is not (or not only) geographical. It, rather, marks a certain before and after where the “after” will eventually become the emergence of the global age itself as the passage west. This ‘west’ should be understood, then, on both a conceptual and historical level. With reference to the former, we are to understand that the West is a very particular form of universality, exceptional, following Max Weber, in the course of human history, and universal in so far as it dominates by unifying, thereby realizing, the universal in its very etymology. Only one modality of the universal is known to it: that of domination. Specifically, this domination has its root in “a particular declension of rationality, which is even more central than the logic of power” (151). Its biggest armament is its particular form of rationality, and this rationality is in turn dependent upon “specific forms of ‘practical-rational behaviors’ that have no adequate parallels in other cultures” (Marramao, 151).