Calasso, Roberto

Abstract

Roberto Calasso was an Italian thinker, writer, and book editor. Though gaining a PhD with Mario Praz, he did not enter Italian academic life, preferring to work as chief editor of the publishing house Adelphi. Calasso published 11 books belonging to a series, his Opera (Work), 1983–2020. Its significance lies in offering a sustained problematisation of secular modernity. The first volume, The Ruin of Kasch, contains the germ of most of the future volumes. Its subject matter is the French Revolution, taking a most unlikely person as guide, Talleyrand, while its back cover states that, in the volume, ‘The Age of Revolutions tells its own shipwrecking'. Calasso's work circles around four main themes: order – the order of the world; knowledge – human knowledge about our world, also implying awareness of invisible powers; rituals of sacrifice; and secular equivalents of rituals of sacrifice – exchange and substitution – focusing on the increasing role of substitution in modernity, leading to a ‘substitution society'.