Our Unnamable Present: On Roberto Calasso’s Weltanschauung

In this review essay, I take on Roberto Calasso’s Unnamable Present and offer a critical framework to understand his thought after the publication of The Ruin of Kasch in 1983 and his vision of the world of our contemporary society. I argue that, by broadening Zygmunt Bauman’s “liquid modernity” concept, Calasso describes the political and ethical consequences of the loss of the sacred in our unnamed, ominous present. The result of this process is the historical creation of the Homo saecularis in the age of digital culture, whose cultural inconsistency is an expression of the current, unsettling political conditions of Western society, which Calasso directly puts in relation to the equally secular development of Islamism and Christianity.