Individual without Passions Modern Individualism and the Loss of the Social Bond

In The Individual without Passions, Elena Pulcini brilliantly deconstructs the presuppositions behind our possessive, narcissistic, and frequently male individualism. Above all she suggests that we should reexamine the bonds between individual and community through a new approach to democracy that revives the requirement for equality based on the gift relationship. With this book Elena Pulcini brings a major contribution to this debate that has the potential to renew political thought. -- Marcel Henaff, University of California, San Diego While complying scrupulously to the ordinary demands of criticism and exegesis of philosophical texts, Elena Pulcini has always taken care, in her studies relevant to the history of ideas, to focus on the particular historicity of the discursive sets examined--that is to say, on the fact of their intelligibility is conditioned on a certain type of correlation between the concepts developed by the philosophers and the way the world works--that they express in their manner while influencing the course. The project brought by Elena Pulcini strikes immediately with its ambition. The work of Elena Pulcini has finally donned a remarkable breadth and an undeniable originality that resembles, that of Martha Nussbaum, or that of Axel Honneth and Daniel Innerarity, with whom she also engages in explicit conversation nonfiction.fr