In 1936, Walter Benjamin defined the revolutionary class as being in opposition to a dense and dangerous crowd, prone to fear of the foreign, and under the spell of anti-Semitic madness. Today, in formations great or small, that sad figure returns—the hatred of minorities is rekindled and the pied-pipers of the crowd stand triumphant.

Class, by Andrea Cavalletti, is a striking montage of diverse materials—Marx and Jules Verne, Benjamin and Gabriel Tarde. In it, Cavalletti asks whether the untimely concept of class is once again thinkable. Faced with new pogroms and state racism, he challenges us to imagine a movement that would unsettle and eventually destroy the crowd.

One of the foremost thinkers of his generation, Furio Jesi began to publish scholarly essays in academic journals at the age of fifteen. By the time of his early death in 1980, he had accumulated a body of work that astonishes with its abundance and diversity, its depth and scope, and, above all, for its unfailing rigor and brilliance.
 
In Time and Festivity, Andrea Cavalletti collects Jesi’s finest essays, ranging from his groundbreaking work on myth and politics to his reflections on time, festivity, and revolt. He explores the significance of texts by Rimbaud, Rilke, Lukács, and Pavese and the mythological language of the biblical story of Susanna. Carefully annotated and referenced, and enriched by a first-person account of Jesi’s intellectual biography, Time and Festivity provides a precious guide to the methodology and approach at the core of Jesi’s thought, displaying how his personal, vitally intense via negativa might in fact originate from his early statement: “All I have ever written is poetry.”