Abstract

Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala’s book Hermeneutic Communism continues the leading motif of “weak thought‘ in the context of political theory. Weak thought is characterized by the idea that under postmodern conditions, the Nietzschean idea of nihilism has acquired the sense of emancipation. This book presents a new stage of the political instrumentalization of weak thought in which the very term ”socialism’ gets replaced by the much more demanding term of ”communism’. The kind of communism the authors are striving for is no longer to be integrated in the existing order of “framed democracy‘. The present critical study of Vattimo and Zabala’s enterprise focuses on the relationship between the kind of hermeneutic nihilism implied by weak thought and the leftist political project the authors try to retrieve from the residuals of Marxism. The main criticism is concentrated on the concept of emancipation as arising out of this relationship.