Marrano Way

The Marrano phenomenon is a still unexplored element of Western culture: the presence of the borderline Jewish identity which avoids clear-cut cultural and religious attribution and - precisely as such - prefigures the advent of the typically modern "e;free-oscillating"e; subjectivity. Yet, the aim of the book is not a historical study of the Marranos (or conversos), who were forced to convert to Christianity, but were suspected of retaining their Judaism "e;undercover."e; The book rather applies the "e;Marrano metaphor"e; to explore the fruitful area of mixture and cross-over which allowed modern thinkers, writers and artists of the Jewish origin to enter the realm of universal communication - without, at the same time, making them relinquish their Jewishness which they subsequently developed as a "e;hidden tradition."e; The book poses and then attempts to prove the "e;Marrano hypothesis,"e; according to which modern subjectivity derives, to paraphrase Cohen, "e;out of the sources of the hidden Judaism"e;: modernity begins not with the Cartesian abstract ego, but with the rich self-reflexive self of Michel de Montaigne who wrestled with his own marranismo in a manner that soon became paradigmatic to other Jewish thinkers entering the scene of Western modernity, from Spinoza to Derrida. The essays in the volume offer thus a new view of a "e;Marrano modernity,"e; which aims to radically transform our approach to the genesis of the modern subject and shed a new light on its secret religious life as surviving the process of secularization, although merely in the form of secret traces.