ABSTRACT
It is a truism nowadays to propose that the world as we know it is in turmoil and that “all that is solid melts into the air.” The historical conjuncture in which we live is in fact displaying significant transformations on a number of fronts and disturbing our sense of certainty in relation to our pursuit of the promises and ambitions of modernity. While the foundational grounds on which the project of modernity has been able to produce its hegemony are breaking down and/or melting, ambivalence appears to be the key notion for understanding the nature of the present. Antonio Gramsci’s famous statement that “the old is dying and the new cannot be bom: in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear,” although penned as early as the 1930s, captures and expresses eloquently the ambivalence that renders it difficult to pinpoint the direction of movement in our inter-societal and inter-national relations.
