Seminar
Santiago Zabala

The Greatest Emergency is the Absence of Emergency:
Anarchic Hermeneutics, Emergency Aesthetics, and Philosophical Warnings

16,18, and 19.03.2021
16h-19h

Online

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Shape PT B/A, 2018 © Filippo Minelli, Silence / Shapes Series, courtesy the artist

The aim of this seminar is to venture into three themes and concepts that form and sustain the philosophy of warnings. In order to outline this philosophy, it is necessary to understand the post- metaphysical connotations of hermeneutics and aesthetics after Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Gadamer. Interpretation and art have become realms where ‘Being’ takes place, that is, existence emerges and resists the ongoing return to order and realism in the twenty-first century. But if the ‘greatest emergency is the absence of emergency’, as I claim, how can we know which emergency to prioritise? What is a real emergency? This theory is meant to question why climate change, social inequality, and viral pandemics are not addressed, even though we are constantly warned of their emergency. Throughout this seminar, we will attempt to carve out the onto- logical meaning of interpretation, art, and warnings in order to individuate alternative ways to exists, that is, ‘being at large’.

Santiago Zabala is ICREA Research Professor of Philoso- phy at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. He is the author and editor of thirteen books and has written for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Al-Jazeera. His most recent publications are Being at Large: Freedom in the Age of Alternative Facts (McGill- Queen’s University Press, 2020) and Why Only Art can Save Us. Aesthetics and the Absence of Emergency (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017).


Registration is free, but limited. Please send an email with a short CV to admin@maumaus.org by 07.03.2021. Confirmation of registration will be sent by email. The seminar will be in English.