About this item
The state of emergency, according to thinkers such as Carl Schmidt, Walter Benjamin, and Giorgio Agamben, is at the heart of any theory of politics. But today the problem is not the crises that we do confront, which are often used by governments to legitimize themselves, but the ones that political realism stops us from recognizing as emergencies, from widespread surveillance to climate change to the systemic shocks of neoliberalism. We need a way of disrupting the existing order that can energize radical democratic action rather than reinforcing the status quo. In this provocative book, Santiago Zabala declares that in an age where the greatest emergency is the absence of emergency, only contemporary art's capacity to alter reality can save us.Why Only Art Can Save Us advances a new aesthetics centered on the nature of the emergency that characterizes the twenty-first century.
About the Author
Santiago Zabala is ICREA Research Professor of Philosophy at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. He is the author of Why Only Art can Save Us (2017) The Remains of Being (2009) , The Hermeneutic Nature of Analytic Philosophy (2008) , co-author, with Gianni Vattimo, of Hermeneutic Communism (2011) , editor of Weakening Philosophy (2007) , The Future of Religion (2005) , Nihilism and Emancipation (2004) , Art's Claim to Truth (2009) , co-editor with Jeff Malpas of Consequences of Hermeneutics (2010) and co-editor with M. Marder of Being Shaken: Ontology and the Event (2013) . He also writes opinion articles and reviews for The New York Times, The Guardian, The Los Angeles review of Books, Al Jazeera, the New Statesman, and several academic journals. His web page is http://www.santiagozabala.com/.
