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The new book by Santiago Zabala explores the paths to freedom in the age of alternative facts

In Being at Large. Freedom in the Age of Alternative Facts, the UPF-ICREA research professor with the Department of Humanities calls for interpretative interruptions of the reigning authoritarian narrative, created by a network of politicians and philosophers.

17.04.2020

Imatge inicial

Santiago Zabala, ICREA-UPF research professor with the Department of Humanities and director of the UPF Center for Gianni Vattimo’s Philosophy and Archives, has recently published the book Being at Large. Freedom in the Age of Alternative Facts (McGill-Queen’s University Press).

The work by Santiago Zabala, a hermeneutic exploration of freedom, through existence, interpretation and emergencies, criticizes the existing “new world order”, a political, technological and cultural framework created by certain philosophers and politicians, who present themselves as the latest bearers of truth.

According to the author, this new order conspires to undermine the interpretative practices of open-ended criticism and normalizes a sense of threat to preserve control. “The greatest emergency has become the absence of emergencies”, he affirms.

The book is divided into three parts, focusing on existence, interpretation and emergencies.

Santiago Zabala echoes three major emergencies currently in existence: the loss of biodiversity due to climate change, economic inequality and refugee crises, and extreme right-wing populism and the treatment of “whistleblowers” (as an example, he focuses on the case of Christopher Wylie, the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower).

The author, with the help of contemporary thinkers such as Bruno Latour, Judith Butler and Giorgio Agamben, traces an intellectual alliance between academics such as Jordan Peterson and Christina Hoff Sommers, and right-wing populist politicians like Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen. The book is divided into three parts, focusing on existence, interpretation and emergencies. These parts, which seek to reveal the meaning of freedom in this age of alternative facts and fake news, revolve around three questions: “What remains of existence after metaphysics?”; “What is the anarchic meaning of interpretation?”, and “Why is the greatest emergency the absence of emergencies?”.

Using hermeneutics to interpret information overload

According to Santiago Zabala, living in the 21st century means being surrounded by a constant influx of information. Society must engage in order to interpret these new and sudden changes that arise, using what he calls “the anarchic power of philosophical hermeneutics”.

There is a need to leave the framings imposed by economic and technological interests, which have established a network created by certain politicians and philosophers: they are constantly calling for the “return to order” that surveillance capitalism and the populist right impose, as a permanent state of exception.

To disrupt these framings of the world order, philosophy, art and the humanities play a key role.

To disrupt these framings that define the world order, philosophy, art and the humanities in general, play a key role, since science is too influenced by economic and technological interests. For freedom to progress, we must adopt an existential position, and give meaning to the interpretation of emergencies.

How are emergencies generated?

According to the author, global alarms do not create themselves, they require government agencies, major media networks and accredited academics to convince of their meaning. Thus, the main problem at this time of alternative facts and fake news is that Internet and social media trick us into believing that the traditional vectors of authority and legitimacy no longer exist to help us find out the facts.

Fake news is the result of information not related to interpretation when such information requires filters and guidelines. The facts and the truth really need all the help they can get to capture people’s attention and really react to emergencies.

Santiago Zabala (1975), doctor of Philosophy from the Pontifical Lateran University of Rome (2006), he has been an ICREA research professor at UPF since 2010.  He teaches Political and Contemporary Philosophy at the Faculty of Humanities at UPF and supervises master’s and doctoral theses. Author of Why Only Art Can Save Us (Columbia University Press, 2017), among other works, he directsseveral book collections on philosophy in the United States and Spain, and writes opinion articles for The New York Times, The Guardian and Al Jazeera.

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