New Radical Enlightenment

Description

A new philosophy of emancipation that escapes from the false binaries imposed on us

This book calls for a new radical enlightenment, a combative attitude against the credulities and oppressions of our time. Today, when historical time has broken down and the present is a succession of catastrophes, who is still in a position to think critically?

There seem to be only two alternatives: condemnation or salvation. This dilemma hides a renunciation of freedom, of improving our living conditions. What fears and opportunism feed these apocalyptic discourses? Why do we believe in them? Disobeying is today the fundamental critical attitude in order to make a common world thinkable.

Philosophy was born out of discussion, out of the rivalry between worldviews. The modern enlightenment projected an idea of progress, imposing it as a universal value and model. This book lays out the need for critical dissent as a new beginning for the Humanities that are in transition, dissent built on the inclusion of multiple voices attending the common problems that affect us.

Humanities based on trust in the power of thought to recompose a liveable time, based on a common commitment to dignity. It is no longer a question of stretching the past of a dying history but of opening up to the present of an unfinished philosophy. Leaping out of historicism, an unfinished, living thought that updates the main problems of contemporary philosophy and places them in a planetary, post-colonial and feminist framework. A philosophy for a common world.Preface
Part 1: New Radical Enlightenment
1. Our Posthumous Condition
Unsustainability
After Postmodernity
The Catastrophe of Time

2. Enlightened Radicalism
Cultural Servitude
Enlightened Illiteracy
Neutralising Criticism
Delegated Intelligence

3. Humanities in Transition

Part 2: Philosophy for a Common World
1. How Not to Philosophise
2. From Infinite Universe to Exhausted Planet
3. Philosophy Had a History
4. Doing Away with Philosophy
5. ‘Europe Is Indefensible’
6. The Places of Philosophy
7. Standardising Thought
8. To Write Is to Be Transformed
9. Learning to Think
10. University without Surrender
11. The New Alliances
12. End of the ‘Great Men’
13. Body and Thought
14. From Suspicion to Trust”What is redeemable from the Enlightenment? Garcés argues that is a question that remains unanswered: she puts forward the idea of composition between knowledge and emancipation. So, radicalizing the enlightenment (in dialogue with those who tried to do the same with modernity) implies the confrontation of the colonial project, which bound knowledge with domination and exploitation.”
—Verónica Gago

“Marina Garcés is a leading voice of the current debates on the shapes of a New Enlightenment. Her radical investigation focuses on the human not so much as a given ground for claims to universal validity, but rather as an open process, historically situated and accessible only from multiple points of view. Her contribution to the New Enlightenment discourse is one of multiperspectivity, including the temporal dimension of social change. The book is a must read for anybody interested in how one cannot only defend the Enlightenment project against the usual charges, but carry it forward in light of recent moral and epistemic progresses in the fields of thinkers of humans as gendered, temporally located animals who are nevertheless capable of achieving progress under fragile circumstances. In this context, Garcés also opens new avenues for understanding the contribution of the humanities and social sciences in their interdisciplinary effort to ground value judgment, not to merely relativize it.”
—Markus Gabriel, University of Bonn

“On the basis of an inventive reading of the history and conceptuality of enlightenment, Marina Garcés arrives at new concepts of knowledge, intelligence and philosophy. Against what she describes as today’s “posthumous condition”, an age of anti-enlightenment between apocalypse and solutionism, the Catalan philosopher calls for a “radical enlightenment”. This concept does not only acutalize Kantian ideas from 250 years ago, but radically multiplies enlightenment thought both in space and in time. As there is a chain of enlightenments in different phases of history, radical enlightenment does not originate only in Europe, but comes from many places, as a work of rebellious weavers from all over the world, with a guerilla philosophy spreading and appearing wherever we least expect it. Listening to the silenced voices of distant places and minor histories, Marina Garcés creates a starting point for future philosophy, a philosophy without a specific territory or origin, a philosophy without dominion.”
—Gerald Raunig, author of Art and Revolution: Transversal Activism in the Long Twentieth Century

“What remains of the human subject in an age when reason is carried out by and through information machines and technologies of calculation? Who will set the boundaries that distinguish between the calculable and the incalculable? What will it take to turn instruments of calculation into instruments of liberation? This wonderfully readable book is also a work of profound scholarship by one of the most powerful thinkers working today.”
—Achille Mbembe, author of Brutalism (Duke University Press, 2024)

“A book that shines indomitably.”
—Manuel Rivas, El País

“Books like this one encourage the reader to grow up in unexpected ways.”
—Vicenç Pagés Jordà, El Periódico

“Marina Garcés insists on demonstrating through her acts the ideas she supports intellectually: philosophy is a transformative and endless power, a way of living.”
—Eudald Espluga, PlayGround

“How frightening, we are losing our enlightenment. The loss of reason is sending us back to before the Age of Enlightenment. The most effective response to overcome this crisis of civilization, according to Spanish philosopher Marian Garcés, is the promotion of a new radical enlightenment, the title of her agile essay-manifesto. A necessary operation “to reaffirm the freedom and dignity of human experience”. Against all induced fear, the fuse of dictatorial and securitarian temptations.”
—Gigi Riva, Il Venerdì di Repubblica

“Garcés’ ambition is thus the return to an imaginary collective enlightenment, in which anonymous clandestine manuscripts are presumably replaced by the militant online samizdat: “Being able to say ‘we don’t believe you’ is the most egalitarian expression of the common power of thought.”
—Antonio Gurrado, El Foglio Quotidiano

“Marina Garcés and her books do not offer formulas or recipes. They argue that philosophy is necessary for the concrete life of each of us and for our societies in crisis. There are those who think that philosophy should be protected and defended as if it were a museum piece or an endangered species. Marina Garcés emphasizes the opposite “philosophy cannot be preserved, it must be practiced and exposed.” Garcés proposes to open ourselves to the present of an unfinished philosophy for a world that shows symptoms of exhaustion.”
—Oriol Puig, El Diario

“Marina Garcés, the rebellious philosopher. Marina Garcés is the thinker of insubordination and social movements. She has taken philosophy beyond the academic world.”
—Matías Néspolo, El Mundo

“A liveable life, a liveable time, a liveable world: life and the human capacity to live it in sustainable, egalitarian, and open ways is at the center of Marina Garcés’ philosophical work. In this book, she harks back to the project of radical Enlightenment to forge weapons for the struggle against the catastrophes of modernization. Garcés reinvents philosophy as a practice of encounter and creation, that takes shared vulnerability as a basis to appropriate common life.”
—Sandro Mezzadra, University of BolognaMarina Garcés (Barcelona 1973) is a philosopher and author of several books including Un mundo común, Escuela de aprendices and El tiempo de la promesa. She is a lecturer at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya and is engaged in collective projects of educational, cultural, and social experimentation, as well as being a leading member of the group for critical thinking “Espai in Blanc.”GB

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