Iconic paintings and photographs
Role models: In public Latin America, the addiction heroes Bolívar and San Martin or Che Guevara and Evita are either idolized or satanized through paintings and photographs. This book takes a closer look at why.
From despotism to anarchy and back to despotism
RUSSIA: Mikhail Shishkin has long pointed out that Russia, unlike Germany, has never come to terms with its totalitarian past.
Political biology
DESIRE: About the intersex subject and revolutionary impatience. A resistance made possible by the 'potentia gaudendi', the reserve of unrestrained 'pleasure potency' which constitutes the basic assumption of the philosophy of desire from Reich to Deleuze and Guattari. 'Polemical non-fiction'? Paul B. Preciado takes up Engels' confrontation with the norms of "the family, the state and private property".
Older and newer tyrants
DESPOTER: The totalitarian regimes of the 20th century caused disasters and crimes of completely different dimensions than any pre-modern tyrants could have imagined. But what qualifies those in power over the centuries to become tyrants?
The eco-anarchist on Greek Hydra: To be able to step out of our western everyday life
PORTRAIT: Can you today live a life where you sing until sunrise and dance at sunset? According to Don Lowe, all Greeks are anarchists at heart.
Should we send weapons to Ukraine, and to Israel?
SCENARIO: MODERN TIMES here tries out an imaginary scenario to compare two irreconcilable conflicts. It is up to the reader to make up their own mind as to what this might mean.
ASIA: «We are the ones who are far away, while they are in ...
TECHNOLOGY: According to Kevin Kelly, technology writer, photographer and publicist, the best thing you can do sometimes is slow down technology.
Agamben: A burning house
PHILOSOPHY: Italian Giorgio Agamben describes and envisions different courses for our thinking than today's more technologically nihilistic will-driven production paradigm. Two books delve into other possibilities than the 'fire' he believes we find ourselves in. In this essay, Astrid Nordang tries to bring out some of this complicated material.
We lack faith, not faith in God, but faith in the world
PHILOSOPHY: The immune democracy. According to the Italian philosopher Donatella Di Cwesare, there exists today a political culture ruled by the fear of the foreigner and the future, a sham democracy in favor of security, control and short-term competitive considerations. And those who consider themselves "liberal" today have suffered greatly in standing up to the irrational impulses and decisions that govern the market and the pursuit of short-term profit.
The pandemic will create a new world order
Mike Davis: According to activist and historian Mike Davis, wild reservoirs, like bats, contain up to 400 types of coronavirus that are just waiting to spread to other animals and humans.
Why is love political?
PSYCHOLOGY: Love is not a project of isolation, but a project of freedom, according to Seyda Kurt: The freedom to be able to choose for oneself is about radical tenderness, about justice.
The limits of our way of life
FUTURE: Environmental disasters, global warming, crisis of civilization and planetary apocalypse have given rise to ideas about the doom of the earth and the end of time. Through a radical anthropology, a couple of authors make an attempt to restore our faith in the world.
Concealment, secrecy, intimidation
ABUSE: Three men in their forties informed their former school, the Jesuit Canisius College in Berlin, about how two priests had sexually abused them decades ago. This led to countless disclosures – not only of the abuse itself, but of the church's consistent secrecy.
End Times Thoughts
PHILOSOPHY: While postmodernism involved an explosion, today's posthumous condition, according to Marina Garcés, involves a liquidation of all possibilities – an implosion. Yes, are the hopes we cling to today just market-adapted needs for hope?
The masses and the people
PSYCHOLOGY: Is it possible to understand why the majority choose a leader or a slave-like existence?
The Norwegian double standard
ENVIRONMENTAL PIONEERS: The story of the history of Norwegian environmental thinking is an ambivalent portrait of Norway's imagined role as an environmental nation.
A voluntary forced relationship
PSYCHOLOGY: Is narcissism a social demand on the individual – that we must become more than what we are?
How the majority's opinions are created by the media
PUBLIC: Precht and Welzer want more "well-intentioned disputes" about views – not social media's definition, personorientering and arousal production. Their book has been met with everything from total rejection and hesitant acceptance to detailed criticism.
Ambivalent about gene manipulation
GENREDIGERING The new gene technology is putting a lot of risk on patients, parents and researchers. When letting nature take its course becomes controversial, choice itself becomes a problem.
Good value for money?
There is intense debate in France and France-speaking Africa about the use of the CFA monetary unit.
Can the technology revolution bring us out of disability?
ESSAY: Today, the extreme state is different than in the post-war period, when Sartre and Heidegger wrote about anxiety and authenticity. The existential threat today lies primarily in an uncertain planetary future.
The power of impotence
We need a new activism – not through revolutionary change, but through systematic efforts to develop a humane and free society.
The topsoil and the soil
With a renewed will to go deeper, Monbiot digs in this new book down to the roots, the very foundation of our modern...
An increasingly nihilistic world
TECHNOLOGY: The world is becoming increasingly nihilistic as it becomes increasingly clear that humanity is unable to take care of it. The challenge Bernard Stiegler takes on is to show the way to an alternative anthropology – in practice as well as in theory.
Dormant ideological viruses
CROWN: Will a far more favorable ideological virus spread and hopefully infect us, the virus that makes us think of another society, beyond the nation-state, a society that realizes itself as global solidarity and cooperation?