With <i>Signs from the Future</i>, Santiago Zabala has issued his own clarion call to address the underlying cause of the hydra-headed crises facing the world today—by reviving the dying art of thinking.
LA Review of Books
Philosophy has often warned us—about God, science, and the very limits of thought. This profoundly original book recasts philosophy as a warning and asks the urgent question: Why don’t we listen? Erudite and provocative, it challenges the reader to hear philosophy anew. Essential reading
- Alex Taek-Gwang Lee, author of <i>Communism After Deleuze</i>,
Santiago Zabala achieves in <i>Signs from the Future</i> what only the best thinkers occasionally do: he effortlessly unites the most pressing concerns of our moments (global warming, pandemic, social crises...) with the reflection of "eternal" questions (reality oriented towards future, the nature of thinking). This is why his book is interesting in the most basic sense of the term of "inter-esse": throwing us into the heart of being. It is a book for everybody who has the courage to think today.
- Slavoj Žižek, author of <i>Zero Point</i>,
In his philosophy of warnings, Santiago Zabala analyzes the difference between temporality and history to craft warnings as genuine signs of possible futures. It invites us to discard banal signals in favor of meaningful signs that mark promises and hopes that we can fulfill if we pay attention.
- María Pía Lara, author of <i>The Disclosure of Politics: Struggles Over the Semantics of Secularization</i>,
Santiago Zabala asks us to think of philosophy as a warning, a call to heed ominous “signs from the future.” He argues that warnings—as distinct from predictions—invite us to see the possibility of a radical break from the present. Predictions tell us to submit to the inevitable, but warnings ask us to take part in shaping a different future. A philosophy of warnings offers an alternative horizon of understanding beyond “the real” and “the normal,” and a politics of warnings helps us confront hidden emergencies through collective interpretation, listening, and action.
Signs from the Future places thinkers such as Nietzsche, Heidegger, de Beauvoir, and Arendt into conversation with present-day politics, art, and culture, drawing our attention to unheeded warnings. This timely and engaging book shows why unresolved crises from the past must be interpreted anew today if we are to imagine an equitable future—or a future at all.
Introduction
Part I. Philosophical Warnings
1. We Have Murdered God
2. Science Does Not Think
3. One Becomes a Woman
4. The Banality of Evil
Part II. Ignoring Warnings
5. I’m Not a Keyboard Jihadi
6. There Is No Rush to Regulate AI
7. The “Don’t Say Gay” Law
8. We Kill People Based on Metadata
Part III. Being Warned
9. Compound Eye
10. Radical Listening
11. The Battle of Interpretation
12. Truth Is Not Enough
Afterword
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index