# Santiago Zabala

Santiago Zabala (born 1975) is a philosopher and ICREA Research Professor of Philosophy at the Pompeu Fabra University. His books have been translated into several languages and his articles have been published in The Guardian, Al Jazeera English, The New York Times, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among other international media outlets. In the fall of 2024 the prestigious cultural institution Circulo de Bellas Artes of Madrid will host an exhibition based on Zabala’s aesthetic theory titled The Greatest Emergency

## Philosophy

His books, articles, and research focus on the meaning of art, politics, and freedom in the twenty-first century when, as he claims, "the greatest emergency has become the absence of emergency." The goal of philosophy for Zabala is to thrust us into these absent emergencies (such as climate change or economic inequality) in order to disrupt the ongoing “return to order” that surveillance capitalism and right-wing populism are imposing upon us. These problems are discussed in his most recent books—Being at Large: Freedom in the Age of Alternative Facts (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2020), Why Only Art Can Save Us: Aesthetics and the Absence of Emergency (Columbia University Press, 2017), Outspoken: A Manifesto for the 21st Century (with Adrian Parr, McGill-Queen's University Press, 2023), in the exhibition The Greatest Emergency—and in many articles. His forthcoming book is Signs from the Future. A Philosophy of Warnings.

## Career

Zabala is ICREA Research Professor at the Pompeu Fabra University, where he currently teaches contemporary and political philosophy, supervises MA and Ph.D. thesis and directs the UPF Center for Vattimo's Archives and Philosophy. In addition to an extensive speaking schedule at conferences, festivals, and art Biennales, Zabala is also visiting professor in several European, Asian, and American Universities.

## Critics

The Journal "Iride" released a forum in 2021 with critical articles by Simona Venezia, Valerio Rocco Lozano and Federico Vercellone on Zabala's Being at Large.
The Journal "Lebenswelt. Aesthetics and Philosophy of Experience" released a forum in 2019 with critical articles by Amanda Boetzkes, Daniela Angelucci, Ivelise Perniola, and Paul Kottmann on Zabala's Why Only Art can Save Us. The forum also includes responses by Zabala.
In 2017 S. Mazzini and O. Glyn-Williams released a book on Hermeneutic Communism published by Springer Verlag, Making Communism Hermeneutic: Reading Vattimo and Zabala, with critical contributions from 17 renown scholars from all over the world as well as Vattimo and Zabala's responses.
According to Hamid Dabashi "European thinkers like Žižek and Zabala, important and insightful as they are in their own immediate circles, are out of touch with these realities, and to the degree that they are they cannot come to terms with their unfolding particularities in terms immediate to their idiomaticities. For them "Philosophy" is a mental gymnastics performed with the received particulars of European philosophy in its postmodern or poststructuralist registers – exciting and productive to the degree that they can be." Zabala's response to Dabashi in Al-Jazeera.
Also, Brian Leiter criticized Zabala on his blog (Leiter Reports). Columbia University Press Blog posted Zabala's response to Leiter.