Zabala, Santiago

ICREA Research Professor at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF).
Humanities

Short biography

I was raised in Rome, Vienna, and Geneva and studied philosophy at the University of Turin and at the Pontifical Lateran University of Rome, where I obtained my PhD in 2006. The following year I was awarded the Humboldt Research Fellowship at the University of Potsdam for two years. After a visiting scholarship in 2010 at Johns Hopkins University, I was appointed ICREA Research Professor at the University of Barcelona. Since 2015 I am ICREA Research Professor at Pompeu Fabra University, where I currently teach contemporary and political philosophy and supervise PhD students. I am also the founding director of the "UPF Center for Vattimo’s Archives and Philosophy." My writing has appeared in The New York Times, Al-Jazeera, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Research interests

My books, articles, and research focus on the meaning of art, politics, and freedom in the twenty-first century where, as I claim, "the greatest emergency has become the absence of emergency." The goal of philosophy 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 my most recent book—Being at Large: Freedom in the Age of Alternative Facts (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020) —and in many articles. This year the Journal Lebenswelt published four critical essays with my responses on my theory of emergency exposed in my 2017 Columbia University Press book Why Only Art can Save Us. Aesthetics and the Absence of Emergency.

Key words

Philosophical hermeneutics, philosophy of religion, aesthetics, and political philosophy

ORCID

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1780-4588

RESEARCHER ID

http://www.researcherid.com/rid/L-2327-2017