ABOUT.

Santiago Zabala is a philosopher and cultural critic. Since 2010 he has been ICREA Research Professor of Philosophy at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, where he teaches contemporary philosophy, supervises MA and Ph.D. theses, and directs the UPF Center for Gianni Vattimo’s Archives and Philosophy. Before moving to Barcelona he was an Alexander Von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellow at Potsdam University and a Visiting Scholar at Johns Hopkins University. In addition to an extensive speaking schedule at conferences, festivals, and biennales, Zabala is also visiting professor in several Universities in Asia, Europe, and North America.

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), and Outspoken: A Manifesto for the 21st Century (co-edit with Adrian Parr, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2023) —and in many articles. His forthcoming book is Signs from the Future. A Philosophy of Warnings (2024).

Zabala is also the coauthor of Hermeneutic Communism (with G. Vattimo, Columbia University Press, 2011, object of a critical study Making Communism Hermeneutical: Reading Vattimo and Zabala, Springer Verlag, 2017); author of The Remains of Being (Columbia University Press, 2009) and The Hermeneutic Nature of Analytic Philosophy (Columbia University Press, 2008); and editor of several books and special journal issues with contributions from Judith Butler, Umberto Eco, and other renowned thinkers. His opinion articles have appeared in The New York Times, Al-Jazeera, The Guardian, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among other international media outlets. A complete list of his writings can be found in his CV.