Institut Ramon LLull

We live in a time Marina Garcés describes as posthumous. Enlightenment’s aim of “liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters,” in the words of Adorno and Horkheimer, seems to have failed. Confidence in history’s constant progress has plummeted and, in its place, reigns a provisional apocalyptic experience. New catastrophic narratives incite authoritarianism, fanaticism, and terrorism, and impose a false dichotomy between seeking contingent solutions or falling into the fatalism of the doomed. The author pushes back against these new forms of gullibility and again picks up the old gauntlet of philosophy. Reinstating the radical nature of the Enlightenment affirms the dignity of the human experience and, from that space, proposes a “reciprocal and welcoming” universal standard that fosters new forms of life.