1st Edition
Global Manifestos for the Twenty-First Century Rethinking Culture, Common Struggles, and Future Change
Bringing together over forty original short essays, some academic, others more creative in nature, this collection responds to the political, historical, social, and economic situation in which we find ourselves today.
The editors argue that we are living in a repetition that must be stopped – if our goal is that the signifier "humanity" remains in the following centuries, the time has come to work in the present. The objective is not to deliver precise or quick answers, but to gather varied voices from different continents, bringing together different languages, ideas, practices, theories, thoughts, and desires. In the words of Yanis Varoufakis, "urging us to become agents of a future that ends unnecessary mass suffering and inspire humanity to realise its potential for authentic freedom." To leave the concept of a manifesto open, the contradictory aspects of the chapters are a subject of the manifesto itself. This is a manifesto of contradictions that reflects our reality as well as our struggles and our aspirations.
This unique anthology will appeal to students and scholars across the humanities and social sciences interested in critical theory and social change.
01 Introduction: Why Global Manifestos for the 21st Century?
Nicol A. Barria Asenjo
02 Foreword
Urgently Needed: A New Manifesto for Fun and Freedom
Yanis Varoufakis
PART ONE
Towards a Historical View Without Retrospective Romanticism or Future Idealization
03 Sublation and Dislocation: A False Choice
Slavoj Žižek
04 Emancipation Through a New Global Perspective
Pavin Chachavalpongpun
05 Manifesto: Commonism Now!
Bara Kolenc
06 A Left of the Passage
Mia Neuhaus, Timo Dorsch, Anna-Maria Imholz, Tomás Imholz, Mario Neumann, Massimo Perinelli, Michael Ramminger, Thomas Rudhof-Seibert, and Anita Starosta
07 Universality in the Middle: A Buddhist Post-Global Perspective
Hung-Chiung Li
08 Manifesto in Favor of Freedom of Thought and Tolerance to Dissent
José E. García
09 The Lessons of Cultural Humility: From a Struggle of Universalities to the Sublation of Existing Systems
Ignacio López-Calvo
PART TWO
Philosophical Footprints of the Present to Build a Here-and- Now
10 United by Touch and Breath: For a Co-ontological Revolution
Francesca R. Recchia Luciani
11 Volcanic Lakes and Hallucinatory Vegetation: A Disaster to Think About the Future
Celia González
12 Epidemic Refraction: A Critical Outlook Echoing Universal Explications Through Microcosmic Mayhem
Bidisha Chakraborty and Esha Sen
13 reading | love | writing | art
Jeremy Fernando
14 Beyond the Permanent Crisis
Jordi Riba
15 Manifesto for a New Grammar of Liberation
Esteban Beltrán Ulate
16 The Road to the Scaffold: The Struggle of Nicolas de Condorcet and Olympe de Gouges for Gender Equality
Olga Vinogradova
17 The Political Challenges of Our Century in Education
J. Félix Angulo Rasco and Silvia Redon Pantoja
PART THREE
Struggle of Universalities, Towards a Global Movement
18 Crisis-Impasse, Centrality of Periphery and the Necessity of International Organization
Fernando A. T. Ximenes
19 Europe’s Malignant Supplements, I Know. But Nevertheless…
Imanol Galfarsoro
20 Is Latin America a Reflection of the Europe Avant-garde Model?
Jorge Torres Vinueza and Veronica León-Ron
21 “Brexit for All”!: Why the Left Should (Urgently) Rediscover the Concept of Sovereignty
Timothy Appleton
22 Decolonial Feminism: A Political Proposal from the Global South
Isabela Boada Guglielmi
23 Universalities: The Power of Lack
Evren İnançoğlu
24 Austerity, Brexit, Covid: Short Circuits and a New Identity for Wales
Alex Mangold
25 No More Manifestos!… Žižek Said “Europe”?
Ricardo Espinoza Lolas
26 From Balkanized Universal(s) to Archipelagic Multiverse
Andrea Perunović
27 War in the State and the State in War
Carlos-Adolfo Rengifo-Castañeda, Alexander Muriel, Diana-Carolina Cañaveral-Londoño, Francisco Yusty, and Conrado Giraldo Zuluaga
28 Can Europe Be a Manifesto? The Role of Europe in Korean American Literature
Brian Willems
29 Lapulapu’s Kris and Panglima Awang’s First Circumnavigation of the World
Ramon Guillermo
PART FOUR
Distinction or Difference: Letting Go of Confrontation and Starting Co-Construction
30 Where the Individual Was, the Self Must Come!
Jairo Gallo Acosta and Jennifer Andrea Moya Castano
31 The Patipolitical Body
Isabel Millar
32 “This is a Shitty Government, But it is My Government”: Love, Power, War in Times of “Collapsed Horizons” and History’s Limitation
“Willka” Álvaro Rodrigo Zarate Huayta
33 The Cosmopolitan Left Against Neoliberalism, Liberfascism and Cyberalism in the Twenty-First Century: A Latin American Approach to the Current Global Political Situation Since Post-Communism
Jesús Ayala-Colqui
34 Reflections from the Theory of the Encryption of Power: Energeia and the Manifestation of the Non-Being
Ricardo Sanín Restrepo
35 The Formation of a Necro-State: Biopolitical Effects of Neoliberal Capitalism in Contemporary Ecuador
Martin Aulestia Calero
36 Real Subsumption, a Problem Rendered
Bradley Kaye
37 Interiority and Exteriority in the Space of Capital
Arturo Romero Contreras
38 Epilogue: Contradictions Between Irreconcilable Manifestos
David Pavón-Cuéllar
Index
Biography
Nicol A. Barria-Asenjo is the author of columns, essays, and academic articles, including Žižek: Cómo Pensar con Claridad en un Mundo al Réves? (2023) and Psychoanalysis Between Philosophy and Politics, co-edited with Slavoj Žižek (2023).
Brian Willems is associate professor of literature at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Split, Croatia. He is most recently the author of Sham Ruins: A User’s Guide (Routledge, 2022).
Slavoj Žižek is director of the International Humanities Centre, Birkbeck College, University of London, and senior research fellow at the Department of Philosophy, University of Ljubljana. He is a lecturer at numerous universities in the United States, United Kingdom, France, Switzerland, and South Korea.
"We share the desire for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and can recognize that it’s untenable to claim them for ourselves but deny them to others. Together with darker motives like greed and vengeance, we have capacities for empathy, self-control, cognitive faculties that can solve problems, and language, which can share the solutions. These existential challenges, and our species’ best response to them, are addressed in the book Global Manifestos for the Twenty-First Century: Rethinking Culture, Common Struggles, and Future Change."
Steven Pinker, Harvard University
"The 21st century now has several Manifestos. Manifestos that announce an anti-neoliberal world, a multipolar world, a world of all and for all. A world where all worlds fit."
Emir Sader, Brazilian political scientist, philosopher, academic, and activist
"The interpellation of these "Manifestos" lies basically in not resigning in the face of the common condition of the struggles. We must cross the particularity of the different struggles and articulate them in a new international project that goes beyond sectorial and identity-based demands."
Jorge Alemán, Argentine psychoanalyst, militant, and poet
