CONTRIBUTI / 5 / Tommaso Guariento /
Today’s current state of political, economic, and social crisis is fostering the proliferation of narratives and philosophies of catastrophe. Our intent with this article is to map the topography of these narratives and philosophical systems. Starting with speculative realism’s fascination with catastrophes (particularly notable in the philosophy of Quentin Meillassoux), we investigate the dialectic between the crisis of imagination and the imaginary of crisis in the contemporary age using the philosophical anthropology of Ernesto De Martino, Peter Sloterdijk, and Paolo Virno. From religious systems to futurology, from divination to the technological materialization of the resurrection of bodies, imagination of the future has always been characterized by its reduction to the present or by its substitution for open fields of creative possibility. Between such absence of meaning and the excess of it lies the wide range of utopian perspectives on creativity and innovation and reactionary attempts to “immunize” against potential threat that make up the current geography of the future.
