santiago zabala's
BEING AT LARGE: FREEDOM IN THE AGE OF ALTERNATIVE
FACTS
reviewed by
SAM MICKEY
________________________________________________________________
Sam Mickey
is a Research Associate for the Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology,
and an Adjunct Professor in the Theology and Religious Studies
department at the University of San Francisco. He is an author
of Coexistentialism and the Unbearable Intimacy of Ecological
Emergency, Whole Earth Thinking and Planetary Coexistence,
and On the Verge of a Planetary Civilization: A Philosophy
of Integral Ecology. He is the editor of several anthologies,
including the open access volume, Living Earth Community:
Multiple Ways of Being and Knowing.
A
philosopher and cultural critic, Santiago Zabala is well known
for articulating the ongoing relevance of a strand of philosophy
oriented around interpretation: philosophical hermeneutics. In
his latest book, Being
at Large: Freedom in the Age of Alternative Facts,
he brings his hermeneutic perspective to an interrogation of the
mounting challenges posed by the conditions of today’s intellectual
and political landscape. As the subtitle indicates, this book
addresses the misinformation and misunderstandings that are so
prevalent today. 
Alternative
facts, fake news and post-truth are all symptoms of a lack of
any mutual understanding about what is real. Similarly, the return
of realism has become a trend in the intellectual world, reflected
in the realist rationality proffered by a psychologist like Jordan
Peterson or by the philosophical movement of speculative realism.
Questions about what is real have never been so pressing on a
global scale. Indeed, responses to those questions have impacts
not only on humanity but on the diversity of species on Earth,
which are currently threatened with a mass extinction event.
For
Zabala, responding to what is transpiring in an age of alternative
facts calls for an understanding of being, interpretation and
emergency – three themes that are for the author “near
synonyms” and are also necessary for facilitating freedom
today. Following a brief preface and an introduction, the book
is divided into three parts, which are named after those three
themes, respectively. Each part is divided into three sections.
Being is discussed in relationship to metaphysics, conversation
and truth. The history of metaphysics involves determinations
of Being that attempt to foreclose the meaning of Being and shut
down interpretive conversations and debates. Following the deconstruction
of metaphysics, articulated by philosophers like Martin Heidegger
and Jacques Derrida, the meaning of Being can now be reopened
to interpretation. What remains of Being after the deconstruction
of metaphysics is thus freed from its enclosures, and accordingly
Zabala says that these “remains of Being” are “always
at large.” “Being is at large, that is, freed from
those frames that limit its possibilities.”
Freed
from limiting frames, Being appears as an open-ended process of
interpretation. In the second part of the book, Zabala elaborates
on the political implications of interpretation, particularly
in relationship to resistance, transgression and alteration. Philosophical
hermeneutics is often conceived as apolitical or conservative,
and not particularly amenable to social transformation; Heidegger’s
complicity in Nazism and Gadamer’s relative complacency
about politics are typical examples. However, Zabala shows that
that is not a completely accurate representation. He shows how
hermeneutics can be deployed for emancipatory political struggles,
as exemplified in its use by philosophers like Richard Rorty and
Gianni Vattimo. By holding open the freedom of Being at large,
hermeneutics resists any imposition of truth through power or
external force, whether that is a political power or the external
force of a theoretician attempting to define Being once and for
all. In this sense, there is an anarchic vein running through
hermeneutics, freeing the remains of Being from any imposed order.
Zabala gives a thorough account of prominent figures in the development
of hermeneutics, including its development in Biblical contexts,
such as the works of St. Augustine and Martin Luther.
Zabala’s
ontology of remnants (Being) and his elucidation of the anarchic
dimension of hermeneutics (Interpretation) come together in the
third part of the book, which focuses on emergency, divided into
three sections: populism, biodiversity and revelations. The rise
of right-wing populism in recent years is exemplified in the presidency
of Donald Trump in the United States, whose administration denies
the existence of emergencies like climate change, poverty and
racism. That denial demonstrates a core point of Zabala’s
book: the greatest emergency today is the “absence of emergency.”
This is related to Heidegger’s insight that the greatest
emergency today is Notlosigkeit, which can be translated as an
absence of emergency, lack of a sense of plight or lack of distress.
The rise of right-wing populism is an emergency not simply because
of the violence it enacts but because it uses the spectacle of
violence to prevent a sense of emergency from emerging.
Biodiversity
loss is an emergency that poses an existential threat to humankind
and to the majority of life on Earth. Representations of biodiversity
in environmental activism and political discourse often render
absent the emergency of mass extinction. Representational thinking
assimilates the emergency into the acceptable frames of the global
order, including statistics, security concerns, spectacular images,
nongovernmental organizations, and conferences. Zabala’s
hermeneutics aims to free the interpretation of biodiversity from
its confines with the current global order. In that sense, hermeneutic
philosophers can function as something like whistleblowers who
publicly disclose matters that are hidden from the global order.
Following the sections on populism and biodiversity, the final
section of the chapter on emergency focuses on “revelations
of whistleblowers” like Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning
and Edward Snowden, all of whom showed “how challenging
and dangerous it is to disclose revelations – to attempt
to thrust us into emergency – within our global framed order.
A
brief afterword provides some remarks that conclude the book without
offering any simple solutions. Rather, Zabala offers an invitation
“to understand the current form of our world and to take
an existential stand. More specifically, this is an invitation
to take an existential stand for freedom. “The promotion
and exposure of absent emergencies has become an existential affair
that we must all endorse if we care about our freedom.”
One could criticize Zabala for a lack of specific injunctions
or practices for facilitating the promotion and exposure of absent
emergencies. However, those injunctions and practices cannot be
imposed from without. Criteria for decision-making are immanent
to the hermeneutic context in which those decisions take place.
Zabala cannot tell anyone what to do, but he can invite participation
in the interpretive openness of Being at large, and from that
freedom one can take an existential stand.
