ABSTRACT
We feel very pleased that you agreed to take part in this interview which sums up issues addressed in the volume Crisis and Communitas. While keeping in mind your previous work, we would like to focus primarily on your truly inspiring book YEAR 1: A Philosophical Recounting (2021). Although from a different angle, you are interested in categories of collective belonging, among other subjects, which is also the topic shared by all articles gathered here. You call YEAR 1 “a project in the reconfiguration of knowledge” (8). By that you mean to radically overturn the basic epistemological preconceptions of modernity—primarily these conceptual frames that divide and order the record of human experience. In order to loosen our own boundedness to modernity’s categories, that in this transitional moment have become a form of entrapment, you consider the modern project of history as an entry point into the constellation of meanings that circle around concepts central to contemporary debates with a clear intention to undermine their fantasised stability. What is of importance for us, among those key concepts, are two words which appear in this volume’s title: crisis and community. Let us start with the first one to open our talk. As you underline in YEAR 1, the word crisis derives from krisis in koine—the commonly spoken Greek at the time—and your book intends to approach this term in a novel way, as a word for judgement in the book of Revelation. Then, you refer to Reinhart Koselleck’s “Crisis” to demonstrate that since the second half of the eighteenth century, the concept of crisis has become the fundamental mode for interpreting historical time and attributing power to change itself as, for instance, in Marx’s theory of crisis. Nevertheless, in YEAR 1, you do not elaborate any further on this concept and its use today. Could you kindly do it now? For instance, how could we destabilise the modern concept of crisis to make our shared consciousness of crisis less about a dreamy revolution and more about common practices that could produce a composite of political actors across national, ethnic, gender, etc. divides, as you explain in one of your earlier books, Revolution Today (2019)?
