INSTITUTE FOR DOCTORAL STUDIES
IN THE VISUAL ARTS
This online presentation on Saturday, November 15, at 12pm EST / 6pm CET, is free and open to all. Please . After registering, you will receive a confirmation email with information about joining the webinar.
The Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts is pleased to host the first online book launch of (Columbia University Press, 2025) by Santiago Zabala (ICREA/Pompeu Fabra University). The author will participate in a conversation with Silvia Mazzini (èƽ), Simonetta Moro (èƽ), and Martin Woessner (City College of New York).
Zabala asks us to think of philosophy as a warning, a call to heed ominous “signs from the future.” He argues that warnings—as distinct from predictions—invite us to see the possibility of a radical break from the present. Predictions tell us to submit to the inevitable, but warnings ask us to take part in shaping a different future. A philosophy of warnings offers an alternative horizon of understanding beyond “the real” and “the normal,” and a politics of warnings helps us confront hidden emergencies through collective interpretation, listening, and action.
Signs from the Future places thinkers such as Nietzsche, de Beauvoir, Preciado, and Latour, among others, into conversation with present-day politics, art, and culture, drawing our attention to unheeded warnings. This timely and engaging book shows why unresolved crises from the past must be interpreted anew today if we are to imagine an equitable future—or a future at all.
is ICREA Research Professor of Philosophy at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. He is the author of many books, including Being at Large: Freedom in the Age of Alternative Facts (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020) and Why Only Art Can Save Us: Aesthetics and the Absence of Emergency (Columbia University Press, 2017). His opinion pieces have appeared in the New York Times, Al-Jazeera, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among other international media outlets.
Silvia Mazzini is Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Art Theory, and Director of the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts (èƽ). She has published on art and politics in Vattimo, Bloch, and Pasolini, on tragic and comic thought, and community theatre; currently, she is writing on the philosophy of poverty. Among her publications are Für eine mannigfaltige mögliche Welt. Kunst und Politik bei Ernst Bloch und Gianni Vattimo (Peter Lang, 2010) and, as co-editor, Making Communism Hermeneutical: on Vattimo and Zabala (Springer, 2017).
Simonetta Moro is Professor of Art, Philosophy, and Visual Studies, and President of the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts (èƽ). She is a visual artist who exhibits internationally and a published author whose work focuses on cartographic practices and their theoretical examinations, most recently in the book Mapping Paradigms in Modern and Contemporary Art: Poetic Cartography (Routledge, 2022). Her latest volume is The Vattimo Dictionary (Edinburgh University Press, 2023).
is Professor of History & Society at the City College of New York’s Center for Worker Education. He is the author of Terrence Malick and the Examined Life (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025) and Heidegger in America (Cambridge University Press, 2011). His writings have appeared in Commonweal, Boundary 2 Online, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among other journals.