Only Friends Share Our Sense of Humor — Santiago Zabala
A philosopher and a teacher: Tell us briefly about yourself and your work.
I was raised in Rome, Vienna, and Geneva, and studied philosophy in Turin, Rome, and Berlin. In 2010, I obtained the ICREA Research Professorship in Barcelona, and I doubt I’ll ever move again. I wrote and edited several books on hermeneutics, aesthetics, and warnings. Also, which was a lot of fun, I curated an exhibition based on my aesthetics theory.
What is your understanding of "humour" proper; or, at least, of those features thereof to which you have paid the keenest attention? And how does your work merge with, or is influenced by, your quotidian encounters with a potentially ubiquitous and ambiguous phenomenon such as humour?
Humor is what makes you different. We all have different senses of humor. I believe most of our friends – true friends – share the same sense of humor. Also, I’m not sure there is anything as humor. We all have a sense of humor. Actually, there are some people out there who literally don’t have one or don’t express it. Gianni Vattimo, with whom I studied and collaborated on many projects, as some of you might know, had a great sense of humor and often linked it to his philosophy: Weak Thought. The idea that thought only progresses when it shows its weakness is also a form of humor. But he didn’t only believe it was vital to have a sense of humor about your own philosophy, but also about yourself. A philosopher who takes himself too seriously is ridiculous. Martin Heidegger – the most important German philosopher since Hegel, according to Jürgen Habermas – could have used some humor. Habermas, too. Analytic philosophy is boring precisely because it lacks humor. When you indoctrinate students into thinking that being sharp is the only thing that matters in philosophy, that vague, encouraging thinking is something to be avoided at all costs, you are reducing thinking to calculation, or, as Heidegger, with a little humor, might say today, AI.
Thinkers as different as Nietzsche, Judith Shklar, and Derrida have argued that cruelty is baffling because, even if we want to eliminate it from human life, it always finds a way to re-emerge therein, almost as if it were part and parcel of the same human life. Has cruelty ever played a significant role in your work's purview, and/or your understanding of social and cultural phenomena?
In my latest book – Signs from the Future – I try to outline a philosophy of warnings. The central question of the book is “why don’t we listen to warnings”? One answer, among others, is that we become cruel when we do not listen to warnings, that is, to those announcements that call for our imagination. This, in part, is how Hannah Arendt justified Eichmann’s banality of evil. Warnings, contrary to predictions, are interesting because they offer an alternative. A warning is a call to act now because something can be changed or even saved. Predictions, by contrast, request submission because there is no alternative. Trump, Meloni, and Milei are cruel. Their support for Netanyahu’s genocide in Palestine is a paradigmatic example. They lack the imagination to comprehend 75,000 murders and the consequences of Gaza’s destruction. They – and we – were repeatedly warned by historians such as Norman Finkelstein, Illan Pappe, and many others.
Are there two or three works that, when it comes to addressing any of the themes fuelling your own philosophical and literary production, you would describe as true "classics" and, therefore, advise the reader of this blog to familiarise themselves with — the way, say, Plato's Republic or Machiavelli's Prince can be said to be "classics" in politics? And are there any works from the past ten years that you would equally recommend?
- Baltasar Gracian, The Pocket Oracle and Art of Prudence (1647)
- Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927)
- Hannah Arendt, The Banality of Evil (1963)
And from the past ten years:
- Gianni Vattimo, Not Being God (2016)
- Richard Rorty, Philosophy as Poetry (2016)