Fabula in Theory: Envisaging a Community of the Future?

This year’s theoretical centre of the festival will focus on two interconnected, but topically diametrically opposed events. The section Envisaging a Community of the Future? will discuss the challenges of future communities and building new social formations of a utopian or dystopian future and will feature a lecture by one of the most prominent contemporary Italian philosophers, Umberto Galimberti. Matejka Grgič will moderate the lecture in which he will explore possible current and future spaces that seem to be sliding back into elapsed ideas, into an area of political and social control, while baring features of a dystopian future.

Umberto Galimberti (1942) is a full professor at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, where he has been teaching since 1976. He studied philosophy, anthropology, and psychology first in Italy, then in Germany. He has authored a number of scientific and popular science books, translations, and technical publications for various Italian media. His work has been translated into several languages; the books The Disturbing Guest. Nihilism and Young People and The Myths of Our Time have been translated into Slovenian. Umberto Galimberti is one of the most prominent representatives of the school of philosophy that developed in the late 20th century so unhomogenously that it does not actually bear a common label. It is a train of thought closely relating to psychology and partly to anthropology and religiology. This philosophy is characteristic of the analytical psychology of C. G. Jung, antique philosophy (especially Plato), and fields of anthropology and religiology dealing with archaic religions and myths. Umberto Galimberti’s philosophy is based on the assumption that the philosopher does not live in a fortress of knowledge, rationality, and logic, but rather in the midst of a life of a community, that they are a person among people and their knowledge, rationality, and logic do not disable, but rather allow them to be confronted with the reality of their life. When contemplating the challenges of a modern society, Galimberti uses the appropriate methods of analysis and synthesis, but does not reject antique or even archaic forms of wisdom. His human is a whole, not just a cluster of organs or a contraposition of body and spirit getting a glimpse into new perspectives. Galimberti uses his works to discuss the phenomena in modern society that have lost all dimensions of the archaic narrative and have become self-explanative, dogmatic – the axioms of the 21st century.

Moderator: Matejka Grgič.
Simultaneous translation will be provided.

The issue of the Razpotja magazine that was created in collaboration with the Fabula Festival and Cankarjev dom for this year’s festival focus will also be available at the festival event.

The event has been postponed to September due to the pandemic and current measures against the spread of COVID-19, which do not allow live events with a larger audience presence.