The latest issue of the Nordic Journal of Aesthetics (vol. 33, no. 67) was edited by Tobias Dias and Maja Bak Herrie, and is titled Aesthetics in the Age of Unreason. From the editorial:

We live in an age characterized by an expansion and deepening of the instrumental reason of capital, an increasing prevalence of reactionary and even fascist irrationalism and “post-truth” myth- making, and a fundamental proliferation of digital technologies of artificial intelligence and other vast information infrastructures mediating our social relations and climate.

Rather than the liberal Zeitdiagnose of a “post-truth era,” it seems more fitting to designate this conjunction an age of unreason, in line with the tradition of the Frankfurt School, as recently revisited by the late Bernard Stiegler and Achille Mbembe. Whereas Mbembe has argued that the colonial history of modernity, with its constitutive division of reason and unreason, the (white) liberal subject and the subjugated Black subject, outlines a “history of reason’s unreason” that to this day constitutes contemporary societies and their public spheres, Stiegler theorized the emergence of a de-formed reason and stupidity as a key tendency in today’s globalized, digital technoculture.

For both theorists, the dialectical tension between reason and unreason—the historical task of Aufklärung with its exclusion, racialization, and proletarianization—takes intensified and ever-more contradictory forms in the 21st century. Following Paul B. Preciado and many others, it seems fair to assert that we are living through an enormous “epistemological crisis” re-addressing the fundamental question of access to knowledge and our ability to know. It’s this overall crisis that marks the current “age of unreason.”

In my contribution, “Dialectic of Barbarism,” I respond to this prompt somewhat indirectly. Under the impact of the genocide in Gaza, I revisit the aesthetic and political figure of the barbarian (the Other of Civilization and Enlightenment) and some of its recent appropriations and transformations by racialized writers and activists.