Born from an idea of Giovanbattista Tusa in collaboration with The Philosophical Salon, “Planetary Conversations” is an attempt to reimagine the shape of an engaged public philosophy for the age of a pandemic and mass quarantines. Putting in touch philosophers, artists and activists we seek to create a space for encounters between distinct places and times that, so we hope, are nevertheless not definitively separate, not definitively lost to each other.

First series: “Futures. Of Philosophy”

“Life does not live,” reads the epigram that opens Minima Moralia by Theodor W. Adorno. In the age of its disintegration, in the context of fragmented reality, in which all master narratives have been shaken by an imponderable violence, planetary consciousness encounters existence in its incomprehensible singularity. As fragmented as the world she hopes to experience, cluttered with material and historical debris, philosophy is now faced with totalitarian unanimity, and she now chooses disintegration. To be a fragment among the fragments. A fragment that does not find in the other what interrupts it, but what continues it.

Imagined as a long letter, or as an endless conversation with the Friend, as well as with the Foreigner, philosophy experiences from its very inception the paradoxical condition of being at the same time in the search for a common eccentricity, a remote and unoccupied position, and, together with the other, for an inhabitable planet.

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Second series: “Letters to the Unknown”

Philosophy was the dimension of thought that opened the possibility of welcoming the stranger—whether god, animal, or planet—into the world. It enabled the world to embrace what is remote and foreign, cultivating a space that was neither mine nor yours, but a shared, open realm.

We once believed we knew what the world was, but we conceived of it as a product of our actions and thoughts, the result of processes governed by properties and laws—legal, social, natural.

When our way of inhabiting the planet was threatened by the emergence of presences we had relegated to an immemorial, celestial background—the unchanging backdrop of things—we resisted their return, perceiving the unknown and its influences as enemies.

The war has begun—a war against everything foreign, against everything that threatens our home and our identity.

For this reason, in the second series of Planetary Conversations, we decided to write letters to the Unknown—to that which, by arriving, alters every place. After its arrival, places no longer belong solely to us, yet they never belong entirely to it. This is how a new world becomes possible.

Through writing, we seek to test another channel of communication—telepathy—to transmit the pathos of the soul across distances. For every letter sent presupposes that my soul is not alone, and that the world is not empty: there is always someone else, somewhere else.