Geophilosophy

October 27, 2026

Jonardon Ganeri
New Argonauts of Attention

--

Ours is an age of attention. While the economies of past societies were built around the extraction of mineral resources and the appropriation of land, our modern economy is an attention economy, the most precious resource being neither material nor manpower but mind. Attention is the name we give to everything that makes us present to the world as well as making us presences in the world; and so to all that makes us human subjects in a world of other subjects.

The mining of our attention is thus the undermining of our very being. The need of the time is to retake control over how we make sense of, and make use of, our attention, to become again free in the way we shape ourselves as presences in the world.

"I'm the Argonaut of true sensations," says the European modernist poet Fernando Pessoa, "I bring to the Universe a new Uni-verse, Because I bring to the Universe its own self." What we can do is make ourselves into Argonauts of a new sort: Argonauts of attention. The voyage of attention I will set sail on asks us fully to engage our capacities of imagination, feeling, sensation, and empathy-our essential humanity.

The idea is clearest in the case of attention to the written word, and I'll agree with Ital Calvino in professing the heteronymic possibility of identifying oneself with an implicit reader who lives only inside the text: "This book so far has been careful to leave open to the reader who is reading the possibility of identifying himself with the reader who is read." For it is only as homo heteronymicus that we shall, as Pessoa demands we must, "realize in oneself all humanity at all moments”

October 5, 2026

Lu Xiaoyu
What is Geopolitical Enlightenment? Waking Up in the Great Disorder

--

In 1784 Kant asked "What is Enlightenment?” and answered that it meant leaving behind a comfortable immaturity and daring to see for oneself. Today the question is back, this time on a geopolitical scale. Europe has woken from its belief that trade and engagement would slowly transform its partners. China has woken from its confidence that it could rise peacefully within an open world economy.

Both now find themselves awake in a great disorder, with the old maps gone and no new ones in hand.

Drawing on his new pamphlet Geopolitical Enlightenment, Xiaoyu Lu follows the metaphor of awakening to its limits. Enlightenment has a ceiling: seeing clearly isn't the same as knowing how to act. It also has a dark side, because the quickest cure for lost illusions is a cynical turn to pure power politics. Geopolitical enlightenment asks for something harder: acting with open eyes and no guarantee that the new frameworks will hold, in a squeezed present where societies have woken at different times.

September 10, 2026

Emanuele Coccia
Ornithology of Power: Culture Beyond Geopolitics

--

For centuries, political community has been conceived through its rootedness in a territory-as though a people derived its identity from the parcel of land it inhabits.

Taking the evolution of Twitter as its point of departure, this lecture argues that this assumption-never truly questioned, and far from universal in the history of political thought-has come to an end. Not because history is over, but because geography can no longer function as the principle by which identities are distributed. New political formations require no geographical anchorage to exist. Beyond any geography, within every tradition, they claim the past of every civilization as their own. Once symbols and cultures no longer belong to any one place, can a culture still be trans-mitted-can education still be thought?

If words and images now circulate every-where, who inherits what-and from where?

June 15, 2026

Gustavo Beliz
New Horizons Based on Leo XIV’s Encyclical on the World in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

--

Al presents a civilizational and planetary challenge that requires placing the human person at the center of all concerns. Pope Leo XIV has just published the Encyclical "Magnifica Humanitas”, on safeguarding the human fundamental questions: the central role of grace as a defining feature of the human condition; new forms of digital slavery and colonialism; technological social justice; the universal destination of digital goods; the principle of subsidiarity to rebuild a "bottom-up multilateralism”; and overcoming corporate monopolies and self-regulation. In short, a magnificent humanity capable of using Al without being robotized by it.

June 4, 2026

Michael Sandel
Democracy in Peril: Paths to Civil Renewal

--

In June, Berggruen Institute Europe hosted 2025 Berggruen Prize Laureate, Professor Michael Sandel, for a conversation surrounding the challenges and potential futures of contemporary democracy.

One of the world’s foremost political philosophers, Professor Sandel has spent decades interrogating liberal political thought, the moral contradictions of markets and meritocracy, and more. Across his many works including Justice, What Money Can’t Buy and, most recently, The Tyranny of Merit, he has critically examined what economic, social, and political institutions owe to the dignity of those who they govern.

April 28, 2026

Dr. Patricia Hill Collins
What's at Stake? Intersectionality as a Word of Power

--

In April, Berggruen Institute Europe hosted 2023 Berggruen Prize Laureate, Dr. Patricia Hill Collins, for an evening lecture as part of the Geophilosophy lecture series at Casa dei Tre Oci.

An esteemed academic, Dr. Collins’s contributions to the fields of critical social theory, feminism, and more cannot be understated. Yet beyond Dr. Collins’s pursuit to provide the language to describe our current condition, what she calls “words of power,” she is fervently committed to building upon the ideas to improve it; her work intertwines theory with praxis. Since the release of her first book, Black Feminist Thought, and throughout her career, Dr. Collins has consistently contoured, and often unsettled, contemporary sociological thought. She continues to remind us that knowledge is not neutral, but epistemically embedded in structures of power.

After opening remarks from the Scientific Director at Berggruen Institute Europe, Niccolo Milanese, Dr. Collins offered the audience a guiding topic for the evening, and one central to her work: intersectionality. Intersectionality, she specified, describes the manner in which overlapping social categories (race, sex, class, and more) intersect to form distinct relations of oppression and privilege. In this way, the notion of intersectionality challenges the often reductive nature of ‘us vs. them’ outlooks, instead constructing “interpretive space” among an array of people. Indeed, it was this interpretive space – expansive and alive – that Dr. Collins spent the evening inviting the audience to inhabit.

Over the course of her lecture, Dr. Collins used powerful examples from her body of work – namely drawing on Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory, Intersectionality, and Lethal Intersections – as discursive conduits. You can watch the full lecture here.

February 9, 2026

Zhang Yongle
Concert of Powers: from Vienna to Beijing

--

The Congress of Vienna (1814-1815) inaugurated the Concert of Europe, a multilateral mechanism designed not only to arbitrate matters of war and peace but also to manage complex financial obligations, such as the Greek debt crisis. As this mechanism extended its reach into colonies and semi-colonies, it forged new political paradigms. In late Qing China, Chinese diplomats sought to leverage the "balance of power" to forestall a collective "concert" that might lead to the partition of China. Nevertheless, the Concert of Powers manifested decisively during the Boxer Rebellion (1900-1901) and the 1911 Revolution, profoundly steering China's political transfor-mation. The collapse of this system in 1914, and the subsequent failure to reconstruct it after World War I, provided China with a strategic window to pursue its sovereign autonomy. Today, as calls for a "new concert of powers" re-emerge, these historical precedents may offer vital insights into our contemporary global

Click here to learn more about Zhang Yongle's European residency

November 27th 2025

Dipesh Chakrabarty & François Hartog
Cosmopolitan time and the future of the present

--

In an era of planetary risks, climate breakdown and dramatic technological development, how do our conceptions of time and history change? Our sense of the time of the planet extends millennia before humans appeared, and potentially millennia after continued human presence - what does this do to our sense of history and our own place and role in it?

April 28th, 2025

Katerina Kolozova
The Techno-Capitalist Fallacy: Value, Capitalism & Subjectivity

--

Katerina argues that Marx’s path is one “no one had yet taken,” and it consists in the ability to materially ground the most abstract of things – the operations of value production as a process of signification. In philosophy and in capitalism, Matter is resource to Value (Signification and Significance), and its existence in and of itself is “pointless” unless assigned value. Marx’s argument is that abstractions, including social relations, in capitalism but in idealist philosophy too, tend to constitute the mirage of a self-sufficient universe. This illusion, Marx intimates in the third volume of Capital, is in contradiction with the real material conditions of human production and becomes ultimately unsustainable. Today the techno-capitalist epistemic fallacy and displaced metaphysics of the self-sufficient universe of pure (financial) value is facing its final contradiction: the physical or material limitations of its very possibility.

March 7th 2025

Peter Sloterdijk
The Midwife of the Intellect: Meister Eckhart and the Divine Man

--

Peter Sloterdijk was among the protagonists of the Special Project of the Historical Archive of La Biennale, Expositio Sancti Evangelii secundum Iohannem by Meister Eckhart (Ospedale Civile SS. Giovanni e Paolo, March 5th-9th, 2025, repeated March 11th-15th, 2025).

The participation of the German philosopher, known for his analysis of modernity and his critique of the structures of Western thought, is the result of a collaboration between La Biennale di Venezia and the Berggruen Institute Europe.

February 4th, 2025

Slavoj Žižek
Toward a Quantum Theory of History

--

The lecture by Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, part of the Geophilosophy of Europe program, started to investigate another theme of great importance to the Berggruen Institute, namely Time - Consciousness, which will be more fully developed in a specific program in the near future.

Linear history is a myth. Quantum theory holds that systems can be in multiple states and configurations at once: this is obviously the case with our world, which cannot be reduced to 1 or 0. Building on this insight, a new theory of history and transformation can be operationalized as the basis of a new policy.

In the video interview below, we asked Žižek why should a new theory of history and transformation be operationalized as the basis of a new politics and which is Europe’s role in the current planetary politics.

November 21st, 2024

Rana Dasgupta
After Nations: preparing for the planetary

--

On November 21st, BIE hosted a lecture with novelist and essayist Rana Dasgupta on the unraveling of the nation-state and the urgent need to prepare for planetary politics.

The nation-state, as the dominant model of governance, is failing across multiple dimensions - theologically, economically, legally, and ecologically.

If this trajectory continues unchecked, it risks leading to a prolonged period of disorder, a modern “Dark age”. To prevent such collapse, new systems must emerge - ones capable of operating at the scale of 21st century challenges and transforming globalization from an extractive, unstable force into a cohesive planetary society.

In the video interview below, Dasgupta, author of the upcoming After Nations, explored the foundations of these necessary planetary systems, how they might take root within the current global order, and the role Europe can play in shaping this transition.

October 07th 2024

Wang Hui
China, Europe and the future of civilizations

--

Wang Hui - one of China's most influential intellectuals - delivered a keynote lecture on the meanings of modernity in China and in Europe, as the urgent need for bringing civilisations into dialogue requires us to take a richer view of their intellectual histories.

Professor Wang introduced his famous interrelated concepts of trans-systemic society and trans-societal system related to China with the attempt to use it as a mirror for Europe and its future. Under what conditions could Europe become a trans systemic society?