Between Worlds and Worldlessness

Over the last few decades, the concept of the “world” has reemerged as one of the most unsettling theoretical problems for contemporary thought. Our historical moment appears to be defined by a fundamental contradiction: the ever-intensifying processes of the global unification of humanity seem to have led to the loss of the world itself. By the end of the 20th century, the movements of globalization and technological development have connected the world to an unprecedented degree. As many influential philosophers (e.g., Heidegger, Arendt, Deleuze, Nancy, Derrida, Badiou, Latour) have noted, however, these very same processes also dismantled our sense of social reality as a shared “world.” This general global tendency, therefore, increasingly coincides with the loss of the world as a common horizon of meaningful experience. The new millennium seems to have confirmed this view through a series of political, social, economic, and environmental crises that keep reminding us that the world we live in effects all of us—albeit in different ways. At the same time, these crises also dispel any illusions of a commonly shared framework for thinking and action. As a result, in response to these existential challenges, we witness the emergence of new dividing lines across the globe, the deepening of economic inequalities, and the intensification of political polarization. With the emergence of new wars, new walls, and more and more excessive conspiracy theories to account for these conflicts, the current state of affairs suggests that we are no longer dealing with mere differences between worldviews but rather with the more radical phenomenon of people inhabiting multiple mutually incompatible worlds. We are seeking papers that explore the philosophical, political, and aesthetic dimensions of these historical crises produced in the field of tensions between the plurality and the absence of worlds.