Fables of Re-enchantment

Ghosts, oracles, and talking plants… an atlas for escaping disenchantment.

Enchantment has disappeared from our lives. Whoever dares to mention it violates the most basic epistemological canons that hold our world together and is immediately labeled ignorant or mad. It is suspicious, however, that the taboo on enchantment comes about just as the historical process of modernity begins to produce spectres and nightmares on an industrial scale. The world is populated by ghosts and no one can talk about them. Even revolutionary thought has conformed to this precept, abandoning the imaginary to the violence of fascism: an enormous historical error since it has brought about the demobilization of intelligence and sensibility on the most crucial terrain for any form of change.

Uniting archeology with modernity, anthropology and yearning, Fables of Re-enchantment analyzes the knot that links disenchantment and totalitarianism; it observes the ruinous effects that it has produced for human and non-human lives; and it sketches another way of thinking of the revolution, the multiplicity, and relations with the imaginary, the pre-individual and the invisible.

A book of anthropology, ecology and philosophy, written as a fable. A book for returning to wonder and to shake off fear in the years of global terror.