Our eventful anniversary year has successfully drawn to a close. And this 25th anniversary is a happy occasion to continue into 2013 with a slew of exciting events. Our request for “word donations” for our birthday got such an overwhelming response that we would like to thank all authors, friends, and Passagen companions: You have made us very happy and proud.
Another resounding success: our Passagen Series, a series of conversations with authors such as Mihály Vajda, Jacques Rancière, and Alain Badiou, which we have hosted in cooperation with various cultural institutions in Vienna, Berlin, Budapest, and New York. The series also inspired us to develop a new book series, Passagen Gespräche, in which we ask our authors to discuss their theories and hope to initiate a debate. We look forward to its continuation with many more exciting events in Berlin and New York in 2013. You will find constant updates and reports about our activities on our website, on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter.
We thank our authors, our increasingly large live audiences, and our event partners, who have all turned this new Passagen format into a great success. Last but not least, I want to thank all our dedicated employees as well as the many journalists, booksellers, and friends, without whom Passagen would never persevered and turned into such an important cultural institution. We hope to continue to meet these high standards and be received with your overwhelming interest in the years to come.
In light of the ongoing economic, political, and social crisis, we have decided to pay special attention this season to economic and political topics which we regard as important contributions to correcting and ameliorating social conditions. We are therefore continuing our critical considerations of the current crisis with a number of controversial books covering a broad range of reform strategies, from radical democratic to communist perspectives.
Colin Crouch, for instance, argues in his new book new book that the distortions prompted by decades of neoliberal domination have left social democracy with the task to intervene and creatively remedy the unacceptable situation that neoliberalism has caused. The task of social democracy is to eliminate the unwanted effects of a structurally unsound market economy. A social democratic movement ought to render the welfare state into a state of social investments. Alain Badiou, on the other hand, predicts the end of liberal capitalist democracy and an awakening of history with the establishment of something new, something Badiou calls the “Idea of Communism”. Conversely, Jacques Rancière tries to rethink the concepts of politics, democracy, and populace, and to develop a new social perspective. Slavoj Žižek rejects multiculturalism as a supposedly post-ideological paradigm and debunks it as the ideology of global capitalism. He pleads for a kind of intolerance that he sees fit to repoliticize economics and the economy.
We have again compiled such a rich and interesting catalogue of philosophy, literature and art books that I cannot even list all the authors here. Please consult our 2013 spring catalogue (in German) for more detailed information about all new releases. I hope you will find something to your liking and, as always, I wish you new insights and an engaging reading experience.
Peter Engelmann
