“An ambiguous Barbarism: the Writer’s High-Hand in Chapter Eleven of Disgrace”.

Falcato, A. (Speaker)

Instituto de Filosofia da NOVA (IFILNOVA)

Activity: Talk or presentation › Oral presentation

Period	20 Sept 2019
Held at	Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, Portugal
Degree of Recognition	International

Keywords

Violence
Nihilism
J.M. Coetzee
Disgrace

Documents & Links

Not always were philosophical debates on the nature of free will related to issues of violence or imbalanced action. Massive progress in industrialization and technology, however, aligned with an increasing secularism lashing Europe from the second half of the nineteenth-century onwards, opened the way for an intellectual debate on the existence of – or even the meaningfulness, and meaningful social reliance upon – any set of a-temporal values and norms. In the high rank of intellectual discussion in the Old Continent, that skepticism came to be called ‘nihilism’. With the benefit of historical hindsight, we may think that such a threat to shared social values would end up in bouts of extreme violence, masterfully depicted in European Fiction and soon to creep to the level of international politics.