Recently Published Book Spotlight: Signs from the Future. A Philosophy of Warnings

Santiago Zabala is ICREA Research Professor of Philosophy at the Pompeu Fabra University of Barcelona in Spain. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Al Jazeera, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among others. He is the author of several books, most recently Why Only Art Can Save Us: Aesthetics and the Absence of Emergency (Columbia UP, 2017); Being at Large: Freedom in the Age of Alternative Facts (McGill-Queen’s UP,2020); Outspoken: A Manifesto for the 21st Century, edited with Adrian Parr (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2024); and Signs from the Future: A Philosophy of Warnings (Columbia University Press, 2025). In this Recently Published Book Spotlight, Zabala explains why philosophy can be interpreted as a warning rather than a system, method, or analysis.

What is your work about?

In this book, I outline a “philosophy of warnings.” This is not a new philosophy; philosophers have warned us about Being, God, and numerous other concepts related to our existence for centuries. However, it is the first time someone has systematically outlined what such a philosophy might entail. Warnings—not to be confused with predictions—are not meant to convince anyone but to invite us to reevaluate our priorities for the future. Isn’t this what philosophy does? The ontological approach that distinguishes philosophy from other disciplines both addresses problems from a global perspective and also warns us of different disciplines’ narrow focus. “This word Being,” as Martin Heidegger once said, “serves as a warning to us,” a warning that reality is not made merely of beings and that its truth is not exclusively what can be measured or verified. This is also the meaning behind the theses of Michel Foucault (“our society is one not of spectacle, but of surveillance”), Judith Butler (“gender is performative”), and Donna Haraway (“technology is not neutral”). These philosophers invite us to think beyond traditional paradigms of politics, nature, and science but also warn us of what might happen if we don’t. It should not come as a surprise that warnings can be traced back to Greek mythology, Confucianism, and Plato’s Apology. In the first part of the book, I analyze four philosophical warnings by Friedrich Nietzsche, Heidegger, Simone de Beauvoir, and Hannah Arendt; in the second, I show how we have ignored their warnings; and in the third part, how we can learn to listen to them through interpretation.

How does it fit in with your larger research project?

Warnings are both a translation of what I called the “greatest emergency” and a call to intervene, that is, “interpret.” The greatest emergency—which I’ve been developing since 2011 in books, articles, and an exhibition—refers to those emergencies we do not confront, those that are absent. The greatest emergency—as I believe—is the absence of an emergency.  This thesis does not mean that a crisis such as the coronavirus was not a fundamental emergency that we should have confronted at all levels. It simply suggests the greatest emergencies are the ones we do not confront. These include, among others, climate change, economic inequality, and ongoing genocides. What is dramatic about COVID-19 is that it was an “absent emergency” until very recently; David Quammen in Spillover and international organizations such as the WHO, in various reports, warned us for years that the threat of pandemic influenza was imminent. Unfortunately, we did not heed the warning, and we found ourselves facing an existential threat. To overcome this problem, it is necessary we take into consideration the anarchic nature of interpretation, which is at the center of my philosophical formation. With Heidegger and Gadamer, hermeneutics has become an existential endeavor, one that extends beyond merely interpreting texts. The latent anarchic vein that is present throughout the history of hermeneutics—which I outline in the second part of my book Being at Large: Freedom in the Age of Alternative Facts—is vital to interpreting warnings because it involves us in a break from reality. A philosophy of warnings seeks to alter and interrupt the reality we’ve become accustomed to through an alternative horizon of understanding, where interpretation and listening play a crucial role and are responsive to warnings.

Who has influenced this work the most?

Those authors—from Nietzsche and Arendt to Slavoj Žižek and Chantal Mouffe—who reject the so-called return to reality in contemporary philosophy. The ongoing global return to order through realism in philosophy and politics and the increasingly narrow focus of experts have prevented us from taking warnings seriously. Too often, these are discarded as useless or insignificant—much like environmentalists, artists, and philosophers—when, in fact, they are vital to understanding our spiritual predicament. Žižek, who titled the conclusion of one of his books “signs from the future”, thoroughly rejects the standard “realist” approach and calls on us “to restore robust hermeneutical horizons, to demonstrate how most things in the future will not depend purely on an acceptance of data and scientific discoveries, but on our own capability to know how to interpret and manage their effects, looking to understand what is really at stake.” The warnings of Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Simone de Beauvoir, and Hannah Arendt regarding God, science, gender, and evil—with which my book begins—all focus on what is really at stake, on those issues that cannot be solved by “seeking to return to a Cartesian realism that was believed to be dead and buried,” as Simon Critchley said.

How is your work relevant to the contemporary world?

It is highly relevant, as we are constantly warned. We could say we are warned to such an extent that it is almost impossible to trust all these warnings. Climate change, nuclear threats, and financial crises are some of the many issues experts and specialists warn us about every day. The problem is that we are not listening. But this is not only a problem of authority—scientific data on climate change is pretty straightforward—but rather of interpretation. We are reluctant to intervene despite its evidentness. This is why “returning to realism” is useless. The book is full of examples from popular culture (TV series such as Black Mirror, novels such as The Handmaid’s Tale, documentaries such as National Bird), political events (the rise of QAnon, the failed global Artificial Intelligence Safety Summit in Bletchley Park in 2023, Governor Ron DeSantis’s “Don’t Say Gay” law), and contemporary philosophers (such as Paul Preciado, Kyle Whyte, and Sara Ahmed).

Which of your insights or conclusions do you find most exciting?

That truth is not enough to listen to warnings. Whether a warning comes to pass is secondary to the intensity and pressure it exercises against hidden emergencies because it depends on our willingness to listen and interpret. The inefficacy of truth inevitably raises the question of whose and which warning we must listen to. Although most warnings we are accustomed to come from scientists, they are often more effective when they come from activists, artists, or journalists. The difference, for example, between Banksy’s Devolved Parliament—where British MPs in the House of Commons are depicted as chimpanzees—and the latest editorial on British political deadlock is not one of kind but rather of degree, intensity, and depth. Editorials by respected political analysts can be truthful, but they are rarely as powerful as a painting by Banksy. I also think it is essential to learn to interpret events as warnings. This is probably why, during the pandemic, Bruno Latour wrote an article titled “The Pandemic Is a Warning.” Philosophy is a warning meant to respond to threatening signs from the future, and it is our responsibility to listen to them.

Santiago Zabala

Santiago Zabala is ICREA Research Professor of Philosophy at the Pompeu Fabra University of Barcelona in Spain. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Al Jazeera, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among others. He is the author of several books, most recently Why Only Art Can Save Us: Aesthetics and the Absence of Emergency (Columbia UP, 2017); Being at Large: Freedom in the Age of Alternative Facts (McGill-Queen’s UP,2020); Outspoken: A Manifesto for the 21st Century, edited with Adrian Parr (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2024); and Signs from the Future: A Philosophy of Warnings (Columbia University Press, 2025).

Richard B. Gibson

Richard B. Gibson is Editor of the Current Events in Philosophy and the Bioethics series. He is a bioethicist with research interests in human enhancement, emergent technologies, novel beings, disability theory, and body modification.