Born from an idea of Giovanbattista Tusa in collaboration with The Philosophical Salon, “Planetary Conversations” is an attempt to reimagine the shape of an engaged public philosophy for the age of a pandemic and mass quarantines. Putting in touch philosophers, artists and activists we seek to create a space for encounters between distinct places and times that, so we hope, are nevertheless not definitively separate, not definitively lost to each other.

“Life does not live,” reads the epigram that opens Minima Moralia by Theodor W. Adorno. In the age of its disintegration, in the context of fragmented reality, in which all master narratives have been shaken by an imponderable violence, planetary consciousness encounters existence in its incomprehensible singularity. As fragmented as the world she hopes to experience, cluttered with material and historical debris, philosophy is now faced with totalitarian unanimity, and she now chooses disintegration. To be a fragment among the fragments. A fragment that does not find in the other what interrupts it, but what continues it.

Imagined as a long letter, or as an endless conversation with the Friend, as well as with the Foreigner, philosophy experiences from its very inception the paradoxical condition of being at the same time in the search for a common eccentricity, a remote and unoccupied position, and, together with the other, for an inhabitable planet.