Today it is widely reported that the West is in crisis, with Europe at the forefront. There are plenty of arguments to sustain this claim. Franco La Cecla, however, warns us not to throw the baby out with the bathwater, as this unstoppable disenchantment is closing our eyes to the exception the West continues to represent. Despite capitalism, world wars colonialism and neoliberalism (a list that could certainly be much extended), the West is in fact seen by the rest of the world as a place that is host to an enviable tolerance, in which the individual, women and children can exercise their own rights irrespective of any form of religious creed, ethnicity, clan, tribe or family; a place in which a form of citizenship is practiced that allows the establishing of free, revocable bonds, an idea founded in Pericles’ democracy and then reformulated in the light of concepts of fraternity and equality. It is this extraordinary exception that risks being thrown away, when instead we ought not only make claim to it, but re-take it for ourselves and radicalize it.
Introduction
Despite everything
Europexit
Europe, the West, as geography
Should the West commit suicide?
To reproduce the hate of those that imitate us
Tunis
The Roman road: being universal, secondarily
Instability as a guarantee
To separate the sacred
Chapter nine 55
To say Me: with literature
Chapter ten 59
The bitter orientalist
Chapter eleven 63
Universalism
Chapter twelve 67
Defending society from having to be
Chapter thirteen 71
Tunis two
Despite everything encore
To the other end of the West, Georgia
The Great Inquisitor
Let society be
Violence and the sacred
Georgia two
The pope as agitprop of secular universalism?
India
India and Europe
India and the rest of the world
A dialogue on what India can do about the West
China
China till today
The individual out of this world
The individual in resonance
Georgia three
Georgia four
An outsider’s vision of (tired) Europe
Insubordination, struggles: a Western heritage?
America and Europe
Anthropology of history
Tunis, again, the West as seen from here
Franco La Cecla has taught at Berkeley, Paris, Venice, Bologna and Milan. He was Consultant to the Renzo Piano Building Workshop and to the Barcelona Regional. His work takes inspiration from the minute observation of daily life and material evidence, which has deepened his interest in architecture’s social impact. He researches models for organizing space and the interactive dynamics these models generate, submitting contemporary architectural practice to a radical critique.
