Although this book tackles the exhaustion and epistemic crisis we are experiencing, reading it only in those terms would risk undervaluing the richness of the nuances that proliferate within it. Understanding the volume A Ghost Walks the World (Siglo XXI, 2026) requires adjusting to a mode of thought that transcends the literal, opening to the expansive logic of dreams.
Profusely researched, the verbal audacity of the treatise by
Pablo Stefanoni
(Buenos Aires, 1972) manages to resolve some of our doubts about the veracity of what we are told. The Argentine journalist, essayist, and historian cares about our childish forms of experience and remedies them through an overexposure to knowledge.
In addressing the global rise of the reactionary machinery, the Doctor of History from the University of Buenos Aires resists classifying, and far less drawing conclusions. His project fulfills the academic obligation to understand. He knows that limiting ourselves to a single point of view means voluntarily confining us to the narrowness of self-indulgence.
He understands that embracing the official narrative is to renounce, motu proprio, control of our intelligence. Therefore, his treatise A Ghost Walks the World confronts the reader with experiences that challenge the techno-rationalism that the Latin American scholar confines to contemporary institutions, without yielding to the comforting resolution of our problems.
The proof of the skill that serves as the vehicle for the editor-in-chief of the magazine Nueva Sociedad to pose urgent questions that give meaning to our experiences, we are offered a respite from the catastrophism that our screens drive us toward, in which “neoreactionaryism leads a crusade to reset the system in an anti-democratic direction”.
An astute observer attends to the gestures of self-deception and to the hidden messages to analyze the ideological, tactical, and cultural mechanisms of this “war” against liberal democracies: “The ghost that walks the world is no longer the one of communism. Now it seems we have returned to a Cold War logic where (…) any progressive position is an existential threat.”
The oversaturation of deceptions that current events, in the hands of unscrupulous megalomaniacs, impose upon us is a hell where disinformation reigns, concludes the Konex Award 2024. Today we inhabit virtual purgatories of trolls who harass minorities under the pretext of freedom of expression; we recommend this paper adventure to counter our self-imprisonments.
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Author: Pablo Stefanoni. Title: A Ghost Walks the World: How the Reactionary War Machine Works (and What We Can Do to Confront It). Publisher: Siglo XXI. Sales: Todos tus libros.