Elogio del Peligro

There is nothing to fear because everything is dangerous. Only this learning can perhaps reconcile us with the prodigious breadth of the act of thought. Danger surrounds us, inhabits our daily activities and distresses us when it escapes us. In the face of this, we seek only one thing: security. But this demand does not come from us, overwhelmed by the reality that overwhelms us. Fear is above all a vast political process of definition, in which what is at stake is nothing more and nothing less than the possibility of a distinction between the thinkable and the unthinkable. In a text full of virtuosity, in which he combines music and Roman law, philosophy and history, psychoanalysis and theology, Laurent de Sutter reminds us to what extent fearing danger is echoing the fear of a power for which security is the best way to perpetuate itself. "In Praise of Danger" allows us to keep the doors open to possibility and to the register of the probable. We must learn to live with danger every day, exploring and expanding our own limits, in order to question the sovereign forces that constrain us in the name of security. It is never us who should be frightened by danger, but those who would like to manage our world as a landlord does his house, of which we would simply be blind and powerless occupants.