CoexistenZ. Endpoint cohabitation

Abstract

In 1990, George Steiner wrote in his "Grammars of Creation":

We have not yet started to calibrate the damage caused to man – as a species, as the one which calls itself sapiens – by these events since 1914. We did not even start to understand the coexistence in space and time, accentuated by the immediacy of the graphic or verbal presentation in the global mass media, of the western super-abundance, with hunger, poverty, infant mortality, which attains three-fifths of mankind. There is an obviously lunatic dynamic in our waste of natural resources... Forty years after Auschwitz, the red khmers buried alive a hundred thousand of innocent people. The rest of the world, previously aware of such an event, does nothing. Due to the magnitude of the massacre, this century has the absurd contrast between available wealth and effective poverty, ... , coupled with the likelihood that either thermonuclear or bacteriological weapons can totally destroy the world, giving hopelessness a new dimension. We reached the clear possibility of a backing down in the evolution process, of a systematic return to brutalization. It is precisely this possibility which makes Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" the central modernity fable or, despite the Anglo-Saxon pragmatism, it makes plausible the famous quote from Camus: "The only serious philosophical question is suicide" (Steiner, 2001).