In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

p r e f a c e t o t h e e n g l i s h - l a n g u a g e e d i t i o n The basic idea for writing Southern Thought is very simple. It has been many centuries since the South has spoken in the first person because others have been speaking in its place. The civilization that has been speaking for and representing the South is the one that, during these centuries , has become dominant, the civilization of the world’s North-West, in whose eyes the South is, at best, synonymous with a backward society and a perverse mix of misery, repression, and superstitions. According to this perspective, the South’s only possibility for redemption is to become North, to erase, as quickly as possible, its difference, to free itself from a culture that, like ballast, prevents it from reducing its disadvantage and embark on the path toward progress. The theoretical program of Southern Thought is therefore very clear: to deconstruct this image; to interrupt the long historical sequence during which the South has been thought by others; and to give it back its ancient dignity as subject of thought. In other words, Southern Thought originates from the conviction that the South is much more than a simple not-yetNorth , that it represents an autonomous and different point of view, and that today more than ever such autonomy enables us to gain a critical perspective on the direction that the world has taken in the era of globalization and hegemonic liberalism. The South does not just represent the past but also offers useful suggestions for the future: It is another point of view on the world, a voice that today, more than ever, we must learn to hear. The core of the dominant expression of modernity is, indeed, the hurried one of Homo currens, the man who has become an appendix of the production machine that he built, but which has now escaped his control: Those who stop or slow down are lost. This world, far from being the best of all possible worlds, is ruled by the fundamentalism of business, which turns the expansion of markets and profits into every aspect of life in an unquestionable and unrelenting absolute. Such an obsessive competitive pressure, which ranges from the workplace to consumerist practices, xxvii xxviii Preface to the English-language Edition unleashes a growing acceleration of our experience that deeply transforms it. One of the crucial arguments proposed by Southern Thought resides precisely in its radical, critical distance from the pressures of competition in all spheres of life. In a world where acceleration seems to have become an inevitable destiny, there needs to be a voice that is not afraid to forcefully affirm that some essential dimensions of experience are in grave danger: Indeed, acceleration transforms and mutilates love, education, thought, and relationships between people, as well as their relationship with the collectivity and with nature. In a world where the dominant rule is cursus omnium contra omnes,1 two processes that are only apparently contradictory affirm themselves impetuously: on the one hand, the radical individualization of experience; on the other, the fragmentation of individual identity. Thus, even the difficulties that are born of structural conflicts are transformed into individual problems, and life becomes a game we are always condemned to play by ourselves. For its part, the acceleration of experience destroys even the feelings of delay and duration. The endless request for innovation and the tyranny of urgency bombard the individual (in-dividuum, that which should not be divisible), causing him to split into many elementary particles, each without connections to the others. If, with the advent of modernity, the past had already lost its force, today even the future seems to have disappeared from the horizon, and humankind remains prisoner of a present that, having undone all ties, has become ab-solutus.2 The crisis of those cultural mechanisms that allowed one to transcend the here-and-now (so that one could bring the future into the present with the offer of promise, commitment, and hope) encloses the individual in a kind of ethnocentrism of the moment, but at the same time increases his loneliness and expands feelings of contingency and fear. Those who have broken every tie with the world constantly fear its sudden return as catastrophe. If the South has begun talking about itself again, it is because...

Share