Professor of Philosophy and Board Member of the Onassis Foundation, Simon Critchley writes about the world after David Bowie on The New York Times
“Bowie will live on for as long as there are people who feel that they don’t really fit in the world, who feel that they somehow just fell to earth.” On his latest piece for the New York Times, Simon Critchley, Professor of Philosophy and Board Member of the Onassis Foundation, explores Bowie’s legacy in today’s dystopian world, 5 years after his final flight to the stars.
David Bowie have died on January 10th, 2016; 48 hours after celebrating his 69th birthday. Five years after his death, the dystopian world that his music describes seems closer than ever. But can he show us a way out of it, also?
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“Everything went to pieces after David Bowie died.
Five years after Bowie’s death, the dystopian world that his music describes seems closer than ever. The total sensory overload of the world, the intolerable pressure of reality, induces in us a feeling of unreality, of fakery, of deals and steals. The felt fragility of identity leads us to withdraw from the world into isolation, to a lonely place peopled only by virtual others, avatars and caricatures. Conspiracies compete to fill the vacuum of sense.
The only way we can survive in the face of this world is by retreating from it into our own private lockdowns and peering out suspiciously through windows and screens, feeling lonely and yearning for love. One might think that it is a world in which Bowie would have rather felt at home.”
Read the whole article by Simon Critchley on The New York Times.
