![]() Writing with characteristic daring and zeal, Žižek ranges across critical theory, pop-culture, and psychoanalysis to reveal the troubling dynamics of knowledge and power emerging in these viral times. Through such examples he pinpoints the inability of contemporary capitalism to effectively safeguard the public in times of crisis. Here, Žižek examines the ripple effects on the food supply of harvest failures caused by labor shortages and the hyper-exploitation of the global class of care workers, without whose labor daily life would be impossible. In this exhilarating sequel to his acclaimed Pandemic!: COVID-19 Shakes the World, Žižek delves into some of the more surprising dimensions of lockdowns, quarantines, and social distancing-and the increasingly unruly opposition to them by “response fatigued” publics around the planet. “It’s a question of getting out there, looking in unobvious places.What do sex doll sales, locust swarms, and a wired-brain pig have to do with the coronavirus pandemic? Everything-according to that “Giant of Lubliana,” the inimitable Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek. “It’s always thrilling as a scholar and a biographer to realise there is still stuff out there,” said Wilson-Lee. They are also working to digitise the manuscript, in collaboration with the Arnamagnæan Institute. Wilson-Lee and Pérez Fernández are currently working on a comprehensive account of the library, which will be published in 2020. This is really giving us a window into the entirety of early print, much of which has gone missing, and how people read it – a world that is largely lost to us,” said Wilson-Lee. “The important part of Hernando’s library is it’s not just Plato and Cortez, he’s summarising everything from almanacs to news pamphlets. ![]() Instead of being a needle in a haystack, it was a needle in a bunch of other needles.”Īfter amassing his collection, Colón employed a team of writers to read every book in the library and distill each into a little summary in Libro de los Epítomes, ranging from a couple of lines long for very short texts to about 30 pages for the complete works of Plato, which Wilson-Lee dubbed the “miracle of compression”.īecause Colón collected everything he could lay his hands on, the catalogue is a real record of what people were reading 500 years ago, rather than just the classics. It’s the major missing piece from the library,” said Wilson-Lee. I was sitting on a beach at the time and I said ‘you’ve got to be flipping kidding me’. Photograph: Suzanne Reitz/Arnamagnæan Institute, University of Copenhagen The Arnamagnæan Institute then contacted Mark McDonald at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, who passed it on to Wilson-Lee and his co-author José María Pérez Fernández, of the University of Granada, for verification.Ī discovery of immense importance. It was Guy Lazure at the University of Windsor in Canada who first spotted the connection to Colón. The majority of the some 3,000 items are in Icelandic or Scandinavian languages, with only around 20 Spanish manuscripts, which is probably why the Libro de los Epítomes went unnoticed for hundreds of years. The manuscript was found in the collection of Árni Magnússon, an Icelandic scholar born in 1663, who donated his books to the University of Copenhagen on his death in 1730. “The idea that this object which was so central to this extraordinary early 16th-century project and which one always thought of with this great sense of loss, of what could have been if this had been preserved, for it then to just show up in Copenhagen perfectly preserved, at least 350 years after its last mention in Spain …” “It’s a discovery of immense importance, not only because it contains so much information about how people read 500 years ago, but also, because it contains summaries of books that no longer exist, lost in every other form than these summaries,” said Wilson-Lee. Instead of being a needle in a haystack, it was a needle in a bunch of other needles Dr Edward Wilson-Lee The discovery in the Arnamagnæan Collection in Copenhagen is “extraordinary”, and a window into a “lost world of 16th-century books”, said Cambridge academic Dr Edward Wilson-Lee, author of the recent biography of Colón, The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books.
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