We are witnessing a steadily more dramatic process of a decentering of the West. This process is disorientating as well as re-orienting in the sense that it helps to detect certain peculiαrities of the Western world which were hardly visible as such for a long time. One of them is a specific approach to the question of (collective) guilt that can now be better identified as “Western” in the sense that it is rooted in Western Christianity. In light of this, I shall try to develop some thoughts on (the production of) guilt communities and an established way to (partly) evade them. Furthermore, I attempt to interpret current battles in the field of gender politics as one consequence of a dialectics between both: emigration from – and (thereby) production of – guilt collectives.
Luca Di Blasi is Professor of Philosophy at the Theological Faculty of the University of Bern in Switzerland and Associate Member of the ICI Berlin. He is currently leading the project “Disagreement Between Religions. Epistemology of Religious Conflicts”. His main theoretical interests include philosophy of religion, modern continental philosophy, political theology, and cultural theory. Main publications: Dezentrierungen. Beiträge zur Religion der Philosophie im 20. Jahrhundert (Vienna: Turia+Kant, 2018); Der Weiße Mann. Ein Anti-Manifest (Bielefeld: transcript, 2013); Der Geist in der Revolte. Der Gnostizismus und seine Wiederkehr in der Postmoderne (Munich: Fink, 2002).
