Creativity and Other Fundamentalisms

ist publishing is an independent publishing house specializing in books on contemporary culture and art.

The book Creativity and Other Fundamentalisms (2012) by Belgian sociologist of culture Pascal Gielen is structured as an eight-day journey unfolding between the late 1980s and early 2010s in which Gielen examines the social context of creativity. How did creativity become a “demand of our time” and can it avoid being emptied out by its own excess after moving from the cultural sphere into economics and politics?

Gielen discusses creativity on three levels — individual, institutional and societal — and enters into dialogue with Slavoj Žižek, Peter Sloterdijk and Alessandro Baricco. Through their striking metaphors describing the present Gielen seeks to ground them in concrete social situations.