MIT Press, Sachbücher, Philos For Passengers (Englisch, Michael Marder, Tomas Saraceno, 2022)

&ldquo We are all passengers in one sense or another: refugees, tourists, precarious nomad workers, making business trips or simply taking a daily ride to our workplace. Philosophy for Passengers is more than a witty and penetrating description of all modes and stages of traveling. What Marder does only a true philosopher can do: he gradually elaborates the idea of passenger as something that defines our human essence today. His book is not a guide for the perplexed, but a guide for the non-perplexed: it makes even those who are used to their role as passengers wonder at what strange beings they are.&rdquo &mdash Slavoj Ž iž ek, author of Hegel in a Wired Brain and Sex and the Failed Absolute &ldquo In this inspiring book, Michael Marder invites us to make the most challenging trip, the one of thinking and sensing our passing existence, anchoring ourselves in the experience of passing and passages. While collating philosophical views on life&rsquo s transitory character and the writer&rsquo s accounts of personal travels, the book departs from our daily being-in-passing, transported by different kinds of means&mdash technical and physic, concrete and imaginary&mdash and reveals a still unthought and unsensed web of relations and emotions. Philosophy for Passengers is like a thinking graffiti, seizing passing visions and thoughts scribbled on the walls of the world that is itself in motion toward an unknown destination.&rdquo &mdash Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback, Sö dertö rn University, Sweden &ldquo Logging in hotspots and toponymies of travel, the work reflects on modalities of experience where passivity meets technology, strapping in the existential passenger on the run, coerced or exulted by the constraints of being, in one way or another, infantilized and controlled, without appeal to any travel &lsquo agency.&rsquo Reminiscent of Roland Barthes&rsquo s Mythologies in scope, yet haunted by transports and proto-totalitarian aspects of passenger assignment, Michael Marder&rsquo s text [JMF1] reviews a pervasive lexicon of ride-along mobility. Stuck in the back seat of life, exposed to the rush of the death drive&mdash or ecstatically transported, carried over by a metaphorics of reading and mapping&mdash the Subject has yielded to the passenger, backseat, or death row. Marder is tuned to the lay of lands riddled with rites of passage, passports, bureaucratic impasses, and identity switchovers as he clocks the passing of time ticking down. His writing interrogates with relentless application our relation to &lsquo passengerhood,&rsquo locating disguised traps of a trip booked in an era of pandemic overdrive.&rdquo &mdash Avital Ronell, University Professor of German and Comparative Literature, New York University.