Santiago Zabala's 3 favorite reads in 2025

What I liked most about Martin Woessner's book is how he avoids the narrow film-studies approach in favor of a conversational one, where Malick’s pictures serve as reminders that the unexamined life – as Socrates famously suggested – is not worth living. An intellectual historian, Woessner visits several archives and carefully reads his subject’s extensive writings. The story he shares is full of detail. Malick fans will find fascinating anecdotes in the book, including his appearance on a Carly Simon album cover or his basketball game with Fidel Castro. But Terrence Malick and the Examined Life is not just for Malick fans: it also appeals to intellectual historians, film critics, and contemporary philosophers. Historians will learn about the origins of the prestigious American Film Institute, where Malick was part of its first class; film critics will see how Jean Renoir, Robert Bresson, and Federico Fellini influenced his style; and philosophers will get a glimpse of how to philosophize beyond the narrow limits of academic philosophy.

Very few philosophical investigations today manage to convey political messages without being ideological, that is, taking a clear political stance. This is the case with Libera Pisano’s study. Through the work of five German-Jewish thinkers, she effectively outlines a “diasporic philosophy of language” that can help us resist the resurgence of authoritarianism, nationalism, and idolatry in the 21st century. This resistance will not succeed—Pisano elegantly explains—until we reject linguistic autochthony, meaning language’s identity with a “specific geographical definition” (4). But why is it necessary to explore the writings of Fritz Mauthner, Gustav Landauer, Margarete Susman, Franz Rosenzweig, and Walter Benjamin to “discover a potential source of insight and guidance” (22)? While the term “diasporic philosophy of language” could also apply to Hermann Cohen, Hannah Arendt, Theodor W. Adorno, Ernst Bloch, Martin Buber, and other well-known Jewish thinkers, the authors chosen by the Italian expert all belong to the German intellectual community of the early 20th century and were influenced by dialogues that are missing among the others.

The recent translation of volume 82, *On My Own Publications*, urges us to focus on the question of Being and Heidegger’s remarks on five of his works. The first four hundred pages center on his most important book, "Being and Time" (1927), while the rest of the volume covers other notable writings: "What Is Metaphysics?" (1929), “The Origin of the Work of Art” (1935/36), the first of the three Country Path Conversations, ‘Ἀγχι βασίη’ (1944/45), and the “The Letter on Humanism” (1946). Unlike the works in the first and third series, this volume, skillfully translated by Scott Campbell and edited by Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, is mainly for Heidegger scholars dedicated to studying and developing his ideas. These scholars can be split between experts on the entire *Gesamtausgabe* and interpreters of specific parts of Heidegger’s work.