Azuma The Philosophy of the Tourist

The independent Japanese philosopher and cultural critic Azuma Hiroki (born 1971) sees the figure of the tourist as a metaphor for the Other, a symbol of incompleteness, randomness, and openness — that way of being that can become a response to the challenges of a world where globalization and nationalism do not so much oppose each other as coexist in a strange way; a world of the crisis of the public and private, the own and the foreign… In agreement with the very subject of the research, the author refuses the attempts to construct a homogeneous theory, but combines philosophical analysis, essays, mathematics, trips to Chernobyl, and observations of everyday life.

Through reflections on tourism, family, the phenomenon of the 'uncanny', secondary creativity, interfaces, and Dostoevsky, Azuma constructs a speculative map of modernity, where randomness becomes not a threat, but a condition for the birth of the new. 'The Philosophy of the Tourist' is not a book 'about the tourist', but a book that offers to think 'like a tourist': effortlessly and freely for a new understanding of solidarity.