Announcing the Berggruen Press

The launch of new book presses has often been a response to changing or dynamic political circumstances that seem to demand new ideas and new voices. Blackwell Publishers, for example, arrived in 1922 in the wake of the devastations of World War I to make space for newly precise forms of philosophical thinking, helping to push forward the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Graham Greene, and W. H. Auden. Likewise, Éditions de Minuit was established in Nazi-occupied Paris in 1941 to provide a space for publications (initially circulated samizdat) that would bolster the resistance and was soon publishing foundational texts of existentialism and French theory. And Suhrkamp Verlag was established amid the ruins of Frankfurt in 1950 as Germany was recovering from the calamities of Nazism and the war, and it would become a major publisher of European philosophy and critical theory.

In each case, the exigencies of the moment provided a point of departure for radical new thinking, which in turn demanded a new publishing platform. And it’s no different with the Berggruen Press in these uncertain times.

About The Press

What defines Berggruen Press books is their identity as art objects whose uncategorizable ideas cross political, philosophical, scientific, academic, and cultural boundaries. Each project is more than a mere text: Alongside literary and philosophical storytelling informed by rigorous research, there will be art and interesting design elements plus activities, guides, blueprints, and other ways to interact with the author(s), with the Press, and with fellow readers.

Soft-launched around a year ago, the Berggruen Press has already published its first book, “The Planetary,” a collection of essays edited by Nils Gilman that explores how human existence is profoundly and inextricably interwoven with Earthly biogeochemical systems, the destabilization of which presents a new and urgent category of distinctly planetary philosophical and policy challenges.

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To rise to the challenge of confronting the polycrisis, we aim to deepen intellectual engagement with ideas that can generate progress on the world’s most important, neglected, and intractable problems. Our books do not necessarily contain ready-made solutions to these crises, but rather aim to open new possibilities. We proceed from the experience that ideas which, at their moment of creation, may seem wild or esoteric but often evolve into what is practical and necessary tomorrow.

At a time when information is becoming increasingly hard to validate, where it’s difficult to determine if a story is true or false or somewhere in between, where interlocutors may not be who they seem or even human at all, the Berggruen Press seeks, through books, to build a scaffold to support a future that is dynamic and habitable for all.

What We’re Doing Differently

There are three driving ideas behind how we’re building the Berggruen Press differently than most popular or academic publishing houses:

1.) Unusual, cross-disciplinary ideas printed as art objects, not commercial ones;

2.) Rapid production — typically 6-8 months between the beginning of the writing process and having a book in hand; and

3.) Shorter length — slim books, the kind you could tuck in a pocket for a commute and finish reading in a few days. Call them nonfiction novellas.

For potential contributing writers and artists, we believe this offers an exciting opportunity to pursue their most adventurous and speculative ideas.

Upcoming Work

We’ve got some amazing projects lined up for this year and beyond. First is a collection of last year’s winning essays from the Berggruen Prize Essay Competition, re-edited and translated into English and Chinese.

In May, the Press will publish a volume called “Accept All Cookies” in partnership with Antikythera, a philosophy of technology think tank based at the Berggruen Institute. The book codifies many of the core ideas that inform Antikythera’s work, which is aimed at reorienting planetary computation as a technological, philosophical and geopolitical force. The book is being produced as part of the Antikythera x MIT Architecture exhibition, “The Next Earth: Climate, Computation, Cosmology,” which will be held at the Palazzo Diedo at the 19th International Architecture Biennale in Venice.

Later in the year will be a monograph by the artist-philosopher Jonathon Keats titled “A Field Guide To More-Than-Human Governance.” It will be divided into five volumes, each focusing on a different biome and exploring “the practical and philosophical dimensions of self-organization in nature as inspiration for future human governance.” The work will include prompts for readers to explore and note natural forms of governance in the species around them.

The former Portuguese secretary of state for European affairs, Bruno Maçães, is writing a study of India as a “civilization state,” which he defines as nations or groups of nations that embody a political philosophy — a contestable foundational theory of the good life. Such states, he argues, are emerging as a direct rival to the Western idea of liberal universalism.

And finally, the UCLA sociologist Hannah Landecker is diving deep into the inner sensorium to look at how the act of eating is much more than a one-way process of breaking down nutrients into fuel for the eater. Instead, recent scientific and technological discoveries have revealed eating to be “molecular crosstalk that is much grander and more distributed than the classic sites of taste and perception such as the mouth or eye.” To eat, she argues, “is to ingest ecological worlds in which microbes interact with plants and one another.”

In tandem with Berggruen Institute Europe, the Press will also publish selected texts from thinkers who have presented their ideas at Casa de Tre Oci symposia in Venice, including Giorgio Agamben, Slavoj Žižek, Peter Sloterdijk, Wang Hui, Yan Xuetong, Rosi Braidotti and Katerina Kolozova.