“My diary is full to the brim and all resonant axes have been under extreme pressure to accelerate for some time now!” says the automatic reply in your email.
A reminder that Hartmut Rosa, professor at the Institute of Sociology at the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena (Germany), where Leibniz and Karl Marx studied, and director of the Max Weber College in Erfurt, is the “father” of the theory of "acceleration".
The one who investigated the changes in the temporal structure of Modernity and came to the conclusion that we live in a “dynamic stability”, which forces us to run more and more, to produce more and more, to consume more and more, even at cost of living alienated, to prevent the system from collapsing.
And this despite the fact that we have the feeling that innovation and speed do not lead us to a better life, because we are destroying the planet.
His book
Acceleration.
A social critique of the times
, published in German in 2005 (Katz Editores, 2016), eight years after receiving her doctorate at the Humboldt University of Berlin, made Rosa (Lörrach, 1965) a reference for critical theory that refers us to a Theodor Adorno.
Always willing to take risks in his social analysis, he has just published a book,
Why Democracy Needs Religion
, the result of a conference given in the diocese of Würzburg, in 2022, not translated into Spanish, in which he defends that Spiritual beliefs, including
new age
beliefs , provide essential elements for the functioning of democracy.
More information
Hartmut Rosa: “Everything goes so fast that we lose contact with life”
Descended from Italian immigrants, Rosa grew up with her sister in Grafenhausen, a town in the Black Forest, very close to the Swiss border.
Her parents ran her maternal grandfather's bakery until an allergy to flour forced her father to become an office worker, Rosa says in a telephone conversation.
A great lover of music, little Hartmut played the organ in the local Protestant church, a hobby that he has taken up again, taking advantage of the seasons he spends in the town of his childhood, very far from his usual home in Jena, where he lives alone.
Rosa's musical passion is not limited to the organ.
She laughs that at the university she formed a rock group with other classmates named Los Professores, in Spanish, that organized a concert a year for the students.
His melomania may be behind another of his theoretical contributions: the idea of resonance as an antidote to acceleration.
That resonance, so linked to music, would occur when we relate to something that we neither control nor can possess.
A sister concept to “unavailability”, the acceptance that we live in a world that is not available to us, despite the fact that we continually try to master it.
Both notions, developed in his books
Resonance.
A sociology of the relationship with the world
(Katz, 2019) and
The indisponible
(Herder, 2021), have granted Rosa the status of a great analyst of Modernity and have earned him numerous awards.
“His work is not as simple as that of a Zygmunt Bauman, but it is equally useful for understanding how technology, which accustoms us to having everything at our disposal, transforms our experience and our way of being in the world,” says Sira Abenoza. , professor at the Department of Society, Politics and Sustainability at Esade, who participated with Rosa in a seminar a couple of years ago.
Frédéric Vandenberghe, professor of Sociology at the University of Rio de Janeiro, attributed in a recent article the success of the German sociologist to “his ability to choose broad transversal themes that allow him to mix the theoretical debates of philosophy and sociology with more existential questions.”
Issues as burning as the crisis of our system that Rosa analyzes in the collective book
What's wrong with democracy?
(Herder, 2023).
Or in her latest text, in which she places religion on the same receptive wave of resonance, which is essential for democracy.
Rosa does not ignore the crisis in which both Catholicism and Protestantism are mired, but her intention, she explains, was to highlight the positive elements of religion, which are, on the one hand, the opening towards something important that is beyond of us and challenges us, and, on the other, its capacity for transformation, to connect us with others.
Two essential elements for democracy to work, “which involves addressing others with other beliefs and accepting that we can be transformed by them.”
With so many benefits of what Rosa calls “half-passivity” in the face of the world, why is frenetic activity so socially valued?
“Because acceleration also has positive aspects,” admits the sociologist.
It provides a feeling of freedom, since we move from one place to another, and having little free time is equivalent to being connected to many things and people.
Living faster is also a way of managing our finitude.
“If we double the speed of our life experiences,” Rosa comments, not without some humor, “it is as if we had two lives in one.”
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