We can’t do without the real. It is something that resists as a fact and does not tolerate being reduced to interpretation.

“What I call new realism is first and foremost the acknowledgment of a turning point. The historical experience of media populisms, of the post-September 11 wars and of the recent economic crisis, has brought with it an extremely severe rebuttal of what to my mind are the two dogmas of the post-modern: that all reality is socially constructed and infinitely plastic, and that the truth is a futile notion because solidarity is more important than objectivity. The real necessities, real lives and deaths, which do not tolerate being reduced to interpretations, have asserted their rights and confirmed the idea that realism (like its opposite) does not just have cognitive implications but ethical and political ones too. Of course, the turning point does not only have a history but a geography as well, confined to what Husserl called the “European spirit”, to the West whose decline Spengler prophesied ninety years ago. It is difficult to think about post-modernity in China or in India. However, the corner of the world where I live, which is – I feel I can say – a little wider than the circle of my friends and acquaintances, this West that has dabbled in postmodernism, is now appearing to abandon it. So the question is why?”