A world of wild doubt

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The starting point of this exhibition and subsequent publication is the novel 'The Man Who Was Thursday' by British poet G. K. Chesterton from 1908. The atmospheres conjured up in the book, ranging from discomfort to paranoia, resonate in many ways with the present. In a time when the German intelligence service enables assassinations by neo-Nazis, or criminal banksters loot globalized financial markets, political-philosophical ambiguity, as described by Chesterton with its causes and consequences, is as red hot as the question of whether a system can be reformed from within or has to be detonated by a coming insurrection. Thus, the exhibition and book fuse the skepticism of classical modernity toward absolute freedom with contemporary attitudes. Additionally, the curators and editors have formulated a criticism of the dominance of neoliberal and plutocratic models of society. But The Man Who Was Thursday is also a defense of nonsense.