Nathan Gardels is the editor-in-chief of Noema Magazine. He is also the co-founder of and a senior adviser to the Berggruen Institute.
Peter Mellgard is a deputy editor of Noema Magazine and the editor of the Berggruen Press.
The Berggruen Institute is launching a new publishing endeavor to create noteworthy books on frontier ideas that capture the zeitgeist of the present epoch-shifting moment.
The Berggruen Press will serve as a platform for showcasing emerging authors and highlighting work from the Institute’s program areas, including work on repairing decayed democratic institutions, tracking the reemergence of civilization-inflected spheres of influence, and efforts to realize AI’s potential to merge human, machine and Earth intelligence. Editorially, the Press will reach beyond boundaries, cultures and disciplines to link the correspondence of ideas and nourish cross-fertilization to seed new ways of thinking.
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The goal of this publishing concept is to enable authors to flesh out ideas at a length longer than is allotted by a Noema Magazine essay but also shorter than the heft traditional publishers often prefer, which often results in untimely delays before books can hit the market. At the Press, manuscript to readership will move at the pace of discourse. These will be slim books you could tuck in your pocket for a commute and finish reading in a few days. Call them nonfiction novellas.
The books are conceived as art objects, each more than a mere text. Alongside literary and philosophical storytelling informed by rigorous research, there will be activities, guides, blueprints and other ways to interact with the author(s), with the Press and with fellow readers.
In short: cross-disciplinary ideas printed as art objects; rapid production; shorter length.
Pilot Book & Upcoming Publications
The Press’s pilot publication, “The Planetary,” a collection of essays edited by Nils Gilman, came out late last year to complement the Berggruen Institute’sPlanetary Summit at Palazzo Diedo in Venice, Italy. At the summit, ideas from this inaugural book were discussed by a wide range of participants from across the globe. The collection of essays explores the paradigm shift from thinking of the world through the lens of the nation-state and globalization to its re-conceptualization as one self-organizing Earth organism — the planet.
Next up is a collection of the winning essays from the 2024 Berggruen Prize Essay Competition, also on the topic of “planetarity.” Each essay will be translated into both English and Chinese and presented in thetête-bêche style by the design team at the Press.
Later in the year, the Press will publish 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 a nation or group 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 sociologistHannah Landecker will dive 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 BI Europe, the Press will also publish selected texts from thinkers who have presented their ideas at Casa de Tre Oci symposia in Venice, including philosophers and academics like Giorgio Agamben, Slavoj Žižek, Peter Sloterdijk, Wang Hui, Yan Xuetong, Rosi Braidotti and Katerina Kolozova.
Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come. The mission of Berggruen Press is to publish those ideas at the time when they matter most.