Philosophy Club: Superweak

We have become super-strong. Nothing can resist us: the greatest work of art, the most heroic action, the noblest undertaking. All exist only insofar as we allow them to. Each of us, everywhere in the world, regardless of wealth or education, has acquired a critical power that seems without limit. Ours is a time defined by super-strength.

For humans of the 21st century, there is no reality that is not immediately followed by a “yes, but.” To be modern is to be critical, and to be critical is to question everything, including critique itself. As Immanuel Kant already understood, critical reason knows no authority other than its own. In extending itself endlessly, it has gradually devoured the entire field of thought.

In Superweak, Laurent de Sutter argues that this triumph of critique has come at a cost. By exhausting every position in advance, critical reason has hollowed out the possibility of an “after.” It leaves behind a landscape of ruins: lucid, self-aware, and strangely inert — a place where perhaps only a firefly might survive, or a daisy might grow.

This evening, de Sutter enters into conversation with Lynn Tytgat, CEO of TheMerode, to take stock of what the critical programme has left out — and what it may have made impossible. Together, they explore what it would mean to reopen the doors of the after: the unknown, the uncertain, the ungrounded, the dangerous. Not as a rejection of critique, but as an attempt to invent a future beyond it.