This weekend I finished the Danish version of Wolfram Eilenberger’s The Presence of Philosophy (in German: Die Gegenwart der Philosophie
Ein Wegweiser) — a short but surprisingly demanding little book about why philosophy still matters in our time.
Over the last years I have also read the first two books in his remarkable trilogy on twentieth century philosophy, Time of the Magicians and The Fire of Freedom. The third and final volume, Spirits of the Present, is still waiting patiently in my ever-growing book stack.
The title Out of the Labyrinth comes from Borges. And the image of the labyrinth becomes the book’s central metaphor for modern existence itself: not merely complexity, but the feeling of being trapped inside systems of language, institutions, ideologies and inherited concepts that no longer help us orient ourselves in the world.
Eilenberger describes philosophy not primarily as theory-building, but as a kind of diagnostic practice. Inspired by Foucault, the philosopher’s task is to ask: what exactly is our present? What is distinctive about this historical moment? And where do our inherited words and categories begin to fail us?
One of the book’s key concepts is the almost untranslatable German word Geistesgegenwart, rendered in Danish as "Åndsnærværelse". “Presence of mind” is too weak. “Spiritual presence” too mystical. The German Geist simultaneously means mind, spirit, consciousness, atmosphere, wit, zeitgeist and even ghost.
That ambiguity is precisely the point.
For Eilenberger, philosophy begins when one senses that the available language no longer matches lived experience. When the “ready-made words” handed down by institutions, media, education or ideology suddenly feel insufficient. Philosophy then becomes an attempt to regain orientation — or perhaps simply attentiveness.
There is a beautiful passage where he writes that philosophers “care for and cultivate their present.” I kept returning to that phrase while reading.
Because the book’s strongest idea may not actually be that philosophy is uniquely necessary today. Every age tends to imagine itself as exceptionally crisis-ridden. Rather, the book reminds us that philosophy matters whenever societies produce too many forms of noise, abstraction, certainty and intellectual automation — and too little genuine attentiveness.
And perhaps that is where Borges’ labyrinth becomes most relevant.
The fear is not merely that we cannot find the exit.
It is that we may spend our lives simply moving from one labyrinth into another.
05/25/2026 16:58:15
nb
See More (10 posts)
- This weekend I finished the Danish version of Wolfram Eilenberger’s The Presence of Philosophy (in German: Die Gegenwart der Philosophie
Ein Wegweiser) — a short but surprisingly demanding little book about why philosophy still matters in our time.
Over the last years I have also read the first two books in his remarkable trilogy on twentieth century philosophy, Time of the Magicians and The Fire of Freedom. The third and final volume, Spirits of the Present, is still waiting patiently in my ever-growing book stack.
The title Out of the Labyrinth comes from Borges. And the image of the labyrinth becomes the book’s central metaphor for modern existence itself: not merely complexity, but the feeling of being trapped inside systems of language, institutions, ideologies and inherited concepts that no longer help us orient ourselves in the world.
Eilenberger describes philosophy not primarily as theory-building, but as a kind of diagnostic practice. Inspired by Foucault, the philosopher’s task is to ask: what exactly is our present? What is distinctive about this historical moment? And where do our inherited words and categories begin to fail us?
One of the book’s key concepts is the almost untranslatable German word Geistesgegenwart, rendered in Danish as "Åndsnærværelse". “Presence of mind” is too weak. “Spiritual presence” too mystical. The German Geist simultaneously means mind, spirit, consciousness, atmosphere, wit, zeitgeist and even ghost.
That ambiguity is precisely the point.
For Eilenberger, philosophy begins when one senses that the available language no longer matches lived experience. When the “ready-made words” handed down by institutions, media, education or ideology suddenly feel insufficient. Philosophy then becomes an attempt to regain orientation — or perhaps simply attentiveness.
There is a beautiful passage where he writes that philosophers “care for and cultivate their present.” I kept returning to that phrase while reading.
Because the book’s strongest idea may not actually be that philosophy is uniquely necessary today. Every age tends to imagine itself as exceptionally crisis-ridden. Rather, the book reminds us that philosophy matters whenever societies produce too many forms of noise, abstraction, certainty and intellectual automation — and too little genuine attentiveness.
And perhaps that is where Borges’ labyrinth becomes most relevant.
The fear is not merely that we cannot find the exit.
It is that we may spend our lives simply moving from one labyrinth into another. (05/25/2026 16:58:15)
- Yesterday the new exhibition by Danh Vo opened at Kunsthal 44Møen — and it is difficult to overstate what a remarkable achievement it is for a relatively small Danish kunsthal to host an exhibition of this calibre.
Just this spring alone I encountered Danh Vo’s works in very different international contexts: at Gl. Strand in Copenhagen, represented by several of the world’s leading galleries at Art Basel Hong Kong, and again in Paris at Bourse de Commerce during the magnificent Chiaroscuro exhibition. And now, suddenly and improbably, these works — and this atmosphere — have arrived on Møn.
What makes the exhibition so powerful is not simply the individual works, but the way they seem to exist between worlds: between archaeology and contemporary art, Christianity and animism, decay and rebirth, intimacy and geopolitics.
Several of the works in the exhibition combine fragments of Roman and Renaissance sculpture with bronze castings, organic material, and living mushrooms. The pink oyster mushrooms slowly emerging from cracked bronze torsos and religious figures feel almost unsettling at first — as if history itself had become porous and alive again. One of the wall texts describes fungi as a life form that survives long after humans and “takes over a host system and changes it from within.” It is difficult not to read this both biologically and politically.
One of the most striking works merges a Renaissance Pietà with a bronze female torso, balancing the classical Christian image of grief and compassion with fragmentation, sensuality, and doubt. Another series focuses obsessively on the hands of Michelangelo’s sculptures — David, Moses, Christ — transformed through close-up photogravure into something unexpectedly intimate, almost erotic.
There are also works connected to Vietnamese history and global exchange: ceramics recovered from a shipwreck that lay on the seabed for 500 years, handwritten calligraphy by Danh Vo’s father Phung Vo, references to French missionaries in Indochina, and even walnut wood connected — through an extraordinary historical detour — to Robert McNamara and the Vietnam War.
Danh Vo’s art has always had a unique ability to let apparently unrelated histories collide until hidden structures suddenly emerge between them.
Empires, migration, religion, violence, colonialism, family, memory, bodies, flowers, ruins.
And somehow it never feels illustrative or academic. Instead it feels strangely human.
There is also something deeply moving about seeing these works on Møn, surrounded by open sky, fields, and silence rather than the usual international art fair machinery. Contemporary art of this level is often experienced in hurried fragments between airports, collector dinners, and crowded museum halls. Here there is actually time to look.
And perhaps that is precisely what this exhibition deserves. (05/24/2026 19:50:20)
- Yesterday Jeanne and I — together with our good friends Jacob and Nina — attended the opening of the new exhibition by the Danish-Vietnamese artist Danh Vo at 44Møen on the island of Møn.
What makes 44Møen special is not only the quality of the exhibitions, which increasingly feel entirely international in scope, but also the strange and beautiful combination of world-class contemporary art and the atmosphere of a local gathering place. A kunsthalle in the middle of fields, open skies, gravel paths, and conversations that continue long after the speeches end.
Danh Vo’s exhibition is extraordinary. Quiet, layered, historically charged works that demand time and attention rather than spectacle. Art that rewards slowness.
But the opening itself also became part of the experience.
There was a warm and generous speech by Bjørn Nørgaard — one of Denmark’s great artists and one of the original initiators behind 44Møen — reflecting on the importance of creating serious artistic spaces outside the obvious metropolitan centres. There was local natural wine. And there was Vietnamese soup prepared by Danh Vo’s family, which somehow transformed the exhibition opening into something closer to a shared meal than a conventional art event.
And then there was the pleasure of seeing so many friends again.
Although the real credit for 44Møen’s continuing success belongs to its curators, directors, and staff, I have personally had the privilege of serving as chairman of the association behind the kunsthalle for almost a year and a half now. Experiences like this make it very easy to understand why people continue to support and care deeply about the place.
One of the things contemporary art at its best can still do is create temporary communities around attention: people gathering not merely to consume culture, but to spend time together around objects, ideas, food, landscapes, and conversations.
44Møen seems unusually good at exactly that. (05/24/2026 19:25:21)
- Looking back at one of the most remarkable parts of the Rothko exhibition in Florence, which Jeanne, Vilhelm and I visited together during our stay there a few weeks ago.
Two studies for the Seagram paintings were installed inside Michelangelo’s Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana — and suddenly one understood something essential about Rothko that is easy to miss in the gigantic retrospective exhibitions of today.
Christopher Rothko in Rothko - From the Inside Out writes that his father was “clearly moved by Michelangelo’s Laurentian Library in Florence, and used it as a touchstone in his conception of the Seagram space.”
And standing there inside Michelangelo’s extraordinary vestibule and staircase, it became obvious why.
The Laurentian Library foyer is not merely architecture. It is psychological space. The staircase seems almost to flow downward like lava rather than behaving like rational Renaissance structure. Gravity itself feels slightly unstable there.
Rothko became obsessed with the possibility that paintings could create that same sense of enclosure and inwardness.
The Seagram commission itself became one of the great conflicts of his artistic life. Officially, he had been hired to decorate the Four Seasons restaurant in the Seagram Building in New York. But Rothko increasingly began to imagine the room not as a luxury dining space but almost as a total environment — a place where the paintings themselves would determine the emotional atmosphere.
Christopher Rothko describes how the murals were conceived almost architecturally: large dark panels intended to “appropriate the room and dictate its ambience.”
And this was precisely where the tension emerged.
Christopher Rothko writes that his father gradually came to realize “that nothing about the restaurant was designed to let him or his artwork speak.”
There is a famous moment described by journalist John Fischer after a ferry trip with Rothko to Europe in 1959. Rothko spoke enthusiastically about Michelangelo’s Laurentian Library and its oppressive, enclosed vestibule. He explained that he wanted to recreate that same feeling in the Seagram restaurant — a feeling where the room itself almost closes in around you and intensifies your awareness.
Not decoration.
Atmosphere.
Not paintings on walls.
But paintings becoming walls.
Standing inside the Laurentian Library with Rothko’s Seagram works, one suddenly understood what he meant. The paintings and Michelangelo’s architecture seemed less like separate works and more like different voices participating in the same centuries-long conversation about silence, contemplation, enclosure, scale, and human presence.
The final photographs are from the library itself and the adjoining spaces: Atlas carrying an astronomical instrument for measuring the planets, and the extraordinary domed reading room nearby — the Tribuna Elci — whose geometry and light felt almost like a continuation of the same dialogue between architecture and contemplation. (05/20/2026 12:36:20)
- Yesterday evening Jeanne and I attended a fascinating conversation at Lille Mølle on Christianshavn between Madame Nielsen and Ivan Rod, arranged by Mere Levet Liv.
Even attempting to describe Madame Nielsen already feels slightly inadequate. Writer, performer, composer, singer, cultural critic, shapeshifter, constructed identity, dissolved identity — somehow simultaneously theatrical and deeply sincere. A figure permanently resisting stable categories.
The conversation revolved around the boundary between lived life and fiction, between experience and performance, between memory and invention. But what I found most fascinating was the discussion about identity itself — particularly the tension between individual identity and group identities.
In a time where so much public discourse pushes us towards increasingly rigid collective categories — political, cultural, national, generational — Madame Nielsen represents almost the opposite impulse: identity as movement, instability, transformation, contradiction and continuous becoming.
Not identity as essence, but identity as process.
There was something strangely liberating in hearing someone speak so openly about the possibility that the self is neither fixed nor singular. That perhaps we contain multiple selves over a lifetime — some abandoned, some invented, some imposed by others.
And perhaps literature and performance become interesting precisely at the point where the borders between these selves begin to dissolve.
I also bought Min Fars Død afterwards — and received what may genuinely be one of the most beautiful book dedications I have ever been given. Somewhere between drawing, signature, mask, flower and kiss. Almost a small autonomous artwork in itself.
The setting at Lille Mølle only intensified the atmosphere: old wooden interiors, evening light through the windows, people gathered closely around language and thought rather than spectacle.
One leaves evenings like this slightly intellectually destabilised — which is probably a very good thing. (05/20/2026 11:57:07)
- Over the last two years I have had the privilege of seeing two major Rothko exhibitions: first the overwhelming retrospective at Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, and most recently the exhibition in Florence.
Both were extraordinary. And yet, after reading Christopher Rothko’s Mark Rothko: From the Inside Out, I increasingly wonder whether large Rothko retrospectives also contain a kind of paradox.
They are almost too much.
Too many canvases.
Too much visual intensity.
Too much emotional weight compressed into a few hours of museum walking.
You move from room to room trying to absorb painting after painting, while simultaneously feeling that each individual work demands something almost impossible within the format of a blockbuster exhibition: slowness, silence and sustained attention.
One of the most compelling aspects of Christopher Rothko’s book is precisely this insistence that the paintings are not primarily intellectual objects to decode through biography, historical context or theory. They are experiences that only really unfold through prolonged engagement between the painting and the viewer.
The irony is that the great retrospectives, despite their magnificence, can sometimes work against this very encounter.
You leave overwhelmed rather than transformed.
I increasingly think the deeper lesson from both the book and these exhibitions may be something quite simple: perhaps Rothko is best encountered in smaller doses.
One or two paintings.
A quiet room.
Enough time.
Some of my strongest Rothko experiences have actually happened exactly that way — unexpectedly encountering a single painting in a museum collection and remaining with it far longer than museum culture normally encourages.
Christopher Rothko’s book subtly argues that his father’s paintings are less about interpretation than presence.
Not understanding them.
Being with them.
And perhaps that is ultimately much harder in our age of cultural consumption, where even art risks becoming something we “complete” rather than something we inhabit.
Yes, I am aware of the irony of writing a long reflection about paintings that probably ask for fewer words and more silence. (05/15/2026 12:16:01)
- I have had the privilege of collaborating with SUPERFLEX on various projects over many years.
That made it an even greater pleasure to be in Florence for the opening of their installation There Are Other Fish In The Sea at Palazzo Strozzi.
The work transforms the Renaissance courtyard into a flooded reflective space filled with pink travertine columns imagined as potential habitats for marine life.
Part climate fiction.
Part speculative architecture.
Part conceptual joke directed at five centuries of European humanism.
And somehow also deeply beautiful.
What I particularly loved was the strange temporal collision created by the installation:
Renaissance Florence.
The memory of the 1966 flood.
Contemporary climate anxiety.
And a future where buildings may need to coexist with species other than ourselves.
SUPERFLEX has always had a rare ability to combine intellectual precision with irony and openness. Their projects often ask serious political and ecological questions while still allowing room for playfulness and absurdity.
The opening also turned into one of those long Florentine evenings where conversations moved effortlessly from architecture and philosophy to wine and friendship in crowded trattorias.
And the following day Jeanne and I had lunch with our two SUPERFLEX friends, Bjørnstjerne and Rasmus, continuing conversations that somehow felt perfectly at home in Florence. (05/15/2026 10:03:54)
- I have for many years been deeply fascinated by the music of Olivier Messiaen.
Every Christmas I make a point of hearing his monumental organ work La Nativité du Seigneur performed in Trinitatis Church in Copenhagen. And whenever his Quatuor pour la fin du Temps is performed here in the city, I try to be there. Few composers have managed to combine ecstatic intensity, spirituality, sensuality and rhythmic complexity in quite the same way.
Yesterday evening Jens and I went to DR Koncerthuset to hear Esa-Pekka Salonen conduct Messiaen’s Turangalîla-Symphonie with Bertrand Chamayou as piano soloist.
The title itself is difficult to translate precisely. “Turanga” suggests movement, time, rhythm and life-force, while “lîla” refers to play, love and divine cosmic playfulness in Sanskrit-inspired interpretation. Together the title points toward something like a hymn to love, life, movement and ecstatic existence itself.
And ecstatic it certainly is.
I love both Messiaen’s almost jazz-like rhythmic energy and the enormous orchestral sound masses that erupt throughout the work — nowhere more overwhelmingly than in the fifth movement, Joie du sang des étoiles (“Joy of the Blood of the Stars”), where the orchestra seems to dissolve into pure cosmic celebration.
But Messiaen could also suspend time completely. The sixth movement, Jardin du sommeil d’amour (“Garden of the Sleep of Love”), is among the most beautiful and meditative stretches of music I know. Listening to it almost feels less like following a composition than drifting slowly through a dream.
What continues to fascinate me about Messiaen is that his music never really sounds historical. It remains strangely outside ordinary musical time — simultaneously ancient, modern and futuristic.
And perhaps that is exactly what great art does. (05/15/2026 09:33:08)
- Last night Jeanne and I went to Cinemateket to see Blade Runner as part of its 35mm series. I must have watched this version — not the Director’s Cut, and not the sequel — countless times since the early 1980s.
There was a period where I could recite almost the entire film from memory.
From Deckard’s first line:
“Sushi. That’s what my ex-wife used to call me. Cold fish.”
To the final monologue that has become almost detached from the film itself and entered cultural memory:
“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe…”
I knew the pauses, the rhythm, the timing. I knew when the rain would fall.
Returning to it decades later, I had expected nostalgia. Instead I was struck by something else.
When I first saw the film, its future felt impossibly distant — a strange world of giant screens, global cities, artificial beings, and blurred boundaries between human and machine. Today much of it feels less like science fiction and more like a distorted mirror. Not because we have flying cars or replicants, but because we increasingly live inside questions the film raised: memory, identity, authenticity, technology, and what remains human when more and more can be simulated.
And perhaps the strangest thing is that while I remembered almost every line, I discovered that I had not been watching the same film all these years.
Or perhaps I had changed.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
Yes, I am aware of the irony of writing that on social media. (05/14/2026 16:58:56)
- Yesterday evening Jeanne and I went to Lille Mølle on Christianshavn for one of the cultural evenings organised by Mere Levet Liv — the association Jeanne has helped establish around conversations, literature, art, and lived experience.
The guest was Liv Helm: author, theatre director, and one of the more interesting literary voices in contemporary Denmark right now.
With Ivan Rod as moderator, the evening became much more than a traditional literary interview. Through the conversation about Med hjertet i hånden and Hvis du er bange, så ryk tættere, her two autobiographical novels, one gradually sensed that the books are not simply “about” the events they describe. They are equally about memory, narration, performance, shame, class, and the strange instability of identity itself.
The interesting thing with autobiographical literature is often not whether it is objectively true, but what kind of truth emerges through the act of retelling.
So rather than explaining too much, I would simply recommend reading the books yourselves and trying to work out what they are really about.
Incidentally, Liv has also written a very thoughtful essay in the latest issue of Atlas on copyright and theatre productions — highly relevant reading at a time where questions about authorship, interpretation, reproduction, and AI are becoming increasingly blurred. (05/13/2026 08:27:53)