Ferran Sáez Mateu

A philosopher and tenured lecturer in the Blanquerna School of Communication and International Relations at the Ramon Llull University, he has long been an essayist with books inquiring into the correlations between communication and democracy in the western world. Notable among his titles are El crepuscle de la democràcia (The Twilight of Democracy, Edicions 62, 1999—winner of the Josep Vallverdú Prize for the Essay), Què (ens) passa?. Subjecte, identitat i cultura en l’era de la simulació (What’s Happening (to Us)? Subject, Identity and Culture in the Age of Simulation, Proa, 2003) and, more recently, Populisme: el llenguatge de l’adulació de les masses (Populism: The Language of Adulation of the Masses, Publicacions de l’Abadia de Montserrat, 2018), and La superfície: la vida entre pantallas (Surface: Life between Screens, ED Libros, 2018). Moreover, he is a specialist in the work of Michel de Montaigne, the subject of his doctoral thesis, and also of other studies including Montaigne i les conceptualitzacions de la diferència antropològica al segle XVI (Montaigne and Conceptualisations of Anthropological Difference in the Sixteenth Century, Universitat de Barcelona, 1993). He has also translated Des cannibales into Catalan Els caníbals (Edicions de la Ela geminada, 2015). For some years now, he has been writing articles of social and political analysis in various areas of the media and presently has a weekly column in the newspaper Ara.