The various essays that make up this book, written by Jorge Alemán , Mustapha Cherif , Francisco Díez de Velasco , Félix Duque , Patxi Lanceros , Javier de Lucas , Francisco José Martínez , Jorge Pérez de Tudela , and Slavoj Žižek , address a global phenomenon of unpredictable scope, brought about by the relentless economic and political globalization of the world. On the one hand, emigration from countries of the so-called Third World or Eastern Europe, still largely controlled in Europe and North America during the second half of the last century, is becoming increasingly intense, not without violence, and is due more to the hardships in the countries of origin than to political reasons.

On the other hand, immigrants already settled in the heart of Western Europe and in parts of the United States (especially the South and Midwest) represent a source of unrest, bordering on revolt, for reasons that combine the lack of ideals and values ​​in people even of the third or fourth generation (politically and legally equal in every way to natives, at least theoretically), the xenophobic rejection by a large part of the native population (which produces a reaction of increasingly violent and uncontrolled outbursts of wounded pride), and the importation by these angry young people of values ​​and cultural manifestations from the "counterculture" of those same countries that welcome (on the part of companies interested in cheap labor) and at the same time reject (on the part of the barely consolidated middle classes) immigration, and not only clandestine immigration.

All of this constitutes a real challenge for the social sciences in general and especially for philosophy in its continental aspect, obsessed since May 1968 with the problem of otherness, but apparently without much success on more concrete levels and closer to the daily pulse of the great European and North American cities.