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I am ready to write again. Like a soldier poised to fire, index finger on the trigger. Writing appears before it is begins, like a mission, an antidote, like morphine. What we refer to as style is nothing more than preventing the trigger from going off at the wrong moment.
The Spanish philosopher Fernando Savater (1985), who claims he is a mere teacher, has drawn an interesting parallel between the history of cinema and that of psychoanalysis, the trajectories of which go hand in hand, as they were born in the same era. In 1895 the Lumière brothers first showed their invention in public, the same year that Freud and Breuer published their Studies on Hysteria. On reading it, I thought that contemporaneity is not just a parallelism. In both trajectories, a group of adventurers and explorers to the end of the night, or the heart of darkness, gradually ceded to applied specialists, skilled in the use of technique and adhering to the limits set out in the manuals of good cinematographic or analytical practices. This cult of dogma versus episteme bears a familiar resemblance to fanaticism and profitability. Incidentally, family resemblance (“aires the familia”) is the title of Mexican Carlos Monsiváis’ great essay (2002) on Latin American cultures.
The quotation in the first paragraph is not the exception. Rather, it seems to be the fate of humanity's great discoveries. It is therefore essential to combat the stultification intrinsic to both organisations and bodies, which can lead not only to the faculties of listening and looking becoming old, but also, as has been said, to the fanatical walling in and monetisation of time in order to recoup the often considerable investment made. Another paradox of these turbulent times is that the multiple global crises of recent years provide us with an invaluable opportunity to question all of this. We have mentioned the walls, which evokes a plethora of images. Let us consider two of these: borders and barbarians.