Times of Hearths

The moment I received the invitation to send a snapshot (or Polaroid, as I like to picture it) on hope, a tune started stirring in my head. A George Michael song from the album Listen Without Prejudice:

In the current context, barbarism is no longer a ghostly presence outside the gates. It is in your TV set, in your cell phones, residing in your neighbor´s hand. It greets you in the discourse of family members, in the immigrant kidnapped by state forces, and the queer beaten up at the corner of your street. In the elder and the youth electing neofascists, in the systematic normalization of atrocity.

Many sentences come to mind as I try to cling to some imaginary life preserver. The volumes of the French magazine Socialism or Barbarism, where analysts such as Laplanche and Castoriadis wrote. Adorno’s warnings about the new forms of extreme right. Pasolini´s premonitions of the new power, and his fight for a place for the return of the fireflies. Also, the calling of the Spanish Republicans against the Fascists in 1938, “they shall not pass” (no pasaran). But they did. Allende´s last words, “Know that, sooner rather than later, the great avenues will open again where free men will walk.” Only now, with the most probable outcome of the extreme right wing winning Chile’s election, they seem to be shutting down again. The eternal return. The constant reminder that bombs are falling, and we failed to see the bombers coming, trapped in the imaginary safety of our consulting rooms.

I remembered some sketches on the ideas of May 1968, which now seem like old Polaroids. Among them, Foucault´s terrible question for a terrible normality: Is there any way to traverse beyond networks of power? And Deleuze´s response: the pleat, the fold, a space born out of the contact with a vast oceanic radical alterity. The aching side of beauty hoisted to resist the ominous shadow of the Real, Steph