Mutual Aid in the Society of Discomfort

Even though contemporary discomforts are collective and experienced by the masses, their destructive force is rooted in individualism. Isolated subjectivities are the condition of the psychic and physical discomfort afflicting contemporary societies. Depression, anxiety, addictions, fatigue and sensitivity syndromes… But also the way in which chronic illness, disability or simply ageing are experienced: all these phenomena push us – as individuals – to the very limit of ourselves.

NOTE: This seminar is within the framework of the MACBA Independent Studies Programme.

In the seminar Mutual Aid we will deal with the other side of the contemporary situation: the collective processes in which mutual aid is placed at the centre of existence, resistance and dissidence. In 1902, Kropotkin affirmed that mutual aid was a factor of evolution, in the continuity between the animal and human worlds. It was not an ideal: it was a condition of life. A century later, competitiveness still makes us ill, but mutual aid continues to weave other bodies and other desires.