The pending image

The deer is going to drink when there appears in the water
the reflection of a tiger.
The deer drinks the water and the image. It becomes,
before being devoured (accomplice, fascinated)
equal to its enemy.

ROSARIO CASTELLANOS, Destino (Destiny)

Violence is one of the problems that define the present. What once seemed the world of the peripheries has become a pattern of socialisation that has spread throughout the world. Faced with its rapid growth, doctrines abound that provide immediate answers. The majority repeat a moralistic scheme that reduces violence to the acts of force performed by irrational people, or to the malfunction of institutions, or to the lack of economic development, or to the absence of values, etc., etc., all of which provides a knee-jerk response to a complex problem. On the other hand, more in-depth investigations fail to establish the common ground necessary for an understanding of the strategic role that violence plays in the definition of collective lives.

Critiques are often blind to the sensitive dimension in which the exercise of violence is inscribed. The discussion about the use of force that lies behind the various forms of violence prevents recognition of the expressive role that accompanies it. The critique of violence cannot ignore its aesthetic dimension, as a process for analysing the political projects in which it is inscribed, together with its historical dimension. This seminar will present the basis for an analysis of the sensitive dimension of violence as one of the central components of its exercise in the contemporary world. Through the study of the aesthetic forms that accompany violence, the seminar aims to reach an understanding of the fundamentals of its execution and the effects that its various forms have on daily life.

The focus of the seminar will be the reflection on the dialectic that is created in the face of the possibility or impossibility of constructing images (visual, sound, written, performance) of violence. For the violence of the twenty-first century, there is a pending image, in at least three main senses: 1) a missing image to account for the complexity of the process; 2) an image that oscillates between shock and cliché; and 3) an image reflecting the dispute to be resolved in favour of critique or in favour of doctrine.

Violence determines our present. We need to reorganise critique to think about its complexity and the ways in which we can face and overcome it.


Presented by Daniel Inclán, lecturer at the Institute of Economic Research at UNAM and member of the Latin American Geopolitics Observatory.

highlights

3 results

Sic Transit. Radical imaginaries of the post-Franco Transition

Seminar given by Germán Labrador Méndez

Activity

6, 8, 13 and 15 October 2020

PIGS Self-Management

Meeting of self-managed queer collectives

Activity

12, 13 and 14 February 2020

Towards a new eco-social imagination. Narratives and transitions in the face of the crisis of civilization 

PEI Obert seminar given by Jaime Vindel

Activity

5, 6 and 7 March 2020