Marina Garcés. Embodying Criticism Pei Obert seminar

This course consists of thinking about the experience of the crisis as an outburst of critical imagination after 2011. If, with the collapse of the Twin Towers in New York, the year 2001 marked the end of the war-peace distinction and a questioning of the concept of ‘freedom’, 2011 marks a before and after in the forms of suffering and fighting against global capitalism, while reopening the problem of emancipation and its senses. After the Arab Spring, the 15-M and the Greek referendum against the Troika, the experience of the crisis is installed in our lives as a new, permanent exceptionalism that erases the future and narrows the times and spaces of the liveable: time becomes catastrophe and space becomes bounded.

In the posthumous condition that extends between catastrophe and border, what are the possible imaginaries of emancipation in the post-2011 world? If the global world is confronted and fragmented by the threat of its destruction, how can we imagine a common world? With what cultural, material and philosophical tools? In this seminar we will address these questions collaboratively and through an exercise in situated thinking.

Marina Garcés is a philosopher and lecturer at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya.

NOTE: This seminar is part of MACBA’s Independent Studies Programme (PEI).