Querido Luis Alberto,
Este mensaje que nos reenvías gentilmente es una verdadera luz en las
tinieblas y te agradezco mucho al mismo tiempo que lo reenvío a mis listas.
Muchas gracias mi buen amigo!
Abrazos polares
Azril
_______________

On Thu, Mar 2, 2017 at 7:11 PM, IRIPAZ GUATEMALA <iripaz.guatemala@...
> wrote:

> Humans in Dark Times
>
> [image: Imágenes integradas 1]
>
>
> ​                   Writing in the late 1960s, Hannah Arendt conjured the
> term “dark times” to
>                    address the legacies of war and human suffering.
>
>
> Arendt was not simply concerned with mapping out the totalitarian
> conditions into which humanity had descended. She was also acutely aware of
> the importance of individuals who challenge with integrity the abuses of
> power in all their oppressive forms. Countering violence, she understood,
> demands sustained intellectual engagement: We are all watchpersons, guided
> by the lessons and cautions of centuries of unnecessary devastation.
>
> Over the past year, we have engaged in a series of discussions
> <https://www.nytimes.com/series/the-stone-violence> with prominent and
> committed intellectuals who are all concerned in various ways with
> developing a critique of violence adequate to our times.
>
> Sadly, many of the warnings offered have become more pressing than ever.
> Across the world, it is possible to witness the liberation of prejudice,
> galvanized by the emergence of a politics of hate and division that plays
> directly into the everyday fears of those seduced by new forms of fascism.
>
> The mission of The Stone is to explore issues both timely and timeless.
> Violence is evidently such a phenomenon, demanding purposeful and
> considered historical reflection. But here we immediately encounter a
> problem: If fighting violence demands new forms of ethical thinking that
> can be developed only with the luxury of time, what does this mean for the
> present moment when history is being steered in a more dangerous direction
> and seems to move more quickly every day?
>
> Perhaps one answer is that any viable critique of violence will not arrive
> from any singular, sovereign academic who might offer reductive
> explanations of its causes and propose orthodox solutions. Such a stance
> leads to the domestication of thought, often in the politicized service of
> a select few. Instead, we need to have a serious conversation among
> thinkers, advocates, artists and others that leads to a new textual
> borderland of open inquiry, where poetry slips into the demands for human
> dignity and the importance of transdisciplinary conversations are not
> simply focused on revealing the crises of contemporary political thought
> but encourage a rethinking of what it might mean to be human in the 21st
> century.
>
> With this in mind, it is useful to revisit the articles in this series to
> draw out some of the more important common threads, insights and shared
> concerns. While not in any way exhaustive, the various conversations we
> have already undertaken present us with a possible framework in which to
> begin a better discussion of the problem of violence and to imagine more
> peaceful relations among the world’s people. So here are 11 lessons worth
> considering:
>
> 1. All violence has a history. Simon Critchley began this series
> <http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/03/14/the-theater-of-violence/> with
> a powerful call to recognize our shared histories of violence and how we
> can still make use of the past to better understand the present moment.
> Understanding the cyclical nature of violence is crucial if we are to gain
> a tangible grip on its contemporary manifestations and look to engage in
> the difficult and fraught process of breaking the cycle. Violence in this
> regard should never be thought about in the abstract. It is “a lived
> reality,” as Critchley writes, with a very “concrete history” that is
> wedded to that tradition we call human tragedy. Indeed, it is precisely by
> projecting a tragic light on history that we humans are able to imagine a
> world beyond suffering and neglect. This is why the arts are crucial to
> developing a civic response to violence.
>
> 2. Violence is all about the violation of bodies and the destruction of
> human lives. For that reason, violence should never be studied in an
> objective and unimpassioned way. It points to a politics of the visceral
> that cannot be divorced from our ethical and political concerns. We
> encountered this head on in the personal testimony provided by George
> Yancy
> <http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/04/18/the-perils-of-being-a-black-philosopher/>.
> In direct response to Yancy’s previous column on race
> <https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/12/24/dear-white-america/>],
> he received a number of violent threats, which revealed how the politics of
> racial persecution is tied to the psychic life of violence. Violence
> concerns the anti-intellectual conditions in which the persecution of “the
> Other” can be normalized and become part of the everyday fabric of
> existence. Words in this regard can literally wound a person.
>
>
> 4. Violence includes the destruction of the customs, spaces and rhythms
> that constitute a person’s life. To echo Arendt again, it is all about
> creating a condition of “worldlessness.” As Zygmunt Bauman suggested
> <http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/02/opinion/the-refugee-crisis-is-humanitys-crisis.html>,
> nowhere is this more evident than with the plight of refugees who are
> fleeing unimaginable devastation — often the destruction of all they could
> wish to return to. It’s true that the refugee’s plight reveals the limits
> of other societies’ levels of compassion toward strangers. But the
> contemporary moment shows especially clearly how vulnerable populations are
> pitted by political opportunists against the most precarious workers in
> their chosen destinations, so a truly toxic political condition takes hold
> where the language of security, both physical and economic, is presented as
> a zero-sum game that trumps humanitarian and ethical concerns. What is
> therefore cast aside is an opportunity for reciprocal, cooperative
> relations based on mutual vulnerability.3. For violence to take hold,
> there is a need to suppress the memory of historical persecution. This
> weaponization of ignorance, as Henry Giroux explains
> <http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/20/opinion/the-violence-of-forgetting.html>,
> points to the violence of organized forgetting. We see this being played
> out in the contemporary moment. Demands for a return to “greatness”
> represent what Walter Benjamin would have identified in his “Critique of
> Violence” as being a naked appeal to mythical violence, born of the desire
> to create a false unity among people by actually creating the most
> pernicious divisions. Education in this setting, as Giroux argues, is
> precisely where effective counterterror strategies begin. Education is
> always a form of political intervention, which at its best produces
> critically minded individuals who have the courage to speak truth to power
> and stand alongside the globally oppressed, because they remember violence
> that the oppressors would prefer to forget.
>
> 5. The overt politicization of violence can render certain forms of it
> rational and tolerable for public consumption. As Gayatri Chakravorty
> Spivak suggested
> <http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/13/opinion/when-law-is-not-justice.html>,
> none of this is divorced from identity politics. Violence, in fact, can
> consist of demeaning processes intended to disqualify lives and ways of
> living from deserving safety and rights. It marks out some as being
> naturally inferior, disposable and expendable. It is also often the case
> that violence can take place within legal frameworks, which rather than
> protecting rights, allow for the legalization of all manner of overt or
> systemic aggressions in the name of order. This demands a better
> understanding of what we mean by justice, especially as we try to protect
> the fragile organism of democracy.
>
> 6. Addressing violence, then, requires rethinking what constitutes a
> crime against humanity. Since the human is necessarily dependent upon
> thriving environmental conditions for a sustainable existence, the problem
> of violence also points us toward an entire ecology of thought. This issue
> was directly addressed by Adrian Parr
> <http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/18/opinion/our-crime-against-the-planet-and-ourselves.html>,
> who foregrounded the importance of the planetary biosphere, and demanded a
> new appreciation of shared responsibility for our life-supporting
> environmental conditions. She also posed the question of what a crime
> against humanity actually means in such a context. It turns out, there are
> many ways in which damage to the environment rises to that level. This type
> of violence presents profound existential questions about what it means to
> be human and the ontological crimes (i.e., a crime against the human as
> such) some of us wage against ourselves.
>
> 7. Violence is not simply carried out by irrational monsters. Sadly, most
> violence is not exceptional or deviant. As Arendt famously noted, people
> following orders in a thoughtless and banal way often carry it out. And as
> Simona Forti argued in this series
> <http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/17/opinion/who-is-evil-and-who-is-the-victim.html>,
> modern violence cannot simply be explained in terms of the negation of life
> or a subconscious, Freudian death drive. It has proved, time and time
> again, to be integral to civilizations’ conceptual claims to truth,
> harnessing the discursive power of human progress, while appealing to
> security and order and even taking place in the name of freedom and
> justice. Such violence often blurs clear distinctions between what is right
> and wrong. In fact, the tendency to justify or condemn violence by drawing
> upon absolutist terms such as good or evil masks more complex relations and
> avoids difficult but necessary questions about our shameful compromises.
>
> 8. Violence brings us directly into ethical relations. We see this most
> fully today, as Cary Wolfe suggested
> <http://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/09/opinion/is-humanism-really-humane.html>,
> in the intellectual moves toward post-humanism and the bestowing of rights
> both to humans and to other animals. The key here is to identify and
> disrupt forms of ethical hierarchy, which allow violence to be committed
> upon a given animal, human or otherwise, as it is naturalized by
> authenticating frameworks of biological designation. So a viable critique
> of violence asks which life-forms the dominant ideology decrees can be
> killed and which forms of life are to be protected within this
> far-from-natural order of things. Fighting this requires addressing the
> biological and racial taxonomies that allow killings to happen without a
> crime being committed. This is a question of consciousness as much as
> anything else.
>
> 9. Violence begins in the minds of people, and mostly men. As such, the
> problem will remain poorly understood if it is accounted for only in terms
> of how and what it kills, the scale of its destructiveness or any other
> quantitative measure. As Richard Bernstein argued
> <http://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/26/opinion/the-intellectual-life-of-violence.html>,
> while we must not lose sight of the fact that violence concerns the
> violation of human lives, it can also include an attack on people’s
> dignity, their belief systems and the very intellectual conditions of a
> credible social order. Understanding the intellectual life of violence is
> therefore crucial if we are to develop the necessary intellectual tools
> that are capable of breaking the chains of violence. Indeed, if nihilistic
> forms of violence are the work of a reactionary mind, part of what’s
> required is overcoming passivity in thought.
>
> 10. Despite the tragic nature of the human condition, there is resistance
> to violence everywhere. The problem, however, is to convey the power of
> that resistance, or the barbarity of the violence it faces, in a way that
> galvanizes action rather than abets the status quo. As Nicholas Mirzoeff
> explained
> <http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/03/opinion/what-protest-looks-like.html>,
> media saturation is such that even the most intolerable forms of violence
> today barely have an impact on the public consciousness. And when they do,
> it is often presented in a way that justifies state violence vis-à-vis
> those oppressed minorities on the wrong side of history or glorifies
> individual over mass suffering. Central here is to understand the power of
> the image and the aesthetic mediation of suffering across many different
> media. It’s not simply sufficient to draw attention to violence. What’s
> required is a much more affirmative understanding of resistance, which is
> capable of producing an alterative and creative image of thought to the
> ones that continue to annihilate people on a daily basis.
>
> 11. To that end, as Bracha Ettinger explained
> <http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/16/opinion/art-in-a-time-of-atrocity.html>,
> there is a world to be gained by recognizing the humanity of the arts. Art
> is the ethical space where we encounter the pain of others and truly
> reflect on its significance to a shared human community. Art is a direct
> and imaginative response to the traumas of suffering. It refuses an image
> of the world that is presented to us as catastrophically fated. Art thus
> places itself on the side of life, as it directly resists the rituals of
> death and destruction. Indeed, as we confront more and more devastating
> spectacles of violence on a daily basis, it is with the arts that we truly
> enter into those most precious and fragile of ethical bonds that foreground
> the importance of love, compassion and human togetherness.
>
> Humanity is undoubtedly at a dangerous crossroads. We are being forced to
> ask whether we have the ethical fortitude to save ourselves from our own
> veritable extinction. The previous year has certainly been challenging in
> the search for answers. As the world said goodbye to some of the best of
> us, it also witnessed the resurgence from the shadows of new forces of
> hatred and repressed anger and rage. But let us not forget, the future is
> yet to be decided. Now more than ever, we need to find reasons to believe
> in this world, for it is the only world we have. So as we look toward the
> future, let’s acknowledge the downtrodden who refuse to accept the
> oppressive weight of history, the writers who bring tears to our eyes, the
> artists who resist the graying of existence, the poets who dare to write
> about a love that cannot be put into words, the musicians who rock our
> souls and the children who are never defeated by the limits of present.
> Brad Evans, a reader in political violence at the University of Bristol in
> England, is the founder and director of the Histories of Violence
> <http://www.historiesofviolence.com/> project (@histofviolence
> <http://twitter.com/histofviolence>), dedicated to critiquing the problem
> of violence in the 21st century. He is an author of “Disposable Futures:
> The Seduction of Violence in the Age of Spectacle
> <http://www.citylights.com/book/?GCOI=87286100745010>,” with Henry A.
> Giroux, and “Resilient Life: The Art of Living Dangerously
> <https://www.polity.co.uk/book.asp?ref=9780745671529>,” with Julian Reid
> *.*​
>
>
>
> --
> --
> *IRIPAZ*
> Instituto de Relaciones Internacionales e Investigaciones para la Paz
> www.iripaz.org
>

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