Posts Tagged ‘Debat de Barcelona’

Byung-Chul Han and the Fatigue Society

February 4th, 2015 1 Comment


In recent years, as a result of his studies of the phenomenon of fatigue in capitalist societies, together with its associated symptoms such as depression and exhaustion, Byung-Chul Han has become one of the most widely read philosophers in Europe. Byung-Chul Han, who was born in Seoul and studied in Berlin, raises the questions of how we want to live today and what we can do to counteract the pressures of goal-achieving digital societies. In this sense, the fatigue syndrome is especially pernicious in South Korea which, in a very brief period, went from being a poor agricultural country to a leading industrial nation. Byung-Chul Han’s book La sociedad del cansancio (The Fatigue Society) examines Europe and South Korea in 2010, while his critical theses on society, as detailed in La sociedad de la transparencia (The Transparency Society), La agonía de Eros (The Agony of Eros), Psicopolítica (Psychopolitics) and En el enjambre (In the Swarm), are very helpful guised to understanding society in the present-day age of self-exploitation, neoliberalism and surveillance.

Since it will not be possible to hear Byung-Chul Han speak in person since he does not make public appearances or give press interviews, we shall screen the documentary film Müdigkeitsgesellschaft (Fatigue Society – Byung-Chul Han in Seoul / Berlin) by the visual artist Isabella Gresser on Monday 9 February. Gresser, who accompanied Byung-Chul Han on his visits to Seoul between 2012 and 2014, interweaves her cinematographic, photographic and sketched observations in Korea with a text spoken by Byung-Chul Han, fragments of lectures and other materials, for example an interview with the famous Korean film director and producer Park Chan-wook and recordings of monks in a Buddhist temple. A key theme of the documentary is that of the wanderer, while the part about Berlin – where Byung-Chul Han guides the spectator through the intimacies of his neighbourhood and its local nostalgic peculiarities – is closely linked with the film Der Himmel über Berlin (Wings of Desire), the screenplay of which was written by Wim Wenders and Peter Handke.

Following the screening of the documentary there will be a panel discussion on the concepts of Individual and Community with Fina Birulés, lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Barcelona, Albert Lladó, cultural journalist, Manel Ollé, lecturer in History and Culture of Contemporary China at the Pompeu Fabra University, and Isabella Gresser, visual artist.

Individual and Community’ is the third event in Barcelona Debate 2015 which, titled ‘Wield the Word’, will include such speakers as Axel Honneth, Saskia Sassen, Bo Stråth, Luc Boltanski, Montserrat Guibernau, Peter Wagner and Seyla Benhabib.

Someone Else’s Shoes and the Words of Politics

January 20th, 2015 No Comments

In recent times we have witnessed a two-way movement. On the one hand, words that had apparently been tucked away in the folds of history have made a forceful reappearance in public discourse. This, for example, is the case of “class”, which seems to have had its explanatory power restored, or “common” and “community”, which have not only recovered their original senses but have opened up a whole array of new meanings. On the other hand, some of the words we have traditionally used to describe and explain the world seem incapable now of accounting for the radical changes we are all experiencing. When we use them, we have the feeling of putting on someone else’s shoe: it is the perfect container for a foot which clearly isn’t ours.

The world we know has undergone far-reaching changes over the past few decades. Traditional ways of doing politics and the democratic institutions are suspect today and floundering in the midst of an unprecedented crisis of legitimacy. The situation is further complicated by the changes in scale, speed and perspective of a globalised world, and new, disconcerting relationships between identity, power, state and market. The decisive exposé in the form of the international financial crisis with its revelations concerning the conditions of neoliberal capitalism and depth of technological change have extended and, in some cases, forced the limits and possibilities of customary words and categories. In this regard, what is happening with the ideas of “equality”, “freedom”, “sovereignty”, “citizenship”, “state”, “work”, “capitalism” and “party”? In their standard formulation do they still help in making the world we share intelligible, and articulating and coordinating the sense of our actions? Which aspects of our experience and our surroundings remain hidden and which are illuminated when we use them? Which new senses and perspectives must we incorporate into our political present in order to re-focus, re-interpret and re-formulate it?

LLEGIR MÉS-LEER MÁS-READ MORE

The Barcelona Debate is back

January 9th, 2015 2 Comments

Torna el Debat de Barcelona

Barcelona Debate the CCCB’s longest-running lecture series is about to begin once more to reflect, as it has done every other year, on some key aspect of contemporary life from a philosophical standpoint. Over the years, hundreds of philosophers, sociologists and writers have visited Barcelona to participate in the Debate, among them Zygmunt Bauman, Tzvetan Todorov, Judith Butler, Lydia Cacho, Claudio Magris and the recently deceased Ulrich Beck.

In recent times the Debate has pondered the meaning of life and the sense of existence in the contemporary world (with lectures series like The Human Condition (2008) and Virtues (2012)) and the cultural consequences of globalisation (in Borders (2004) and Thinking the Future (2010)). Speakers have also discussed the future of Europe, the economic crisis, the open city and life in common.

This year, Barcelona Debate will be revisiting some of the great concepts of political thought in the present context of multiple crises by way of questioning the sense of such important notions pertaining to collective life as “freedom”, “equality”, “community” and “citizenship”. With the title “Wield the Word”, the Debate also aims to uphold the value of words, bring them up to date, endow them with new senses and invite citizens to appropriate them.

This year’s Debate will be opened by Axel Honneth, director of the Institute for Social Research at Frankfurt University. Other speakers will include such outstanding present-day thinkers as Saskia Sassen, Luc Boltanski and Seyla Benhabib. among others.

For the complete programme, click here.

(Català) 7 nous BREUS per acabar l’any

December 23rd, 2014 No Comments

Kamila Shamsie and Multicultural Writing

March 18th, 2014 No Comments

Bolaño Archive. 1977-2003 © Lidia González Alija

Many writers from all around the world have written about Barcelona, embracing the city as theirs. A great number of foreign gazes, from George Orwell to Jean Genet, to the first writers of the Latin American boom, for example Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa, who for years made the city the base for their European operations, to Roberto Bolaño who described his Barcelona in Consejos de un discípulo de Morrison a un fanático de Joyce (Advice from a Morrison Disciple to a Joyce Fanatic) – now being adapted for the stage – and Los detectives salvajes (The Savage Detectives), to Colm Tóibín and The South, to Richard Gwyn and The Colour of a Dog Running Away … have contemplated Barcelona. Very few, however, have depicted today’s multicultural metropolis. There are travellers’ chronicles – including Hemingway’s notes from his time as a correspondent – flashes from the past, glimpses of the fascinating red-light district known as Barri Xino, or of the cosmopolitan capital of the seventies when speaking Catalan was a private matter, but there are virtually no novels about today’s global metropolis or chronicles of this “global city” of more than 200 languages, in which there are neighbourhoods like the Raval where more than half the residents were born abroad. Among the writings of today’s newcomers, the “latest ‘other Catalans’”, there are only the novels by Laila Karrouch and Najat el Hachmini, the work of Matthew Tree, Stefanie Kremser’s Carrer dels oblidats and Carrer Robadors by Mathias Énard, but novels about the 23,000 Pakistani residents or the 6,000 Chinese people in Santa Coloma, the story of the Italian community, and the family worries and joys of the 8,500 Filipinos living in the city are yet to be written.

England is the great reference for multicultural literature in which, for several generations now, the narrators have depicted everyday reality in England’s hundreds of immigrant communities. Owing to the tradition of integration in this country at the heart of the Commonwealth, or simply because of its language, which was taught in the colonies, all kinds of accents and uses have easily been embraced and adapted (would we accept a novel about Barcelona in Spanglish, or Catalan mixed with other languages, when we already make such a fuss about the Spanish-Catalan hybrid we might call Catanish?) literary England today is replete with Zadie Smith’s districts, Vikram Seth’s interracial marriages and recent exiles, as Nadeem Aslam remarked when he was here some months ago. Indeed, in the Granta 2013 list of the top twenty young British writers, only 60% were born in the United Kingdom. The others hail from Ghana, Bangladesh, China and Pakistan and, although they write in English, they broaden the canon of world literature rather than the British one.

Kamila Shamsie, photo by Robert Burdock

Born in Karachi but now resident in London, Kamila Shamsie is one of these writers, and certainly one to be followed. Her novels portray this multicultural spirit from many angles since she writes stories of a worldwide reach with chapters set in Hiroshima, India, London, New York or Pakistan, and her characters, whether they are English or Indian, are not just that but also citizens of the whole world, each one with a rich personality and in touch with all kinds of people.

In this borderless literature a multitude of multicultural encounters and clashes take place, with Japanese girls falling in love with German doctors or English people with Indian servants, and these exchanges are described with intelligence and sensitivity, bringing out the preconceptions on both sides and portraying many-sided characters who make mistakes and rectify them. Prevailing most notably in her work is her neutral stance of never judging and treating all her characters as equals. This multicultural spirit also appears when Shamsie writes about languages because her novels are about communication and she upholds a multilingual world where every language one learns is a door opening into a new universe.

Finally, Shamsie manages macro and micro levels, constructing episode and anecdote with exceptional timing but always as part of a greater story, from the bombing of Nagasaki to the 9/11 attacks and the last war in Afghanistan. Here, there are no autarchies, no dividing walls or barbed-wire fences: the world is a single entity and everything is related. In Shamsie’s books, every city is a bridge, or a port where exchange and interaction occur, where one is moored but from which one will also sail away again. These are love stories in global cities, novels of individuals and how they fit into a world they don’t shrink from joining. Neither do they avoid dealing with religious issues or inequality or oblivion or forgiveness.

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