Europe's not dead

I was talking today with my brother who invited me for dinner at his place. He's on charge for the creation of a new mine here on Chile for Teck, a Canadian company. It will take six years from now to have it working.

Then I thought on my PhD: four years working —supposedly— eight hours a day in order to write four papers of around ten pages each.

Then, of course, I thought on our work: to change the world. And I understood that this is precisely what Parra means by "we are on the prehistory of poetry." We have only two options: or History is over and neoliberalism is here to stay; or History is not over, we are on the prehistory of humanity, and if we do not work daily for the continuos creation of a new Humanity we are pretty much fucked up. And it will take years and years.

Ok, then History is not over, let's agree on that. What does this mean? In the first place, that in the best Lacanian logic, "there is nothing for which I am not responsible." Formally, if we comply with the modern doxa and enjoy our life without questioning the status quo, we are as guilty as the guys who didn't care about slaves 200 years ago, about the jews that were burned 80 years ago, or the one million guys from rwanda who were killed on a month 15 years ago.

And what is to be done then? What we have always done: fight for more freedom, for more rights, for more equality; even if we are conscious that those words are empty now. Imagine that otherwise is possible, that the impossible can happen, that things change and that they change for better. And to do that in Europe.

The best that Europe has ever gave to humanity is the idea of democracy, of enlightenment, the sapere aude. The best Europe has are the ideas worth fighting and dying for. Our task is to imagine otherwise, conscious of the historical nature of our thought and of the crime that entails not to do it.

(Fuck them and their anti-colonialist logic: if it wasn't for the enciclopedia that it was on my house and that I read every day for years when I was a kid, I would be certainly death, or worst, working eight to six on a job I hate and married to a wife I do not talk to.)

(Fuck them and their "reality is like that." I tell you, as someone who has spent ten years trying to understand this joke —from quantum physics to neuroscience to philosophy— that they are wrong, that no one knows, and that in 2000 years of thought we have advanced very very little. We are on the prehistory of thought.)

(In fact, fuck them tout court.)

I came to this conclusion watching a lecture by Etienne Balibar and realizing about the fact that only 500 people have seen it in half a year. (That is, one on every 100,000 internet users, just to give you an idea.) As a professor used to say on my university days in Chile: "The truth is not hidden, but buried on a big pile of shit." Our duty today, then, is take the crap out and put some truth on the table. Against the senseless and serialized repetition of the same that our lives become more and more everyday we must learn, learn and learn.

Starting today, then, I will add links for lectures, podcasts and texts I found interesting for me to read, watch, listen and share. The first one is of course the aforementioned Balibar's talk, which lasts one hour and talks about the end of Europe. I seriously think that is a crime that so few people have watched it, hence this rattle today.

Here is the video, and this is one of the final memorable quotes of the lecture: "It is always on the side of the poor where there is money to be harvest for the rich; even if the poor have no money, only debts."

Photo of Lisbon by Southbites.