When I was young, at the beginning of what, due to laziness and intellectual indigence, is called “democracy”, a group of perhaps very visible writers and intellectuals from previous generations exercised an attitude towards us, then twenty-somethings. , a magazine from today, might well be called castrating (of course, not all of those generations, theirs, were like that: I was and still am a friend of those, I published several of them in various editorial jobs that I had and have, and the most important: I always read them). That visible group asserted a bitter criticism of us (a us that, in truth, never included me: I was always alone). While they had been active in various left-wing groups, had gone into exile or supposedly had resisted here, we (a we that never included me: I was always alone. Oh, did I already say it? Well, I repeat it), accused of frivolity, we were to Cemento, to Parakultural, to Palladium, or we read Cerdos & Peces (I think I wrote there, I don’t remember well, it happened so long ago). In general, this critique was indifferent to me: I considered those intellectuals intellectually irrelevant, and only paid attention to those who, under the guise of market populism (Soriano and company) or under the trait of extreme conservatism (Abelardo Castillo and other workshops of similar perspective) might, precisely, end up generating the conditions for a conservative restoration in Argentine literature, as occurred in the 1990s.
And what’s all this? Because now I, regarding to enter the third age, find myself once morest the grain of the time. I have a very critical look at a lot of contemporary writing and thinking. That overwhelmingly trivial essayists like Mark Fisher, Boris Groys or Byung Chul Han, among others, occupy a relatively central place in current debates only informs us of the very triviality of the time. Well, the question I ask myself is how to carry out this critique of the time without becoming, in turn, conservative. The first advantage is that I have no will to influence anyone (on the other hand, who would want to be influenced by me?). But, above all, because I think of our time under the most optimistic phrase I know, that of Kafka: “There is hope, but not for us.” That implies thinking of our time as an impasse, a fold, a withdrawal. Take, for example, the French philosophy of the 19th century. What was interesting? Little and nothing. But the previous century, the eighteenth, was extraordinary, and the following, the twentieth, even more intense and remarkable. The 19th century, for French philosophy, was a great impasse (not so for literature, from Balzac to Flaubert and from Baudelaire to Mallarmé, still insurmountable) that one day ended, to unfold in a set of radical thoughts.
The problem is that the triviality of our time reaches not only thought, but also popular music, cinema (almost defunct art), nonsense that is presented as the new (those series that appear on the platforms, the networks , etc.) and, of course, also to a large part of the literature. Well, our urgent task is to go from folding to deploying and reinventing a critical spirit in the face of the new alliance between capitalism and fascism, which is already among us.
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