Son[i]a #255
Daniel Inclán
In the 2008 financial crisis, the banking industry won thrice over: it kept the pension and savings funds, it was bailed out by public money, and it managed to concentrate its activities in a small number of banks.
The historian and ‘violentologist’ Daniel Inclán, lecturer at the Institute of Economic Research at UNAM and member of the Latin American Observatory of Geopolitics, uses this example of the concentration of capital as one among many cases of what he describes as ‘a stateless war, a war against history.’
This steam-rolling, ubiquitous war, leads to the symbolic and real extermination of people and of social ties. In his opinion, the lethal combination of this ‘presentist’ logic and the aestheticisation of the world, in which we ‘consume effects rather than processes’, turns us into mere spectators of our own catastrophe. It prevents us from recognising an alternative historicity and, consequently, robs us of the possibility of imagining presents that contradict the prevailing homogeneous forms. Daniel suggests confronting the prisons of liberal thought with a politics of moderation that seeks understanding in disagreement, and other ways of inhabiting time.
SON[I]A talks to Daniel Inclán about coffee, Zapatismo, à la carte politics, hamburgers, long presents, tacos, biographical narcissism, authoritarianism in democracy, aesthetic whiteness, and the nixtamalisation of maize.
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