Son[i]a #281 José Luis Barrios Lara
- 02:06 The great lie of the West is the idea that there is an origin.
- 04:46 In historical terms, the West is defined by the invention of the Other.
- 06:17 In economic terms, the West is defined by the invention of the market economy, via shipping. Colonisation and protocapitalism.
- 11:53 Dismantling genealogies and their social expressions. Parmenides. The Greeks. Slavery.
- 13:00 Mexican-American cultures. Origin Myth. Fiction. Exoticisation. Marginalisation
- 19:45 Identity: not an ontological notion, but a political strategy.
- 20:57 Agamben, The Use of Bodies
- 26:21 Contemporary migratory phenomena
- 27:34 Globalisation. Logic of the global market: gap between politics (territory and citizenry) and the economy (deterritorialised workforces and the free flow of goods).
- 29:56 Migrations. Gap between human rights and civil rights. Concentrationary practices, forms of slavery.
- 35:15 Crisis of the state model and national law.
- 37:25 Art creates conditions of possibility for the sensible in the social space.
- 38:13 Poetics. Aesthetic distancing of the process. The specificity of art is not discursive.
- 41:55 Politics: the physics of bodies in space. The artistic gesture captures this collision.
- 43:04 The Zapatista movement. Destabilisation of the semantic field of representation.
- 47:30 Iconoclasm. Political strategy of art. Subversion, critique of power and anarchic outbreaks.
- 53:22 Generating laughter. Nietzschean joy and eroticism. Recovering the Dionysian side of life.
- 55:56 Grotesque. Form is distorted in its lust for life.
This podcast is part of Re-Imagine Europe, co-funded by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union. Music and sound production commissioned to Mario de Vega. Editing by Dolores Acebal and André Chêdas.
José Luis Barrios Lara is a philosopher, art historian, curator, critic, professor, and author of numerous essays and books. In his work, Barrios reflects on the insurmountable aporias that arise in contemporary global capitalism, between the free market economy and democracy as a political and legal system. He traces the origins of these contradictions back to the perverse hidden alliances that have gone hand in hand with the advance of colonialism, modernity, and industrial economy since the fifteenth century. And that have now become a neo-slavery regime that unleashes the full force of its violence, exploitation and expropriation on migrant bodies. According to his analysis, this violence is deployed in the form of a cultural and cognitive neo-colonialism that despotically manages the forms of representation or non-representation of bodies.
In this podcast, José Luis Barrios Lara reflects on the founding myth of the West, modernity, and the invention of the other. He considers identity politics as a political tool and a means for the management of bodies in space, questions the effectiveness of the epistemologies of the South, and interprets the global migration crisis as a form of neo-slavery. A grim scenario in which, he says, certain intersections of art and politics still have the power to destabilise the semantic field of representation and make room for the subversive.