According to the Korean philosopher Byung-Chul-Han, we live in a society of transparency, of the smooth, the shaved, the shiny and transparent, that is, of the ambiguous and unbalanced.
The hypervisibility to which we are exposed does not allow us to close our eyes, not even for a moment, much less process the accumulation of images of which we are victims. It would seem that closing your eyes is nonsense in this hyperconnected society.
The contemplation of things, of oneself, thinking as an exercise of the spirit and delay, are practices that are out of place in this visually globalized world.
In this society they try to sell us the benefits of hyperactivity and self-exploration of the subject. Do not close your eyes, keep them open in hypervigilance until exhaustion itself.
These neoliberal narratives are used both in commercial advertising, as well as in politics and government, all of them are mounted in the devalued transparency, as if we could really look through a glass at all the outrages that are carried out day after day.
The philosopher Chul-Han invites us to close our eyes, to contemplative delay, where the conclusion is in the same contemplative stillness and warns us: “Hypervisibility goes hand in hand with the dismantling of thresholds and limits… space becomes transparent when it is smoothed and flattened. The thresholds and passageways are areas full of mystery and enigmas where the other atopic begins”, that is, the strange, the different.
French philosopher Alain Badiou tells us that neoliberalism with its narcissistic drives for self and performance eliminates the other, turning everything into contemporary individualism; everything has a price, there is no value, everything is merchandise, and of course in this era of globalized capitalism love is sick and Eros in agony.
Han admonishes us: “Let’s look for the spaces where the atopic other begins, along with the limits and thresholds so that the fantasies related to the other do not disappear.”
We will have to reinvent love, the énfant terrible Arthur Rimbaud, the cursed poet of the 19th century, would tell us, but the world is still a project.
Alain Badiou affirms that fantasy is stunted, the current crisis of art, literature and politics, can be attributed to a large extent to this crisis of fantasy and the disappearance of the other, of the others, of all, that is, to the agony of Eros.
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