How characterize year 2017
02
Jan
If I wanted to be simplistic I would say that it was a year of retreat, Trump’s 
inauguration, the threats in the Dutch, French and German elections where the Nazi reached 11% of the vote, but this is only one face of a change in progress, the discovery of Paradise Papers, where some great international names like Hamilton and Madonna appear and the biggest surprise was the Crown (not so much for those who know the English possessions in several islands of tax havens), Petr Sloterdijk characterizes our time as we might think in 2018, barbarism has never been so visible and reason has become a “cynical reason”.
The problem is the impotence of the discourse of change, incapable of a planetary vision with parochial solutions, finds itself impotent in the face of a massacre of financial capital and the speculations it makes all over the planet, not exempt from tax havens and corruptions, built barbarism as portrayed by Ruben’s painting of (1609): The Massacre of the Innocents (photo).
Petr Sloterdijk said: “We can trace the communitarian fantasy that lies at the root of all humanism back to the model of a literary society, in which participation through reading the canon reveals a common love of inspiring messages. At the heart of humanism so understood we discover a cult or club fantasy: the dream of the portentous solidarity of those who have been chosen to be allowed to read. In the ancient world—indeed, until the dawn of the modern nation-states—the power of reading actually did mean something like membership of a secret elite; linguistic knowledge once counted in many places as the provenance of sorcery. In Middle English the word ‘glamour’ developed out of the word ‘grammar’. The person who could read would be thought easily capable of other impossibilities.“
What has happened with reading, with the vulgarization of culture, reading and even the arts, replaced by fundamentalisms, self-help and a culture of the ugly, horror and even terror, says Sloterdijk about our time: barbarie.
But not only speech about kit culture, so more in processo f despiritualization: “of asceticisms is probably the event in the current intellectual history of mankind that is the most comprehensive and, because of its large scale, the hardest to perceive, yet at once the most palpable and atmospherically powerful. Its counterpart is the informalization of spirituality – accompanied by its commercialization in the corresponding subcultures.” (Sloterdijk, Crítica da razão cínica, 1983).
Writing these Writer : “Only the artistic will to transform the future into a space of unlimited art-elevating chances enables us to understand the core of the procreation rule: ‘a creator shall you create [… ] a self-propelling wheel, a first movement’ (in the book You can chance your life, within translation to portugues
esse).
