Cultural diversity and hopes
02
Dec
In his book “In the same boat: essays on hyperpolitics” Peter Sloterdijk
points out that: “historical appearance teaches every observer that human groups in pioneer regions, during the last three or four thousand years, must have been able to sail on their old rafts of such that groupings of rafts could emerge in great style” (Sloterdijk, 1999, p. 73), which means that old cultural habits resist time, even though I consider “mentally poor and yet significant the term ‘culture’” . (idem).
It emphasizes that the decay of superstructures “reveals that they have almost nothing to give to individuals in their efforts to continue life” (Sloterdijk, 1999, p. 74), and more than that, it can be recognized that “as soon as the opus decays commune, people can only regenerate as smaller units” (idem).
Thus, it is in these smaller units that a new opus commune can be regenerated and elaborated, taking up the Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio where there is the survival of the small community in the face of the “large disaster”, recalling the period of the plague that can be a parallel with the In the current pandemic, there the Fiorentinos “no longer know whether to fear contamination or looting or hunger any longer, they fall into a disorientation equivalent to paralysis” (Sloterdijk, 1999, p. 75), the first version of “in the same boat ” is from 1993.
In a period that followed the Babylonian, Egyptian, Syrian and Persian empires, it was in the small Greek communities that the idea of city-state polis was born and that reached the modern republic, it was the Fiorentine Renaissance that an artistic-cultural revolution was born that led the human spirit the first great navigations and the expansion of mercantilism, and it was from Franco-German rationalism that the bourgeois liberal revolution was born and today where are these small groups capable of rescuing civilization?
There are new cosmovisions that are reborn (they seek their first cultural forms) in Africa such as the philosopher Achiles Mbembé and his necropolitics, a reaction to the power to dictate who can live and who can die, in Latin America the Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano, the philosopher, psychiatrist and essayist Frantz Fanon, born in the French Antilles.
The central problem of these thoughts is decoloniality, that is, the idea that modernity and its political project made use of colonization and there will be no significant changes in the superstructures of power if this way of thinking is not subjected to criticism and the unmasking of its objectives .
That’s where hopes can be born, a reconfiguration of the globe where peoples have the right to their freedom, their cultural and social expression, with a dignified life.
