Close your eyes
03
Jun
It could be the other way around, but the reality is so frightening
that it will only be possible to see the one who has concluded the courage to do what seems insane right now, look inside and see how much he collaborates with this very harsh reality.
The diagnosis came to me unexpectedly while I asked what is eternity and where I want humanity to go, I had the intuition that everything should change starting with me, and knowing the new book by Byung Chul Han some answers were there, I received the book in two days and I can already comment on it.
The intuition was based on what many already know: the great utopias and the great speeches collapsed and the obvious question was then where will we go.
Chul Han’s clues are inspiring, without the book’s subtitle: “Please close your eyes: in search of another time”, edition now from 2021 by the publisher Vos, the essay is from 2013.
One might think that we live in a time of acceleration, but Chul Han points out that “narratives do not allow themselves to be arbitrarily accelerated, acceleration destroys their own structures of meaning and time, the disturbing thing about the experience of current time is not the acceleration as such, but the conclusion of the missing beat”, that is, the lack of rhythm and beat.
The completion of things from the practice of new lives, the rites that cause things to be done with rhythm and pace to get things done well and reach their conclusion.
The acceleration has its cause in the universal incapacity to close, time keeps rushing forward, because it doesn’t reach the closure anywhere.” (p. 20)
That’s how I inverted my diagnosis, the end of utopias and great ideals (in the sense of eidos and not idealism), did not happen not for lack of speech or “good intentions” but for lack of conclusion.
But it is important, consistent with Chul Han’s speech, to review the impact on people, on their internal integrity of doing an experiment to the end, and Chul Han will touch on another term.
It will touch on a taboo theme of death, present now during a pandemic, “and in a world in which the conclusion and closure give way to an endless and directionless advance, it is not possible to die because dying also means presupposing the ability to end the life” (p. 29-30), understand that life is a cycle.
He also speaks of the performance subject, the one who seeks the maximum “the performance subject is incapable of reaching a conclusion”, and this leads to overcharging themselves and not concluding.
Understand that we are at the end of a cycle and if we don’t understand this well, “it has to end [ver-enden] at an inopportune time [Unzeit]” (p. 30), for this not to happen it is necessary to close your eyes and see yourself.
Han, Byung-Chul (2021). Favor fechar os olhos: em busca de um outro tem
