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Arquivo para March 10th, 2023

The forest bordering the clearing

10 Mar

Modern man, victim of ideologies, cultures and religious apostasy lives only with the awareness of individual freedom, without really understanding who is the Other who is not equal, the Korean/German philosopher Byung Chul Han developed this in “The expulsion of the other : Society, perception” (Editora Vozes, Brazil) in which he talks about the adipose emptiness of fullness.

This emptiness has nothing to do with the phenomenological epoché, opening the mind and soul to dialogue and receive the Other, the different, the discourse and the narrative contrary to ours, to later merge the horizons in the “hermeneutic circle”, the emptiness of soul is positive, it elevates us.

Through successive tragedies, the pandemic was the first and will not be the last, and this is not about an apocalyptic discourse, but about the social realization of a civilizing crisis in an increasingly profound and dangerous process, not only in the rulers, but also in personal conscience.

Chul Han goes so far as to say these processes are obscene in “hypervisibility, hypercommunication, hyperproduction, hyperconsumption, which lead to a rapid stagnation of the same. Obscene is the ‘connection of like with like’ (Han, 2022) in short, everything translates into an obscene sameness.

He cites a very illustrative example which is the animation Anomalisa by Charlie Kaufmann (photo), which talks about a speaker Michael who goes to Cincinnati for a lecture and there approaches a person by his voice, Lia is a person who already knows him and came to see his talk and fall in love.

But the hell of the same are the employees of the Hotel, all the same and who want to seduce Michael.

The essay emphasizes erotic love, but this also applies to agapic love, without falling in love and dialoguing with what is different, we live in the hell of the same, in our vicious circle, in an environment full of vices and obscenities, in the worst sense of word.

In the biblical narrative, Moses, who was trying to lead his people to a new path, wanted to stone him and blasphemed against the proposal of a different life (Exodus 17,3-7), even asked for the return of Egyptian slavery (any resemblance to the current politics is no coincidence), and also in chapter 4 of John, Jesus goes to meet the Samaritan woman, a woman and “pagan” and dialogues with her

In the week that women’s day was celebrated, this is important, which is not a biblical detail, but the essence of her message, Jesus, when meeting her, finds her interest strange and says “How come you, being a Jew, ask drink to me, a Samaritan woman?” (Jo 5,9).

The obscenity and sameness of the same not only impoverishes each one, but limits the civilizing process that is enriching the more the different can exist with dignity.

 

HAN, B. C. (2022) A expulsão do outro: sociedade e percepção. (The expulsion of the other: society, perception). Trans. Lucas Machado. Brazil, Petrópolis: Editora Vozes.