domingo, 30 de enero de 2011

Los nuevos reaccionarios (2002), por Maurice T. Maschino. Este artículo lo encontré en una reseña al libro de Antoine Compagnon, Los antimodernos.

domingo, 23 de enero de 2011

Documentary: The History of Hacking in the (old-good) Discovery Channel.

Minorities and Transgressors: transient partners


The movie A Single Man, by Tom Ford presents a personal retrospective about being homosexual in the California of the 60s'. It is a movie whose main subject is the beauty of tragedy -may as well be the tragedy of beauty-. I shall use this movie to address the relation between explicit and implicit narratives of homosexuality. In some of the scenes the characters refer to homosexuality in an implicit way, sometimes under a sociological approach such as the speech of the professor (George) in the classroom, or in an existential approach such as the dialogue between the student Kenny and George in the bar. Both scenes could apply to many objects besides homosexuality, in fact in the classroom speech there is a specific reference to this issue when George refers to anti-Semitism. It is not fair to ask to a movie something which was not in its aims, nevertheless I should use it as a scapegoat to criticize a discourse or narrative which takes the infinite potential of transgression and directs it into well defined social categories (if you recall the scene of George talking to his lover in the dessert you shall understand how unfair is using this movie as scapegoat). The attitude I take here somehow contradicts former positions I've taken about liberal activism (see Progresistas: entre la modernidad y la tradición) and retakes attitudes such as that of Ignacio Castro Rey in La Sexualidad y su Sombra. I believe these two conflictive approaches to liberalism are an example of the tension between negative and positive liberty as introduced by Isaiah Berlin. On the one hand the radical liberalism of transgression, and on the other hand the institutionalized version of freedom as conceived by legal rights [1]. Coming back to the movie, I recognize that social categories cannot be reduced to common places, after all, the notion of social reality is not fortuitous, there is a commitment with social history. Perhaps movies such as A Single Man do not fully support the idea of transgression despite treating indirectly the issue of homosexuality -and besides being a movie with another main subject- because it treats it mostly as a condition, rather than a possibility (recall again the scene of the dessert to discover how rhetoric is what I say). Indeed, conditions (african-American, jew, immigrants, etc.) demands rights and they see emancipatory philosophies just as transient mediums rather than goals in itself. This is the point where the pioneer differs from the activist, the individual from the citizen [2]. George personified none of these characters; he was rather just a man who knew too much about beauty as to avoid the call of tragedy or perhaps, just a man who truly loved.

[1] It may as well be related with the antagonism between positivism and natural law in legal theory. And if a contractual theory of law is the bridge between these two approaches, we may as well find in some kind of hermeneutical ethics the bridge between positive and negative liberty.

[2] Wachowskis' The Matrix, is an even more clear example of how a potentially transgressive narrative may fall into well defined social categories, in this case a unique narrative of the corporative world.
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