Critic for the Shipwrecked: Literature beyond borders

Abstract

It would seem to be a recurrent event in history, in times like ours marked by ideological tension and political polarization, that the language of morals, and  the aesthetic and artistic perception suffer a radical simplification. The inner life becomes impoverished because we feel obligated somehow to take sides in the collective causes in confrontation, although none of them has wholly convinced us, neither intellectually nor morally. The public debate —cultural and artistic critic in general— degenerates into a battlefield in which each of the sides, entrenched y protected by unbreakable convictions and irrevocable feelings of moral superiority, discharge hate and resentment against real and imaginary adversaries. Autonomous thought and analytic complexity descend to a second plane, dragged down by a simultaneously stimulating and comforting sentiment of being part of something larger than oneself. The formerly unrestricted reign of thought is reduced to the narrow limits of the ideological view of the world to which, by an autonomous decision, we cling. Hannah Arendt's imperative of Thinking without Bannister, i. e., without crutches and dogmas, thus becomes all the more urgent in the digital agoras. It is of that thought that questioning the current rebellion of the masses, actual version 2.0, depends, that is, the digital and postmodern one.