About the End of the World: Crises of Cosmopolitanism in Contemporary Culture and Theory

SPANSH 232 Subject & Catalog Number

Description

Cosmopolitanism and globalization, two master-concepts that were extremely useful to understand subjective universalistic desires and material processes of global dislocation, disjuncture and displacement (as well as fantasies of totality, transparent communication and interrelations, and fictions of totality) can no longer account for our present cultural-political situation; they are not useful to interrogate the global displacements and traumatic losses constitutive of the overwhelming experience, over the last few years, that we are living through the end of the world. The idea of end of the world does not refer only to the sense of overwhelming political futility that dominates the artistic and intellectual spheres today, but also to the collapse of the world understood as the modern/modernist symbolic structure that supported humanist discourses of universal emancipation through global connections, translations, interactions, displacements and exchanges; the world as the symbolic realm where demands of justice, emancipation and universal inclusion were meant to be actualized. Today, the displacement of more than 67 millions refugees, migrants and forcibly displaced persons as a result of environmental catastrophes, economic hardships, and small and large scale perpetual wars and terror in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and Europe; the theatrical demolition of liberal democratic governmentality in Trump's America and across the Western hemisphere; the crisis or death of Europe as a project of political and cultural reorientation of the American global hegemony; the painful intensification of the military, economic and symbolic violence the Israeli state exerts over Palestinian people; and the radicalization of financial capital’s global sovereignty since the “recovery” from the 2008 crisis and the subsequent concentration of wealth and global socio-economic inequality―all these point to the radical dislocation of the structure we used to call "world". But this course is not about the very real historical suffering and losses of those whose bodies are wounded by the end of the world; it is rather about the trace of those experience that we call art and literature; about some of the idiosyncratic ways in which those of us who care about art and literature attend to these forms as symbolic sites in order to try and fail to understand the end of the world; about our reaction to an experience of the end of the world that is and is not our end of the world; and about what we (we professors, students, intellectuals, writers, artists) can and can no longer do about the end of the world through art as mediation. In order to work through these notions we read texts by Roberto Bolaño, Imannuel Kant, Yuri Herrera, Hannah Arendt, Homi Bhabha, Jason de León, Maurice Blanchot, Jesús Carrasco, Giorgi Agamben, Georges Didi-Huberman, Samantha Schweblin, Svetlana Boym, Cuathémoc Medina, Raqs Media Collective, Enzo Traverso, Sigmund Freud, Hernán Díaz, Julia Kristeva, Verónica Gerber Bicecci, Olga Tokarczuk, Bonnie Honig, César Aira, Walter Benjamin, Lina Meruane, Mike Wilson, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Bettina Keizman, Ursula K. Heise, Bruno Latour, Irmgard Emmelheinz; we think with the visual work of Bouchra Khalili, Francis Alÿs, Daniel Richter, Leila Alaoui and Daniel Castro García; and we analyze films by Alejandro Brugués (Juan de los Muertos), Jia Zhangke (The World), Lars von Trier (Melancholia), Alfonso Cuarón (Children of Men), and the Brazilian Netflix series "3%".