'Piñera Porno', the book on how the Chilean president buried the neoliberal right | Interference

The Spanish Language Dictionary (RAE-ASALE) tells us that the word “pornography” derives from the French pornographie, which means “treatise on prostitution”, “obscene drawing or publication”. Its meanings are three: 1. Open and crude presentation of sex that seeks to produce excitement. 2. Show, text or audiovisual product that uses pornography. 3. Treatise on prostitution. The semantic field of the word lies in the open and crude exhibition, the spectacle and the sale. The understanding of the word as merchandise must have an addition: the link with prostitution, therefore, with an inauthentic sex and derived from a market relationship. Raw exposure, of pornography, is on offer, is for sale. All this semantic field is useful to us. There is a word no, however. There is also talk of excitement. The truth is that that word is inappropriate for our case. We are reflecting here on a subject (our object) that does not seem to be oriented towards the production of arousal with its pornographic action. That word, then, seems to be very far away. Rather it is an arousal manager. When he has achieved it, because he has ever achieved it, he has immediately considered it a credit in his relationship with power and has immediately spent it. As soon as he rescued the miners and his data exploded in extraordinary proportions, he decided to use that outstanding score to avenge his ego, to use it as a weapon. It is always so. If he is comfortable, he decides to occupy that comfort to eliminate a rival that torments him. He confuses power of attorney with a checking account. And if he has blue numbers, he will try to get to zero by satisfying a wish. In politics he spends, he does not invest. As a primary consumer, you believe that using your resources is only for pleasure. And because? Because he sees politics as a commodity, as an object that satisfies him, that awakens his fetishism. The extremely complex and ancient Greek definition of politics is alien to him. He cannot believe that pain, love, misfortune, institutions, rites, religious beliefs, knowledge, silence, expulsion from the city, conversion into a god can come together in a single concept. He admires the magic of politics, but wants to be a competent user. You don't want to sail a dark sea with only a crescent moon and a guiding star. He doesn't want to know the true blizzard, the one that subjects you to your own horrors, the one that makes you fear for your memories, for the quality projected on others of your figure when you die. No. In him, as in various members of the Chilean elite, there is no death. There is your show. Armed with a sustained faith in expediency, loss is but an accident to gain. And the end of a human being lacks mystery. It's just its expiration date. Things are what we see, they say. Does an old man have to work to survive? It is reality, they will tell us. And if so, then it's okay. That is cynicism. It is neoliberal cynicism. Do you like sex? Here you will only have sex, nothing more than that. Porn is the cynicism of sex. If you want sex for a thousand reasons, then come to his show and forget about the thousand reasons. Just remember one: that you like sex. Lo and behold, you have it, better than practicing it, with angles you never saw. Pornography.

For its part, the word 'obscene' has a complicated history. There are those who associate it with being in front of dirt. There are those who consider it associated with what is not in the theatrical scene (what cannot be shown). From here derives a usage about the ominous. This is the most popular etymology, although strictly speaking it seems to be false. But even though it is false, it has been used for millennia and its pragmatics are still there. The true etymology would be the reference to what appears from the left side and, therefore, results in misfortune. It is a bad omen. Someone will wonder why there is so much frequency in the history of cultures to consider the left side as negative. It is quite evident in many cultures the association of the right side with the correct orientation, with 'putting something straight'. It is not only in the Bible where sitting at the right hand of God the Father is a sign of worth. The roots probably lie in praxis. Most of the population develops a laterality where the predominance is on the right side of the body, especially the arm and hand. This implies, in times of violence and physical confrontation, that the left side is a source of misfortune, because it is the area where the defenses are weak. Conceptual development normally has origins of this order, especially when they occur in different and distant cultures, where an explanation of an original moment that was ritually projected is improbable. The truth is that I am not a linguist, although I love linguistics. But evidently I don't know the classical languages ​​or their potential sources, perhaps coming from Indo-European (if it existed). And in this sense I cannot say which concept of 'obscene' is the correct one. I only know that Piñera once again brings us a miracle at this point, well, what are his miracles: events of very low probability, but a miracle in reverse, that is, a misfortune. And it is that Piñera has achieved that the etymology of obscenity must necessarily be the true one and the two false ones, all united. Piñera has put us in front of the dirt. Piñera has destroyed the scene, in fact, he has devastated the transitional political scene and has left in its place an authenticity so extreme, so lacking in staging, that it is simply unlivable and intolerable, that has no social or aesthetic mediation. Finally, it has brought misfortune, fall, horror. It is true that it has brought awakening, the possibility of looking at the true horror and leaving behind the false scene. But on that path, there really wasn't an exercise in honesty. There was only a collapse of the foundations. The truth is that the great neoliberal obscenity was money, its image everywhere, its pre-eminence, its undisputed reign, the shaky morality of doubt about performance. Obscenity remains installed as a representation of non-representation, like a theater on whose stage an ominous, scatological (putrid and transcendent) element is left that is unacceptable, that cannot be watched. And here is the profit. The theatrical scene is marked by evidence (which dissolves the work as a representation and leaves it as a mere presentation), by a President who, in a contract for his own project, is capable of agreeing that the last installment depends on the actions of a government that is his own.

Where do we start to understand the concept of “porn” that we will elaborate here? The first word we summon will be “positivity”. She will guide us at all times.

Perversion of concepts is not unusual. Rather, it is a constitutive part of its history. You will have heard someone who sentenced some kind of link between being positivist and optimistic. In an easy to follow error, simple in its most probable genealogical process: since the word positive refers on a philosophical level to what is present, what is there, but at the same time colloquially it is used to evaluate something as adequate or beneficial , there are those who have turned positivism (the philosophical-epistemic current) into a kind of mental or doctrinal state equivalent to optimism. All truths touch each other, said Andrés Bello. But the truth is that stupidity fucks. This is how they easily procreate futures.

All truths touch each other, said Andrés Bello. But the truth is that stupidity fucks. This is how they easily procreate futures.

The truth (the positive) is that positivism is a philosophical current and at times a doctrine within epistemology that assumes, sometimes with nuances and revisions, the importance of a path of scientific thought based on induction; that is, starting from the facts and arriving at the general rules. Positivism was consolidated at the end of the 19th century and had its glorious era at the beginning of the 20th century. Even today the common sense of science is positivist, even when the postmodern drift of our time has weakened this common sense in some of its dimensions. It is absurd. We researchers usually demand that our investigations be seen as conclusions in the positivist sense, but we treat others as if we were observing a religious opinion or position. I don't know how it happened, but it happened. It must be that the self has taken over the new century, after a successful preparation in the last century. And it is not the self and its circumstances. It is the self and its conveniences.

The truth is that positivism is born from an inductive conviction, from the construction of regularities from the observation of facts. Bertrand Russell raised the problem of induction, known as the impossibility of guaranteeing that a general statement based on the facts can be definitive, true. This is simple. If I say that all swans are white, because I have always seen white swans, and because all researchers in the world have only seen white swans, because there is not a single report of a black swan, then we assume (given all known and coincident observations) that all swans are black. And we state the regularity. And with a bit of urgency, we enunciate a law. But actually we can't do such a thing. Can we guarantee that we know that there are no more cases than the ones we know about? We can not. We're assuming it's unlikely to be any different, since there's not a single indication to the contrary, but there's never really a guarantee. The opposite school, deductive and rationalist, gave guarantees. Every statement was deduced from another, therefore it was true as a derivation of the previous one, except for logical error and human stupidity normally easily detectable by the rest (by the rest of the highly intelligent philosophers, that is, very few people). But rationalism did not usually say anything new. From deducing so much, he simply repeated with style (or without). The induction was creative, but uncertain; the deduction was true, but conservative. This is another story. It ends and begins again in Kant. And then, much later, he has an exceptionally interesting footnote in Sokal.

What's this digression? Piñera is obsessed with induction. You want to know everything that has been detected, everything that is actually present. He has the obsession of the scientist, although his heuristic talent is discreet, his argumentative responsibility is deficient and prudence is not exactly his most faithful companion. Piñera sees two or three things about a phenomenon and takes it for granted. He is a positivist, a rude positivist, a primitive beast of coarse positivism, a pervert of argumentation. He has his reasons for believing in that form of analysis: done so, his decisions have made him a billionaire. That, in today's society, is a lot like being a genius, being right at all times.

Pornography is an aesthetic of the absence of aesthetics.

The reduction of a phenomenon to its mere positivity, the concentration on its specific forms of appearance, is an essential characteristic of pornography. The pornographic filming focuses its attention only on the central, it is so assertive that it lacks context and even text. Every movement leads to a predictable ending and to an expression of that moment devoid of any metaphor, subtlety or finesse. The organs are protagonists, there is no space to dedicate time to other nuances, to other findings. His reasoning is coarse positivist: since sex is defined by the activity of the sexual organs (the other thing is eroticism), then a radicalization of sexual expression is mainly showing the moment and the place where the definition of sex becomes absolute; for example, the penis at the moment of penetration (vaginal, anal, buccal). In sociology, the State is defined based on its fundamental characteristic: the use of legitimate violence. Therefore, when a newscaster points out that the French state has defined legalizing “x thing”, then he should present the state in the figure of a French policeman. As it is obviously a stupidity that does not produce understanding, the French State will be signified by great French symbols: government palaces, Parliament, the Eiffel tower. They will make a reasoning, the editors of the news, of an "erotic" cut; that is, they will build a space for the sublimated and cultural realization of what they want to represent. And they won't fall for porn. But the viewer of porn wants to see the truth of sex. But the truth devoid of heuristics is simply a mechanical image of an object or a piece of a subject. Porn, by the way, is not the truth, although it is in the zone of facts. These facts are true, because in porn there is no fiction, it is real, even if the protagonists do not want each other, even if the passion is fictitious, even if the pleasure is mechanical and exclusively external. Pornography is deeply inauthentic and at the same time concretely true. The filmic form of elaboration of the image and of the pornographic narration is usually accompanied by gestures and acting. Deliberately, the efforts of these acting repertoires are aimed at a grotesque image of pleasure or surprise due to the supposedly extraordinary of the moment (the acrobatic conjunction of the bodies, the size of the penis, the size of the breasts, the voluptuousness of the ass, the amount of of simultaneous members, the debauchery represented). The scene is normally crude in its fictional character, not surreal, not realistic, not hyper-realistic, not infra-realistic. It's just a deliberate parody, a kind of bureaucracy capable of building an officialdom of sexual pleasure as penetration or an unusual collection of sexual positions. Parody plays a central role, since it depoliticizes, which is the same as saying that it annuls or minimizes the process of elaboration on the situation. Having become weightless and gross at the same time, sexuality remains remitted to her organs, without sublimation.

Pornography is an aesthetic of the absence of aesthetics.

Porn is the disappearance of seduction, it is sex without eroticism, it is the simple presence, the mere positivity. The positivist current had its porn moment; that is to say, the moment in which the philosophers of said current lost the capacity to look beyond what is positive, what is given, what appears in front of us. The great representatives of positivism were the members of the Vienna Circle, a group of extraordinary intellectuals. His main influence would be that of Ludwig Wittgenstein, the philosopher who wrote only two books and revolutionized philosophy on both occasions. Strictly speaking, he only wrote one, the other was unfinished at his death and his manuscripts were transcribed. Then some notebooks with notes would appear that were also published as books. But the Tractatus lógico-philosophicus, as his friends call him, and Philosophical Investigations turn out to be the pillars of the Austrian author's building. The truth is that Wittgenstein never wanted to be associated with the Vienna Circle. He had postulated the theory of silence, related to mystical knowledge, which he personally validated and experienced. And this tendency to assume that only the positive exists, typical of the Vienna Circle, seemed in bad taste to him. Of course, for Wittgenstein, what cannot be observed is impossible to adequately represent in language, and —following the author— what cannot be talked about, one must remain silent. Hence the theory of silence. Sebastián Piñera does not know the theory of silence, he sees no other way to know than to look at the latest measurement of the survey, if he sees a rise of two points, he only sees a rise of two points or at most he sees the projection of a subsequent consecutive increase . It is not capable of understanding that behind an increase of two points a crisis, a structural problem, a fall may come lurking. No. For him, what went up, went up and what went down, went down. It sounds simple and impeccable, but in reality it is the moment in which a subject of knowledge comes out of knowledge and becomes an organ that receives stimuli. It is not a human being, it is the sensor of a car seat that indicates that you have not (or have) put on your seat belt. As I write this excerpt, in Chile there is a warming of the economy due to an increase in consumption derived from the money injected into the economy by the withdrawals of the AFPs, state aid, plus the reactivation of labor activity and high growth (mere recovery in relation to the lost). Piñera observes the increase in consumption and concludes: "The market society cannot be dying if people madly resort to the market to satisfy all kinds of needs." Pure linear thought, pure factual reflection. This is Pinera. I cannot say that this was the way of the Vienna Circle, let alone that Piñera could have participated in it. The truth is that the Circle was quite sophisticated and it is not necessary to explain that our president does not enjoy these virtues.

To understand the limits of a look focused only on the “positive”, on what is present, it will suffice to recall the response of the Frankfurt School to the Vienna Circle. Young Frankfurt scholars will point out that positivity is not all that matters when it comes to analyzing and understanding phenomena. In the first place, because what is in front of us, the positive, may require mediation to be observed, a conceptual development. The object is not given to the researcher in a natural state. Not even the researcher usually knows how to capture the fact sufficiently. An extrafactual process must be developed so that what we call a fact can be generated. This does not imply that there are no facts, nor does it imply a condemnation of radical subjectivity. It simply implies that there is a necessary distancing exercise from what is observed. The epistemic translation of this point can lead to the concept of theoretical load of the facts, which is like saying that human beings not only observe reality, but also integrate it into our conceptual frameworks and perception matrices that have been previously developed. . This is an overdetermination of my previous experience, of my knowledge, to everything that I observe. In order for me to "cut out" "a fact" from the experienced reality, an extraordinary operation must occur: a conceptual base and a way of perceiving must collude to establish what that fact will be, what kind of construct it will be.

But let's go back to the Frankfurt School. Science, say these theorists, must be built with a desire not only to observe what is presented, but also to understand phenomena from the observation of facts that are gathered within the framework of a theoretical perspective. The idea is to avoid the Cartesian dualism in which reason and experience not only live in separate spaces, but are the two central cognitive experiences. For the Frankfurt theorists this is not the case. The historicity of human experience presupposes the very historicity of the process of knowledge. There is no conscious spontaneity of free people who, as a result, build society. Knowledge involves power. For this, reflection by negativity is fundamental, in which an observation capable of disintegrating the ideological formulations that are inscribed in the very structure of reality is constructed. Without critical, negative thinking, we are doomed to reproduce order in the form of knowledge, which would not be knowledge.

Could Sebastián Piñera understand this? It turns out impossible.

I would like you to understand the judgment I just made. The theory indicated here is dense for anyone who reviews it in this summary and is more complex if you read the authors of this current. But the problem that Sebastián Piñera would have to understand this argument would not be because of the conceptual or philosophical difficulty that it entails, this problem is common to all of us. His problem would be more pedestrian: he is unable to imagine that the way he thinks is determined by prior structures, by the history of philosophy and science, by millennial traditions of reflection. He is not able to see the historicity of concepts. Rather, it assumes that their way of thinking is simply the right way. And there is no more. Question a premise? Impossible. Money is not made by questioning the premises, but by surfing them.

It is not strange that the historical form that the free-market right acquires is that of total positivity, in which the ideological configuration of the historical right of Chile (the oligarchic right), which was capable of producing moral and political manifestations, is even suspended. metaphysical effluvia associated with his material project. The form of neoliberalism lacks any ideological expression, even if it is an ideology. It's a Malevich painting, black on black, white on white. The painting exists (ideology is produced), but it is the very reality of his actions turned into an extraordinary manifestation. It is banal as such. And it's pornographic, it just zooms in on their own genitalia.

Where our cognitive modeling sees activity, what actually exists is passivity. Looking at the polls, what each one marks, what the population approves, the most important issues for people, in short, constitute a form of knowledge that contributes to establishing a reality that solves (would solve) the question about desires and needs of the population, generating a deactivation effect. It was deduced that if security was the most important issue in the polls, it was because insecurity was rampant. The data on crimes in Chile did not say the same, but the concept of security was growing in form and depth, provided with all kinds of forms of multiplication of its social relevance. This produces an already defined scenario, where the social actors understand that reality is drawn and that modifying it turns out to be such an objectified path that either the path of modification is perceived as very difficult, or the idea that this world is "the world" is internalized. " world.

A knowledge capable of suspending the structures that solidify a certain way of thinking convenient for certain actors in society is difficult to achieve. It is an intellectual experience, a personal challenge, a social odyssey. It is exactly what is not wanted in the consumer society: the conclusion must be quick, the action comes after the conclusion, the action must be functional to the central experience, to the market. Knowledge must be aimed at producing a monetary value, design is advertising, science is technology, art is prestige for its purchase.

Harvard is a good university. But he seems to have little room for negativity. Friedman in Chicago said that there is no free lunch. The assertion is true in more than one sense, but this does not imply that it is a form of knowledge. Have you explained what you mean by free? Are you referring to monetization?

Harvard is a good university. But he seems to have little room for negativity. Friedman in Chicago said that there is no free lunch. The assertion is true in more than one sense, but this does not imply that it is a form of knowledge. Have you explained what you mean by free? Are you referring to monetization? Probably yes and no at the same time. The plot is elusive, even if it seems brutally concrete. What about acts of gift, what about reciprocity? They will say that someone bought, that someone paid. Taken to the extreme, the argument is as true as it is banal, it is like saying that each movement we make consumes energy and participates in the entropy of the world.

In the process of building society, the technocratic gaze, in itself, is pure passivity. Its action is administrative and builds value for a segment of society, it does not contribute to the social processes of liberation, democratization, construction of substantive equality, emancipation from arbitrary powers and oppressive social configurations. The technocratic look may make sense, however. In short-term actions, in basic rationalizations, it is useful. But it cannot participate in the meaning of history without destroying that very meaning. Technocracy does not understand what is absent, what is not visible, what seems to be in a passive condition.

Why is this important?

For the discomfort.

Because discomfort can only be understood in its negativity. And, therefore, whoever does not know how to think or "observe" what is not present, but who has the capacity to determine other facts, will simply be blind.

Discomfort is an invisible enemy. Discomfort is always a hypothesis, it is not directly detectable, we cannot say with certainty: “There it is, you can see it”. Discomfort is like the dark matter of the universe. Cosmologists have constructed the concept of "dark matter" to refer to an invisible phenomenon. Its existence can only be imputed by the enormous magnitude of distortions in what is visible with respect to the calculations made related to the visible matter of the universe. To put it simply, if we stick to the matter that we can "see" with existing tools, the structure of the universe is not justified. For the universe as diagnosed to make sense, it is essential that there be enormous amounts of matter that we cannot detect and that, despite our blindness, are there. This phenomenon has been called "dark matter", to refer to the fact of its invisibility (the invisible is dark because it lacks light or, at least, it is not projected). The data on this is staggering. Some researchers stated that more than half of the matter in the universe would be invisible to us and we would only know it by its effects. That would be dark matter. Others imputed 80%. Celestial objects would only explain 4% of the matter in the cosmos, an amazing figure due to its smallness. The bulk of the invisible would be repulsive energy (more than 70 percent) and the rest (more than 20 percent) would be dark matter with gravitational effect, attractive, with a behavior equivalent to that of visible matter. The hypothesis arose in the thirties as an essential speculation to be able to operate with current theories. Cosmologists assume that this matter is already res judicata, that dark matter indeed exists and that it can be considered that it has passed the stage of speculation. My external opinion is different and, as befits an academic from another area, it is an irresponsible opinion. But of course, I have seen thousands of times physicists, chemists, biologists and all kinds of scientists making observations on social facts and drawing critiques of social theory. I don't think it's bad at all. It just seems to me that it should be reciprocal.

But back to the point. I believe that the custom of working with the hypothesis of the existence of dark matter has done its job, since there is a consensus that the nature of this dark matter cannot be determined and in this regard, descriptions are simply assumed in which there are an intellectual consensus, but not sufficient evidence.

Attempts have been made to understand the dynamics of the universe without the dark matter hypothesis. There have been various proposals, but none have been satisfactory and, despite numerous inconsistencies derived from the modeling of the universe with what is assumed to be concentrations of dark matter, the tendency has been to accept the existence of this component. In social sciences there is an extra difficulty when dealing with ad hoc hypotheses. Case studies are plentiful and often have a political bias. This is unavoidable. And those who investigate the cases cannot assume the mere possibility that Barcelona and Chile exploded almost at the same time, the city due to independence and the country due to neoliberalism, and that both issues could have a fundamental structural similarity. The social sciences have fallen into the specificity trap. They wish to account for one particularity after another. Generalities are turning out to be indifferent to them or even offensive. Nobody seems to care too much that between 2018 and 2019 around sixty countries have exploded in the world, practically a third of the existing States in the entire world. If that's not a regularity, then what the hell is? One of the aporias of politics is that the order of intellectual action has been inverted: if Socrates said that the philosopher would be the bee that bothers the donkey, in current politics it is the donkey that forces the bee to produce honey for it. very particular that does not offend your feelings and that expands your interests. The press and the intelligentsia become helpful and at times servile. To imagine that the observation of the human experience from an intellectual perspective can be neutral is absolutely absurd. But there is a long journey between a complex subjective operation to produce knowledge that will be dressed in biases and the acceptance that intellectual action simply has to serve interests; but not even in the construction of a path, of a perspective, but in the political operation of winning the political battle of each day. The intellectual experience, under this fate, is impoverished to the point of ceasing to be a reflection. Sebastián Piñera knows it. It has hired many times intellectuals, writers and journalists. He has bought media outlets and has founded research centers. That is your story. It's not your fault. Or, at least, it's not just his fault. If the chef is persuaded with a little money to stop cooking meat and make burgers that seem to be of good quality, being of cheap material, the employer is not the only one to blame. The chef can accuse the empire of his needs, the categorical imperative to cover the family budget. It's not false, but it's usually not entirely true either. Social research supposes a commitment to strive to understand reality, to describe it, to explain it. There is a limit, of course, to the intrusion of interests or subjectivities in this process.

But back to the cosmological question of dark matter. It's a great guide to understanding social unrest. The fact that there is an explanation not solidly based on induction may mean to some people that there is a structural weakness in the argument. It is not my opinion. I consider exactly the opposite. The virtue of cosmology over other disciplines is that it has been forced, due to the magnitude of its research object, to display imagination and speculation, to fill in the gaps with hypotheses and narratives that complete argumentation and representation. Its virtue is precisely to have fled from the obligation of induction. I once enrolled in a physics course as an elective while studying aesthetics at the Catholic University of Chile. The professor requested an essay and recommended some excellent popular magazines available at the university. I immersed myself in them for a few days and decided on my theme: anthropological impact on interpretations of the shape and structure of the universe. It was relatively easy for me to argue that, having evidence in the 20th century in favor of a hypothesis that we consider absurd (that the Earth is the center of the universe), we made the decision to declare that conjecture intolerable and we assumed all kinds of ad hoc hypotheses to support it. dodge the possibility of giving space to that argument. I will not go into details here. The professor liked the work, but found it extremely unpleasant at the same time. He expressed his annoyance to me with humor. But the truth is that, even if this makes physicists uncomfortable, the truth is that there is nothing wrong with it. On the contrary. Today physics is what builds our image of the cosmos we inhabit, its function is social and cultural, even religious. No one can claim that the mere empirical does something as important as giving us the very definitions of our existence.

The truth is that the problem of malaise for the social sciences is the equivalent of the problem of dark matter for the physical sciences. The discomfort cannot be seen. Suicides and all kinds of psychic problems increase in a society; is it discomfort? Could be. How to know? It is virtually impossible to verify. Society becomes disruptive, with sudden and explosive mood swings, exploding here and there. Is it discomfort? Could be. If it's not thirty pesos, but it's thirty years, even if it's thirty pesos anyway; We are in the empire of disruption. That's almost certainly social unrest, but can we prove it? We only see its effects, the impact of its deployed energy, of its matter colliding with other matter, the force of surprising waves, of an inexhaustible seismic drift. And it is that the discomfort is not seen. We only know about it by its cumulative effects. And this is how the complaints to the National Consumer Service, to the information and complaints offices of the municipalities, rise at the same time, while the approval of the Presidents of the Republic falls, the legitimacy of the National Congress and the parties falls. politicians. There is a universe that is collapsing. But Abaddón the exterminator does not appear anywhere, we do not see his image, we do not understand the space in which he is located, we do not know where he is going. Such is discomfort. A powerful enemy... for the elites.

How can neoliberalism address malaise?

You can't.

Technocratic reasoning flees from the holistic perspective, escapes all heuristic capacity. He does not seek explanations or interpretations. Its objective is to guarantee an operation. It is a film that gives up all its artistic vision to meet the requirements of massiveness. He assumes that doing both is impossible and comfortably chooses to eat garbage. The history of humanity is the cultural effort to square the circle, to face the contradictions and tensions in order to resolve them in a higher version. Neoliberalism suffers from mediocre rationality. Where a society collectively exploits in a mysterious manifestation of collective consciousness, it simply sees the reprehensible influence of certain international actors in collusion with national factions who, inspired by some practically oriented ideology of terrorism, have organized collective action. Tests? None. But it is not important. His reasoning is focused on the fact that this explanation is the only possible one. There cannot be a phenomenon of accumulation of disruptive energy, there cannot be a politicization of that initially anomic malaise, the destructive energy of a society cannot have been activated on the sacred object of the economic model. They can't see that because the premise is simple: the model is excellent. And people love to shop. Therefore, they conclude, people love the model, even if it is confused at times. Who can hate what has given prosperity? That's what they wonder. And they return to zero, which for that matter is a return to the post-dictatorship political transition.

Therefore, they conclude, people love the model, even if it gets confused at times. Who can hate what has given prosperity? That's what they wonder. And they return to zero, which for that matter is a return to the post-dictatorship political transition.

Neoliberal blindness became political with the rise of neoliberal economists to political activity as the prophets and priests of Chile's extraordinary times of economic growth. Sebastián Piñera is not just a symbol of that process. It is the time and place of knotting the intellectual base of an era with the political system. Piñera is a cultural phenomenon, something much bigger than himself. Since before choosing him, no one doubted that he could use his power to do business. I was able to investigate it with qualitative studies from 2008. When I presented that study to political leaders of the time, they were surprised. One of them commented: "That sounds like Argentina." He was referring to an unhealthy pragmatism of voters who could consider the candidate a fraudster, but who at the same time could consider it necessary, despite ethical doubts, or was even seen as eventually necessary due to his reprehensible, but pragmatic and profit-oriented conduct. success. The country seemed to say: "If you have to sacrifice some minor values ​​to have money, welcome." Soon it would be the other way around. Macri would be the Piñera of Argentina. Chile has lived many lives in a few decades

The heart of our time, at least of the second decade of the 21st century, is the process of politicization of social unrest. Chile has exploded with intensity twice: in 2011 and in 2019. "Social earthquake", businessmen said about the first. They didn't say anything about the second. "Cataclysm" would be relevant as a term if we continue with the previous metaphor. From the first was born free education and a strong tax reform. Of the second we only know what has died: the 1980 Constitution, the austerity of the State, the commodification of social rights, the transitional elite. Or well, we do see something that has already been born, but that in itself is still nothing: the Constituent Convention. This process of destructuring the operational pillars of the Chilean society of political transition and neoliberalism is what I called "the collapse of the model" in 2011 in my presentation of Enade, an argument that was translated into the 2012 book with reissues in 2013. and 2021. I am talking about the politicization of malaise, because it is essential to understand that most of the time malaise remains like an inactive volcano because its main form of manifestation is anomie, social disintegration. It pierces the structures of society with it, but it does not explode because it lacks motive. It is a vague discomfort. This is how they described it in the 1998 UNDP Report. That report was going to be called The malaise of modernization but the government at the time (Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle) asked that the name be changed. It was called The Paradoxes of Modernization. It's like writing an extensive chronicle (in a book) about an excellent schoolteacher, great father of a family and extraordinary environmental activist named Fernando Suárez (I'm making this up, please, for the peace of mind of those who coincide with that name), who it turned out to be a psychopath who had kidnapped and murdered 30 women in 10 years. Well then. Then the chronicle would be called "The Gentleman Psychopath." But finally a more elusive name is preferred: “The paradoxes of a gentleman”. That was what happened. The discomfort was kept, not without comfort, in a good environment where it could cultivate its own development. So it was. It grew, germinated, one structure and another were born from it. And one fine day the possibility of historical realization of its outbreak gave birth to a new era, admired and dystopian, challenging and impossible, vertiginous and lethargic. It was the big bang. And from it millions of galaxies were to be born. But only one was born, the constituent galaxy. And in it reside all the demands, all the solutions.

The neoliberal economist, the neoliberal president is not capable of seeing any of this. Look at his survey. I have fallen, how can I go up? The government acts and after two or three breaths taken for a few days the data moves, goes up (let's imagine it goes up). The president (then, since he went up) insists with the successful appeal. A small explosion destroys the good moment and makes the hero defeated by nobody fall a little more. One fine day, in any case, they will ask if there is such a thing as malaise. And they will send a survey. Are you happy? That will be the question. They assume that if the majority say “no”, then there is discomfort. People, however, mostly answer yes. They scream fervently at their own incomprehension. "There it is, it's not discomfort, people are happy, stop screwing around." And we go back to the survey, to the grandchildren in Fantasyland, to the most visited morning show, we are repeatedly going to announce some good news.

Can discomfort come in the form of happiness? That should be asked by the judge to the expert.

“Yes”, answers the expert. Or should I answer that if I were an expert.

But the experts associated with the model and/or the President prefer to say “no”. “It is impossible”, they complement. "And therefore the people who say they are happy are mostly saying that society lacks discomfort," they will end up saying. A linear reflection, without considering the scale of the observed facts, without guiding concepts; it is not a reflection. It is something similar to a vomit. But coming from the experts of our era, from the economists, the argument gains plausibility or at least makes many people uneasy about what has been observed. Avoiding the mediation of concepts, these professionals do their own mediation. And the ones that are in the middle are no longer concepts, they are interests. And then comes the time to discuss the theory in the public space. Some even write a book about it. The neoliberal economist, who considers that philosophy and the social sciences are an intellectual derivative of socialism, or at least believes that they are failed sciences and reasoning; others are formidably convinced that, given the prevailing happiness, no one can sustain that there is malaise. There were those who were more elegant and said that the thesis of malaise in Chile is a theory. That argument was used to say that it was not a diagnosis; that is, that there was no evidence and that therefore it operated in the environment of an empty concept. Those who said that, Guzmán and Oppliger, were right. His criticism was born as a response to the book The collapse of the model. The problem is not understanding the status of a theory. They assumed that a theory was an inferior artefact, scientifically speaking, to a piece of data. And it is exactly the other way around. A bad theory is worse than a fact. But a good theory is far superior to one or many data. The theory feeds on observation and concepts, but it is neither observation nor concepts. It is a mediation with heuristic power. I have never made the theoretical repertoire with which I worked to construct the observation on discomfort explicit, I admit that. A couple of people have noticed it and have written to me and I have sent them the material. This was not the case for many other authors. Very few people (and almost no study center) asked me for an explanation of what was said. No one required the background and concepts. Every few years, trickle down, some researcher asked something. I must say, in any case, that in Mexican universities they did ask me and they asked me for some lectures on the matter; in Spain the same. The act of asking, among academics, must be one of the essential activities. There is no doubt that the works have a structure that makes it impossible to fully understand the intellectual process of the writer. If you get the chance to do it, why not ask? The colleagues who summoned me to meetings were divided into two: those who summoned me from an assistant to ask me how I had reached a conclusion (without, therefore, acknowledging that they were the ones who wanted to ask the question; but I must tell them to those people that the assistants always gossip about), and the researchers who called me to explain how and why my goals of growth in the sociological environment were truncated beforehand and to tell me to give up any attempt. A notable example was Vicente Espinoza, a sociologist of some relevance in Chile. When I came to work at the University of Santiago de Chile, it was rumored that my arrival was related to the opening of the sociology degree and other large projects. It is true that the idea was explored. But I came to the University of Santiago as an academic, not to specifically build any project. Vicente Espinoza called me on the phone (he works at the same university) and invited me to have a coffee to welcome me. The chivalry of the gesture surprised me. I couldn't cry with emotion, but almost. I went to the meeting. What would be my disappointment when he warned me: "I wanted to welcome you and tell you that none of your projects with which you arrive here will be fulfilled." I thanked him, got up and paid the bill. I have the lousy habit of paying the bill to my enemies. And also my friends. That ended when I was a presidential candidate, since then I haven't paid any bills, but because I couldn't.

Globalization and neoliberalism, which are not the same, but by intersection can operate together, have been great producers of conditions that accumulate social unrest as potential energy and that, at some point of politicization, generate explosions capable of devastating the structures that companies have given themselves for their administration. The malaise first liquefies the meaning, then ends with the foundations. The first moment is presented as a muted melody, the second turns out to be a roar.

Byung-Chul Han is a philosopher who writes analyzes of contemporary society, without any inductive anchorage. He doesn't do case studies, he doesn't cite political experiences. It will not write the name of Donald Trump on any page, nor the world wars, nor any election in a certain place. He is not analyzing (Han) any kind of political process of a political system; he is trying to understand a time. He is reflecting on classical authors of philosophy, but with a simple structure. Normally each chapter does not use more than one author, sometimes (rarely) a number of two or three. The plot always unfolds with subtlety. Do not confuse. I say it from now. I am not an intellectual follower of Han, I must say that I have great distances. But his work is solid and his thinking is very intelligent. I will say it in a way that will sound ironic and insulting. It is not true, however, that this is in my words: Han is the sociological and philosophical translation of the self-help books that abound in our time. And that is very important because those books are the main source of meaning of our time. It is necessary to take them seriously, of course at a higher level of analysis.

When Sebastián Piñera delivers information —behold the satanic mystery of his messages to the country—, said information escapes the realm of experience, because it is simply not an entity that lives in the process of time, but is only mere present of a being that does not know the present.

But let's get to the bottom. Han considers that we live in a society subject to acceleration and instantaneousness. In a society with these characteristics, a restriction to mere positivity is generated. That is, what is understood to exist is necessarily what is always present and visible. In this way, the present attacks the rest of the times (the past and the future), and the information remains outside the experiential field. This argument of Han's is very interesting. Any imbalance in the past-present-future triad seems to generate far-reaching aporias. In The Divine Comedy, Dante meets the father of a friend in Hell, he is Cavalcante del Cavalcanti (hereinafter Cavalcante), a nobleman who had embraced Epicurean currents of thought in the thirteenth century, a rationalist and materialist, therefore a heretic. He considered that atoms constituted all existing reality, in the tradition started by Democritus and consolidated by Epicurus. Cavalcante died when Dante was fifteen years old, and his son Guido was a great friend of Dante's, as well as a great poet and politician. Being one of the Guelph leaders, he married the daughter of the Ghibelline leader, not uncommon measures at the time to generate peace pacts. Along with Dante, he is the creator of Dolce stil novo, a category that refers to a modification of religious literature with a more subjective twist. The truth is that, when Dante arrives to talk with the father of Guido's wife, the Ghibelline leader Farinata degli Uberti, Cavalcante will appear, who has recognized Dante and is desperate to learn that his son's friend has managed to get there, but not his son. “If you go through this blind prison by high-witted grace, my son where is he? And why doesn't he go with you?" Dante replies: “I don't come here on my behalf; the one, who waits there, take me here; whom perhaps your Guido had in contempt”. Dante has targeted Virgil. But Cavalcante despairs over the use of the verb, since Dante said "had" and therefore assumes that he is dead. This raises a crucial question. "Has my son died?" That's what the father asks. But it implies something else: the dead do not know the present. That is what interests us, is what is relevant. Or at least that the dead who are in hell have no right to know the present. Because? Because if not remembering the past is unfortunate and painful, if not knowing the future is normal but distressing; It turns out that not knowing the present is the greatest tragedy imaginable, the one with the greatest consequences, the one that can cause despair or, even worse, the ominous action of those who do not know what they are doing. Well, Han was saying that we live in a society where the present attacks the future and the past. But what if the ruler is unaware of the present? What happens if the ruler is dead and precisely because of this he does not know the present? This is what is disturbing. Here is another derivative of Piñera's pornographic character and of a typology that must be paid attention to: the idea of ​​a pornographic ruler is relevant because time will necessarily be suppressed in that action. And it will not be suppressed as the medieval Church guides the human being to eternity, nor will it do so as postmodernity will guide us to the ephemeral. The pornographer is an enemy of the idea of ​​history. It is not its antithesis, it is its dissolution. And again the concepts must be specified. It is not its dissolution like someone who dissolves powdered milk in water. It is a dissolution by mere fading, it is something like the exact opposite of a philosopher's stone, something that can transmute what exists into nothing.

When Sebastián Piñera delivers information —behold the satanic mystery of his messages to the country—, said information escapes the realm of experience, because it is simply not an entity that lives in the process of time, but is only mere present of a being that does not know the present.

The only excuse Piñera had left was to know the present, since it is only present.

But it doesn't, because it doesn't know what's going on around it.

This is how his photography was born in Plaza Baquedano; “in the oval”, as the carabinieri used to say when passing by.

Piñera is obsessed with ovals. She wants to sit on them. He did it in the Oval Room of the White House. He did it at the feet of Baquedano. I leave this trifle at the service of psychology or psychiatry professionals. Or to the people who have explored the human soul in all its forms.

For the neoliberal technocrat, information is a function of performance. And as such the information is merely present. For this reason it is very difficult to apply it beyond the specificity of a time; its expiration is guaranteed because it is pure context, but it is null in so much time. In that sense, politics today has that feature. Piñera is the son of this premise, but also one of the political figures who channeled strong criticism against the President has the same trait: it is Pamela Jiles. Political pornography is radical presenteeism. Both characters, on two sides of the phenomenon (one as a technocrat and the other as a show-woman), represent the totally ephemeral character, but at the same time caustic, that is, capable of destroying, capable of drilling, which has information without scope experiential. And they understand (both) that in this path of political action the forms of use of information will define a result. Only that, it is true, but it is not little. Both look for the result and assume that his caustic character is more of a power than a threat. But, of course, the problem is that the equation has a temporality: in the short term, what is corrosive is a force against its rivals, but in the medium and long term, corrosion affects the very foundations.

Information, within the framework of a technocratic action, exists only to unfold “for itself”. The information has to produce something and then it disappears from the field of experience, we have nothing left of it. That is very typical of the current condition, the postmodern condition, and that is a characteristic of the pornographic condition of our time.

If the other is mere merchandise, if the other people are only a fetish that is in a market, if standardization is the rule, the other becomes simply a mirror of one, and all experience with the other is not more than a new repetition of the experience we have with ourselves. This is what is called “the equalization of narcissism”. An enormous difficulty is consolidated: escaping from the self turns out to be equivalent to climbing a mountain.

Narcissism is the condition of the age. It is a great mutation of our time. In this Piñera is not alone. The entire political system suffers from it, it is a condition of political performance. If you don't have narcissism, you'll have to inject it to survive. But, of course, there are exaggerations. Pinera is one. Pamela Jiles is another. Gabriel Boric is another. Daniel Jadue was another (dysfunctional). But Piñera is of a very particular narcissism, more radically childish and ridiculous than anyone else. He has turned all other members of society into a mirror, his mirror, where he tries to see himself.

We come from a 20th century that, from the point of view of the mythical vision, is a Faustian century, it is a century in which we live effort and experience, pleasure and tragedy; to discover the great power we have. It is the century in which we live the hope of that power and the horror of it. We went to take the fire away from the gods. We did it. And then we were our own destroyer gods. We killed the gods and finally we punished ourselves. We eliminate the gods not to avoid our pain, but only to modify the subject that propitiates it. We have known the great power and we live the evil of that power. Science, technology and the atomic bomb are the great symbols of that. It was a “Promethean” century. We leave the gods defenseless.

We know what Prometheus' punishment was. We could imagine the various forms that this punishment would imply for a humanity with such daring. But that was not the historical drift. The play had an unexpected twist. Or did someone expect that after a triumphant Prometheus, epically and tragically, a thin and fragile Narcissus could come as the next stage? The 21st century has given us the great scandal of the self.

Narcissism, remember, is a condition that includes a pathological element. Narcissism is a loss of awareness of reality. Not all psychiatric disorders have this feature. Narcissism is born from a weak self-esteem that is fortified by excessive self-importance and a lack of empathy. Tolerance for criticism is almost nil, but his psychic energy can be raised to maintain the cover that prevents the narcissistic wound from being left in the open. Narcissism directs a lot of energy to the construction of its own representation. And in this process of construction of a representation there is a paradox: on the one hand the representation has a short yield, but for the same reason this condition can generate a general triumph of the self over reality.

The “short yield” is the description that allows me to point out something simple: Narciso does not go beyond his reflection, his image in the lagoon is enough for him. Narcissus can't get very far like that. There is only him and his mirror figure. Hamlet no longer needs the ghost of his father, the ghost of himself is enough for him. But in this self-referential and masturbatory exercise, Narciso is capable of becoming the exchange value of all reality. He and his image can handle everything. Sebastián Piñera believes that his message is transparent because he identifies his own interpretation with the image of reality that anyone else can have. This is formidably illustrated in the state visit he made to the United Kingdom in October 2010. The emblematic miners trapped in the San José Mine had recently been rescued and Piñera was enjoying his moment of greatest fame and prestige. The rescue had had an epic component and also a television one. It had been a complete success. It was his first year in government and perhaps it was his most solemn moment, Piñera traveled to the United Kingdom and met with Queen Elizabeth. It will sound ironic, but it was October 18. And surely it was one of the most important days of his life. Make no mistake, it is full of authorities from republics who directly or indirectly admire the ancient monarchies. All powerful loves to have their power guaranteed and the monarchy, without being able to give absolute certainties, is the closest thing to it. The truth is that that day Sebastián Piñera gave Queen Isabel a stone from the San José mine. What stone? None very important. A stone. It is true that in the Atacama desert there are very interesting stones, many of a volcanic nature that keep life inside them, others sidereal, which arrived with meteorites. It is an interesting place. But it is important to note that the President took any stone and turned it into a gift for Queen Elizabeth. Someone will think that he wanted to offend her, but no. That would be thinking well of the President. That behavior was simply narcissism. He assumed that the magnitude of the feat promoted by his government, rescuing 33 miners from the depths of the desert, was so great that no one in the world, not even the queen of the last great empire, could resist admiring and touching any stone from the place of the facts. He also showed the message sent by the miners again, in front of the press. He read it again, while his (fanciest) wife begged him not to. The President did not hesitate. He reread it in its entirety. And he exposed it again, protected by a plastic envelope with which food is wrapped to store in the refrigerator. The queen scene is formidable. Various photographs show her alone, in a corner observing the stone, looking for a shine, an exceptionality, a particularity; to understand the reason for the gift. It is undoubtedly the least valuable gift he has ever received. Of course, he doesn't care too much. But if Piñera managed to generate in her an enormous strangeness, what was the grace of the stone? He didn't get it. The stone was him. Nothing but him.

“Don't show it Sebastián” says Cecilia Morel. The phrase could serve to stop an exhibitionist: "Don't show it," she insists, embarrassed. But Sebastián remains solid in his ominous conviction; proud of his speech in English, of his role, of his conquest of the desert, of the Hollywood movie to come; proud to imagine his brother José full of rage for his success, for his triumph, for his greatness. So it was that on a London night he simply pulled out his weapon of choice, showed it off, and demanded the global publicity he felt he deserved. He did it many times. He distributed stones around the world, showed the paper around the world. But this time it was special. It was in the old British kingdom, ancient, evil and pure. There he went with his stones, like the gypsies in One Hundred Years of Solitude, like a traveling salesman; after all, what has been. What was in both demos? What was on the paper, what on the stone? His own name, his penis, his successes, his good luck, his daring; everything he values ​​about him.

Sebastián began and ended with himself. Like the medieval serpent, it bit its own tail. With much less elegance Pamela Jiles would have said “Chinese lock”. We will prefer to quote the uroboros and forget in an unknown way the lewd references. This book, despite the title, is not written as a provocation.

Sebastián began and ended with himself. Like the medieval serpent, it bit its own tail. With much less elegance Pamela Jiles would have said “Chinese lock”. We will prefer to quote the uroboros and forget in an unknown way the lewd references. This book, despite the title, is not written as a provocation. If you conjugate that verb it's just an accident. But back to the President.

Not only does Queen Elizabeth enjoy the Chilean pride stone, but James Cameron also received another. How did Sebastian distribute them? Did you sit down to look at them and select them according to your preferences? It is something thinkable. But how to distinguish the beauty and value of pure common stones? It is not unexpected that the queen had called the Prime Minister and, in the midst of State conversations, could ask him if he had understood the gift from the Chilean President. It would not be strange if, restless and incredulous at the strangeness of the scene, the queen had called an academic from a geology faculty who could tell her if perhaps there was some mysterious, unexpected peculiarity in such a stone. A queen, you know, will always think that behind the gift of a stone there is a priceless mystery, a noble and beautiful gesture, a glittering story of blood and slaves. But not. Or if. Here was a glittering story of workers being buried alive, but the stone was worthless. The court geologist sure ratified it. We imagine his phlegmatic tone, his neat clothes, the resounding and deep, but almost silent voice of the court geologist. "I have investigated the stone your majesty." And she, very interested, responds prudently and without excitement: "Anything to highlight?" The man looks straight ahead and affirms softly: "It is undoubtedly a stone."

Sebastian had let a queen down.

No one can dispute it: he is a man who surpasses himself.

Byung-Chul Han affirms that eros sets in motion a voluntary lack of self-recognition. Love and sexuality are subject to positivity, performance and permanent exposure. A pornographic being is required for this world; that is, an unwavering energy relentlessly oriented towards exposure, an incombustible psychic energy. This is the great trademark of President Piñera, a man who flies helicopters, planes, plays soccer, tennis, dives, makes laws, goes to Fantasyland, submits the right to its designs, in short. One thing is certain. Everything does it wrong. But it does. And that's a lot of difference in the neoliberal era. He is an active, powerful, capable being, brimming with formal performance, always breaking records, always proving that he can push the next frontier, even if it isn't necessary, even if it's counterproductive.

Piñera's pornography can border on snuffing. This category of movies is speculative. There is no evidence of anyone actually filming murder or torture porn works and commercializing them. Rather it has been an impact strategy. With Piñera in the snuff, I mean his infinite tolerance that he shows in the limits of damage and obscenity. Apparently, when the situation turns pornographic and/or violent, he is able to calmly resist and continue in the world as if nothing had happened. In his government, all world records for eye damage were broken. 18 days after the social outbreak there were 180 injured with ocular trauma in Chile. In the Palestinian-Israeli conflict the record was 154 in six years. A month after the outbreak, the figure continued its surprising growth: 285 eyes. The history of the protests and street confrontations tells of a constant occurrence of lost eyes. In “El herido”, Miguel Hernández (a work published in 1938) symbolizes the Republican battle in the civil war through some verses that were popularized almost forty years later by Joan Manuel Serrat under the title “Para la libertad”. In those verses, the description of the bodies damaged by weapons and the missing eyes is heartbreaking, but it is also a sign of hope.

For freedom, I bleed, I fight, I live

For freedom, my eyes and my hands

Like a carnal tree, generous and captive

I give the surgeons

For freedom I feel more hearts

What sands in my chest: my veins foam

And I enter the hospitals, and I enter the cotton

As in lilies

Because where empty sockets dawn

She will put two stones of future look

And it will make new arms and new legs grow

In the cut meat.

The empty basins that dawn are precisely the space where freedom will place the stones of the future, from the look of the future. This in Chile is surprising. There are two emblematic cases in the protests, a man and a woman, who lost both eyes, who became blind: Fabiola Campillai (41 years old) and Gustavo Gatica (23 years old). The first, as I write this text, has gathered the signatures to be a candidate for the Senate of the Republic. His political speech has generated controversy in recent months when he has stated that everything must be burned and destroyed. What could you expect? She got up one day and walked amid clashes to catch a bus to go to Carozzi's for work. He received a tear gas bomb in the face, which damaged his entire skull, both eyes, which has meant dozens of hours of surgery. His eye injuries could not be healed. Nor the wounds in his soul. I have not seen any reference to support from the company where I worked. Gustavo Gatica, for his part, continues to study psychology. The day that a Carabineros agent fired the pellets that blinded him a few meters away, Gatica was taking pictures at the protest. The word “photo” combines two Greek words: attic and light. It is the light in the dark. Gustavo Gatica's story will be marked by this duality. But when reading it in various interviews, it is very pristine that the young man displays clarity more than reproducing the shadows to which he has been condemned. Solid and with surprising wisdom, Gustavo Gatica allows us to ask ourselves who has gone blind after the explosion: him or Sebastián Piñera.

The figure of the author of the aforementioned poem, Miguel Hernández, is not without relevance. The persecution of his pen manifested itself in accusations as high-sounding and absurd as the murder of José Antonio Primo de Rivera (which was a firing squad). But the victim would ultimately be him, on the run and systematically detained, until the cold of the jail drove his 31-year-old lungs to an unjust end. When he died in Alicante, Vicente Aleixandre accompanied him. The poet and friend could have noticed that Miguel, dead, could not close his eyes. That is how, at that moment, he wrote a beautiful poem (“En la muerte de Miguel Hernández”) that begins like this:

I don't know. It was without music.

Your big blue eyes

open they stayed under the ignorant void,

sky of dark slab,

total mass that slowly descends and vaults you,

body alone, immense,

unique today on Earth,

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that with you squeezed by the suns escapes.

The death of Hernández was perhaps the most painful mourning of the republic and of the poets of that time, giants like mountains. Miguel was stubborn, he always returned to his town, he exposed himself to arrests. Neruda managed to get him out of prison in Madrid, but he was arrested again. Neruda also wrote a poem about his death, a poem full of vengeful energy, of telluric strength against those who dared to attack Miguel. The following is the poem, strictly speaking, it is a part of the poem.

You came to me directly from the Levant. you brought me

goat herder, your wrinkled innocence,

the scholastic of old pages, a smell

to Fray Luis, to orange blossoms, to the burned dung

on the mountains, and in your mask

the cereal roughness of mowed oats

and a honey that measured the earth with your eyes.

You also brought the nightingale in your mouth.

A mockingbird spotted with oranges, a thread

of incorruptible song, of leafless strength.

Ay, boy, in the light came the gunpowder

and you, with a nightingale and a rifle, walking

Under the moon and under the sun of battle.

You know, my son, how much I couldn't do, you know

that for me, of all poetry, you were the fire

blue.

Today on earth I put my face and listen to you,

I hear you, blood, music, dying honeycomb.

I'm not alone since you died. I'm with the ones

They're looking for you.

I am with those who will one day come to avenge you.

You will recognize my steps among those

that will fall on the chest of Spain

crushing Cain to bring us back

the buried faces.

Let those who killed you know that they will pay with blood.

Let those who tormented you know that they will see me

one day.

Let the damned know that today they include your name

in his books, the Damasos, the Gerardos, the sons

of a bitch, silent accomplices of the executioner,

that your martyrdom will not be erased, and your death

It will fall on all its moon of cowards.

And to those who denied you in their rotten laurel,

on American soil, the space you cover

with your fluvial crown of bled lightning,

let me give them scornful oblivion

because they wanted to mutilate me with your absence.

Why did I stop here? Because that is. I have stopped here. In the Spanish civil war, in the dead, in the felled meat. I do it out of concern, to ask myself a question, almost a syllogism.

If neoliberalism and Piñera only think about what is visible, present, without context.

If the deaths, torture and injuries were so visible, so obvious.

How is it that the President who indulges in mere presence has not been able to see such violence?

The answer is overwhelmingly simple. It is perhaps the problem of the answer, which is simple and forceful. The President is blind. By far he is blinder than those who lost their eyes. His darkness is made of frustration, of a damaged and prominent self, of a restlessness that corrodes him, of a deformation that torments him. The President has gone blind. It lives on the edge of the shadows, not knowing where is far and where is near. His words have been hollowed out, they have ceased to mean. His presence is just impertinence. All of this is true. But his eyes, the worst is in them, because his eyes have fallen in battle, even though he formally sees, even though no one has shot him. His eyes no longer know how to distinguish what is true from what is false, they do not distinguish the blue sky from the clouds and their obstacles.

The President is blind. By distance he is blinder than those who lost their eyes. His darkness is made of frustration, of a damaged and prominent self, of a restlessness that corrodes him, of a deformation that torments him. The President has gone blind. It lives on the edge of the shadows, not knowing where is far and where is near. His words have been hollowed out, they have ceased to mean. His presence is just impertinence. All of this is true. But his eyes, the worst is in them, because his eyes have fallen in battle, even though he formally sees, even though no one has shot him. His eyes no longer know how to distinguish what is true from what is false, they do not distinguish the blue sky from the clouds and their obstacles.

The frustrated blind man seeks an act that avenges his own discomfort. No one has done anything to him, but all at the same time have marked a wound that does not stop bleeding. Man suffers, man in the spiritual form of a damaged child who does not forgive, who does not overcome; suffer. And his answer is the wound of the rest, the need to socialize the losses. If I already lack all truth, let no one have it. And he works hard at it.

What is the solution to your darkness?

Speak.

He sits in an armchair with the techniques learned at Harvard, already old, with three synonyms, three words that mean the same thing, three different signifiers for three meanings; he sits there slouched and, between each tick, sketches out a speech. And in that gesture he tries to elaborate that wound, he tries to overcome it. And always left unsatisfied. For each painful omission, for each achievement of repression, a tick jumps across the screen. This is how he speaks, without communicating, without connecting with anyone. He speaks to the stone of the San José mine, to his enemies, to the stock market. Speaks. To God's greater misfortune.

Sebastián Piñera made sixteen speeches on a national network after the social outbreak of October 2019 and before the pandemic (March 2020). It was there that he transformed into an emblem of his speech the thesis of a powerful and implacable enemy, which would become a failed mantra of his discursive efforts to support existing police action. This is how the only moment occurs when Piñera agrees to work in the face of what is not visible, and it is to justify what is visible and evident: the deranged violence with which the protesters were being treated.

Sebastián Piñera's speeches, each time, lit the bonfire.

This is known.

He spoke and the fires began, the burned city.

Burnted silver, Piglia would say.

It is a conviction of Sebastián Piñera's advisors that his constant speeches only generate problems. It is not only because of the sophisticated problems of leaving the government's spokesperson irrelevant in the face of the permanent appearance of the president, but simply because of something more pedestrian: he does it wrong. In his first government, El Mercurio published that some analyzes carried out by communication experts indicated that the weeks in which Piñera intervened the most, his approval normally fell. The correlation may exist and may still be spurious. But it is a settled conviction. With horror, many people on the right saw that the first days and weeks after the outbreak, Sebastián Piñera spoke almost every day on the national channel. That was how Piñera configured one of the worst combinations in politics: elimination of distance with mistrust. Because, of course, a politician who reduces the distance with the people, or ultimately with his television audience, can generate empathy and affection. But if it is a subject that produces distrust, nobody wants to feel close to it. The reduction of the distance is also not very erotic, since the formula of eroticism lies in the insinuation and not in the explicitness. An image of fully nude male or female bodies is less erotic than semi-nude exposure of the body. The minor, delicate obstacle is simply an addition of desire, of affectivity, of the need to search. In this sense, eroticism has a dimension, a depth, that no direct explanation can give. Pornography is the end of eroticism. And if we want to apply this to politics then, we are talking about pornography, in politics —pornpolitics—, is the end of all forms of erotic possibility, of all possibility of distancing, it is the absence of the sidelong glance, it is the impossibility of pause.

In the same Enade session where I had the opportunity to give my lecture —in which I announced the crisis of legitimacy and results of the Chilean economic model as the basis of the 2011 protests— Moisés Naím spoke. I do not have a political harmony with the Venezuelan intellectual, but I do consider it an extraordinary contribution to reflection. Political differences in this regard have never mattered to me. I also admire Arturo Fontaine (former director of the CEP) and Óscar Godoy (former director of the CEP survey) and Augusto Merino; the same as Manuel Antonio Garretón, Rodrigo Baño, Gabriel Salazar, in short. I return to Naim. He exhibited early that day. It corresponded to me at approximately 12:30 p.m. I was walking around the place while I saw Naím take the podium. Standing in front of the microphone, he said something like this (the video is not available): "I have brought you four images so that we can reflect on the present." After a few seconds and while the presenter continued speaking, the room began to fill with a murmur. Since it was understood that the writer had “brought” four images, everyone was looking at the screens for those images, to understand. But nothing appeared. The murmurs pointed out: "The photos are not there", "you have to notify him", in short. Suddenly there was a certainty. Naím told us that she had brought those images, but in reality we all had them in our minds. Tiananmen Square and the man confronting the tank need no reminder. His mere description illuminated the appearance of that image, not only in the brain, but possibly in the soul. What's that? Eroticism, distance at the service of the approach.

The great beauty lies in that distance. Somehow, it is always disappointing to see a pictorial work in person. After loving her from a distance, one fine day you arrive at the museum where she lives and, after a few erratic movements, you arrive and suddenly she appears before you. There she is, all of her, spotless. But there is no way to be happy. Total presence is a kind of death. Only when we begin to appreciate everything we need to understand it, only when we see how many limitations that totality has, only then do we feel that work again as we knew it in a book, in a documentary, in a story by your grandfather.

There are thousands of pianists in the world who are capable of playing hundreds of pieces of music, note for note, with absolute perfection, either from memory or from sheet music. But a performance by Evgeny Kissin is like no other. Or our Claudio Arrau. At the first note, at the first hit on the piano, something submerges us in an unknown ocean and we feel that since the dawn of time a voice is unraveling that tries to give a fundamental message. And there we are, absorbed, waiting to understand. And the expectation disturbs us the same as it makes us happy. The message arrives and does not arrive. It never finishes being consummated, but it doesn't go extinct either. It is a river, it is a tree, it is something that grows, it is something that has never moved. That is the strength of art. And behind a work lies a power: the rite that builds meaning. A work is always part of the most important human experience: ritual. Our modern institutions are weakened derivatives of the rite, they are shallower, they are more functional. They exist to occupy the residue of ritual power that, from so much turning beliefs into projects, gradually diluted, but which remained somewhere hidden in the institutions. And it is thus that the engine of an institution is made of magic, of mystery.

What happens if a leader lacks ritual?

Everything burns. The energy of society finds no peace. Lévi-Strauss explained that the rite channeled the energies of society. But, what happens when the society does not have rites, or when they are few, as it is in contemporary societies? The truth is simple: the rite continues to exist, not so much in ceremonies as in meeting instances and in those actions where an active power suggests that the world has something more than the function to fulfill. That is why we feel proud when we see a sacrifice, a total, disinterested delivery. Or when we see a perfect, fine, elegant gesture that shows that the form wishes to accompany the background, or to qualify it.

A rite can last three seconds in the middle of combat.

I'm going to ask you to go look for an image in your mind. It's 1974, boxing, Kinshasa, Ali versus Foreman, what has been called the greatest fight in history. Remember Mohammed Ali, he had returned from sanction when he had been punished for being against and refusing to go to the Vietnam war. Not only that, but also for stating in a very intense press conference, that it would destroy part of his career, but it would also make him a hero:

When I get up in the morning, the one who insults me, the one who takes my seat on the bus, the one who doesn't let me enter a place, it's not the Vietcong, it's the Americans. When I try to go in to eat something in the middle of the afternoon, the one who won't let me eat in the restaurant, or leaves me in a relegated place, is not the Vietcong, it's the Americans. They are the ones who have made their government house a white house to deny everything black that we have, it is not the Vietcong; the Vietcong are not my enemies; I am not going to go to war against the Vietcong, if I had to make a war, I would have to make it against the Americans.

It was April 28, 1967 and it was clear that a sanction would come against Mohammed Ali. The boxing myth speech reminds us of Achilles against Agamemnon in the Iliad:

I have not come to fight forced by the warlike Trojans, since they do not seem guilty of anything to me — they never took my cows or my horses, nor did they ever destroy the harvest in the fertile Phtia, breeder of men, because many dark mountains and the roaring sea separate us—but we follow you, great insolent, to give you the pleasure of avenging Menelaus and you, dog-faced, on the Trojans.

Mohammed Ali was serving his three-year jail sentence. American society was divided on the matter, and as the war became more unpopular, Ali's weight grew. It was probably that which determined that a judge reviewed the case in 1970 and determined that the sanction was arbitrary, releasing him. Mohammed Ali's ability was much more than the ring, but above all it was the harmony between what was happening inside the battle arena and what was happening outside. It is not surprising that his greatest work has been a combination of all these traits. By 1974, a fight had been organized in Zaire, sponsored by its President, Mobutu Sese Seko. The fight was simply to be a great African milestone, in which the two greatest in boxing history fought for the title. Foreman came from destroying Joe Frazier and, it was assumed, he would do the same with Ali. The dispute would be called "The Rumble in the Jungle" ("The jungle fight") and was accompanied by an extraordinary musical event associated with great artists of African descent. James Brown sang "Say It Loud — I'm Black and I'm Proud." It was all supposed to take place in September 1974, but Foreman suffered a foot injury and the contest was delayed. The increase in time only gave Mohammed Ali more power: training with Zairians, running through the streets with a political speech, Ali did not stop growing. The dictator, who had accepted the fight in his country to whitewash his image, began to worry and decided not to broadcast the fight in Zaire. But the country burned. There was a black who vindicated the blacks and another who was silent. It was clear who to support.

The fight is part of the myth. Mohammed Ali didn't contest any rounds in his iconic high-speed, high-throttle style. You have to remember that they were both giants (over six feet two and around two hundred pounds), but Ali moved like someone smaller, more agile. However, he decided to simply wait out Foreman's blows and destroy his psyche when he saw that they did not affect him. It was crazy. Foreman had the heaviest hand ever seen and, in fact, when he returned to boxing two decades later his hand was still capable of winning fights without a body prepared for high competition. But Ali tolerated it. The configuration that closed the myth occurred in the eighth round. Throughout the fight, Mohammed Ali had limited himself to receiving and generating the occasional counterpunch. Foreman hit so hard that he was exhausted by the fifth round. The climate was also very hostile to him. At every punch from Ali the crowd erupted in support and throughout the fight they chanted “Ali, kill him”. There was a boxer versus a global leader, a strong and powerful beast versus a myth. There were fourteen seconds left for the eighth round to end. It didn't seem like anything could happen. It was a tangled, rough and dirty fight. Suddenly Ali comes out of the ropes, where he had stayed to live throughout the fight. Land three full blows, but not powerful first. With them he leaves the defensive position. He turns and leaves Foreman towards the ropes. In that instant he strikes twice in milliseconds, first a furious left, then a right. And at this moment the magic arises. Foreman staggers. There are two seconds between those blows and the fall of the defending champion. In those two seconds the artist, the prophet and the priest appear at the same time. Mohammed Ali has Foreman crouched in agony in front of him. You can and should finish it off. The champion staggers, he looks lost, he is waiting for the last blow. Thirteen seconds to go, then twelve, finally eleven. In that time Foreman has described a semicircular path in the ring, seeking to support himself. At all times Ali's right hand is ready to finish off. What would I have done, what would you have done? Finish hitting him, close the moment, push him into the abyss. Is human. You are facing a monster and you have managed to get your hands on it, but you are afraid of it, of course, you have seen it destroy Frazier. And Frazier was a wonder. But Mohammed Ali decided something very different: he will not dirty the scene with one more punch. He simply followed the sequence, holding back his final blow, and when he saw the giant approaching the ground, he just turned on his axis and didn't look at him anymore. There were eleven seconds left, just the time for the count. The magic had come in the form of inaction. After speaking, after hitting, after defending himself, at the key moment, Mohammed Ali decides to watch from above; Don't hit, wait, enjoy the beauty of your rival's fall. It does not define the combat, but awaits its destiny.

What would Sebastián Piñera have done?

I would have hit him three times in those two seconds. And who knows if he would have already spoken to the referee.

Ali understands that his message is made of pride, that Afro-descendant crying is not the key, but his arrogance. She has changed the power structure, forever. They are not facing a boxer; he is an artist and he is a social reformer.

Mohammed Ali did not use three synonyms to communicate, like Piñera did. He didn't learn any communication lessons at Harvard. It only united the rite, the myth and the political dispute. He had the courage to go against the current and fight for justice. And he always understood that meaningful action is made not only of what is earned, not only of strength, but also of the art of rest and retirement.

I used to always ask my mother: Why is everything good white? Why is Jesus white? Why are they all white at the last supper? Why are the angels, the pope and the virgin white? Mom, I asked him: When we die do we go to heaven? Of course, he told me. And why are there no blacks in the sky? Or is it that we blacks are taking the photos of the white angels? Or maybe while the whites are in heaven, we blacks are in the kitchen preparing milk with honey. And I wondered why I would have to die to go to heaven and why I couldn't have a nice house now, why I couldn't have a delicious steak now. Why was Tarzan, the king of the jungle, white? And the white one is there and can talk to animals, but the black ones who are in Africa and have been there for thousands of years cannot talk to animals. Those questions I asked. Why is Miss USA always white? Why do pretty women have to be white? And why is heaven's cake white and chocolate cake devil's cake? I always wondered why everything is white. And, of course, the President lived in the White House.

Mohammed Ali did not use three synonyms to communicate, like Piñera did. He didn't learn any communication lessons at Harvard. It only united the rite, the myth and the political dispute. He had the courage to go against the current and fight for justice. And he always understood that meaningful action is made not only of what is earned, not only of strength, but also of the art of rest and retirement. He understood that prison was part of his message. While Ali becomes Africa and blackness, Foreman cowers from inhabiting a world that surpasses him in meaning and ends up becoming the servant of white people.

Mohammed Ali made eroticism out of rites and made emancipation out of its power. Piñera arrives at his first government handing over a flash drive with files, examining his ministers like a professor and promising work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The frenzy of the sales and post-sales service, the logic of the operation in the market and its seduction. But he ends up becoming a disposable and rotten leader. His performance speech has no backyard, no mystery; it lacks everything that is not a result. And that is not governing, that is not power. Sebastián Piñera transitions to porn not from the show (that's Pamela Jiles), not from sexual desire (that's Karol Dance). He does it from an unfortunate incapacity: symbolic blindness, metaphysical blindness, spiritual blindness.

What is the first thing a Sebastián Piñera minister should do? Insert the flash drive that the President has given you into your computer. And what should you do next? Study what is there. And the third? Being put to a test. The minister cannot pose a challenge, cannot generate a longing. The minister must understand a country that the President has defined as “the country”. There are no windows, there are no paths on the street, there is no reflection, there is no stress. The only certainty is the certainty of the President. And the only performance is to respond adequately in meetings with the President. And help the boss in the polls.

But one day porn was exposed. In the heart of Santiago, one of the first scratched after the explosion simply said: "Piñera eats pizza." The scene says it all. It was news all over the world. The President ate at a pizza parlor while the city burned everywhere, while four billion dollars in damage occurred. Whoever wrote that graffiti returned the pornography. Here's the scene. Do you want a zoom to the genital? “Piñera eats pizza”. Sums it up. No more is needed. It is the photograph of your indolence, your evasion, your indifference. "Piñera eats pizza" means nothing. It's just pornographic.

In porn there is really no sexuality, it is simply the conversion of sexuality into merchandise, it is the fetishism of that merchandise. Under these conditions, politics becomes tourism. You have to go through the district, the country, without delay, efficiently. You have to show off. What is the supermarket? The place where I go, as a candidate, to show that I am like everyone else. I do it the day before the election. Don't forget me, please, unformed masses. There is no mystery, there should not be. We want a clear north and south, transparency, complexity. And if you divert the path? Is prohibited. Everything is planned as it should be. With the silent numbers of a construct called Chile. Think you. He is a tourist, he goes to those places crowded with Chinese, Japanese, all kinds of tourists taking pictures, talking excitedly, rushing through four countries in six hotel nights. Suddenly we got tired of following the tour. Suddenly we strayed. we lose ourselves And we arrive at the “wrong” side. Suddenly, walking through small streets, you have come out right in front of the Roman Colosseum. You turn and there it is, it catches you, it subjugates you, you don't believe it, it must be a mistake. But it is. There it is, on the edge, imposing, talking about its history, without any tourists. You have been transported seventeen hundred years. You don't know what, but you've understood something. Something has remained in your heart. You will remember it forever. "Remember", which means "go through the heart again".

But no. It's not possible. The President can't. What happens today (he wonders) that there are no oranges in the orange yard? They answer that it is not the season. But, he will say, we will record a video. And here the porn begins, again. Bring oranges from the supermarket, tie them up, pretend that they inhabit that tree. Opt for imposture, for fake orgasm.

But one day porn was exposed. In the heart of Santiago, one of the first scratched after the explosion simply said: "Piñera eats pizza." The scene says it all. It was news all over the world. The President ate at a pizza parlor while the city burned everywhere, while four billion dollars in damage occurred. Whoever wrote that graffiti returned the pornography. Here's the scene. Do you want a zoom to the genital? “Piñera eats pizza”. Sums it up. No more is needed. It is the photograph of your indolence, your evasion, your indifference. "Piñera eats pizza" means nothing. It's just pornographic.