Sentimental Cartography of Ongoing Brutalization

This is the first installment of “Sentimental Cartography of Ongoing Brutalization”, an editorial agitation proposal for the convulsive times that our anesthetized sensibilities are going through.

We must have the courage to be radically alive,
and not be negotiating survival.
—Ailton Krenak

I
How do we recover the poetic force of death¹? How do we invoke a review of the racial archives that are sustained within the ruins of the living body? In other words, how do we access the deepest memories that compose our experience of the world as we know it? To collectivize, in a profound act of intimacy, not only the tools of excavation but also the findings.

If the current configuration of the world is being attacked by different forms of administering and defending fascism as a technology of death and its desires, as asserted by the Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe, then we are at a moment when the ethical, political, poetic, and aesthetic are compromised by forms of dispossession, the fragility of the subject, and compulsive mass narcissism. As this occurs, it seems that resistances and their dissemination fade away, preventing forms of radical imagination from making themselves present both in thought and action. It seems that the only way to experience resistance is through consumption, the creation of merchandising, and the reinforcement of the logic of compulsive overexposure on social media. Yielding to the modern-colonial architecture that materializes from time and speed to maintain the logistics of contemporary capitalism that manages and programs both death and violence, producing destiny, while genocide consolidates as an aesthetic project on a planetary scale.

Perhaps it is time to invoke committed pessimism with transmutation, which, in turn, stands alongside the possibilities to create, the paths to chart, and the lines of flight that continue to emerge

The brutalization of this world configuration opposes any emancipatory project and rather captures, twists, and conditions its existence. Producing indifferent subjectivities, incapable of being affected beyond the superficiality of consuming bodies and experiences, thus preventing the invention of the social from being driven by anything other than cruelty, despair, and fear. Violence has never had such lubricated channels for its legitimization. In this scenario, perhaps embracing the possibilities we have to deal with this end, which intersects with several other ends of the world, may allow us to recover the radical force to imagine, feel, share, and risk. A sort of hacked machine through the participation and collaboration of us in constant rehearsal, with all the openness for error and the unbreakable optimism that would entail risking radical forms of existence in conjunction.

The body, language, territory, and thus our ways of thinking, doing, feeling, sharing, building, resisting, and defending are completely conditioned by current forms of violence, as current as artificial intelligence, the trivialization of control, the tokenization of desire, and the dispossession of the political. Diverting our attention and diluting our sensitivity to the intensities of our time, interrupting the possibilities of connecting with multiple forms of life and their full expansion.

In this scenario, perhaps embracing the possibilities we have to deal with this end, which intersects with several other ends of the world, may allow us to recover the radical force to imagine, feel, share, and risk

How do we prevent the reactivation of the plantation and colonial regime? How do we interrupt the brutalization of the world? How do we allow ourselves to reinvent the social and its realization? Perhaps it is time to invoke committed pessimism with transmutation, which, in turn, stands alongside the possibilities to create, the paths to chart, and the lines of flight that continue to emerge. This would imply, therefore, renouncing the ways in which pessimism becomes the executioner of each and every possibility and creative line for the leap. That is to say, from both a macro and micropolitical perspective, the experience of extermination of the possible that sustains, precisely, fascism. Fascism is pessimism in its radical and fatalistic petrification.²

to map out

[1]Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro, Quando o sol aqui não mais brilhar: a falência da negritude. (Brasil, 2022,N-1 Edições)

[2] Vladimir Moreira Lima, Jazz e política da existência – a música de Félix Guattari. (Brasil, 2024. Sobinfluencia)

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Sentimental Cartography of Ongoing Brutalization

This is the first installment of “Sentimental Cartography of Ongoing Brutalization”, an editorial agitation proposal for the convulsive times that our anesthetized sensibilities are going through.

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