The Current Tragedies

[Celso Alvarez Cáccamo]

Dear All,

When we are able to step back (or step in, inside burning buildings) and
envision the details of murder and massacre, any social function of
discourse analysis dissipates. Death may come as instant dismembering by
flying metallic debris -- body parts fly around in gardens of blood. Fuel
from the plane spreads around floors, at unbearable temperatures until the
body dissecates from inside out. Burning skin peels off while one tries to
reach the stairs to escape hell. Inside the airplane, one knows that these
last minutes of life will be of unbearable anguish. Time collapses onto a
tiny spiral and one's entire life passes in front of one's eyes as the
preview of an irrepetible story. One debates oneself between burning or
suffocating while flying 400 meters down, one's last step, one's last,
incomparable view of the city, the antiheroic step down that horribly
mirrors the human arrogance of that historical step on the moon. This is
perhaps the most placid death: while flying, one suffocates slowly, lets
herself surge into this frequent dream, knows that reality awaits in one's
comfortable bedroom after an instant shock against the floor.

There may be more horrible ways of dying, and we have recently been
witnesses to all of them in Irak and Kuwait, Kosovo, Serbia, Chechnia,
Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, Palestine, Israel, Colombia, Ireland, Rwanda,
any town... We have seen how women's throats get slit by their male
possessors, or how their bodies burn in flames in their kingdom, the
kitchen. We have seen one hundred children asfixiate, all of them heirs to
the napalm girl and to McCullin's 1969 emaciated Biafra boy. We have seen
dismembering by machetes, agent Orange, Auschwitz, war machines burying
people alive in the desert dunes, we have seen Viet-Nam, Hiroshima, which
defy description. We have felt the penetrating pain of cold iron in our
ribs in a dark city corner, electrical shocks in our testicles or nipples
inside a police station, dismembering of tongues and hands in a Chilean
stadium... What else do we need, dammit? What other evidence, what other
bloody data?

Discourse analysis is my field, too. But these alleged discourse analyses
fail from the start, by reducing horror to data. I do not cry when I read
them -- I just disagree or agree, and this makes my academic position
grotesque. We can not invest in metaphors as if they were pieces of gold
for our symbolic capital. We can not speculate with madness. We cannot
compare forms of torture, types of historical responsibility. Any word, any
academic argument that is not triggered by and aimed at a higher form of
social utopia misses the point. I do not want to be an academician, do you
understand? I do not want to just contemplate this horror, as so many
contemplated the Kosovo horror. I do not want to distinguish between
terrorism, war and sexual crime. I do not want you to treat this text as an
academic argument. I do not want to read words as labels to hide the
reasons for horror. The reasons -- and we know it -- are social inequality,
misery, social injustice, male brutality, and, above all, the reason for
this horror is the personal treason that each assassin, each general, each
leader and each transnational capitalist, and each of us, is perpetrating
daily against their own utopian ideal, which palpitates historically
despite this abhorrent flowering of death and will continue to palpitate
inside the human mind, designed by history to fight against itself and thus
to win. I want that discourse of the mind, of humankind's thousands of
years old mind, not the academic discourse which utopian reason is unable
to understand.

Please excuse my vanity in writing this, in telling you that while writting
this I've been crying unstoppably from start to end. Please excuse me. I
don't want to have anything to say.

-celso
lxalvarz at udc.es


At 08:17 2001-09-13 -0400, Kerim Friedman wrote:
>I thank Richard for allowing us to discuss this on this forum. I feel that
>we, as intellectuals, must do something to combat the discourse on the
>news. This thoughts are just meant to raise a few issues I feel need to be
>discussed, as well as expressing my initial reactions to the violence...
....