In this first article of the year, desire compels me to write. At the end of the year, we take stock of life, both our own and that of the world we inhabit. As we begin another, we formulate desires, usually desires for change. Although there can also be desires, immutability, and certainty in reality, the only thing that becomes clear is precisely that the only certainty is uncertainty and change.
Changes, therefore, can be desired, driven, or befall us. Be that as it may, they always represent a learning process to flow without resistance, to let go of what we think we control. They force us to move forward in the void, to shape ourselves by reading the constant becoming of things, which, in this world of today, are becoming increasingly uncertain, threatening, violent, and definitive. And it is precisely in this scenario that it is necessary to recover desire, to problematize desire, to politicize it, to reclaim it from a place of genuineness, radicalism, collectivity, and 'living well'. (sumak kawsay), and not from the imposition of technological saturation, hedonistic individualism, consumer society, or the need for escape generated by the impotence and weariness of an exhausting life.
And just these days I've received information about a series in Barcelona: Post-capitalist desire: Undoing the end: the course Fisher didn't teachMark Fisher died eight years ago. In the last months of his life, he taught a course that aimed to explore the idea of the desire to make another shared life conceivable. He is credited with the phrase, "The real struggle is for imagination and possibility." And the world is here now, in that struggle. It is here and now that the dispute lies in possibility: in the possibility they want us to believe doesn't exist.There's no alternativeThatcher's "since we don't want to give up on imagining, building, and inhabiting."
Waiting for the time to delve deeper into Fischer's readings and thought ('Capitalist realism: no alternative, post-capitalist desire? either 'K-pink') and knowing that I won't be able to attend in person the sessions that, from January until April, will feature talks I would love to hear from Clara Serra, Amador Fernández Savater, Alicia Valdés, Carolina Yuste, and Marcelo Expósito, among many others, I take refuge in some of your reflections.
Mark Fisher spoke of a "cancelled future," which is what happens when culture begins to repeat itself: nostalgia, 'remakes and 'revivalsWhen the future ceases to be a promise and comes to be perceived as a threat or something simply absent. It's not that ideas are lacking, but rather, Fischer says, what weakens is the collective capacity to imagine something truly different: when there is no horizon, the desire for transformation also erodes.
Fischer urged us to use the known to interpret the present, not as a nostalgic refuge; to discard the romanticism of defeat; to avoid cynicism; to create spaces to breathe; to connect our unease with its causes, not with guilt.
And thus, I understand, we can recover the desire for the unknown in order to shape desirable futures that do not reproduce old, familiar normalities, which, precisely because they are old and familiar, seek to remain outside the necessary questioning and politicization required to learn from them without becoming captive. It is necessary to rekindle the desire to experiment with these new forms of collective articulation in order to generate livable and desirable spaces and lives, in the face of a world suffocating us with returns to old, dark pasts now glorified, with unprecedented levels of violence, distortion, falsehood, and manipulation. The past, misunderstood as 'security,' is a danger that causes solid collective structures, thoughts, and organizations—which could and should underpin desirable change to envision desirable ecosocialist horizons—to become immobile spaces that withdraw into themselves to maintain the status quo.status quo'Without questioning it. And in this context, we capture another equally revealing thought from Fischer: he says that the problem is not that people don't adapt to this imposed reality or to the regression, but that we are required to adapt to a way of life that makes us sick. It is necessary, therefore, to politicize these discontents as a radical gesture to contest life, possibility, and reclaim desire. A desire that stems from different coordinates, that has no clear direction beyond the shared horizon of radical transformation to enable a life lived with awareness, fulfillment, and with freedom as its guiding light.
