The monster

PalmThis is the last article I will write this year. December marks the end of the fiction of calendars. Perhaps that is why I intended to write about the passage of time. Reconciling being and time is an immense problem; the Greek philosophers knew it, and contemporary thinkers still think it. Juan Carlos Mélich in the pages of The fragility of the world He offers us precious reflections on the passage of time, on haste, on duration. There is nothing in the world that is not captured by the passage of time, but this past does not conform to calendars; we are almost defenseless before duration, it is irreversible.

Following this line of thought, Mèlich invites us to think about ethics from the perspective of time. In fact, he formulates it beautifully: ethics is time, because it is not possible to "reach an end point," which would be a matter of morality; we are always in flux. We must stop imagining ethics in fixed terms and try to imagine it from the perspective of plurality and contingency. Ethics conceived from the perspective of time revolves around the concepts of compassion and shame, without absolutes or possible paradises. We are faced with a demanding ethics, because there is no respite of "duty fulfilled" or "a clear conscience."

It is from this imperative, coupled with the certainty that the wounds of time do not align with calendars, that I have found it impossible to write about anything other than denouncing barbarity. Last Saturday in November, a monstrous act took place in Costitx.

Male violence feeds on hegemonic legacy and subtle gestures. Every silence, every justification, every insufficient measure, every time someone judges feminism instead of unequivocally condemning male violence, the monster grows larger. Arendt warned us long ago that monsters have the appearance of someone "normal"—a neighbor, a friend, a brother, a son who becomes capable of barbarity. Institutions and protocols also become monstrous if, instead of allaying our fears, they transform us into victims. They normalize violence; they allow it to exist.

From schools, streets, hospitals, bars; from every corner of our daily lives, we must fight against this monster, we must demand accountability from those who, instead of protecting us, abandon us. We must summon the complicity that exposes every act of negligence, every hypocrisy. Every trace of sexism should be a cause for shame; our indignation cannot be relentless.

To feel shame

Faced with the "duty fulfilled" of the list of phone numbers to call for help, faced with the "clear conscience" of a feminist pedagogy that encourages reporting and tells us that women are not alone, we have the ethical duty to feel shame for every silence, for restraining orders that are nothing but empty words, for the institutional darkness that, within the bureaucratic darkness, fills the lives of so many women with night and shadows. We need all social and institutional agents to carry out their work with firmness. I hope they feel a shame similar to mine, seeing that duty is always far from being fulfilled.

The days go by and we begin to talk about other fires that will also soon be extinguished by the waters of time. We receive statistics on gender violence that fall like a light rain on our shoulders; faced with infinite suffering, we have learned the poisoned art of indifference. However, each wound is deep and unique, and therefore, in the face of pain, we cannot stop talking about the monster and the monstrous protocols.

Mélich's proposed ethics of shame is inevitably an ethics of compassion. Far from any paternalistic connotation, if we go to the root of the word cum patiorWe will find the capacity to suffer with the pain of others, to unite with it in sorrow. To the mother, the sister, the dearest friends, to all the people who love her and suffer with this immense pain, we must embrace their fears tenderly; we must let them know that the helplessness they feel is shared by us. They have us, unconditionally, on their side.

To you, whom the monster wounded in the night, we want to offer our support, our open hands for you to hold all your pain and all your rage. You are the wound that bleeds us all dry.