Modernitat i postmodernitat

Refuting the cliché that crying is useless, this booklet maintains that, givenour current context of insensible neoliberal globalization, public expression of suffering is an essential form of political criticism. This is so not only because weeping revealsto others our interior affliction, butalso because our crying together with others and for othersturns ourmourning into a sign of empathy, protest, criticism, outcry, and resistance.

This publication is about conversation, about its conditions of possibility in a world where distraction and dispersion have impoverished it to limits we could not even suspect. And the framework or tradition from which the author speaks to us is that of Ignatian spirituality, a spirituality whose central place is precisely in conversation. As the author says: “The first requirement for spiritual conversation is to listen. To listen deep down, to acknowledge the other and his presence, to show compassion and not just walk on by. And then ask.

Sequestration. Everyone understands what that means. It is to appropriate something, to make someone or something of interest disappear. The sequestration of truth, therefore, what does that mean? What is it that has disappeared? The truth. And this disappearance gives way to the absence of truth, to post-truth. If we have been robbed of the truth, what is left is what comes after truth. If we think about it, that is strange. To a certain extent, it is a worse option than a simple lie.

At the end of 2022, ChatGPT was released to the general public; it is a softwareprogram trained to reproduce human language and to answer any question it is asked. The fact that this softwarehas learned to offer non-predetermined responses, thanks to the vast amount of information fed into it, has put the expression artificial intelligence (AI) on everyone's lips.

Why do we assume that jumping over the limits imposed by nature and social customs is the right thing to do? What consequences are there for our lives by uncritically assuming the technological mentality? Is there some way to escape from this labyrinth? These are some of the questions that the author poses in this pamphlet, written from a philosophical point of view and attempting to go to the roots of a question that is not only technical or scientific, but also affects that which is most central to the human condition.

From a Christian and human perspective, all spiritual searching is something positive, but it requires a special effort of introspection and self-criticism. Some elements of Christian theology are indispensable and cannot be downplayed, since Christian theology must be done from the perspective of “the least and the last” of this world. It is to this debate that the present booklet seeks to make a contribution; it is the fruit of the reflection of a complete course in the theology seminar of Cristianisme i Justícia.

This publication, according to the author, seeks to make a contribution to the elaboration of a new paradigm of vulnerability, a paradigm that takes issue with the narratives that have shaped the Western worldview of self-sufficiency and forgetfulness of the body. After an initial deconstructive moment, the booklet proposes the creation of a “somatopolitical” language, which uses the universal semantics of vulnerability to place at the very center of social praxis the ethical demand for responsibility and the political vindication of caring.