ARCHEOLOGY OF SENSITIVITIES (REFERRING TO VIOLENCE)
Synopsis
In this context, the vertigo, simulations, and saturation of events in our times anesthetize us to the horrors of violence, discrimination, and inequalities that we experience daily. This is a complex and contradictory era that brings together the old and the contemporary in a single moment, allowing space for the archaic while dissolving in a constant acceleration that permeates all human spheres. Such a reality presents challenges to scholars of society and human issues. Faced with this complex and contradictory social reality, the authors of this text engage in the collective search for ‘subjugated knowledge’ and question urgent and, at times, invisible social issues, such as violence, the body, gender equity, and other concrete matters closely tied to our existence.
This remarkable text is a testament to an investigative drive that has generated concepts and perspectives that are more radical and agile, attending to the immediate and novel while acknowledging their historically non-progressive and non-linear character—realities that transpose and intersect in multiple ways. The theoretical framework of these investigations challenges the positivist scientific postulates of history, its objectivity, and its predictive nature. Likewise, the object of study shifts towards analyzing practices and discourse concerning the aforementioned realities. The authors argue that archaeology, power, and discontinuity—rooted in poststructuralist and feminist thought—form the basis of their approach to the historical phenomena under discussion. Issues related to violence, gender equity, and the use of bodies are a priority for contemporary thought and social coexistence, as they manifest in multiple ways and require studies from a perspective that offers possibilities for structural cultural changes, fostering respect for women's rights and questioning the inevitability of violence or the subjugation of bodies. They assert that human events are inscribed in time, in the very moment, carrying the full weight of their political reality, demanding an "injunction" that commits us to safeguarding the present through the pursuit of peace, justice, and inclusion, in order to build a free, just, and humane society.
This collection of texts raises questions about the social, economic, and political implications of the most pressing contemporary practices, which, in one way or another, reflect a disciplined society with a distinct approach and a rigorous collaborative effort. However, we do not wish to distance the reader by presenting a difficult or overly specialized book. On the contrary, from our perspective, this is a timely, thought-provoking, and marginal work. It is timely because its subject matter addresses the absurd and widespread social affliction of multifaceted violence, which claims more victims each day, the alienation of bodies manipulated by a society that imposes norms and functions, and the impossibility of freely manifesting diverse gender identities. It questions the new social relationships rendered invisible by political or economic power, which have given rise to disciplined societies. It provides a reflective analysis of violent practices that use the “principle of means and ends” to justify their execution. This is a provocative, agile, and insightful work that calls for the insurrection of subjugated knowledge through the questioning of practices and discourses generated by collective bodies or institutions—an insurrection that compels us, through a symptomatic inquiry, to ask: What have we done with our bodies, our relationships, and our everyday actions?
The text is structured around shared theoretical premises: archaeology, genealogy, and sensitivity; anachronistic imagery; and a symptomatic approach to social phenomena. It offers an immanent, discontinuous, and complex perspective that, while constituting a conceptual “toolbox” for socio-political struggles, also draws on unpublished materials: testimonies, silenced voices, artistic practices, and novels. It presents a critical and contemporary perspective on topics that tend to be ignored or downplayed. In this sense, it is also marginal, as it seeks truth through encounter and revelation in concrete events, employing methodologies that do not require validation within totalitarian or universalist knowledge systems. It does not adhere to grand narratives of the social sciences or any deontology of research; instead, it offers new perspectives that enable an approach to complex, open, and plural realities.
The text originates from diverse perspectives and seeks to account for changes in the perception and construction of corporealities that mark historical shifts while intertwining different temporalities. Fundamentally, it draws from “Archaeology,” as used by Foucault, to analyze strata of knowledge akin to geological layers, aiming to delineate the relationships among philosophical systems, spoken and written words, documents, and people's knowledge. In this sense, rupture and discontinuity are as crucial as regularity and reordering in an initial approach to the concept of archaeology. One of the key elements recovered from Foucault’s notion of archaeology is the possibility of analyzing continuities and discontinuities without the concern of a pure rationality detached from complexity. Ultimately, it does not seek to establish what has been said in its identity but rather to rewrite discourses at the level of their exteriority.
The Archaeology of Sensitivities and Violence aspires to contribute to the analysis of contemporary experience through aesthetics and discourse analysis from an immanent, discontinuous, and historically conditioned perspective. Following Derrida’s idea of ‘injunction,’ it emerges as a call to responsibility, commitment, and action. From these theoretical positions and commitments, the book addresses themes such as Cruelty, Death, and Mourning: Acteal, which links ‘mourning’ to ‘resistance’; Masculinities and Interrogations of Drug Traffickers and the Appropriation of Bodies; Death and Silence and the lack of narratives to explain our present; Feminism and Violence, contributing to the visibility of art created by women in institutionalized contexts; Gender and Body in Literature and elective possibilities; concluding with the chapters on New Forms of Violence and Disgusted Bodies and Discourses, based on testimonies from drag house residents.
Before our eyes, we witness the shifts and settings in which the diagnoses of these historical phenomena unfold, from geographical to cybernetic spaces—environments that neutralize human space itself within a disciplined society. The contributions of those who participate in this provocative text go beyond trends or ambitions of permanence; they are researchers who subject practices and discourses to the crucible of our present. Readers willing to venture into its sharp precipices will be astonished by the lucid bricolage presented. However, it is crucial to critically recover the various strands of these protean investigations that explore society and the socialization of the individual—to reclaim the transformative historical subject in order to eradicate violence, to reinstate political praxis as part of the critique of history and progress, and to restore aesthetics as a domain spanning from sensory to symbolic experience, serving as a privileged mode of creative and peaceful emancipation. By the end of these pages, we will be left with an archaeological, plural, and dispersed horizon regarding the current conditions of the practices and discourses exercised over different sensitivities through the exertion of power.
Chapters
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Acknowledgments
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Prelude to the Archaeology of sensitivities (referring to violence)
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MEMORY WORK
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Archaeology of sensitivitiesCriticism to understand some years
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SO FAR SO CLOSE
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Contemporary experiences of crueltyThe Acteal massacre: testimony, trauma and mourning
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WHAT FOLLOWS. THE MATTER KNOWN TO ALL
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Drug trafficking interrogations: a relationship between masculinity, violence and representation
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CERTAIN CONSEQUENCES
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Listening to the deadTestimony, archaeological work and sensitivity to silence
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FEMINISMS. NO DOUBT
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Feminism as a framework for visibility
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The legal order and the discussion of violence in feminist demonstrations on August 12, 2019
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AND BEYOND
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Towards a transfiguration of gender and the body in “Perras” by Jorge Enrique Lage and Máscaras by Leonardo Padura
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Scenarios and drag (re)presentationsHaus of Toro in Cuernavaca, Morelos
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AND DEEPER INTO THE LABYRINTH
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Experiences of disgust: unbiased spectator and disgusted body
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Spaces of the new violence and new violence of spacesTres ejemplos
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