In the middle of the twentieth century, British writers George Orwell and Aldous Huxley predicted dissimilar dystopic futures: Orwell predicted that power would do his best to hide the truth and prohibit books; Huxley thought it would not be necessary because nobody would like to read them and the truth would be diluted in a sea of irrelevance. The philosopher, epistemologist and Argentine interdisciplinary researcher Miguel Benasayag (Buenos Aires, 72 years) warns that the constant bombardment of information to which we are submitted today not only makes it difficult to concentrate the necessary concentration to read but also that “avoids action, inhibits it.”
In the seventies, Benasayag was part of the generation of Argentines who thought we had to take arms to assault power and entered the Guerrillas Revolutionary Army (ERP). He was arrested in 1974, tortured and imprisoned. Four years later, in full dictatorship, he achieved freedom in exchange for exile in France, a country in which he still resides. It returns to Buenos Aires sporadically. The last time was at the end of April, to present its last rehearsals –Praise of the conflict (Prometheus, 2025) and Mounted clinic (Prometheus, 2024), written four hands with Angélique del Rey – at the International Book Fair. The country chatted with him at the editorial headquarters with other media and then continued the interview at his home in the Argentine capital, in the busy neighborhood of Once.
“The twentieth century was a century of revolutions and we saw that power is not the place of change. That was already,” he says. But he believes that we must not be paralyzed in the face of a threatening future and less before the false idea that there are no alternatives. If we fail to love this time, find happy, powerful, solidarity practices, we will not be able to change anything. Resisting cannot be against only, the confrontation against what destroys you. It is, above all, to create. Create levels of conflict and possible new, “he says.
Ask. In Praise of the conflict He points out that, for some time, the complex reason “has been replaced by a binary, virile, warrior way to see things: the pure confrontation.” How is the conflict from the confrontation different?
Answer. The conflict is the basis of individual and social life. They are regulations of each person, couple and group. It is the social fabric. The more simplify the intrapersonal and social ties, the more we eliminate the conflict and we go to the confrontation. (The president of Argentina, Javier) Milei is a fantastic example of crushing the conflict. That is why the rudeness, the insult, what it is doing is break all the complex, conflictive ties that form a society. Then, there are the power and the isolated individual.
P. Trump also applies. Is it a common strategy of ultra -right?
R. Trump, Milei, Bolsonaro … are the avant -garde of the transformation of the world. They crush the conflict to seek only one confrontation because, if there is no alternative, there will be no water for everyone tomorrow, food or non -flood land for everyone. They know that there will be strengths surrounded by No Man’s Lands. The new distribution of power is that. They know that confrontation is the only thing that can allow their world model to succeed: a model where some are saved.
Benasayang urges “understanding these mechanisms” instead of “entering the clashes” because they consider that they produce enjoyment, but does not lead to anything.
P. What mechanisms break the social fabric?
R. In Argentina, during the dictatorships of Onganía, Levingston and Lanusse, social conflict rose. There was counterculture, hippies, feminism, indigenism. What did Videla’s dictatorship? He first attacked all parties, artists, intellectuals, trade unionists; And in the end he found only in a confrontation with armed organizations. When we reached that point we were already defeated.
P. Do you see a parallel between the last dictatorship and the action of Milei?
R. Milei does that exactly. An artist does not follow is logical but creates something that is not polarized, which is not yes or no, can have a point of view, but it is complex, and that is why he attacks, causes and maintains a high level of aggressiveness so that everything becomes bipolar and be: o Milei or Cristina (Kirchner). At the moment you have the confrontation you already won, because it is always specular.
P. It is an unequal confrontation, one is in power and the other does not.
R. Yes, but the point is that if you want what power has, power has already won. The question is how we can create an aesthetic and another way to desire alternative, so artists are so important, because they are able to create other possible.
P. How do social networks amplify the confrontation?
R. The fact that there are no bodies present makes everything up very fast, insulting and radicalizing from the chair, without distinguishing one thing from the other. Postiness has to do with that because for what you understand bodily there is no post -truth: if you are burning, you are burning. But in a world where everything is information that does not happen. People are very feedback, responding to everything and that increases violence and suffering.
P. Argentina has an important social fabric and a great tradition of street protests. How did Milei get to power so quickly?
R. It has nothing to do with my research, but I think he won as revenge against the women of many young people, injured, who voted for him. In this country, feminism has a tradition with the mothers and grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, the peasants, the trans and the homosexuals and a lot progressed, but not everyone accepted it.
Benasayag consults the time on a pocket watch that has been tied to a leontina. He says he does not use cell phone because he was already “too much time in Cana (in jail)” to be now controlled by a device and warns of the risk of delegating more and more functions in the machines.
P. What consequences does it have on our bodies to always be connected?
R. For years we see brain modifications. Our body shape is the same as always, but in reality we are hybridizing, we are cyborgs, and there is a weakening of the brain structure. For example, we did a job with taxi drivers who began using GPS. After three years, all those who had begun to handle with GPS had the subcortical nuclei of the brain trunk, which take care of mapping time and space, stunted. All this is to delegate functions. We are in an evolutionary change where the brain is not going to deal with more of the things that were occupied so far and we believe that the machines are going to occupy what until now took care, the human.
P. Are you going to replace us?
R. In a world where it is what it is about producing, of efficiency, the machine is perfect. The problem is the assimilation of us as living beings to this culture of production. We can serve the machines, but it is not true that the hyper rationality of the machine to eat is needed, it is not true that they need transgenics to feed people. That is ideology, an ideology that says, as Margaret Thatcher would say, that there is no alternative.
P. What alternatives are there?
R. I think you have to emancipate the future. Decolonize from that linear time where we have the head absolutely full of minutes. Actually, I don’t know what will happen, but what I know is that when I think what will happen, I’m wasting time.
For more updates, visit our homepage: NewsTimesWire
