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Praise of the intruder. Or why do we have to go where they don't call us

2022-12-07T10:46:05.084Z


The belief is spreading that not everyone can talk about according to what things. The philosopher Jürgen Habermas, however, maintains that there is no subject so specialized as to exclude it from public debate.


Bea Crespo

There is almost no synonym for intruder without a negative connotation, from nosy to nosy, going through nosy or stranger.

It seems that stranger or foreigner does not connote anything bad, but only because we have gotten used to reading them without a xenophobic charge (at least, those of us who are not members of such parties).

The word intruder itself comes from the Latin

intrudere

, to introduce by force.

The noun intrusiveness designates a crime that can be very serious depending on the profession to which it is applied, since we all agree that the surgeon who is about to open us up should go through a Faculty of Medicine and obtain official recognition of his pairs before grabbing the scalpel.

Bad fame accompanies intruders.

There is no tribe, rock, group of friends, elite urbanization or college of architects that does not have tools to detect and expel them.

A conceptual brother of his, the impostor, gives his name to a syndrome suffered by those who doubt whether they deserve success.

As if society were still made of medieval estates or resembled a posh nightclub with a VIP area, many people strive every day to prove that they have the necessary credentials to be where they are.

The computer systems of large companies are organized according to privileges, such as the accreditations that allow entry to their offices, which open some doors and not others.

This may work well for a company with offices and boardrooms, but a democracy shouldn't copy that design.

Unfortunately, this logic of hierarchies also works in social and intellectual debate and is at the heart of phenomena such as cultural appropriation.

The belief has spread that not everyone can talk about anything and that there are social forces with legitimacy to disavow and silence those who do not have the privileges, diploma or sufficient pedigree to participate in a debate.

According to this, a man could only participate in a feminist discussion under certain circumstances and with the authorization of the women concerned, in the same way that there are Catalans who think that a man from Palencia has not lost anything in Catalan politics.

Although there is no shortage of those who insist on distributing credentials, a democracy will only be so to the extent that all points of view are accepted and collected.

auctoritas

or autobiographical reason.

Whether that debate is informed and rigorous depends on the culture and quality of democracy in which it takes place, not on those who monopolize the stands.

More information

The double edge of cultural appropriation

Intruders, despite their bad reputation, are essential in a democracy, but also in an intellectual, cultural and artistic life that wants to be more than a decoration or gallant background music.

In

The Rebellion of the Masses

, Ortega y Gasset coined the concept of the vertical invader.

A Europe with hyper-specialized knowledge, where technical advances are so rapid and transform civilization so thoroughly, favors the irruption of a primitive type, "a barbarian emerging from the trapdoor."

Like the Goths sacking Rome, the vertical invaders come to mess everything up.

The writer John Berger picked up this idea in 1965 to qualify Pablo Picasso and explain his effect on culture.

The painter transforms art because he comes from outside, he is an intruder, someone who does not respect the rules and decorum.

He is also what today we would call a cultural appropriationist: someone who draws inspiration from traditions foreign to his own, such as African art.

Today we surrender to Albert Camus, another vertical invader, an Algerian with an illiterate mother who was reminded daily that he did not deserve the place attributed to him in the belles lettres of Paris.

"I don't know why, but in the company of intellectuals I always feel as if I have to apologize for something," he said in a television interview in 1959, months before his death.

For Tony Judt, who dedicated an essay to him, his peripheral and intrusive condition is key to understanding the impact of his work.

It was his colonial upbringing, alien to the aristocracy of thought to which Sartre belonged, that made him an original writer.

The outsider's point of view often conflicts with that of the expert.

Curiosity, dilettantism and the daring inherent in these conditions are often drafts that ventilate libraries and forums that are too closed and consumed by their own mold.

In today's world the obsession with who has the right to speak can kill off that life-giving influence of interlopers.

If it is established that not even the actors have the right to interpret characters foreign to their identity, not only will the very idea of ​​interpretation be attacked, but we will put an end to intellectual, free and democratic discussion, and we will replace it with dogmatic sermons without the right to replica.

I have been militant in intrusion for a long time.

Although many of my books have an autobiographical root, in others I have gone where I was not called, and I have done so with joy, invoking a freedom that assists us all.

For example, I have just published a book about Felipe González without being a socialist militant, neither friend nor enemy, nor even a witness, since I was three years old in 1982. I consider myself an outsider, a passerby who comments on what he observes without necessarily feeling part of it. and I assume and celebrate that they consider me an intruder, because, unlike the dictionary of the RAE, I do not perceive anything negative in it.

This does not mean that the gaze of the intruder should prevail over that of the affected or the scholar, nor that all forms of intrusion are equally rich.

There are catastrophic intrusions and views so aberrant that they deserve to be fought with the full weight of reason, such as those who maintain that the Earth is flat or those who are anti-vaccinators.

The intruder does not have a free bar to derail and has to earn attention and prestige as much as the others, but it must be the debate itself and its arguments that put everyone in their place, and not credentials distributed

a priori

.

Perhaps it is enough to change the attitude slightly: before calling the guards to expel the stowaway, it would be good to listen to him a little, in case we are kicking Camus back to Algiers, or Picasso to Malaga.


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Source: elparis

All news articles on 2022-12-07

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