Thinking In The Present: Virus, Feminism, Politicity

Abstract

The following conversation took place on 20 September 2020, during a virtual encounter jointly organised by Princeton University’s Latin American Studies Programme, and the journal Cuadernos de Literatura, from the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Bogota. “Thinking in the Present” offered a critical opportunity to confront the interpretative volatility and paralysis of criticism of the current moment, the failure of liberal democracy, the deepening of inequality based on intersectionality, and the geopolitics of the COVID-19 pandemic. The virus has disorganised and exposed the intrinsic failure of the algorithms set in the past few decades to predict our movements, to anticipate, and therefore to control, life on the planet, our behavioural patterns and wishes: from how we shop to how we vote. The interpretative failure vis-à-vis the virus’s global behaviour – its universalisation in other words, that attempts an interpretation that could apply from New Zealand to Colombia, from Honduras to Singapore – summons forth two thinkers who have worked around the notion of uncertainty, thinkers who could be defined with a key word: suspicion. The photograph featured on the event poster (Figure 1) is by Lotty Rosenfeld, who had recently passed away in Santiago de Chile. The encounter also took place in memoriam of this unforgettable artist, who taught us how to cross the sign. Her crosses bear witness to an indelible act: Lotty Rosenfeld (1943–2020).