filamentosmovimentos

"these are the times to contemplate new ways of being in an age that seeks to anesthetize affect, or, rather diminish our ability to experience and embody love, empathy, and pleasure—that interior power—which Audre Lorde names the “depth” or “reservoir” of feeling: the “erotic.”

The principal horror of any system which defines the good in terms of profit rather than in terms of human need, or which defines human need to the exclusion of the psychic and emotional components of that need—the principal horror of such a system is that it robs our work of its erotic value.” The “system” itself is guilty of embezzlement, of theft of affect, spirit, the erotic, of freedom. And why would there be a need to extinguish affect, spirit, and the erotic except the need to disrupt those movements that move us toward each other even if some of us within such movements might also flee feeling and resist community? 

(...)

For it is there, deep in the interstices of intimate and affective connection, where our power lies and when we remember to tap into that erotic power, the place where love, empathy, and pleasure reside, we animate our human/spiritual beingness and resist the commodification of our bodies—resisting the tug to exist as bodies laboring without purpose, without freedom. 

What are the uses of love, empathy, and pleasure in these times: temporal moments when intimate connection between friend and stranger is seemingly obstructed by a type of capitalist individualism that refuses community? 

(...)

Empathy is a feeling and an enactment of intentional regard for others. It is a positively antagonistic and radical energy in an isolationist culture that promotes self-centeredness. Wenshu Lee reminds us that present within neoliberal govermentality is an “isolating force.” Empathy frustrates that force because empathy excites engagement: it is a liberating posture in these times. If love is the elimination of the expansive spaces that may separate us, then empathy might very well be understood as the position we must take when the distance is cleared: the movement from the position of egotism to thoughtful concern of the other; the movement from our contented social locations to that of dislocation; the examination of our excess, access, and privileges as possible contributing factors for the denials, lack, and experiences of marginalization in the lives of others; analyses of our various oppressions and the ways we might also oppress. 

(...)

I want to propose that freedom feels. Freedom moves. Freedom is the condition that allows feeling, as opposed to numbing, denying, or disrupting it, in an age that is antagonistic to feeling as a force of connection to self, others, our spirits, and the planet. Freedom is also the condition for movement."

Darnell L. Moore: "What Freedom Feels Like: On Love, Empathy, and Pleasure in the Age of Neoliberalism"

The Kennedy School, Harvard University, November 7, 2012, Audre Lorde Human Rights Lecture Series