El Amor

 

por 

Camilo E. Ramírez 

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El amor es desencuentro, discontinuidad, diferencia; amor es amar a eso particular del otro, eso mismo que encanta y en otros momentos, aterra; que suscita admiración y encanto. Enamorarse de la lengua extranjera que habla el otro, particular, única e irrepetible.

No es atacando, reduciendo al otro a objeto a controlar, a modificar, objeto para la propia satisfacción, que se realiza el amor, como sería el objeto-amor-mercancía, que se desecha cuando se considera que ya no sirve, sino más bien posicionarse ante el otro, a quien se ama, como lugar inagotable de exploración, de creación y novedad.

El amor ideal, ese del modelo estándar, sin fallas ni dificultades, ya desde sus principios posee fecha de caducidad, basta con que se asome la diferencia, la contingencia o incluso la posibilidad de la pérdida, para que algo de dicha fantasía -muy del mercado- se esfume, ¡Se acabó la luna de miel!

El amor Real es amor también a lo desconocido del otro, a lo ridículo de sí mismo y del otro, de la relación; a lo que desborda y rebasa, lo que no puede ser del todo simbolizado e imaginado, de ahí el carácter siempre novedoso, riesgoso y sorpresivo de nuestro encuentro con el amor. 

 

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EDUCATION IN POSTHUMANITY

In these times, what does mean to educate? 

 

By

Camilo E. Ramírez 

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As Freud said, education is one of the imposibles; the other two are, to govern and to psychoanalyze. In spite of being impossible we did not resign to any of the three. Nowadays education has become, like any other topic in our post-human society, more business than education in its fundamental meaning: requiring a lot of certifications, qualified programs for professors and members of the administration staff, standardized evaluations, goals, the human rights etc. Which make us realize, What really means in these times, to educate? Why go to school in these times?

Therefore, their effects are: we have education but without its substance (like Slavoj Zizek has said about others objects, like alcohol, war, sex, coffee all the decaffeinated life) we have students and teachers, working together -in vain- just in order to conclude the programs, to fill the standards that the protocols of the school system requires.  

 This situation is possible, at least by three elements: 1) the pure technological illusion, which refers, what students, teachers, educational and political authorities believe (in order to guarantee all the educational goals) all we need is more technology: computers, multi interactive-media, more network systems, and other technology platforms. 2) Standarized programs and evaluations that are separating knowledge from wisdom; this explains why there are a lot of students specialized in how to do, instead of, how and why to become like, we have a lot of information and a little purpose and professors that just repeat the tasks that supra-educational system (computers, laws of education, protocols and evaluation criteria) give them. 3) The illusion that knowledge is separated from political and economical power (see M. Foucault, Truth and Judicial form) 

So, in these terms we just have buildings that we have called schools, institutes, universities, etc. We have education, without education, we just have the copy-paste effect in the students work, without reflection and debate, there is a great deficiency of dialogue and authority. It seams like new education is becoming more statistical, pure quantifications of knowledge.  

Is there any relation between this operational educative reality with the school shootings (to be listened with bullets) the bullying phenomena, one kind of sadistic and masochism relationships in school, one kind of (possible) love, the proliferation of drug treatments for those problems considered just as behavioral problems  an apparently easy way to correct the errors? 

The questions are open 

 

 


 

Learning languages and psychoanalysis project  

by

Camilo E. Ramírez

 

 

 

 How to learn a new language and don't get kill by boring in the process?

 


 

The Labyrinths of Love


 

 

 

 

by 

Camilo E. Ramírez

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“There is no love without humor”

CER

 

We talk about love, write about it and even remain silent about it; we cry about it, scream about it and sing about it. With love, everything is possible; without love, nothing is possible. Love—says one of the many clichés that tries to explain it—makes the world go round.Though we’ve heard about it or read about it, no one is immune from the illusions and seductions of love. In a way, it is an experience of ecstasy, a chase and a snare. What do you see in me that you say you’re in love with? I don’t see it, but I’m glad you do, because that somehow makes more of that part of me that I never thought anyone would appreciate. That’s what we ask ourselves when we’re in love, whether we know it or not. And when our heart is broken, we see the discrepancy between what we thought about the other person and reality. We could say that love doesn’t happen without disappointment, and when we take our masks off, instead of what we expected to find in the other and didn’t, what we find is our own desire that failed, and now coping with and playing lovingly and comically with this failure (what I wanted to see in you, that I thought I saw, but I never had) can build something new, wiser and less naive, less demanding of the other, as if to say, “I want you to love me like I want you to love me.”

Love is an encounter that no one knows quite how or why it started, much less what will happen. So, it’s an experience, a passage with comic characteristics. There is no love without humor. That could be the message of romantic comedies: not only that we can detect the existence of the prince and princess, the ideal, but also the tragedy of the failure of another to meet our impossible demands—that even we ourselves can’t meet. And we can use play to create a love in every-day life where the impossible aspect of love, in which the other is always perfect for us, is inverted. The other is imperfect, but we love him or her anyway. “Love is giving something you do not have to someone who is not,” said Jacques Lacan. We love without words and with risks; there’s always something inexplicable and silent in love, which, when we try to define it too much, cheapens it. Like when you try to decipher love genetically or neurochemically. When they say, “what actually happens in the brain is...,” they strip the symbolic meaning of the experience from love. So, when Freud was asked about love, he would slyly tell people to ask the poets and artists, because they’re the ones who speak to us about love. It is precisely by playing with their artifacts—the words of the poet, music, sculpture, dance, and so on—that something of the ineffable and evanescent nature of love becomes present in an instant with its irony and lightness. At the slightest desire to formalize and protect love, it loses its luster and charm, since the desire, the moment and the risk have been separated from it, making it a routine, crushing, dull, humorless, simple social routine of companions who share a journey or manage a home—everything but love. You never know how long love will last, much less the vicissitudes that those who risk love will go through in the context of change and transformation, not only of one’s self but of the other, of the context, the bond; of the love that allows neither control nor monitoring, because as soon as we look back at what we thought was stable and secure, it has already changed. And, on the contrary, when we lose it, its nucleus becomes dynamic again, sparking love, and energizing the life of the person who loves the lightness of risk and the paradox f loving and living. It is the sense of the meaninglessness of existence, like love itself, since love has reasons that reason doesn’t understand. 

 


 

 The end that is a beginning

 

by 

Camilo E. Ramírez

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All ends become beginnings. The end of the year is the edge—the limit of a 12-month calendar that delimits a 365-day year, which is based on the stars and seasons. It’s one of the many ways in which humans create the space-time references that we rely on for just about everything. The end of the year is an imaginary passage from one time period to another that occurs at the threshold where the end coincides with the beginning at the appointed day and hour—twelve mid-night on December 31. Like life, which changes from one moment to the next, the old year ends and begins again—in the New Year—in a single second. Along with new expectations and old, unstoppable time transpires, eventually catching up to everything—with celebrations and high hopes for some and work and loneliness for others. We all experience the passage of time in our own way.

The New Year gives us the feeling of having a clean slate that is full of possibilities. It represents a place in time where we can start to make good on outstanding resolutions (“Now I’ll finally get to...”), projects, wishes and desires. But the new can be just as stressful as the old, precisely because it is something that is unknown, which implies creation on the basis of lack of knowledge, not only of life and the supposed reality in which we live, but a misinterpretation of what someone is supposed to be or not be, since the self is empty of content but full of error and ignorance. For example, if we wait until we’re ready to do something we want to do, we’ll never do it. If we only respond based on what we know (the skills, errors, etc. that we believe we possess), our scope of action will be limited. This is why it’s best not to know ourselves too well—not pay much attention to how little or how much we think we know about ourselves. Instead, we need to do what we want to do precisely because we want to do it, not because we have the skills, requirements and so on that will supposedly guarantee a successful outcome...

Some New Year’s wishes are just that wishes. We make them and hold on to them in order to wish for them not to actually do them, but rather to use them to organize something: sometimes guilt, sometimes thwarted hopes and dreams. Other wishes may come true, and we can use them to commence something—an experience, perhaps, which we don’t know where it will lead—maybe a meeting, if not a re-encounter with whatever we thought we possessed or lost. Where allow yourself to be taken—without many guarantees—in order to make your dreams a reality?