INTERMITTENCES OF DEATH THE SYMPOSIUM RESPONDS TO A SPACE OF READING AMONG SEVERAL COLLEAGUES WHO, FROM DIFFERENT DISCIPLINARY AREAS, THINK ABOUT DEATH AND MOURNING
Intermittences of death
Our symposium proposes to reflect, from different disciplinary perspectives, on loss and mourning. What forms of mourning do we experience in the contemporary world, from the situated experience of our Latin American countries? How do we inhabit space and perceive the sense of time when the experience of death affects us? What cultural fabrics do we weave to heal wounds? With what archives (domestic and institutional) do we engage when managing our losses through writing, artistic creation, sociocultural accompaniment, critical thought? In what language do we think and narrate death, because mourning requires our mouths to re-enter language, to make our own words that were once foreign, to invent a grammatical tense to speak of our dead in the present and externalize lament. Or perhaps to silence it. The Belgian philosopher Vinciane Despret proposes that the dead are only truly dead if we stop conversing with them; that is, conserving them. What rituals, writings, and practices do those of us who remain on this side invent in order to continue the conversation with our dead, so as not to forget them, to give them an extra measure of existence and make a place that houses them? How do we confront the past and the voices that come from behind, so that they may erupt into the present of the living, when inscribing filiations and collective memories? What do we do with the weight of legacies and how do we interpret the inheritance received, in the process of constructing narratives of identity and shared genealogies?
David Le Breton distinguishes between pain and suffering: pain arises from medical usage, referring to sensory experience, nociception. Suffering, meanwhile, is the perceptual result of that; it leads us into the realm of meaning, of the symbolic. Losses, mourning, death are inevitable and constant events in our lives, referring us to diverse forms of death. Mourning is the passage we follow between life and death. Between death and the return to life, we move with the certainty of having lost something and of being transformed. Mourning does not leave us unscathed. To mourn and to give rise to new horizons are one and the same thing. We ask ourselves in what places the dead are situated from the vision of the living. For death reorganizes the rhythm of those of us who remain to inhabit, survive, and narrate the world. Our societies have changed in recent years, leaving bare and de-ritualized the experiences of death that appear before our eyes stripped of names, history, or empathy. The sacred place of mortality is constantly seized by the reality of armed spaces. Violent and serial deaths in our countries alter the sense of coexistence, the possibility of a shared world. Mourning is experienced individually and, at the same time, collectively. We are a grieving community. The codes for caring for life and respecting death are dissolving in the world amid the escalation of violence. Hence the need to think about them, manage them, reinvent them.
