Julio Cabrera

"Let us think, for example, of the experience of speaking a foreign language and what happens when one speaks "perfectly and without error", when one speaks German "as a German", and in what happens, on the contrary, when one speaks imperfectly, when, through the babble of one who "does not master a language", a vital dimension is shown that is hidden in the perfectly "dominated" language."

"As Wittgenstein would point out, the word "poor" does not have an absolute reference, but acquires its meaning in reference to specific language games, in which it acquires its reference to the world dynamically. The poverty to which Marx referred does not necessarily diminish by extending the benefits to the workers within the alienated society. A well-paid slave remains a slave and therefore alienated and poor in the Marxian sense. (...) the worker did not enter into a state of "non-poverty" in the relative sense of Marx (and Wittgenstein), but he remains alienated, living with the minimum (relative to the society that alienates him)."

"Psychoanalysis is not science. But very few things are science. Nor is Kant's ethics a science, but it is a high-level reflection about the human being in his relation with the world, as is Freud's reflection. What seems curious is the scarce insistence about the fact that Kantian ethics is not science, while everyone seems so preoccupied with stressing the non-scientificity of psychoanalysis."

"Psychoanalysis's interest in discursive breakdown is not merely theoretical, but also because it is regularly marked by suffering, by some kind of emotional involvement (...) Suffering is not an external "accompaniment" to linguistic anomalies, but a constituent part of them. The discursive break is the manifestation of a psychic break. The generation of language anomalies and discontinuities is linked to the attempt to avoid displeasure. The actual compactness of the linguistic chain, that is, the correct filling of it through authentic signs would generate unbearable suffering."

"(...) why is it illegitimate to eliminate philosophies? Here, logical-epistemic motives and ethical motives are joined. (...) what was thought creates a way of life of thought, one of its reflective possibilities. When a worldview is established, it is indestructible as a possible form of thought, as a direction of reflection; the fact of having thought is inextinguishable, and the only thing to be done with this view is to accept it, complement it or even exclude it, but these three attitudes already imply its non-elimination: the philosophical exclusion of a philosophy by part of another presupposes the recognition of its existence, only counterexamples of its laws are presented (...) We cannot eliminate other philosophies for a motive similar to that by which we cannot eliminate people."

"The study of "lexical inferences" (if they exist) should be something that oscillates (...) between ML [Mathematical Logic] and informal logic. In historical terms, we like to say that this is a wittgensteinean undertaking of the intermediate period (...) something that has already passed beyond the deception of the one-dimensional semantics of the Tractatus, but which has not yet fallen into the dense multidimensionality of Philosophical Investigations (...)"

"We call "divergent" (...) all the systems of ML of the last century that challenge some aspect of the "classical" ML (hence its proper name "non-classical") (...) Rather, we call here as "hyperdivergent" those logical projects that present logic in a way that is incompatible, or very difficult to assimilate, with its presentation in logic systems, in such a way that it is difficult, or perhaps impossible, to define this logic in relation to classical systems of ML and, consequently, their own divergence as even a divergence. Historically, logical projects such as those presented by Hegel, Husserl and Dewey, for example, are of this nature."

"Perhaps the lexical connections ultimately rest on the will to live, on the will to power, on pain, on mortality or sexuality, and not on pure logical structures. If our lexical logics were still considered to be linked to the "dispositional" and the technology of thought (in a Hegelian-Heideggerian line) there would be nothing to do; then it would seem that we went beyond the limits of all that could be called "logic" (...). For a convinced Heideggerian, little will have been gained by moving from the usual logic to [lexical logic]. Notwithstanding this, we feel that there is an intermediate sensitivity to be harnessed and cultivated, which would be between rigid analytical logical forms and wild "continental" existentialism, a sort of existential sensibility of logical forms."

"The current professionalized philosophy has been openly understood as "apathetic," without pathos, exclusively driven by the intellect and leaving aside emotions and sentimental impacts. Only a few philosophers of the last two centuries (Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud, Kierkegaard, Heidegger) have resisted this tradition by questioning the hegemony of intellectualist reason and the systematic exclusion of the emotional component in the task of grasping the world. In this sense, we can call these thinkers of the European tradition "cinematographic"."

"Wouldn't much of what Heidegger, for example, tries to say, almost without success, forcing the German language, forcing it to generate difficultly intelligible phrases, or Hegel's attempts to think the work of the concept "temporarily" putting it "on movement" wouldn't be much better exposed through the images arising from the calm and thoughtful displacement of a cinematic camera?"

"Cinema does not eliminate the requirement of truth and universality, but (...) redefines them within the logopathic phenomenon (...) the universality of cinema is peculiar, it belongs more to the order of possibility than to necessity. Cinema is universal, not in the sense of "necessarily happens to everyone", but in the sense of "could happen to anyone""

"(...) A good movie is precisely the one in which the camera disappears, when we are no longer aware of watching a movie, while an avant-garde film tries to turn the camera to itself and show the hidden device. A jocular way of understanding this would be to compare the reaction of a human and that of a cat when we point to an object with the finger; while the human looks beyond the finger trying to discover the object to which the finger points, the cat stares at the finger; in this sense, the cat is avant-garde, it is more interested in the medium (the finger, the camera) than the object pointed."

"(...) the cinematographic image cannot show without questioning, without destructuring, repositioning, twisting, distorting. Cinema cannot be the pure "record of the real" that the photographic conception of cinema usually formulates (and which currents like Italian neorealism have tried to take advantage of)."

"By exerting this effect of shock, visual violence, assault on sensibility, aggressiveness in the show, it is possible for the viewer to acquire acute awareness of a moral or epistemological problem as may not happen to him by reading a treatise on the subject. This "sensitization of concepts" may even question some of the traditional solutions of philosophical questions offered by the concept written throughout the history of philosophy (...)"

"Films do not "have" a meaning that has to be interpreted, but they establish with the viewer an interrelationship from which an unintended meaning arises which was nowhere waiting to be found."

"Blow-up [Antonioni] shows what Descartes says: our senses deceive us. However, there is no cogito in the images of this film that helps to overcome the unbearable state of doubt provoked by the ambiguity of the facts. Thomas [the young photographer of this film] cannot protect himself in any cozy subjectivity; on the contrary, it is his subjectivity that is stolen by the mysterious force of things."

"Pessimism seems to have an existential density that optimism - even non-naive optimism - does not have. In Bernardo Bertolucci's famous Last Tango in Paris (1972), the unknown (Marlon Brando) whose wife has just committed suicide, wanders around Paris and casually meets Jeanne (Maria Schneider), with whom he has a rich and violent physical and existential relationship, in an unfurnished apartment, where conventions and the name of things or people do not matter (...) But the moment he can get out of the pit and get back into life, dress well and resume the exercise of usual conventions, knowing her name, marrying and being happy, it becomes a conventional caricature and his relationship with Jeanne abruptly ends (...)."

"A "quiet" movie in which "nothing happens", where people are shown looking through the windows, walking the streets, living in completely banal situations, or simply looking at each other without saying anything, does not satisfy the spectator eager for novelty ( ...) this type of spectator usually says, after watching an ontological film, that he did not like it because in it "nothing happens": precisely the kind of attitude that Heidegger intends to provoke in his writings, making the absence of pressing entities put us in touch with the being."

"(...) Paradoxically, the silent cinema inaugurates the act of saying, and the audio cinema the act of silencing. Saying does not need words, but silencing does. The lack of sound was not a "limitation" for silent movies, but rather the lack of silence. And this does not seem to be a strictly Wittgensteinian type of limit."

"(...) an abstract conception of cinema opposes a photographic conception, marked by technology; because of this I do not like it when photography is talked about as a precursor or pioneer of cinema; photography is related to cinema only mechanically; the poetic predecessor of the cinema, its thinking pioneer, is literature much more than photography; there is nothing intrinsically photographic in the cinema, cinema is as abstract as literature, and so opaque; nor is photography concrete; nothing human is concrete, or transparent, every human is predicative, it shows by hiding, includes by excluding , understands by ignoring, thinks by dispensing (...)"

"When a European philosophizes, all his problems are of essence, there is no doubt about the existence of his thought. When a Latin American philosophizes (and this could be extended, for example, to Africans and other marginalized thoughts) he has to prove that his philosophy exists, that he has the right to reflect. (...) I call this a requirement of "insurgency" of Latin American philosophizing: to come into being, the activity of philosophizing from Latin America must insurge against intellectual exclusion (...) not strictly because it "wants" to insurge but because it is not allowed to "arise" in another way (...) Philosophizing from Latin America is reactive and insurgent or it isn't; it is an imperative need for survival."

"Helplessness is hidden or camouflaged under the professionalised forms of philosophizing, both in analytical philosophy and in the studies of the "experts on Nietzsche". The fragility intrinsic to all philosophizing (all living) is disguised as an apparently firm, secure and technical way of "mastering subjects" and constructing arguments. But even there, philosophizing cannot hide its original helplessness."

"I am not trying here to define Philosophy, but, on the contrary, to strip it of any fixed definition, to leave it as free as possible to find its own definitions that are more fitting, provisional, celebrated or unaccepted. Just as I want to see it free of any "critical," "theoretical," or "profound" obligation, I would like to be able to experience it without the stigma of the edifying affirmativism that has haunted it throughout arduous times, as a struggle against rhetoric, relativism, skepticism, pessimism, and nihilism. I believe that philosophy has no duty to seek conceptual edification, salvation through ideas, or the construction of a just society. The less "tasks" it has, the better. I do not rule out the possibility that sophistry, rhetoric, relativism, skepticism, pessimism, or nihilism are powerful ways of thinking. It is not my task as a philosopher to "overcome skepticism," "overcome relativism," "go beyond nihilism," or "not be overwhelmed by pessimism," but to ponder whether skepticism, relativism, nihilism, or pessimism can develop as legitimate possibilities of thought. If skepticism is correct, we should be skeptical. If relativism sees important aspects of the real, we should be relativists. If our thinking leads us to see the world as nothing, we should be nihilists and pessimists. A philosopher has no apostolates or missions, and no obligation to engage in crusades. I have, therefore, no affirmative conception of philosophizing. Philosophical activity is, for me, ruthless, incisive and unforgiving, and goes as far as its categories lead it. A Philosophy may shake the values that sustain our society, or it may even destroy its own upholder. It is a dangerous task, whose outcomes cannot be predicted."

"(...) "institutional philosophy" has transformed philosophical activity into a series of automatic and lifeless movements; in an enormous apparatus where teachers and students appear submitted to static and meaningless routines. (...) students often write their work far from what they would really like to do, works that will be read absentmindedly (and then shelved in large thesis banks that nobody consults) by professors increasingly busy with administrative and political tasks, and who also offer, absentmindedly, the classes that their students will listen for by obligation."

"In universities, no one is expected to develop a philosophy, and if one tried to do so, they would be evaluated poorly, and considered irresponsible. (...) There is no explicit censorship against this, that is, no one who forbids doing more personal works or essays on national authors, but someone who dares to do so would be heard by a few, or worse, viewed with distanced irony, and the author considered a dilettante or a "weak philosopher". The "community" itself plays the role of censorship here, dismissing it as an external authoritarian mechanism. Authoritarianism was incorporated into the community."

"In the still dominant paradigm, it seems that the possibility of being a "great philosopher" is ab initio discarded. So if this paradigm is accepted, the real alternative would seem to be: would you rather be a great commentator on philosophy or a small philosopher? A genuine philosopher never thinks while foreseeing that they will make great or small philosophy; for he simply thinks, compulsively, his own "things", his points, his obsessions, and can do nothing but think them. (...) What has to be evaluated is whether, at worst, being a small philosopher is more important than turning into a brilliant commentator or a great expert on someone."

"At least two different ways of receiving the European legacy could be clearly formulated: (1) Continue to expose and spread the thought generated in Europe; or: (2) Try to receive this legacy in order to assume the same creative attitude that the Europeans have taken to build, value and spread their own philosophy. In option (1), Europe bequeathed us an object of study; in the alternative (2), Europe bequeaths us an attitude. Assuming the first alternative, we present the contents of European philosophy; assuming the second, we try to make philosophy as the Europeans did theirs."