Event

Monday 19 January, 19:30

Barcelona Debate 2009 - Impurity

Observations on the Human Condition

"Pathologies of Purity: Eating Disorders and the Perfectible Body"
Lisa Appignanesi. Writer, president of English PEN and author of Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800 (Virago/Little Brown, 2008).

The human species is imperfect, impure by its very nature. The dream of purity has only produced individual and collective monsters. Purity and perfection have been implacable arguments for dominance and exclusion. In the name of God, the race or the ideal society, death and devastation have been wreaked and millions of people have been psychically annihilated. Human society is mixture, plurality, contamination, imperfection. As the world becomes smaller thanks to technological advances, the absurdity of fantasies of homogenous human societies made up of perfect, exquisitely selected individuals is becoming evermore evident. The human being is a faulty creature and, in order to survive, it needs to know its limits and to recognise the reality of evil and abuse of power. It is the impure nature of the human condition - impurity as the condition of freedom; purity as the guarantee of oppression - that the lectures in the Barcelona Debate 2009 will be pondering: the impurities that constitute us as individuals, the impurities that weave open social relations and the impurities that threaten to destroy us, as people and as a society.

This cycle is part of an ongoing reflection on human nature and is preceded by the debates "Passions" (2005), "Life" (2006), "Sense" (2007) and "The Human Condition" (2008).


19 January

"Social Identity and Personal Identity"
Clément Rosset
. Philosopher and author of Loin de moi. Études sur l'identité (Éditions de Minuit, 1999). 


26 January

"Climate Change and the Human Condition: On Some Limits to Human History?"
Dipesh Chakrabarty. Professor of History, South Asian Languages and Civilizations and author of Humanism in an Age of Globalization (CCCB, 2008) and Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton University Press, 2000)


9 February

"Pathologies of Purity: Eating Disorders and the Perfectible Body"
Lisa Appignanesi. Writer, president of English PEN and author of Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800 (Virago/Little Brown, 2008).


16 February
"The Religious Ambiguity of Purity"
Lluís Duch. Monk at the Montserrat Abbey, Lecturer in the Faculty of Theology of Catalonia and co-author of Antropologia de la vida quotidiana (Anthropology of Everyday Life - Publicacions de l'Abadia de Montserrat, 1999-2003).


23 February
"Racial Impurity: a Blocked Dream"
Ash Amin. Director of the Institute of Advanced Study, Professor at the Department of Geography, Durham University (United Kingdom) and author of Collective Culture and Urban Public Space (CCCB, 2008).


2 March
"On Corruption"
Misha Glenny. Journalist and author of McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld (The Bodley Head/Alfred A. Knopf, 2008). 


9 March
"Disrespect"
Axel Honneth. Philosopher, director of the Institute of Social Research of the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University at Frankfurt am Main, and author of Disrespect. The Normative Foundations of Critical Theory (Polity Press, 2007).


16 March
"A New World Ethic in Today's Political and Economic Crisis"
Hans Küng. Emeritus Professor of Ecumenical Theology at the University of Tübingen, President of the Foundation for a Global Ethic and author of The Beginning of All Things: Science and Religion (2007).


Closing Session. 28 April
""Ulysses and Modernity"".
Claudio Magris. Writer, professor of German Literature at the University of Trieste and author of L'infinito viaggiare (Infinite Journeying - Mondadori, 2005), inter alia.