Impurity

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.