Tragedy in modernity

• Autor(a) principal: Martins, Moisés de Lemos
• Data de Publicação: 2002
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/1822/1788
• topic: Modernity; Politics; Intimate terror; Democratic ideal; Pragmatic order; Tragedy; Terrorism

A barbarian, primitive, bloodthirsty, in short, non-rational unknown currently fouls our air. Its presence leads us to reflect upon the fact that a thing may be true, without being, however, good, beautiful or fair. As a perverse compensation for the "intimate terror" of a city that has bowed down to the ghost of social asepsis, and also as a perverse compensation for the lethal boredom in which that same city agonises, a latent insurrection takes place in it: terrorism, all kinds of tribal wars, archaic beliefs, and fundamentalisms of many sources and loyalties. I believe that civic absenteeism, everyday sedition and terrorist escalade are all part of the same disastrous eroticism, a kind of allergic reaction of an impoverished and uprooted social body, given over to the abyss of total bartering in a flat, immaterial world.