Event cancelled

Colloquium with Máriam Martínez-Bascuñán

On occasion of the publication of her book El fin del mundo común

Participants

Javier de Lucas. Professor of Legal Philosophy at the UV

Cristina García Pascual. Head of Initiatives Narration Classroom at the UV

Máriam Martínez-Bascuñán

She is Professor of Political Science at the Autonomous University of Madrid. She is specialised in political theory and feminist thinking. She finished her studies at the Paris Institute of Political Studies and she was a visiting researcher at the University of Chicago and at the Columbia University in the City of New York. She is the author of the book Género, emancipación y diferencias (Plaza & Valdés, 2012), and co-author with Fernando Vallespín of Populismos (Alianza Editorial, 2017). She has written academic articles on research journals such as Journal World Political Science, REIS, ISEGORÍA or RECP, among others. On June 2018, she was appointed as Head of Opinion of the newspaper EL PAÍS, a position she hold until 2020. Currently, she is a columnist and contributor to this newspaper, and is part of its editorial committee.

‘The post-truth era may be understood, of course, as the disinformation era. However, the novelty in what happens to us has more to do with a pervert usage of citizen trial and our inability to distinguish between what is it true and false.’

The day after Trump’s presidential inauguration, her press officer stated that the event gathered the largest audience in history. When defending what was a provable falseness, an adviser at the White House claimed it was a matter of ‘alternative facts.’ In this splendid and insightful essay, Máriam Martínez-Bascuñán argues that it was in that moment when a political era ended, and other started.

With the experience gained throughout her career as Professor of Political Sciences and columnist and Head of Opinion of El País, the author sheds light on this new paradigm assisted by the prescient intelligence of Hannah Arendt. The problem of the appearance of alternative facts, post-truths and pre-lies is not that they eliminate the truth –after all, truth is not an absolute term in politics–, but that they shatter the common world that lately had enabled democratic deliberation. Without a shared image of the world, it is unfeasible to discuss the issues that concern us all, and our condition of citizens does not make sense anymore. A plurality of perspectives requires all us to be looking at the same thing.

Arendt’s ideas, strinkingly contemporary, and how they contrast with those of other thinkers such as Orwell, Foucault or Plato serve as a guide for the analysis of this new reality, whose complexity must not lead to hopelessness.

Free entry, limited places

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