Jorge L. Tizón
Barcelona: Herder, 2022
[Automatic translation from Spanish]:
Amin Maalouf (2019) pointed out in one of his texts that every writer has the obligation to act as a lookout. A writer, said the great Lebanese author, must be like the watchman who warns us, at night, that our house is in flames and that we cannot continue to sleep so quietly. A writer, especially an essayist —we would add— must work as a porter, as one who give notice —and warns— about the state of the situation, especially if it is not on the right track.
We believe that Tizón, in some of his recent works, exercises as such, as he presents himself as a very critical auditor with the socio-psychological conditioning factors of contemporary society. A society in which many of its inhabitants are, or we are, as Fromm (1955) would say, deranged, with respect to the most fundamental humanistic and ethical values.
In fact, in recent years, Tizón has produced three texts aimed at reflecting on various aspects of the times in which we have to live. In Psychopathology and Power (2015) he specified a brief, but substantial, analysis of the perverse relational mechanisms operating in certain ways of exercising power and its disastrous consequences. Afterwards, we were surprised by Emotional Health in times of crisis (2020b), showing us, about the COVID 19 pandemic, how different emotions can influence our response to situations of social crisis. Finally, we arrive to the text today we talk about: The war as a battlefield (2022) book that, as the author himself indicates, does not derive from the urgency of the scrutiny on the current war in Ukraine, but it began to be gestated long before it.[…]
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