Becoming a Seer: Thoughts on Deleuze, Mindfulness, and Feminism

My essay “Becoming a Seer: Thoughts of Deleuze, Mindfulness, and Feminism” is out now in Journal of Philosophy of Life, Vol. 7, No. 2, 2017.

Abstract: This essay circles around two ideas. First, I try to answer the ethical question “What is the right thing to do?” through the application of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s affirmative philosophy. Second, I relate Deleuze’s philosophy to mindfulness. I do not wish to suggest that they are identical. They are not. Yet, mixing mindfulness with Deleuze leads to a philosophy of mindfulness. That is a philosophy that makes us less blind to our experiences, but also ethically responsible for what actually happens. Hereby, I move mindfulness from the sphere of psychology into philosophy, or from being primarily a practice of turning inward to one of turning outward, but also make Deleuze’s ethic more operational. The latter I will – briefly – illustrate by touching on elements of feminism.

Read it all here.

All about love

Many years ago, I ended my first book with a reference to the lyrics of Massive Attack’s song “Teardrop”: “Love is a verb, a doing word.” I make a habit of never re-reading my own work, but I was again reminded of that song while I was reading Bell Hook’s lovely treatise on the transformative power of love.

In All About Love: New Visions, Bell Hooks or—as in all her books, her name isn’t capitalized—bell hooks argues that love is what liberates us and others. She says it’s about time that we defined and understood love. For example, love is not something mystical, an excuse for losing all control, or—even worse—those times when we hurt someone out of love. Just imagine the parent who abuses his or her children yelling, “I hit you because I love you!”

“Love and abuse cannot coexist,” bell hooks says. I love her from saying so, with such argumentative strength that this is clearly non-negotiable.

In this way, hooks also lifts love from an individual to a social issue. We are formed by the society we live in. Therefore, unless we become conscious of our blind spots and fight to get rid of them, we might reproduce a misunderstanding of what love is and how to live and practice love.

“To maintain and satisfy greed, one must support domination. And the world of domination is always a world without love,” hooks writes. Just think of Trump. Is he alone the real problem, or is it the mentality or ideology that put him in power?

Hooks emphasizes that our current culture is full of greed and exploitation—not only sexual or gender exploitation but also racial and economic. She mentions how former president Bill Clinton’s sexual relationship with an intern exposed a fundamental flaw in his self-esteem and how easily such behavior was accepted or objections to it silenced.

Hooks offers us a useful definition of love that she takes from M. Scott Peck’s The Road Less Traveled. “Love is the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” In other words, love is not something that we simply activate by pushing a button. Rather, love is something we must learn. Important ingredients are care, trust, respect, affection, and honesty. Hook adds, “When we are loving, we openly and honestly express care, affection, responsibility, respect, commitment, and trust.”

As a parent, teacher, or adult, we are responsible to teach and cultivate love. This also means addressing situations in which we see love being violated, for instance, if some parents—or partners—use violence to express love. It’s not love. It’s violence and abuse.

“There can be no love without justice,” hooks writes. This means that parents and teachers should treat children with respect. My children are not my property. They are individuals that I have a responsibility towards, ensuring that each of them—with “them” being the operative word—is capable of giving and receiving love. This also illustrates the need to find the balance between setting limits and nurturing free expression. So, without justice, love can’t exist. It resembles Plato’s idea of the Good, which is right, just, and beautiful. Hooks is an idealist about love.

Hooks’s narrative is a mixture of a personal memoir, in which she refers to her own friends or relationships, and an ongoing dialogue with psychologists and spiritual thinkers. She has an especially critical outlook on sexist stereotypes that extend back to Eve and Adam, in which women, just by being females, were—or are!—less likely to tell the truth. After all, as the story goes, Eve did lie to God. However, who cares about this since God now is dead? I find that many care because, although we may not believe in any transcendent being, the idea still colors our culture and many people’s behavior.

Although I don’t mind setting love and freedom up as ideals—basically, because I can’t come up with any two virtues of more importance—I still think that hooks tends to moralize. Since I agree with her basic arguments, the challenge is to know when, or if, she takes her points too far. For example, she is apt to describe men as one homogenic mass, perhaps because of her stated agenda. She writes, “most men tend to be more concerned about sexual performance and sexual satisfaction than whether they are capable of giving and receiving love.” Here she falls for what is a stereotypical cliché, regardless of if this appears to fit scores of American men. Even in the United States, I believe that there are as many ways to be a man as there are to be a woman.

Basically, hooks describes men as rather primitive animals that hardly know how to show emotion, sounding like a popular journalist writing about Mars and Venus rather than grounding her discussion in facts. I have much sympathy for those wanting to get back at men, but this undermines her project since she doesn’t live up to her own philosophy. Love can only liberate us if we think beyond individual identity and experience. Even as I say this, I can’t help adoring bell hooks’ work. She also has written one of the best books on feminism, in which she stresses that men are not the problem but sexism and exploitation are.

For me, capitalism is the main evil and the cause of racial and gender inequalities. We all know that disparities and discrimination still exist. We know that a white patriarchal president at this moment reigns in the United States. We all know that he’s a racist and sexist who, I think, actually fears losing the fictional privileges he sees as due to him because of his gender and skin color. However, fortunately, far from every man is like him. I know I say this from a privileged position of being a Scandinavian brought up with a high level of equality (unfortunately, even Scandinavian countries now have a rising number in intolerant politicians and citizens), yet I also only need to look out my window here in Barcelona, Spain, to see that sexism, exploitation, and domestic violence are part of daily business.

I stand by hooks regardless of her stereotypical descriptions of men, and I am inspired by her overall idea that love should be first defined and then understood so that we can finally learn how to practice it. We can actively decide whether we really want to love this or that person. Believing this is impossible reduces humans to beings purely made up of lust and desire, whereas—as Spinoza said—we are a mixture of reason and emotions.

Thus, hooks advises us to stop saying, “I am in love,” and, instead, to say, “I am loving” or “I will love.” Emphasizing love as a verb and not as a noun requires courage. She writes, “as long as we are afraid to risk, we cannot know love.”

To love is to accept that no promises can be kept in life. All we can do is to live life to the fullest so that we, one day, can die without regrets. This echoes Plato’s idea that knowing how to live is also knowing how to die. As hooks might say, knowing how to love is also knowing how to die. I hereby warmly recommend All About Love.

 

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When Stupidity Rules

Most of the fathers in my six-year-old son’s class use an instant messaging service called WhatsApp. The idea was to share information regarding school issues, but in reality it became a way of passing on jokes and pictures of women. In the beginning, the pictures were harmless, that is to say, no nudity. However, the other day, a father, who by the way is the father of two girls, sent a photo that was pure porn. It’s not the first time. A few others have sent pictures like that, although the majority doesn’t. This time, I thought about writing something like: “In ten years, this could be your daughter”; “Is this your wife?”; “You’re that desperate?”

I didn’t.

Ok, some context is needed. I am a Dane who lives in Barcelona, Spain. Here, the men are much more machista, male chauvinist, than what I am used to. For example, between 2003 and 2010, 545 women died as victims of domestic violence in Spain—more than two per week.

I am choked; I am surprised, both with what I see and hear, but also with how I react. Silence is consent.

I don’t consent.

I am balancing between being polite versus honest; or rather, being far too polite to be honest.

Gender role, unfortunately, is one of those stiff identities that acts like an unchangeable norm, although all norms are social constructions. They change. We get smarter. Or am I just daydreaming? The identity we attach to being either a girl or a boy, in reality, is quite static.

The other day I was talking with my wife about having a fourth child. We have two boys, four and six years old, followed by a girl, who is now two. At one point, she said, “Smilla might like a new little baby. Girls are like that.”

”Yeah,” I said.

Then something happened. Why did I say “Yeah”?

I realized how many times a day I hear from other parents at the school, or in the park that boys are like that and girls are like this. It always irritates me because I don’t believe that girls or boys have one fixed gender identity. The French philosopher Voltaire once said, “to learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.”

The problem that keeps me from saying something is that I don’t want to offend people. Perhaps, more from being a foreigner, I try to blend in. Also, I know from after more than eight years in Spain that it’s not okay to question the status quo. People are a bit more fragile here. The culture lacks open debate, not just about gender, but also identity, nationality, the civil war, etc. Spanish people shy away from conflicts. Apparently, I do the same. I am turning into glass. Call it integration.

I don’t want to.

So let me man up, as the cliché goes. My daughter is not a princess; I don’t even like the monarchy. My daughter, though, wears pink. Where did this need come from? One day, I woke up and she couldn’t drink or eat if the glass or spoon wasn’t pink. My boys love all the male superheroes, although my four-year-old also likes The Little Mermaid.

Fighting gender stereotypes is like Don Quixote’s fights with windmills. Gender identity doesn’t stand on anything solid, but only upon stupidity.

I have decided that from today onward, I will stop people if they uncritically put boys or girls into idiotic categories. I hope that people would stop me if I were doing the same. I refuse to be ruled by stupidity – or the monarchy. Men are not more ambitious and competitive than women, who are not more empathic or compassionate than men.

It is my ethical responsibility, not only as a father, but as a human being, to stop the spread of stupidity. I will not cultivate politeness when I unequivocally know that not all men dream about becoming a soldier and not all women dream of having their nude photos passed back and forth via WhatsApp. There is an inherent power balance here between men and women. It’s problematic. Often men define the “sexy” gender roles of women, whereas women less often, and less derogatorily, define the “strong” gender roles of men.

It stops here. The silence is over.

Published in The Transnational. A Literay Magazine, Vol. 3, 2015

 

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Det sande liv

“Én kvinde er altid i sig selv det jordiske bevis på, at Gud ikke eksisterer, at Gud ikke behøver eksistere.” – Alain Badiou, Det sande liv

Den franske filosof Alain Badious bog Det sande liv – opfordring til ungdommen er filosofisk let, men ikke uden dybde.

Badiou tilhører den store generation af franske filosoffer, der efterfulgte Sartre og de Beauvoir m.fl., hvor vi finder navne som Michel Foucault og Gilles Deleuze, og som stadigvæk tæller Michel Serres (en anden gigant).

”Hvad er et sandt liv? Det er filosofiens unikke spørgsmål,” siger Badiou. Han revitaliserer Platons filosofi, hvilket bl.a. sker ved hjælp af begreberne sandhed og væren; begreber, som Foucault, Deleuze og Serres, eksempelvis, er mere skeptiske overfor.

Skulle man være uenig med Badious præmis, er det i grunden ligegyldigt, da Det sande liv ikke er en filosofisk afhandling, men et debatterende essay, der er relevant læsning for alle studerende, deres undervisere og forældre.

Badiou vil ”fordærve ungdommen.” Det vil sige, vække den fra dens åndelige dvaletilstand, hvorved den (læs: ungdommen) blindt følger den slagne vej. Filosoffen forsøger at vise – eller overbevise – ungdommen, ”at der er et falsk liv, et ødelagt liv, som er det liv, der er tænkt og udøves som en vild kamp om magt, om penge.”

Det falske liv er domineret af kapitalismens idealer og normer. Sandheden for Badiou er tættere på Marx end neoliberalisten Milton Friedman, hvilket man nu ikke behøver være filosof for at se det indlysende i.

Og dog! Hvorfor har de unge så svært ved at anerkende muligheden af det sande liv?

De unge baserer deres liv på et falsk fundament, siger Badiou, der kommer til udtryk i to former for lidenskab.

  • Lidenskaben for det umiddelbare liv, fx kortvarige forhold, spil og fornøjelser.
  • Lidenskaben for succes, fx drømmen om at blive rig og magtfuld

At leve for fornøjelser alene kan de fleste nok se det overfladiske i, men mange vil nok mene, at drømmen om rigdom er fornuftig, fordi den fremmer en lydighed overfor den eksisterende sociale orden. Det er studenten, der fortsætter på universitetet eller handelshøjskolen, mens hun skæver til hvilke jobs, der rummer mest prestige (læs: magt og penge). Begge er falske og nihilistiske. Den ene uden fremtid, den anden med en naiv tro på det forløsende i karriere og penge. Begge lidenskaber mangler en overordnet ide.

For Badiou – som for Platon – må det sande liv guides af en overordnet ide, fx kærlighed.

De to indre fjender er dog ikke de unges eneste problem. De har svært ved at ville vokse op, da de netop hyldes, fordi de er unge. At være ung er blevet et attraktivt ideal. Ungdommen lever endvidere under en større frihed, forstået som ” fraværet af visse forbud”, ”en negativ frihed…” Endelige mangler de unge symbolske ritualer, der kan hjælpe – især drengen/manden – med at blive voksne, fx værnepligt.

Det betyder, at de unge fortsætter en tilværelse af uendelig ungdom, der er kendetegnet ved en nærmest infantil adfærd, hvor det vigtigste synes at være indkøbet af legetøj. Legetøjsbilen bliver til en rigtig bil. Dukkehuset bliver til en lejlighed på Mallorca. Plastik telefonen til den nye iphone.

Badiou er nok lidt moraliserende, men han er ikke nostalgiker eller konservativ. Han efterlyser ikke den gamle autoritære mand. Nej, han vil vække de unges evne til at spørge: Hvad er det sande liv? Eller i det mindste: Hvilket liv er også muligt?

Efter at have opridset problemerne, vender Badiou sig nu mod de unge drenge og piger. Hvad kan filosofien sige til ungdommen?

Det, der adskiller filosofien fra sociologi eller psykologi er, at den har blik for det, som er i færd med at blive. Det, som er i sin vorden. Det, som fortrænges eller forsømmes, hvis man lever falsk, det vil sige blot kæmper imod det bestående (uden at skabe alternativer), eller blot gentager fortidens succeshistorier, det som en virksomheder kalder ”best practice”.

Fremtiden for nutidens drenge ser mørkere ud end pigernes. Det er efterhånden velkendt, at manden er fremtidens taber. Drengen har mere end pigen brug for ritualer eller indvielser, der kan vække manden i ham (ikke karikaturens Rambo). Disse mangler. I stedet for har drengen udsigt til, hvad Badiou kalder ”den perverterede krop, ”den ofrede krop” eller ”den meriterende krop.” Den piercerede og tatoverede revolte eller søgen efter identitet; den politiske selvmordsbomber, der ofrer sig for politisk eller religiøs tomhed og den lydige krop, der har fundet sig et arbejde.

Fremtiden for pigerne er lysere, sandsynligvis fordi deres fortid generelt har været mørkere. Dog, ser Badiou ikke det store potentiale i den dominerende ”borgerlige femisme”, hvorved kvinden reduceres til at blive én, nemlig karrierekvinden. En tro kopi af manden stereotypologi.

Det store problem er kapitalismen. Den fastholder drengene i en infantilt stagnation. Mens fraværet af en ydre markering, fx (ægteskab eller en mand, som tidligere) medfører at pigerne bliver kvinder for tidligt.

Badiou tilføjer ny energi til den ”borgerlige feminismes” lidt trættende positioneringskamp, der – ganske uambitiøst – handler om at fratvinge manden hans position, selvom dette reelt er en reduktion af kvindens potentielle. Kvinden er en proces, ikke en position. Manden er fastlåst i én position – historisk – som lovens garant, men når nu Gud ikke eksisterer, er der frit spil.

Historisk er kvinden blevet betragtet som farlig, fordi hun reelt rummer to positioner (eller To-positionel, som matematikeren Badiou skriver). Husmoderen er ”kun kvinde, hvis hun virtuelt dubleres af forførersken, forførersken er kun magtfuld, fordi hun færdes på kærlighedens bredder …” Kvinden er altid to-positionel ”noget, som udspiller sig mellem to positioner … Man forstår ikke meget af alt dette, hvis man ikke er overbevist om, at Gud ikke eksisterer, og dermed at ’Faderens Navn’ som En-positionel ikke længere eksisterer. En kvinde er processen i denne ikke-væren, som konstituerer det En-positionelle hele væren.”

Manden har undertrykt (og undertrykker (visse steder!)) kvinden for at bevare sin position, som den En-positionelle magt og lov. Af samme grund spærrer mange religioner kvinden inde i et sort boks eller gemmer hende af vejen.

Heldigvis – hvilket Badiou ikke nævner – vil de fleste unge mænd i Vesten ikke reducere kvinden til noget som helst (ej heller ophøje sig selv, fordi du tilfældigvis er født mand). (Et muligt problem er, at Badiou skriver med sine sønner in mente, men disse er angiveligt i slutningen af fyrrene (eller mere), da Badiou er næsten 80 år, hvorfor han heller ikke helt har blik for det, som er i sin vorden blandt de lidt yngre, hvor manden også kan rumme flere positioner).

Det overordnede problem er nu, at kvinderne har et ansvar overfor menneskeheden. Enhver kvinden bærer potentielt fremtiden i sit skød (en mands sæd kan blot fryses ned). ”Enhver kvinde kan være en pige uden noget ønske om moderskab. At det er en mulighed, er fuldt ud legitimt. Men man må indrømme, at det ikke kan være en regel.”

En regels universelle konsekvenserne skal nemlig altid undersøges, og en universel afvisning af moderskabet betyder slet og ret menneskeracens endeligt. Ergo: Det er en dårlig regel, fordi den ødelægger spillet.

Det er denne balancegang der p.t. er udfordringen, og som nok ikke overvindes ved at opfordre kvinderne til at tælle deres æggeløsninger. Løsningen er altså ikke pligter, men en kultivering af et fælles ansvar, som nødvendigvis må inddrage manden, hvorved omsorg, pleje og kærlighed vitterligt bliver et fælles anliggende, der udspringer af kærlighed – og ikke en frygt for at kvinderne taber eller vinder terræn på arbejdsmarked.

Til trods for sine matematiske ideer om kønnet, så virker Badiou i sine tanker en smule gammeldags. For eksempel slutter han med at spørge: ”Hvad er en kvindelig kunstner, musiker, maler, digter? … Hvad er en kvindelig filosof?”

Dette er ikke interessante spørgsmål. Her fristes jeg til at gentage Foucaults spørgsmål: Hvad betyder det for kvaliteten af det sagte, hvem der har sagt det? Ingenting. Det er indlysende, at der findes store kunstner af alle former for køn og ikke-køn.

Det kunne have været interessant, hvis han var dykket lidt ned i andre, mere progressive feministiske teorier eller posthumanismens tanker.

Selvfølgelig betyder kønnet ingenting med hensyn til god litteratur, kunst, filosofi og matematik, men kulturen, religionerne, uddannelsessystemet og fiktive kønsroller har alt for længe bildt os ind, at det er sådan.

Hvad nu hvis den italienske forfatter Elena Ferrante viser sig at være en mand? Enhver litteraturelsker, ville sige: So what?

Badious bog er ikke desto mindre vigtigt, fordi den gør de unge opmærksomme på, ”at der kunne ske noget andet end det, der sker.” En anden, mere fair og kærlig verden, er mulig. Det er ikke etableringen af position og karriere, ”der står i første række, men derimod en sand tanke.”

Det sande liv kan stimulere de unges spørgelyst, hvorved bogen til fulde tjener sit formål.

Everything is fucking

The second season of True Detective, written by Nic Pizzolatto, is about caring and being fucked. To put it simply, only those who care survive, but the survivors need to run away to avoid being fucked. The rest—that is the non-caring—well, they all get fucked, sooner or later.

So in a way the moral is sad, and no less sad in that it’s a pretty accurate picture of contemporary capitalist society. Corruption, loneliness, fights for possessions—whether land, kids, property, even fights for the right to deal or not deal with one’s past.

“[T]here is no outside to the world market: the entire globe is its domain,” Michael Hardt and Toni Negri wrote in Empire. The two writers stress that there is no outside to capitalism, that there is no other world we can refer to as being better, more beautiful, more righteous, and so on. A possible change of an ethical approach in business comes from within as a kind of counter-actualization of something overlooked or neglected, for example from the few human beings who have the capacity to care for life not money.

In True Detective a missing girl says – as a reply to the question whether she shouldn’t aim for more in life than just fucking: “Everything is fucking.”

It is, since everything is business, and is cool and calculated transactions. Fucking is not making love; it is just one’s person assumed right to use another person to fulfill his or her desires. And here, True detective shows us that it apparently is more acceptable when men fuck than when women do.

The sadness of gender inequality is still here in 2015!

“I support feminism, mostly for having body image issues,” says detective Ray Velcoro to his female colleague, Antigone. This can be interpreted in many ways, but women are under more pressure from men, society, and, perhaps, themselves to live up to a sexy ideal, whereas men, apparently, can still be old, fat, and ugly and be sexy, as long as they have money or power. Also, many men can’t avoid seeing the body rather than the person when they speak with a woman. Of course, this is black and white; but in the end, it seems like Pizzolatto puts all the blame on capitalism, not men per se.

It makes you wonder: Will business corrupt women, like it did with the men?

Let me draw a parallel between death, capitalism, and sex. Climbing Mount Everest, one will at one point enter “the death zone” (above 8,000 kilometers). In this zone, the level of oxygen is so low that only very experienced mountaineers can survive with this level of oxygen. And common for many human beings in “the death zone” is that they become much more selfish. There are many stories of people passing dead bodies, or passing people asking for help but are left because the others are so seduced by their objective: to reach the top. Capitalism is similar to the death zone. Most people forget all about moral responsibility; they focus on the ends not the means. To be rich is to be on the top of the world. And sex… it has always been a good business—just see how the porn industry helped establish the Internet, together with the military. Sex and war—there you have it. Once upon a time, it was war and peace.

What happened with peace of mind?

And it doesn’t stop there. To add another moral: those who are capable of confronting their own nightmares—in the second season, related to past experiences of solitude or abuse—learn to care and then move on. The positive moral is that moving on and caring go hand in hand. We are offered a way out. However, caring is something more than self-compassion; rather, caring as in having compassion for others.

Nic Pizzolatto knows—or I assume he knows—that each of us is always secondary to life. Life came before us, and it will still be here when we are gone. It is ‘others’ who make us alive, and in that sense we all need one another. Those who care as elements of their own interests and egoism, like Ray and Paul (custody of his son and less heterosexual pressure), here fate catch up with them.

The caring element is one of two things that ties the second season with the first (see more of this here: True Detective: Pessimism, Buddhism or Philosophy?). A true detective cares . The other element that ties the seasons together is one of the many celebrated statements from Rust Cohle, that the “world needs bad men to keep the other bad men from the door.” It still does. Now, however, the world is just getting worse and worse, so it is not just a job for bad men but also for bad women to clean out. Thus, we need bad men and women. Paul, Ray, and Frank can’t do it alone; they need Jordan and Antigone.

Perhaps there is a reason why only the women survive, not the men. Is it because no one gets away with anything? Do men always fuck up?

The second season is about karma, the Buddhist concept that emphasizes our actions bring results. Each moment we plant seeds, those seeds will bear fruits depending on various circumstances. One can’t control the outcome, only one’s motive for planting this seed. Therefore, one’s intention becomes important.

The last and most important moral of True Detective: try to bring a moment of awareness and reflection to your actions, basically to make wise choices.

Is it wise of Paul to hide his sexuality? Apparently not.

Is it wise of Frank to want to kill everyone and get all the money before he escapes? Apparently not.

Is it wise of Ray first to abandon his kid and then to return and say good-bye while being on the run? Apparently not.

Is it wise of Antigone to share her story with another, like sharing the responsibility to make one’s own burden lighter? Apparently so.

No one survives alone (was that yet another moral?).

Ray Velcoro dies out in nature under a big tree, the Bodhi spot. He dies peacefully, perhaps because we are told that he already lived many lives and that he is tired. Frank dies in the desert. Often we associate the desert as being a limitless space, a kind of freedom. But those are just delusions: deserts are full of sand and have a lot of heat, but are devoid of water and people; nothing but death. Frank was already dead. He already died a long time ago, when he decided to enter the business world where legitimate businessmen can’t be distinguished from illegitimate. Business is entering “the death zone.”

Antigone is the only true detective in the second season. Next time, we need both bad men and women to keep the bad men and women from our doors. In the end, if everything is fucking, then not only men fuck.

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Hver eneste forbandet ting er vigtig

»Og helvede?,« spørger journalisten Mónica Maristain den chilenske forfatter Roberto Bolaño, og han svarer: »Det er ligesom Ciudad Juárez, vores forbandelse og spejl, en foruroligende refleksion af vores frustrationer, og af vores berygtede fortolkning af frihed og af vores begær.«

I Bolaños mammutroman 2666 hedder den mexicanske by ikke Juárez, men Santa Teresa. Byen gik tidligere under navnet Paso del Norte. Det er en by, der kontrolleres af narkohandler, politiet er korrupt politi, de fleste er fattige, kriminaliteten er udbredt og, det er byen, der er berygtet for de mange uopklarede mord på især unge piger. De fleste af ofrene har været udsat for seksuelle overgreb og tortur. Flere mener der er tale om femicides, en omskrivning af begrebet homocides. Femicides beskriver kvinder, der myrdes af mænd, fordi de er kvinder. I sin roman beskriver Bolaño flere steder udbredelsen af en machokultur, hvor kvinder rangerer så lavt, at det reelt ikke er en gåde at så mange myrdes. Kvinder er mest af alt råstof for gode vittigheder blandt romanens detektiver.

Læs videre i Atlas Magasin.

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