Zona cinza: como perceber a catástrofe?

Abstract

The aim of this study is to examine the perception of catastrophe and how literature and visual arts can contribute to its elaboration. To this end, we propose the concept of the gray zone, which consists of the distance between everything we know about a risk of catastrophe and what, even so, has the power to mobilize us to take that risk. As this is an irreducible field to knowledge and experience, we look at the threshold of perception. The gray zone represents the crisis of the perceptive faculty in late capitalism: it is a turbid, cloudy space, in which the boundaries between legal and illegal, between cause and effect, between interest and contingency, gets mixed up in order to produce subjectivities determined by “lies” and willing to act in the wake of “accidents”. We will examine different ways of producing this contradiction between knowledge and experience, always asking how the arts - with their signs capable of producing a perception - can subvert this relationship through a reactivation of a sensitive, speculative and intuitive sense of prudence.