Jorge Majfud Knihy

Since the Monroe Doctrine in 1823, at least one-third of what is currently the United States and what is known as Latin America have been shaped initially by U.S. pro-slavery expansionist policies and later by big American corporations, which promoted thousands of inventions and bloody dictatorships in the name of freedom and democracy over the last 200 years. Americans and Hispanics in the U.S. have tended to accept this convenient “freedom and democracy” narrative over the facts. It is time to start saying the inconvenient truth rather than waiting for another two centuries.

Jorge Majfud reflects once again on the economic, political, and cultural realities of the first two decades of the century 21st with “an outsider’s view from the center”: the culture of masks of the United States' cultural industries and national unconscious, the hyper-fragmentation of the contemporary individual, the construction of reality through social narratives, the narrative dictated by the major social powers of money and the social castes who have taken us steadily toward a new form of feudalism, one no longer based on ownership of the land but of finance capital. In all of the essays that comprise this book, one can see the urgency of responding to the historical moment, to the specific events that have occurred over the past two decades, but with an unflinching effort to contextualize events within their greater historical framework. Because, as the author asserts, forgetting is one of the principal weapons of moral, social, and, ultimately, military violence.

Crítica de la pasión pura fue escrito en su gran mayoría en Mozambique en 1997 y publicado por primera vez al año siguiente, en Uruguay. Está compuesto de 358 “compactos”, cada uno de los cuales pretende ser una unidad en sí misma. No obstante, este conjunto de ensayos gira entorno a pocos temas básicos: la formación de la ética y la moral a partir de los miedos y las angustias persistentes en la historia la renuncia ; las formas de comprender y representar el mundo, la vida y la muerte, la historia y el presente, la evolución humanística y las reacciones autistas de los poderes tradicionales. Según el diario La República de Montevideo, “en esta nueva entrega Majfud confirma su indudable vocación por filosofar en tiempos de indiferencias y vacuidad, desafiando al lector a meditar en torno a su destino y sus seguramente más estre-mecedoras incertidumbres”.