FRANS DE WAAL: The Age of Empathy

Frans de Waal examine the empathy from an evolutionary point of view, concerning that human society is very competitive, selfish, and greedy. The author support his thesis that give importance to the emotional and mental processes like empathy that are not unique for humans, because it has been observed among a wide variety of animal species, and also take in account the cooperative behaviour, which is essential to the mammal animal societies to have existence.

In terms of evolution and society, we, as human beings, have been evolving during our whole existence, and with us, the society have lived lots of changes. In our society, there have been a big globalisation because of the wide advances in transportation and communication infrastructures, inlcuding the rise of the Internet, and those are generating further interdependence of economic and cultural activities.

Nowadays, we are like hyperconnected, and the migration movement of people and the enviromental challenges are also affecting to us. This processes have also affected to our society in terms of business and work organization, economics and sociocultural resources, and also in our natural environment. If we think about evolution and changes in terms of science, we realise of the improvement of science and technologies in our society and those have a big influence in our lives nowadays, for instance, today we can't live without a Smartphone or Internet. 

In my opinion, in terms of empathy and evolution, empathy had changed, nowadays we, as human beings, are characterized by the empathy that we have, but now this is changing and is becoming different, we are fighting to be the bests in whatever and we are forgetting to be empathic, we are losing empathy only to be above the others. 

ON THE GENEALOGY OF MORALITY: Virgina Woolf

The feminist author, Virginia Woolf, explores the history of women in literature through and unconventional and highly provocative investigation of the social and material conditions required for the writing of literature.

The gender inequalities at the time of the author were enormous, and it was too difficult to have success as a women writer.  It’s very interesting how Virginia Woolf reflects on that if women wanted to work as a writer, she must be able to count on a number of conditions: access to writing and education, autonomy possession (access to a physical space to provide privacy) and the possession of own economic resources. But now, the womens situation have changed.

So this main ideas of Virginia Woolf are the ones that I choose to represent visually through this video.

I've choosen to put in the video this song called "Ella" by Bebe, an Spanish singer-songwriter and actress. I think that this song is linked to Virginia Woolf 's ideas because the song is about the freedom of women and also is an statemen against gender violence.

ON THE GENEALOGY OF MORALITY: Feminism and subjectivity

"AN IMAGE IS WORTH MORE THAN A THOUSAND WORDS"

This series of portraits called "Like every day" by Shadi Ghadirian, had impacted me a lot, how the face of the women is replaced for a household object. I could see throuhg this pictures the different conceptions that exsist in the world about the women's roles.

As Ghadirian do, uses an ordinary kitchen utensil and through her simple recontextualisation, she develops a fictional character of hilarious proportions. So, what I have done is to add some utensils such as the Smartphone, the money or the fast food because I think that is what is identifying us as a modern society, because we're dominated by all of these things.

Finally, I decide to put my face, to demonstrate the value of womens nowadays.

POWER: Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett

I'm questioning the purpose of human life...

Waiting for Godot, written by Samuel Beckett, was written in the 1953. This book is focused in the idea of the suffering of being, because both protagonists, Estragon and Vladimir, are waiting for something to attenuate their boredom, and for this reason I think that Godot can be interpreted as one of the many things that people wait for in life. 

In my opinion, this novel is irrational, and it doesn't take into account the chronological plot, the logical language, the themes, etc. I think that there could be different interpretations of the novel, such as the religious one, that makes us think that Godot is the representation of God, and the tree can represent the tree of death or the tree of life. Also, there is a political interpretation, because there are some people that think that the relation between Pozzo and Lucky is that of a capitalist to his labour, it's like a Marxist interpretation, and also I found that there are som that have understood it as an allegory for Franco-German relations.