Raúl Cazorla

Diletante consumado.

[Raúl Cazorla @RaulCazorla77]

Selfie.
25 de junio de 2014.

[Raúl Cazorla @RaulCazorla77]

Tiempo de clásicos.

[Raúl Cazorla @RaulCazorla77]

@alb_olmos De leerlo no, pero sí de comprarlo.

[Culture Explorer @CultureExploreX]

In a Beijing studio promoting Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, a young Chinese woman named Zhong Shu leans forward and asks the question Western interviewers have carefully avoided:

“We live in an age that demands apologies from greatness… Is it still a story of apology that demands repentance, reflection, and self-criticism?”

She is a doctoral student, political philosophy lecturer, and podcaster whose discussions of classical thought attract hundreds of thousands of young Chinese listeners. She has studied Greek and Latin since high school and reads Homer as a living study of power, ambition, and human greatness.

Nolan answers with the caution of a filmmaker who understands his audience. In today’s democratic and egalitarian culture, he says, greatness requires an apology or audiences will reject it. The hero must appear sympathetic. Hubris must carry consequences. Exceptional men must submit to the moral expectations of ordinary society.

His answer is revealing, and inadequate.

As Western universities reduce their classics programs and increasingly approach Plato and Thucydides through the language of elitism and imperialism, China is translating, debating, and institutionalizing them. In November 2024, a Cambridge classicist arrived in Beijing expecting a conventional academic conference. He found diplomats, scholars, and officials gathered in a vast convention center. A letter from Xi Jinping presented ancient Greece and China as the great civilizational centers of Eurasia. A Chinese School of Classical Studies was announced in Athens.

China is studying the Western inheritance that the West increasingly treats with suspicion. Its scholars want to understand how earlier civilizations thought about authority, excellence, social order, and the stories that held societies together. Some Chinese readers approach Plato’s Republic and its Noble Lie as political observations rather than moral scandals. People differ in judgment and ability. Large societies depend upon shared beliefs. Hierarchy can support order when it joins authority with responsibility and merit.

Western political thought, shaped by Enlightenment suspicion of authority and modern egalitarianism, often recoils from these ideas. Confucian thought offers Chinese scholars a different starting point, one grounded in social roles, harmony, education, and merit-based hierarchy.

Zhong Shu stands between these traditions. Her Chinese background allows her to examine greatness without treating it as a moral confession. Her classical education gives her access to Western texts that many Western institutions are abandoning. That combination gives her the confidence to ask a direct question: Why must the West apologize for the excellence it once admired?

Nolan answers from within the culture she is questioning. Hollywood audiences have been shaped by democratic instincts, post-imperial guilt, and suspicion toward heroic authority. The exceptional figure must repent, suffer, or be morally reduced before the audience will accept him. Nolan understands this demand, but he accepts it as unavoidable. He can describe the pressure to apologize for greatness, yet he cannot imagine storytelling beyond it.

That is the deeper irony. Homer celebrated greatness with all its ambition, violence, pride, and consequence. Plato examined hierarchy with a clarity that modern readers often find uncomfortable. The West once taught these works as foundations of its civilization. Now a Chinese scholar, armed with those same texts, must ask one of the West’s greatest living filmmakers why apology has become the price of portraying greatness.

She can ask because China still wants to understand power. He struggles to answer because the West has learned to fear its own inheritance.

[Raúl Cazorla @RaulCazorla77]

Entremos más adentro en la espesura...

[Raúl Cazorla @RaulCazorla77]

El Hambre, Martín Caparrós.

[Raúl Cazorla @RaulCazorla77]

@tortubita @Juanmanuelmaci Si ddf Z d ser zdxzd--#+@0

[Juan Manuel Macías @Juanmanuelmaci]

El final de la Odisea en el canto XXIV sigue siendo más "moderno" (por intemporal) que muchas de las relecturas o reescrituras modernas. Es como un cese repentino de la música o un verso quebrado: tremendamente disruptivo y, sí, "anti-épico". Atenea acude en un falso deus ex machina no para resolver un conflicto que la trama no pudo resolver, sino para mostrar a todos (lectores incluidos) que ese conflicto es irresoluble bajo la lógica de los héroes. Y esa panorámica sólo podría hacerlo la diosa.

Los dioses se marchan al cielo, los héroes declinan y los hombres habrán de aprender a convivir con un pacto endeble. El camino hacia la polis.

Pero lo asombroso de verdad es cómo Homero hace desaparecer a Odiseo hacia su rutina, confundido en medio de la multitud de los días y la vida. No hay un parlamento final, no hay un último momento dramático. No hay un coro que subraye la escena. Simplemente se apaga su foco y se baja el telón. Homero nos despoja de toda emoción, de cualquier transición y a cambio nos deja un leve sabor amargo en esa fuga. Un recordatorio de que el cantar ha terminado y la vida sigue.

#RepescasHoméricasVeraniegas

[Raúl Cazorla @RaulCazorla77]

@Rei___pictures @TIFF_NET @FeaturesRT C. Z v v

[Raúl Cazorla @RaulCazorla77]

El hambre, Martín Caparrós.

[Raúl Cazorla @RaulCazorla77]

Empezando...

[Raúl Cazorla @RaulCazorla77]

Kapuscinski nunca falla.

[Raúl Cazorla @RaulCazorla77]

Botín de Feria.

[Alberto Olmos @alb_olmos]

🤣🤷🤣🤷

[Raúl Cazorla @RaulCazorla77]

Lecturas pendientes.

[Raúl Cazorla @RaulCazorla77]

Soledad era una de mis periodistas de referencia. Sus artículos, sus editoriales siempre estaban trabajados, razonados e impecablemente escritos. Que la tierra te sea leve, compañera.
https://t.co/xINQmq49jZ

[El vicio impune de leer @historiador]

Dicen que más vale tarde que nunca, así que...
¡Feliz Día del Trabajador!
Aquí les dejó 14 libros sobre el pasado, presente y futuro del trabajo.

1. Aprendiendo a trabajar. Cómo los chicos de clase obrera consiguen trabajos de clase obrera (1977), de Paul Willis. Publicado originalmente en 1977, desde esa fecha ha sido leído y releído ininterrumpidamente por generaciones de sociólogos, historiadores, analistas y lectores que han encontrado en él el perfecto ejemplo del libro que ofrece respuestas a problemas aparentemente sencillos de responder o respuestas obvias, pero que no tiene nada de sencillas ni obvias. Se trata, en esencia, de un libro magnífico sobre la cultura del trabajo en la clase obrera, sobre cómo los estudiantes de ésta transitan de la escuela a sus primeros puestos de trabajos como consecuencia de un sistema educativo que los prepara (o conduce) a esos puestos como una forma de mantener y reproducir el orden social establecido (lo que aquí algunos llaman eufemísticamente mantener el modelo). Pero esto apenas es la epidermis del entramado empírico y teórico que Willis sostiene con habilidad, hondura y, especialmente, lucidez.
👉https://t.co/XCpfPOB7Pz

[Raúl Cazorla @RaulCazorla77]

De la película al libro.

[Raúl Cazorla @RaulCazorla77]

Feliz Día del Libro 2