Innuendo 9_2015: The Scary Other

With the start of a new semester, Innuendo starts anew, earlier, from 10:00 am to 11:00 pm, and it starts with a difficult and „hot“ subject: Otherness. Like usual, I try to draw a bigger picture and dig deeper in the history of the fear of another human being. Not only did the ancient Greeks call foreigners „barbaros“ because they were apparently babbling, their myths (Euripides’s Medea, and, to an extent, Homer’s Odyssey)  and philosophical treaties (Plato’s Eleatic Stranger from the Sophist dialogue) constantly warn of the perils that await one should they come across someone different (in Medea’s case, a woman). No wonder then that so many psychologists, anthropologists and philosophers have tackled with the conceptual other. Besides Jaques Lacan’s well-known mirror stage in child development and the consequent transference of one’s „qualities“ to anyone new, Jung’s shadow is the oldest of all four archetypes, and Michel Foucault made a whole geography out of it: Heterotopia.

The subject, however hot, is as old ad the world itself, and I tried to spray the monologue with music from as many regions and as many historical times as possible. Starting with the concert „Revueltos y unidos“ (Scrambled and united) from Inti Illimani and Illapu (two bands who have experience a decade long exile), I couldn’t not include Leonard Cohen, neither Massive Attack’s Paradise Circus or Portishead’s Roads. The conclusion was drawn by the main theme of the PC game Brothers: a tale of two sons, reminding us that even an 10 year old boy from Lebanon can one day become the director of successful movies (Jala! Jala!) and a great video game.