The Poetics of Captivity. A Cultural Theory

A reductive generalisation holds that the principal feature of captivity is exclusively political—because Europeans and their philosophical tradition tend to assume that everything begins with Western modernity. This verdict has persisted to the present day. As a consequence, the studies and the philosophy of captivity have stagnated, or have gravitated toward the domain of imprisonment and incarceration as regenerated by philosophers such as Michel Foucault. The present study proposes a new poetics of captivity, tracing the genealogy of the concept up to the digital captivity of our time, which surpasses all post-totalitarian forms of captivity. Unfortunately, conceptual discussions have receded precisely in those spaces that have concretely experienced socio-political and psychological forms of captivity at a collective scale. The question is whether captivity and ethics maintain differing relations. It is implicit that such discussions presuppose the criteria of liberty and democracy; the notional subtleties are therefore all the more interesting. Captivity remains one of the most powerful fluid concepts—transforming and rapidly adapting to all the major sciences, evoking past and future in scenarios that become concrete reality. A poetics of captivity entails, at the same time, a new perspective for the study of the social-human and literary disciplines.

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