FLEX SLIDER
Ninety-Two Surgically Enhanced Mannequins
A Micro-Poetry Collection
By Julián Esteban Torres López
“Daring and risky, [the poems] challenge readers to think beyond the norms of language and cultural history, as each is broken down and reinvented. Think of Derrida working toward a written Picasso.” – Carl Boon, professor of literature and author of PLACES & NAMES: POEMS
“Reading [the poems] is like reading the writings of Russian poet and avant-gardist Daniil Kharms or one of the many heteronyms of Fernando Pessoa. But the poems’ minimalism reminds one of Zen koans: absurd, irrelevant, contradictory, imaginative, fun and beautiful.” – Bunkong Tuon, poet and associate professor of English at Union College
“To step into [these] micro poems is to step into otherworldliness itself. […] Julián Esteban Torres López has created a world where history, erudition, and vulnerability are challenged, where colonialism, veneers, and appetites are sharply scrutinized — and what a world it is.” – Aïcha Martine Thiam, author of AT SEA and BURN THE WITCH
The ninety-two minimalist, at times surrealist and magical realist, pieces tackle the absurdity of what it means to be human and honor how moments, not plots, compose our lives. The collection is an attempt to capture these fleeting moments, while also trying to remember the intensity of the mundane and the abyss of the beautiful.
Reporting on Colombia
Essays on Colombia’s History, Culture, Peoples, and Armed Conflict
By Julián Esteban Torres López
Prolonged war has drained Colombia of its most essential resources and has created an aggressively vengeful environment of resentment and resistance. Though the second oldest democracy in the hemisphere, an effective modern nation-state has never existed. Its 200+ years of so-called democracy have been a farce given Colombia’s feudalist innards and fascist exoskeleton.
Further, the continuing armed conflict is exacerbated by the country’s historical lack of hegemony, corruption, institutionalized violence, socio-political exclusion, lack of social mobility opportunities, and foreign intervention. We must curb the traditional might-makes-right conflict resolution method and the state must gain true legitimacy if Colombians are ever to manifest their potential.
Julián Esteban Torres López machetes through the tall weeds of Colombia’s power vacuum and fragmented sovereignty, peels the layers of the country’s flirtation with modernity and class consciousness, dissects the insecurity of Colombia’s security policies, and looks to understand who and what stand in the way of Colombia becoming the El Dorado it could become.
Marx’s Humanism and Its Limits
Why Marx Believed We Should Achieve Socialism and Communism Nonviolently
By Julián Esteban Torres López
In this long-form essay, Julián Esteban Torres López dissects Karl Marx’s writings to make explicit a Marxian Humanitarian Theory. Torres López surveys and analyzes Marx’s work on violence, revolution, and the treatment of human life, and concludes that not only did Marx see the possibility that socialism and communism could be achieved by peaceful means, but that it should be done so.
Torres López challenges the mainstream notion that Marxism has always been a war-machine that leads to tyrannical, authoritarian, and anti-democratic regimes. Instead, Torres López argues that actualizing human potential, while still treating the individual as an end, was the goal Marx endorsed. As Marx got older, he became more moderate in his justifications of violence, and he more intensely adopted the view that humans deserve to be afforded dignity and treated as ends.
However, though Marx hoped the road to socialism and communism would not be stained with blood, in most places in the world, he believed, violence used as self-defense would be the lever of revolutions. Nevertheless, though the end may justify force under specific circumstances, much hinges on the uncertainty of the realization of those very ends.
SLIDER IN COLUMN
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