There is an Instagram account where you can find the peripheral Macarena that corresponds to your zodiac sign. The Esperanza Macarena resides in a basilica attached to the San Gil Church in Seville, but there are countless peripheral Macarenas that, located around the world, spread her image and presence. She is everywhere and can reach the most distant land without even having to leave her house. As the peripherals demonstrate, her power is such that it is impossible to conceive of an outside, a distance from her, something beyond her reach. For her, the periphery does not exist because everything that exists remains under her mantle. She exists even before the possibility of existence. She is the mother of God. If there is anything useful in Christianity, it is the certainty that God has a mother. You come to understand that in Seville, thanks to hyperbole, you can go very far with thought and imagination.<\/p>\n
\u2026<\/p>\n
The San Gil church impresses us with the wonder of its own existence. The peripheral Macarenas, however, impress us with the precision with which they embody the Freudian concept of the sinister, Das Unheimliche<\/em>, a strange familiarity, like the phrase \u201cthey say it\u2019s her but it\u2019s not her.\u201d We could easily fall into temptation and, letting ourselves be carried away by the sinister impression produced by the peripherals, get entangled in the original-copy question, similar or not so similar, but that\u2019s not the point. Instead, it is a matter of trying to understand what all these presences do and, ultimately, of venturing into the future that Macarena and her peripherals portend.<\/p>\n \u2026<\/p>\n Both the Sevillian Macarena and her peripheral are dolls. It\u2019s best to say that up front. They are people made of wood, iron, silk, lace, gold, more gold, even more gold and all kinds of precious stones. In none of them are there any veins, blood, muscle, humors, functions, or liquids, as they are Bodies without Organs made from the intensity that passes through them. To deny or evade her concrete materiality, to believe that She represents something other than what She is, is to miss the mark. Her figures don\u2019t fool anyone. It is precisely the fact that they are hollow bodies, stripped of any solid center, that allows them to exist as pure enunciation, as pure pronouncement. In case you haven\u2019t realized it yet, they are performance.<\/p>\n \u2026<\/p>\n In these hollow bodies, stories are suspended and another time emerges in which adventures are not needed to exist. Yes, true, there is the narrative context of the Passion of Christ, but She does not exist because of that, She is not part of a scene, She is not a character. She exists long before the text and She has not come to illustrate anything. Once again, her job is none other than to exist and to pronounce her presence, nothing else.<\/p>\n \u2026<\/p>\n The Esperanza Macarena of San Gil celebrates two great moments a year. It is true that her calendar can be occasionally dotted with other extraordinary events, but mostly everything is concentrated during those two occasions. The first moment of maximum splendor takes place during the early hours of the day, from Thursday night to Friday morning, on the first full moon after the spring equinox. From that night until the following noon, She is carried by her servants out into the street and around the city, around her neighborhood and then back to her house. On this occasion, She is in motion while people calmly await her arrival. The second moment takes place at the end of autumn, in the last week of Advent, just before the winter solstice, when She is lowered to the ground so that her servants can kiss her colorful wooden hands. On this occasion, She remains still while people must come to her.<\/p>\n \u2026<\/p>\n Her hollow body, covered in layers and layers of wonder, is freed from all forms of subjection. She is, above all, an object, and her body is a vanishing point. In this sense, She is the Other, that which appears on the other side of the hegemonic mandate of classical epistemology, not as a binary opposition but as an excess, an overflow of being condemned to be someone. For as Jos\u00e9 Luis Pardo puts it, \u201cbeing someone is a complication of the complication\u201d (La intimidad<\/em>, 1996:44)<\/p>\n In her now classic reflection on the classical episteme, perspective, the resurrected body of Christ, and wounds, Peggy Phelan proposes the following: \u201cWithin the arco of resemblance and mimesis that perspective inaugurates, the stand-in stands in for a real that, like God and the Other, forever eludes us. The point is not so much to \u2018find\u2019 the Other, but rather to play the drama in such a way that the stands-in come to reveal that the kernel of the drama of the other is that the Other is always a stand-in.[1]<\/sup><\/a>\u201cWithin the arco of resemblance and mimesis that perspective inaugurates, the stand-in stands in for a real that, like God and the Other, forever eludes us. The point is not so much to \u201cfind\u201d … Continue reading<\/span><\/span><\/span>