We live in times through catastrophe: multiple wars, borders in trenches, security technologies that are actually control,
Speeches that reduce life to figure, waste or threat. In the midst of that dark landscape, The Flight of the Fireflies proposes a countercurrent bet: to learn to look at what, even in the densest night, continues to emit light.
Inspired by the thoughts of Georges Didi-Huberman, Achille Mbembe, Nelly Richard, Mary Louis Pratt, among others, as well as in his own research, this book traces the fireflies of the present: minimal gestures of resistance, artistic and community practices, collective struggles, ways of looking, listening and naming that interrupt the order of violence and open fissures in the given.
From essays that dialogue with political philosophy, contemporary art, cinematography and the social sciences, this book traces a cartography of fragile but stubborn resistances. It is not a question of offering superficial comfort or false utopia, but of training the gaze to recognize the faint flashes that hurt the darkness. Perhaps the future will not come as a great promise and it is just a perceptible spark, but learning to recognize it—and to take care of it—can be a deeply political act today.