Lately I feel very sensitive to space. I feel its dimensions, its noises, its smells. The office where I work is a small rectangle. It has two huge black cupboards that take up quite a lot of room. The rest of the space is filled by three small individual sofas. One grey, one light grey, and the other one – which I tried to hide – fluorescent green. Opposite the cupboards, a huge black board made of acrylic. You can see your own reflection in it. It's almost like a mirror. Maybe too big for the room. There isn't enough space to look at it. For a moment I felt like writing with a white marker this sentence from J. Rancière: “I write to shatter the boundaries that separate specialists of philosophy, art, social sciences, etc. I write for those who are also trying to tear down the walls between specialties and competences.” But in the end I write nothing. I prefer seeing on the board the reflections of the room.
Today I woke up at 4am. I couldn't sleep anymore. I have a meeting with the director of the faculty. When leaving the house, I say a little prayer: Gracias Gracias Gracias to all 22 buses and to all 22 bus drivers. Gracias Gracias Gracias for smiling at 6 am no matter what. Entering the central station at 6:15 feels like heaven. No one is around. I’m reading chapter 5 of The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt. Many times I have to re-read the sentences in order to understand. I get distracted by the few people on the train. I look at my phone. These days my head is like a little Tower of Babel. Somewhere between the awkwardly articulated Spanish, the never-well-learnt English, the wannabe Italian and the unaccomplished Dutch. But wait, so many people have asked me why I'm doing this exchange. Honestly I never asked myself that question. It felt more of an intuitive decision. Meeting people I would have never met and talking to people I would have never talked to otherwise. I think they might be expanding the way I see and I think. Most of the talks I have had recently have to do with organizing something in a certain way. I would like to say that we've been discussing – in quite a fundamental way – the being-in-common. In a sense, I feel grateful for those conversations. I guess we are learning together how to apply qualities and capacities to different events and situations. Could it be that, at some point, the different sets of competences are exchangeable, to the extent that it is almost hard to distinguish who is who?