There is no need to rush to defend bullfighting from the scandal it provokes. On the contrary: one must linger in it, even inhabit it, like someone who recognises in that discomfort an unmistakable sign that something essential is at stake. The scandal here is not an accident, nor a misunderstanding, nor a media distortion. It is the very form under which bullfighting appears before us today.
We live in an age that has learned to carefully conceal whatever it cannot integrate. Death, first of all. But also conflict, risk, the radical exposure of the body. Everything that cannot be translated into terms of utility or well-being is progressively pushed to the margins. It does not disappear: it becomes invisible.
The corrida, by contrast, insists on showing.
And it does so in a way that admits no mediation. There is no narrative here to soften it, no screen to filter it, no editing to sweeten it. What happens takes place before everyone and in real time, in that circular space where the gaze cannot look away without acknowledging, at the same moment, its own surrender. That is why it scandalises. Not so much for what it shows —the death of an animal— as for the way it shows it: without alibis.
The scandal is born of that absence of alibi.
It has been repeated ad nauseam that bullfighting "offends contemporary sensibility". Perhaps it is true. But it would be worth being precise: it does not offend just any sensibility, but a very specific one, historically situated, shaped by the aspiration to a world without friction. A sensibility that can no longer bear the presence of the irreducible. That demands that everything be, in some way, justifiable, explainable, integrable.
Bullfighting will not be integrated.
And therein lies its strength —or its condemnation.
For what is scandalous is not the violent, but what cannot be absorbed by the dominant system of values. There are perfectly tolerated violences —invisible, even— that arouse not the slightest rejection. And there are, by contrast, ritualised forms, codified, subject to a strict ethics, that become unbearable precisely because they lay bare the logic under which we live: that will to control which, under the appearance of safety, has ended up emptying experience.
The scandal, then, is not moral. It is ontological.
It occurs when something erupts and undoes the frame within which we believed we understood the world. When it forces us to acknowledge that there are zones of existence that will not be tamed. The corrida belongs to one of those zones. Not because it celebrates death, but because it incorporates it without concealment, without displacing it outside the field of shared experience.
In this sense, bullfighting is not so much a tradition as an interruption. It interrupts the continuous flow of a life organised around production, consumption and entertainment. It introduces a suspension, another time, where what is at stake is not accumulation or performance, but intensity. Risk. The possibility —however remote— that something might truly happen.
Perhaps that is why the temptation to abolish it takes such varied forms today. It is not only a matter of animal sensibility or moral progress. There is, at bottom, a deeper discomfort: the one provoked by everything that cannot be reduced to a calculation, a norm, a forecast.
Bullfighting is uncomfortable because it cannot be foreseen.
And a society that has made foresight its guiding principle can hardly tolerate the unforeseeable without feeling it as a threat. Hence the scandal should not be dispelled, but understood. Not as an argument against, but as a symptom.
A symptom that there still remains something —minimal, fragile, but persistent— that has not been completely absorbed.
Something that resists.