Here you'll find the abstracts of forthcoming articles as well as a selection of published ones, both in English and in Spanish, some in Word and others in .PDF format. You can click on the links to access them. Downloadable
articles (full text)
Insurgencies don’t have a plan —they are the plan. Political performatives and vanishing mediators in 2011 (Forthcoming in Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies, 2012). Download here 2011 turned out to be an extraordinary year. The clustering of insurgencies around time and geography gave a political ring to the seasons: commentators spoke of the Arab Spring, the European Summer and the US Fall. TIME magazine even named “the protester” person of the year. Yet many faulted these revolts for their lack of plans and proposals. This criticism misses the point. Insurgencies are about saying “enough!” and refusing to go on as before; they upturn the given and open up possibilities that may or may not prosper. More specifically, insurgent actions are political performatives —participants start to experience what they strive to become— and vanishing mediators, passageways to something other to come rather than standard political practices or policy-making exercises.
El reencantamiento de la política como espacio de
participación ciudadana
(Siglo XXI, 2011). descargar artículo. Este
escrito discute la participación, el sentido de pertenencia y el
reencantamiento de la política. Tomo como eje la propuesta de un nuevo pacto de
cohesión social que elaboró la CEPAL para responder a problemas relacionados
con la pobreza, la exclusión y la discriminación.
Primero esbozo un marco
analítico para pensar a la cohesión y la pertenencia. Veo a éstas como
experiencias singulares cuyo sentido se juega en la interfase entre procesos de
gobierno y procesos de disenso o subjetivación que buscan reconfigurar lo dado.
Luego examino cinco ideas que están presentes en el PCS. Estas son: la apuesta
normativa por la solidaridad, el papel del conflicto y la exclusión, las
dimensiones “supra-” y “trans-nacional” de la política, los actores de la
gobernanza y el carácter fundante de los pactos. En tercer lugar discuto una
manera de entender la pertenencia examinando, por un lado, el valor y sentido
del prefijo “re-” que precede y modifica la idea del encantamiento de la
política y, por el otro, el desencanto y los procesos de subjetivación que dicho
desencanto puede generar. El cuarto y último paso consiste en elaborar un
diagnóstico de la política actual. Consiste en establecer que la política
latinoamericana está en un momento de inflexión en el que se abren
oportunidades para la experimentación y la innovación en materia de participación.
El poder aprovecharlas depende de nuestra disposición para aceptar el desafío
de ser audaces y reconocer que el post-liberalismo es una idea-fuerza cuyo
momento ha llegado. Las formas de participación, canalización de demandas y
rendición de cuentas que aparecen en este escenario post-liberal apuntan a un
empoderamiento social que suplementa el empoderamiento electoral que heredamos
de la tradición liberal. En esto radica su capacidad potencial para reencantar
la política, renovando y desplazando sus parámetros habituales. Politics is hegemony is populism? (Constellations, 2010). Extended review article of Ernesto Laclau's On Populist Reason. [download text] [bajar en español] Disagreement without reconciliation: Democracy, equality
and the public scene (Critical Review of International Social
and Political Philosophy, 2009). [download text]
or [bajar en español] Nancy Fraser claims that the public sphere did not
live
up to the assumption of strict equality envisioned by Arendt and
Habermas. She also believes that socioeconomic equality is a necessary
condition for a truly democratic public realm. This is problematic not
because equality is an unworthy goal but because it ties its pursuit to
classical narratives of emancipation and hence to an ethos of
reconciliation, at least implicitly. I argue instead that public space
is structured around an ethos of polemicization and propose two
criteria to frame its relation with equality. One is that the public
scene comes into being through a polemic to stage claims. This staging,
which involves an effort to verify equality, disturbs the given and
reshapes the boundaries between public and private. The other is that
equality is always a contested equality to come. By this I do not mean
that it is a delayed presence, an equality that is not-yet-here, but
rather that it never finds a final resting point: the question of
equality opens up whenever there is an attempt to verify it.
On the political: Schmitt contra Schmitt (Telos
142, 2008). [download
text] or [bajar
en portugues] or [bajar en español]A standard observation in the literature is that
Schmitt's take on the political wavers between nostalgia for the strong
state of the Westphalian era and a lucid depiction of the new statal and
non-statal political scene. This wavering doesn't close off more
interesting possibilities that emerge by thinking with and against
Schmitt, either navigating through his theory of the political without
endorsing all the consequences he draws from it or taking his reflection
in a direction he did not foresee or wish to go. I will look at some of the
tensions --the nature of the link between war and politics, the status
of enemies, the moral claim about the goodness of order-- and use his
distinction between politics and the political, perhaps his most
original insight, to develop the theme of the double inscription of the
political.
Arguments about the Left turn(s) in Latin America: a
post-liberal politics? (Latin American Research Review, 2008) [download
text] or [bajar versión
en español]. I propose a conceptual framework to discuss the
Left and Left turns in Latin American politics. I then argue that
winning elections --the recurrent criterion for these turns-- might
generate tremendous enthusiasm but is also a restrictive benchmark.
Other indicators I discuss here include the Left's agenda-setting
capacity, its redefinition of the political and ideological center and
its incipient challenge to the liberal setting of politics as actors
experiment with post-liberal arrangements.
Post-hegemony:
politics outside the usual post-Marxist paradigm (Contemporary Politics, 2007) [download
text] or [bajar
versión en español].
I take the early work of Laclau and Mouffe as a starting point to raise
a series of questions concerning post-Marxist and/or post-Gramscian
accounts of politics. I argue that their take on hegemony oscillates
between conceiving it as one form of politics amongst others and as the
form of politics as such. They ultimately settle for the latter. This is
problematic, if only because the absence of an outside shields the
theory of hegemony from the test of its own contingency and prevents it
from being falsified. My aim, though, is not to develop yet another
critique of their work but to clear the field for post-hegemony. I use
‘hegemony’ in the specific sense that these authors give to the term and
not to designate the dominant force in a contested political field. By
preceding it with the prefix ‘post’ I acknowledge temporality as a
conceptual shift rather than as a discontinuity between past and
present: what comes after hegemony is ways of thinking and doing
politics that do not conform to what the theory of hegemony prescribes.
Yet what is at stake is not simply an outside, as electoral politics has
been around for a long time and rarely cared about the mechanics of the
hegemonic format. Post-hegemony instead names an outside that
explicitly eludes hegemony, particularly viral politics and some aspects
of the politics of the multitude like exodus or defection that I will
examine here, but it need not be limited to these.
Althusser (book chapter in Palgrave Advances in Continental Political Thought, 2006) [download text] La totalidad como archipiélago: el diagrama de puntos nodales (revista Question No. 25, 2010, reedición actualizada de un artículo originalmente publicado en 1991) [bajar en español] La lógica o pensamiento del fundamento ha dominado el pensamiento occidental. La asociamos con el modelo topográfico de la verdad de Platón y con la búsqueda de la certeza absoluta en Descartes. Presume que detrás de la diversidad empírica del mundo hay un orden subyacente y que ese orden es cognoscible y sirve para descifrar el significado de la diversidad de fenómenos. El cuestionamiento de esta tradición ha contribuido a crear el terreno discursivo del post-fundamento. El giro de una tradición a otra incide sobre cómo pensamos conceptos familiares como los de totalidad, sociedad y lo social que discuto aquí. Si, como señala Laclau, la tesis esencialista de la sociedad como un objeto unitario que funda sus procesos parciales es imposible, resulta igualmente sospechosa la idea de sociedad como puro juego de diferencias desprovisto de reglas. La “sociedad” es una construcción excéntrica que surge en la zona comprendida entre dos extremos lógicos que son a su vez inalcanzables, el del cierre absoluto y la dispersión total. Propongo dar cuenta de la excentricidad de las totalidades sociales conjugando los centros de fuerza de Nietzsche con los puntos nodales de Freud y Lacan. Ello me permitirá concebir la totalidad como un archipiélago de puntos nodales o centros de fuerza o, para ser más preciso, como el diagrama de ese archipiélago. From
globalism to globalization: The politics of resistance (New Political Science, 2004; among the 5 top downloads of NPS 2003-2005) [download
text] or [bajar versión
en español]. The target of this reflection is the third circuit
of politics. My
main assumption is that the ‘second great transformation’ proposed by
global actors parallels the one advanced by those who resisted
laissez-faire capitalism in the nineteenth century. Both dispute the
unilateral imposition of a new planetary order and endeavor to modify
the rhythm and direction of economic processes presented as either fact
or fate. In doing so, they effectively place the question of the
political institution of this order in the agenda. I look briefly at the
familiar underside of globalism and then move on to develop a tentative
typology of initiatives that set the tone for a politics of
globalization. These include radical and viral direct action, the
improvement of the terms of exchange between industrialized and
developing countries, the expansion of the public sphere outside
national borders through global networks, the accountability of
multilateral organizations, and the advancement of democracy at a
supranational level. Participants in these initiatives take politics
beyond the liberal-democratic format of elections and partisan
competition within the nation state. They exercise an informal
supranational citizenship that reclaims —and at the same time
reformulates— the banners of social justice, solidarity, and
internationalism as part of the public agenda.
Populism as a spectre of democracy: A response to
Canovan (Political Studies, 2004). [download text]
or [bajar
versión en español] The literature on populism used to depict
the phenomenon as an alternative to the standard path from traditional
to modern society, as a way to enfranchise the underclass, or as an
anomaly vis-a-vis class politics and liberal institutions. More
recently, the debate has shifted into something of a terra incognita
due to the growing interest in the connection between populism and
democratic politics. One of the more intriguing contributions to this
debate is an article by Margaret Canovan, if only because it makes this
unknown territory less confusing. Her argument draws from Michael
Oakeshott's claim that political modernity is characterised by the
interplay of two distinct styles, the politics of faith and of
scepticism. She renames them the redemptive and pragmatic faces of
democracy, and suggests that populism arises in the gap between them.
This establishes a relation of interiority between populism and
democracy. The former will follow democracy like a shadow. At times,
however, the theoretical status of the gap is somewhat uncertain, as it
seems more appropriate for thinking politics --particularly radical
politics-- in general. One could specify the political valence of the
shadow further to show the in-built undecidability between the
democratic aspect of the phenomenon and its possible ominous tones.
The
becoming-other of politics: A post-liberal archipelago (Contemporary
Political Theory, 2003) [download text]. [The Spanish version (2005) won the 2006 award of the Spanish
Political Science Association (AECPA) for Best Book Chapter [bajar versión
en español]. Here I address the theme of
post-liberalism by speaking if the becoming-other of politics and
proposing an image of thought for this becoming-other. I claim that the discussion
about the double inscription of the political is a familiar trope among
progressive thinkers, whose discussions have focused primarily on the ontological
presuppositions of the political at the expense of a theoretical
reflection on politics. The article shifts the emphasis to the latter. It develops an
image of thought of our political actuality that moves beyond the
commonplace observation that politics exceeds electoral representation.
Its underlying assumption is that modernity is characterised by a
continual process of political territorialization and
re-territorialization whereby the political frontier has experienced a
series of displacements along a migratory arc that goes from the
sovereign state to liberal party democracies. But it does not stop
there, for as politics colonizes new domains and carves up novel places
of enunciation, the cartography we inherited from democratic liberalism
experiences a Copernican de-centering that throws us into a scenario
best described as an archipelago of political domains. This announces
the becoming-other of politics, the post-liberal setting of our
political actuality.
Stirred and shaken. From
'the art of the possible' to emancipatory politics (Parallax,
2005) [download
text] or [bajar
versión en español]. This article explores the persistence of
agitation —the stirring and shaking mentioned in the title— in
emancipatory politics. It deconstructs the familiar notion that politics
is the ‘art of the possible’, an observation made by Bismarck in the nineteenth century
and taken as a rallying cry by political realists everywhere. The
purpose of this is to destabilize the frontiers between the possible and
the impossible, and between revolutionary and non-revolutionary
politics. This will allow me to argue that to stir and to shake the
given is not a hangover from the hot politics of times past but lives on
as part of an internal periphery of institutional politics. Agitation
functions as a symptom that prevents the closure of politics in a purely
gentrified format or, alternatively, agitation in tandem with
emancipatory politics brings out the eventness of events and reveals the
working of the impossible, something that is easily lost in the more
banal realist coding of politics as ‘the art of the possible’.
Ciudadania
de geometria variable y empoderamiento social: una propuesta
(Social Empowerment and a Citizenship of variable geometry, in F.
Calderon (ed.), Ciudadania y desarrollo humano, Siglo XXI, 2007) [bajar
en español]. Here I address some of the shortcomings of the
liberal conception of citizenship with regard to equality and look at
ways of strengthening social citizenship. I argue that the validation of
civil, political or social rights is not simply the result of legal
provisions but an effect of polemic, and that instead of a coexistence
of three types of rights in a unified citizenship what we have is a
variable geometry. Finally, I discuss Schmitter's proposal to grant
semi-public status to social organizations and provide them with public
funding.
BOOKS Polemicization. The Contingency of the Commonplace (Benjamin Arditi & Jeremy Valentine), Edinburgh University Press & New York University Press, 1999. Download book, 3 MB El reverso de la dicerencia. Identidad y política (Benjamin Arditi, ed.), Nueva Sociedad, 2000. Descargar libro completo, 6.2 MB La sociedad a pesar del Estado. Movimientos sociales y recuperación democrática en el Paraguay (Benjamín Arditi y José Carlos Rodríguez, 1987). Descargar libro completo, 2.2 MB Adiós a Stroessner. La reconstrucción de la política en el Paraguay (1992). Descargar libro completo 1.4 MB Discutir el socialismo (1989). Descargar libro completo 2 MB El deseo de la libertad y la cuestión del otro (1989). Descargar libro completo 2 MB Conceptos: ensayos sobre teoría política, democracia y filosofía (1992). Descargar libro completo 3 MB |