The Political & Latin America

The Political & Latin America.
The Political is not just politics. Politics, on the one hand, is the set of practices and institutions that organize conflicts and disagreements in those societies that have developed a specific milieu for the staging of its internal divisions. Not all historical societies have had a realm explicitly designed as politics, but most modern and contemporary ones do have one. The political, on the other hand, refers to a dimension all societies have, not to a specific set of practices and institutions. The political is the dimension of societies' reversibility, the way they shape, stage, and make sense of themselves. The political is the forming of the social: the activity of its passivity. As such, the political is not circumscribed to politics only, it manifests itself in all meaningful social practice--in regular politics, of course, but also in its arts and its culture, as much as in its interpersonal, intergender, or interethnic relationships. For this reason, political theory is the interrogative practice of studying the way societies shape, stage, and make sense of themselves in the broadest possible sense. The political theory coming out of Latin America is its own thinking of the political and springs from the region's diverse shared historical experiences. During the semester, we will center on the two major political events theorized by Latin American thinkers in contemporary times. In the first half of the course, we will deal with the antifascist fight and the process of democratization, historical developments that dominated the entire twentieth century and that intertwined both local and global events and influences. During the second half of the course, our focus will move to the phenomenon of populism, its clash with neoliberal ideology, and the emergence on new Latin American left -and right-wing movements in the twenty first century. We will explore these major intellectual debates through the close reading of four of the most emblematic and globally influential Latin American thinkers: Argentine fiction writer and essayist Jorge Luis Borges, Mexican political theorist Mara Pa Lara, Brazilian political philosopher Marilena Chau, and Argentine political and social theorist Ernesto Laclau.