Search results

This article seeks to contextualise the 'Heideggerian' or destructive critique against Lenin in the 1980s. The hypothesis I develop is based on Oscar Del Barco's critique against Leninism and on the theoretical moments in which this critique has been resisted by other Latin American thinkers. Del Barco is one of the leading philosophers in Latin America. His extraordinary effectiveness reconstructs the history and thought of the Bolshevik leader in order to abandon the leader's enlightened programme. I argue that the demonisation of Lenin and the complex relationship with a demand for the authenticity of the Bolsheviks' original project leads the philosopher to omit the birth or the genealogy of extreme liberalism or neoliberalism. The demonisation of Lenin and the omission of the historical context in which he writes makes Del Barco's philosophy a propitious place for the neutralisation of the relationship between politics and emancipatory programmes. This hypothesis is confronted with the resistance of authors such as Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, García Linera, Bolívar Echeverría, Dominico Losurdo, Marta Harnecker and Tomás Moulian, among others. The article concludes by affirming that the Leninism reloaded by these authors constitutes a 'toolbox' for thinking the conflictive and never-finished relationship between politics and emancipation.

Este texto describe la figura trágica de Salvador Allende desde la pregunta por el presente. El análisis busca mostrar la relación entre el líder de la Unidad Popular y un cierto agotamiento de la modernidad socialista como programa civilizatorio. El ocaso de la modernidad, sin embargo, encontraría resistencias en el acto ético de Allende y el aura de su fantasma político cuya agencia residual se presenta como un difícil problema para la política tradicional. ; This text describes the tragic figure of Salvador Allende from the question of the present. The analysis seeks to show the relationship between the leader of Unidad Popular and a certain exhaustion of socialist modernity as a civilizing program. The decline of modernity, however, would find resistance in Allende's ethical act and the aura of his political ghost whose residual agency presents itself as a difficult problem for traditional politics.