Alejandro Múnera

Spanish and Portuguese Department

Program in Critical Theory
University of California, Berkeley

Shaping Life: social pathologies of the people

In his famous Letter from Jamaica, Simón Bolívar elaborates a nuanced description of the South Commented [h1]: …gives a nuanced description of the
American territory, along with its problematic social and geographical heterogeneity. Originally South American territory, central to which is an account of
the region’s social and geographical heterogeneity
sent to Henry Cullen, the letter intends to gain support from Britain for the Independence of the
Spanish American peoples. Throughout the letter, Bolívar envisions the viability of different Commented [h2]: Sought to gain…makes more sense in the
past tense and seek to gain works better than intend to gain
national projects after Independence, suggesting where would these new nations be located, how
would they be organized, and what kinds of people would constitute them. However, for only a Commented [h3]: Lower case independence
brief moment Bolívar suggests that “institutions which are wholly representative are not suited to Commented [h4]: considers
our character, customs, and present knowledge,” taking Venezuela’s case as “the clearest example Commented [h5]: Here it’s capitalized because it’s an
of the inefficacy of the democratic and federal system for our newborn states.” Here, Bolívar event, rather than earlier where it’s a ‘thing’ to be gained
understands that one of the structuring principles of liberal democracy is the representation of the Commented [h6]: These new nations would be located
“people” through institutional means, while also counterpoising the “character”, “customs” and Commented [h7]: They would be organized
“knowledge” which, according to him, characterize the Spanish American people, to the
Commented [h8]: For a brief moment,
democratic form of governing. In other words, it seems that heterogeneity comes at a great cost
for democratic representation, which presupposes that some degree of commonality must exist Commented [h9]: Rephrase this
before popular will can take on an institutional democratic form.

Indeed, much of what happened after the Independence of South American territories was
motivated by this desire to administer and manage heterogeneity, not only through categorizing it
and thus making it legible for demographic purposes, but also through importing and imposing
Eurocentric racial and gendered schemas that, as we know, pathologized some lives and endorsed
the reproduction and flourishing of others. In this sense, it is not that the failure of a certain
rationalization of society generated a social pathology, but rather that the patho-logization of a
certain part of the population generates the illusion of the “common” and thus produces the
“people”. It is worth noting that, at least in the case of Spanish America, medicine and moral
philosophy continue to be carefully interwoven at this point, and that both inform the way creole
elites envisioned the political future-form of “their” incipient nation states. A social hierarchy,
then, was given a moral and medicalized rationalization, so politics in this case ends up being a
question of whether there can be a figure of the “common” that does not entail shaping or even
uni-formizing Life from the start.

I work on Latin American literature and culture of the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, from Spanish
America as well as Brazil, sites where I also seek to trace the emergence of diverse forms of critical
thought that establish problematic tensions with figures like “critical theory” and “continental
philosophy”. My previous research has dealt with bioethical debates about the representation of
HIV/AIDS in Colombian literature and culture, emphasizing the connections between
epidemiological discourses about the illness and literary productions. I am currently interested in
figures of Life across a number of different materials ranging from continental philosophy, critical Commented [h10]: The figuration of Life?
theory, psychoanalytic theory, gender and queer theory, moral philosophy and bioethics, as well
as literary and visual culture in Latin America. I believe my approach to the question of democracy
is mostly biopolitical, but I am also deeply interested in individual psychology and conscience-
formation, as well as phenomenological and affective approaches.