Mente y política. Dialéctica, realismo y liberación

Abstract

The object of study in this research is the homologies between epistemology and politics. Based on a critical reformulation of the dialectical method, we identify the co-implications between theories of mind and subjectivity, and social and political doctrines. In this context, we analyze (1) alternative conceptions of individuality and sociability; (2) opposing theories of action and history; and (3) the modern moral order, its imaginaries, and social practices. The purpose is to identify the malaises underlying the separation between "the economic" and "the political" that define the institutional form of capitalism. From an epistemological point of view, we assess recent reconsiderations of realism in the face of the anti-realism hegemonically imposed by the postmodern cultural turn. This is linked to the "return" of Marx at the beginning of the 21st century. Within this framework, we explore the critique of representationalist theories of knowledge and reconsider the "cultural" theories of modernity in the light of their underlying structures. The result of this research, inspired mainly by the works of Charles Taylor, Ellen Meiksins Wood, and Enrique Dussel, is the formulation of a dialectical realism that navigates between (1) the nihility to which the anti-realist dialectic that imposes the "subject-object correlational circle" leads us, when the latter is abstracted from its background and remains closed to its transcendence, and (2) metaphysical realism, trapped in the aporias of time and history. Against the anti-realist dialectic —the idealism that emerges in the face of the impossibility of resolving the contradictions posed by the enunciation of the objectivity of the world—, the realist dialectic invites us to go beyond the limits of the so-called "correlational circle", to remain open to otherness, and to keep in force the promise of liberation that the closure of the "immanent framework" —expressed in the figures of "the death of god" and the "end of history"— pretends to cancel.