María Pía Lara

Este ensayo está enfocado a desarrollar la concepción feminista de los imaginarios como topografías del espacio y tiempo. También propone la necesidad de pensar en las dos categorías que vinculan a las experiencias con las expectativas. Los imaginarios no poseen espacios materiales y sin embargo son lugares en donde aparecen nuestras autorepresentaciones y nuestros proyectos de transformación social. Por otro lado, el cine es análogo a los imaginarios porque ambos lidian con autorepresentaciones, ya que estamos en permanente esfuerzo por autointerpretarnos. Por lo tanto, la imaginación es el espacio mediador donde aparecen nuestras prácticas de instituir y crear a los espacios políticos y sociales. Este ensayo también propone que el feminismo debe ir más allá del espacio público, lo que significa expandir el espacio de la política.

Conceptions of evil have changed dramatically over time, and though humans continue to commit acts of cruelty against one another, today we possess a clearer, more moral way of analyzing them. In _Narrating Evil_, María Pía Lara explores what has changed in our understanding of evil, why the transformation matters, and how we can learn from this specific historical development. Drawing on Immanuel Kant's and Hannah Arendt's ideas about reflective judgment, Lara argues that narrative plays a key role in helping societies acknowledge their pasts. Particular stories haunt our consciousness and lead to a kind of examination and dialogue that shape notions of morality. A powerful description of a crime can act as a filter, helping us to draw conclusions about what constitutes a moral wrong, and public debates over these narratives allow us to construct a more accurate picture of historical truth, leading to a better understanding of why such actions are possible. In building her argument, Lara considers Greek tragedies, Shakespeare's depictions of evil, Joseph Conrad's literary metaphors, and movies that portray human cruelty. Turning to such philosophers and writers as Jürgen Habermas, Walter Benjamin, Primo Levi, Giorgio Agamben, and Ariel Dorfman, Lara defines a reflexive relationship between an event, the narrative of the event, and the public reception of the narrative, and she proves that the stories of perpetrators and sufferers are always intertwined. The process of disclosure, debate, and the public fashioning of collective judgment are vital methods through which we make sense not only of new forms of cruelty but of past crimes as well. _Narrating Evil_ describes the steps of this process and why they are a crucial part of our attempt to build a different, more just world.

This article deals with the empirical example of how social subjects, in this case women, have appropriated the language of rights in order to demand social inclusion. Since there are many different points of view in feminist theory with regard to how to deal with the idea of women’s rights, this article is divided into three sections. In the first section, I focus on how some important normative contents about democracy and rights have already been accepted by many different theorists who speak from critical perspectives. In the second section, I deal with how women’s struggles have gained consensus about the importance of defending the idea of rights for their own struggles to overcome their exclusion. In the third and last section, I turn back to the theoretical efforts by leading feminists, in order to show how these struggles from women all over the world can be thematized in our global scenario

In this article I deal with Kant's concept of reflective judgment, and recover it through its links to the aesthetic dimension as its fundamental scenario. Then I go on to explain why Hannah Arendt understood this important Kantian connection, and why she thought it would allow her to develop it through a political dimension. Last, having reviewed both Kant and Arendt's contributions to the concept of reflective judgment, I recover my own input to the concept by showing its linguistic dimension based on the Heideggerian notion of world-disclosure. With this in mind, I show how the concept of reflective judgment is the most suitable to analyze evil actions.

This essay investigates the new meaning of human capabilities that can be drawn out of the feminist model. Drawing on a further elaboration of narratives and the dynamics established between the public sphere and the new emergent publics, I explain how such moral narratives constitute the symbolic order in three stages of 'mimetic representation'. This model articulates the feedbacks between specific historical moments when 'lay narratives' are invented in response to a particular challenge; the subsequent creative process of the initial construction of the literary narrative; and the return to the experiential dimension of the readers, where narratives gain influence and transform previous ways of seeing things, the process that can occur both contemporaneously and decades or centuries earlier.

In this paper I want to leave behind the failed attempts to think about populism as ideology, strategy, style, or even discourse. I will focus on the ‘conceptual battles of politics’ and their potential to influence actors to pursue and effect specific ends. Reinhart Koselleck and his ideas about conceptual history will figure prominently in my discussion, as will his concept of asymmetrical combat-concept as a means of unleashing a theoretical and political war. The goal is to demonstrate that concepts have taken the place of weapons of war among political actors.