Maria Lara

This paper deals with recent political consequences of presentism as conceptualized by the historian Francois Hartog. It clarifies how our experiences of time and history have enlarged the present and the past and have almost disappeared the future (except for catastrophic views). The consequences of these changes in the experiences reflect profound changes in expectations about the future, and how this regime of historicity allows people to become disoriented. They were moved into the margins of precarity. As a result, many of their views on politics find resonance redesigned by the distorted narratives of ultra-right leaders who blame those who are the weakest, the immigrants. These ultra-right narratives have learned how to create counter-hegemonic views to bring about their revolutions by furbishing the past myth of greatness to head towards a future's-past.

The type III secretion system (T3SS) is a specialized nanomachine that enables bacteria to secrete proteins in a specific order and directly deliver a specific set of them, collectively known as effectors, into eukaryotic organisms. The core structure of the T3SS is a syringe‐like apparatus composed of multiple building blocks, including both membrane‐associated and soluble proteins. The cytosolic components organize together in a chamber‐like structure known as the sorting platform (SP), responsible for recruiting, sorting, and initiating the substrates destined to engage this secretion pathway. In this article, we provide an overview of recent findings on the SP's structure and function, with a particular focus on its assembly pathway. Furthermore, we discuss the molecular mechanisms behind the recruitment and hierarchical sorting of substrates by this cytosolic complex. Overall, the T3SS is a highly specialized and complex system that requires precise coordination to function properly. A deeper understanding of how the SP orchestrates T3S could enhance our comprehension of this complex nanomachine, which is central to the host‐pathogen interface, and could aid in the development of novel strategies to fight bacterial infections.

The subject of gender violence is complex because our conceptions of what constitutes violence have historically evolved. Therefore, I propose that we should try to understand gender violence neither in abstract nor in essentialist ways, but within historical frameworks and through concrete examples. In this essay I will focus on a historical genealogy of our moral views about gender violence, and, in particular, on the figure of what we call today “rape.” The question of rape is but one example of the long history of gender violence. However, this example is important to understand how violence and gender violence are related to specific conceptions of political and sexual sovereignty. My claim is that we need to pay attention to how is it possible to understand the role of imagination to interpret gender violence nowadays. My conclusion is that the moral filters that configure our “feminist imaginary” have changed our views about rape.

Resumen: Spinoza afirma que las decisiones, elecciones y acciones de un agente son necesarias porque están determinadas causalmente. ¿Acaso los seres humanos no son agentes morales? ¿son sólo eslabones de una cadena de causas cuyo curso no pueden controlar y que los exime de las consecuencias de sus actos, así como de premios y castigos? ¿ser un individuo libre significa aceptar pasivamente lo que ocurre y abandonar la pretensión de modificarlo? Este artículo responde a estas preguntas mediante la distinción en la obra spinoziana de dos conceptos de libertad, la verdadera libertad y el libre albedrío, así como con la distinción entre la responsabilidad civil fundada en el concepto de potestas humana -y no en la verdadera libertad, aunque la posibilita-.: Spinoza sustains that the agents' decisions are necessary because they are causally determined. But then, are humans really moral agents? Is it possible that they are only passengers in a train of causes, whose course they cannot control and exempts them from the consequences of their acts, of reward or punishment? Is accepting whatever happens and quitting the aspiration of changing things the hallmark of the free man? This paper answers these questions by distinguishing two concepts of freedom, real freedom and free will, as well as two concepts of responsibility. Civil responsibility is grounded in free will, whereas moral responsibility is not grounded in true freedom, but in human power.

This paper deals with Claudia Card's important contributions to a theory of evil that steps out from traditional models of thinking about this problem (theodicies, metaphysical theories, etc.). Instead, our author seeks to explore important elements from other theorists (such as Kant and Nietzsche) in order to build up her ideas of what she calls the "atrocity paradigm." This critical essay focuses mainly in the spaces where Card's conclusions need to rethink the limits and constraints of her theory.

This innovative volume will be welcomed by moral and political philosophers, social scientists, and anyone who reflects seriously on the twentieth century's heavy burden of war, genocide, ethnic cleansing, and other evidence of people's desire to harm one another. María Pía Lara brings together a provocative set of essays that reexamine evil in the context of a "postmetaphysical" world, a world that no longer equates natural and human evil and no longer believes in an omnipotent God. The question of how and why God permits evil events to occur is replaced by the question of how and why humans perform radically evil acts.

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

En este libro, la autora desarrolla su concepción del juicio reflexionante inspirada en Emmanuel Kant y en Hannah Arendt para concentrarse en cómo cierto tipo de narraciones modelan nuestras nociones de lo que consideramos moral. Lara nos ofrece distintas concepciones sobre el mal en su formulación histórica mediante los ejemplos de las tragedias griegas, las diferentes concepciones sobre el mal en la obra de Shakespeare, el uso literario de la metáfora en la obra de Joseph Conrad y en narraciones fílmicas que describen la crueldad humana. Lara sugiere que el aprendizaje moral es un proceso en el que intervienen las instituciones sociales, la voluntad de los individuos y de las sociedades para comprometerse a un debate abierto y con ello modelar los juicios colectivos sobre el pasado. Lara enfatiza que el juicio reflexionante se da entre un evento, una narración de dicho evento y la recepción pública de dicha narrativa. En este libro se aportan importantes métodos para la comprensión del fenómeno moral del mal, porque introducen nuevas verdades desvelatorias acerca de eventos particulares que no pueden ser simplemente captados por medio de categorías conceptuales. Lara utiliza como fuentes a Jürgen Habermas, Walter Benjamin, Primo Levi, Giorgio Agamben y Ariel Dorfman para probar la conclusión de este tipo de narraciones: la acción (de crueldad) ata de manera definitiva al perpetrador con su víctima