María Pía 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.

This article deals with our constructed notions of evil and how an historical appraisal takes shape after specific stories and narratives become important objects of public deliberation, historical criticism, and disclosive views of what constitutes the moral harms of human cruelty. I analyze the historical representations of the meaning of evil in specific historical times through narratives that have made important contributions to our historical understanding of them. I also propose that our learning from them is the result of public debates, of memory wars, and of important interventions from public intellectuals, writers, historians and witnesses. Therefore, deliberating about human cruelty is always a reconstructive effort to understand and judge what has happened and why it could have been prevented. The term evil is a moral filter that allows us to situate the kind of moral harm that needs a specific lens of moral understanding and a reconfiguration of actions that tie perpetrators to sufferers. Moral harms are better ways to describe the kind of actions that we call evil. The article highlights the relevance of language, disclosive views, criticism, public debate and the ways in which societies cope with their past in order to envision a different future

Postmodern political critiques speak of the death of ideology, the end of history, and the postsecular return of religious attitudes, yet radical conservative theorists such as Mark Lilla argue religion and politics are inextricably intertwined. Returning much-needed uncertainty to debates over the political while revitalizing the very terms in which they are defined, María Pía Lara explores the ambiguity of secularization and the theoretical potential of a structural break between politics and religion. For Lara, secularization means three things: the translation of religious semantics into politics; a transformation of religious notions into political ideas; and the reoccupation of a space left void by changing political actors that gives rise to new conceptions of political interaction. Conceptual innovation redefines politics as a horizontal relationship between governments and the governed and better enables societies (and individual political actors) to articulate meaning through action--that is, through the emergence of new concepts. These actions, Lara proves, radically transform our understanding of politics and the role of political agents and are further enhanced by challenging the structural dependence of politics on religious phenomena.

This article offers a new interpretation of Mexico's transition to democracy that differs from the pessimistic and less culturally oriented ones that currently prevail. In the article I develop a normative model, which emphasizes the moral capacities of civil societies and their ability to inspire altruistic actions. I suggest that this approach is not only more compelling philosophically but also more plausible empirically. To demonstrate this, I reconstruct a series of events from Mexico's recent past. My discussion suggests that social actors can reconfigure societal self-understandings through moral interventions in the public sphere and that such refigurations of the symbolic order are central for democratic transition.

Following a previous article where I defined how a concept becomes a weapon of ideological wars, this article seeks to clarify why there are semantic connections of the actual concept of ‘populism’ with the semantics of the concept of crisis (illness, destruction of democracy, salvation or condemnation). My key argument is to focus on how actors use the concept of populism on the public sphere with the goal to inspire fear instead of allowing citizens and theorists to understand what is behind our present political–economic crisis. In my view, both theorists and politicians should be aware how a concept that lacks any precision does not help us to understand our present moment of crisis. We must use other tools and the help of historians to understand why has neo-liberal politics unleashed this present crisis.

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.