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Editorial of the volume 43, number 3 (2016) of Estudos Ibero-Americanos

Dados Internacionais de Catalogação

Review of: PINTO, António Costa. Os Camisas-Azuis: Rolão Preto e o Fascismo em Portugal. Porto. Alegre; Recife: EdiPUCRS; EDUPE, 2016; PINTO, António Costa. Os Camisas Azuis e Salazar: Rolão Preto e o Fascismo em Portugal. Lisboa: Edições 70, 2015.

Review of: MUÑOZ, María L.O. Stand Up and Fight: Participatory Indigenismo, Populism, and Mobilization in Mexico, 1970-1984. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2016.

From shared experience begins a reflection that concerns the political dimension of daily memories registered in images during the dictatorship in South America. It is oriented by history of images and the study of the practices of looking to analyze the way taken by family daily snapshots when they migrate from home to the visual public space of press and art worlds. It is also discussed the whole played by photography in the elaboration of contemporary civil imagination.

This paper deals with the history of the press founded by Pedro Madrigal in 1585 in Madrid, after he left his workshop in Salamanca. After the death of the editor, several printers followed his steps in the studio: his widow, María de Rodríguez; his supposed “son” Pedro Madrigal; Juan de la Cuesta and finally, María de Quiñones. This last one enjoyed a privileged chance for business and took advantage of it along with the bookseller Pedro Coello, so they printed several parts of comedies after the prohibition finished in 1634. Therefore, the studio managed by Quiñones released comedies written by great authors of the Golden Age such as Tirso de Molina, Calderón de la Barca o Lope de Vega, amongst others. 

Appraisers (v. 42, n. 1-3, 2016)

***“Crimes that can’t be punished or forgiven” – Thinking with Hannah Arendt, in the debate about the recent past in Argentina***The paper focuses on a sentence often repeated by Hannah Arendt, stating “crimes we can neither punish nor forgive”, and discusses the use made of this sentence in debates on recent history in Argentina, where it is repeated as a slogan which should make all thinking about forgiveness impossible. The paper tracks the different manifestations of this sentence through Arendt’s work, and argues that with the changes Arendt introduces in her reflection on evil, the way we should reflect on the relationship between evil, punishment and forgiveness ought to be modified as well.

Considering the emergence of testimony as a fundamental source of history and shared memory after the Second World War, this article intends to discuss the role of testimony in Arendt’s theory, considering, on the one hand, her criticism of the use of testimonies in the Eichmann trial and, on the other hand, the importance narrative, memory and metaphor acquire in her work. This discussion casts a lighton the role of testimonies inhistorical trialsconcerning crimes against humanity.

***Monarchic republics and republican monarchies in the constitution of the Iberian world***Throughout the making of modern States, while the existence of a monarchy defined the European Constitutional model as a parliamentary system, in America, it was the lack of it which defined that continent’s model, and the first, both constitutional and presidential, republic was established. During the post revolutionary era, while seeking how to temper the revolution, emerged the need to reorganize the balance of powers in favor of the executive branch. However, this was a problem for monarchies, where this executive branch was an undetachable and politically irresponsible king. For that reason, it became necessary to search for an alternative executive power named by the king, but actually responsible before the parliament, and, therefore, detachable. It could be dismissed in case of conflict. This was the monarchy’s “constitutional costume”: the parliamentary system was thus understood as a republican model under a monarchical superstructure. In America, where the elected president was responsible before its electors, it was not necessary to diminish the principle of separation of powers. That was the key difference in the making of the two different constitutional models in both continents up to day. However, several Latin American conservative republics did considered those features of the monarchy and its moderating role. This article deals with the evolution of both monarchical and republican political systems and historical transferences between them both.

Review of: GONZÁLEZ GÓMEZ, Lina Marcela. Un edén para Colombia al otro lado de la civilización. Los llanos de San Martín o Territorio del Meta, 1870-1930. Medellín: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 2015. 515 p.

The article analyses the political opinions published by the newspaper O Estado de São Paulo during the phase between the AI5 and Geisel’s distension, which was the harsher period of the Brazilian dictatorship. The aim is to understand the periodical’s strategies towards the dictatorship, which varied between adhesion and accommodation according to the analysis presented here. During the period on focus, Estadão worked to bring the dictatorship closer to liberal positions and, for that purpose, the newspaper used both verbal and visual resources. Following this path the newspaper assumed risks that, in the end, provoked the state censorship. The article’s last section approaches Estadão’s strategies during the debates concerning Médici’s succession, when the newspaper made pressure on behalf of a process of normalization or institutionalization, which meant for Estadão strengthening the liberal institutions without breaking with the militaries.

***Totalitarianism and dictatorship: Arendt to read chilean’s recent history***This article seeks to expose and discuss the pertinence or inpertinence of two key concepts in the thinking of Hannah Arendt, to describe and understand fundamental processes of Chile's recent history: In one hand, 'totalitarianism' as a regime founded on Terror to refer to the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet that took place between 1973 and 1989. In other hand 'labor society' as a form of post-totalitarian society, oriented to labor and consumption, to describe one of the central aspects of the neoliberal society that the Chilean dictatorship installs.

The main goal of our paper is to analyze Arendt’s idea of the influence of revolutions on the public real by examining its theoretical and practical scope. In the course of our analysis, we will also answer the question whether Arendt’s understanding of revolution could be used in the modern context. After a critical investigation of Arendt’s idea of revolution and of her thesis about the impact of revolution on the public realm, we will briefly investigate several examples of modern revolutions from an ‘Arendtian’ standpoint in order to draw a conclusion about the current applicability of Arendt’s key arguments concerning violence, power, social issues, collective political action and communication.

Europe is facing a wave of refugees and migrants. To solve the many inherent problems is primarily a practical political task. However, there are existential experiences, democratic values, human attitudes, and political principles involved, and I am going to look particularly at the following three aspects of the refugee crisis, (1) the existential (I refer to the philosopher Martin Heidegger and to the political thinker Hannah Arendt), (2) the political (I turn to the EU’s steps for a common refugee policy), and (3) the legal (I refer to Immanuel Kant’s notion of hospitality and Seyla Benhabib’s notes on Human Rights). Finally, I will make a concluding remark on education’s task (I refer to Hannah Arendt’s and Aristotle’s notion of philia).

This article discusses some questions concerning the humanitarian approach to “solving” the so called refugee crisis in Europe in autumn 2015, when thousands of refugees headed on the journey to EU, most of them to Germany, by the so called Balkan migrant route. When some European states like Slovenia started to place razor wire on their southern borders, the others resumed the control of their inner EU borders and almost all introduced more restrictions on the existing laws on international protection of refugees and asylum. While taking up the question of what is the core element of today’s “refugee problem” the main argument relies on Hannah Arendt’s concept of superfluousness as the key feature of the new form of global government. There are two sides of the phenomenon of superfluousness that are crucial for understanding the situation in which we find ourselves in regard to the so-called “mass migrations”, the problem of “refugees”, “migrants” and “us”. Regardless of the need for a dose of humanitarianism in such moments, the focus on the humanitarian “solving” of the problem conceals the key question: how to enable, as soon as possible and in the long term, those who are excluded from political units and the law to be included (have the right to have rights) in a political community?

One of the most horrific scenarios in ethics – more than immorality or amorality – is moral indifference. Arendt’s final work, The Life of the Mind, shows a different facet of ‘indifference’ and sees it as a vital component of judgement and reflection. The following article addresses this understanding of indifference. Arendt draws from Immanuel Kant’s Third Critique, where emotion and experience are considered constitutive, in contrast to the two earlier Critiques, the first of which deals with the logical function of judging and the second, with moral judgement. In this respect – the Arendtian background to judging that belongs to aesthetics rather than ethics – it is the freedom of aesthetic judgement that guarantees its ethical potential. In Arendt’s work, judgement is the undisputed basis of her thinking. In addition to Kant’s two conventional types of judgement – determinative and reflective – he presents a third way of judging in his Critique of the Faculty of Judgement. Only this third, subjective reflective aesthetic judgement (subjektiv “ästhetisch-reflektierendes Urteil” (KANT, 1974, p. 57; KANT, 2007, p. 169) has the potential for what Kant himself calls the ‘rehabilitation of emotion’. Further analysis of this third type of judging would demonstrate that here Kant combines a form of indifference and the idea of prototype judging, giving indifference a positive aspect. And only this third form constitutes the basis for Arendt’s general thoughts on  udging. The range of types of judgement in Kant’s thinking could in fact be interpreted not only as three differents ways of thinking, which he refers to with the term Denkungsart, but rather as three different ways of understanding the world. It is thus of particular interest  o Arendt in terms of what she calls “worldlineness”. The diversity of judging worked out in Kant’s Third Critique is anexistential expression of the human ability for what is known as ‘Haltung’ in the German language and in every other languageonly translates fragmentarily into ‘posture’, ‘habit’ or ‘attitude’. It is not simply the ability to adopt a certain ‘Haltung’, butalso to change it.

***Agency and institution of Hannah Arendt’s political thinking: reading On Revolution***As Margaret Canovan points out, On Revolution has been one of the least read and least understood books of Hannah Arendt and our Latin American countries has not been the exception to this rule. However, this text is of great importance to explore some questions of Arendt's thought that, although they have continuity, find less development in her other books. In On Revolution, Arendt focuses her attention on the institutional dimension of revolutionary political action. This is essential for a more conprehensive portrait of Hannah Arendt's political thinking as well as for mobilizing it in order to reflect about our Latin American political realities. In this work we propose certain elements of analysis of the political thought of Hannah Arendt, as they appear in her work On Revolution. We will frame our reading between two interpretations which, in our view, are equally interesting, strongly influential in the Latin American context and which are essential references on the understanding of Arendt's work, but which differ in their interpretation of her political thinking and in particular as to the place which political institutions occupy in it. These are the interpretations of Étienne Tassin on the paradoxes of Arendt's understanding of the revolution and those of Margaret Canovan on the new arendtian republicanism. Then we will develop some keys to our own reading of On Revolution that stand in between both positions. Finally, we will offer a conclusion recapitulating the most significant points of our argument.