Neoliberalism in Crisis

Abstract

This review article examines two recent books, Verónica Gago’s La potencia feminista o el deseo de cambiarlo todo (Buenos Aires, Tinta Limón, 2019) and Diego Sztulwark’s La ofensiva sensible: Neoliberalismo, populismo y el reverso de lo político (Buenos Aires, Caja Negra, 2019). Both works approach the crisis of neoliberal governance in Argentina, and the new forms of collectivity that it has produced, as a heuristic lens for understanding the dynamics of contemporary political economy. In doing so, both authors also make important claims on their own mode of inquiry, which, derived from their earlier work as members of the Colectivo Situaciones, aims to decipher, rather than prescribe, forms of practical knowledge operating in the political situations they study. The present essay explores the way each book formulates the specificity of this knowledge and the language of its transmission.

Keywords:

• neoliberalism
• militant research
• crisis
• conjuncture
• Néstor Kirchner
• Cristina Fernández de Kirchner
• Diego Sztulwark
• Verónica Gago
• Colectivo Situaciones
• neo-extractivism
• populism
• social reproduction

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 An English translation of La potencia feminista has been published under the title Feminist International: How to Change Everything. 2020. Translated by Liz Mason-Deese. London: Verso.

2 In Política y situación: de la ofensiva al contrapoder (Politics and Situation: From Offense to Counterpower, 2000), Sztulwark and his co-author, philosopher and psychoanalyst Miguel Benasayag, expound on the subjective figures of a slightly early moment of the neoliberalism’s crisis of legitimacy. Just as one finds in Sztulwark’s latest book, the link between militancy and knowledge passes through the ability of the researcher to apprehend the present in the absence of judgements of value or evolutive schemes (26).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Karen Benezra

Karen Benezra works on twentieth-century visual art and critical social and psychoanalytic theory. She is the author of Dematerialization: Art and Design in Latin America (University of California Press 2020), and has recently finished editing Accumulation and Subjectivity in Latin America, a collection of scholarly essays addressing debates about the historical logic of capitalism in social theory and contemporary culture. Karen has been an editor of the journal ARTMargins (MIT Press) since 2012.