Review of Jean Franco, Cruel Modernity

A Contracorriente: Revista de Historia Social y Literatura en América Latina, 2014

2020

A history without violence would, for us at least, be unrecognizable as history. Yet, paradoxically, violence as phenomenon appears to exist apart from the history in which it is omnipresent. Violence seems, almost unconsciously, to found the historical imagination itself and at the same time to exist apart from it, as a moral or metaphysical absolute. In the final analysis this no doubt has to do with the impossibility of disassociating the idea of violence from that of death as physical annihilation. Taken to its extreme, violence could end history by destroying virtually all historical agents. Indeed, it must rank as one of the great historical feats of modernity that is has actualized what was before this merely theoretical possibility and even learned to make us accommodate ourselves to it in our daily lives. Alongside the abstract repugnance it universally merits in the language of official 'values,' violence as means and as sheer adaptation advances at a sure and accelerating pace. Whatever they may convey on the level of official historical sanctions, the stories and images of catastrophic violence-whether of

Handbook on the Politics of Memory, 2023

Review of Jean Franco's Cruel Modernity

Democracy and Security, 2012

Latin American Research Review, 2010

This article studies how the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa and, more generally, neoliberalism rearticulate the opposition between civilization and barbarism, and the vision of the world that underlies it. During a time in which many intellectuals have embraced a relativistic notion of culture that makes judgment problematic, neoliberals embrace this clear-cut value hierarchy with complete abandonment. In fact, one cannot but be surprised by the ease with which Vargas Llosa makes pronouncements based on the identifi cation of individuals, groups, and political movements with either civilization or barbarism. However, the fact is that his reference to this dichotomy differs substantially from its nineteenth-century version and its colonial precedents.

Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 2014

On September 26 th , 2014, students in Mexico from the school of Ayotzinapa were attacked and forcibly disappeared. As hundreds of thousands of people took to the street in an unprecedented outpouring of anger and rage, the attack became the largest scandal in recent historical memory, revealing the horror of contemporary forms of governance. Situated at the interstices of the Drug War, the militarization of the Mexican State, political corruption and impunity, neoliberal reforms, and the residual national trauma of the Dirty War of the 60s and 70s, the attack quickly transformed into a metonym of ubiquitous contemporary forms of violence and loss experienced across Mexico. This work explore how Ayotzinapa became an event which called into question the very legitimacy of the occult powers of the state, challenging the very organization of secrecy, the epistemological conditions and contradictions of governance. This work argues that by mobilizing the horror of Aytozinapa, the unspeakable scandal that lies at the heart of the event, the movement was able to open a breach in historical time and allow people to sense the violence concealed within the everyday. This work looks at both at the epistemic conditions of governance by which the constitutive violence of the state-form is continually figured as exceptional and how other ways of knowing, characterized by refusal and negation, are capable of overcoming these conditions.

CORVINUS JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY AND SOCIAL POLICY Vol.5 (2014) 1, 111–117