Current Research/Projects

Decentering the Human (book manuscript)

In this project, I critically analyze what I conceptualize as the three main underlying structures of thinking/feeling that have helped produced, justified and reproduced our current and no longer viable conceptualization of the Human and its place in the world: (1) teleological reason, or the belief that there is a promised, better future as articulated in, among others, the idea of progress; (2) hierarchical reason, understood here as all those discourses and practices that classify humans, non-human animals and other entities such as nature and the environment, and assign differential values to the groupings thus created; and (3) binarial reason, which refers to both our persistence reliance on dichotomies such as nature/culture, male/female, human/animal and mind/body, as well as the belief in the messianic and redemptive powers of technology. My claim is that these three reasons or structures of thinking/feeling are the main tenets of liberal humanism used to justify and instrumentalize relations of domination and expropriation either among humans or between humans and non-human animals and the environment. Accordingly, the project ultimately proposes that the rational, autonomous, self-making, and almost-always white, male and bourgeoise Human inherited from Enlighten, colonialist and capitalist discourses and practices must give way to a post-anthropocentric conceptualization of the Human attuned to the interconnectedness and sympoietic nature of life and therefore able to imagine ways to meaningfully address and move beyond the Capitalocene and the climate crises it has largely produced. 

“You shall not care! Horrorism, Neoliberal Rationality and the Production of Collective Helplessness” (article)

This article shows how neoliberal rationality’s construction of the subject as an autonomous, self-sufficient and sovereign subject of achievement inverts the underlying logic of what Adriana Cavarero calls horrorism, a type of violence that renders the subject concurrently vulnerable and helpless. I argue that this inversion leads to the construction of the caring of oneself and the caring of others as mutually exclusive categories, producing thereby a condition of collective helplessness in which the Other is no longer conceived of as what enables collective action and the possibility of a meaningful political life, but rather as the visible agent of neoliberal rationality’s seemingly faceless violence and thus as a threat to oneself and those one loves.

“Detectives of Forgetfulness: Monologic Memory and Neoliberal Rationality in Puente Adentro, by Arnoldo Gálvez Suárez” (article)

In this article, I propose reading the novel Puente Adentro (2015), by Guatemalan writer Arnoldo Gálvez Suárez, as a critique of the type of historical memory that the hegemonic neoliberal rationality demands of the subject, namely, a type of memory that does not seek to dialogue with the memory of the Other and thus reduces the resolution of collective trauma to the level of the individual. I argue that what this monological and individualistic neoliberal memory demands of the subject is, ultimately, to forget the traumatic event so as to be able to become a subject capable of complying with the neoliberal imperative of achieving success and proactively participating in the cycle of production, exchange and consumption.