José Aricó and the “crisis of civilization”: the search for a socialist-democratic imbrication for the development of "subjectivity dilatation" (1979-1986)

Abstract

Moving between political sociology and intellectual history, we will approach aspects of the work of the so called "gramscian argentine" José Marí­a Aricó (1931-1991). With a renown political and intellectual activity developed in his country for as long as three decades, the military coup d'état in 1976 forced Aricó to exile. Anchored in Mexico, the theme of democratic transition, present throughout Latin America and Europe, throws him into a series of studies concerning the ties between socialist and democratic traditions, the notion of progress and the disturbing divorce between politics and culture which since the times of World War II continues to deepen. Always with Gramsci work at the core of his questionings, Aricó returns to Argentina in 1983. Considering that not even liberalism, nor marxism-leninism, nor populism, nor social democracy can contribute to the conformation of a "strong thinking" of emancipatory expectations, deepening within the theme of "subjectivity dilatation" and in an unbiased study of the work of reactionary german intellectual Carl Schmitt, Aricó rehearses an original path, stimulated by the force-idea of a "social advanced democracy", able to give ambitious answers to what he continues to point out as a crisis of civilization