Colombia in front of the opening of “the political”. Unprecedented, sedimented and latent temporalities in the recent Colombian political process

Abstract

The recent arrival of Gustavo Petro and Francia Márquez at the “Casa de Nariño” constitutes an event that represents an unprecedented turning point in the Colombian historical experience. That inflection is studied in the following article as a small and not insignificant instance of opening towards the field of “the political”.

Without reducing politics itself, to the episodic, instituting and prior to the legal dimension that this concept entails, in this paper the contingent and constitutively ambivalent character of the “politics-political” binomial is explored under the idea of ​​a process. With this purpose, the text contributes to understand the precise context that is inaugurated with the coalition government of the “Pacto Histórico”, using of analytical operations that underline the unprecedented dimensions of the politics of the present and its relations with other sedimented temporalities and latent from a past of long and medium duration.

As a corollary of the analysis offered here, the radical indeterminacy of a true political process in progress is emphasized and, also, we reflect about the possibility of understanding it as the beginning of a national and popular government in Colombia during the XXI century.