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Showing posts from September, 2012

On Temporality & Life Critique

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A comment on a footnote in one of Fernando Coronil  very last articles, "The Future in Question:  History and Utopia in Latin America (1989-2010)".  Coronil  observes in a footnote to R. Koselleck's work that "Scholars have shown that conceptions of history and cultural cosmologies are intimately connected to each other and are historically specific" (288). In the piece Coronil found it necessary to discuss to a certain extent the question of the future, or rather, to be more precise, the issue of a "present-day future imaginary" (232). His discussion looks in particular at how the the "turn to the Left" in Latin America has been linked to new contemporary imaginaries for a future envisioned from the state. The point Coronil is making is simple. He means to say that the cultural category of the future that Latin Americans work with, serving as a basic understanding of temporality, would have some kind of historically specific cosmologic