Ricardo Sanín Restrepo

Beware. This art­icle con­tains spoilers. Let’s start with a self-​evident affirm­a­tion. Movies, or more pre­cisely Hol­ly­wood, is the ulti­mate con­trap­tion of hege­monic ideo­lo­gical dif­fu­sion. The proph­etic dysto­pias in which secret police would place the mech­an­isms of con­trol inside the private realm of people, fall way short of the intrus­ive viol­ence of today’s real­ity. Now we ...
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Far from being an implaus­ible para­dox, the dif­fer­ence between what is hap­pen­ing in Europe and in Latin Amer­ica lies at the epi­cen­ter of a 500-​year long farce: colo­ni­al­ity. In a monu­mental reversal of for­tune, the peoples of Latin Amer­ica are decon­struct­ing colo­ni­al­ity from its core, while within Europe this seems to be the new tune of power. ...
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Given the massive stu­dent demon­stra­tions of last Decem­ber in the UK, it is per­haps sur­pris­ing that more cov­er­age has not gone to the recent events in Colom­bia. In early Octo­ber the San­tos gov­ern­ment sought to intro­duce a law (Ley 30) that would, among other thing, privat­ize the remain­ing pub­lic uni­ver­sit­ies. In an imme­di­ate and power­ful ...
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Colombia’s 1991 con­sti­tu­tion is seen by many as the threshold of an intense polit­ical pro­cess that has arrived at a set of revolu­tions in Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela and now, maybe, Peru. Fur­ther­more, in the midst of a hor­rible con­flict, Mex­ico is look­ing to a Colombian-​style con­sti­tu­tional assembly to over­come the blood­shed its people have suffered. I believe such ...
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Abstract The under­tak­ing of this art­icle is to assemble an eth­ical and polit­ical mean­ing of the people as neces­sary to any legal order that reputes itself demo­cratic. The chal­lenge is then set to think dif­fer­ence and mul­ti­pli­city not from legal orders but from the demo­cratic abyss, ant­ag­on­ism not from con­sti­tu­tional law but from con­stitu­ent ...
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Ricardo Sanin: Do “the people” still carry any eman­cip­at­ory potential? Sla­voj Zizek: Yes – recent events in Iran dis­play this poten­tial. The green color adop­ted by the Mousavi sup­port­ers, the cries of “Allah akbar!” that res­on­ate from the roofs of Tehran in the even­ing dark­ness, clearly indic­ate that they see their activ­ity as the repe­ti­tion of the ...
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