Martin Plot

National Scientific and Technical Research Council, Idaes-Unsam, Faculty Member

Followers

193

Following

126

Public Views

Martín Plot is a Research Professor of Political Theory at EIDAES-UNSAM/CONICET in Argentina. He is also a Research Fellow in Political Thought at CalArts' Aesthetic and Politics Program. His most recent books are Chaos and Cosmos. The Imaginary and the Political in Jorge Luis Borges (Rowman & Littlefield, 2024,) La matriz de sentido (Prometeo , 2024,) and The Aesthetico-Political. The Question of Democracy in Merleau-Ponty, Arendt, and Rancière (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016 - paperback edition.)

less

Interests

Uploads

Papers by Martin Plot

The Aesthetic Regime of Politics

Although French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty's early phenomenology of perception and his ess... more Although French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty's early phenomenology of perception and his essays on art, politics, and language already showed an affinity between the aesthetic phenomena of expression and style, and the political and cultural dynamics of society at large, it was his late notion of flesh 1 that became crucial for grounding what I assume to be his aesthetico-political understanding of politics and ultimately democracy. The emergence of flesh as a concept was contemporary with Merleau-Ponty's break with Marxism as a philosophical model and with revolutionary dialectics as a political project. The move represented the earliest and more fundamental rejection of both the revolutionary "solution" to the indeterminate and conflictive character of social life and also to the technocratic and ideological attempt to eliminate democratic politics in the name of market efficiency and neoliberal radicalism -and his former student and friend Claude Lefort was the author who made the most out of this break. In theorizing the historical breakdown of the horizon of radical transcendence implied in the theologico-political regime and in denouncing the re-embracement of the One in the horizon of radical immanence in the totalitarian party's claim to having access to a complete knowledge of the social, Lefort developed a comprehensive understanding of the social in terms of flesh and of the political as its mise-en-forme, mise-en-sens, and mise-en-scène. Due to lack of space, I will limit myself here to just outlining the major conclusions I extract from Merleau-Ponty's late philosophy 2 . His investigation moved from an early concern with the body as an incarnated and situated subject 3 to a late concern with the general way of being he called flesh. Existing in the form of flesh was, for him, existing as simultaneously active and passive, subject and object, seer and visible. This way of transcending the idealist/materialist dichotomist approach that had dominated the history of modern Western thought was soon afterwards fully politicized by Lefort. For both authors, flesh thus became the way of being, not just of individual humans and animals, but also of society and the world at large. Moreover, the flesh of the social became, for Lefort much more explicitly than for Merleau-Ponty, a collective way of being of society that is neither just object nor just subject, neither just visible nor just seer, but both. This intertwining of activity and passivity of the social in which individuals, collective actors, and societies at large are all "reversible," "twodimensional" beings, at once active and passive, is, however, unable ever to achieve full transparency for itself. If I touch my left hand with my right hand -as Merleau-Ponty used to say, following Husserl -and then I switch to touching my right hand with my left hand, I still can never achieve an instance in which my hands are, at the same time, touching and touched; a chiasm always remains between my left 1 «The flesh is not matter […] it is not a fact or a sum of facts "material" or "spiritual" […] To designate it, we should need the old term "element", in the sense it was used to speak of water, air, earth, and fire, that is, in the sense of a general thing, midway between the spatio-temporal individual and the idea, a sort of incarnate principle that brings a style of being wherever there is a fragment of being. The flesh is in this sense an "element" of Being»: M.

Download

La mentira en política

BORDES, Mar 4, 2020

A pesar de su poca repercusión, el discurso de despedida en cadena nacional de Mauricio Macri fue... more A pesar de su poca repercusión, el discurso de despedida en cadena nacional de Mauricio Macri fue un acontecimiento político notable. Lo que él y/o sus asesores se propusieron fue fijar un sentido, hacer del tembladeral interpretativo que caracteriza a todo período de transición algo imaginariamente controlable desde el enunciador. Salvando las distancias, porque no estoy diciendo que el gobierno saliente haya sido otra cosa que un gobierno democrático, verlo a Macri con su PowerPoint televisado me transportó a una experiencia televisiva semejante de mi infancia: el anuncio en cadena nacional, con imágenes y palabras cuidadosamente coreografiadas, de la Ley de Autoamnistía (oficial-

Download

Igual libertad: Cuerpo y espacio de aparición en Hannah Arendt y Judith Butler

Anacronismo e irrupción: Revista de teoría y filosofía política clásica y moderno, Nov 30, 2018

En sus últimos trabajos, Judith Butler ha regresado, una y otra vez, a las ideas arendtianas de "... more En sus últimos trabajos, Judith Butler ha regresado, una y otra vez, a las ideas arendtianas de "espacio de aparición" y de "derecho a tener derechos". Este retorno nunca se hizo de modo acrítico, de todos modos. El distanciamiento se funda en la crítica de una Arendt que suele ser leída como la autora de una separación extrema e inmodificable tanto entre lo público y lo privado como entre el cuerpo en su relación con el mundo de la necesidad y el cuerpo en su relación con la libertad. El doble movimiento que Butler realiza es, de todos modos, particular: éste va de la recuperación de las nociones de espacio de aparición y de derecho a tener derechos como imprescindibles para comprender las formas contemporáneas de la opresión, al rechazo de las tajantes distinciones arendtianas entre espacio y cuerpo privados y públicos. A partir de este doble movimiento, y en paralelo con una lectura del Merleau-Ponty de la reversibilidad de los cuerpos y del espacio intercorporal, es que Butler propone un modelo novedoso de concepción y de defensa de lo que aquí llamaremos "igual libertad".

Download

Democracy and Terror

Constellations, Jun 1, 2005

Download

Tlön as Political Form: Democracy and Totalitarianism in Borges and Lefort

Constellations, Sep 1, 2012

That day we faced a chaos that made the decision to become a cosmos.

Download

Divided Power in Space and Time

Constellations, Jun 1, 2009

How shall we be governed during the War on Terrorism? Definitely not as we have in the past.

Download

Deliberative Scenes and Democratic Politics in the Lewinsky Case

Constellations, Jun 1, 1999

Download

La Democracia Dualista Como Forma Política

Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales. CLACSO eBooks, 2020

Trump y lo político

BORDES, 2017

Download

François Dosse, Castoriadis. Una vida

DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals), Oct 1, 2019

El enigma de la democracia: Entrevista a Martín Plot

Papeles de trabajo: La revista electrónica del IDAES, Jun 1, 2007

Plot viene desarrollando desde hace más de una década una indagación original sobre las relacione... more Plot viene desarrollando desde hace más de una década una indagación original sobre las relaciones entre teorías estética y política. En especial, le interesa pensar la acción política como praxis creativa y democrática; lo cual implica concebir la sociedad como proceso de auto-institución. Ya en su primer libro, El kitsch político (Prometeo, 2003), reflexionaba críticamente sobre un tipo específico de acción política contemporánea -aquella que muestra especial obsesión por prever la reacción del público, para ajustarse a ella-a partir de una categoría, la de kitsch, inicialmente formulada para analizar un modo de producción de obras de arte. La noción de kitsch político, afirma Plot, se propone iluminar esa práctica política "que tiende a reducir al mínimo la creatividad implícita a toda política democrática, limitándose a manifestar sólo posiciones que han sido suficientemente testeadas sobre su potencial aceptación pública". A Plot, que vive en los Estados Unidos desde 1997, le inquieta que esta práctica se haya extendido de manera evidente en los sectores de izquierda, que "atacados por el terror que les produce la imprevisibilidad de la opinión pública, han renunciado a la palabra y han dejado hacer" a los grupos más conservadores de esa sociedad. La continuación de aquel primer trabajo, que se publicará a fin de año en castellano, se titula El enigma de la democracia, e incluye una teoría de la acción política a partir de las tesis sobre la democracia de Claude Lefort y, sobre todo, del último Merleau Ponty, de quien Lefort fue discípulo y amigo. En su paso por Buenos Aires, donde dictó en el IDAES un curso sobre "Cultura y pensamiento político" y una conferencia sobre "Acción política y democracia", Plot expuso algunos de los ejes de este nuevo libro. Allí discute la teoría de la acción comunicativa de Jürgen Habermas desde una lectura propia de la teoría democrática presente en los últimos trabajos de Merleau-Ponty: Las aventuras de la dialéctica, El ojo y el espíritu y Lo visible y lo invisible. ¿Cuál es la fertilidad de trabajar con conceptos estéticos para pensar la práctica política?

Download

Between authoritarianism and democracy in Latin America’s re- founding revolutions CARLOS D E L A TORRE

Teología, estética y epistemología políticas en Lefort, Schmitt y Arendt

Political Action and Speech in the 2000 Presidential Election

Constellations, Sep 1, 2001

Personal life, expression, understanding, and history advance obliquely and not straight toward e... more Personal life, expression, understanding, and history advance obliquely and not straight toward ends and concepts. What we strive for too reflectively eludes us, while values and ideas come forth abundantly to him who, in his meditative life, has learned to free his spontaneity. Merleau-Ponty 1 Is political speech still meaningful? It is in the sense that the actual outcome of political events is fundamentally shaped by it. Does that mean that the public discourse is omnipotent? Not at all, but it does mean that it is potent, i.e., that in interaction with other public discourses, interpretations, judgments, and decisions, it is capable of influencing the course of events. Does that mean that political speech can influence the course of events in a desired fashion? The more a given political action and discourse is inspired by a thoughtful, wise, and flexible interpretation of the current political conditions and the plurality of others' actions and discourses, the more it may find at the end of the road the desired panacea. Is this technologically perfectible? No, but it is politically perfectible. In the realm of human affairs, things could have always been otherwise and it is not too difficult to remember what others interpreted as possible during the 2000 presidential campaign and the Florida contest, and the ways in which we ourselves constantly interrogated the events at that time. Those two indicators are not proof that things should have been otherwise, but allow us to evaluate the political realm in all its complexity, to consider the ways in which the actual decisions made and actions performed by the actors finally shaped the outcome of the events. How did political speech and action actually shape the outcome of the 2000 presidential race? In order to attempt an answer to this question, I propose to formulate a typology that would conceive of its first term, democratic political action, as a form of practice that inhabits a crossroads between actions inspired by a principle and performed from a point of view that are assumed to be the right ones, and the seemingly paradoxical acceptance of the fact that other actions which spring from different principles and are performed from different points of view enjoy similar convictions regarding their own validity. This reflexivity inherent in any democratic political practice is rooted in the projection of our own experience onto a context of reciprocity -an elementary

Download

Political Horizons in America

Social Imaginaries, 2018

In this paper, I go back to French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty&#39;s influence on Claud... more In this paper, I go back to French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty&#39;s influence on Claude Lefort&#39;s theory of democracy in order to offer a revised understanding of political regimes as coexisting and competing horizons of politics. These horizons develop from differing positions regarding the political enigma of the institution of society-its staging, its shaping, and its making sense of itself. A theological understanding of such political institution of society will be described as fundamentally voluntaristic, while an epistemic understanding will be described as, in its radical iteration, potentially totalitarian. This theorization is triggered by an interpretive perplexity: what happened to the United States in the aftermath of 9/11, in its War on Terror, in its committing of the supreme international crime of aggressive warfare, in its embracement of a massive policy of executive , global targeted assassinations and of a white nationalist, xenophobic politics? Is the theologico-political horizon becoming once again dominant in America? Is the epistemic, plutocratic regime taking over instead? Are they coordinated in their effort to undermine an egalitarian understanding of the American republic? These are the interrogative driving forces behind this investigation.

Our element: Flesh and democracy in Merleau-Ponty

Man and world, Mar 29, 2012

Your article is protected by copyright and all rights are held exclusively by Springer Science+Bu... more Your article is protected by copyright and all rights are held exclusively by Springer Science+Business Media B.V.. This e-offprint is for personal use only and shall not be selfarchived in electronic repositories. If you wish to self-archive your work, please use the accepted author's version for posting to your own website or your institution's repository. You may further deposit the accepted author's version on a funder's repository at a funder's request, provided it is not made publicly available until 12 months after publication.

Download

The Law of the Earth: Intersubjective Co-Perception and Judgment in Hannah Arendt

Social Science Research Network, 2012

Arendt, in her unfinished book The Life of the Mind, quotes Merleau-Ponty for the first time in h... more Arendt, in her unfinished book The Life of the Mind, quotes Merleau-Ponty for the first time in her life — and quotes, in particular, the late Merleau-Ponty of Signs and The Invisible and the Invisible. During the same time, Arendt had asked twice, in letters written to Martin Heidegger, what the latter thought of the French philosopher’s work. Regardless of Heidegger’s response — he, probably without even having read him, disregarded Merleau-Ponty as just one more case of hopeless French existentialism — Arendt’s work, from her early identification of Totalitarianism as the regime that aimed at obliterating human spontaneity, action, and expression from the face of the earth to the notion of the space of appearances and her late political reading of Kant’s aesthetic judgment, it is clear that Arendt’s work inscribed itself in the same “aesthetico-political” project as Merleau-Ponty’s. As opposed to the latter, however, Arendt did not attempt to develop an “ontology” that would claim a generality for aesthetic expression, political action, and the being flesh of the social. What she did do, however, was to engage in the constant phenomenological description and interpretation of political action and speech that Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of the flesh of democracy demanded. What she found out in the process, expressed in the section “Appearance” of The Life of the Mind, was that “plurality is the law of the earth” — a notion that Merleau-Ponty would not have had much trouble to subscribe. The paper will thus investigate the articulations between Arendt’s major works and concepts and the late Merleau-Ponty’s theorizing of the question of the plurality of the flesh of the social.

Interpreting the Political

Palgrave Macmillan eBooks, Aug 19, 2013

Lefort and the Question of Democracy-in America

Constellations, Mar 1, 2012

Como una muralla

BORDES, 2021

Como una muralla, así fue como se desempeñó el establishment del Partido Demócrata de los Estados... more Como una muralla, así fue como se desempeñó el establishment del Partido Demócrata de los Estados Unidos desde los últimos años del gobierno de Barak Obama hasta las elecciones presidenciales de 2020. Como una muralla, las elites partidarias antepusieron el coro de loas a la administración Obama a la sensación, extendida entre jóvenes, pobres e hispanos, de que el "yes we can" había sido más slogan publicitario que proyecto político reformista. Como una muralla, el Democratic Nacional Committee se le plantó a quién osara poner en duda la determinación de que en 2016 era Hillary Rodham Clinton la que debía acceder a la presidencia, lo que hizo que Bernie Sanders se convirtiese,

Download

Martin Plot

Uploads

Papers by Martin Plot

Log In