Abstract
In the second half of the twentieth century, a great, ambivalent and violent conflict occurred that, like the National Strike, produced both destructive and creative energies that manifested in a civil war among peasants and in an academic project called engaged science. This chapter discusses these developments. The first part addresses the peasant civil war through Michel Foucault’s concepts of technologies, technology of the self and biopolitical subjectivation, and Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of morality. The second part examines the ways in which the various components of the project of engaged science were combined, drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s concept of radical critique. The third part presents conclusions that underline the impact of the project of engaged science, whose practices both broke down boundaries between fields, and retained practices that led to a reintroduction of traditional morality.
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Notes
- 1.
Gamonalismo emerged in Peru during the second half of the nineteenth century and lasted until the agrarian reforms of the 1970s. It designates landowners from outside the colonial caste system who expanded their land and socio-political power through violence against the Indigenous. [Trans.]
- 2.
See decree 575 of May 28, 2021, ‘whereby instructions are issued for the preservation and reestablishment of public order’. Departamento Administrativo de la Presidencia (2021).
- 3.
Mamerto is a derogatory term used to describe ‘someone who follows the principles or guidelines of communism or of left-wing politics’ (Diccionario de colombianismos (2018)) [Trans.]
- 4.
The new ‘Venom’ weapon used by riot police has been widely questioned, especially by international human rights organizations such as Human Rights Watch. El País Internacional (2021).
- 5.
According to official figures there have been 17 deaths, but according to human rights organizations there have been more than 80 deaths caused by the police. Indepaz (2021).
- 6.
As of April 2021, there have been 904 murders of social leaders since 2016, along with 278 murders of former FARC-EP combatants. See DW Actualidad (2021).
- 7.
Foucault defines the term biopolitical subjectivation as ‘intelligible mechanisms which link together different practices and their effects, and which consequently allow one to judge all these practices as good or bad, not in terms of a law or moral principle, but in terms of propositions subject to the division between true and false’ (Foucault, 2008, 18).
- 8.
Deleuze (quoting Péguy) defines an event as a critical moment that possesses its own ‘freezing and boiling points, points of coagulation and of crystallization’ and ‘states of superfusion’ (Deleuze, 1994, 189).
- 9.
A ‘rosca’ is a Colombian term for group of people with power and influence that acts in their own interest. [Trans.]
- 10.
El Movimiento Obrero Independiente y Revolucionario (The Revolutionary Independent Labour Movement), or MOIR, was founded in Colombia in 1970 as a left-wing party with ties to Maoist militants. [Trans.]
- 11.
Deleuze understands the science of aesthetics to be the philosophical empiricism that emerged after the publication of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, and its introduction of time and space into thought. Although he recognizes Kant’s place in the transformation of philosophy, he differentiates between Kantian empiricism, governed by representation, and another, like Nietzsche’s, governed by creation. He says that the former is limited by the conditions of possible experience, while the latter unleashes a real experience that is proper to the creative act. In his words: ‘the being of the sensible reveals itself in the work of art, while at the same time the work of art appears as experimentation’ (1994, 68).
- 12.
One of the Deleuze’s various definitions of radical critique in Difference and Repetition is posed in terms of modern art. As he puts it, art ‘aesthetically reproduces the illusions and mystifications which make up the real essence of this civilization, in order that Difference may at least be expressed with a force of anger which is itself repetitive and capable of introducing the strangest selection, even if this is only a contraction here or there—in other words, a freedom for the end of a world’ (1994, 293).
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P., M.Z. (2023). The Project of Engaged Science and the Appearance of the ‘People’ in Colombia. In: Zepke, S., Alvarado Castillo, N. (eds) Violence and Resistance, Art and Politics in Colombia. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10326-1_1
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