The 2019 revolt in Chile touched and exposed the mythical violence involved in the establishment and preservation of political‐legal orders (Benjamin). The demand for the New Constitution and the (ineffective?) process of its elaboration could have been key moments of that exposition, but never its final destination or the legal body in which the revolt could have been hosted and translated. It was not the demands of the revolt that put the established legal‐political order in check but the constitution without Constitution of a collective and vital political power (potencia) that, once and again, resisted being subjected by force—by the force of instituted law—to the legal‐political pact within whose framework it was supposedly irrevocably destined to move, be recognized, and raise its demands.
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Elizabeth Collingwood-Selby is professor in the philosophy department at the Metropolitan University of Educational Sciences. She holds a PhD in philosophy in aesthetics and art theory from the University of Chile. She is the author of Walter Benjamin, la Lengua del Exilio (Walter Benjamin: The Language of Exile) (1997); El filo fotográfico de la historia. Walter Benjamin y el olvido de lo inolvidable (The Photographic Edge of History: Walter Benjamin and the Forgetting of the Unforgettable) (2009); and Disturbios. Ley, imagen, escritura, excepción (Disturbances: Law, Image, Writing, Exception) (2021). Her translation into Spanish of the biography Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life was published in 2020. She is a member of the editorial committee of Ediciones Macul. She is a co-researcher on Fondecyt project 1210997, “Visual Sociology of the ‘Eruption.’”
Elizabeth Collingwood-Selby; The Revolt's Illegitimate Body. South Atlantic Quarterly 1 October 2023; 122 (4): 855–860. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-10747802
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