Emergent Peoples. Image and representation

Abstract

The various social outbursts and revolts that accompanied the two great revolutions of modernity –the American Revolution and the French Revolution– which continued during the 19th and 20th centuries and which, far from having disappeared, are still taking place today, brought to the fore the main categories of political action, such as “equality”, “freedom”, “social justice”, “universal human rights”, “sovereignty of the people”, “political representation”, etcetera, but always in a conflicting and problematic manner. All of them happened and are happening critically. They are categories that in their universal character are, however, from the beginning crossed by difference. In this article we would like to show that the staging of these categories has been inseparable from the emergence of peoples. We propose to show that this “apparition” has been internally strained by the “aporias of the logic of modern representation”. We will confront, from the Kantian concept of “amphibology”, this “logic of representation” –referred to an ontological dimension– and the apparent apparition peoples –referred to a spectral dimension.