Paper short abstract:

The paper explores the contentious displacement of the notion of the community in Latin America through the analysis of socio-political imaginaries. The emergence of the Latin American imaginary informing the restructuration of the community grasps the complexity of the political in the region.

Paper long abstract:

The debates about the formation of the post-(neo)liberal moment in Latin America have tended to stress the shifts in governments ideological leaning and public policies over the more complex transformations in the socio-political discourse informing, in turn, transformation at the state level. The result is that post-neoliberalism is seen as a new moment of political totalisation and as such co-constituted along the structuration of a new fully-fledged political subject. Engaging with this debate, the aim of the paper is to explore the contentious displacement of the notion of the community in the region in general and in Argentina and Brazil in particular. The struggles over the redefinition of the contours of the community define, although contingently, the frontiers of the people which, in turn, construct the narrative permeating the dominant socio-political discourse. The analysis of the shifts in a) the social, b) the state, and c) political forms indicates a significant displacement from a liberal to a Latin American imaginary of the community over the past decade. The latter suggests that the new notion of community while expressing major political transformations it equally raises fundamental new challenges to the structuration of the political subject because it also transforms the external element which once functioned as the critical 'other': neoliberalism. The consequence is therefore the contingent formation of a new post(neo)liberal moment which instead of total is contingent and hence essentially precarious.