Marcelino Viera

Over the past decade, my research has sought to deepen our understanding of the relationship between popular culture and politics in Latin America. This work involves examining the formation of the nation-state in the Río de la Plata region and the counterforces it encountered. My framework is rooted in the concept of cultural identity and draws from regional history, political theory, continental philosophy, and psychoanalysis. Situated at the intersection of these fields, I explore how cinema, literature, and theater have evolved into vital modes of political discourse concerning cultural identity and its challenges.

In recent years, I have authored two monographs that investigate political dynamics as they emerge through cultural production—specifically in cinema, literature, and theater. For example, my most recent book, El retorno del individuo en el Río de la Plata: el discurso del Único, offers a historical interpretation of the processes that have led to contemporary individualism, with the aim of reopening the imagination to alternative forms of social relations prefigured in Latin American cultural production.

More recently, I edited a volume, Excesos: entre literatura y psicoanálisis, that brings together reflections from cultural critics and psychoanalysts on the relationship between literature and psychoanalysis. The book argues that the experience of reading—whether in literature or psychoanalytic practice—reveals a constellation of shared spaces where the vitality of the letter asserts itself, offering a basis for resisting the intense deterritorialization of desire in contemporary life. By privileging the letter, the volume helps to illuminate the dynamics at stake within the shared space of language. The “reading experience” evoked in each chapter not only reflects the authors’ own processes of individuation through writing, but also invites readers into a distinct mode of engagement and reflection.

 

Here are some of my works:

Excesos: entre literatura y psicoanálisis (2024)

El retorno del individuo en el Río de la Plata: el discurso del Único (2023)

Modernidad Sublimada (2019)

Authoritarianism, Cultural History, and Political Resistance in Latin America. Exposing Paraguay (2018)

Comprendre l’anarchisme(2013)