On pandemics, States of exception and other calamities

Abstract

The pandemic and its calamities have demanded us to discuss a limit situation: the imposition of a planetary State of exception. This article intends to establish the coordinates of this debate from a Latin American perspective, based on the State in Latin America as its axis and resuming the thread of a discussion, sometimes late, sometimes abandoned –which, at the new coup in South America, raised a sense of urgency to recover the future– of understanding what has led to the unprecedented or perhaps inevitable situation of violent institutional bankruptcy in societies and countries, the most developed in the region. Taking the issue of fascism in Latin America as an alibi, this debate made notable progress in understanding authoritarian political forms, the creole leviathans (Marcos Kaplan), the States of the capitalist periphery, advancing on the issue of military dictatorships as the specific form assumed by the State of exception in the region, different from a fascist one (Poulantzas). Although the socalled transitions to democracy and the very European discussion on the crisis of legitimacy, and the neoliberal ideology, displaced reflections on the State, at this juncture of global crisis, we return to the discussion on a subject on which there is much debate and interest in our region.