Full name | Bolívar Echeverría Andrade |
---|---|
Born | 31 January 1941 Riobamba, Ecuador |
Died | 5 June 2010heart failure) Mexico City, Mexico |
(aged 69) (
Era | Contemporary philosophy |
Region | Latin America |
School | Marxism · Frankfurt School |
Main interests | Political Economy, Literary Theory, Cultural History, Political Philosophy, Marxism, Mathematics, History of art |
Notable ideas | a-political, historical ethos, capitalist circulation, four ethe of modernity: baroque ethos, realist ethos, romantic ethos, classical ethos, civilizatory crisis |
Influenced
|
Bolívar Echeverría (Riobamba, Ecuador, 1941 – Mexico City, Mexico, June 5, 2010) was a philosopher, economist and cultural critic, born in Ecuador and later nationalized mexican. He was professor emeritus on the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).
Contents |
Echeverría realized his studies in Germany (Free University of Berlin) and Mexico. He participated on the German student movement in the late 1960s, establishing friendship and long-lasting collaboration with its leaders, including Rudi Dutschke. On 1970, he started permanent residence in Mexico, where he lived as a translator, also continuing his studies on philosophy and economics. Later on, he developed a seminar on Marx's Das Kapital, which lasted six years and included intensive systematic readings of the book. Since then he became an academic of the Faculties of Philosophy and Economics on the UNAM, where he founded several magazines on culture and politics, such as Cuadernos Políticos (Political Notebooks) (1974–1989); Palos de la Crítica (roughly translated as Sticks of the Critique) (1980–1981); Economía Política (Political Economy) (1976–1985) and Ensayos (Essays) (1980–1988). He was also part of the Editorial Board of magazines like Theoria (Theory) (since 1991); and Contrahistorias. La otra mirada de Clío (since 2003).[1]
His investigations where mainly (and broadly) concerned on: the ontological problems of existensialism, especially in Sartre and Heidegger; Marxian critique of political economy, focusing on the contradiction between Use value and Exchange value; and a contemporary development of critical theory and the Frankfurt School, including cultural and historical phenomena of Latin America. From this standpoint, Echeverría formulated a rigorous critique of postmodernity, with which he developed his theory of capitalist modernity and the baroque ethos, a form of cultural resistance in Latin America. He also wrote extensively on the fundamental contradictions of modernity as a civilizatory process and explored the possibilities of what he called an alternative modernity, in other words, a non-capitalist modernity.
Echeverría received several prices for his scholarship, including: Premio Universidad Nacional a la Docencia (México,1997), Premio Pio Jaramillo Alvarado (FLACSO-Quito, 2004) and Premio Libertador Simón Bolívar al Pensamiento Crítico (Caracas, 2006).
He died in Mexico City on June 5, 2010, of a heart attack, as a result of several blood pressure complications.[2]
(There are no english translations of any of his works)
Stefan Gandler, Marxismo crítico en México: Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez y Bolívar Echeverría, México, FCE/UNAM/UAQ, 2007.
Stefan Gandler: Peripherer Marxismus. Kritische Theorie in Mexiko. Hamburg, Berlin: Argument-Verlag, 1999. 459 pages, ISBN 3-88619-270-9.