Latin American philosophy as critical ontology of the present: Themes and motifs for a "critique of Latin American reason"

When Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno published The Dialectics of Enlightenment in 1947, few imagined the decisive influence that this book would have on the form of theorizing the world in times of globalization. In this work, the philosophers from Frankfurt posit that the processes of rationalization project an image of dominion and control over the world that, by virtue of its own dynamic, ends up producing the perverse effect of self-destruction.1 The increase in rationalization advanced by modernity, instead of eliminating incertitude, fear, and contingencies, ends up producing them. This means that the "project of modernity," in the process of the intensification of its structures, culminates in suppressing itself, in undermining its own normative principles. Behind the backs of social actors-that is, independent of what they might or might not want-modernity has generated the globalization (mundialización) of its undesired consequences: risk, unknowability of the world, the loss of ontological security, the return to myth, individuation, and hedonism. The disintegration of the project of modernity and the exhaustion of its technologies of control over the social world are not imputable to external enemies of the project itself. For it is not because of a lack of social, economic, scientific, and political "development" that the promises of modernity could not be fulfilled, but, on the contrary, because of such development.