On Historical Exhaustion: Argentine Critique in an Era of “Total Corruption”

Abstract

AbstractThis essay examines the experience of corruption as an unavoidable and self-destructive dynamic of everyday life in post-crisis Argentina. Embedded in both everyday practices and popular evaluations of those practices, corruption in this context of neoliberal crisis operated as a folk category of socio-moral critique much like witchcraft does in some other settings, for it named a cannibalistic logic that imperiled the very framework of sociality. In order to grasp the reflexive pragmatics of this category, the essay attends first to the conceptual, then to the ethnographic, and finally to the historical dimensions of its practical life. Moving across these three dimensions, it argues that corruption indexed a very particular moral sensibility, marked by the sense of exhausted historical possibilities and inevitable national crisis.