The Chilean Student Movement and the Bio-Politics of Existence: New Patterns of (re)Politicisation in a Post-Authoritarian Society

Abstract

This article analyses the specific forms of doing and building politics in the Chilean student movement, and through which, it becomes a key actor for mobilising (re)politicisation within a post-authoritarian democratic society. The bio-politics of existence – transforming life into political action – is central to understanding this role. The bio-politics of existence refers to the emergence of a new political subjectivity in the Chilean student movement engaging with new forms of (re)politicisation of everyday life and forms of egalitarian political relationships. The bio-politics of existence interweaves with self-transformation to constitute subjectivities that subvert neoliberal governmentalities. Learning through making mistakes is central for student activists in 2006 to (re)vision their political agency and animate, in 2011, a radical political imaginary of politics as being-in-common. The manifold forms of the bio-politics of existence in the Chilean student movement, from everyday activism to grassroots building network alliances – presupposing temporal contingencies to identity politics as marginal sites and spaces of resistance – unveil a rhizomatic growth of egalitarian, participatory politics through which the Chilean student movement transformed, from below, the character of politics and democracy in a society regarded as the first laboratory of neoliberalism.