In 2003, on the thirtieth anniversary of the military coup of September 11, 1973, the Chilean philosopher Willy Thayer published a provocative interpretation of the destruction resulting from the bombing of the Palace of La Moneda in Santiago as a component of the military takeover. This violent political break from Salvador Allende’s rule would mark an anticipation and preemptive deactivation of the poetics of rupture, happening, and event in the Chilean art scene, especially the neo-avant-garde canonized as Escena de la Avanzada (active 1977-1983) in cultural critic Nelly Richard’s book Margins and Institutions: Art in Chile since 1973 (Melbourne, 1987). In this talk Bruno Bosteels revisits the heated polemic that followed between Richard and Thayer on the potential links between art, politics, and cultural critique.
Bruno Bosteels is Dean of Humanities and Jesse and George Siegel Professor in the Humanities in the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures, with a joint appointment in the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. Prior to returning to Columbia in 2016, he taught for many years at Harvard and Cornell University. His research covers a wide range of topics in literature, culture, and politics in modern Latin America as well as contemporary philosophy and political theory. He is currently preparing two new books, the first a sustained polemical engagement with contemporary post-Heideggerian thought, titled Philosophies of Defeat: The Jargon of Finitude (Verso); and the second, a collection of recent and previously unpublished essays under the title The State and Insurrection: New Interventions in Latin American Marxist Theory (University of Pittsburgh Press).
This program is presented in conjunction with the exhibition, Lotty Rosenfeld: Disobedient Spaces, on view through March 15, 2026.
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