Abstract

MENENDEZ-CARRION, Amparo. Revisiting an outlier. The previously unsuspected locus of Uruguay’s exceptionalism. Rev. Cien. Soc. [online]. 2019, vol.32, n.44, pp.123-150.  Epub June 01, 2019. ISSN 0797-5538.  https://doi.org/10.26489/rvs.v32i44.6.

Uruguay’s exceptionality within the context of Latin America and beyond has been well established in the scholarly literature for some time. Most fragments of experience which have sustained the notion of 'Uruguayan exceptionality’, turned into a sort of commonplace, belong to the past. My purpose in this paper is to show the plausibility of relocating this 'exceptionality' by focusing on the changing relationship between Uruguay’s itinerary and the polis, posed as a specific kind of discursive space, form of (public) capital and regulatory regime. This formulation allows an integral re-reading of Uruguay’s historicity, the making of citizenship and things-public, and suggests new entries for action-oriented theory, to conclude that the locus of Uruguay’s exceptionality is none other than theory and, more specifically, political theory.

Keywords : citizenship; public space; polis; political theory; Uruguay.

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