Resumo

FORNARI, Aníbal. The Question of the ‘Historical Subject’. Preliminary Considerations about its Socio-Political Demands and its Problematic Historicity . Utopìa y Praxis Latinoamericana [online]. 2006, vol.11, n.35, pp.31-53. ISSN 1315-5216.

The abandoned question of the historical subject from the merely negative and rather superficial deconstructions made by mega-narrations belonging to the latest modern philosophy retakes its philosophic actuality at the moment of so-called globalization, coinciding with a general decadence of political culture and responsibility. The aforementioned question is pressing for those who, for different reasons, are not satisfied with the bewilderment or cannot agree with it, either due to awareness of the task that historical existence implies or due to the pressure that its rather determining position in contemporary history receives. This study approaches the subject from a preliminary question, divided in two parts, that tries first to demonstrate from the current re-dimensioning of the decisive importance of civil society for a living democracy, the need to approach the sense of configuring the historical subject. In second place, it shows the decisiveness of a recapitulation, parallel to the preceding, of the founding experience and the basic theses that determined the powerful modern revival of this question, under the sign of the “collective subject,” in order to define the horizon for a new treatment of this theme.

Palavras-chave : Civil society; meta-political subjectivity; historical liberation; gnostical modernity; Feuerbach/Marx.