How do we think about social reality? Theoretical defeatism and the need for utopia from Zemelman.

Abstract

This essay is based on the reflections made in the text “Epistemology and politics in socio-historical knowledge” Zemelman (2000), in which it is asked: what kind of thinking is generated from Latin America? The answer is not simple, to address it, I present a problematization is proposed not only of Latin American thought but of those ways of theorizing from the social sciences that represent a loss of the subject, of its history, and its context, for which I recover reflections on the existence of social thought under capitalism, and the need to return to utopia and overcome theoretical defeatism, based on texts such as Eros and Civilization (Marcuse, 1955) and Capitalist Realism (Fisher, 2016).