Introduction

In recent years, I have oriented my work toward a critical study of the thought of Francisco Varela and of the enactivism developed by his heirs. From that philosophical, historical, and ethical research a book has emerged, which I hope to publish soon, entitled Life in History. Beyond Biology, Phenomenology, and the Cognitive Sciences.

This project continues the line opened in my three previous books: Constellations of Identity. Charles Taylor and His Interlocutors (2010); Planned Misery. Human Rights and Neoliberalism (2018); and Mind and Politics. Dialectics and Realism from the Perspective of Liberation (2024). A single concern runs through all of them: to interrogate the modern forms of closure of meaning—scientific, political, or spiritual—and to think, against such closure, the exteriority that exceeds it.

The text that follows is the proem of that book. The term, as is often said, comes from the Greek prooímion (pro- “before,” oimē “song”) and in the Hellenic tradition referred to the opening chant that introduced epic poems and philosophical treatises. It was not an external or explanatory introduction, but rather a threshold of meaning: the moment in which thought announces itself before unfolding into systematic development.

In a recent interview published in El País, Shoshana Zuboff, author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, advances a thesis that is both clear and unsettling: artificial intelligence does not constitute a historical rupture, but rather the continuation—and radicalization—of what she calls surveillance capitalism, a regime whose effectiveness depends on a structural opacity that turns participation into a mechanism for capturing meaning.

Beyond its immediate relevance for thinking about contemporary technology, the interview provides a particularly fertile opportunity to address a philosophical problem that has traversed my work over the past years: the problem of participatory opacity, understood not as a technical flaw or a mere lack of transparency, but as a constitutive structure of certain systems of meaning production.

Zuboff insists that surveillance capitalism can function only insofar as its operations remain concealed. Data extraction, behavioral modeling, prediction, and the modulation of action cannot be made fully visible without losing social and legal legitimacy. Opacity is not accidental; it is a condition of possibility. If subjects were to truly understand how their experience is extracted and used, the system would enter crisis. Surveillance must present itself as interaction.

Racism is commonly presented as a residue of the past: a moral pathology or cultural prejudice whose return to the public sphere is understood as an ideological drift confined to the margins of politics. It is treated as an excess that civilizational progress was supposed to overcome, now allegedly encouraged by the “barbaric discourses” of the far right. Yet the facts compel us to formulate another hypothesis: that racism is neither an error nor a deviation of the system, nor the return of a shadow from the past, but rather one of its central operating principles—one that functions not only at the cultural or symbolic level, but as a geopolitical rationality that orders the world, hierarchizes it, and in doing so decides which lives deserve protection and which may be sacrificed in the name of the “civilized.”

This suspicion does not arise out of nowhere. It imposes itself through events: the systematic persecution of Latin American immigrants in the United States; the growing pressure exerted against countries such as Venezuela; the complicity of local elites who openly despise their own popular majorities; the double standard embedded in European human rights discourse; and, as a backdrop, the structural defenselessness of the Palestinian people in the face of a violence that no longer requires justification to be exercised obscenely.

We live in an era in which what we still call “rationality” has been reduced to systemic thinking. I do not mean an isolated theory or a particular discipline, but an intellectual climate that runs through cybernetics, systems theory, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and a large part of contemporary philosophical thought—often pleased, if not outright entranced, by these totalizing proposals. This climate rests on a basic conviction: that life, mind, and society can be fully understood as self-regulating processes, adaptive networks, and circuits of interaction whose ultimate purpose is not radical transformation but the continuity of the system itself. It is a way of thinking that trusts that everything can be explained within the horizon of immanence, where no true exteriority exists and where all alterity is reduced to information flow.

This form of technical rationality is not accidental. It arises in late modernity as a way of securing its own survival and fostering its self-expansion through devices of control, technologies of stabilization, and increasingly sophisticated models of management. In this context, academic philosophy seems to have become—often unwittingly—an instrument dedicated to sustaining the illusion of stability. From there emerges what I call the “bunker philosophy”: a philosophy produced from protected locations, from spaces where the continuity of the world still appears conceivable, where conflict is treated as a corrigible accident, and where life is thought according to the logic of equilibrium. This bunker philosophy looks at the world through a notion of functional and institutional security and therefore conceives it as a system capable of self-regulation both linguistically and operationally.

The decisive question is not what democracy is, but what democracy does. Liberal tradition conceives of it as an end, as the culminating political form of modernity, when it is only a means: a procedure intended to channel conflicts, administer legitimacies, and confer authority on those who govern. To mistake democracy for an end is the beginning of a moral alibi: it shifts responsibility onto the procedural mechanism, onto the form, and neglects what that form produces. And what it produces are lives exposed to the raw elements of a power that exploits, excludes, or eliminates them. A democracy can produce horrors, and when it does, it produces them “democratically.” That is its blind spot.

The Palestinian question exposes this knot with clarity. We are not dealing with a “dictatorship” or a “fundamentalist theocracy,” but with the action of a state that proclaims itself “democratic” and that, despite this—or driven by it—has for decades carried out policies of siege, expulsion, occupation, and ethnic cleansing. To produce this horror, Israel has not suspended democracy: it has acted in its name. Procedural democracy has granted moral legitimacy and a license to kill Palestinians indiscriminately. The brake has turned into an accelerator.

A banal fiction can illuminate the architecture of contemporary social thought. The Mission Impossible saga belongs to that kind of cultural artifact that reveals more than its creators initially intended. Not because it offers easy metaphors about technology or geopolitics, but because it stages—perhaps unintentionally—the fundamental tension between the immanence of systems and the irreducible exteriority of human life. Read from this perspective, the saga ceases to be an exercise in technical spectacle and becomes instead a crude, yet revealing, dramatization of the constitutive limit of any systemic logic.

Ethan Hunt is the figure in which this tension condenses. An agent without institutional shelter, a liminal and “problematically” heroic character, he embodies a truth that contemporary social theory seems to have forgotten, despite lying at the core of every emancipatory tradition: no system can liberate itself; every radical transformation demands an interruption that emerges from a place the internal logic of the world cannot absorb. This intuition becomes especially significant when confronted with three influential currents of contemporary thought: the constructivist perspective inspired by cybernetics and autopoiesis, which conceives the social as a system of operational closures and distributed couplings; the immanent critique that interprets social pathologies as internal contradictions of forms of life; and the theory of justice that understands conflicts as problems of institutional framing.

The recent awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to María Corina Machado has been celebrated by major Western media as a moral triumph for Venezuelan democracy. Yet the gesture reveals a contradiction that cannot be ignored: rarely has a Peace Prize been granted to someone who has so explicitly and consistently supported severe economic sanctions, extreme diplomatic pressure, and the need for a greater U.S. role in precipitating regime change — including, if necessary, by military means. This paradox is not a mistake by the committee but the symptom of a deeper conceptual shift: the identification of peace with the “proper” administration of coercion rather than with its suspension. As Michelle Ellner has critically argued in relation to Machado’s award [1], humanitarian language here functions as a vehicle for a politics of force.

The media construction that elevates Machado as a symbol of freedom is embedded in this conceptual shift. Editorials in The Washington Post [2], The Wall Street Journal [3], and the reporting in El País [4] reproduce, in unison, a Manichean narrative: on one side, the “darkness” of Chavismo; on the other, the moral clarity of the opposition leader. In these accounts, Nicolás Maduro appears reduced to an autocrat devoid of legitimacy or political rationality, while the complex geostrategic architecture that frames the conflict disappears from view.

This text is written on the day of the presidential elections in Chile. The result is not yet known. What is examined here does not depend on that outcome but on the structural transformations of the Chilean political system and on the international context in which they unfold.

First part

The Chilean political landscape has changed significantly in recent years. The real possibility that José Antonio Kast may reach the presidency cannot be interpreted as a strictly electoral phenomenon. It signals a deeper shift affecting the institutional model inherited from the dictatorship, the way the transition shaped democratic governance, and the capacity of the political system to process structural conflicts. This shift also takes place within an international environment marked by geopolitical tensions that shape the political options available in the region.

The transition established a democratic regime conditioned by authoritarian enclaves: a Constitution designed to limit the action of civilian governments, an electoral system that favored the continuity of institutional pacts, and mechanisms intended to restrict political intervention in the economic model. This architecture produced a form of stability grounded in consensus. Differences existed, but were contained within a framework that privileged broad agreements and avoided substantive change. As long as economic growth sustained expectations of mobility and social protection, this model operated with relative effectiveness.