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.

The deterioration of material conditions and the persistence of deep inequalities gradually strained this equilibrium. Consensus politics was not designed to address conflicts that could not be resolved through negotiation. In that context, the 2019 social uprising revealed that a significant part of society stood outside the institutional framework. It was not a deficit of representation nor a demand that could be channeled through participatory procedures. It expressed a structural disagreement with the political and economic order consolidated during the transition.

The institutional response was to call for a constituent process. This decision aimed to redirect discontent toward a mechanism capable of producing a renewed agreement. But the magnitude of the conflict exceeded the mechanism’s capacity. The first Convention incorporated a wide range of demands but faced limitations stemming both from its design and from the gap between social expectations and the real scope of the process. Its rejection showed that the conflict could not be translated without revisiting the very foundations of the model of governance that had guided political life since 1990.

Gabriel Boric’s administration took office in this context. Its strategy relied on dialogue, gradualism, and expanded participation. This orientation aligned with the logic of the transition, which had interpreted social problems as deficits of representation or communication failures. But the current conflict did not follow that pattern. It was not a programmatic disagreement manageable through progressive reform but a dispute over the limits of political action, over the role of the state, and over the system’s ability to change material conditions widely seen as unjust.

Economic difficulties, a heightened sense of insecurity, and declining trust in institutions reinforced the perception that traditional mechanisms lacked efficacy. In this climate, Kast emerged as a figure able to channel demands for order and control. His discourse does not require a detailed project. Its strength comes from aligning with a widespread social perception: that the political system is unable to address everyday problems or provide stability in an uncertain environment.

This phenomenon is not unique to Chile. It unfolds within a global context where U.S.–China rivalry reshapes alliances, where discourses privileging security over deliberation proliferate, and where authoritarian projects have resurged in both core and peripheral countries. The rise of Javier Milei in Argentina and the return of Donald Trump in the United States show that this political climate is part of a broader reconfiguration. Within this setting, Chile’s authoritarian drift is not an exception but the convergence of internal conditions and an international environment that favors control-oriented options.

The central point is that Chilean democracy faces a structural limit: a participatory model designed to manage moderate differences cannot process conflicts that challenge the institutional framework as a whole. When participation is conceived as a mechanism of integration rather than as the recognition of non-integrable disagreements, it loses the ability to respond to situations in which the system itself becomes the object of dispute. The current crossroads is not only about determining who will govern, but about assessing whether existing institutions can sustain the constitutive tension that makes democratic life possible.

Second part

The transformations affecting Chilean democracy can be situated within a broader theoretical framework that clarifies why certain conflicts cannot be processed through expanded participation or incremental institutional reform. Contemporary theories of recognition, disagreement, and representation offer three distinct approaches to this question. Comparing them helps identify the limits of participatory models and the conditions required to sustain democratic tension.

Recognition theory, developed most prominently by Charles Taylor, holds that individual and collective identities require validation. Social stability depends on institutions being able to acknowledge the value and dignity of subjects. Conflicts arise when existing practices or structures denigrate, invisibilize, or subordinate certain groups. The response is to broaden legal and symbolic mechanisms of recognition—to integrate those who were excluded through reforms that strengthen equality and participation (Taylor, 1992).

Axel Honneth expands this perspective by arguing that social struggles are struggles for recognition at affective, legal, and social levels. When recognition fails or is distributed unequally, conflicts arise that can be resolved if the system incorporates the demands of the wronged. From this viewpoint, democracy is an ongoing process of expanding recognition, and legitimacy stems from the system’s ability to integrate new identities and repair symbolic injustices (Honneth, 1995).

This approach has been useful for understanding the importance of dignity and equality in plural societies. However, it encounters limits when confronted with conflicts that do not seek integration or expanded rights within the existing framework but transformation of the framework itself. In such cases, conflict arises not only from a deficit of recognition but from the structure of social life, which distributes positions in ways that prevent certain voices from being incorporated without altering the very criteria of relevance and speech.

Here Jacques Rancière’s perspective becomes relevant. For him, politics does not arise as a process of recognition but as the irruption of those who were not included in the distribution that determines who belongs, who may intervene, and what counts as a valid issue. Disagreement is not a difference of opinion; it is a rupture in the distribution of roles. Politics appears when those without a part assert themselves as subjects capable of intervening. Such conflicts cannot be resolved through expanded participation, because they call into question the very basis of the political order (1999).

Nancy Fraser adds a third dimension. For her, injustice unfolds across economic inequality, cultural denigration, and political exclusion. Redistributing material goods is insufficient if forms of stigma persist; expanding symbolic recognition is insufficient if structures of inequality remain; and deep injustices cannot be addressed if the framework that defines the demos and decision-making powers stays intact. Representation—understood as the structure that delimits the political community—is thus central to contemporary conflict (Fraser, 2008).

Bringing these perspectives together clarifies a key point: not all conflicts are integrable. Some disputes target the very framework that organizes political life. In such cases, expanding participation is not enough because the conflict concerns the criteria that determine who can make demands at all (Dussel, 1998; Fanon, 2004; Ambedkar, 2014; Federici, 2004).

This raises a broader issue for democracy. Democratic life is sustained by a tension between individuality and totality. This tension must remain unresolved. If the whole absorbs the parts, autonomy and difference disappear. If individuals become self-sufficient, the common space dissolves. Democracy requires maintaining both poles open—a condition for genuine disagreement and for non-integrable positions to persist.

In the current context, certain strands of systems theory, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence conceive subjects as nodes within collective processes. From this perspective, conflict tends to be interpreted as a perturbation of the system. Applied uncritically to politics, this risks reducing democracy to coordination and adjustment. Yet democracy is not about preserving systemic coherence, but about sustaining disagreements that cannot be resolved through cooperative interaction.

Differences must not only be expressible; they must be capable of altering the state of affairs, of questioning criteria of decision, and of sustaining positions that refuse absorption into the existing order. This is incompatible with models that interpret conflict as mere misalignment. Democracy requires acknowledging the legitimacy of positions that seek not integration but revision of the order.

This theoretical lens clarifies why certain conflicts—such as those in Chile—cannot be absorbed through expanded participation or gradual reform. It also explains why models oriented toward coordination, interaction, or systemic regulation fail to capture the structural dimension of contemporary political disputes. Democratic stability depends on institutions able to sustain tension between parts and whole and to recognize the legitimacy of actors who cannot or do not wish to participate on existing terms.

Against this background, the limitations of Chile’s participatory model appear not as anomalies but as expressions of the system’s inability to sustain conflicts that touch its basic structure. The challenge is not expanding participation but rethinking the framework that shapes its possibilities. Democracy must be conceived not as integration but as a regime that recognizes exteriority and sustains the tension that makes common life possible.

Coda addressed to enactivists

Enactivist theory, in its various formulations, emerged partly from the Chilean intellectual context. First with Maturana and Varela’s autopoiesis (1980), then with the phenomenological and Buddhist expansion of Varela, Thompson, and Rosch (1991), and more recently with Di Paolo, De Jaegher, and Thompson’s attempts (2018) to address the social and political dimensions of human life. This genealogy gives the Chilean case particular significance: the country where the notion of operational closure was born is also the place where its limits appear most clearly.

Enactivism holds that living systems constitute their own domain of meaning through dynamics of autonomy, coupling, and regulation. This ontology is fertile for biology and phenomenology but becomes more complex when applied to social life. “Participatory sense-making” proposes that collective normativity emerges from coordination among autonomous agents. From this viewpoint, conflict is understood as misalignment in interactive dynamics, something corrigible through reconfiguration or expanded participation.

Yet when concrete political contexts are considered—Chile’s 2019 uprising, structural inequalities, polarization—it becomes evident that many conflicts cannot be reduced to coordination failures. They are expressions of historical structures that do not adjust because they were designed not to. Conflict does not arise from interaction but from the position certain actors occupy within an institutional architecture that distributes capacities unequally. In such cases, autonomy is not reciprocal and participation does not constitute a shared space.

The enactivist framework encounters here an ontological limit. Its notion of operational closure tends to dissolve exteriority. Relations to the environment—whether biological or social—are always mediated by the system’s own dynamics. Translated into politics, this yields a tendency to interpret social tensions as internal perturbations to be reabsorbed through adjustments in interaction. This neutralizes conflict and prevents recognizing positions that cannot be integrated without altering the foundations of the existing order.

Democracy requires the opposite. It demands institutions capable of maintaining tension between totality and individuality, and the presence of subjects who do not seek to be integrated under existing terms. Politics emerges when those without a part interrupt the existing framework and force reconsideration of criteria of belonging. This exteriority—ethical, material, historical—cannot be reduced to coordination without losing its meaning.

Recent enactivist attempts to engage with the social realm—especially in Linguistic Bodies—develop a theory in which normativity arises from the adjustment of linguistic bodies that co-constitute their worlds. While this describes everyday interactions precisely, it struggles with structural conflicts. The presupposition of a shared linguistic horizon collapses where the political problem is precisely that no common language is possible within the existing framework.

The Chilean case shows this clearly. The 2019 protest did not seek integration or adjustment. It pointed to an exteriority that could not be translated without transforming the institutional architecture. The response could not be expanding participation, because the conflict concerned the very criteria defining who could participate and under what conditions. As it stands, enactivism lacks an ontology capable of recognizing these phenomena.

The theoretical challenge is evident: if enactivism intends to offer a framework for understanding social life, it must abandon the assumption that meaning is always co-constitutive and acknowledge conflicts where coordination is impossible. Autonomy may be asymmetrical; normativity may be imposed; exteriority is not a deficit of interaction but an irreducible condition of political life.

Without incorporating this dimension, enactivism will remain useful for describing cooperative dynamics but ineffective when confronted with real political situations like those unfolding in Chile and across much of the world. Democracy requires an ontology of conflict that acknowledges non-integrable subjects—something incompatible with a model that understands social life solely in terms of coordination and adjustment. A deep reconsideration of the paradigm’s ontological assumptions is necessary if it is to extend beyond phenomenology and biology.

Bibliography

Ambedkar, B. R. (1936/2014). Annihilation of Caste (A. Roy, Ed.). Navayana.

Di Paolo, E. A., Cuffari, E., & De Jaegher, H. (2018). Linguistic Bodies: The Continuity Between Life and Language. MIT Press.

Cincunegui, J. M. (2019). Miseria planificada. Derechos humanos y neoliberalismo. Dado Ediciones.

Cincunegui, J. M. (2024). Mente y política. Dialéctica y realismo desde la perspectiva de la liberación. Dado Ediciones.

Cincunegui, J. M. (2026). La vida en la historia. Más allá de la biología, la fenomenología y las ciencias cognitivas. (En prensa).

Dussel, E. (1998). Ética de la liberación en la edad de la globalización y la exclusión. Trotta.

Fanon, F. (1961/2004). The Wretched of the Earth. Grove Press.

Federici, S. (2004). Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. Autonomedia.

Fraser, N. (2008). Scales of Justice: Reimagining Political Space in a Globalizing World. Polity Press.

Honneth, A. (1995). The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts. MIT Press.

Maturana, H., & Varela, F. J. (1980). Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living. D. Reidel.

Rancière, J. (1999). Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy. University of Minnesota Press.

Taylor, C. (1992). Multiculturalism and “The Politics of Recognition”. Princeton University Press.

Varela, F. J., Thompson, E., & Rosch, E. (1991). The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. MIT Press.

© 2025 Juan Manuel Cincunegui
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Bachelor in Philosophy. PhD in Philosophy, PhD in Citizenship and Human Rights, and PhD in Sociology. University professor of social and political philosophy, ethics, and epistemology. Author of Miseria Planificada. Derechos Humanos y Neoliberalismo (2019) and Mente y política. Dialéctica y realismo desde la perspectiva de la liberación (2024). In preparation: La vida en la historia. Más allá de la biología, la fenomenología y las ciencias cognitivas (2026).