In Who Knows Where He Lives, published in El País on October 31, 2025, Martín Caparrós turns political bewilderment into a reflection on the impossibility of knowing ourselves as a community. The text suggests that every nation is built upon a shared fiction: an image of “us” that never matches its multiple realities. This is nothing new — Benedict Anderson pointed it out over four decades ago in Imagined Communities — but it gains new force today, in a time when national fictions can no longer sustain a common experience.

Caparrós thus revives an intuition that runs through all modern theory of the nation: the political community is not founded on a real bond, but on the shared belief of belonging to the same story. In my own experience, that tension between narrative and reality takes another form. I belong to a different generation — one marked by state violence and the civil complicity that sustained it — yet forced to live that violence without prior notice. When the coup took place, I wasn’t even a preteen; and I not only grew up under the weight of history, but violence, concealment, and hypocrisy were the daily bread of my childhood. I later understood that my social group had not only discursively legitimized the dictatorship but had also integrated the bureaucratic apparatus that made the disappearance and plundering of thousands of people possible. That awareness drove me out of the country and defined my entire life. But distance does not erase belonging: one remains from the place where one learned to be silent. Since then, my relationship with Argentina has been one of broken loyalty — a belonging torn between memory and disillusionment.

That early experience helped me understand, years later, what Caparrós expresses so sharply: that the image each of us has of our country never coincides with what that country actually is. We all project our own part — our environment, our readings, our values — onto an imaginary totality we call “Argentina.” But that totality is contingent: an unstable composition of institutions, languages, territories, bureaucracies, and affections held together by nothing more than a name. In that word is condensed an aspiration to unity that never fulfills itself and yet we need to believe it possible in order to keep inhabiting a fiction of community.

And the name is the problem. Every name produces a totality: a circle of meaning that defines what belongs and what is left out. “Argentina” designates a community but also excludes everything that doesn’t fit into the imaginary that names it. National identity is not a fact but an operation — a boundary drawn with words. Every name contains its constitutive negation: to affirm the Argentine is to deny what lies outside the Argentine.

The problem, however, is not limited — as we would like to believe — to the Argentine case. It refers to a broader question: the relationship between words and things, between signs and what they claim to name. Names — especially collective ones such as “people,” “nation,” “identity” — do not describe a prior reality; they produce it. In that sense, every discourse about identity is already implicated in a form of power. Hence the question that runs through this text, explicitly or implicitly: can we still engage in identity politics in any meaningful or coherent way when the very act of naming constitutes the exclusion it claims to fight?

That is why the nation is, by definition, a dialectic between totality and part. The totality seeks to encompass diversity under one sign — a flag, a language, a memory — while the parts resist or exceed that integration. Authoritarian regimes attempt to achieve unity by suppressing difference; democracies manage it, tolerating conflict without resolving it. Each election reminds us: the whole we believed we belonged to was never homogeneous. What we call “us” is not an essence but a temporary coincidence of interests and expectations — a fiction of unity that lasts only as long as no one asks too many questions about its boundaries.

Milei’s rise does not create that fracture; it exposes it. His discourse of hatred and exclusion revives an old Argentine impulse — fascination with strength, the search for an internal enemy — that runs through our institutions since their colonial origins. But that logic no longer flows from the top down; it reproduces itself from below, among equals, when one part of the people rises against another. In that inversion of conflict — when the excluded reproduce the master’s language — lies the collapse of the symbolic bond that once sustained the idea of a national community.

But we must add something unprecedented in its explicitness, though constitutive of our colonial being. For the first time, Argentina’s historical subordination — that mixture of fascination and obedience toward imperial power — is declared without disguise. The declaration is “ours”: that of a voluntary submission to the imperial and colonial project of the United States and Israel. The president said it outright while “negotiating” a financial bailout tailored to imperial will: his commitment to the United States and Israel is unconditional, because that is our civilizational and geopolitical identity. In that confession — adopting the tone of proud surrender — we see the contemporary form of our dependency: not imposed, but embraced as identity.

For years I’ve tried to understand, from Latin American political philosophy, what the word people means today. In our tradition — from Mariátegui to Dussel, from Fanon to Rodolfo Kusch — the people are not a demographic fact or sentimental category, but a form of historical consciousness: the subject of the excluded, the living negativity of the nation. The people name the wound of totality, not its fulfillment.

That is why what we are experiencing is not merely the defeat of Peronism, but something deeper: the fracture of the people themselves. The excluded confront each other. One part of the people celebrates cruelty against another part of the people, applauding verbal and symbolic violence directed at those who share the same precariousness. When the poor hate each other, the moral bond that sustained the word people dissolves, and power no longer needs to repress — it only needs to administer hatred.

This logic of social confrontation is not an Argentine accident; it is part of a broader political rationality. As Christian Laval, Pierre Dardot, Pierre Sauvêtre, and Haud Guéguen show in The Choice for Civil War: Another History of Neoliberalism (Traficantes de Sueños, 2024), neoliberalism is founded on the deliberate choice of civil war as a form of governance. This is not a metaphor: war, in its neoliberal sense, is the device that organizes society through permanent conflict — turning competition into virtue and enmity into the motor of social life. The paradox, as they note, is that neoliberalism, while proclaiming individual freedom and the market as horizons of emancipation, needs the state and its coercive power to sustain that internal war.

The current crisis thus reveals the limits of the political imaginary that organized our democratic life. It is not enough to denounce neoliberalism or long for a past of social justice; both gestures remain trapped within the same exhausted horizon. We need new categories to think about community, justice, and exclusion. Perhaps the time has come to accept that totality can no longer be reunited, and that politics can no longer be founded on the promise of reconciliation. A living democracy should recognize dissonance as a condition, not an error: to learn to inhabit conflict without turning it into enmity, to sustain a fractured “us” without seeking a false unity.

If the name “Argentina” has ceased to designate a real bond, it is not because the country has changed its essence, but because it never had one. Nations are inventions that stand only as long as we believe in them. But that failure of the name is not necessarily a tragedy: it can be the opportunity to imagine another form of community — one founded not on identity but on responsibility; not on unity but on hospitality; one that can coexist with its own fracture.

Perhaps that is the deepest meaning of Caparrós’s final line: “we don’t know who we are or where we live.” Not knowing can itself be a form of knowing — the awareness that every identity is contingent, that every name conceals an exclusion, that “we” is always incomplete. Perhaps the future of democracy — and with it, of hope — depends on embracing that ignorance without fear. Only by abandoning the illusion of unity can we finally begin to think seriously about justice.

© 2025 Juan Manuel Cincunegui
Creative Commons Attribution–NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)
Reproduction is permitted provided the author is credited. Commercial use is not allowed