A Critique of Civilizing Rationality: Marginality Production Strategies

Abstract

The radical distinction between civilization and barbarism used in the discourse of the national states of Chile and Argentina during the second half of the XIX century, not only was used to justify the genocidal military intervention of
the territories inhabited by the mapuche indigenous from the south of both countries; but also inaugurated a conflictive relationship that remains to the present. The main objective of the paper is to identify the scope of the “civilization project”
initiated during the second part of the 19th century and expressed during the 20th and 21st centuries through different and broad forms of marginalization, both ethnic and -by extension- immigrant, the criminal and LGBT+ groups; in such a way that it is a historical, systematic and institutionalized process of producing marginalities, which considers various production strategies of the intimate enemy, especially from the cultural industry available in each time. The results show how “marginal/marginalized” is produced and reproduced, through policies of death, dispossession, inclusion/exclusion, in a constant relationship from moral, criminal and neoliberal rationalities.