Course Offerings for the 2026-2027 Graduate Summer Program at Universidad de Belgrano
The following is a list of courses offered through the Mente Argentina Graduate Summer Program at Universidad de Belgrano 2026-2027.
Description
Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) was a terribly sophisticated fiction writer who had a long and ambivalent relationship to Argentine and Latin American politics. Although he was not, strictly speaking, a “political” writer, his texts nonetheless constantly engaged in the interrogation of our shared, political worlds. The course will thus proceed to read Borges' fiction and non-fiction writing by paying attention to the implicit and explicit allusions to “the political” as such. Three twentieth century political theorists will be central to the course discussion: Carl Schmitt, Hannah Arendt, and Claude Lefort. They are known as the “thinkers of the political.” Intertwined with a close reading of Borges' work, we will thus explore the theoretical implications of his political interrogation of the questions of the same and the Other (in dialogue with Schmitt,) the imaginary and the real (in dialogue with Arendt,) and chaos and cosmos (in dialogue with Lefort.)
Dr. Martín Plot is Research Professor of Political Theory at the Institute of Advanced Social Studies (IDAES/UNSAM—CONICET.) He was the founding director of the MA Aesthetics and Politics Program at the School of Critical Studies, California Institute of the Arts (USA) and also taught at Columbia University, the New School, and NYU. He is the author, among other books, of The Aesthetico-Political (2014,) Indivisible (2011) and has recently edited Critical Theory and Democracy (2012, with Enrique Peruzzotti,) and Claude Lefort: Thinker of the Political (2013.) His current research focuses on two major subjects: on the one hand, the study of political regimes as horizons for the configuration of collective life; and, on the other hand (under a broader research umbrella that poses the question “what is political art?”) on Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges’ work and its relationships to twentieth-century political thought.