Aáadne in Latin America: the threads of «the being», history, and the revolution

Abstract

Striving to orientate themselves in the tortuous labyrinth of Latin America, in-tellectuals, emulating Theseus, have devised their own "Ariadne's threads" —a variety of concepts and theories— to unravel the enigmas of this inscrutable region. Although it might be presumptuous to encompass the whole universe of conceptual approaches to Latin America, it is feasible to discuss some of these approaches, trying to identify their main epistemological, discursive and ethi-cal underpinnings. Therefore, in this essay I examine a few works that exem-plify each one of them, a particular way of devising Latin America's history. In order of appearance in this paper, the keywords in each one of these works are: TheBeing, which is another way of denoting identity; History, understood as historiography; and, finally, the idea of revolution, regarded frequently as an inexorable fate for Latin America. My goal is to offer critical views on ideas that have functioned as virtual "Ariadne's threads" for the interpretation of Latin American history.