Del 2012 la reflexión, del 2013 el deseo y la esperanza.

Salud, vida intensa y grandes memorias para el 2013. Mucho cariño.

Aquí algo de lo mío....

Carmen Guerrero, para un "deber ser" gubernamental

A partir de enero de 2013 el Departamento de Recursos Naturales y Ambientales contará con una nueva Secretaria: Carmen Guerrero Pérez. No hay forma de hacer un buen análisis si no se mira atrás unas cuantas décadas y se examina la trayectoria tanto de Carmen como del contexto de controversias y movimientos sociales en el eje medioambiental en Puerto Rico. El asunto puramente partidista me interesa menos, los grupos de interés que han dictado la agenda mucho más. Digamos esto por ahora: Además del mérito y la respectiva preparación y experiencia, ocupar una secretaría de gabinete implica, entre otras cosas, implantar y fomentar la política pública de la agencia y velar por que su Ley Orgánica se cumpla, ser la voz de esa política pública en la Rama Ejecutiva y ante el Gobernador, reconocer a los sectores y grupos de interés y saber aglutinar fuerzas y energías en la agencia para que funcione. 

Para esto  se necesita tener claro lo que significa hoy día ser una funcionaria pública (el deber ser del servicio público) saber escuchar, tener liderato -sin que eso implique arbitrariedad- y tener un compromiso genuino con el bienestar común y el interés público, todos conceptos muy maltrechos y que necesitan reivindicación. Quizás lo más que necesita reivindicación en estos momentos es el sentido de confianza, la sensación de que al mando de esa institución gubernamental, hay alguien verdaderamente íntegro, capaz de apalabrar con firmeza las necesidades del país y que pueda sentirse que esa persona nos representa. Y ese sentido de confianza no se busca en aras de descansar en el ejercer ciudadanía, sino para la posibilidad de ejercerla aún mejor y más efectivamente.

Carmen Guerrero Pérez para mí reúne estas características y puedo decir desde este blog, que siento que ella, su voz allí, representa un nos del cual me siento parte. Pero mejor aún, sus oídos allí, representan la posibilidad de disentir y ella cuenta con la inteligencia y sensibilidad de saber escuchar. Tanto lo primero, como lo segundo son importantes. Carmen, voz y oídos, corazón e inteligencia, marcan un nuevo ciclo de quehaceres intensos, al menos en la política pública ambiental. No hay que dejarla sola, al contrario, hay que ejercer la ciudadanía aún más intensamente.

Keep calm and...

Detalles aquí.

Regala el comienzo de una conversación, regala "Derecho al Derecho"!

En estos días de fiesta, si vas a hacer un regalo, regala el comienzo de una conversación importante para nuestro país y para nuestro mundo de vida  común. Pensemos juntos en nuestras instituciones jurídico-políticas, en el estado de nuestro acceso a la reivindicación de los derechos. 

Regala esta nueva publicación Derecho al Derecho: intersticios y grietas del poder judicial en Puerto Rico y con este regalo amplía la gama y pluralidad de los y las participantes en este proyecto-conversación. Derecho al Derecho está disponible en:

-Librería Mágica (Río Piedras)

-Norberto González (Río Piedras)

-Tertulia Viejo San Juan

-Libros AC (Santurce)

-Escuela Derecho UPR (UPR-Río Piedras)

-Bibliográficas

-Coop Inter Metro

-Universidad Católica Ponce

-Página Web de EEE

-Amazon

Derecho al derecho: intersticios y grietas del poder judicial en Puerto Rico es una invitación audaz al diálogo sobre lo jurídico y a la participación activa de la ciudadanía en ese esfuerzo. El sistema judicial en Puerto Rico ha sido secuestrado, nos advierte. Es preciso rescatarlo de la del contubernio político-partidista y traerlo a la esfera del debate público crítico. Es urgente que cada persona ejerza su ciudadanía en la esfera del poder judicial no solo reclamando cuentas y exigiendo decisiones razonadas y ponderadas, sino siendo sujetos de la esfera judicial dialógica que es posible en las mejores democracias.

El espacio digital (www.derechoalderecho.org) y las comunidades que propicia son el pretexto para una apuesta por la construcción de la esfera jurídica en Puerto Rico desde todas las esquinas. La Rama Judicial –compuesta por abogadas/os y juezas/ces en su mayoría– debe estar atenta a la ciudadanía y a la academia jurídica para poder descargar sus gestiones responsable y justamente. Pero, sobre todo, para ajustarse a la vanguardia de los tiempos y traslucir su voluntad por un mejor país.

Érika e Hiram se dan a la tarea de iniciar estos diálogos –en la mejor tradición socrática–, sin dejar a nadie fuera de la convocatoria. Esta tertulia es para los oponentes y para los simpatizantes del estado actual del poder judicial en el país. Es para los estudiantes y los profesores. Es para el experto y el aficionado del Derecho. Es para ti, lectora y lector que reclamas una ciudadanía participativa todos los días.

Derecho al derecho… es una apuesta por la democratización radical de lo jurídico y, a la vez, es una crítica aguda y firme sobre la realidad actual del poder judicial, tan distante del ideal al que se aspira. El punto final, es el comienzo de una historia contemporánea del derecho en nuestro entorno jurídico y un punto suspensivo en espera de otros diálogos por venir.

 — with Editora Educación Emergente.

La configuración de un arte de la vida

"Sigo leyendo a Bennett, y reconozco en él cada vez más a un hombre no sólo cuya actitud es actualmente similar a la mía, sino que además sirve para reforzarla: un hombre en realidad en el que una absoluta falta de ilusiones y una desconfianza radical respecto al curso del mundo no conducen ni al fanatismo moral ni a la amargura, sino a la configuración de un arte de la vida extremadamente astuto, inteligente y refinado que le lleva a sacar de su propio infortunio oportunidades y de su propia vileza algunos de los comportamientos decentes que competen a la vida humana".

Le escribe Walter Benjamin a Jula Radt, en sus Cartas de Ibiza.

The venture into the public realm (H. Arendt)

Gaus:

Permit me a last question. In a tribute to Jaspers you said: “Humanity is never acquired in solitude, and never by giving one’s work to the public. It can be achieved only by one who has thrown his life and his person into ‘the venture into the public realm’”. This ‘venture into the public realm’ -which is a quotation from Jaspers- what does it mean for Hannah Arendt?.

Arendt:

The venture into the public realm seems clear to me. One exposes oneself to the light of the public, as a person. Although I am of the opinion that one must not appear and act in public self-consciously, still I know that in every action the person is expressed as in no other human activity. Speaking is also a form of action. That is one venture. The other is: we start something. We weave our strand into a network of relations. What comes of it we never know. We’ve all been taught to say: Lord forgive them, for they not know what they do. That is true of all action. Quite simply and concretely true, because one cannot know. That is what is meant by a venture. And now I would say that this venture is only possible when there is trust in people. A trust –which is difficult to formulate but fundamental—in what is human in all people. Otherwise such a venture could not be made.” (1964).

Hannah Arendt, Essays in Understanding (1994), pp. 22-23.

Encuentro de Derechos Humanos 2012

Encuentro de Derechos Humanos 2012 (por la Excarcelación de Oscar López Rivera, dedicado a la Memoria de Juan Santiago Nieves)
7 al 10 dic en la Universidad del Sagrado Corazon

Pulsa para el Programa y más detalles.

Prejudice Against Politics

“Prejudice Against Politics and What, In Fact, Politics is Today.

Any talk of politics in our time has to begin with those prejudices that all of us who aren’t professional politicians have against politics. Our shared prejudices are themselves political in the broadest sense. They do not originate in the arrogance of the educated, are not the result of the cynicism of those who have seen too much and understood too little. Because prejudices crop up in our own thinking, we cannot ignore them, and since they refer to undeniable realities and faithfully reflect our current situation precisely in its political aspects, we cannot silence them with arguments. These prejudices, however, are not judgments. They indicate that we have stumbled into a situation in which we do not know, or do not yet know, how to function in just such political terms. The danger is that politics may vanish entirely from the world. Our prejudices invade our thoughts; they throw the baby out with the bathwater, confuse politics with what would put an end to politics and present that very catastrophe as if it we inherent in the nature of things and thus inevitable.

Underlying our prejudices against politics today are hope and fear: the fear that the humanity could destroy itself through politics and through the means of force now at its disposal, and linked with this fear, the hope that humanity will come to its senses and rid the world, not of humankind, but of politics. It could do so through a world government that transforms the state into an administrative machine, resolve political conflicts bureaucratically, and replaces armies with police forces. If politics is defined in its usual sense, as a relationship between the rulers and the ruled, this hope is, of course, purely utopian. In taking this point of view, we would end up not with the abolition of politics, but with a despotism of massive proportions in which the abyss separating the rulers from the ruled would be so gigantic that any sort of rebellion would no longer be possible, not to mention any form of control of the rulers by the ruled. The fact that no individual ---no despot, per se--- could be identified within this world government would in no way change its despotic character. Bureaucratic rule, the anonymous of the bureaucrat, is no less despotic because “nobody” exercises it. On the contrary, it is more fearsome still, because no one can speak with or petition this “nobody”.”

-Hannah Arendt, “Introduction into Politics”, in The Promise of Politics (Shocken Books, NY, 2005), pp.  96-97.

Carta de Agamben a Arendt

 

"I am a young writer and essayist for whom discovering your books last year has represented a decisive experience. May I express here my gratitude to you, and that of those who, along with me, in the gap between past and future, feel all the urgency of working in the direction you pointed out."

-Fragmento de una carta de Giorgio Agamben a Hannah Arendt en 1970, cuando el primero tenía 26 años. Tomado de Vivian Liska, "A Lawless Legacy: Hannah Arendt and Giorgio Agamben", en M. Goldoni and C. McCorkindale, Hannah Arendt and the Law (2012) p. 80.

Ten theses on Politics (J. Ranciere)

Thesis 1:

Politics is not the exercise of power. Politics ought to be defined on its own terms, as a mode of acting put into practice by a specific kind of subject and deriving from a particular form of reason. It is the political relationship that allows one to think the possibility of a political subject(ivity) [le sujet politique],3 not the other way around.

Thesis 2:

What is proper to politics is the existence of a subject defined by its participation in contrarieties. Politics is a paradoxical form of action.

Thesis 3:

Politics is a specific rupture in the logic of arche. It does not simply presuppose the rupture of the 'normal' distribution of  positions  between  the  one  who exercises  power and  the one subject to it. It also requires a rupture in the idea that there are dispositions 'proper' to such classifications.

Thesis 4:

Democracy is not a political regime. Insofar as it is a rupture in the logic of arche - that is, in the anticipation of rule in the disposition for it - democracy is the regime of politics in the form of a relationship defining a specific subject.

Thesis 5:

The 'people' that is the subject of democracy - and thus the principal subject of politics - is not the collection of members in a community, or the laboring classes of the population. It is the supplementary part, in relation to any counting of parts of the population that makes it possible to identify 'the part of those who have no-part'[le compte des incomptés]8  with the whole of the community.

Thesis 6:

If politics is the outline of a vanishing difference, with the distribution of social parts and

shares,  then  it  follows that  its  existence is  in  no  way  necessary,  but  that  it  occurs  as  a provisional accident in the history of the forms of domination. It also follows from this that political litigiousness has as its essential object the very existence of politics.

Thesis 7:

Politics is specifically opposed to the police. The police is a ‘partition of the sensible’ [le partage du sensible] whose principle is the absence of a void and of a supplement.

Thesis 8:

The principal function of politics is the configuration of its proper space. It is to disclose the world of its subjects and its operations.  The essence of politics is  the  manifestation  of dissensus, as the presence of two worlds in one.12

Thesis 9:

Inasmuch as what is proper to 'political philosophy' is to ground political action in a specific mode of being, so is it the case that 'political philosophy' effaces the litigiousness constitutive of politics. It is in its very description of the world of politics that philosophy effects this effacement. Moreover, its effectiveness is perpetuated through to the non-philosophical or anti-philosophical description of the world.

Thesis 10:

The 'end of politics' and the 'return of politics' are two complementary ways of cancelling out politics in the simple relationship between a  state  of  the  social  and  a  state  of  statist apparatuses. 'Consensus' is the vulgar name given to this cancellation.

Fragmentos de: Jacques Ranciere “Ten theses on politics’ in 5(3) [2001] Theory and Event pp 1-10.

Rosa Luxemburgo

Hace más de un año, presencié un panel de discusión sobre los movimientos sociales globales, el análisis de la primavera árabe, la crisis del capitalismo global, entre otros temas. Integraban el panel Slavoj Zizek, Etienne Balibar, Costas Douzinas y Drucilla Cornell. Como suelo hacer, tomé notas y luego me llamó la atención la mucha insistencia de Drucilla Cornell en la necesidad de, ahora más que nunca, decía, retomar el pensamiento de Rosa Luxemburgo. A un año y medio de eso, Rosa Luxemburgo y su pensamiento reaparecen en la genealogía que estoy trazando sobre la relación Derecho y "lo político". Hace unos días vi la película de Margarethe von Trotta sobre ella (Rosa Luxemburg, 1986) y la semana pasada pasé horas largas en un piso de la biblioteca dedicado a estudios Soviéticos e historia rusa. Cientos de libros, genialidad de fuentes bibliográficas, sus cartas mientras estuvo en prisión. Tanto ahí.

No escuchada, olvidada y ninguneada por los 'suyos' por mucho tiempo, esta mujer y su pensamiento son hoy revisitados, y sus cartas, historias y debates principales en los adentros del socialismo, objeto de análisis minuicioso. Hoy, en el día de no más violencia contra la mujer, comparto este fragmento escrito por otra grande del Siglo XX, Hannah Arendt. Arendt, en Men in Dark Times, comenta una biografía de Rosa Luxemburgo y nos da luz sobre los detalles de su vida y obra. En este fragmento Arendt resume sus discrepancias con Lenin. 

Porque el olvido y la invisibilidad de las mujeres y su pensamiento también es violencia. Salud!.

"The second point was the source of her disagreements with Lenin during the First World War; the first of her criticism of Lenin's tactics in the Russian Revolution of 1918. For she refused categorically, from beginning to end, to see in the war anything but the most terrible disaster, no matter what its eventual outcome; the price in human lives, especially in proletarian lives, was too high in any event. Moreover, it would have gone against her grain to look upon revolution as the profiteer of war and massacre-something which didn't bother Lenin in the least. And with respect to the issue of organization, she did not believe in a victory in which the people at large had no part and no voice; so little, indeed, did she believe in holding power at any price that she "was far more afraid of a deformed revolution than an unsuccessful one"-this was, in fact, "the major difference between her" and the Bolsheviks. And haven't events proved her right? Isn't the history of the Soviet Union one long demonstration of the frightful dangers of "deformed revolutions"? Hasn't the "moral collapse" which she foresaw-without, of course, foreseeing the open criminality of Lenin's successor-done more harm to the cause of revolution as she understood it than "any and every political defeat . . . in honest struggle against superior forces and in the teeth of the historical situation" could possibly have done? Wasn't it true that Lenin was "completely mistaken" in the means he employed, that the only way to salvation was the "school of public life itself, the most unlimited, the broadest democracy and public opinion," and that terror "demoralized" everybody and destroyed everything?

She did not live long enough to see how right she had been and to watch the terrible and terribly swift moral deterioration of the Communist parties, the direct offspring of the Russian Revolution, throughout the world. Nor for that matter did Lenin, who despite all his mistakes still had more in common with the original peer group than with anybody who came after him. This became manifest when Paul Levi, the successor of Leo Jogiches in the leadership of the Spartakusbund, three years after Rosa Luxemburg's death, published her remarks on the Russian Revolution just quoted, which she had written in 1918 "only for you" -that is, without intending publication.10 "It was a moment of considerable embarrassment' for both the German and Russian parties, and Lenin could be forgiven had he answered sharply and immoderately. Instead, he wrote: 'We answer with . . . a good old Russian fable: an eagle can sometimes fly lower than a chicken, but a chicken can never rise to the same heights as an eagle. Rosa Luxemburg ... in spite of [her] mistakes . . . was and is an eagle." He then went on to demand publication of "her biography and the complete edition of her works," unpurged of "error," and chided the German comrades for their "incredible" negligence in this duty. This was in 1922. Three years later, Lenin's successors had decided to "Bolshevize" the German Communist Party and therefore ordered a "specific onslaught on Rosa Luxemburg's whole legacy." The task was accepted with joy by a young member named Ruth Fischer, who had just arrived from Vienna. She told the German comrades that Rosa Luxemburg and her influence "were nothing less than a syphilis bacillus."

….

One would like to believe that there is still hope for a belated recognition of who she was and what she did, as one would like to hope that she will finally find her place in the education of political scientists in the countries of the West. For Mr. Nettl is right: "Her ideas belong wherever the history of political ideas is seriously taught."

-Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times (1955, 1968, pp. 53-56). 

Beca Curso Intensivo sobre Derechos Económicos, Sociales y Culturales: América Latina en Contexto Global. 11-15 de Febrero 2013, Bogotá, Colombia.

Pulse el cartel para detalles. Gran oportunidad.

Consensus

“According to the reigning idyll, consensus democracy is a reasonable agreement between individuals and social groups who have understood that knowing what is possible and negotiating between partners are a way for each party to obtain the optimal share that the objective givens of the situation allow them to hope for and which is preferable to conflict. But for parties to opt for discussion rather than a fight, they must first exist as parties who then have to choose between two ways of obtaining their share. Before becoming a preference for peace over war, consensus is a certain regime of the perceptible: the regime in which the parties are presupposed as already given, their community established and the count of their speech identical to their linguistic performance. What consensus thus presupposes is the disappearance of any gap between a party to a dispute and a part of society. It is the disappearance of the mechanisms of appearance, of the miscount and the dispute opened up by the name “people” and the vacuum of their freedom. It is in a word, the disappearance of politics.” 

J. Ranciere, Disagreement (p. 102).

Opúsculo: Acceso a la información

El ProBono de la Escuela de Derecho UPR, dedicado al tema de democracia y participación ciudadana, comparte para el público este opúsculo sobre Acceso a la Información. Puedes imprimirlo, copiarlo, repartirlo y compartirlo. Salud!.

Nuestro 3er podcast en "Pensando el Derecho": Legitimación activa para grupos ciudadanos

Nuestro 3er podcast en "Pensando el Derecho". Escúchalo y compártelo:

En este episodio Érika Fontánez Torres, conversa con el licenciado Luis José Torres Aencio, abogado de grupos ambientalistas en casos ante el Tribunal Supremo, como el 

del gasoducto, y profesor de Derecho de la UPR de la Clínica de Asistencia Legal. Fontánez Torres y Torres Asencio conversan sobre los desarrollos recientes del Tribunal Supremo de PR respecto a la doctrina de legitimación activa en casos de derecho ambiental impulsados por grupos de ciudadanos. Luego de detallar la última jurisprudencia, analizan cómo ésta afecta el acceso de la ciudadanía a los tribunales en busca de remedios. 

» Podcast “Pensando el Derecho”: con Luis José Torres Asencio, Acceso a los Tribunales

Presentación de: "Derecho al Derecho: intersticios y grietas del poder judicial en Puerto Rico"

Editora Educación Emergente

se complace en invitarles a la presentación del libro

Derecho al Derecho: intersticios y grietas del poder judicial en Puerto Rico

Érika Fontánez Torres e Hiram Meléndez Juarbe
escritores y compiladores

Lugar: Escuela de Derecho, Aula Magna 

Día y Hora: Martes, 18 de diciembre 2012, 7:00pm

Presentan:

-Lcda. Ana Irma Rivera Lassén, Presidenta del Colegio de Abogados y Abogadas de Puerto Rico

-Arq. Miguel Rodríguez Casellas, Profesor Escuela de Arquitectura de la Universidad Politécnica 

-Lcda. Amaris Torres Rivera, abogada comunitaria, exalumna y mentora del Programa ProBono de la Escuela de Derecho UPR