Bolívar Echeverría

Bolívar Echeverría

Bolívar Echeverría Andrade

Full name	Bolívar Echeverría Andrade
Born	31 January 1941 Riobamba, Ecuador
Died	5 June 2010 aoremovetag(aged 69) (heart failure) Mexico City, Mexico
Era	Contemporary philosophy
Region	Latin America
School	Marxism · Frankfurt School
Main interests	Political Economy, Literary Theory, Cultural History, Political Philosophy, Marxism, Mathematics, History of art
Notable ideas

Bolívar Echeverría (Riobamba, Ecuador, 1941 – Mexico City, Mexico, June 5 2010) was a philosopher, economist and cultural critic, born in Ecuador and later nationalized mexican. He was professor emeritus on the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).

Life and Work

Echeverría realized his studies in Germany (Free University of Berlin) and Mexico. He participated on the German student movement in the late 60's decade, establishing friendship and long-lasting collaboration with its leaders, including Rudi Dutschke. On 1970 he started permanent residence in Mexico, where he lived as a translator, also continuing his studies on philosophy and economics. Later on, he developed a seminar on Marx's Das Kapital, which lasted six years and included intensive systematic readings of the book. Since then he became an academic of the Faculties of Philosophy and Economics on the UNAM, where he founded several magazines on culture and politics, such as Cuadernos Políticos (Political Notebooks) (1974–1989); Palos de la Crítica (roughly translated as Sticks of the Critique) (1980–1981); Economía Política (Political Economy) (1976–1985) and Ensayos (Essays) (1980–1988). He was also part of the Editorial Board of magazines like Theoria (Theory) (since 1991); and (since 2003).

His investigations where mainly (and broadly) concerned on: the ontological problems of existensialism, especially in Sartre and Heidegger; Marxian critique of political economy, focusing on the contradiction between Use value and Exchange value; and a contemporary development of critical theory and the Frankfurt School, including cultural and historical phenomena of Latin America. From this standpoint, Echeverría formulated a rigorous critique of postmodernity, with which he developed his theory of capitalist modernity and the baroque ethos, a form of cultural resistance in Latin America. He also wrote extensively on the fundamental contradictions of modernity as a civilizatory process and explored the possibilities of what he called an alternative modernity, in other words, a non-capitalist modernity.

Echeverría received several prices for his scholarship, including: Premio Universidad Nacional a la Docencia (México,1997), Premio Pio Jaramillo Alvarado (FLACSO-Quito, 2004) and Premio Libertador Simón Bolívar al Pensamiento Crítico (Caracas, 2006).

He died in Mexico City on June 5, 2010, of a heart attack, as a result of several blood pressure complications.

Major Works

(There are no english translations of any of his works)

Works on Bolívar Echeverría

Stefan Gandler, Marxismo crítico en México: Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez y Bolívar Echeverría, México, FCE/UNAM/UAQ, 2007.

References

External links

• [1]
• Bolívar Echeverría: Teoría crítica y filosofía de la cultura Página personal
• “El descontento se está dando en los usos y costumbres de la vida cotidiana” Interview with philosopher Bolívar Echeverría, Premio Simón Bolívar al Pensamiento Crítico 2007
• Producir y significar. Sobre Bolívar Echeverría: Definición de la cultura Essay by Stefan Gandler

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