The Disintegration of Community

Analysis of this important Mexican philosopher's social, cultural, and political writings.

The Disintegration of Community analyzes the social and cultural writings of Jorge Portilla (1919−1963) in order to demonstrate the continued relevance of his thought. Carlos Alberto Sánchez and Francisco Gallegos situate Portilla’s otros ensayos—a series of essays originally published with his more widely known Fenomenología del relajo—at the center of the contemporary debates on the politics of social and cultural identity, the nature of community, and the political role of affect and moods. Sánchez and Gallegos address questions as timely today as they were for Portilla: What drives the impulse toward political nationalism? What sustains the myths that organize our political lives? Under what conditions do communities disintegrate? To answer these questions, the authors seek to think with Portilla by analyzing his writing and to think after Portilla by bringing his critical spirit to bear on the present. An appendix with original English translations of Portilla’s three otros ensayos enables the reader to do the same.

“This book opens dialogues between the European and Latin American philosophical traditions, between Portilla’s work and the Mexican philosophical tradition of which he was a part, and even opens a way to connect Portilla’s work to contemporary work on race in the United States. The authors themselves create a dialogue between their own views of Portilla, which makes the book quite exciting to read.” — Elizabeth Millán Brusslan, coeditor of Brill’s Companion to German Romantic Philosophy

Carlos Alberto Sánchez is Professor of Philosophy at San Jose State University and the author of Contingency and Commitment: Mexican Existentialism and the Place of Philosophy and The Suspension of Seriousness: On the Phenomenology of Jorge Portilla, With a Translation of Fenomenología del relajo, both also published by SUNY Press. Francisco Gallegos is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University.