Thinking out in the open. Epistemological, ontological and methodological tensions spanning the production of "political subjectivity"

Abstract

This paper explores some of the central concepts of tension spanning the production of the category "political subjectivity" (internal-external; particular-universal; mind-body), specifying the ontological, epistemological and methodological assumptions that this entails. It then addresses the way in which some emerging issues from empirical research carried out with young people of Cordoba (Argentina) in various processes of politicization, examines and puts into question these theoretical assumptions, allowing them to be reexamined for their fruifullness. It then deals with, thinking out in the open, being removed from certain comforts which result from sustaining theoretical perspectives as self-evident truths, whose values are not weighed in relation to their possibilities in order to give an account of a field of preexisting experience but rather to other criteria which may be the principle of authority coming from a "well-known name".