Historia Natural de la República. Ezequiel Martínez Estrada y el Problema de la Fundación

This dissertation proposes a political reading of the Argentinian writer Ezequiel Martínez Estrada. Considering his essay production between the years 1933 and 1956, I illustrate in which manner the paramount problem in Martínez Estrada’s work lies in the critique of the republican thinking of the creole elites of the 19th Century. As I suggest, it puts forward a narrative model, which radically rebuts the premise of historical progress sustained by the nationalist discourses of the creole intellectuals. In this regard, the essays of Martínez Estrada amount to a narration of the foundation of the Argentinian Republic, which, at the same time, sheds light over the origin of its crisis as a modern Nation-State. Martinez Estrada’s chief contribution to the intellectual history of Latin America consists in his revision of the foundational genres of the Argentinian literature, insofar the function as symbolical constructions of a political community. Thus conceived, my dissertation is divided into five sections. The first chapter describes the state of the question in Martínez Estrada’s essay work, and establishes the postulates and the scope of a political approach of it. The second section analyzes the conceptual foundations of the creole Argentinian thought, and in which manner Martínez Estrada’s essays would invert them in the form of an opposition between a concept of the universal history (presupposed by the first), and a concept of the natural history (purported by the latter). The third section deals with Martínez Estrada’s revision of the gauchoesque literature, and, in particular, how the sense of a national territory is born out of this genre. The fourth chapter addresses the creation of a national historiography in Argentina as a metaphor of the temporal foundation of the Argentinian republic, which, from Martínez Estrada’s outlook encloses the source of legitimation of a certain political order. Finally, in the fifth section I draw the conclusions about the actuality of Martínez Estrada’s though in the current debates in the field of the Latin American studies.