Everyday life and armed militancy in Argentine during the seventies: conceptual problems and reading hypothesis

Abstract

This paper analyzes a number of authors who raise questions about the definitions and boundaries of the everyday in relation to other areas of human existence. First, I examine some Marxist authors who have worked the notion of everyday life from the category of alienation and its link with the idea of revolution (Henri Lefebvre and Ágnes Heller). Secondly, I discuss the ideas of Michel de Certeau and Norbert Lechner, who understood the category of everyday in his opposition to the non-daily. This dichotomy is interesting because it structured many other polarities that build the social space and because it’s useful to think about the exceptionally time and space of the armed militancy. Third, I present the reflections of different Feminist authors that are essential for the analysis of the ties between everyday life and militancy, mainly because it’s an object that touch the Women History (Nelly Richard, Gayle Rubin, Joan Scott, Sylvia Molloy and Francoise Collin). Finally, I study the usefulness of Judith Butler’s conceptualizations on violence and precariousness of life to analyze the ways in which violence broke through the private lives of militants and their families. In each of the sections, I present some conceptual problems and pointed hypotheses about the links between everyday life and activism in the seventies.