Abstract

This article presents an approach to the way in which Bolívar Echeverría, based on his reformulation of Marxist criticism, attempts to locate in the truncated configurations of Latin American modernity potentials for resisting the universal expansion of the value form. Drawing on his distinction between modernity and capitalism, as well as his interpretation of the fundamental tension between natural form and value form, the article exposes Exheverría’s historical analysis of the triumph of the realist ethos over the baroque ethos of Latin American modernity. Nevertheless, the remnants of the latter constitute for Echeverría a possible counter-figure of the realistic ethos embodied by Whiteness. This is how his approach attempts to go beyond both Eurocentrism and the postmodern rejection of modernity, aiming to save the hope of a concrete universalism against the purely abstract universalism of capitalist modernity.