The Chilean philosopher Pamela Soto (48 years old, Valparaíso) attends the interview at the top of a hill, with the port city of Valparaíso at her feet and the Pacific Ocean on the horizon. Before delving into her areas of research—democracy, education, and feminism—she proudly shows the sights of her town from the Federico Santa María University, where she recently began teaching. In many of the ideas of the member of the Network of Feminist Philosophers about the exhaustion of representative democracy and the need to offer direct answers to citizens, the philosophical thought of María Zambrano (1904-1991) from Malaga sneaks in. In the year that just ended, Soto published María Zambrano: the times of democracy (Herder), where he reviews the scars of his exile of almost half a century and proposes alternatives to the system in its current form.
Ask. Why did you become interested in studying democracy?
Answer. I lived until I was a teenager in a dictatorship, in Valparaíso, a city that has always sought greater independence in relation to Santiago. There were many political categories that I heard as a child and that I did not understand well. Over the years they consolidated into a view of how to think about democracy, which I had always categorized as something very positive. When I started teaching classes on democracy, however, I met 10-year-old children who, after a life experience full of marginalization in their family, at school, in the neighborhood, told me that democracy was unjust.
Q. How did that statement impact your work?
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R. For me it has been the shock strongest theoretical I have ever had. Until 2011 I had thought about the category of democracy from philosophy, not from experience. With this diagnosis of a child one wonders what we have done with democracy… In the end it becomes an empty signifier. It serves to elect representatives, yes, but it is not allowing us to have a better life. What happens when my experience is not positive? There I began to think about other dimensions of democracy and not exclusively about a government model.
Q. What conclusion have you reached?
R. For me it makes no sense to try to reach Greek democracy as an ideal. Our present demands a much more participatory and everyday democracy. The erosion of this democracy for citizens is evident, marked by despotic and authoritarian actions. In that space, democracy is diluted and that worries me.
Q. What is that space?
R. I think about it, for example, in school, where very hierarchical relationships are maintained. Student opinion is always marginalized. At work it seems that hierarchy between groups predominates and that will always have elements of despotism, since only one group makes the decisions. It is necessary to incorporate new readings of democracy, otherwise it will be devitalized. My concern, linked to the boredom and exhaustion of representative democracy, has to do with the fact that any political decision comes very slowly to our lives, therefore it seems that politics is very outside of our daily lives.
Q. How do you think we can organize ourselves better?
R. The nation-state category homogenizes and dilutes the difference too much, therefore, we remain unrepresented or do not feel linked. It is the metropolitan logic that leaves all the differences of places absolutely invisible. When one talks about a territory, one does not refer to the soil, but to the relationship dynamics that occur in that specific place, which are super different. That is why I believe that democracies do not work, because they begin to homogenize and we have too many differences that, if they are not seen, we get lost.
Q. What alternative do you propose?
R. Communal democracies, where each of the citizen spaces has more impact, so that I can quickly see an improvement. I am not saying that it is the solution to all our problems, but that we need forms of Government that allow public policy to reach more directly so that politics is not seen as a second moment in my life. Today it seems that politics works completely unrelated to what happens to me and prevents me from being collective, and that generates fear, emptiness and a limbo where there is no protection.
Q. Is politics using the tool of fear more?
R. Politics always uses it and varies who the enemy is: migrants, unleashed crime or even the climate. There is a deep-rooted use of population control at different levels related to how I keep them worried about things that have nothing to do with how to organize collectively. The safety device works very well to keep others separated from me and is the way the control of fear is sold to us. Faced with this control we can act individually or collectively, and my bet is the second.
Q. What do you think of exile?
R. The category of exile shows us that it is possible to live without a sovereign and precisely the political punishment consists of removing you from this context, from this history where you were, where you set up networks. When Franco died, Zambrano said that he was not happy, no one was going to give him back the life that he could not live, neither the friends who died nor everything he had promised. You have to think from all angles and recover the memories that were truncated. I am worried that politics and thinking differently will be punished.
Q. Is Chile, 50 years after the coup d'état, working to recover its memory?
R. No. We still have a lot to do and in this year of deep reflection we must continue to delve deeper. As a Network of Feminist Philosophers we are investigating exiled philosophers. It is vital to know our recent history to feel part of a place, inhabit a city, live in a context, understand what I am. Zambrano said that time is not linear, it is prospective and projective at the same time, and that vital experience of feeling that I am all the women who have lived in this territory and will be the ones who will live it is what we are missing. That collective life also of the past and the future.
Q. Just as, as he suggests, democracy has lost its meaning, what has happened to feminism? What are feminists thinking?
R. Today we see an international policy related to women's inequalities in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Between now and 2050, a large percentage of jobs will be linked to these areas, therefore, if women do not enter these careers, the level of inequality will increase and that is absolutely worrying. You can no longer think about politics without thinking about technology, which advances and moves at great speed.
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