Edition and reaction. How the Argentine anti-progressive cultural battle takes place (also) in books

Abstract

In recent years, a constellation of readers, editors and political and intellectual activists has emerged in Argentina seeking to set up a political and cultural alternative to PRO, the right-wing party of former president Mauricio Macri. The specificity of this ecosystem is the emergence of a dynamic nucleus calling itself “libertarian”, with a youth base, and a particular reception of the American Murray Rothbard, whose paleolibertarian postulates function as the articulator of a right-wing culture without the complexes of yesteryear. Javier Milei and Agustín Laje are two figures of these rightists who have emerged in the public and political debate and have constituted themselves as referentes who have achieved differential access to particular instances of consecration. From the analysis of their authorial and editorial trajectories, we propose to reconstruct an aspect of the right wing that has not been reviewed so far, taking into account the relevance of the book as a traditional instance of intellectual, political and commercial intervention. The analysis of the cases of Milei and Laje and their publishers shows how the new rightists burst into the public space in the form of mass-circulation books and how the editorial dimension is part of the transnationalization of these movements. In this context, the “cultural battle” that their referentes present as emergent, anti-systemic and irreverent, is nourished and complemented by structures, leaders, practices and long-standing political discourses, as well as by the commercial and spectacularized dynamics of the cultural industry.