Rodrigo Nunes: Q&A on Open Access publication

Congratulations to Dr Rodrigo Nunes on the publication of his new book, Bolsonarismo y Extrema Derecha Global: Una Gramática de la Desintegración (Tinta Limón Ediciones, 2024), which we are delighted to note also has the distinction of being our first Open Access funded work in a language other than English!

Bolsonarismo y Extrema Derecha Global: Una Gramática de la Desintegración is now freely available for download.

We recently spoke to Dr Nunes, Senior Lecturer in Political Theory and Organisation at the Essex Business School, about his new book and why he decided to use the Essex Open Access Fund to go Open Access (OA).

How does it feel to have your book published?

As usual, there's both the satisfaction of seeing hours of effort finally coalesce into something people can read and discuss, and the thrill of waiting to see what conversations the work can spark and how it will be received. I am especially excited that the book is coming out in Argentina at a time when the election of Javier Milei has made the themes it deals with even more relevant and urgent. Apart from an excellent catalogue, my publishers, Tinta Limón, have a long-standing trajectory of intellectual and political engagement, and they lined up a series of media appearances and debates with activists and academics when I was there for the launch in late May. People were very keen to talk and to hear what I had to say - they joked that I was coming from the future! - and I think everyone learnt a lot from the comparisons between what's happening in Argentina and what's taken place in Brazil and elsewhere.

Dr Nunes at the book launch of Bolsonarismo y Extrema Derecha Global: Una Gramática de la Desintegración.

How long has it taken from original idea to publication, and what inspired you to write it?

This book is the Spanish-language translation of a volume that came out in Brazil in 2022 and appeared to hit a nerve in the run up to that year's presidential elections. Even if there's a clear thread and several common themes to its different chapters, these were actually born as separate essays that were written between late 2019 and early 2022 in response to the rise of the far-right in Brazil and in the world, the Jair Bolsonaro administration, the pandemic and so on. Earlier versions of some these have already circulated in English, having been published in Radical Philosophy, South Atlantic Quarterly and Public Books, and one of them even had the distinction of being discussed in Naomi Klein's latest book, Doppelgänger. Tinta Limón and I had been talking for some time about the translation another work, Neither Vertical Nor Horizontal: A Theory of Political Organisation (Verso, 2021), but Milei's electoral triumph last year ultimately made us decide that this one should come out first. Once that decision was made at the end of 2023, the process was actually quite quick.

Although we can all download it freely we might not all be able to read Spanish, so could you please outline some of your central themes?

Well, the good news is that I have recently signed a contract with Verso and the book will be available in English next Autumn! What the book does is simultaneously place the rise of the far-right in Brazil in a broader global context which includes the political and economic conjuncture opened up by the 2008 crisis, the pandemic, capitalist stagnation and climate change, and use it as a perspective from which to read similar processes elsewhere. The point is neither to treat what happened there as somehow unique nor to reduce the country to a local case of a global phenomenon, but to show how what's particular to it can both be better understood against a broader background and shed light on things going on elsewhere. To do this, I deal with a number of themes that are easily generalisable: the convergence of aggressive market libertarianism and social conservatism, the affective conditions that make this combination appealing to people, how the latter are connected to the longue durée of subjective transformations brought about by four decades of neoliberal reforms, the centrality of identification with the figure of the entrepreneur, the systemic conditions driving the turn towards more extreme forms of politics, the traps contained in much of the discourse about political "polarisation", the reasons why the far-right, not the left, appears to have become the vehicle for diffuse yet widespread anti-systemic feelings.

Why did you choose to publish Open Access, and what are the main benefits to you and your book?

Academic publishing is more often than not a perverse industry that works by turning public investment in research into private property that can only be accessed at an unjustifiably high cost. Open Access is a way to circumvent that and to do what we, as academics and public intellectuals, really want to do: reach the largest possible number of people with our ideas, to see them engaged with and discussed and to be part of a broad social conversation. This is especially true in the case of a book, such as this one, that aims at both specialist and non-specialist publics and is concerned with processes that affect us all. This is particularly important in a country like Argentina, which for several years now has faced an economic crisis that has made both publishing and buying books exorbitantly expensive.

And how do you plan to take full advantage of its accessibility?

The fact that it's Open Access makes circulation much easier, but obviously the secret is always to generate enough attention through digital platforms, legacy media and word of mouth. I have done a lot of promotion for the book already; one thing I found surprising is that the radio remains a very important medium in Argentina. A major highlight of the trip was, in fact, being interviewed by the journalist responsible for the most iconic narration of Maradona's legendary goal against England in the 1986 World Cup. Since the rise of the far-right is a hot topic in the country at the moment, I expect there will be plenty of buzz to make people buy or download the book. But being in Spanish means there is a market for it all over Spain and Latin America, and I'm hoping we'll manage to tap into that by doing events online and in other countries.

What's next for you? Do you have any other publications lined up?

As I mentioned, an updated and expanded version of this book is due to come out next year in English with Verso. That should keep me busy for the next few months! There's an Italian and, quite probably, a Spanish translation of Neither Vertical Nor Horizontal due to come out in 2025 too, and I'm negotiating with publishers in two other countries at the moment. I'm currently finishing or revising a number of shorter pieces, including one I'm quite excited about: the preface to the Brazilian translation of Aleksander Bogdanov's Essays on Tektology, which I expect to publish in English at some point as well.

Finally, I have two research projects going on, one which should yield at least an article, the other I expect to turn into a book. The first consists of a dialogue with the so-called "ontological turn" in anthropology that attempts to sketch the conditions for a perspectivism that is at the same time thoroughly realist; the second takes in a number of historical and contemporary debates around the concept of "transition" and continues the effort of combining insights from Marxism and cybernetics that had already begun in Neither Vertical Nor Horizontal.

Bolsonarismo y Extrema Derecha Global: Una Gramática de la Desintegración can be downloaded free of charge now.

The Open Access Fund

The University's institutional Open Access Fund enables Essex authors to publish as much research as possible Open Access. If you want to explore your Open Access options, please start with our short form.