CALL FOR PAPERS
"TRAZOS – Revista de Filosofía" invites students, graduates, and research faculty who wish to
publish their work in the field of philosophy and its intersections with other disciplines to submit
their writings that are relevant to the topics proposed by the journal.
This dossier constitutes a space for methodological and epistemological inquiry; it arises
from a persistent observation in the field of teaching research methodology in philosophy: the
persistence of a reflective deficit surrounding the fundamental gestures that organize our
academic practice. Faced with the seemingly technical question of how we organize our work
files, we are revealed a more far-reaching problem, which concerns the very constitution of
disciplinary knowledge and the policies of evidence production that support them. In this sense,
this dossier proposes to address the archive not as a mere repository of sources, but as an
operative category that condenses the tensions between tradition and creation, between canon
and heterogeneity, between epistemic authority and critical dimension. In this sense, this dossier
proposes to address the archive not as a mere repository of sources, but as an operative
category that condenses the tensions between tradition and creation, between canon and
heterogeneity, between epistemic authority and critical dimension. It is then a matter of
interrogating the ways in which the archive, as a device of selection, classification, and
legitimation, configures the contours of what is thinkable in our disciplines, and of exploring,
from there, methodological gestures capable of opening the philosophical and humanistic
archive to its own conditions of possibility and to its constitutive exclusions.
The need for this reflection arises when considering what we could call, following Hayden
White's provocation taken up in the context of our research on Deleuze, the absence of a
"philosophography". If historiography operates as the metacognitive fold of history, questioning
the ways in which its narratives are constructed and its sources legitimized, philosophy, and by
extension, many of the humanities, lack a formalized space for analogous reflection. This lack
has its operational counterpart, as it allows certain reading protocols, certain delimitations of the
valid corpus, and certain homologation operations to be naturalized, which are rarely put into
crisis. The result is often an investigative practice that, even in its critical gesture, reproduces
the "archival" frameworks it claims to question.Faced with this impasse, the Deleuzian proposal
analyzed in our research context, that is, the consideration of the image-action as a
historiographic operator, acquires exemplary methodological relevance. There, Deleuze does
not merely comment on or systematize a film corpus; rather, he performs an opening of the
traditional philosophical archive by articulating, through what we conceptualize as "conceptual
cooking," combining heterogeneous materials: Bergsonian ontology of the image, Peirce's
three-part semiotics, and the morphology of classic American cinema. This articulation is neither
synthetic nor hierarchical; it is a non-natural relationship that generates a new concept: the
image-historical, a concept that does not represent a given object, but rather produces a new
regime of visibility on historicity itself. The methodological lesson is crucial: the archive is
revealed here not as the static starting point of the investigation, but as the dynamic field of a
conceptual elaboration where the methodological, precisely, consists in establishing operational
connections between disparate elements, connections that "make you think" before reproducing
established knowledge.
This gesture of openness and conceptual creation must in turn be subjected to a radical
critique, one that comes from postcolonial and decolonial studies on the politics of the archive.
Mario Rufer's reading in "The Archive: From Extractive Metaphor to Postcolonial Rupture"
introduces a decisive break in any idealization of the archive as a neutral space of conservation.
Rufer dismantles the extractive metaphor that underlies the illusion of the historian, and by
extension, the researcher in the humanities, as a miner who extracts pre-existing data from the
veins of the past. On the contrary, it informs us how the archive is a technology of power that
produces authority at the same time as it produces absence. Its operation is not limited to being
an essentially silent guard, it selects and encodes according to an order that is inseparable from
the formation of the nation-state and the colonial enterprise. The archive, Rufer tells us,
practices a selective resource of the past that has the function of denying historical debt and
manufacturing a homogeneous, empty, and progressive temporality. In this context, the figure of
the archon, the guardian of the archive, reveals itself as that of a sovereign who decides what is
worthy of remaining and what should be condemned to oblivion, what experience is archivable
and what is relegated to the realm of the informal, of rumor, of the uninscribed body.
We see the emergence of tension between two registers, the Deleuzian creative openness
and the postcolonial dissolving critique, which define the problematic core of this dossier. It is
not a matter of choosing between them, they are not mutually exclusive, but rather of thinking of
their productive friction as the very place of a reflexive and situated methodology. In addition,
this approach is not limited to questioning the content of the archive, but also carefully observes
its access rituals, its classification protocols, its custody gestures, and its invisibility
technologies. The archive thus becomes a total social fact, a space where power relations are
performed and the meanings of the past and present are negotiated. In this context, the
methodological question is no longer just "what do my materials say?", but "under what
conditions do these materials become legible?", "what silences organize their enunciation?",
and "from what place am I, the researcher, able to address them?"
1 ⃣Based on this theoretical framework, the dossier invites contributions that explore the multiple
dimensions of the archive in contemporary humanities research. A fundamental axis will be that
of genealogies and critiques of the archive in 20th and 21 st century theory, from Foucault's
archaeology, which defines it as "the law of what can be said," and Derridean "archive
sickness," which links it to a death drive and the phantasmagoria of origin, to the postcolonial
reformulations of Spivak or Rufer himself, for whom the archive is the place where the epistemic
violence of coloniality materializes.
2⃣In addition, the aim is to promote solid reflections on archiving methodologies in concrete
research practice. Analyses that, taking specific cases, for example a documentary corpus, an
oral archive, a visual repository, a body of work, problematize the challenges of constructing,
accessing and interpreting materials marked by heterogeneity, fragmentation and absence are
of interest. How do you work methodologically with what is not said, with the suppressed
gesture, with the rumor that circulates outside the official document? It is about developing
symptomatic reading strategies that, far from pretending to "give voice to the silenced," a
gesture that we can say reproduces the salvational resource of the archive, question the
conditions that produced that silence and the ways in which it structures our own present.
3 ⃣At a third point, the dossier will address the issue of disciplinary openness and archival
experimentation. Inspired by the Deleuzian gesture, we invite you to explore productive
intersections between the traditional philosophical or historical archive and other records: the
cinematographic, the sonic, the performative, the digital, the bodily. What is the basis of a study
community, for example, the one of Deleuzian studies? Assuming that a study community can
be defined by the common work on a series of materials, is it enough to talk about a field of
Deleuzian studies, do all the homologations justify that community, what about the specificities
present in the different types of readings that are done? Finally, a transversal axis of the dossier
will be the pedagogy of the archive. In line with the teaching experience that motivates this
proposal in the context of the research chair in philosophy of the Philosophy degree at FFHA,
contributions are expected that reflect on how to teach problematizing the archive in
undergraduate and graduate classrooms. How can we train researchers who are not inert
instruments of a protocol, but critical subjects of their own archival gesture? How to design
slogans and training routes that make the tension between the authority of the document and
the creative power of its reinterpretation experiential?
4⃣Ultimately, this dossier aims to contribute to the construction of a methodology for research in
the humanities through the creation of a reflexive and situated space, which enables dialogue
between researchers regarding working methods, simple as that. It is about taking the archive
as a problem and as a tool, as an inheritance that constitutes us and as a field that we can
transform. At a time of profound institutional and epistemological redefinitions, questioning our
archival practices in this special context for the humanities, and for science in general, seems to
us to constitute a political gesture because all methodology is a political issue. In this sense, this
dossier invites the academic community to collectively take on this challenge, contributing with
analyses, experiences, and proposals that broaden our horizon of what is thinkable and, with
that, our ability to intervene critically in the present.
We appreciate the dissemination of this call. The call for papers is also open for the sections
"Research Articles", "Papers", "Bibliographic Reviews" and "Philosophical Essays", which
receive papers on various topics within the fields covered by the journal.
Coordinators: Dr. Alejandro De Oto (CONICET-FFHA) and Lic. Martín Masciardi Recabarren
(CONICET-FFHA)
The deadline for submitting the work is March 31 , 2026.
See the sections and publication criteria here.
Contributions should be sent to: trazosrevistadefilosofia@gmail.com