‘Learning How to Learn’: Rahel Jaeggi’s Progress and Regression in Dialogue with Brazilian Critical Theory

This article explores Rahel Jaeggi’s conception of the relation between progress and regression, highlighting her account of social transformation as a practical and reflexive learning process. In the first section, the article reconstructs Jaeggi’s argument that progress is never linear or necessary but contingent, multidimensional, and embedded in ‘forms of life.’ This perspective emphasizes that emancipatory change arises through crises and problem-solving practices, where gains and losses are simultaneously articulated. The second section places Jaeggi’s framework in dialogue with Brazilian critical theory, particularly the paradigm of formação [formation], which long framed the nation’s development as a progressive overcoming of colonial and slaveholding legacies. By foregrounding race as a decisive category, I argue that Jaeggi’s approach helps reinterpret Brazil’s history of incomplete modernization and persistent inequality. Anti-racist struggles, in this view, exemplify processes of experiential learning that create possibilities for emancipation while confronting enduring contradictions.