THE ENDS OF LITERATURE

The Latin American "Boom" in the Neoliberal Marketplace

,i

Brett Levinson

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

STANFORD, CALIFORNIA
2001

168

1, Rigoberta Menchu' as Allegory o[Death

L Rigoberta Menchu materialized as a figure that helped bring about so many positive changes: not only in literary studies, but in the actual response of human rights activism as well. We can therefore say that only the end of testimonio can continue testimonio's trans/mission. Yet such a transition or trans/mission. turning on the literariness that imprints it, that marks the affliction o[the oppressed, forestalls this very event, Testimonio, as antiliterature, always already revives, ritualizes, naturalizes, cements the very trope-testimonio-that, as allegory, figures its own literariness. In other words, testimony as trope marks the failure of testimonio: its failure, precisely, to stand as antiliterature. Testimonio thereby also represents an insistence on still another nameljigure for that antiliterature. It calls for more literature, more names, at the moment it marks literature's demise: in spelling literature's ruin it necessary spells that of itself Every testimonio is an allegory of testimonio (an allegory of the opposition to literature), and hence, as allegory, it is the narrative of its own fall or the impossible mourning of its own life (since the dead do not bury the dead). Allegory, language figuring language, is the trope that marks tropes themselves. All allegory is the allegory ofliterariness and language, the allegory of allegory, hence of the limit of the human: death. If allegory is tied to the Baroque, or to the monumentalization of decay, it is so because allegory commemorates that which is ceaselessly ruined within every representation, to wit, language. Language, then, is the overexposure of testimony, the ruined site or the death to which testimony testifies. We can thus say that Menchu's secret resists the West not by hiding from it (as a reserve for another subjectivity) but through its own overexposure, its overdisclosure. The condition of testimonio is the death o[literature, with the "of' functioning as a double genitive. This death renders testimonio possible and clears its space; yet, precisely because literature is the bearer of such a death, which it communicates to testimonio and which testimonio communicates, testimonio reveals that death-literarure's death, literature as the carrier of death itself-is its own condition: the condition not only of the Other's qua the subaltern's very existence, but of itself as the narrative of such devastating situations. Because testimonio as antiliterature figures death, it is trapped as and within the allegory of literature. How to figure this final figure (without falling for the figure of literature, falling without knowing it) is the task: not of transition but of a Latin Americanist posttransition.

The Bind Between Deconstruction and Subalternity, or, the Latin Americanist Nation

Roman de la Campa's Latin Americanism! assesses critically U.S.based Latin American literary and cultural studies. Viewing these intellectual endeavors as grounded in the "dominant discourse" ofEuro-American deconstruction and poststructuralism, ventures which in the author's eyes fail to address both the political specificities of Latin America and global capitalism's sway over the region, de la Campa strives to offer a series of alternatives. Thus the text interchanges between, on the one hand, critiques of Latin Americanists (e.g., Antonio Benitez Roja, Roberto Gonzilez Echevarria, and Djelal Kadir) who deploy the deconsttuctive paradigms, and on the other hand, affirmative analyses of Latin American-based and Caribbean-based intellectuals, such as Eduardo Galeano, Angel Rama, Nelly Richards, Nestor Garcia Canclini, and Edouard Glissant. The latter, according to Latin Americanism, do not so much refuse the premises of deconstruction as they take what is worthy of the project and then develop politicized, theoretical discourses adequate to the Latin American situation. At first glance, such arguments recall familiar assertions. In ifact, the very scholars from whom de la Campa would prefer to distinguish , himself, such as Gonzilez Echevarria (in V<iice o[ the Masters and jth and Archive), seem to put forth similar theses, as we will be seei : Latin American literature, in Gonzilez Echevarria's vision, deploys, but in some way departs from, deconstructive maneuvers. The difference, ho ver, lies
:

Bind Between Deconstruction and Subalternity

not in this proposal, but in the question of literature itself ;.. noted earlier, for Gonzilez Echevarria, Latin American literature (or certain literature) radicalizes and subverts Eurocentrism. For de la Campa, literatureincluding much of its Latin American vatiety-and U.S.-literary studies are frequently Eurocentrism's mirror image, their apolitical and aestheticist cohort. The latter position assumes, again, a sociological understanding of the literary: literature as the cultural form by means of which the modern bourgeoisie constructs irself as above the social at large. Thus, according to this discourse, when deconstruction and modern/postmodern literature subvert signs in the name of the political, they misconstrue bourgeois culture for the social as a whole. The revolution against elitist forms, it follows, cannot but be itself elitist. It takes an intervention into aesthetics as an involvement in social reality, thereby ignoring, or "letting be," reality itself. Radical notions ofwriting, and the deconstructive beliefs that accompany them-groundlessness, decentering, the death of the subject, lack of reference or a fixed signified, undecidability, displacement-in essence espouse the class, racial, gender, and sexual hierarchies that they would seem to question, since they ignore the "actual" (as opposed to the "textual") Other. This problem, for de la Campa, is particularly acute in the Latin Americanism of the North Ametican Academy, where literary theory, or disruptions within the field of literature, come to displace the rebellious position once occupied by Marxism, grounded on intercessions into class differences and injustices. De la Campas determination to track down a radical Latin American discourse not in literary works but in Latin American thinkers marks another important aspect of his endeavor. In fact, Latin Americanism reveals that the problem of Latin American culture in irs relation to the West is not one of being silenced as is perhaps the case in other postcolonial sites. In the modern period, the voice of Latin America, via literature, has been heard across the world. But, again, literature, like art, music, and even athletics, is placed too readily into the domains of natural talent and inspiration, as opposed to those of thought or reason. It slips habitually into the nature/culture, instinctlthought, irrationallreason dichotomies so key to the violence of colonialism and the ideology of developmentalism. If Latin Americas true voice were exclusively irs literature (the thinking is), then that articulation could not interprer or know irself. It would, on the contrary, need to send itself off to the First World, where it would be

Bind Between Deconstruction and Subalternity

171

theorized, processed, and mailed back in its truth: the Third World makes what the First World thinks, organizes, and distributes. For de la Campa, in other words, the deconstructive rum and the advocates who embrace Boom literature under the auspices of the principles of that turn replay the scene of an old developmentalism, one in which thought (theory and reason) grows from the First World, whereas production (inspiration and instinct) arises from the Third. Extremely open, therefore, to anthropologists and sociologists-the disciplines, at least in Latin America, which lie between literary studies and an all too conservative political science--de la Campa counters this model in his quest for a non-Western theory, one that would disrupt the reason/irrational and thought/art binaries. De la Campas interpretation and praise ofRama is thereby indicative. Rama, as critic, is according to de la Campa literary enough to partake in the subversion of bourgeois ideology, the myths of empiricism, the totalitarianism of the state, and instrumental reason (like the deconstructionists), bur not so literary or into writing-as Rama makes clear in his La ciudad letrada-that he would confuse literary or bourgeois culture for the totality of social institutions. Rama, in essence, deploys the assumptions of deconstruction (about which, de la Campa argues, Rama had thorough knowledge) against bourgeois culture and the Latin American enterprise of rransculturation against this same deconstruction, thus moving beyond and politicizing it. De la Campa should not be regarded, therefore, as an antitheorist. To the contrary, he searches, on the one hand, for discourses that, theoretical enough both to understand deconstruction's method and to tap its radicaliry, undermine ignorant views that might suggest that the Other is behind or slower intellectually; and, on the other hand, for ones that are sufficiently grounded and localized to reign in any exaggerated, decollsrructive decentering or lack of reference (to Latin American realities). Latin Americanism, to phrase the last point in a different fashion,
scrutinizes deconstrucTIon, postmodernism, poststructUraliSffi, Boom

literarure as vehicles of an intellectual intervention that only a traditionalist (including the so-called classical Marxist) would discard out of hand. Yet, since this intercession is also part and parcel of a familiar Eurocentric developmentalism, it must be resisted by the radjcal Latin Ametican critic. The politics of Latin Americanism lies in this movement .. Latin American scholarship should be advanced and to
!

17z

Bind Between Deconstruction and Subalternity

Bind Between Deconstruction and Subalternity

173

avoid accusations of intellectual conservatism, but not so progressive that it falls back into a developmentalist model tbat-and I cannot repeat this enough-is also, within the critique de la Campa and many others have put fortb, the literary or aestbeticist model. Or still in otber terms: for de la Campa, deconstruction, on one side, and antitbeory, on tbe otber, epitomize (at least, at tbeir worst) two unsavory stances. Deconstruction, given its supposed lack of locality and commitment to actual places, that is, its decenterings and appeals to meaningless/lawlessness, represents tbe global, capitalist market. Antitbeory, conversely, stands for the state, witb its effort to restrain displacements and to contain all elements witbin its borders and/or edicts. The engaged Latin Americanist, according to de la Campa, avoids botb of tbese traps, deploying tbe local/fixity to defY tbe global/displacement and tbe global (witb "radical tbeory" as one ofits signs) to challenge tbe local state ("empiricism" being one of its indexes). Here, it is interesting to reconsider tbe Latin Americanist scholarship tbat de la Campa critiques, particularly that of Gonzalez Echevarria. I have already signaled the way in which, for Gonzalez Echevarria, tbe displacement and fictionalization of European authorial discourses, such as tbe law, index tbe crux of a "Latinamericanist" literary and cultural practice. Yet, we should not forget tbat Gonzalez Echevarria, in Voice of the Masters, also indicates that his criticism, while indebted to it, is fundamentally distinct from tbat of deconstruction: it places witbin a historical context (i.e., situates within Latin American history) the purely textual focus he
associates with deconstruction. 2

Historical context, here, is akin to de la Campas claim on tbe political impetus of tbinkers such as Rama and Glissant. These latrer, according to de la Campa, recover tbeories of displacement by situating tbem onto local maps, just as Gonzalez Echevarria positions Latin Americanist acts of autborial subversion onto a Larin American history (whereas Benitez Rojo's work, another object of de la Campas critique, siruates tbem across a floating Caribbean). The discrepancy between tbe antideconstruction of de la Campa and tbe deconstruction of Gonzalez Echevarria is only one of degree or accent, tbe direction of tbe "tilt." Botb efforts play local place against Western universal or global displacement, tbat is, real history against textual performance, witb tbe goal of producing from out of this out-and-back a mixture: maps of hybridity as indexes of a hybrid Latin America.

These ideas betrer explain a phenomenon already signaled. Latin Americanism (which must be distinguished from traditional Latin American literary studies, at least in tbe model provided by de la Campa), botb tbe version de la Campa pracrices and tbe one he critiques, is strongly bound to theory: not to deconstruction, structuralism, feminism, or Marxism, etc., but to tbeory itself. This bind is, in fact, as sharp for scholars such as de la Campa, George Ylidice, and Doris Sommer, as it is for Gonzalez Echevarria: for tbe supposed "lefr" as for tbe supposed "right." For only tbe appeal to tbeory can put in question all of tbe following: (I) tbe developnientalist paradigm tbat contends tbat tbe Otber cannot think; (z) liberal humanism, so key to tbis developmentalism, which claims to approach tbe Latin American topos witbout tbeory, but via reason, objectivity, intuition, and intelligence; and 6) deconstructive practices, coming from abroad and not qUite fir for Latin America: tbese can be exposed only by tbe Latin Americanist theorist, tbe one witb sufficient tbeoretical knowledge. It is tbeory, in otber words, tbat nearly all Latin Americanism calls upon to separate Latin America from botb underdevelopment and tbe total yielding to developmentalism (incarnated, in de la Campas case, by deconstruction), and hence to mark out a specific Latin American intellectual and political geography. Theory is for Latin Americanism tbe bridge between literature and politics, conservatism and radicalism, state and marker, aestbetics and activism, and tbereby it holds attraction for all. This appeal to tbeory, tbe appeal of tbeoty, points up tbe more or less geographical determinism tbat informs Latin Americanism. Virtually all of tbe Latin Americanist thinkers de la Campa advocates are scholars, living in Latin America, who are nonetbeless well schooled in Western tbeory. They have voyaged into tbe global arena, dislocated themselves, and articulated discourses of displacement. But tbey have tben returned to adapt tbeir endeavors to local affuirs. Taking Latin American studies outside fixed and stodgy boundaries, tbese intellectuals have tben regrounded botb tbeir persons and tbeir scholarship within the paramerers of Latin America as a locality. Garcia Canclini tbus emerges to tbe head of tbis class: having studied under Bourdieu, he applies Bourdieu's principles not orjly to Latin America but, witb even greater effect, to Latin American indigenous art and grassroots cultural practices. ! The academics de la Campa assails, such as Gonzalez Echdvarria and otber Cuban inrmigrants, have done tbe opposite. They havel (for de la

!
!


'74

Bind Between Deconstruction and Subalternity

Bind Between Deconstruction and Subalternity

175

'.

Campa) gone out into the global/theory, only to move Out further: they have entrenched themselves in the United States Academy, within so-called Euro-American political and intellectual ventures, and inside aestheticist projects. Latin Americanism's critique, stated in other terms, is not directed at deconstruction--de la Campa's willingness to use poststructuralism, pOStmodernism, and deconstruction interchangeably bears witness to this point-but at any Latin Americanist project that "goes out too far," is so global, is so about displacement, that it misses the place called Latin America. Its alternative, similarly, is not a locally grounded endeavor-this project, as indicated earlier, is critiqued as part and parcel of an antitheoretical ideology-but one that rums to the global to reign it in via the local: one that embraces decentering to yank it back toward the center, the signifier to recover it for the signified, displacement to re-situate it back onto a place, resistance to meaning to regain meaning itselE The Latin Americanist readings of I, Rigoberta Menchu, the merits of the testimonio itself notwithstanding-and let us not forget that, according to these readings, such merit cannot lie in the aesthetic qualities of the text since testimony's worth lies in its supposed subversion of aesthetic value, of aestheticism-thereby reveal the nature of a desire that underlies not only Latin Americanism but Latin American studies in general: a desire that perhaps sheds light on the attraction, within the United States, toward this particular testimonio. Those analyses, indeed, cast I, Rigoberta Menchu as the struggle between local/particular and global/universal, one in which the particular makes gains, but not without first voyaging Out into, and then mastering, the universal. Dictated in Spanish, I, RigobertaMenchuattests to the power of the indigenous person to surmount the resttictions that the use of an indigenous idiom or minor language poses, and therefore to petition the international community; yet Menchu's Spanish is not so Western that it fails to carry within it Quechua ttaces, which interrupt Western idioms and modes of comprehension. Menchu speaks as the embodiment of her community, of the local site, but she does so from Paris, in the name of the oppressed across the world, or of universal oppression. The testimony is grounded in empirical observations and experience. Yet it also appeals to the literary and the theoretical, imbued on the one hand as it is with a "secret" or mystery that permits it to rise above "unpoetic" recordings, and on the other with meditations that allow it to stand as something more than a thoughtless or pathetic reproduction of objective observations.

Containing a strong feminist program, and hence moving outside the more or less problematical views on sex and gender held by Menchu's local Quiche community ("problematic" according to Menchu herself), I, Rigoberta Menchu nonetheless is not so feminist that it embraces newfangled, globalized Euro-American theories on woman (read psychoanalysis). Or, to state this last point in other terms, the text is strong on gender concerns, a reflection of its interest in the actual siruation of the indigenous woman, but weak on sex and desire, as a private issue removed (within the paradigm established by the testimonio itself) from the more grounded question of political rights. I, Rigoberta MenchU is Catholic enough to retain the ideals of truth, authenticiry, the good, the just, tradition, respect (for others, authority and nature), and firm foundations, discarded by the nihilism of Western deconstruction; yet, it is not so Catholic that it champions the conservatism

of the Church. Sufficiently autobiographical to maintain the I in the position of authority, and thus to refute Eurocentric concepts such as the "death of the author," the work, as told to a woman anthropologist/writer who transcribes and edits it, is not so autobiographical that it obscures the collective aspect of the account. Premodern as indigenous, and postrnodern as a new gente (testimonio), the chronicle exceeds both; Marxist because ascribing to facets of liberation theology, yet resistant to the otthodoxy of a dogmatic Marxism unable to tackle matters of ethnicity, it performs a novel politics of subalternity. As antiliterature, I, Rigoberta Menchu is not proper to the Western canon; however, ascending over its local concerns to be recognized by the universal as a classic within its genre, the narrative nevettheless exists as an example of a great book. I could, but will not, go on. My point concerning the critical reception of I, RigobertaMenchu should be clear. Thatreception reflects ,the desire for a project that, first, ventures into the global from a Latin American base, and second, masters this dispersion, overpowers the global qua West not in the name of the local itself but of a hybridity that, in fa!ct, is neither racially- nor class-based but is the local/global, nation-state/market symbiosis. Yet what is truly at stake hdre, for Latin Americanism, are less these matters than the question of as it links up to controversies concerning the the nationstate in the advent of neoliberalism. De la Campa, as noted, rever tackles the topic of deconstruction, even as he avows to be doing fO. However,

176

Bind Between Deconstruction and Subalternity

Bind Between Deconstruction and Subalternity

177

John Beverley does in the article "On the Category of 'The People,' the Hegemonic Relation, and the Limits of Deconstruction, "3 to which we will be turning. I will not analyze here the ofren brilliant, if sparse, deconstructive toil to be found within Latin American literature and literary studies, such as the critical essays ofMoreiras, the fiction of Diamela Eltit, or the poetics of Jos/: Lezama Lima. Instead, I want to define certain fundamentals of deconstruction so as to tear the discourse away from its common, but misleading, associations: displacement of fixed categories and binaries, undecidability, the subversion of dominant paradigms, the flotation of meaning, and
so on.

At the very least, deconstruction involves the exposure of "Iogocentrism," a Derridean concept worthy of review here. The deconstruction of logocentrism is not the critique of the logos, logic, meaning, or reason, but, as the word suggests, of the logos' tendency to bring its exterioriry or limit back to the center, to the logos itsel Derrida frequendy employs the father (logos)-son (logoi) relation to explain the point. To be a true father or logos, a father must produce a correct son. If the son stays too close to the father, if he never leaves home, if he remains exacdy the same as the father, then he desists as a son. The father (logos), in such a situation, also ceases to be a father. Without a father!son difference, there is no father, for there is no other than the father, no son. Conversely, if the son strays too far, ceases to reflect the father, not even poorly, then the father again loses the son, again desists as the father. This wanderer is another unfavorable son, for he does not (re)produce the paternal figure. The condition of being a father, therefore, is a father! son diff/:rance or relation, which the father cannot dictate. He can make the son stay (bad for the family economy, since the son does not "make anything" of himself, does not add to the family capital), or he can make the son go away (also bad, since this progeny does not bring his "additions" back to the family name); but he cannot make the son go "not too far but far enough." The "not too far but far enough" cannot be defined, and hence, cannot be dictated by the patriarchal law, or by any other precept or figure. No signifier for the "just right" command exists. The father (logos) is the commander whose command is limited by his own word or rule, since he cannot say "go" (far) and "stay" (close) at the same time. The boundary on the logos, then, lies within the very structure of this logos. A father is a father only via a correct son-a correctness the father

cannot completely mandate, not even hypothetically or ideally. Translating this father!son metaphor back into terms of logic or reason, we can therefore say: logic/reason (the father) needs a certain difference (the son) from itself (imagination, fantasy, belief. language, faith, dreams, feeling, the unconscious), one it cannot ordain, in order to be itself. This, for logocentrism, is ideally the role-of literature, religion, philosophy, music, art, ideology, government, and, of course, writing: to leave logic behind to fulfill or consummate it, to abandon it to return to, disappear into, and supply it with the necessary returns. , And yet, the very discourses that are called upon to complete logic, like any son, only more firmly mark "father logos' " finitude. Iflogic needs its supplement to totalize its domain, this can only be because it is not total in the first place. Logic or reason, stated in different terms, always strives to drag its supplement, its Other, back into its own realm: to cast fields both too far outside of it (like sexual desire, passionate poetry, or pure inspiration) and too close to it (like a philosophy such as phenomenology) as "logic" that has lost the way. The Other of logic is posited as bad logic--either as too different from logic or not different enough-that needs to be corrected by logic. And this is logocentrism: not a discourse that rejects, defies, or displaces logic but any that claims that the truth of domains outside of logic lie in logic itself as the totality ofBeing. 4 In such a case, the deviation from the father!authority (the logos) supports his position, speaks to his truth, since that going away is merely the "wrong" that affirms the father's. infinite right: the very authorial right that deconstruction, through the just-presented analysis of "the supplement," indeed deconstructs. Derrida's reading of logocentrism thereby should play well for critiques of Eurocentrism, that is, for postcolonial studies. Eurocentrism, of course, works to posit the colonial Other as a deviance from Western reason: as more (as innocent child, without blemishes) or less (as the barbarian) the Same, more or less reasonable. Such an Other, then, is situated not outside the Same or reason, but as the Same, as reasonable-though not quite, not in truth: as (if) reasonable, the Other is not reasonable. In other words, the Other is not different from the West but its imperfect reflectjon. More or less the Same, as are all such reflections, the Other hence stahds as an ("right" extension of this West, one substantiating the latrer's infinite both in the sense of legality and correctness) in consummate l.tocentric and!or colonial fashion. !

178

Bind Between Deconstruction and Subalternity

Bind Between Deconstruction and Subalternity

'79

This means, however, that the Western logos needs from the start its addition, a non-Western supplement, in order to be. Such a fact confirms
that Western reason cannot account for its own account or supply a com-

which captures the present for future advancement, for the ideology of developmentalism, made possible by writing's displaceability.
Derrida. of course, labels this process "phonocentrism." His decon-

plete reason for its reason. The colonial Other, annexed, exposes Western reason-and the brutality of the Conquest that it legitimizes-as not itself entirely within reason: the Conquest of barbarism by Western reason cannot not, by its vety foundation, recur to barbarism itself. The West may well be grounded in reason, but that reason itself has no reason, enjoys no foundation, and is therefore potentially irrational, displaceable, wrong, even dispensable. The colonized supplement, at once too close to (indeed, now its property) and too far from the West (too distant from the central governments during the colonial periods), points up the West's incompletion or finitude, and hence the potential for both an alternative to reason and an alternative reason on the other side of this limit or border: the potential that postcolonial studies works to tap and that the West strives to annihilate, but-in the end-cannot do without. The colonial Other, in brief, can be seen as the supplement. Either he supplies/fulfills the West, or he bears witness to its not-Allness, and hence discloses an alternative space. The Other, in fact, cannot not play all these roles: the "fill in" for the West, the stamp of its completeness, and the marker of its contingency. One does well to pursue these last issues via a close look at Derridas concept of writing. Critics, assuming that Derrida "privileges" writing over speech, commonly argue also that he potentially ignores oral qua colonial or marginal cultures. In fact, however, Dertidean "writing" addresses (at least in part) a question that has emerged as more central to postcolonial studies and to colonialism itself than to deconstruction: If for the Western colonizer writing is to orality as development is to underdevelopment, why is this the case? Because, as scholars of colonialism such as Anthony Pagden have shown, writing has been posited in and by the West as that form which preserves oral exchanges, permitting them to be passed down from generation to generation. s Each generation receives the learnings of the past, conserved in written works. It then compares the more modem practices and ideas to the older ones, makes improvements, contributes to progress, and sends the work to its offspting, where a process toward truth and the good persists. Writing qua displacement, in this paradigm, is the conduit for the speech that antecedes it, a faithful reproduction of orality

struction ofphonocentrism, in other words, is not a critique of orality but of any thought/practice which contends that speech is the truth of language,
and writing its mere continuance or reproduction, a reflection of the spoken word. Derridas comments on phonocentrism, then, also represent his

assault on "writing as a sign of progress," his deconstruction of the discourse of developmentalism: of the .thesis that writing is passed-down speech that allows advanced peoples to learn from and correct the past, and hence evolve. Derrida, to be sure, also links writing to the subversion of this Eurocentric movement. Writing, he holds, survives in the absence of its author, and thereby can make its way into any hand and be put to work for virtually any putpose, any meaning. The author cannot authorize or control the interpretation, circulation, displacement, and reception of his law (via a writren "send-off"), which can thereby undermine itself, Without a reception, such as obedience, there is no law or authority, no dictated body. Yet this same reception, this force necessary for law, cannot be controlled by law. Thus, the undoing of authority, because dispatching or "writing" is its condition, is fundamental to that authority. The dispatch that is writing, the movement from one place to another, is necessary to the law's construction, perseverance, and strength, and the assutance of its potential deconstruction. The decentering operation that many associate with deconstruction can-and must-as much fuel and supply logocentrism as undermine it. In addition, the subversive thrust of writing no less turns on its immobility and inflexibility than on its displaceability. .As Derrida indicates in Dissemination
Logos was also a living thing (zoon) whose vigor, richness, agility, and flexibility
were limited and constrained by the cadaverous rigidity of the writteh sign. The type does not adapt to the changing givens for the present situation. ... While presence is the general form of what is, the present, for its part, is always different. But writing, in mat it repeats itself and remains identical in its type, 'cannot flex itself in all senses, cannot bend with all the differences among .... 6

Orality is always guaranteed to be present and situated, eten in and for the future, since it adjusts its time and place for the contexf in which
!

180

Bind Between Decomtruction and Subalternity

Bind Between Decomtruction and Subalternity

181

it emerges. It maintains the same, keeps present, and keeps the present, often by shifting, by developing (it). Struck to the page, writing cannot be altered so easily. It thus potentially stops the very progress, the remodeling and readjustment process, which allows for the present's spreading, its development, its authority, its maintenance. Socrates feared not only mimetic acts (especially writing) that strayed too far ftom the eidos but also ones that stayed too near and carne overly close to truth; accordingly, writing, for Derrida, threatens no more when it is "too" displaced and deviant than when it is not displaced or deviant enouglr, when it is too rigid, tOO "at home." In sum, logocentrism eschews writing, at once too stiff and too fluid, since it counts upon neither fixity nor displacement but the binary or difference between the two. This is not to imply that either place or displace, by themselves, divorced from their counterpart, would subvert logocentrism. In fact, the condition of the one (say, place, locality, or fixiry) is the difference from its alternative (displacement, the exterior, or a shift)-the condition of the "inside" is its distinction from the "outside"-and hence the alternative itself. Logocentrism, or the play of fixity and alteration, is foundational not only to any binary structure, but to the formation of either side of the binary. The difference between fixity and shiftability, in short, grounds sameness, hence desists as difference. This is what Derridean diffirance, as a neologism that mourns difference, that stamps the closure of a difference that no longer necessarily makes a difference, marks. To illustrate the point in a clearer fashion, take the example of the difference between a local Latin American site and the global market. Any description or analysis, to say nothing of any evaluation, of the local topos can only materialize through a comparison with other local sites, including "the global" as one such locality. By logical necessity, the local is the local via its "being set off" from somewhere else: through the border that thereby emerges, rendering the specific space an actuality. Now, both Marx and Nietzsche teach us that the qualitative difference between any two entities/spaces is always already subsumed by quantitative difference, by value. Such is the ground of the restrictions imposed by capitalism (for Marx) and metaphysics (for Nietzsche): qualitative difference has been appropriated and annulled by quantitative difference, distinctions in value. If the thesis holds--and I would argue that no thouglrt afrer Nietzsche or Marx has disputed it-then the turn to local a hinges on

its being measured against local b. The understanding of a swings on its relation to the worth of b, hence on its own worth, indeed, on worth itselE Thus, the affirmation of the local is also the affirmation of a discourse that presents difference as a relation of values, hence, as more or less the Same. The effort to disengage absolutely, in the name of the local, from a market whose foundation is relative difference, differences of value, risks contributing tei the stabilizarion of this very market. Difference from the homogeneity of the global is at the root of this homogeneity: difference is the Same. The fact that Derrida's investigations of the closure of difference coincides with the emergence of the neoliberal market, whose violence in Latin America, scholars such as de la Campa highliglrt, is thereby no coincidence at all. The market, to reiterate, operates precisely through difference, or rather, througlr the deployment of quantitative difference in the name of qualitative difference. By producing differences qua competitors as a means to interpellate the "individual" (collective or solitary) toward his choice qua
self-determination to recruit the citizen as consumer, the market reduces
j

any desire to sally beyond that private self (whether individual or collective), that is, into the public and/or the political. The subject of choice, of difference, materializes not only as the free subject but as the value that grounds all the other values (above all, "crass" monetary values), or as the higlrest value. Derrida's "end of difference," indeed, reaches its fruition in the market, where difference concludes in practice: paves the way for a potentially absolute Same, for the consenso neoliberal we have discussed previously, and which is currently the center of political debate in Latin America. At this point, to pursue further the question of deconstruction within Latin Americanism, I will pick up the previously mentioned Beverley article. The text is a dialogue with a statement by Moreiras, who works to ti:e the project of subalternism to that of deconstruction? Moreiras deems the link extremely positive, if not necessary. Beverley does not dismiss the postulate. He too contends that a certain "deconstructionism" is important for

subaltern studies-but within the limits indicated by the tirle of his piece: "... and the Limits of Deconstruction." Such limitations turn on the connection of political practice and the terms "nation" and "people." Beverley, of course, expresses strong reservations about the latter signifiers. He knows all too well that "nation" l<1nds itself to "nationalism," "people" to "popularism," and both to the tertors I

182

Bind Between Deconstruction and Subalternity

Bind Between Deconstruction and Subalternity

183

of fascism, Stalinism, Nazism, and of course, capitalism. Beverley, in other words, heeds the demand for the deconstruction of these categories. He calls, for example, for the deconstruction of nationhood and an opening to transnational practices within subaltern studies. Yet by the same token, Beverley illustrates how notions such as "people" and "nation' are often fundamental to grassroots and/or leftist political activism in Latin America. When deployed in a certain manner, they malre possible resistance movements. In the name of politics one ought to deconstruct, but
to a certain point: the point where deconstruction exhausts its otherwise

On this note, let us return to the category of nation, one Beverley deploys as a means to mark the limits of deconstruction. Every nation, it should first be noted, is always already constructed via its own displacement
or transnational processes. After all, a nation-not simply a nation-state

ample possibilities. Beverley thereby advocates what he calls a "double register" for subaltern politics. Radicalism, he holds, hinges neither on the deconstruction of classifications such as nation/people, nor on the classifications themselves, but in the shift from the one to the other, depending on the situation. I do not think that Moreiras-or Derrida-would disagree with at least this part of Beverley's argument. As to the deployment of terms such as "people" and "nation," Moreiras is well aware of the unlikely possibility of not advocating them: not only for politics but also for thought in general. We lack the names, as Derrida has stated over and over again, for a new politics-perhaps the term "politics" itself has been exhausted-and .hence have no choice but to recycle, in novel ways, the old ones: at the IlSk, of course, of reviving their negative potential, the rot they carty within them, even when revamped. However, one cannot but question Beverley's conviction that by shifting between place (nation and people) and displace (deconsttuction), as per the specific political circumstance, one is in fact moving in a double register. This double register, actually, is the single register whose designation we have already invoked: logocentrism. Beverley strives to deploy the difference between place and displace in the name of subalternity when it is precisely this separation-between nation and transnationalism, center and decentering-that creates the nationalisms, Eurocentrisms, and the capitalist enterprises that, historically, have yielded the abuse of the subaltern. Beverley's good intentions are clear; one cannot fail to admire the genuineness and intelligence of his political and intellectual commitment. Yet, this does not alter the fact that Beverley's double register, the play between grounds and groundlessness, itself grounds the One: the vety One that Beverley aims to dismande.

but also a nation struggling to oppose the state-is so only if recognized by another nation, indeed, by the universal "we" of nations. The scenario of a nation that declared itself a nation and then actually became one without receiving exterior recognition of the declaration is, strictu sensu, absurd. The move into or communication with an outside space (displacement) whereby the nation receives the recognition that allows it to stand as a nation, is a condition of its institution, not part of a deconstructive-conservative or radical-aftermath. This need for a priori recognition, stated in a different fashion, binds the nation to another nation it cannot dictate. The demand for recognition, after all, cannot guarantee the recognition itself: cannot guarantee, hence, a nations very emergence. Demand thus marks the limit of the power and sovereignty of that nation, the limit as such: if the nations
command cannot assure obedience, that domain or dominion is finite, not

sovereign at all. Paradoxically, however, it is this same finitude, this border, which defines and delineates-produces-the nation as nation. The call for the acknowledgment that blocks the nations self-determination forges the nations space via that same impediment: the impediment that represents the boundary, indicates the limit which in turn marks out the nations property. Yet this boundary, as permeable border, also malres way for the
"rightful" contamination, transgression, alteration, hence displacement, of

this property. The nation is sovereign via the very formation that undermines its soverei'gnty. In sum, the displacement into the exterior, transnationalism or the
deconstruction of the nation, is not an alternative to the nation. It is the

confine, boundary, exposure, and contamination that is the nation's foundation and source. This is why place and displace, local and global, pertain to a single, not a double, register. Latin American history, as much if not more so than any other, has shown this to be the case. Born through the clash and intermjngling of worlds, the Latin American nation is from its inception a con$.minated site, a topos of mestizaje. However, the formation of the Latin American nation-state was founded on the conviction that the Creole elit was the

184

Bind Between Deconstruction and Subalternity

Bind Between Decomtruction and Subalternity

185

true or essential Latin American. All others, the "half-breeds" or indigenous peoples, were deemed, de facto or de jure, invaders whose de@ements had to be cleaned out, viciously if necessary. And vicious such acts could not help but be: since the defilements were proper to the nation, inside its guts rather than outside forces, they had to be yanked out, not gently shifted aside. I am not here critiquing violence or a politics of violence. Violence is, to be sure, often necessary for the type of subaltern intervention for which Beverley calls: for revolt. And such disturbances often materialize, as Beverley illustrates, due to the fact that the subaltern nation, bordered and open lilre all nations, has been penetrated, distorted, destroyed-and certainly "displaced" from its space or land-by the neoliberal state, the intolerant universal, or Western capital. Beverley's rightful suggestion that the category of the nation, as fixed space, must at times be affirmed, grows from these understandings. Indeed, the in@trations, and subsequent land displacements effected by capital or the colonial state, render any subaltern studies' embracing of displacement in general, as ctitical and political tool, at best suspect. The subaltern must advocate a place or nation, if only on occasion, to fight off this @thy Western contagion, both at the political and at the cultural level. It should be stressed, however, that the "in@trator" (force of displacement) to which the subaltern populace or nation is exposed is not only the West, the srate, the universal, capital, or the forces of cultural homogeneity: the "bad guys." This "contagion" is also the subaltern itself. As we saw in our reading of L Rigoberta Mench", any affirmation of the subaltern as "indigenous" (for example) risks doing violence to its own internal outsider: the other Other, or the other subaltern. The other Other is proper to the Other, just as the indigenous gay person, the indigenous woman, or the poor ladino are proper to the "oppressed," to the indigenous subaltern, in Menchu's narrative. The case cannot be otherwise. The political actions of a subaltern nation, of one Other, must-by logical necessity-violate the subaltern itself, or the other Other. And they must do so in the name of their own subaltern space, in quest of autonomy and liberty. The point, then, is not that the subaltern, over against the West, cannot account for the politics of the oppressed in general. The point is that the category or practice of subalternity cannot account for subalternitynot, in any event, without breaching and betraying itself. Thus, Spivak's notion of "strategic essentialism" (which Beverley deploys in the name of subalternity, but which Spivak actually never

advocates), demands a hard rethinIting of the very notion. In faCt, one cannot logically choose, in specific circumstances or strategically, to affirm a people qua an essence to unite that group for activism. The appropriation
of an essence "for a moment," in fact, is the appropriation of no essence,

since the marginal group, always already occupies a shared space. It isvia its relation to another, or to the other Other, through its relationality. Thus, the periphery disclaims its essence or essentialism precisely at the second it asserts it. The instant one realizes oneself in an essential subject, individual or collective, one derealizes that position, derealizes that essence. Strategic essentialism is essentialism itself the essentialism that, on the one hand, deconstructs itself by its vety logic, and on the other hand, disavows its exposure or relation to the other, thereby violating the Other himsel This category of "strategic essentialism" brings into light another deconstructive topas, one about which Beverley voices his reservations: unde-

cidability. On the one hand, Beverley's argument concerning undecidability is perfectly sound. He accepts, along with the deconstructionists, that between global capital and local politics, state and people, cultural representarion and hard reality, text and fact, displacement and place, transnationalism and nationalism, and deconstruction and other methods, no choice is just right or just plain wrong. What is right is structurally undecidable. Yet Beverley also argues that the subaltern activist, to be an activist, must decide. Even if no decision can be perfectly correct, some decision and the acts that ensue are the condition of a political intervention. With this contention Beverley acrually performs, quite well, the very practice---undecidability-he preaches against. Undecidability, to an extent, indeed means that no category, a priori, is the right one, politically or epistemologically. In fact, if we knew beforehand which actions, ideas, or concepts were correct or good, then we could not form good decisions, for the good decision would be ready-made, already known in advance. Undecidability is the condition of decision since, without it, there is no decision to make. Beverley demonstrates the point: whether transnationalism or nationalism represents the good cannot be known. For the subaltern, the "right option" is, as a general rule, undecidable. All depends on the particWar predicament, about which one must make a political decision. . Yet the options that Beverley discusses are determined by their iundecidability fur another reason, namely, that the activist cannot select fne domain without selecting as well its opposition. For, as we have esrablisi"d,

186

Bind Between Deconstruction and Subalternity

Bind Between Deconstruction and Subalternity

Rather, he is indicating that subalternism, as site, always already exposes itself to its boundary or limit: to its internal breach and to the threat of death that this opening to the outside marks. A subaltern politics demands the death of subalternism, the forging of an alternative alternative, or it is no politics at all. To lock deconstruction onto subalternism, and vice versa, is to respond to this demand: to the codetermination, the border, the limit, or death of both deconstruction and subaltern srudies. This cojoiningalso a rift-answers to the charge of a novel critical project, one built from the articulation of the frontier that ties, but also potentially marks the end of, or mourns, the two critical enterprises. If Moreiras names deconstruction as an indispensable component of subalternity he does so in the name of neither deconstruction nor subalternism. He petitions deconstruction as a practice that discloses the limit qua the locus of contamination of any individual site/discoutse, and hence the poisoning, romag, or death of this site: the decay that is proper to it. Deconstruction, by appearances, best brings about closure, its own as well as that of subalternism. Yet such a statement only recalls the paradox signaled previously: as marker of the end of subalternism, deconstruction necessarily revives the subaltern enterprise, thereby fails to bring about the very closure it stamps. Not only does deconstruction, within Moreiras's vision, fail to deconstruct; it is that failure. If deconstruction might somehow index the death of subaltern studies, its incapacity actually to bring about such a demise points up the death/limit of deconstruction itself. Indeed, if deconstruction were successful in stamping subalternism's collapse, it would itself fall: in succeeding, deconstruction would lift up, hence reinvigorate; itself-when its task is to close itself off, or closure as such. Deconstruction fails as deconstruction when andifit succeeds to murder its alternatives. And when it does so (when it fails by not-falling), not only does it not mourn itself; it does not mourn or close off the Other (in this case, subaltern studies), it does not succeed. Either deconstruction succeeds, in which case it fails to deconstruct (subalternism); or its fails, in which case it also fails to deconstruct (subalternism). These, and not some blind embracing of the deconstructive turn, represent Moreiras's arguments concerning the bind of deconstruction and subalterni ty. I Yet another point emerges here. I have been noting t\'roughout that the literary or a poetics, as the creation of a name for thq bind between

the inliltration of option A by option B is proper to A itself An activist cannot choose between the two, for he cannot choose one without simultaneously electing, at least in part, the other. And there is no strategy that would permit him to get around the impasse. Undecidability means still something else. Things are undecidable because one has already decided. The very marking of the categories such as deconstruction/nation or local/global, about which one is making a decision, already constitute a decision, an institutional marking out of the range of possibilities. One cannot freely decide between "this or that," such a free decision is impossible, since the election between this "this or that" or that "this or that" already dictates the judgment. Ironically, this means also that one cannot not decide, since decision (for which categories) precedes the indecision and institutes the selections. Decision is impossible; yet so too is indecision. Undecidability is the condition of decision; and decision is the condition of undecidability. And the one permeates the other: in rendering a decision one must always decide between decision and undecidability themselves. For Beverley, we might therefore conclude, undecidability yields a "must decide," a "must" that is moral and ethical. One must decide in the name of leftist activism, which fur Beverley is representative of the Good. Deconstruction's "must decide," as we have just seen, is distinct: it is a logical must. One must decide since, in positing the two "undecidable" alternatives, in naming and separating them out-for Beverley, separating out deconstruction and subaltern activism--one has already rendered a determination, already selected the categories, and hence marked off certain limits. These thoughts, once more, have powerful ramifications for the market. The market, we said, sells choice as self-determination and freedom. If one can demonstrate that choice is not a choice but a mandate, a must choose, a bind from which one cannot be liberated, one has at the very least broken the ligature between individual choice, or individualism, and political freedom: the connection that, if completed, would guarantee the consenso neoliberal. I malee these arguments, in part, to emphasize that, when Moreiras binds subalternism to deconstruction, indeed, when he calls for deconstruction, he is not suggesting that displacement or transnationalism are better, politically and/or epistemologically, for a politics of subalternity than are categories such as nation, people, meaning, reference, identity, and so forth.

188

Bind Between Deconstruction and Subalternity

Bind Between Decomtruction and Subalternity

189

names, is the discourse assigned to the end-game. However, as just suggested, a deconstructive operation, too, is obliged to the demarcation of this boundary, bind, or border. Deconstruction and literature collide at this juncture. Hence, de la Campa's linkage of deconstruction and Boom literature, however problematic, grows from an important intuition: deconstruction and Boom literature are allied. Deconstruction, at its end, is the demand for (Boom) literature (for the name of its end), just as Boom literature, at its end, is the demand of deconstruction. The story of the ligature of deconstruction and the Boom, as the writing of the end of both, or as the trace of the demand of that end, is not over (as de la Campa and others claim) for it has hardly begun. One cannot have deconstruction without literature, or as a means to mediate between text and realiry, for deconstruction is the response to literature, is literature's response, even and especially if literature is dying, or rather, precisely due to that death. How then do we explain the "leftist" Latin Americanist resistance to deconstruction, so manifest not only in de la Campa's work but in the Latin Americanist deconstructionists he critiques? Any response, I believe, turns on precisely the desire that is visible in Beverley's article: the desire for a Latin Americanist nation. That desire grows from the situation created by the global market in its relation not to the Latin American nation but to the Latin American nation-state. The market, with its pitiless disregard for the local, almost naturally inspires a wish for the recovery of the welfare state, this supposed local monitor of the market. Yet as critics such as de la Campa and Beverley understand, the Latin American state has in fact most often lent itself to the spread of capital, served as an agent of the global rather than the local. Over against the global in general one may indeed be tempted to appeal to the state; but in Latin America such temptations are at best risky, at worst devastating. The quandary that the leftist Latin Americanist faces today thus emerges. The Latin American state cannot be counted on to combat the ills of global capital; nor can the global be counted on to do battle with the terror of this very locality: state terror. The solution to the predicament seems to lie in some idea of the nation: a local collective, not completely determined by state rule. Indeed, the common definition of a nation-a people with a common territory (actual or virtual), history (real or imaginary), consciousness, and language-clearly suggests that a nation ma)\ but

need not, fonn a component of a state. It could just as well represent a site
of resistance to the state, even if a transnational one.

Ideally for the Latin Americanist, then, the contemporary nation, irreducible to the state, would displace or transnationalize what the state controls, on the one hand, and on the other, would resist or refuse, as local nonstatist realm, neoliberal global impositions and displacements. Yet, is the site of such a double resistance even conceivable? Political activism on the part of the nation, insofar as a concrete claim (rather than an ideal or abstract one) is made on the political, is necessarily a demand for "representation or self-representation. By the logic of the nation and by the logic of politics, no national politics outside such a demand is even imaginable. In the past, and still presendy, the plea has frequendy been made-with the expected mixed results-to the state (perhaps via civil sociery) on behalf of the n'ation whose rights the state unjusdy abuses or refuses to recognize. Today, however, it could just as well be made to global institutions, such as human rights groups, the United Nations, international
or transnational organizations, an outside state, or even to corporations and

philanthropists: assemblages that might rightfolly and legitimately contest the state. A present-day nation's intervention, we can therefore say, is either a petition to the state, usually in the interest of protection from the market and/or the global, or a solicitation to the global in the quest for aid in battles with a particular government. The nation, however rebellious and auronomous, therefore can never defY or offer an alternative to both local and global, state and market. If it bucks against the local powers (not just government, but the many organizations within civil society and the private sector that function as agents of the state), it has already appealedto the global or to the international (i.e., cast the global as appealing). If, conversely, the nation challenges global or transnational impositions (particularly but not exclusively the market), then it has already posited the state as the site ofresolution, as the final of politics. A nation that repudiates the state and the global is purely qmceptual, absolutely theoretical-stated in very different terms, the repu.;iiation is stricdya moral condemnation rather than a political comment-since a
collective that renounces one necessarily espouses the other.

This absolutely conceptual nation, resistant to global and Latin state rule, nonetheless points up the nature of the desire of the Americanism. "Nation' (without the state) names the "between" pf two extremisms. The first espouses pure displacement, hence the glopal, be

190

Bind Between Deconstruction and Subalternity

Bind Between Deconstruction and Subalternity

191

it called deconstruction, postmodernism, the market, theory, or multinational capital. The second extremism absolutely resists displacement and circulation; it is authoritarianism, traditionalism, liberalism, and the state, with anti-theory as one of its agents. The cultural politics of the Latin American thought that de la Campa and others embrace, then, is not a question of the left versus the right or even of the state versus the market. These topoi, in fact, are simulated via the "Structuralist linguistification" of the political itself: via the political promotion of competitions between fixed meaning qua the signified, renamed as "the local," and floating signs qua the signifier without reference, designated "the global." Contemporary Larin Americanist leftism, in other words, rests in a radicalism nor in an orthodoxy, change nor maintenance, but in the effort to occupy an imaginary hybrid site between aestheticism and empiricism. Latin Americanism markets, and is sustained by, the debates between these sides. L Rigoberta Mench';, although a fundamental and, in my view, brilliant narrative, ascended to the summit of Latin Americanism because it stages such rivalries in a single Latin American work, bearing witness to a Latin Americanist project now capable of containing itself within itself ODe in which even "outside" or "foreign" discourses are situated inside Latin Americanism itself, jusr as de la Campa converts deconstruction-which, as I have argued, has been practiced in Latin American studies only on the tarest of occasions-into a foundational Latin Americanist topos, an internal dominant discourse. The discourse of Latin American studies, for too long, was mortgaged to alien paradigms, be they liberal humanism, literary conservatism, orthodox Marxism, radical deconstructionism, or (and the project that perhaps enjoyed the greatest impact) Spanish philology. Labors to refute such foreign, Eurocentric models always prove less than satisfactory, since the repudiation of the foreign is itself Eurocentric or hegemonic. The critique of exterior influences is overdetermined by those very exterior influences. The only seeming resolution, therefore, is the Latin Americanist appropriation of the domestic and the foreign, the local and the global, to render critical contestations not as battles between genuine Latin American thought and Eurocentrism but between Latin Americanism and itself Latin Americanism, just recendy, materializes as its own field, with no urgent need to meditate on other literatures (Spanish, French, North American) or outside theories. The desire for the perfect nation, resistant

to both the brutal law of the state and the callous lawlessness of the market, rematerializes as the, desire for an institution called Latin Americanism, one both local and universal, tied to a particular "land" but part and parcel of broad worldwide intellecrual endeavors-yet, at the same time, which is none of these: a nation of Latin Americanist theorists, on the margins and at the center, texrual and empirical, offering a choice between the two, and the freedom of the Latin American nation, fteedom itself, as that choice.

206

Notes to Pages

translation itself-not the discourses but the transformations of the discourses ma! come about through reading and rewriting-is that foundation. 15. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, (New YOlk: Oxford University Press, 1989), esp. 5 and 16. Sommer, Beverley, and Yudice, in the previously cited essays, all make this

Index

claim in one form or another. Sklodowska, Testimonio hispanoammcano. Hutona. teona poetica, 7-53, and Moreiras, of Testimonio," counter these arguments,
demonstrating that the relationship of testimonio and literature is highly complex. '7. See especially, Paul de Man, "The Rhetoric ofTemporality," in Blindness and Insight. Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 187-228.
CHAPTER EIGHT

1. Roman de la Campa, Latin Americanism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). 2. Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria, Voice ofthe Masters: Writing and Authority in Modern Latin American Literature (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985), 3. 3. John Beverley, "On the Category of 'The People: the Hegemonic Relation, and the Limits of Deconstruction," in Dispositioln, vol. xxiii, no. 50 (fall, 2000): 155-79 4. This Wlderstanding of logocenuism is presented in its strongest fashion, in my view, in Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 61-171. 5. Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man. The American Indian and the Origins ofComparative Ethnology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 126-32. 6. Derrida, Dissemination, II3-14. 7. Alberto Moreiras, "Popularism in a Double Register" (paper presented at the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group meeting at the College of William and Mary, May 2-4, 1997); ''A Thinking Relationship: The End of Subalternity. Notes

Arendt, Hannah, 47 Arlr, Roberto, 56, 58-67, 69, 80 Avelar, !delber, 195n
Benitez Raja, Antonio, 169, 172 Benjamin, Walter, 24, 28, 66, 163 Beverley, John, 146-147, 155, 176, 181-19 Borges, Jorge Luis, 62

Garcia Mirquez, Gabriel, 3 Glissant, Edouard, 169 Gonzalez EchevarrIa, Roberto, 5-6, 169, 172,173 Greenblatt, Stephen, lID Griffich, Beatrice, 82
Haver, William, 199n

Hider, Adolph, 56
Jameson, Fredric, 158, 163 Jusciano, Gonzalo. 31

Bourdieu, Pierre 173

Cabrera Infante, Guillermo, 4 Carpentier, Alejo, 4, lIo-lIB, 123-125
COrtazar,

Kadir, Djalal, 169

Julio,
3, 4, 10-20, 24-25

on Hegemony, Contingency, Universality. Contemporary Dialogues on the Left"

(unpublished manuscript).

de la Campa, Roman, 169-'75, 181, 188, 189 de las Casas, Bartolome, I29-141 de Man, Paul, 163, 166-168 Derrida, Jacques, 90-91, 176-181
Danoso, Jose, 4

56,77-78 Kant, Immanuel, 47 Krisreva, Julia, 34-35

Lacan, Jacques, 15-16, 37-39 Lezama Lima, Jose, 176 Lezra, Jacques. 204n Lugones, Leopoldo, 62-66, 80

Lyorard, Jean-Frans:;ois,
Eltit, Diamela, 176
Fanan, Frantz, II9-120 Freud, SigmWld. 12, 19 34, 82, 83, 85. 87,88 Fuentes, Carlos, 3

160

Matiarequi, Jose Carlos, 159 Marx, Karl, 180 Menchu, Rigoberta, 142-168,174-175

Mignolo, Walter,

122, 123

Fukuyama, Francis, 8 Fynsk, Chistopher, 197n, 198n

Galeano, Eduardo, 169 Garda Canclini, Nestor, 165, 173

Moreiras, Albe.n:o, 5-6, 30, 158, 176, r8I, 186-190 Mouffe, Chantal, 50 Muuux, Floyd, 82

Nietzsche, Friedrich,

180