Insubordination of Signs

Richard Nelly Richard, Nelson Alice A. Nelson, Tandeciarz Silvia R. Tandeciarz

Description

Nelly Richard is one of the most prominent cultural theorists writing in Latin America today. As a participant in Chile's neo-avantgarde, Richard worked to expand the possibilities for cultural debate within the constraints imposed by the Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1990), and she has continued to offer incisive commentary about the country's transition to democracy. Well known as the founder and director of the influential journal Revista de critica cultural, based in Santiago, Richard has been central to the dissemination throughout Latin America of work by key contemporary thinkers, including Nestor Garcia Canclini, Jacques Derrida, Fredric Jameson, and Diamela Eltit. Her own writing provides rigorous considerations of Latin American identity, postmodernism, gender, neoliberalism, and strategies of political and cultural resistance.In The Insubordination of Signs Richard theorizes the cultural reactions-particularly within the realms of visual arts, literature, and the social sciences-to the oppression of the Chilean dictatorship. She reflects on the role of memory in the historical shadow of the military regime and on the strategies offered by marginal discourses for critiquing institutional systems of power. She considers the importance of Walter Benjamin for the theoretical self-understanding of the Latin American intellectual left, and she offers revisionary interpretations of the Chilean neo-avantgarde in terms of its relationships with the traditional left and postmodernism. Exploring the gap between Chile's new left social sciences and its "new scene" aesthetic and critical practices, Richard discusses how, with the return of democracy, the energies that had set in motion the democratizing process seemed to exhaust themselves as cultural debate was attenuated in order to reduce any risk of a return to authoritarianism.

Sujets

• América del Sur
• Cultural studies
• South America
• History of the Americas
• Chile
• Chili

Informations

• Publié par: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 23 mars 2004
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780822385721
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Insubordination of Signs

- 

Series Editors: Stanley Fish and Fredric Jameson



   /

 / 

The Insubordination of Signs

Political Change, Cultural Transformation,

and Poetics of the Crisis

 

Alice A. Nelson and Silvia R. Tandeciarz, Translators

   Durham & London 

©  Duke University Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of

America on acid-free paper 

Typeset in Quadraat by Tseng

Information Systems, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-

Publication Data appear on the last

printed page of this book.

In memory of Germán Bravo, for those moments

when what he called a ‘‘gentle inquiry into the insuturable

character of questions of meaning’’ fails.













Contents

Author’s Note ix

Translators’ Acknowledgments xi

Translators’ Preface xiii

Note on This Translation xvii

Ruptures, Memory, and Discontinuities (Homage to Walter Benjamin) 

A Border Citation: Between Neo– and Post–Avant-Garde 

Destruction, Reconstruction, and Deconstruction 

The Social Sciences: Front Lines and Points of Retreat 

Staging Democracy and the Politics of Difference 

Conversation: Germán Bravo, Martín Hopenhayn, Nelly Richard, and Adriana Valdés 

Notes 

Bibliography 

Index 

Author’s Note

This edition brings together five texts that converge on a single prob- lematic: the interplay of tensions between culture and society, aes- thetics and politics, signs and ideologies. The stage on which these tensions are debated corresponds to Chile in the s and early s. The book analyzes the meaning of the discursive strategies constructed by the political culture of the left, the aesthetic neo– avant-garde, and the alternative movement in the social sciences, in- cluding their problematic differences. But the questions contained in this analysis go beyond their contextual referent to engage in a discussion—vital for any cultural and political context—regarding the relationships between institutional discourses and critiques of representation, constituted and informal forms of knowledge, so- cial identity and subjectivity in crisis, legitimized practices and those situated at the margins of organized cultural systems. Other than ‘‘Roturas, memoria y descontinuidades (homenaje a W. Benjamin)’’ [Ruptures, Memory, and Discontinuities (Homage to Walter Benjamin)], the chapters are revised and transformed ver- sions of previous publications and talks. Chapter  first appeared as ‘‘Una cita limítrofe entre neovanguardia y postvanguardia’’ [A Bor- der Citation: Between Neo– and Post–Avant-Garde] in the anthol- ogyModernidade: Vanguardias artísticas na América Latina[Modernity: Artistic Avant-Gardes in Latin America] (Sao Paulo: Memorial/ Unesp, ). Chapter , ‘‘Destrucción/reconstrucción/desconstruc- ción’’ [Destruction, Reconstruction, and Deconstruction], was pub-