Literature and "Interregnum"

Patrick Dove

Description

Literature and "Interregnum" examines the unraveling of the political forms of modernity through readings of end-of-millennium literary texts by César Aira, Marcelo Cohen, Sergio Chejfec, Diamela Eltit, and Roberto Bolaño. The opening of national spaces to the global capitalist system in the 1980s culminates in the suspension of key principles of modernity, most notably that of political sovereignty. While the neoliberal model subjugates modern forms of social organization and political decision making to an economic rationale, the market is unable to provide a new ordering principle that could fill the empty place formerly occupied by the national figure of the sovereign. The result is a situation that resembles what the Italian political philosopher Antonio Gramsci termed "interregnum," an in-between time in which "the old [order] is dying and the new cannot be born." The recoding of history as literary form provides occasions for reconsidering modern conceptualizations of aesthetic experience, mood, temporality, thought, politics, ethical experience, as well as of literature itself as social institution. In his analysis, Patrick Dove seeks to create dialogues between literature and theoretical perspectives, including Continental philosophy, political thought, psychoanalysis, and sociology of globalization. The author highlights the connections between mass media, technology, politics, and economics.
Acknowledgments
Introduction

1. Tonalities of Literature in Post-dictatorship Argentina: Mood and History in Post-Utopian Times

2. Mediatization and the Literary Neo-Avant-Garde in Argentina

3. The Dis-jointures of History: Market, Virtuoso Labor, and Natural History in Post-dictatorship Chile

4. Literary Contretemps: Histories of Love, Labor, and Abandonment

5. Repetition or Interruption?: The Fate of Modernity in the Time of Globalization and Global War

Afterword: From Ciudad Juárez to Latin America

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Latin American
• Americas
• Latin America
• History of the Americas
• Caribbean

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 21 juin 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438461564
• Langue: English

Extrait

LITERATURE AND “INTERREGNUM”
SERIES EDITORS
David E. Johnson (Comparative Literature, SUNY Buffalo)
Scott Michaelsen (English, Michigan State University)
SERIES ADVISORY BOARD
Nahum D. Chandler (African American Studies, University of California, Irvine)
Rebecca Comay (Philosophy and Comparative Literature, University of Toronto)
Marc Crépon (Philosophy, École Normale Supérieure, Paris)
Jonathan Culler (Comparative Literature, Cornell)
Joanna Drucker (Design Media Arts and Information Studies, UCLA)
Christopher Fynsk (Modern Thought, Aberdeen University)
Rodolphe Gasché (Comparative Literature, SUNY Buffalo)
Martin Hägglund (Comparative Literature, Yale)
Carol Jacobs (Comparative Literature German, Yale University)
Peggy Kamuf (French and Comparative Literature, University of Southern California)
David Marriott (History of Consciousness, University of California, Santa Cruz)
Steven Miller (English, University at Buffalo)
Alberto Moreiras (Hispanic Studies, Texas A M University)
Patrick O’Donnell (English, Michigan State University)
Pablo Oyarzún (Teoría del Arte, Universidad de Chile)
Scott Cutler Shershow (English, University of California, Davis)
Henry Sussman (German and Comparative Literature, Yale University)
Samuel Weber (Comparative Literature, Northwestern)
Ewa Ziarek (Comparative Literature, SUNY Buffalo)
LITERATURE AND “INTERREGNUM”
Globalization, War, and the Crisis of Sovereignty in Latin America
PATRICK DOVE
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2016 State University of New York
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For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Production, Jenn Bennett
Marketing, Michael Campochiaro
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Dove, Patrick, 1967- author.
Title: Literature and interregnum : globalization, war, and the crisis of sovereignty in Latin America / Patrick Dove.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2016] | Series: SUNY series, Literature … in Theory | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015036593| ISBN 9781438461557 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438461564 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Spanish American literature—20th century—History and criticism. | Spanish American literature—21st century—History and criticism. | Literature and globalization. | Sovereignty in literature. | Literature and society—Latin America.
Classification: LCC PQ7081 .D686 2016 | DDC 860.9/980904—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015036593
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Samuel, Theo and Reuven, and their love of stories
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Tonalities of Literature in Post-dictatorship Argentina: Mood and History in Post-Utopian Times
2. Mediatization and the Literary Neo-Avant-Garde in Argentina
3. The Dis-jointures of History: Market, Virtuoso Labor, and Natural History in Post-dictatorship Chile
4. Literary Contretemps: Histories of Love, Labor, and Abandonment
5. Repetition or Interruption?: The Fate of Modernity in the Time of Globalization and Global War
Afterword: From Ciudad Juárez to Latin America
Notes
Bibliography
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book has been a long time in the making, so much so that its initial impulses were born in what might be called a different world: that of Southern California in late August 2001. In the wake of that turbulent autumn the concerns and impulses that gave rise to this project have undergone significant mutations and acquired new directions, both in response to world events and in view of the ongoing transformations that are affecting the academic spheres of Latin American literary and cultural studies and the theoretical humanities in general. My thinking about the guiding themes and questions in this book has been shaped through sustained conversations with old and new friends, including Bram Acosta, Marco Dorfsman, Moira Fradinger, Erin Graff-Zivin, Edgar Illas, Danny James, Kate Jenckes, John Kraniauskas, Brett Levinson, Alberto Moreiras, Sam Steinberg, Sergio Villalobos-Ruminott, and Gareth Williams.
At Indiana University, where the vast majority of this book was written, I am profoundly grateful for the friendship and intellectual comradery of many colleagues. In particular I would like to thank Anke Birkenmaier, Michel Chaouli, Deborah Cohn, Melissa Dinverno, Ryan Giles, Carl Good, Jeff Gould, Andrés Guzmán, Edgar Illas, Danny James, Josh Kates, Cathy Larson, Alejandro Mejías-López, Kate Myers, Bill Rasch, Jonathan Risner, Ben Robinson, and Steve Wagschal for helping to make Bloomington an intellectually vibrant and rewarding place to work. This book also bears the imprint of the many graduate students with whom conversations have helped spur my thinking about Bolaño, political thought, globalization, and global war.
The development of ideas in this book also benefited from invitations to give talks and discuss work in progress in various venues. For opportunities to share my ideas and to refine them in dialogue with others I express my gratitude to David Johnson, Alberto Moreiras, and Dianna Niebylski. I am also extremely grateful to David for the encouragement and guidance he has provided as editor of the “Literature … In Theory” series. By the same token, Beth Bouloukos at SUNY Press has helped to facilitate the production process.
This book bears an inestimable debt to my family. To my parents, Bill and Alex, I am eternally grateful for the way they exemplify and support intellectual inquiry and reading as ends unto themselves. To my parents-in-law, Ginny and Jerry Myerson, I am thankful for their boundless generosity, which includes devotion to their grandchildren and a commitment to being an integral part of their young lives. Samuel, Theo, and Reuven: this book has grown up alongside you and has never stopped learning from your ways of asking questions, and has benefited more than you can know from your curiosity and desire to understand the world you live in. It is your spark and your laughter that have breathed life into these pages. Last but not least, I am thankful to my wife Deborah, whose encouragement, companionship, and sense of humor made it possible to carry this project out.
Portions of chapters 1 , 2 , 4 , and 5 appeared in the following venues: CR: The New Centennial Review 4:2 (Fall 2004): 239–67; Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 43:1 (January 2009): 3–30; Sergio Chejfec: Trayectorias de una escritura , ed. Dianna Niebylski (Pittsburgh: Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana, 2012); and CR: The New Centennial Review 14:3 (Fall 2014): 139–61. They are reprinted here with the permission of the journals and Pittsburgh University Press.
The publication of this book was partially funded by the Office of the Vice Provost of Research at Indiana University Bloomington through the Grant-in-Aid Program.
INTRODUCTION
Literature and “Interregnum” looks at late-twentieth and early-twenty-first-century literary responses to neoliberal-administered globalization and its impact on the conceptual vocabularies of political and aesthetic modernity in Latin America’s Southern Cone and Mexico. The book endeavors to establish dialogues between literature and a range of theoretical perspectives including Continental philosophy (Aristotle, Leibnitz, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Deleuze, Nancy, Agamben, Schürmann, Thayer), political thought (Hobbes, Marx, Benjamin, Schmitt, Gramsci, Jameson, Laclau, Rancière, Virno, Galli), psychoanalysis (Freud, Lacan), and sociology of globalization (Harvey, Sassen, Reguillo, Segato). Through juxtaposition of the methods and sensibilities proper to these traditions of inquiry I explore two related hypotheses.
The first is that the violent impact of neoliberal-administered globalization in Latin America that began in the 1970s and ’80s culminates, at the end of the millennium, in the suspension or exhaustion of key principles of political and aesthetic modernity, foremost among which are the regulatory state, political sovereignty (that of the national state or of the collective subject known as “the People”), and the modern conceptualization of the subject as autonomous, self-conscious origin that assigns itself its own laws. I describe this crisis of the conceptual vocabulary of modernity as an interregnum in which, in the words of the Italian political philosopher Antonio Gramsci, “the old [order] is dying and the new cannot be born.” Of course, sovereignty and its political manifestations (the state, the nation, the national popular) have not simply disappeared from our contemporary topography. However, what were once the foundations of modern social formations have now been subjugated to new economic and technological rationales and forces that in turn seem incapable of serving as new organizing principles. One significant consequence of this shift can be found in Carlo Galli’s