Exhaustion of Difference

Moreiras Alberto Moreiras

Description

The conditions for thinking about Latin America as a regional unit in transnational academic discourse have shifted over the past decades. In The Exhaustion of Difference Alberto Moreiras ponders the ramifications of this shift and draws on deconstruction, Marxian theory, philosophy, political economy, subaltern studies, literary criticism, and postcolonial studies to interrogate the minimal conditions for an effective critique of knowledge given the recent transformations of the contemporary world.What, asks Moreiras, is the function of critical reason in the present moment? What is regionalistic knowledge in the face of globalization? Can regionalistic knowledge be an effective tool for a critique of contemporary reason? What is the specificity of Latin Americanist reflection and how is it situated to deal with these questions? Through examinations of critical regionalism, restitutional excess, the historical genealogy of Latin American subalternism, testimonio literature, and the cultural politics of magical realism, Moreiras argues that while cultural studies is increasingly institutionalized and in danger of reproducing the dominant ideologies of late capitalism, it is also ripe for giving way to projects of theoretical reformulation. Ultimately, he claims, critical reason must abandon its allegiance to aesthetic-historicist projects and the destructive binaries upon which all cultural theories of modernity have been constructed. The Exhaustion of Difference makes a significant contribution to the rethinking of Latin American cultural studies.

Sujets

• Sociologie, société et politique
• Cultural studies
• Latin America

Informations

• Publié par: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 26 septembre 2001
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780822380597
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

T H E E X H A U S T I O N O F D I F F E R E N C E

T H E

E X H A U S T I O N

O F

D I F F E R E N C E

The Politics of Latin American Cultural Studies //Alberto Moreiras

                   //                 

© Duke University Press

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Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 

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appear on the last printed page of this book.

C O N T E N T S

Acknowledgments // ix

Introduction. Conditions of Latin Americanist Critique // 

. Global Fragments // 

. Negative Globality and Critical Regionalism // 

. Theoretical Fictions and Fatal Conceits // 

. Restitution and Appropriation // 

. The National Popular in Antonio Candido and Jorge Luis Borges // 

. The End of Magical Realism: José María Arguedas’s Passionate Signifier // 

. The Aura of Testimonio // 

. The Order of Order: On the Reluctant Culturalism of Anti-Subalternist Critiques // 

. Hybridity and Double Consciousness // 

Notes // 

Works Cited // 

Index // 

Of such dreams and of the rituals of them there can also be no

end. The thing that is sought is altogether other. However it may

be construed within men’s dreams or by their acts it will never make

a fit. These dreams and these acts are driven by a terrible hunger.

They seek to meet a need which they can never satisfy, and for that

we must be grateful.—Cormac McCarthy,Cities of the Plain()

A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S

This book is particularly indebted to four of my friends whose thought has had a determining impact on my own thinking over the last several years: Brett Levinson, Gareth Williams, John Kraniaus- kas, and Jon Beasley-Murray. I am also grateful to Abdul Mustapha and Kate Jenckes for their very generous and highly useful commen- tary of my typescript when I was in dire need of readers. A num- ber of visits to Chile have enabled me to establish and maintain strong intellectual and affective contacts with the group of think- ers aroundRevista de crítica cultural:Nelly Richard, Willy Thayer, Federico Galende, Elizabeth Collingwood-Selby, Carlos Pérez Villa- lobos, Ivan Trujillo, Pablo Oyarzún, Sergio Villalobos, and others will not, I trust, let people say that my own work is extraneous to their own thinking and thus not Latin American enough. I see my work as a modest form of solidarity with their efforts. Although I would not want my other friends, particularly in the United States, to feel unrecognized by my omission of their names here, I cannot be exhaustive. But I will mention, for reasons instrumental to this book, Teresa Vilarós, George Yúdice, Laurence Shine, Gabriela Nou- zeilles, Danny James, Adriana Johnson, and Horacio Legrás. Thank you also to Ana Lucia Gazzola and Wander Melo Miranda, who in- vited me to present a large amount of material from this book in a seminar at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais in Belo Hori- zonte, Brazil, in the summer of . Much of the analysis that fol-