Tonalities of Literature in Transition: the World Of
1 INTRODUCTION: Literature and “Interregnum”: Globalization, War and the Crisis of Sovereignty in Latin America Literature and “Interregnum” looks at late 20th- and early 21st-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, 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). 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 begins in the 1980s culminates, at the end of the millennium, in the suspension or exhaustion of certain principles of political and aesthetic modernity, foremost among which are the regulatory state, political sovereignty (that of the national state or 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.” To be perfectly clear, I do not argue that sovereignty and its political manifestations (the state, the nation, the national popular) have disappeared from our contemporary topography. However, what were once the foundations or first principles of modern social organization have more recently been subjugated to new economic and 2 technological rationales and forces that appear to be incapable of serving as new organizing principles.
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