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. One of the important consequences of interregnum for this book is found in Galli’s meditations on “Global War” (Galli 2010): the conceptual vocabularies of political and aesthetic modernity are no longer capable of explaining or regulating the contradictions produced by capitalist modernization. Thus the modern concepts of sovereignty and subject—to name two central ideas—may well obscure what is going on in our world today rather than shedding light on things. But if the metaphysics of the subject and the Hobbesian-Schmittian tradition of sovereignty are helpful today primarily to the extent that they illustrate what does not work in the world, some explanation is required for the fact that I continue to rely here on a number of modern thinkers whose conceptual vocabularies remain useful in my view: Kant and Hegel (to an extent), as well as Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Freud, and other more recent thinkers who engage with these four. There is no contradiction, as I see it, in asserting that Hobbes and Schmitt have been rendered more or less useless today (they remain or become useful precisely in their uselessness) whereas Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Freud remain altogether useful. This is because these latter are all antifoundational thinkers whose thought not only interrogates the conditions of possibility for modern forms of experience but which also seeks out the ways in which the forms and structures of modernity have always been more unstable that modern thought would care to acknowledge. The second hypothesis is that the in-between time of interregnum announces the exhaustion of the modern idea of “literature,” or the aesthetic ideology of literature that had prevailed from the Romantics through the rise of testimonio literature in Latin America during 3 the 1980s and 90s. This claim will require considerable explanatory work, since I am by no means suggesting that a clear and definitive break exists between the literary history of modernity and the contemporary novels I study here. On the contrary, it could be said unequivocally that, in terms of literary style or technique, there is nothing (or almost nothing) in these works that has not already been done or said in the time of literary modernism. If there is something different in these works that would distinguish them from literary predecessors it cannot be explained as innovation; indeed, as Brett Levinson has stated with respect to Bolaño, it may be that what these works share is a radical skepticism about the very concept of the new, the novel (Levinson 2009, 178). The exhaustion of “literature” does not mean that the literary simply goes away either. On the contrary, one thing that opens up at the end of the millennium in Latin America has to do with alternative ways of thinking about literature and literary language, or perhaps another side of what we call literary modernity. In the works that I examine this includes different manners of literary confrontation with the loosening of bonds and pacts (social, epistemological, semantic), as well as with what appears today as the absence or impossibility of what Aristotle calls arkhē: that philosophical ground or first principle that would provide the solid foundation for thought and action. Each chapter of this book traces a tension at work between endeavors to revitalize the personal and collective projects that make up our world on the one hand, and literary exploration of how the ties that constitute social fabric are prone to coming undone on the other hand—and of what this loosening of principial logic might itself have to say to us. What I call the crisis of sovereignty takes several forms, but in each case it is defined by the displacement or suspension of modern political forms and concepts together with the fact 4 that no new principle has emerged to replace them. The experience of economic and technological globalization in late 20th century Latin America is defined specifically by such phenomena as: the retreat of the national-popular and the withering of contestatory and utopian political imaginaries; the privatization of the regulatory and welfare state models; mediatization as technological unification of the planet; the decline of industrial capitalism and the formal subsumption of intellectual work into the capitalist economy in the time of post- Fordism; and the rise of narco-capitalism as post-ideological configuration of power. While each of these contexts contributes to destabilizing the conceptual vocabularies of political and aesthetic modernity, no new ordering principle has risen to fill the empty place once occupied by the sovereign subject of modernity. The formal dynamics of this situation bear some resemblance to what classical juridical thought called interregnum: a gap or lag time in between the death of the old sovereign and the coronation of his replacement. I look at these forms of crisis through selective readings of a series of end-of-millennium Latin American novels by César Aira, Marcelo Cohen and Sergio Chejfec (Argentina), Diamela Eltit (Chile), and Roberto Bolaño (Chile-Mexico-Cataluña). My interest in these works has less to do with how social, economic and political contexts are represented as plot content and more to do with how those contexts and their attendant conflicts are “translated” into the formal dynamics of literary narrative. There is thus a Lukacsian sense to this book even if the works I look at do not belong to the realist tradition. The recoding of history as literary form provides occasions for reconsidering modern conceptualizations of aesthetic experience, mood, temporality, politics, ethical experience, as well as of literature itself as social institution. Allow me now to provide some clarifications about what I am calling the crisis of sovereignty. 5 The crisis of sovereignty in Latin America can be traced back at least as far as the transitions from military dictatorship to representative democracy during the 1980s and 90s. Those shifts, accompanied by powerful recodifications of earlier histories of political violence and radicalism, seek to provide neoliberal reform with both a sense of necessity and moral legitimacy. During the so-called “Washington Consensus” of the 1980s and 90s, the democratically-elected transitional regimes of the Southern Cone preside over the privatization of public services and industries together with the dismantling of the regulatory state, which served as mediator between the local/national and global capital for much of the 20th century. While the privatization of the Welfare State model may be the most salient landmark for thinking the crisis of sovereignty in Latin America, other contributing factors include: (1) tele- technological mediatization, through which old configurations of space and time according to the parameters of the nation are superseded by transnational mediatic networks and real-time technologies that facilitate the virtual elimination of geographic distance as an obstacle for production and commerce, culminating in the tendential integration of the planet to meet the needs of global capital; (2) new patterns of displacement and migration in response to drug- related violence and changing labor markets, which in turn have the effect of destabilizing national borders and providing a mobile (and often highly vulnerable) labor force for global capital and its preference for flexibility and relocation; (3) the proliferation of narcotrafficking and the drug wars, which in the

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