Introduction: Ethical and Political Thinking after Literature

In the Introduction, the author proposes a mode of reading that would expose the misunderstanding that is constitutive of both the literary and the political. A reading of the figure of the “blind” reader in two primal, early modern scenes of reading taken up by Ricardo Piglia in his 2005 El último lector [The Last Reader] is then taken up, suggesting that the blind reader might be that reader who—desperately close to the text—is attuned to its marks of invisibility, to those elements of unreadability that serve as an aporetic demand for more (blind) reading. The motif of opacity, or invisibility, recurs throughout Anarchaeologies vis-à-vis a cluster of concepts—misunderstanding, error, equivocation—to which the author turns in order to imagine new interpretative possibilities not only within literary criticism, but within ethical and political thinking as well.

Toward a Passive University

The book’s final part, “Exposure and Indisciplinarity,” asks whether and how “anarchaeology,” misunderstanding literature, error, and the violence of ethics-against-politics, may be thought to provide a critique of the very institution that seems to make them possible as ways of thinking: the university. As a mode of conclusion to this book, Graff Zivin proposes the possibility of an institution whose foundation is passive, exposed responsibility. The idea of the “exposed” university would imply not only the university’s exposure to other institutions, or to other ethico-political demands, apparently exterior to the university, but also, crucially, an internal exposure, in which the exposure of one discipline to another would reveal the defective quality of the sovereignty or autonomy of each, the “points of untranslatability” that serve as the condition of possibility (and impossibility) for disciplinary thinking.

Levinas in Latin America

“Levinas in Latin America” focuses upon four types of ethical philosophy in Latin American and Latinamericanist thought: theological, literary, political, and deconstructive. First, Graff Zivin evaluates theologian Enrique Dussel’s assimilation of the work of Emmanuel Levinas into his own philosophy of Latin American liberation. Next, Graff Zivin juxtaposes Dussel’s Levinasianism with Doris Sommer’s ostensibly very different Levinasian approach to literary studies, focusing upon her analysis of Mario Vargas Llosa’s 1987 novel El hablador. The chapter then unpacks the debate over the relation between ethics and political militancy that surfaces in Argentina following the publication of philosopher Oscar Del Barco’s 2007 letter “No Matarás” [Thou Shalt Not Kill].

Untimely Ethics

“Untimely Ethics: Deconstruction and its Precursors” takes up Borges’s notion that literary precursors are retroactively determined in order to examine the preposterous timing of this “anarchaeology” of violent ethics. Here, Graff Zivin considers two possible “precursors” of deconstruction, from two quite different traditions, Levinas and Borges himself. Graff Zivin traces the concept of the illegible demand (for reading) in the thought of Levinas and Derrida, suggesting that the most significant consequences of Levinas’s work can only begin to be traced “after” Derrida, and proceeds to argue, through an analysis of Borges’s short essay “Kafka y sus precursores,” that if literary and philosophical precursors can be determined retroactively and anachronically (Borges “after” Derrida), then intempestive reading—reading after whatever is untimely in the work before it—might serve as the condition of possibility for indisciplinary, marrano thinking.

Ethics against Politics

The second part of the book is a critical engagement with the so-called ethical “turn” in critical studies of literature, culture and philosophy. “The Ethical Turn” takes the reader through the tense articulation of ethics and politics in current criticism and political philosophy in Latin America. The first section, titled “Ethics against Politics,” shows how the notion of an ethical “turn” tends to place ethics and politics in a relation of antagonism or substitution (ethics or politics, but not both), which limits the possibilities of both ethical and political thinking. What if the two terms were to be thought instead as operating against each other? Here “against” would indicate both antagonism (ethics versus politics) and correlation, even support: ethics against the backdrop of politics and vice-versa, an arrangement in which ethics and politics would be mutually interdependent.

Misunderstanding Literature

Graff Zivin draws upon Jacques Rancière’s notion of literary misunderstanding—malentendu littéraire, which bears a formal compatibility to mésentente politique, or political dissensus or disagreement—in order to develop the first concept that structures this book, as well as the relation between literature, ethics, and politics. Here Graff Zivin turns to an understudied scene from Juan José Saer’s 1983 novel El entenado in order to consider a literary practice that performatively and constatively bears witness to the misunderstanding that constitutes the modern subject.

The Aesthetics and Politics of Error

“The Aesthetics and Politics of Error,” analyzes “error” as a defective, erroneous political concept through literature (César Aira’s 2010 novel El error), critical theory (Paul de Man’s Blindness and Insight), and political discourse (the theatrical actions of the Internacional Errorista).

Afterword

The Afterword asks after the role of the university in the age of Trump, in the so-called post-truth era. Specifically, it pursues the possibility of a defense against inventions and untruths that does not, or does not only, rely upon scientific or legal, proof-based knowledge, but also, crucially, that would advance a notion of knowledge, or truths, that pertain to the logic of testimony and witnessing, but which are themselves unprovable in an empirical sense. It may seem a strange moment to turn, or return, to figures such as Jacques Derrida or Paul de Man, thinkers that have been wrongly accused of relativizing truth, or of doing away with truth altogether, but whose work in fact point the way to a different, but no less radical, commitment to the idea of truth.

Toward an Anarchaeological Latinamericanism

Graff Zivin argues against a mode of reading—of a text, of the archive—that would seek to uncover a buried truth (alêtheia), following the logic of archaeology or arche (ἀρχή‎) logos (λόγος‎): an excavational mode of thought, a cousin of a certain conservative philological tendency that has as its foundation or ground (Grund), which hides beneath it, an identifiable and revealable truth. Instead, the author proposes the notion of anarchaeological, or marrano, reading, an interpretative practice that would take into account the secret, incalculable qualities of the archive or the text. After reviewing several examples of archaeological (Dussel, Bosteels) and anarchaeological (Williams, Draper, Steinberg) engagements with the Latin American archive in general, and the archive of 1968 in particular, Graff Zivin analyzes Albertina Carri’s unsettled relation to the inheritance of her murdered militant parents in the 2003 and 2016 films, Los rubios and Cuatreros.

The Metapolitics of Allegory

The fourth part of this book, “Political Thinking after Literature,” places violent ethics “against” politics by revisiting classical political concepts such as sovereignty and decision from the vantage point of literature, literary criticism, and art-activism. The first section, “The Metapolitics of Allegory,” claims that Latin American literary studies has been haunted by Fredric Jameson’s (in)famous claim that “all third world texts are […] national allegories,” accompanied, more recently, by a critical countertradition in Latin Americanism that rejected Jameson’s argument without pursuing alternative readings of allegory. The author traces a link between allegory and intention, or will, in the “masters” of Latin American literary criticism. The section concludes with an allegorical reading of César Aira’s 1997 novella, El congreso de literatura, in which what is allegorized is the impossibility of politics understood as entailing sovereign decisionism or the intentional fidelity to an event.