Anarchaeologies

Reading as Misreading

Erin Graff Zivin

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780823286812, 9780823286829
• eBook ISBN: 9780823286836
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

How do we read after the so-called death of literature? If we are to attend to the proclamations that the representational apparatuses of literature and politics are dead, what aesthetic, ethical, and political possibilities remain for us today? Our critical moment, Graff Zivin argues, demands anarchaeological reading: reading for the blind spots, errors, points of opacity or untranslatability in works of philosophy and art.Rather than applying concepts from philosophy in order to understand or elucidate cultural works, the book exposes works of philosophy, literary theory, narrative, poetry, film, and performance art and activism to one another. Working specifically with art, film, and literature from Argentina (Jorge Luis Borges, Juán José Saer, Ricardo Piglia, César Aira, Albertina Carri, the Internacional Errorista ), Graff Zivin allows such thinkers as Levinas, Derrida, Badiou, and Rancière to be inflected by Latin American cultural production. Through these acts of interdiscursive and interdisciplinary (or indisciplinary) exposure, such ethical and political concepts as identification and recognition, decision and event, sovereignty and will, are read as constitutively impossible, erroneous. Rather than weakening either ethics or politics, however, the anarchaeological reading these works stage and demand opens up and radicalizes the possibility of justice.

Part I. Anarchaeologies

Misunderstanding Literature

Listen, I have sobbed from pleasure. And I’ve cackled / over my own tombstone, carved with: Understanding.

—Robin Coste Lewis

Literature I could, fundamentally do without, in fact, rather easily. . . . But if, without liking literature in general and for its own sake, I like something about it, which above all cannot be reduced to some aesthetic quality, to some source of formal pleasure [jouissance], this would be in place of the secret. In place of an absolute secret. There would be the passion. There is no passion without secret, this very secret, indeed no secret without this passion.

—Jacques Derrida, “Passions: An Oblique Offering”

In his invitation to contribute to a special issue of CR: The New Centennial Review on the topic of “Literature and the Secret of the World,” David Johnson referred to John Beverley’s provocative 2011 book Latinamericanism after 9/11, in particular to the conclusion of the chapter that diagnoses a “neoconservative turn” in Latin American literary and cultural studies. There Beverley states, decisively, that “Borges is literature, and literature is, finally, what those of us who work in the field of literary and cultural criticism do as intellectuals” (94). Like Johnson, I too felt a certain interpellation in Beverley’s words when I first read the book, even as I wondered about the relation of equivalence established between “Borges” and “literature” and between “literature” and “us.” Who, or what, is Borges? What is literature? Who are we? What, exactly, do we do? In what way are these productive questions, and to what extent do they reinforce the identitary logic that underscores Beverley’s argument, that is, a logic that stands on and has as its goal the reproduction of ethnic, national, linguistic, and political identities? What if, instead of trying to identify Borges, literature, and ourselves, or our work, we were to turn our attention elsewhere, upon the places where those identities (and projects) fail or prove impossible? In that sense, I would rather read Beverley’s statement (which, like Althusser’s allegorical example of ideological interpellation, is also an accusation, an indictment) as an interpellative statement that produces a failed subject, that misrecognizes Borges, literature, us. The question then becomes, for me, this: Can literature (or literary discourse) allow us to articulate such failures more precisely, or, if not, can literary discourse bear witness to the impossibility of such an articulation? Is “literature” misunderstood, or, on the contrary, can literary discourse create the conditions of possibility for a theory of misunderstanding, indeed, of misunderstanding as the constitutive quality of literature itself?

To take up the question of misunderstanding, I want to turn to a 2003 essay by Jacques Rancière, “Le malentendu littéraire,” in which the philosopher asks whether literature has a particular relationship with misunderstanding.¹ He opens the essay by engaging in a close reading of the Trésor de la langue française dictionary’s entry for “misunderstanding,” which gives two possible definitions: “a divergence of interpretation regarding the meaning of words or acts leading to disagreement” and “a disagreement brought about by such a divergence” (31), both of which imply an elusive yet proper interpretation of words, the deviation from or quarrel over which leads to problems.² Yet the same entry betrays an internal contradiction when it turns to literary examples to illustrate the definition. “Inevitably,” he quotes Martin du Gard as having written, “at the bottom of all passionate love, there is a misunderstanding, a generous illusion, an error of judgment, a false idea each has of the other,” while in Zola we find the affirmation that “Their disharmony only grew, aggravated by one of those peculiar misunderstandings of the flesh that chill the most ardent heart: he adored his wife, she had all the sensuality of a sensuous blonde, yet already they were sleeping apart, ill at ease, easily hurt” (32). Rather than corroborating the definition (of misunderstanding, but also of words, of acts, of signification), the passages end up subverting it by exposing the gap at the heart of love, the misunderstanding that resides at the core of language itself, “a non-relationship constitutive of the very faculty of producing and interpreting signs” (33).

The essay then traces a genealogy of literature as misunderstanding, turning to Sartre’s What Is Literature?, in which the philosopher claims that writers, after 1848, “don’t want to be understood,” refusing “to serve the ends the bourgeois public assigns to literature” (33). Yet this too is a misunderstanding, a misunderstanding of literature and of misunderstanding itself: “Misunderstanding . . . is fictitious,” Rancière claims, “it is the fiction that seals the tacit contract between the literary elite and the dominant class at the expense of . . . the people” (34). Among the reasons why such a relationship is fictitious or impossible is the problematic assumption that “the elite agree on what they are doing” (34). On the contrary, it is disagreement that characterizes the political and that stands as the correlative of literary misunderstanding. The idea of malentendu littéraire, then, bears a formal compatibility to mésentente politique: “This is the ground on which political disagreement arises. It is also the ground on which we can theorize the relationship between politics and literature, between political disagreement and literary ‘misunderstanding’ ” (41).³ Despite the structural affinity, however, politics and literature do very different things, particularly in relation to the concepts of partage (partition or distribution) and counting:

Political disagreement and literary misunderstanding each attack one aspect of [the] consensual paradigm of proportion between words and things. Disagreement invents names, utterances, arguments and demonstrations that set up new collectives where anyone can get themselves counted in the count of the uncounted. Misunderstanding works on the relationship and the count from another angle, by suspending the forms of individuality through which consensual logic binds bodies to meanings. Politics works on the whole, literature works on the units. (41)⁴

Both politics and literature challenge the idea of “what counts” by introducing a language (and for Rancière language resides at the core of each) that would derail any count deemed to be total, whole. Yet they do so in radically different ways, so much so that literary misunderstanding “tends to steer away from serving political misunderstanding,” which is why Rancière opts to speak about the metapolitics of literature rather than the politics of literature (or “content-based commitment”).⁵ At the same time, literary misunderstanding—or literature understood as misunderstanding—might act as a condition of possibility (although certainly not the only condition of possibility) for a radical rethinking of the political along Rancièrian lines. That is, while literary language might not “serve” politics in an explicitly ideological or strategic way (as the bearer of a translatable message or position, as a means to a particular end), misunderstanding literature, or reading the misunderstanding quality that is constitutive of the literary, might call our attention to the misunderstanding that resides at the heart of the political—at least of a notion of the political that poses a radical demand grounded in dissensus (rather than, for example, Rancière’s idea of “police,” which, in contrast to politics, would merely preserve the status quo).

Here I take a first step toward outlining a mode of reading that exposes the misunderstanding constitutive of both the literary and the political. By this I do not mean an exposure that would seek to remedy, resolve, or clear up such a misunderstanding: misunderstandings that can be cleared up through exposure or analysis or clarification are precisely not what Rancière, or I, have in mind. Rather than appealing to what Rancière describes as a common fantasy of “a form of communication that would be devoid of misunderstandings” (2, italics my own), I am interested in a reading praxis that would point to the gaps in processes of signification and subjectivation, whether these gaps are understood as textual gaps (Pierre Macherey’s discussion of the gaps and silences in literary texts), misrecognition (Judith Butler’s Lacanian reading of Althusserian interpellation),⁶ or the posthegemonic (as in Jon Beasley-Murray’s take on Gramsci’s and Laclau’s theories of hegemony). Responding to a conventional misreading of literature (the conflation of “literature” as a historically—and geographically—specific institution with “the literary,” or that which would exceed such an institution),⁷ I want to introduce a logic that would subvert identitarian thinking (the “is” in “Borges is literature,” in “literature is what we do”). At work in the literature and in the political scenes I study we find instead a sort of secret that is not susceptible to archaeological disclosure; I will call it the marrano secret. I refer here—as I have detailed in other published work—to a secret not necessarily evident to the person or the work that holds it (as the crypto-Jew or marrano is not perhaps aware of the ties that bind him or her secretly to Spain, to Sepharad: He or she is, and is not, Jewish, Spanish, Christian, self-aware, acting or desiring intentionally, and so on). If in previous work I examine concrete representations of the figure of the marrano in literature, here I take this figure “figuratively,” dwelling upon the idea of the marrano-as-metonym, the notion of a universal marrano subject that bears witness not to a secret that he keeps but rather to the secret that keeps him: a subject, in short, that refuses a logic of revelation, self-reflexivity, intelligibility. I then turn to an understudied scene from Juan José Saer’s 1983 novel El entenado (The Witness) in order to consider a literary practice that performatively and constatively addresses the idea of misunderstanding and, in doing so, bears witness to the subject’s failure to understand. We will come to see the idea of misunderstanding as constitutive of a wounded or equivocal subjectivity, that is, constitutive of the condition of marranismo as that which exposes the impossibility of subjectivity.

What is the relationship between the secret, or the marrano secret, and misunderstanding, or literary misunderstanding? Is it possible to trace a formal link between the marrano secret, literary misunderstanding, and disagreement or dissensus, over and above any thematic compatibility? Let us recall the marrano as an early modern figure that the Argentine philosopher Ricardo Forster has described as the alter ego of the nascent modern subject:

Leer al marrano, en parte, significa leer la incompletitud del hombre en la modernidad, o comenzar a comprender la imposibilidad de esa estrategia colosal montada por el cartesianismo, que supuso proyectar un sujeto autosuficiente, en términos racionales, capaz de ordenar, en términos de completitud, su lugar en el mundo. Mientras que, en el caso del marrano, nos encontramos desde el comienzo con la falla, con la grieta, con el lado oscuro, con la incompletitud. (155)

(To read the marrano, in part, implies a reading of the incompleteness of man within modernity, a beginning to understand the impossibility of the colossal strategy mounted by Cartesianism, which aimed to project a self-sufficient subject, in rational terms, capable of ordering, in terms of completeness, his place in the world. Meanwhile, in the case of the marrano, we are confronted from the beginning with a flaw, a fissure, a dark side: with incompleteness.)

The fractured, incomplete marrano does not offer an “alternative” to the Cartesian subject’s wholeness or autonomy but rather exposes “la imposibilidad de toda identidad,” the impossibility of all identity (156, italics my own). The faultline, void, or gap that traverses the marrano alludes to her constitutive guilt: The marrano is always already a subject-at-fault, a flawed, or failed, subject. For Forster, the marrano’s significance lies in the exposure of this faultline, of the mistaken or faulty quality of the modern autonomous subject: Such exposure, moreover, takes place through the act of reading. Jacques Derrida, for his part, links marranismo to absolute secrecy, locating “in the metonymic and generalized figure of the Marrano, the right to secrecy as right to resistance against and beyond the order of the political” (“History,” 64).⁸ In what follows, I turn to Saer’s El entenado in order to consider misunderstanding as both trope and performative utterance, asking what the literary might have to tell us about subjectivity, truth, or the failure of both.

A fictionalized account of the arrival of Juan Díaz de Solís and his crew to the Río de la Plata in 1516, El entenado (translated into English as The Witness) is narrated from the perspective of an orphan or bastard (entenado) who has accompanied the crew as cabin boy and who is taken captive by the Colastiné Indians, with whom he lives for ten years, bearing witness to, among other things, the killing and eating of his crewmates.⁹ The novel has been read by literary scholars as a metafictional account of the Spanish arrival to the New World (de Grandis), as a rewriting of the colonial relación or crónica (Gnutzmann, Romano Thuesen), as a theorization of the impotence of language (Miller), as a decentering of the subject of the conquest (Copertari), as “speculative anthropology” (Riera), as an ethical response to the call of the other (Legrás), as a deconstruction of cannibalism (González), and, finally, as a register of the crisis of literature in the wake of dictatorship and transition to neoliberalism (Gollnick). While a majority of the criticism dwells upon the ten years the protagonist and narrator spends living among the Colastiné, as well as the ensuing decades after his return to Spain, at the end of which time he sits down to compose the story as an old man—that is, while most critics are concerned primarily with the colonial (protoethnographic) “encounter” with the other and the related problem of representation—I want to turn to an earlier moment, a relatively understudied scene that is narrated in the opening pages of the short novel and that concerns itself not with the question of the other but with the problem of the subject.

After having spent several months at sea, during which time boredom, heat, sexual desperation, and madness begin to overtake the claustrophobic crew (a period represented in a few short pages of the novel), the three ships finally catch sight of dry land, at which time some of the sailors dive into the sea even before they dock, others wait until reaching shore to run onto the sand and jump up and down in place or jog in circles, others joyfully urinate into the ocean, while still others opt to remain on board, observing this new land from a safe distance. They spend the first evening singing, farting, and laughing around a campfire and, the next day, come to realize that they have reached an unknown place, rather than their expected destination of the Indies, at which point the crew begins to argue among themselves over whether to stay or continue to the south. Their shouting is interrupted by the appearance of the captain, whose disembarkment provokes fear, awe, and respect in the contentious crew as they await what they imagine must be an official speech claiming the new land. The speech never comes, however, and the narrator relates the surprise and horror of what takes its place:

La expectativa aunaba a los marinos, inmovilizados por la misma estupefacción solidaria. Por fin, después de esos minutos de espera casi insoportable, ocurrió algo: el capitán, dándonos todavía la espalda, emitió un suspiro ruidoso, profundo y prolongado, que resonó nítido en la mañana silenciosa y que estremeció un poco su cuerpo tieso y macizo. Han pasado, más o menos, sesenta años desde aquella mañana y puedo decir, sin exagerar en lo más mínimo, que el carácter único de ese suspiro, en cuanto a la profundidad y duración se refiere, ha dejado en mí una impresión definitiva, que me acompañará hasta la muerte. En la expresión de los marinos, ese suspiro, por otra parte, borró la estupefacción para dar paso a un principio de pánico. El más inconcebible de los monstruos de esa tierra desconocida hubiese sido recibido con menor conmoción que esa expiración melancólica. (20–21)

(Expectation united the sailors who stood immobilized by the same shared sense of stupefaction. At last, after the almost unbearable waiting, something happened: the captain, still with his back turned to us, let out a long, deep, heartfelt sigh that could be clearly heard in the silent morning and that sent a slight tremor through his solid, upright frame. Some sixty years have passed since that morning yet I can say without the slightest exaggeration that something about the depth of that long-drawn-out sigh so impressed me that it will remain with me till I die. The effect on the sailors, however, was to replace the look of amazement on their faces with the beginnings of panic. The most incredible of monsters inhabiting that unknown land would have been greeted with less horror than that melancholic sigh.) (19)

“Something happened”—“ocurrió algo”—but what? The mystery of what experience, thought, emotion has provoked the sigh—and the subsequent reaction of dread displayed by its witnesses—is left unsaid here. As he does in a number of the most dramatic scenes of El entenado, Saer inserts the voice of the narrator, writing more than a half-century after this unforgettable day on the beach, so that the captain’s sigh is not only observed by the panicked sailors but also recalled six decades later and then witnessed a third time by the reader, who is only implied here through the narrator’s address. It is not until several pages after the “event” that founds the novel, or that which has triggered the event—the “ocurrió algo”—that the reader is offered a theory of what might have provoked such terror.

El capitán parecía despavorido—si se puede hablar de pavor en el caso de una verificación intolerable de la que sin embargo el miedo está ausente. Las pocas palabras que pronunciaba le salían...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: Ethical and Political Thinking after Literature
• Part I: Anarchaeologies
• Part II: The Ethical Turn
• Part III: Violent Ethics
• Part IV: Political Thinking after Literature
• Part V: Exposure and Indisciplinarity
• Afterword: Truth and Error in the Age of Trump
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index