Although there is no precise date or moment of encounter for an âethical turnâ in Latin Americanism, a large number of books have come out attempting to read how ethics operates in the literary and cultural field in Latin America. Overall across the academic landscape, ethics has taken on newfound importance in an era where large-scale conflicts with neoliberalism no longer seem to have the affective attraction they once had. Capitalism as neoliberalismâs greatest success might be the foreclosure of imagination about new projects envisioning its destruction, especially in light of the academic/intellectual division of labor that I have identified as a problem in understanding the nations of the Global South.
The link between politics and ethics (political and narrative alike) that I make here is not mine alone. In a recent text, The Ethics of Latin American Literary Criticism (2007), Erin Graff Zivin signals how important the notion of ethics has become, but I believe that, overall, the approach I outline here constitutes a call to a new generation of work, applying a new optic that makes ethics a part of available cultural signification and subjectsâ consciousness of it, rather than a project of absolutes or contradictions.
I have focused my attention on Peter Hallwardâs work because his notion of a logic of individuation and relationality is an emergent form of analysis that integrates well into the concerns and theoretical productions elaborated by some of the most significant Latin American thinkers of the last few decades. Hallwardâs work focuses on going beyond the regional and national distinctions implicit in theoretical models and instead interrogates the basic intersubjective structure they assert.
If, for instance, we take Antonio Cornejo Polarâs notion of heterogeneity, it is possible to see how he reads the precise sociohistorical details of the constant tension between the orality of the precolonial indigenous cultures and the textuality and repression of the colonial apparatus, a tension which emerges as a distinct conflict between the specifying logic of Spanish textuality and the specific, situated but transcontinental orality of the indigenous societies. Cornejo Polarâs work situates the historical consequences, at least partially, as a debate concerning the clash of intersubjective frames of indigenous and European colonizers: âel sujeto, individual o colectivo, no se construye en y para sĂ se hace casi literalmente, en relaciĂłn con otros sujetos, pero tambiĂ©n (y decisivamente) por y en relaciĂłn con el mundoâ (The subject, individual or collective, is not constituted by and for itself; it is done almost literally in relation with other subjects, but also (and decisively) by and in relation with the world) (Cornejo Polar 15)
This statement illustrates how fundamentally a logic of individuation operates as the intersubjective substrate for any ideological project. Indeed, I would assert that part of the central force of Hallwardâs work is how it opens up a different view of evaluation for cultural analysis. As we can see in the aforementioned quotation by Cornejo Polar, the colonial apparatus countered the oral tradition as one way to specifiy their project and transform the western hemisphere into a zone of wealth extraction and racialized hegemony. Colonial modernity carried with it the actual project of specifying, directed against the wealth of difference that the Spanish colonists encountered among the cultures of the western hemisphere. Looking at this project through Hallwardâs account, it is possible to imagine the essential intersubjective quality of a cultural project in terms of the specific itself. Hallwardâs work critiques the implicit intersubjective formations of some of the most canonical versions of postcolonial theory. And it can be extended to investigate and situate rhetorics of intersubjective relation, as well. Each of these forms of meaning, in turn, produces ethical and political consequences in the form of structuring possible actions between subjects.
By examining critical texts through Hallwardâs work on relationality, I assert that an analysis of the implicit possibilities for ethics and politics is more visible, as a theory of relationality organizes intersubjective relations discursively.
Part of the motivating factor behind the turn to ethics has again been the now regular use of Derridean thinking as a baseline for investigation within the humanities, an innovation of the millennium by scholars of western literatures and memory culture. Derridaâs challenge to the signifying fieldâhis early work on deconstructionâand some of his later work on the nature of cosmopolitanism, the neighbor, and the politics of friendship, remain vital to the academic field for situating how nation, proximity, and friendship work in Latin American discourse.1 Among some of the most important critics in the transnational field of Latin American studies today, deconstructive thinking ranks as the point of departure for a thorough-going investigation on the ethical in literature and cultural studies.
The problem with this type of critique through opposition, as I have already noted, is its point of origin in older Marxist dialectics or new thinking about the Other of criticism (including subaltern studies): what Derrida calls âthe ethical relationshipâa nonviolent relationship to the infinite as infinitely other, to the Otherâas the only one capable of opening the space of transcendence and of liberating metaphysicsâ (Derrida 83).
Beyond Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, in particular, has been instrumental in these debates, postulating a way of thinking that locates the importance of the ethical, or the metaethical, in Latin American discourse, particularly in the work of AnĂbal GonzĂĄlez in, Killer Books: Writing, Violence and Ethics in Modern Spanish American Narrative (2001), and in Zivinâs edited collection The Ethics of Latin American Literary Criticism (2007). Levinasian philosophy has molded the concerns of many through its attention to the fundamental experience of alterity and the breaking up of any essential identity or name gained from that experience. Instead, the Levinasian ethic is one that models a process of radical responsibility to the other derived from the phenomenological experience of alterity without signification.
Yet Southern Cone writers such as those I discuss here seem to have recast their roles as public intellectuals away from these models: they realize that politics needs to be enacted from sites and optics other than those of official governments, present or pastâand that even retheorizing the others defined in opposition to these official governments actually prolongs the impact of this restrictive logic. In their novels, as we will see in later chapters of the present project, they refresh and thus reclaim what emerges as an ethical perspective on politics, through literature that recasts the relationships between history, intersubjectivity, and memory. Many of these novels address the specifics of the generation of experience after the fall of the dictatorships, a comparatively late occurrence in the Southern Cone. They have to not only oppose external forces like neoliberalism, but also assess the lingering consequences of the dictatorial era and the prevalence in memory of its politics of torture and violence for nationalistic purposes.
Many of these writers argue for the retention of an unforeclosed space to reestablish the possibility of nation after such public breaches of trust, as is indicated in the interminable name of the Argentinean dictatorship: El proceso de reorganizaciĂłn nacional.
This introductory chapter will start from these observations to make the case for how and why a theory of narrative ethics unfolds aspects of the literary production in the Southern Cone. I call for a Latin Americanist critique of politics through opposition and a model of public critique based on intersubjectivity, experience, and memory rather than the structure of the public sphere.
The theoretical frame that I evolve here is taken from the work of two thinkers: Hallward and Alain Badiou, each of whom will be treated in some detail below.
From Hallwardâs Absolutely Postcolonial (2002), I take the terms the singular and the specific as the two vectors that model the logics of distinction in ways other than the simple dichotomies of deconstructionâthat is, as two different ways in which language tends to mark out distinctions between âusâ and âthem,â âinsideâ and âoutside.â His model allows us to expand literary analysis, adding the insight that the logics of otherness and distinction do not all function the same way (to which I return below).
Mention of Badiouâs Ethics (2005) will help frame how such new logics of distinction work to model ethico-political possibilities for collectivities. His work moves beyond deconstruction to show how the logics of designation and enunciation straightforwardly force certain ethical patterns of behavior and evaluation into existence. And finally, in the conclusion, I will turn, as a supplement to these theoretical positions, to Simon Critchleyâs work. His view of ethics allows us to make a connection to the logics of desire and totalitarianism, modeling how dictatorships âimagineâ ethical and political possibilities through language as something to be implemented at the level of governance, turning ethical distinctions of language into practices, often totalitarian or violent in nature.
Politics as Events: Languages and Logics of Individuation
One of the most exciting trends in cultural criticism and philosophical scholarship of recent years has been the near explosion of popularity of academic philosophers working against the deconstructive tradition that has dominated so much of recent Latin American thought. Slavoj Zizek, Jacques RanciĂšre, Sylvain Lazarus, Giorgio Agamben, Catherine Malabou, and Alain Badiou have each contributed much to renovate the thinking and study of politics, aesthetics, ethics, and ontology itself. Zizek and Badiou are, of course, the most familiar of these names, given the massive publication and translation industry that accompanies both men. Zizek, in particular, has become an international phenomenon, occupying simultaneous and prestigious chairs at Birkbeck College, London, and the New School for Social Research.
For the present purposes, this new generation of theory shows us how to take up the project of reconceiving what politics means: instead of seeing it as inherent in a public sphere conceived structurally, that theory helps us to evolve a new model stressing the participation of individuals as members of a broad new collective space in that public space, especially as an ethical call to identity. This is necessary because the language and behavior of the Southern Coneâs national subjects were heavily inscribed by largely indigenous dictatorships, built on the basis of local experience and intending to manage national identity. In retrospect, and in Badiouâs terms, these dictatorships and their national politics may be defined as unique manifestations of what is known as radical evil. This radical evil has a specific character as constitutive of the public sphere: it is not a privative evil that seeks to take something away from individuals (freedom, property, life) or finds its origin in a situation of lack. Instead, this Southern Cone evil works through a network of identification, values, and projects that define, implement, and reify the ethical and semiotic public spheres of dictatorship, through language. Because this evil is language-based, literature, as we shall see, emerges as critical to the politics of this public sphere, in order to analyze this evilâs affective, metaphoric, and sometimes even allegorical persistence in memory, long after the governments that created them have passed.
The basis for this argument is the realization that any official communication functions in ways that may be characterized as literary, if that term applies to the ability of these texts to reify a world that is in many ways factual, but which also interpolates its readers into a specific affective and cognitive space. That is, any language shared within a community works to map, using Deleuzeâs language, subjects and subjectivity at the deepest levels of ontico-politico-ethical subjectivity and to bind them into a specific understanding of shared experienceâinto a national identity, an âimagined community,â or any other designation for a collective, set apart from individuals. This somewhat abrasive neologism for identity (ontico-politico-ethical subjectivity) is necessary, I believe, for thinking through the analysis of politics as a process of enunciation. It captures how speaking, writing, or understanding texts within such a space is the essential act that positions individual subjects within a collective (in relations of positionality), inculcating in them a set of ethical and political justifications for the brutality of the era (an ethos), and a set of comprehensible acts of power. Not just fiction, but even the language of dictatorships in the public sphere (speeches, news releases) participates in this particular mode of mapping the subject. Here, as we shall see below, the works of Hallward and Badiou help generate analyses of ideology and political consequences, help illustrate the impressive power of radical evil to construct a name, and a national project of eliminating particular others.
For the moment, Badiouâs logic of Ethics helps us to reconceptualize as a political space, what has often been seen as a historical paradox in dictatorial regimes. Much like the German Nazi regime, the dictatorships of the region structured their politicial projects by bolstering them with an ideological scaffolding that justified their interventions on an ethico-political plane. Political violence through state terrorism became the operating currency of states whose economic plans necessitated the ethical claim that no individual or collective group may be permitted to derail the momentum of the regimeâs claimed return to order. The effect of codifying such exclusionary imperatives into state pronouncements familiar to its citizens is to co-opt the ideas of good and evil into functioning principles that make sense only within the system of their enunciationâusing the linguistic ground as the basis for a new and imaginary national community. The result is that the systemâs fundamental logic subjects ethical norms to itself, and then it bolsters its credibility affectively, through a logically articulate dichotomy between the selves within the space of the dictatorial regimes and the others who exist to be excluded from itâthe systemâs site of enunciations2 provides a set of coherent ethical principles, expressed in certain narrative forms, that help individuals evade certain traditional âethical normsâ if they are to function as part of the new collectives.
Some of this is grounded on analyses based on Jacques Lacanâs idea of the Symbolic Order and its master signifiers, but it is useful to call Badiouâs impressive new vocabulary for ethics into play to see what else is going on in this situation. Badiou extends this model to introduce new terms: the event, the immortal name, and the unnameable. Event refers not to a historical moment, but rather to a framework of understanding which calls the memory of history into being, sometimes through the agency of groups and sometimes by other hegemonic forces. By designating an event, a field of enunciation forms a nexus that becomes memorable in new ways. That event framework, in the case of the Southern Cone dictatorships and other political dominants, is usually structured around an immortal name, a master signifier, a signifier posited as the reference point to the structure of life within the public sphere, and then bolstered by the calling into existence of the unnameable, an other from the outside of that life, posited by that reference point.
Thus, deconstructionâs analysis reveals itself as somewhat limited, as it neglects the effects of the emergence of such an immortal name on both community and individual consciousness, and on the whole structure of public memory and community ethics. When a name emerges, it excludes, in an effect that Badiou calls the closure of the event. This overt strategy of introducing such a name as a fixed and finite point of reference is part of the enunciation of a national projectâa name such as martyr or a savior or a victim, chosen as an immortal name by a government, creates a historical singularity, a discrete event that can be used to structure the verbal and practical justifications for greater networks of governmental and âprivateâ action in this specific state. The act of naming posits the existence of an âevent,â a moment in which individuals are interpolated into the network of such enunciations as national subjects (Maoâs Cultural Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the vision of a Left-governed Spanish Amer...