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Pablo Oyarzun is one of the foremost Benjamin scholars in Latin America. His writings have shaped the reception of Benjamin’s work in Latin America and have been central to the effort to identify the tasks and responsibilities of the kind of critical theory that would interrupt social violence. In this book Oyarzun examines some of the key concepts in Benjamin’s work – including his concepts of translation, experience, history and storytelling – and relates them to his own systematic reflection on the nature and implications of ‘doing justice’. What is meant by the words ‘justice was done’? The passive voice is important here. On the one hand, justice does nothing: it is not ...
The Untimely Present examines the fiction produced in the aftermath of the recent Latin American dictatorships, particularly those in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile. Idelber Avelar argues that through their legacy of social trauma and obliteration of history, these military regimes gave rise to unique and revealing practices of mourning that pervade the literature of this region. The theory of postdictatorial writing developed here is informed by a rereading of the links between mourning and mimesis in Plato, Nietzsche's notion of the untimely, Benjamin's theory of allegory, and psychoanalytic / deconstructive conceptions of mourning. Avelar starts by offering new readings of works produced be...
This book rethinks the nature of testimony beyond the ground of the human in works produced in Chile and Argentina from the 1970s to the present. Focusing on literature by Juan Gelman, Sergio Chejfec, and Roberto Bolaño, as well as art by Eugenio Dittborn, Kate Jenckes argues that these works represent life, death, and the relation between self and other "beyond the human," that is beyond the sense that we can know and represent ourselves and others, with powerful implications for our understanding of history, community, and politics. Jenckes engages with the work of Jacques Derrida together with the intellectually rigorous field of Chilean aesthetic theory to explore issues related to the nature of testimony.
Translated from the Spanish De lo extraordinario: Nominalismo y Modernidad, this book argues that a defining aspect of modernity is an ever-increasing pursuit of, and need for, what Eduardo Sabrovsky calls "the extraordinary," a term that encompasses both the exception and the miraculous. Sabrovsky shows the degree to which Robert Musil's novel The Man without Qualities functions as a paradoxical paradigm of the extraordinary, and he extends the theoretical insights drawn from Musil's magisterial work through a series of inquiries into cardinal elements of modern literature, material culture, historiography, physical science, psychoanalysis, and political theory. Sabrovsky demonstrates how the extraordinary condition of modernity emerges from the debates conducted by the last representatives of medieval scholasticism in which nominalism defeated realism, and he resituates the results of this triumph of nominalism in the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and Georges Bataille, among others.
Martin Heidegger is one of the twentieth century's most important philosophers. His ground-breaking works have had a hugely significant impact on contemporary thought through their reception, appropriation and critique. His thought has influenced philosophers as diverse as Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Arendt, Adorno, Gadamer, Levinas, Derrida and Foucault, among others. In addition to his formative role in philosophical movements such as phenomenology, hermeneutics and existentialism, structuralism and post-structuralism, deconstruction and post-modernism, Heidegger has had a transformative effect on diverse fields of inquiry including political theory, literary criticism, theology, gender theory,...
Latin American Studies Association Visual Culture Section Best Book Prize Latin American Studies Association Historia Reciente y Memoria Section Best Book Prize The role of documentary photography in exposing and protesting the crimes of a dictatorship After Augusto Pinochet rose to power in Chile in 1973, his government abducted, abused, and executed thousands of his political opponents. The Insubordination of Photography is the first book to analyze how various collectives, organizations, and independent media used photography to expose and protest the crimes of Pinochet’s authoritarian regime. Ángeles Donoso Macaya discusses the ways human rights groups such as the Vicariat...
This book is the long-overdue publication in English of Aimé Césaire’s account of Toussaint Louverture, the legendary leader of the revolution in Saint-Domingue – a slave revolt against French colonial rule that led to the founding of the independent republic of Haiti. Saint-Domingue was the first country in modern times to confront the colonial question in practice and in all its complexity. When Toussaint Louverture burst onto the historical stage, various political movements already existed for political autonomy, free trade and social equality. But the French Revolution established a compelling understanding of universal liberty: the Declaration of Human Rights opened up the possib...
Within the violence our societies must confront today exists a dimension proper to language. Anyone who has been through the educational system, for example, recognizes how language not only shapes and models us, but also imposes itself upon us. During the twentieth century, this system revealed how language can condemn one to a certain death. In The Vocation of Writing, philosopher Marc Crépon explores this dimension of language, convinced that the node of all violence pertains first to language and how we make use of it. Crépon focuses on Kafka, Levinas, Singer, and Derrida, not only because each rose against commandeering language in order to warn against the next massacres, but also because their work affirms the vocation of writing—that which makes literature and philosophy the final weapon for unmasking the violence and hatred that language bears at its heart. To affirm the vocation of writing is to turn language against itself, to defuse its murderous potentialities by opening it toward exchange, responsibility, and humanity when the latter fixes the other and the world as its goals.
Colonial Trauma is a path-breaking account of the psychosocial effects of colonial domination. Following the work of Frantz Fanon, Lazali draws on historical materials as well as her own clinical experience as a psychoanalyst to shed new light on the ways in which the history of colonization leaves its traces on contemporary postcolonial selves. Lazali found that many of her patients experienced difficulties that can only be explained as the effects of “colonial trauma” dating from the French colonization of Algeria and the postcolonial period. Many French feel weighed down by a colonial history that they are aware of but which they have not experienced directly. Many Algerians are traum...
Indigenous leader and activist Ailton Krenak reminds us that we must awaken from the comatose senselessness we have been immersed in since the beginning of the modern colonial project, where order, progress, development, consumerism, and capitalism have taken over our entire existence, leaving us only very partially alive, and, in fact, almost dead. To awaken from the coma of modernity is, for Krenak, to awaken to the possibility of becoming attuned to “the cosmic sense of life.” He points out that the COVID-19 pandemic affects all so-called “human” lives and that the time is ripe for us all to reflect on and undo the exclusivity and distinction that have characterized the concept of humanity throughout Western modernity.