Latinamericanism after 9/11

3. Deconstruction and Latinamericanism (apropos AlbertoMoreiras’s The Exhaustion of Difference)

chapter three Deconstruction and Latinamericanism (apropos Alberto Moreiras’s The Exhaustion of Difference) Alberto Moreiras’sThe Exhaustion of Differencewas one of the most wideranging and influential books in the field of Latin American literary and cultural studies in the period immediately preceding and following 9/11.1 I would like to use it here to reflect more generally on the relation between deconstruction and Latinamericanism. I should begin by saying that this relation is a complex one, in the sense that deconstruction functions in this relation as both a critique but also a new form of Latinamericanism.2 The Exhaustion of Difference follows or anticipates a cluster of publications that shared this double ambition, some by former students or associates of Moreiras—for example, Idelber Avelar’s The Untimely Present, GarethWilliams’sThe Other Side of the Popular, Brett Levinson’sThe Ends of Literature, or Patrick Dove’sThe Catastrophe of Modernity—and others by the group of writers and critics associated with Nelly Richard’s Revista de Crítica Cultural in Chile, among them Diamela Eltit, Willy Thayer, Federico Galende, SergioVillalobos, Kemy Oyarzún, and Richard herself. Though it would be too much to speak here of a “school,” one could speak perhaps of a collective “intervention” along certain lines of theoretical and personal affinity, which I perhaps too restrictively characterize here as deconstruction. Kate Jenckes has dubbed this intervention the “New Latin Americanism,” alluding to the project of the New Americanism in American studies, which was also indebted to deconstruction in some ways.3 She intends the phrase to describe the work of Moreiras and the North American–based group in particular (which she is herself part of), 44 chapter three but it could be extended to include the Chilean group as well: the boundaries between the two groups have been relatively porous. The approximation of deconstruction and Latinamericanism has its roots in an earlier, “first-wave” critical articulation, of which perhaps the most celebrated example was Sylvia Molloy’s book Signs of Borges. It also includes more generally the work of what might be called the “Yale school” in Latin American literary criticism (which of course is not limited to nor coextensive with critics actually at or from Yale); for example (to cite just a few particularly influential texts), Roberto González Echevarr ía’sVoice of the Masters and Myth and Archive, Djelal Kadir’s Questing Fictions, Carlos Alonso’s The Latin American Regional Novel, and Doris Sommer’s Foundational Fictions. As I noted in the introduction, Moreiras himself argues that the foundational gesture of Latinamericanist deconstruction was Enrico Mario Santí’s notion of the relation between Latinamericanist discourse, which Santí conceived of on the model of Said’s idea of Orientalism, and what he called, taking the term from Geoffrey Hartmann, “restitutional excess.” Politically, the character of this first-wave intervention of deconstruction in the Latin American field was ambiguous. On the whole its practitioners could be described as sympathizers of the Left or left-liberals, although in some cases they took a position that was more explicitly critical of the Left (Santí and González Echevarría, for example, were products of Cuban exile culture after the revolution).What is undoubtedly the case, however, was that more often than not what was deconstructed in the work of first-wave deconstruction were the claims of certain forms of literary and literary-critical discourse associated with the nationalist or populist left in Latin America, or with positions of “solidarity” with Latin America from abroad, to “speak for” the Latin American subject.4 There is a continuity (most notably, around the critique of supposedly naive readings of testimonio) between this first wave, which breaks in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and the “second-wave” variant of deconstruction represented by The Exhaustion of Difference and the New Latin Americanism in the late 1990s and first decade of the new century. What is “new” about the New Latin Americanism, however, and what it has in common with Gayatri Spivak and with Derrida himself (though not with de Man or Yale school criticism generally), is that it sees its intervention as a force for the renewal of, if not the Left in a traditional sense, then certainly an emancipatory politics to come in the emerging new world deconstruction and latinamericanism 45 orderof globalization. Moreiras calls this “a thinking for the interregnum” (90–91), borrowing an idea from Paul Bové, who...