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  • Violence and Naming: On Mexico and the Promise of Literature by David E. Johnson
  • Lucas Izquierdo
Johnson, David E. Violence and Naming: On Mexico and the Promise of Literature. U of Texas P, 2019. 274 pages.

Violence and Naming: On Mexico and the Promise of Literature intersects with multiple epistemological models that oscillate from Hegelian idealism to Husserl's phenomenology and Derrida's post-structuralism. In dialogue with European continental philosophy, the text incorporates hermeneutical frameworks generated in Mexico to include Antonio Caso, Octavio Paz, and Alfonso Reyes. The book is comprised of an introduction, five chapters, and a postscript that interweave intellectual practices and aspirations that, as the essay genre, emerge at the crossroads of philosophical meditations, socio-historical analysis, and literary criticism. The analysis oscillates amid staging an argument and destabilizing the conditions of possibility of such reasoning, and this narrative sequencing at times evokes Herlinghaus' Violence Without Guilt (2009) or Bakhtin's famed Dialogic Imagination (1975). Navigating the tension between logical-deductive reasoning and non-linear modalities of thought, readers are invited to cipher and unveil generative categories of time/space that point towards a Mexican specificity. The analysis wishes to both render and efface a given intellectual gesture or social practice. As naming and violence intersect, the book calls for an audience that feels confortable traversing multiple planes of thought. [End Page 581]

The introduction sets the stage for a symbiotic relationship of violence and naming. The text reveals a schism vis-à-vis language and the world, as the name is by definition other than what it designates. The gap or aporia amid words and the worlds expressed or produced constitute double binds, which Johnson deftly situates in Mexico's philosophical, literary, and socio-historical legacy. The doubling of a given signifier ruptures the world it partitions, and the oscillation generates variable hermeneutical methods that ground the analysis of seemingly distinct disciplines, traditions, and historical contexts that crisscross Mexico's heterogeneous landscapes. Although Johnson's analysis focuses on Mexico, it aims to be universal. The first chapter, titled "Dar(se) cuenta: The Logic of the Secret," dialogues with Colón, Malinche, Cortés, Bernal Díaz, and Las Casas up to twentieth-century authors O'Gorman and Octavio Paz. Language as secret reveals yet occludes that which is expressed, illuminated, or conceived. The desires to conceal yet reveal the possession of a secret are rendered analogous to language's effacing/naming of the world. Language as the origin of non-truth and simulacrum, hence secret, mediates ongoing constitutions of community, and the logic of the secret both divides and establishes social interactions. Engaging with symbols and signs in Hegel and Derrida, the section's creative layering of idealism and post-structural traditions "counts/accounts" for the other as a constitutive secret.

Chapter two, titled "Murder and Symbol: Feminicide's Remains," focuses on how to account for deaths and disappearances in the midst of a neoliberal landscape that decrees human capital fungible. Introducing a genealogy on naming, including Plato, Colón, and Todorov, the sections dialogues with González Rodríguez's poignant work on countless female murders on the northern Mexican frontier. To name, count, or account for the dead is a double gesture that both re-inscribes their memory and effaces their singularity. In dialogue with Hägglund, the text conceptualizes time deferral to problematize the remembrance of the murdered. The analysis interrelates semiotic iterability with neoliberal border economics. The third chapter, titled "As If … Literature before the World," focuses on the intersection of writing and civilization. Literature as constitutive fiction navigates ideality, identity, and writing to stage the world that it names. It has the uncanny potential to interrelate language and law without claiming either. The literary text can constitute anything, claim no truth, and yet promise alternate forms of subject and community. Johnson deftly interplays Alfonso Reyes and Antonio Caso with Husserl and Derrida. A perceived ontology of speech is displaced by a mechanics of writing, which echoes Derrida's Of Grammatology (1976).

In attention to Roberto Bolaño, Alfonso Reyes, and José Vasconcelos, chapter four's "Killing Time: Jet Lag, or the Anachronism of Life" traces a "structural incompleteness of...

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