Session I: Historizing Desires

EDUARDO GARGUREVICH (Concordia College, Moorhead, MN): César Aira’s Rebellion Against the Opacity of History

Argentine novelist César Aira has, thus far, published more than fifty novels. One of the most salient characteristics of such hyperbolic production is the construction of narrators who build their identity in their own discovery of levels of reality that would otherwise be left undiscovered even by reality itself. This feature of Aira’s narrators surprise the reader, of course, but it specially surprise the stories and the characters generated by their own texts. It is thus that in his 1998 novel La mendiga, César Aira’s narrator utters this enigmatic phrase: “La historia está siempre encima y debajo de la realidad.” How not to recall Alain Badiou’s dictum in his 2007 essay The Century, where he proclaims that the greatest barrier to the real is reality itself? Avoiding the easy identification between history/story and the real, in this presentation I intend to explore how reality interferes with the reading of its own “history/story” in two novels by César Aira: the above mentioned La mendiga and La villa, of 2001.

ELIXABETE ANSA-GOICOECHEA (Concordia College, Moorhead, MN): The Origin of Man through Jorge Oteiza’s Writings

In 1963 the sculptor Jorge Oteiza wrote a provocative statement in Quousque Tandem…! An Essay on the Aesthetic Interpretation of the Basque Soul: “The whole process of the European prehistoric art ends in the transcendental Nothingness of the empty space of the Basque Neolithic cromlech” (77). With this statement Oteiza places the origin of the (Western) Man in a paradoxical ground. On the one hand, he describes an origin that appeals to a universal man, close to a concept –the emptiness and the nothingness—theorized already by other philosophers, such as Martin Heidegger or Michel Foucault. On the other hand, he connects such origin with a particular space: the Basque Neolithic cromlech. Dialoguing with the philosophers mentioned above, my paper aims to analyze various writings by Jorge Oteiza in order to problematize what he envisions as the origin of Man.

OSCAR ARIEL CABEZAS (Concordia College, Moorhead, MN): Decapitalizing Theory: Literature and Sovereignty in relation to León Rozitchner’s San Augustine’s Confessions

In his book Who’s Afraid of Philosophy? Right to Philosophy Derrida justified this title in order to deconstruct it. Decapitalizing the notion of right and philosophy, he showed that the most problematic subject emerges from the philosophical institution itself. How can “we” deconstruct the institutions of literature and theory in the era of immanent reduction of any field of knowledge to the logic of Late Capitalism? This paper is an attempt to deal with the possibility of decapitalizing literature and, above all, theory. I understand by decapitalizing a double movement whose force not only challenges the Latin American field but also what Heidegger called “the task of thinking.” I find this double movement in the work of the Argentine León Rozitchner, La cosa y la Cruz: Cristianismo y Capitalismo. (En torno a las Confensiones de San Agustín). Considering that Saint Augustine was one of the most significant ideologists of Christianity, I analyze Rozitchner’s work because he deconstructs the theological background of Saint Augustine’s Confessions. I think Rozitchner decapitalizes the epistemological fundaments of Saint Augustine’s book and at the same time, he decapitalizes the sovereign and phallocentric structure of Christianity and, therefore, phallocentric structure of domination.