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Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies
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Literary Communism, a Manifesto of the Rearguard Juan Duchesne Winter
Online publication date: 02 December 2010
To cite this Article Duchesne Winter, Juan(2010) 'Literary Communism, a Manifesto of the Rearguard', Journal of Latin
American Cultural Studies, 19: 3, 225 — 236 To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/13569325.2010.528889 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13569325.2010.528889
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Juan Duchesne Winter LITERARY COMMUNISM, A MANIFESTO OF
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THE REARGUARD Just five years before the terrible seismic event that has recently afflicted Haiti, in a book titled La cohe´e du Lamentin, the Martinican writer Edouard Glissant, an intellectual heir to Frantz Fanon, alluded to existing premonitions of great geological catastrophes looming over the Caribbean in order to meditate about what he called ‘la pense´e du Tremblement’ (2005: 128) (thinking about Temblor). In the word ‘Tremblement’, as capitalized by Glissant, he gathers the musical, rhythmical, psychological and geological denotations it has in French, including the sense of ‘earthquake’, in order to convey an ethics and an aesthetics of utopian thought. The ominous and permanent premonition of a mega-catastrophic tremor, capable of sinking entire islands that the Caribbean shares with so many other places in the world, according to the Martinican poet harbors an atrocious irony, which should shake Creole conformism in his country and in the region. With cruel humor, Glissant plays with the title words of Paul Gilroy’s wellknown book, The Black Atlantic, in order to lead us, the readers, to ask ourselves if the Caribbean is not, in fact, on the verge of becoming a Black Atlantis (2005: 14), that is, another replica of the sunken Western paradigm of Utopia. However, Glissant assumes precisely this ultimate post-utopian experience, as intimated by the imminence of catastrophe, as a point of departure to rethink an other Utopia deliberately counterpoised to the apocalyptic eschatology within which the Western utopical tradition is embedded. In this exercise of his poetic art of theory, Glissant manages to articulate in a single metaphor, ‘la pense´e du Tremblement’, a thought on utopia that is shaken to its roots by the premonition of catastrophe, but which can also extract the rhythm of creation of the new out of the temblor that threatens us all. This can happen because Glissant literally shakes the Western notion of utopia and decides that he is not interested at all in the kind of utopia that corresponds to a scheme of final salvation or implies systems of social perfection (2005: 142). Neither is he interested in utopias subjected to a system of thought or implying a thought of system (2005: 33). On the other hand, Catastrophe does not constitute an end of time in what Glissant considers as a Caribbean cultural reflexology, but a beginning inscribed in the calamitous Atlantic slave trade and the ethnocide of indigenous populations in the Caribbean. Catastrophe also constitutes a threshold through which the present continues to flow, under the colonial and neocolonial conditions that prevail. Utopia, for this Caribbean thinker, does not contain visions of paradise, perfected hygiene, total security, transparence or uniformity. He prefers to think of utopia beyond any closed notion of wholeness, and he embraces, as we saw, the metaphor of ‘Tremblement’ in order to locate utopia in the out-of-place of resistance to exploitation and to suffering, as well as in the out-of-place of desire and the delirious excess of peoples and multitudes. Glissant (2005: 135) also embraces Gilles Deleuze’s dictum (1998: 4), according to which the function of Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Vol. 19, No. 3 December 2010, pp. 225-236 ISSN 1356-9325/print 1469-9575 online q 2010 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/13569325.2010.528889
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literature is to convoke peoples, which also implies contributing to invent them. And these peoples can only be convoked as the portentous reverse, full of creative life rhythms, of that other catastrophe more ominous than many geological tremors, which Glissant identifies as neoliberal globalization. It is within this reflection, coming from someone who thinks the world from the place in the world that was granted to him, from a trembling, hurricane-ravaged and invaded place that I share as a Puerto Rican, where I want to think literary communism, according to my reinterpretation of the notion first elaborated by Jean-Luc Nancy some decades ago.1 What is literary communism? We may sustain this definition as a banner: Literary communism is the free encounter of the different as equals in the commons of writing. The commons of communism implies both places and moments experienced in community within difference, as constructed by writing understood in a very broad sense as an unceasing play of traced and untraced marks, which includes hearing, speaking, reading and writing, as well as silence, and other arts of the lasting or evanescent trace of pictorial, acoustic, or performative characters. The adjective ‘literary’, as it stands besides the word ‘communism’, may restrict the sense we want to convey. The idea of literature is burdened by a history of exclusive, Eurocentric modernity that it cannot lay aside. Literature has been the inner fortress of the imperial lettered city located by Angel Rama in Latin America. Its potency of community has been accumulated and sequestered by the elites. It would be more suitable to talk about communicative communism, notwithstanding the redundancy, if it were not for the technocratic ideology that has colonized current communication sciences, thus confining the concept to a conformist good-feeling ideal of an eventual harmonization of codes that would guarantee a happy interchange between transmitters and receptors. In its restricted sense, communication is concerned with the effective transmission-reception of messages. But in the amplified sense that someone like Georges Bataille would give it, communication embodies, in its most radical manifestation, a mutual exposition of beings through the wounds and lacks proper to their humanity and their animality, to the extent that their individualities in communication might potentially configure a limitless and plural space in which not even the concept of collectivity may hold. This is how we may interpret the following words by Bataille: Two beings communicate with each other [ . . . ] through their hidden lacerations. No other communication can be more profound, two beings lose themselves in a convulsion that binds them. But, they may only communicate by unbinding a part of themselves. Communication connects them by their wounds, through which their unity and integrity dissipate into a fever.2 Bataille’s metaphorical formulation of the concept as an encounter between two beings, which alludes to the scandal of antinomic, erotic surrender, is extremely relevant because it is in such an act of communication, with virtually mystical projections in the sense that it exceeds codes and systems of knowledge, where Bataille places his thorough search of non-knowledge, a search he shares with Fernando Pessoa, Jose´ Lezama Lima, and Glissant, all of whom use active non-knowledge, and conscious opacity as a basis for poetic gnosis.3 Another extremely relevant aspect of the words just quoted from Bataille concerning communication is that he mentions a community
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of two. This is to say, a community that is paradoxically un-communitarian, where we find an excellent image of literary communism, insofar as the scandalous community of lovers that turns its back upon society defies conventional community as a collective unity closed upon a code of accepted customs. The community of lovers threatens to open up the unthinkable, suppressed reverse of the overwhelming community of the same; it threatens to open the community of difference, in the sense of Glissant’s rapprochement of utopia to chaos, to the ungraspable sum of rhythms and tremors, which he opposes to all system building. Maurice Blanchot suggests that the community of lovers not only makes society tremble, but it also harbors universal catastrophe: The community of lovers [ . . . ] has as its essential finality the destruction of society. There where an episodic community of two beings who may be made for each other springs up, a war machine is constituted, or better said, a possibility of catastrophe emerges, that carries within it, even in an infinitesimal dose, the threat of universal annihilation.4 Blanchot is of course referring to antinomic lovers, scandalously united against society. The antisocial and antinomic advocation of the community of lovers is essential to the idea of communism and also to the idea of utopia that we obtain from Glissant’s poetics. In its cosmic rebellion against all practical means and purposes, against all projects, be they collective or individual, and against the very idea of salvation, the community of lovers utters a psychic and ethical call against the systemic delusions that have absorbed Western utopian projects tuned to the mantra of progress and infinite accumulation, which includes both market capitalism and the state capitalism of Stalinist and other dictatorial ‘socialist’ regimes. With the preceding words, I pretend to enable in this context, in order to rethink them, the two terms that Jean-Luc Nancy has dared to join and posit in their unity, in spite of the indelible blemish they bear: communism and literature. We know that communism bears the atrocious history of Stalinism and its heirs, and that literature carries the stigma of an elitist appropriation of writing, and it is good that they continue carrying that history, which we should never forget; we do not need any more pure concepts or ideals. The history these terms carry is not contingent or accidental, it is intrinsic to their heretical excess. As Peggy Kamuf sustains, there is a principle of ruin that never ceases to threaten the concept of resistance. She asks: ‘Can we have a general concept of resistance that does not include a resistance to itself, which would ruin it as a concept?’ (2002: 8). Certainly one cannot pretend to raise human practice above the leveling forces of what simply is, and defy history in ethical and existential terms, without risking abysmal falls. We may add that those falls continue to be a responsibility, a ‘never again’ reminder, but they need not paralyze all possibility of human revolutionary action in the broadest sense. To sum up: communism never ceases to pose an idea of community that exceeds mere communitarian sociability in the realm of the same, of the kind related to projects of systemic hygiene of the social. Communism claims a radical expansion of the commons, which may congregate in the universal free encounter of the different as equal. On a converging path, literature is literally pregnant with countless counter-poetics that are capable of convoking peoples to the commons of amplified writing. Moreover, writing can invoke, beyond verbal language, the act of communication as the radical exposition
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and mutual surrender of being that subverts social codes. I want to stress, even if it seems redundant, that the notion of the commons is what links communism and literature. I adopt Antonio Negri’s use of the word (Negri and Cocco 2006: 28) as designating, not an utilitarian management of difference, nor the making viable of differences in designated spaces where they may intersect, but the conflictive opening up of all spaces and goods to be lived and shared in common, something that implies contradiction and struggle, and constant resistance to the expropriation and privatization of life, and to colonial, racial, ethnic, gender and class oppression. It is within this vortex that we may place literary communism, and define it as the free encounter of the different as equals in the commons of writing. The Guyanese scholar Jerome Branche has recently proposed malungaje as a metaphor for transracial, transethnic and outer-national resistances that go beyond conventional identity politics without ignoring the need of a radical awareness of identity as a point of departure for emancipatory consciousness (Branche 2009). Branche explores the political and cultural registers of malungaje, a term he coins from malungo, a Brazilian word of Bantu origin that refers the tradition whereby Africans who had shared the same ship in their transatlantic ordeal during the slave trade would recognize each other as comrades in suffering, trauma, and survival, in order to form lifelong alliances in the New World in spite of the enormous difficulties posed by bondage for any kind of gathering or meeting of former shipmates. These alliances established a sense of community based on shared oppression and resistance originating in a catastrophic trauma that becomes a new beginning. Catastrophe becomes a potential commons on which a collective sense of identity is built. If we resort to Edouard Glissant’s distinction between identity based on filiation, and identity based on extension (1997a: 48– 55), that is, as shared experience of a symbolic and existential space, we might add that malungaje belongs to this second category. Experiences similar to malungaje are known in Trinidad (malongue), Haiti (baˆtiment), Surinam (sippi or mati) and other locations of the Atlantic Diaspora. Jerome Branche, on his part, links his metaphor of malungaje to its sisterly correlate, cimarronaje, the Spanish word for the maroon experience of runaway slave communities. He goes on to consider cimarronaje as a postraumatic trajectory that can be interpreted as a malungaje mode of identity construction. Branche finds this in the Saramaka struggle against the Surinam nationstate and transnational corporations. The Saramaka maroon people have created a narrative matrix of beginnings that articulates their collective being, called First Time (Price 1983). This narrative matrix is constructed as a repertoire of potential versions, rather than as a linear master plot. It does not stress mythical ethnic filiation, which is impossible, given the extremely diverse ancestry of New World slaves. Neither does the Saramaka epic relate to a National identity, in a situation in which the Surinam state has actually made war on them after expropriating half of their land. As Branche points out, the Saramaka epic dwells on a deeply cherished collective loyalty to the maroon struggle and its protagonists, revered as ancestors of their present resistance, and places itself in an ‘outer-national’ space, an expression used by Paul Gilroy (1993: 16 –17) to convey a degree of exteriority to the national state that is not expressed by terms like ‘transnational’ or ‘international’. These writings of the common Saramaka trajectory underwent, as Branche shows, a further stage of malungaje when the famed American anthropologist Richard Price, and his wife Sally Price, not only produced, in collaboration with the Saramakan elders, a written account of First Time (1983), but
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also became engaged in their struggles against the Surinam neocolonial state. Richard Price testified as an expert, on behalf of the Saramaka, before the Inter American Human Rights Tribunal in San Jose´, Costa Rica, during the early 1990s.5 In their confrontations with Surinam’s army during the mid eighties, Saramaka warriors wore as amulets copies of the text in which Price had collaborated. So we can conclude that the founding scriptures of the Saramaka are an oral-based text, produced in collective collaboration with American nationals, and that it is also the testimony of an instance of transethnic, outer-national collaboration in the defense of a common space against attempts of globalized expropriation as instrumented by the national state and transnational corporations. I have extended myself on Jerome Branche’s malungaje metaphor because it provides an excellent paradigm for a critical approach that listens to rumors of literary communism. Literary communism may be assumed as a post-utopian thought of Tremblement, in the sense suggested by Glissant’s expression. It is also an outer-national practice that surpasses particular national, racial and ethnic provinces to engage in a radical resistance against oppression in general. Literary communism traverses territorialities but it does not ignore them in thralldom of some stratospheric idea of cosmopolitanism, of the kind promoted by some self-proclaimed paladins of the global letters. Literary communism harbors a strong sense of the earth, from a geo-poetic stance like that assumed by Edouard Glissant in his Poetics of Relation (1997a), in which he builds a lyrical and theoretical reflection by tracing the dense network of paths traveled by Caribbean diasporas of the past and the present, according to transnational flows of labor and capital. Most probably the mission of literary communism would be to listen. Preferably it would not prescribe a specific corpus or cannon, or a menu of politically correct topics or approaches. What would be the stance of a critical practice that is responsive to literary communism? It would be a rearguard stance. There is really no lack of vanguard stances in the history of Latin American and Caribbean letters, at least in the Spanish-speaking area. What we have missed is an enduring rearguard. Even in the military sense of the metaphor, we can say that most guerrilla movements in Latin America were really drawn back by the lack of a strategic rearguard (Duchesne 2010). The rearguard is often underestimated; there is a supposition that it involves less drama and less heroism. But it can be argued that the rearguard is the heart of resistance. It is the space of relative autonomy where a new sense of community can be built, it is also a refuge from traumatic exposure to violence, a place for convalescence and creativity, and more than anything, it is an out-of-place, an outer-national location where the multitude can gather in order to launch its utopia-in-resistance. The maroon palenque or clandestine community in resistance is a concrete paradigm of the rearguard. In literary terms, the rearguard heeds the rumor of resistance, it interprets, it translates it, entertains dialogues, takes care, and builds a legacy. It does not lead the struggle, it does not point the way. Rearguard activity is not necessarily a synonym nor an antonym of militancy or activism. In tune with this paradigm, a critique that hearkens to the rumor and trembling of literary communism is in a disposition to receive the utterances that convoke peoples, which demand community, even when they engage in antinomic postures, in apparently senseless destruction or self-destruction, in what Glissant calls the delirium of communication (1997b: 623 – 721). In a contemporary scenario where nobody is
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normal, where those who claim to establish the norm are outrageously non-normal, beginning with the American Association of Psychiatry, there is no place for establishing norms, for proclaiming a literary or cultural cannon, for authorizing realism or antirealism, nor a particular subject matter, nor any style or genre. Perhaps it would be better to tune in to the delirium, to listen to what Glissant has called ‘le de´lire coutumier’ or customary delirium, which he defines as a symptom of omnipresent alienation, its most interesting mode being the dramatization of conflict (1997b: 637). If Lacan has established that the unconscious is structured like a language, then we can say that literature, and amplified writing in general, are structured like a delirium. As Deleuze has shown, delirium dissolves the frontiers between subjective and social discourse. The most intimate fantasy can be read as a social drama and vice versa. Every character is a multitude and a given multitude may be the unconscious larva of an ego. A didactic style and a hermetic style may be two sides of the same leaf. Rather than theorizing about delirium, we may prefer to engage with the theories produced by delirium, inasmuch as they articulate collective and individual desires, which can transmit catastrophic premonitions, but also prodigious signs of liberation. The critical practice of listening in the rearguard should not attempt to make delirium transparent, nor to pathologize it, but simply inscribe its inseparable illuminations and opacities. It should not count out non-knowledge nor assail that which hides from knowledge. The active opacity of the subaltern should not be subjected to epistemological aggression, but should be counted as a premise for a different knowledge. The critique of listening consists of grasping, taking care, and relaying forward. Grasping exercises discernment, taking care concerns interpretation, and relay disseminates dialogue and contributes to a legacy of creative resistance. Literary and cultural forms related to modernism and the avant-garde play an important role in the constitution of that rearguard. An increasing number of artistic, theoretical and academic practices related to the modernist experience and to the legacy of the avant-garde no longer comply with the spectacular paradigm of the entertainment complex. They confront gradual marginalization and consequently engage in a task of creative resistance as intense as that of many subaltern expressions in neocolonial or marginal spaces. This leads to a repositioning of many forms that used to be associated with so called high culture, and to their potential convergence with emerging subaltern practices, including those that reappropriate aspects of what Guy Debord defined as the society of the spectacle. One may suppose that every critical approach insinuates its creative models. But a literary communist critique should not canonize exemplary works, because it intends to grasp the instances of free encounter of the different as equals in the commons of amplified writing, wherever they come from, even if they arrive as nihilistic intimations of the impossibility of that encounter. I cannot even attempt to mention the type of works that best populate the field of literary communism because the mere act of naming an example or type would fix our critical stance to a normative expectation. But I may describe the threshold beyond which our critical practice wants to reach. We intend to exceed the threshold of what Jacques Rancie`re, in The Politics of Aesthetics, has called a ‘modernatist’ program of modernist aesthetics, one that entails, according to him, ‘the identification of forms from the aesthetic regime of the arts with forms that accomplish a task or fulfill a destiny specific to modernity’ (2004: 26). Literary communism is not harbored in any particular form or subject-matter, it claims no organic link to any
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genre, form, medium, content or approach. Neither does literary communism seek a form that may embody the aspirations of a particular class or community; it does not seek a community equal to itself, but an excessive community that performs aspirations of equality on an open, common stage that convokes peoples as a plurality unfixed to specific communitarian ideals. We have considered the unmoored, outer national palenques, the malungo alliances and Saramaka activism as instances of these pluralities, not as identitary, self-enclosed communities, which they may also be. Thereby we agree with Jacques Rancie`re when he claims that literary locutions ‘do not produce collective bodies [ . . . ]’, that ‘[i]nstead, they introduce lines of fracture and disincorporation into imaginary collective bodies [ . . . ]’, and when he adds that ‘[t]he channels for political subjectivation are not those of imaginary identification but those of “literary disincorporation”’(39 – 40). As I write this I think about Costa Rican writer Anacristina Rossi. Her recent novel, Limo´n Reggae (2007), brings us to the limits of ‘modernatist’ attempts to produce a collective Latin American incorporation by linking a particular form to a modern emancipatory destiny, in this case, the forms of the historical-didactic novel and the sentimental education of the revolutionary. To a certain extent, the story line of Limo´n Reggae re-enacts the sentimental education of the revolutionary as artist and as critic, the kind of fable that the Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier bequeathed upon us in his impressive historical novel El siglo de las luces, written in the 1950s. Carpentier’s emancipation sagas are also part of our sentimental education as Latin American readers. In fact, Limo´n Reggae duly quotes El siglo de las luces in an epigraph. Rossi’s text also narrates the unraveling of the link between modernist form and modern emancipatory agendas, not by an existentialist disillusion of the kind experienced by Esteban in Carpentier’s El siglo de las luces, but because of an aesthetico-political delinking. Limo´n Reggae is the second novel of a trilogy that began with Limo´n Blues, and readers are still expecting the third part. We don’t know if its title will be Limo´n Passa Passa. The hero of Limo´n Reggae is Laura, a depauperized middle-class young woman from the Central Valley of Costa Rica, the region that really constitutes a synecdoche of the white Creole elite that has defined the nation as racially white and culturally European, disregarding its plural ethnic composition, which includes, among other indigenous and migrant constituencies, an important West Indian population in the socalled Atlantic coast, whose capital is Puerto Limo´n. Laura herself is of mixed origin, having been partly raised during her adolescence by her Palestinian aunt in Limo´n. She adheres her vocation as a painter to a personal quest involving a succession of intense political and erotic enthusiasms that lead her through a series of conflictive scenarios of the kind that Arjun Appadurai would call global or transnational scapes (1996: 42). In a sentimental and revolutionary quest that reminds us of Esteban and Sofı´a in El siglo de las luces, she participates in the struggles of Afro Antillian Costa Rican youths in Limo´n, she enters the Communist Party of Costa Rica, she becomes a combatant in the guerrillas of El Salvador; later she convalesces in a Rastafarian community in Cahuita from the psychological and physical wounds suffered in the Salvadoran front, to eventually join a Mara Salvatrucha gang led by an estranged son she had adopted during the Salvadoran war. Laura explicitly characterizes her adventures as a never-ending quest for utopia. Her quest is marked by three big epiphanies, which she experiences as existential earthquakes that may be compared to Bataille’s riveting moments of radical
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communication: (1) the erotic epiphany; (2) the epiphany of revolutionary violence, which may be interpreted in Frantz Fanon’s sense; (3) and the aesthetic epiphany as expressed by reggae music. Each epiphany invokes multitudinous processions, insurgent masses: sex will convoke a legion of androgynous men and women who have the power to surrender themselves without qualm, revolutionary violence will invoke masses of indigenous peasants, the pulse of reggae calls forward the Afro-Antillean multitude that straddles the Central American Caribbean coast, the Caribbean islands and the cities of the North. This sequence of epiphanies assumes the structure of a delirium that mixes individual desires with multitudinous flows. Laura meditates on utopia with all her being, by engaging herself body and soul in an experience that far exceeds the bourgeois ideal of a sentimental education. We can say that she literally makes love, kills, and dances to the music in a frequently ecstatic pursual of utopia, in order to arrive at an extremely critical and negative reflection on the utopian dream embraced by the best minds of her generation. One of the results of this traumatic reflection is that Laura destroys her hyperrealist and expressionist paintings and abandons her artistic vocation altogether, haunted by her most violent revolutionary deed, the Mata Hari style seduction and killing of a counterinsurgent spy. I read this break with her artistic vocation as a post-allegorical sundering apart of the narrative form of the historical-didactical novel vis-a`-vis modern agendas of emancipation. The text renders a lucid delinking of modernist form and modern political emancipation, stated as a meta-poetical proposition. Like Carpentier’s El siglo de las luces, Limo´n Reggae is a historical novel about revolution. However, reference to historical events is much more precise in Limo´n Reggae. As Bataille has taught, ecstasy and lucidity are not mutually exclusive. Laura welcomes ecstasy without moral regrets, which in turn empowers her sense of ethical responsibility and enables her to produce an extremely lucid analysis of historical events. The story of Laura, as it switches between the first and the third person, weaves into the narrative a number of compelling analyses on: (1) the achievements and shortcomings of the war strategy followed by the Frente Farabundo Marti de Liberacio´n Nacional (FMLN); (2) the tragic internal crisis of the guerrilla leadership, which includes a detailed account of the murder of Comandante Ana Marı´a and the suicide of Comandante Marcial; (3) the peace negotiations in Central America; (4) the struggles of Afro-Costa Ricans in Limo´n; (5) the influence of the Black Panthers in Limo´n, and their suppression; (6) the cultural resistance of the Rastafari; (7) the nihilistic drive of the Mara gangs; and (8) the privatization of vast ecological reserves in the Limo´n coast and consequent displacement of Afro-Costa Ricans. At the end of the novel, the disillusioned protagonist has extinguished all her twentieth-century enthusiasms except for two of them: her admiration for the American Black Panthers, and her love of reggae and the Rastafarian ethos. Bob Marley’s hymn, No woman no cry, is playing as she decides to go out with friends in what appears to be a new engagement with Costa Rican activism against the violent anti-Mara policy of the government and against the privatization of the Limo´n coastal reserve. Her new post-utopian vision abandons Eurocentric systems of thought, including the Marxist-Leninist credo of the guerrillas, but she assumes a listening stance vis-a`-vis the resistances and rhizomatic rhythms of impending social catastrophe. This listening, rearguard stance is consonant with an aesthetic breach that challenges the cultural conventions of mestizaje on which Latin Americanist policies of the Central American
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revolution were based. She connects to an aesthetic, sensorial, erotic and affective structure, represented by both the Afro Antillean form of reggae, and her Rastafari lover in Cahuita, that is, an outer national excessive community excluded by Central American national projects. I cannot help remembering the experience that a Black American friend related to me concerning her solidarity activism in Bluefields, Nicaragua during the Sandinista government. She organized a modern dance group and workshop for Bluefilen˜o youths of Afro Antillean ascendance, only to have it disbanded months later by orders of Rosario Murillo, the wife of President Daniel Ortega, on the grounds that Afro-Antillean and Afro American cultural agency did not comply with Sandinista cultural policy. We should also note, in this context, the peculiar manner in which Anacristina Rossi incorporates West Indian English in the Spanish text, by using a technique that Sofı´a Kearns calls ‘mimetic bilingualism’ (Kearns 2006: 20). She actually writes in Spanish with an ear tuned to West Indian English, and on occasions the text switches briefly to West Indian English. The sum of the attributes of this novel places it completely outside of the ‘national allegory’ model that Fredric Jameson (1986: 69) and Peter Hallward (2001: 77) seem to prescribe for postcolonial narratives. In any case, Limo´n Reggae performs an outer-national politico-aesthetical investment. The sequence of world-scapes traversed in the novel trace emblematic flows of multitudes, traumas, desires and aspirations linked to the global accumulation of capital. In this sense, the displacements of Anacristina Rossi’s heroine sketch a geopoetics that is also a geopolitics. Against all prognostics of the demise of the subject in postmodern times, sometimes derived from poor readings of deconstruction, this text enacts a very strong subject that evolves as a strategic subjectivity in continuous recomposition. Peggy Kamuf clearly warns in her reading of Derrida that resistance to the sovereignty of the subject ‘does not mean cancellation, annulment, destruction, or negation of the subject’ (2002: 15). Rossi’s Laura enters into composition with a wide array of multitudinous events that nevertheless relate to cultural, social, and political resistances that converge in intense, explosive, and antinomic demands of community against the reigning global forces intending to expropriate the commons. This subject-incomposition is paradoxical: its great strength is also its vulnerability: a great capacity for struggle entails a great sensibility. Laura is equipped with an extreme capacity to rebel that is also a capacity to be affected by events. Her unstoppable determination entails syncopes of melancholy. Laura’s subjectivity-in-composition is congruent with her love of the particular backbeat sound practiced in reggae music. Reggae’s backbeat is an allegorical fragment of the popular with no necessary filiation to modern narrative genres. It is part of a free-flowing outer national scape that challenges the hierarchies of the modern sublime with its democratic ecstasy. It bypasses the modern as project while at the same time it fulfills the modern as a common stage for the free play of feelings, sensibilities and affects of equals.6 The text describes how the reggae syncopation introduces a riveting, amplified instant of silence just where a strong beat should follow. In other words, a vacillation, a tremor, introduces itself into a sequence of traces, which connotes how writing involves the absence of the trace, as well as its presence, and how opacity, silence, and the catastrophe of sense are inherent to the creation of meaning. Within that parenthesis of syncopation, Laura claims to feel ‘the power and the glory’, an expression that reminds us of Bataille’s idea of sovereignty, obtained with the lucid
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assumption of the infinitely ambiguous multiplicity of the universe, and its affirmation as the only available fulcrum of meaning. In this sense, Anacristina Rossi’s intimation of post-utopian times points to a syncopated utopia. But at the end of the novel Rossi’s protagonist acts as a metaphorical subject, in Jose´ Lezama Lima’s sense,7 who exceeds the threshold defined by the novel itself. She is delinked from modern culture as project, as ‘modernatism’; in fact she could as well have invested her performance of equality on many other fragments of the contemporary cultural landscape able to serve as a commons. This conception, as suggested by Limo´n Reggae, fans out a wide register of ideas that may be heeded by us, among them: (1) Utopia conceived as trance, rather than as finality or teleology; (2) resistance as a stance that is radically prior8 to the opposition between activity and passivity; (3) the political subject as an effect of free, nonhierarchical, and heteronomous aesthetical compositions of affects, sensations, desires, thoughts, actions, ethics, acquiring a collective post-artistic nature (beyond the modernist sense of the autonomous form of art); (4) the conception of collective agency as an exposition to fractured becomings that demand the constant opening of the common; and (5) critical and creative practices assumed as common spaces of present gathering, encounter, inquiry, transformation, or relay, rather than as agendas for the future or opportunities of instrumental agency. These ideas presuppose that Laura’s expression in Limo´n Reggae, ‘the power and the glory’, may be read as implying that she has resemantized ‘power’ and ‘glory’ to refer, not to the fulfillment of possession of self and others, but to the release from the fetters of the political and aesthetic subject as a project of infinite harnessing, accumulation, concentration, and subjugation of life forces. Notes 1 Cf. Jean-Luc Nancy’s essay, ‘Literary Communism’, in The Inoperative Community. See also Juan Duchesne Winter, Comunismo literario y teorı´as deseantes (2009). 2 Quoted by Koichiro Hamano in Georges Bataille: La perte, le don et l’e´criture, 152. My English translation of quoted text. 3 Cf. Fernando Pessoa, Libro del desasosiego [Livro do Desassossego], fragment 149, p. 167; Jose´ Lezama Lima, ‘Confluencias’, in Introduccio´n a los vasos o´rficos, 255; Georges Bataille, The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge. It is true that Bataille aims at transparency, but it is a radical transparency that departs from objective and subjective knowledge. Bataille rejects the kind of opacity that is the result of the unconscious, of alienation or deficiency, but he welcomes the lucid exploration of the opaque. Besides, as Celia Britton has noted, Glissant, on his part, clearly conceives opacity as a strategy assumed by the colonial subject against the epistemological violence of the colonizer. Cf. Celia Britton, Edouard Glissant and Postcolonial Theory, 25. 4 My English translation of quoted text, Maurice Blanchot, La Communaute´ inavouable, 80. 5 At the moment of writing, Richard Price’s book on this human rights epic was not yet published: Rainforest Warriors. Human Rights on Trial. University of Pennsylvania Press, December 2010. 6 See Paul Gilroy’s suggestive reading of the ‘outer-national’ impact of Bob Marley, in Darker Than Blue: On the Moral Economies of Black Atlantic Culture, 105, and passim. 7 Jose´ Lezama Lima uses the expression ‘sujeto metafo´rico’ (metaphorical subject) to convey a subject that is the effect of a series of undecipherable event-traces, and the
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result of a series of poetical mutations in which the subject is not an interpreter, but an effect of a heteronomous process of interpretation, in the broad sense of the word. See La expresio´n americana, 290. 8 Cf. Thomas Carl Wall, Radical Passivity, 2 and passim.
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References Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large. Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bataille, Georges. 2001. The Unfinished System of Non-Knowledge, edited by Stuart Kendall. Translated by Michelle Kendall and Stuart Kendall. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Blanchot, Maurice. 1983. La Communaute´ inavouable. Paris: Minuit. Branche, Jerome. 2009. Malungaje: hacia una poe´tica de la dia´spora africana. Bogota´: Biblioteca Nacional/Ministerio de Cultura. Britton, Celia. 1999. Edouard Glissant and Postcolonial Theory. Strategies of Language and Resistance. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Deleuze, Gilles. 1998. ‘Literature and Life’. In Essays Critical and Clinical. Translated by Daniel Smith and Michael A. Greco. London: Verso. Duchesne Winter, Juan. 2009. Comunismo literario y teorı´as deseantes: inscripciones latinoamericanas. La Paz, Bolivia: Plural Editores. Duchesne Winter, Juan. 2010. La guerrilla narrada, accio´n, acontecimiento, sujeto. San Juan: Editorial Callejo´n. Gilroy, Paul. 1993. The Black Atlantic. Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso. Gilroy, Paul. 2010. Darker Than Blue: On the Moral Economies of Black Atlantic Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Glissant, Edouard. 1997a. Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Glissant, Edouard. 1997b. Le Discours antillais. Paris: Gallimard. Glissant, E´douard. 2005. La cohe´e du Lamentin. Paris: Gallimard. Hallward, Peter. 2001. Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing Between the Singular and the Specific. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hamano, Koichiro. 2004. Georges Bataille: La perte, le don et l’e´criture. Dijon: E´ditions Universitaires. Jameson, Fredric. 1986. ‘Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism’. In Social Text 15 (Fall). Kamuf, Peggy. 2002. ‘Introduction’ to Jacques Derrida, Without Alibi. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. Stanford University Press. Kearns, Sofı´a. 2006. ‘Postcoloniality in Cristina Rossi’s Limo´n Blues’. In The South Carolina Modern Language Review 5 (1). Lezama Lima, Jose´. 1971. ‘Confluencias’. In Introduccio´n a los vasos o´rficos. Barcelona: Barral Editores. Lezama Lima, Jose´. 1975. La expresio´n americana. In Obras completas. I. Me´xico: Aguilar. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 1991. ‘Literary Communism’. In The Inoperative Community. Translated by Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland, and Simona Sawhney. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
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Negri, Antonio, and Giuseppe Cocco. 2006. Global: biopoder y luchas en una Ame´rica Latina globalizada. Buenos Aires: Paidos. Pessoa, Fernando. 2002. Libro del desasosiego [Livro do Desassossego]. Translated by Santiago Kovaldoff. Buenos Aires: Emece´. Price, Richard. 1983. First Time. The Historical Vision of an Afro-American People. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University. Rama, A´ngel. 1996. The Lettered City. Translated by John Charles Chasteen. Durham: Duke University Press. Rancie`re, Jacques. 2004. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. Translated by Gabriel Rockhill. London: Continuum. Rossi, Anacristina. 2007. Limo´n reggae. San Jose´, Costa Rica: Legado. Wall, Thomas Carl. 1999. Radical Passivity. New York: State University of New York Press.
Juan Duchesne-Winter is a professor of Latin American Literature in the University of Pittsburgh. Among his books are Narraciones de testimonio en Ame´rica Latina (1991), Polı´tica de la caricia (1996), Ciudadano Insano (2001), Fugas incomunistas (2005), and Comunismo literario y teorias deseantes: inscripciones latinoamericanas (2009). His study on factual and fictional accounts of the guerrilla experience, La guerrilla narrada: accio´n, acontecimiento, sujeto, (Guerrilla Narratives: Action, Event, Subject) came out this Fall in La Paz, Bolivia.