The Exhaustion of Difference: The Politics of Latin American Cultural Studies (Post-Contemporary Interventions)

The conditions for thinking about Latin America as a regional unit in transnational academic discourse have shifted over the past decades. In The Exhaustion of Difference Alberto Moreiras ponders the ramifications of this shift and draws on deconstruction, Marxian theory, philosophy, political economy, subaltern studies, literary criticism, and postcolonial studies to interrogate the minimal conditions for an effective critique of knowledge given the recent transformations of the contemporary world. What, asks Moreiras, is the function of critical reason in the present moment? What is regionalistic knowledge in the face of globalization? Can regionalistic knowledge be an effective tool for a critique of contemporary reason? What is the specificity of Latin Americanist reflection and how is it situated to deal with these questions? Through examinations of critical regionalism, restitutional excess, the historical genealogy of Latin American subalternism, testimonio literature, and the cultural politics of magical realism, Moreiras argues that while cultural studies is increasingly institutionalized and in danger of reproducing the dominant ideologies of late capitalism, it is also ripe for giving way to projects of theoretical reformulation. Ultimately, he claims, critical reason must abandon its allegiance to aesthetic-historicist projects and the destructive binaries upon which all cultural theories of modernity have been constructed. The Exhaustion of Difference makes a significant contribution to the rethinking of Latin American cultural studies.

History

Moreiras, Alberto

Americas

Duke University Press Books

Infrapolitics: A Handbook

The personal is not political, even if politics marks it and, in many cases, determines it. Infrapolitics seeks to understand conditions of existence that are not reducible to political life and that exceed any definition of world bound to political determinations. It seeks to mobilize an exteriority without which politics could only be business or administration, that is, oppression. It demands a change in seeing and an everyday practice that subtracts from political totalization in the name of a new production of desire, of a new emancipation, and of a conception of experience that can breach the general captivation of life. In this book, Alberto Moreiras describes a form of thought aiming to provide content for a form of life and to offer a new theoretical practice for concrete existence. The book provides a genealogy of the notion of infrapolitics and places it within contemporary philosophical reflection, examining its deployment in the wake of postphenomenology and deconstruction, Lacanian analysis, the principle of anarchy, and an egalitarian symbolization of social life. In doing so, Moreiras elaborates Infrapolitics as both a general critique of the political apparatus and as an imperative horizon for existential self-understanding.

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

Fordham University Press

Review\nProvocative and gripping. You won't look at life and politics―and the wedge in between them―in the same way again.---Cristina Rivera Garza, author of Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country\nOne of the most important books concerning contemporary thought written this century.---Brett Levinson, SUNY Binghamton\nAlberto Moreiras’s Infrapolitics: A Handbook offers a timely and provocative manual, in the age-old tradition of spiritual practices and political catechisms, but with no less keen modernist intent and resolute activist gusto. The work gives further flesh and blood to a concept that subverts the available classical options and dilemmas of liberal individualism or political liberalism, on the one hand, and collective communitarianism, in both its conservative-reactionary and progressivist socialist and communist varieties, on the other. Without resorting to theologico-political or, for that matter, anarchical alternatives that likewise seek to avoid these very dichotomies, infrapolitics challenges the very notion of the political, its ontology and politics, while redirecting our understanding toward an appreciation of concrete and ontic uses the ancient and modern overarching concept once envisioned but failed to realize. Along the way, a host of new voices are added to the chorus and political theoretical canon (María Zambrano and Felipe Martínez Marzoa, to name just these two). An engagingly written manifesto written in robust and rigorous philosophical style.---Hent de Vries, Paulette Goddard Professor of the Humanities, New York University & Director, School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University\nThe personal is not political, even if politics marks it and, in many cases, determines it. Infrapolitics seeks to understand conditions of existence that are not reducible to political life and that exceed any definition of world bound to political determinations. It seeks to mobilize an exteriority without which politics could only be business or administration, that is, oppression. It demands a change in seeing and an everyday practice that subtracts from political totalization in the name of a new production of desire, of a new emancipation, and of a conception of experience that can breach the general captivation of life.\nIn this book, Alberto Moreiras describes a form of thought aiming to provide content for a form of life and to offer a new theoretical practice for concrete existence. The book provides a genealogy of the notion of infrapolitics and places it within contemporary philosophical reflection, examining its deployment in the wake of postphenomenology and deconstruction, Lacanian analysis, the principle of anarchy, and an egalitarian symbolization of social life. In doing so, Moreiras elaborates Infrapolitics as both a general critique of the political apparatus and as an imperative horizon for existential self-understanding.

In 2015, members of the philosophy department at the University of Madrid conducted an interview with Alberto Moreiras for the university’s digital archive. The resulting dialogues and the Spanish edition of this work, Marranismo e inscripción, o el abandono de la conciencia desdichada, are the basis for Against Abstraction, supplemented with an interview conducted for the Chilean journal Papel máquina. In these landmark conversations, Moreiras describes how, though he was initially committed to Latin American literary studies, he eventually transitioned to become an eminent scholar of critical theory, existential philosophy, and ultimately infrapolitics and posthegemony.
Blending intellectual autobiography with a survey of Hispanism as practiced in universities in the United States (including the schisms in Latin American subaltern studies that eventually led to Moreiras’s departure from Duke University), these narratives read like a picaresque and a polemic on the symbolic power of scholars. Drawing on the concept of marranism (originally a term for Iberian Jews and Muslims forced to convert to Christianity during the Middle Ages) to consider the situations and allegiances he has navigated over the years, Moreiras has produced a multifaceted self-portrait that will surely spark further discourse.

Against Abstraction: Notes from an Ex-Latin Americanist (Border Hispanisms)

University of Texas Press

Uncanny Rest: For Antiphilosophy

In Uncanny Rest Alberto Moreiras offers a meditation on intellectual life under the suspension of time and conditions of isolation. Focusing on his personal day-to-day experiences of the "shelter-in-place" period during the first months of the coronavirus pandemic, Moreiras engages with the limits and possibilities of critical thought in the realm of the infrapolitical--the conditions of existence that exceed average understandings of politics and philosophy. In each dated entry he works through the process of formulating a life's worth of thought and writing while attempting to locate the nature of thought once the coordinates of everyday life have changed. Offering nothing less than a phenomenology of thinking, Moreiras shows how thought happens in and out of a life, at a certain crossroads where memories collide, where conversations with interlocutors both living and dead evolve and thinking during a suspended state becomes provisional and uncertain.

La identificación de práctica política y subjetividad es una deriva de la época particularmente perniciosa para el pensamiento de izquierdas. Si la pregunta de toda posible política emancipatoria es necesariamente una pregunta por la igualdad y por la libertad, se hace necesaria una interrogación explícita acerca del resto enigmático que condiciona toda política y al mismo tiempo excede la subjetividad del agente, al que este libro llama subalternidad. La subalternidad es el no sujeto de la política. Darse cuenta de ello impone la obligación de una crítica de la noción dominante de sujeto de la política y al mismo tiempo fuerza a pensar en qué podría consistir una política conmensurable con el pensamiento del no sujeto de la historia. Ambas instancias son necesarias para cruzar la línea de sombra que amenaza crecientemente con ocupar nuestro horizonte, si es que no se lo ha comido ya irreversiblemente.

Línea de sombra: El no sujeto de lo político (Spanish Edition)

Politics & Social Sciences

Philosophy

SPLASH Editions

La literatura del tercer espacio y la noción misma de tercer espacio remiten a una región de experiencia no mimética, no identitaria, rebelde a la ontoteología tan metida en la médula de la producción de pensamiento en español. Preocupaciones posteriores a la primera publicación de Tercer espacio. Literatura y duelo en América Latina (1999), de infrapolítica a marranismo, del desencanto universitario al goce desnarrativizante, de la crítica de las formas de la política realmente existente a la afirmación existencial, del republicanismo democrático a una cierta imposibilidad de arte complementan su configuración. Este libro se ofrece como testimonio de una vida parcialmente dedicada a la observación y estudio de lo que permanece salvaje y subversivo en la misma tradición canónica y de una práctica teórica no controlable ni aceptable en los cada vez más exhaustos salones de clase y salas de seminario universitarias.

Tercer espacio y otros relatos (Spanish Edition)

Interpretación y diferencia

A. Machado Libros S. A.

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Books by Moreiras, Alberto

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Moreiras, Alberto. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Exhaustion of Difference: The Politics of Latin American Cultural Studies (Post-Contemporary Interventions)

The Exhaustion of Difference: The Politics of Latin American Cultural Studies (Post-Contemporary Interventions)

Infrapolitics: A Handbook

Infrapolitics: A Handbook

Against Abstraction: Notes from an Ex-Latin Americanist (Border Hispanisms)

Uncanny Rest: For Antiphilosophy

Uncanny Rest: For Antiphilosophy

Línea de sombra: El no sujeto de lo político (Spanish Edition)

Tercer espacio y otros relatos (Spanish Edition)

Interpretación y diferencia