Workshop with author on Anarchaeologies: Reading as Misreading

Please register here: http://duke.is/4gUwdy

The Latin America: Theory and Narrative in Present Tense Working Group is hosting a reading group and workshop series on four recent publications in Latin American Studies. Reading group discussions will precede a workshop with the book's author the following week. All books are available electronically at Duke University Libraries.

Anarchaeologies: Reading as Misreading (Fordham UP, 2020)

Our critical moment, Erin Graff Zivin argues, demands anarchaeological reading: reading for the blind spots, errors, points of opacity or untranslatability in works of philosophy and art. Working specifically with art, film, and literature from Argentina (Jorge Luis Borges, Juán José Saer, Ricardo Piglia, César Aira, Albertina Carri, the Internacional Errorista), Graff Zivin allows such thinkers as Levinas, Derrida, Badiou, and Rancière to be inflected by Latin American cultural production. Through these acts of interdiscursive and interdisciplinary (or indisciplinary) exposure, such ethical and political concepts as identification and recognition, decision and event, sovereignty and will, are read as constitutively impossible, erroneous. Rather than weakening either ethics or politics, however, the anarchaeological reading these works stage and demand opens up and radicalizes the possibility of justice.

Erin Graff Zivin is Professor of Spanish and Portuguese and of Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California.