How do we read after the so-called death of literature? If we are to attend to the proclamations that the representational apparatuses of literature and politics are dead, what aesthetic, ethical, and political possibilities remain for us today? Anarchaeologies brings together works of continental philosophy and critical theory (Emmanuel Levinas, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Rancière) and works of art from Argentina (J.L. Borges, Juán José Saer, Ricardo Piglia, César Aira, Albertina Carri, the Internacional Errorista) in order to practice anarchaeological reading: reading for the blind spots, errors, points of opacity or untranslatability in works of philosophy and art. Rather than “applying” concepts from the former in order to understand or elucidate the latter, Graff Zivin exposes works of philosophy, literary theory, narrative, poetry, film, and performance art/activism to one another. The work of aesthetic or political expression, then, does not appear as an object of study in the conventional sense, but rather as a possible source of philosophical and political thought itself. Ethical and political concepts such as identification and recognition, decision and event, sovereignty and will, are read as constitutively impossible, erroneous, through these acts of interdisciplinary (or indisciplinary) exposure.

Bio: 

Erin Graff Zivin is Professor of Spanish and Portuguese and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. She is the author of three books: Anarchaeologies: Reading as Misreading (Fordham UP, 2020; translated into Spanish and published as Anarqueologías: Ética y política de la lectura errada, Buenos Aires, Prometeo Editorial, 2021), Figurative Inquisitions: Conversion, Torture, and Truth in the Luso-Hispanic Atlantic (Northwestern UP, 2014; translated into Spanish and published as Inquisiciones figurativas: conversion tortura y verdad en el Atlántico Luso-Hispano, Buenos Aires, Editorial La Cebra, 2017), and The Wandering Signifier: Rhetoric of Jewishness in the Latin American Imaginary (Duke UP, 2008). Graff Zivin is the editor or co-editor of two special journal issues and three edited volumes on deconstruction, ethics, and politics.