Writing of the Formless: Jose Lezama Lima and the End of Time

by Jaime Rodr guez Matos

Overview

In this book, Jaime Rodríguez Matos proposes the "formless" as a point of departure in thinking through the relationship between politics and time. Thinking through both literary and political writings around the Cuban Revolution, Rodríguez Matos explores the link between abstract symbolic procedures and various political experiments that have sought to give form to a principle of sovereignty based on the category of representation. In doing so, he proposes the formless as the limit of modern and contemporary reflections on the meaning of politics while exploring the philosophical consequences of a formless concept of temporality for the critique of metaphysics. Rodríguez Matos takes the writing and thought of José Lezama Lima as the guiding thread in exploring the possibility of a politicity in which time is imagined beyond the disciplining functions it has had throughout the metaphysical tradition-a time of the absence of time, in which the absence of time no longer means eternity.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780823274079
Publisher:	Fordham University Press
Publication date:	12/01/2016
Series:	Lit Z
Pages:	248
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Jaime Rodríguez Matos is Assistant Professor of Spanish at the University of Michigan.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

Part I "Times"

1 Toward the Absence of Time 29

The Problem with Teleology in Cuba 29

Time, the Ungraspable: Of Latin America as Modernity 35

Badiou: EvcntalTime 42

Derrida: "Time," 46

From the Mastery of Time to the Formless "Time" of Infrapolitics 48

2 Sovereignties, Poetic and Otherwise 52

Dictations: The Romantic Roots of Foquismo 52

Dictations: Marti, Vitier, Guevara 56

Romanticism/ Theory 62

Heidegger, Noise 72

Sovereignties Otherwise 74

3 The (Mixed) Times of Revolution 79

Why Lezama? Why Now? 79

Christianity, Apocalypse, Revolution 81

The Times of Revolution 91

4 Nihilism: Politics as Highest Value 99

Postfoundatioinlism as Forgetting of Being 100

Nihilism Today 104

Politics or Nihilism 111

The Time(s) of Politics 117

Part II Writing of the Formless

Lezama's Critique of T. S. Eliot's Difficulty 125

Meta-phora and Out-of-Place: Aposiopesis 128

Aposiopesis and the Postsocialist Exhaustion of Literature 130

Aristotle's Physics and "Muerte del tiempo," 132

Lezama's "One": Aesthetics, Avatar of Western Metaphysics 138

Infrapolitical Lezama as Reader of Valéry: Sovereignty and the Placing of the Void 148

Lezama as Reader of Baudelaire: Ennui as Nonsynthesizable Remainder 155

Killing the Scribe 158

Other/Same 166

The Allegorical Reading; Classical, Baroque, Romantic 173

Conclusion: Godard, Lezama, and the End of Time(s) 185

Acknowledgments 195

Notes 197

Bibliography 217

Index 229

Editorial Reviews

"Deep and dazzling. The Writing of the Formless dismantles or powerfully threatens the very basis of much of what today wants to present itself as 'properly leftist' thought but also the equally paralyzing liberal-democratic administration of things: both ideologies are anchored in disavowed understandings of temporality. This is a groundbreaking, extraordinary book that will mark a before and after in Latinamericanism." — Alberto Moreiras, Texas A&M University

From the Publisher

Deep and dazzling. The Writing of the Formless dismantles or powerfully threatens the very basis of much of what today wants to present itself as 'properly leftist’ thought but also the equally paralyzing liberal-democratic administration of things: both ideologies are anchored in disavowed understandings of temporality. This is a groundbreaking, extraordinary book that will mark a before and after in Latinamericanism.

Texas A&M University - Alberto Moreiras