Abstract:
Literature and Subjection is based on the premise that what we today call Latin
American literature is inhabited by a series of constitutive ambiguities. These ambiguities
allow us to situate literary works in relation to social and political conflicts,
while also dislocating our understanding of "literature" by revealing its difference from
itself This constitutive ambiguity is ptesented most succinctly in Legrás's discussion of
"subjection" in the book's introduction. On one hand, borrowing from the Lacanian
psychoanalytic tradition, subjection denotes the emergence of a subject who attains
a certain degree of autonomy by articulating his or her desire with a traumatic cause
that precedes the conscious, willful subject. On the other hand, in Foucault's wotk,
subjection describes the social ptoduction of subjects who identify with—even when
they appear to resist—the institutional discourses that dominate them. Subjection thus
incorporates an emancipatory hope alongside a subjugating force. This ambiguity leads
Legrás to conclude that these two tendencies are inseparable in modern societies. It is
literature that best illustrates this ambiguous mutual implication of subjectivity and
subjugation, in large part because literature as a social institution has frequently been
charged with conveying or realizing one or the other of these goals—and sometimes
both at the same time. Legrás demonsttates this lattet point in the historical context
of late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Latin America by exploring several attempts
to develop Latin American literature as a historical project capable of responding to
pre-existing social, political and epistemological conditions and demands.
