Review of Literature and Subjection: The Economy of Writing and Marginality in Latin America

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.