Literature and Expropriation

• In Event: Subjetividades precarias: Mexico en la era del neoliberalismo tardío

Abstract

his paper reads in the narrative of Cristina Rivera Garza the working-out of a properly post-Fordist writing, given over to the tendential desmaterialization of labor, or more precisely, the conditions of immaterial labor and its relation to the screen. Rivera Garza thematizes critically the dichotomy physis/techné, establishing writing and thought in their irrevocable relation to the machine (war/media) as a question of periodization. If writing-as-techné in Heidegger´s conception is poiesis, then under the mediatic era proposed by Rivera Gaza, it resists its own poietic inscription, preferring instead, repetition, citation, appropriation, “desappropriation.” Under this inscription, I argue, writing no longer upholds its (always phantasmal) autonomy with respect to the contemporary conditions of labor, war, and technology, but rather prodigiously pursues the very ruination of its own relative immunity.

Author

• Samuel A Steinberg, University of Southern California