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CR: he New Centennial Review , Vol. 12, No. 2, 2012, pp. 217246, 1532-687x. Michigan State University Board of rustees. All rights reserved.

he Fatality of (My)Subalternism

A Response to John Beverley

A l b e r t o M o r e i r a s

Texas A&M University, College Station, USA

o eresa, for all the reasons she knows

And a man should never take lightly

anything that happens.

(Sophocles , )

I . E L

Recently, I decided to watch some old Western classics as part of my preparation for a graduate seminar on narcotr co. My idea was that wecould learn from those lms about the pathological subject, in the Kantiansense, and that the Western genre might therefore be apropos to studyingnarcotr co, hence perhaps its future. And one of the lms I purchased was

Fred Zinnemans High Noon ( ). By the time Will Kane says, Te judgehas left town, Harveys quitted, Im having trouble getting deputies, I was

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h e F a t a l i t y o f ( M y ) S u b a l t e r n i s m218

thoroughly alarmed. People are indeed telling Kane to leave town, as it is allfor nothing, and nobody wants to see him get killed. Was it all for nothing? When, at the end of the lm, Kane throws the tin star on the ground with agesture of contempt, everything seemed to have been set rightor so I hadthought as a kid, as it came back to me. My alarm came from the realization,this time around, that the worldly judge who leaves Hadleyville before thetrain arrives (I have been a judge many times in many towns and I hope tobe a judge again) was probably laughing, with good reason. Kane was a fool,and it is not like he wasnt told. And what was he going to do now? Yes, he

rides off into the sunset with the gal, Amy. But what about tomorrow, whenhis gesture wears off and his contempt comes back to exact a price?

A few years ago Jon Beasley-Murray jokingly dened John Beverley as theLatinamericanist unconscious. It happened after a Latin American Studies Association panel where Beverley had been arguing in favor of Brazilian nu-clear rearmament for the sake of the constitution of a Latin American greatspace or hegemonic block against the North American one. It was a high

compliment in the context, I thought, but perhaps a little undeserved. Notthat John Beverley does not deserve high compliments; rather, that particu-lar one was not totally deserved. Beverley has never spoken, on professionalgrounds, from the position of the subject of the unconscious, as his politics will not allow him to do so. Beverley is very much an ego Latinamerican-ist, or if you want, an American ego Latinamericanist, as the structure ofhis recent book, Latinamericanism After / , once again conrms. As one

would surmise, there are plenty of ego Latinamericanists around, and thatis perhaps the secret of Beasley-Murrays remarks: John Beverley hits thenail on the head for all ego Latinamericanists, he represents their collective preconscious better than anybody else. I think I could go along with that. Itis indeed a compliment, but, hey, for us old closet Lacanians, within limits.It is precisely those limits that are at stake in the discussion I think we musthave in the wake of Beverleys book.

Or I can come out of the closet and make a premature and impossible proposal for a change, which in this context is a counterproposal: in hisseminar of , Jacques Lacan undertook a critique of American ego psychology as a travesty of Freuds heritage. His intention to return to Freud

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A l b e r t o M o r e i r a s 219

by painstakingly reading Freuds evolution from his early work to the meta- psychological texts, in particular Beyond the Pleasure Principle, led him tothe discovery of the subject of the unconscious, a nemo which is not theego, and which holds the possibility of what the Lacan of those years under-stood as psychoanalysis proper. Mutatis mutandis, I would like to suggestthe possibility of a Latinamericanism beyond the pleasure principle, whichis also a Latinamericanism beyond culturalism and ego psychology, beyondthe humanism of the subject, beyond the pieties of speculative identity andmimetic difference, beyond narcissism and imaginary projections. Within

this essay, which is meant to be a personal response to John Beverleys book,such a form of Latinamericanist re ection can only be announced as a sortof mythical possibility. But all projections of thought are mythical. If Lacancould announce his own endeavor under the guise of a return to Freud, we could launch ours in the invocation of a return to the very ground ofLatinamericanism, which is, structurally and destinally, the very possibilityof an anti-imperial, hence also an antiprincipial and anarchic critique of the

total apparatus of Latin American development. Who is we, however? No one,nemo. Te position is unoccupied. Tere

is no we here except in a phantasmatic and counterproductive way thatshould be avoided. I know that because I once put my Latinamericanist eyesout (yes, like Oedipus did at Tebes, to my shame, as I do not compare myselfto Oedipus), and what I then saw, to the extent that it can be conveyed, wasthe nothingness of our collective desire: the essential drama of destiny, the

total absence of charity, of fraternity, of anything whatsoever relating to whatone calls human feeling (Lacan , ). Oedipus asks, Am I made manin the hour when I cease to be? For Lacan, however, that is where beyondthe pleasure principle begins ( , ), and he goes on, enigmatically, totalk about the

negation of the prophecy [ parole ], which takes place within the precinct,

upon whose borders the whole drama takes place, the precinct in the place

where it is forbidden to speak, the central point where silence is obligatory,

for there live avenging goddesses, who do not forgive and who catch hold of

the human being at every opportunity. You get Oedipus to come out of there

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each time you want to get a few words from him, for if he says them in that

place, something awful will happen. ( , )

In the impolitical grove of the Eumenides, the Dread Ones, Oedipus has be-come a holy man. His sacredness comes from having become one with hisdestiny, in full destitution, which is another way of saying that he has becomeone with his life desire. Te mortal Oedipus remains the embodiment of anaprincipial thought of restitution. He could also be the apotheosis of theLatinamericanist postcolonial unconscious. Te Latin American Oedipus

must indeed pull her very eyes out to begin to see.I can picture former Marshal Kane within the precinct, far from the town,

vanquished from the town, in mourning for the town and its fatality, blindand yet seeing. It is the same place om Doniphont occupies, in his ownburnt home, for the many years after Stoddard and Hallie leave Shinbone, with only the company of his cactus blossoms and his old buddy Pompey,in John Fords Te Man Who Shot Liberty Valance ( ). Were they Latina-

mericanists, they would be Latinamericanists beyond the pleasure principle. And arent we all? We secretly are, or I am, or I strive to be. But not JohnBeverley. Tat is the function his ego Latinamericanism serves: apotropaic,he always indulges in a little bit of the evil in order then to step back and feelfortied by the winds of history, like Polyneices. He talks about everybodyelses paradigm of disillusion ( , ) only to conceal from view his owndisillusion, probably harder to bear, but secret. He must set up the ction

that everybody is impotent but him, the leader of the Seven Against Tebes,so that his recipe for politically active Latinamericanism is immediately le-gitimized on the grounds of an expediency that comes, naturally, at the priceof refusing it to everyone else. But it is a rather constraining universe that hecreates, and some of us would feel choked within it.

Will Latinamericanism reach its destination? o whom is it addressed? While reading it, I could not help but think that there is something of Edgar

Allan Poes Te Purloined Letter to it. Te book, like the letter in the story,is designed so that everybody must take a position in relation to it; or rather,it has always already dened everybodys position. So, let us imagine that thebook is addressed to the Queen, as it might well be. Well, the rogue minister

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will take advantage of that, and the King will remain the impervious idiot andbe used as such. But things change. One could say that, when the charactersget a hold of this [book], something gets a hold of them and carries themalong and this something clearly has dominion over their individual idio-syncrasies (Lacan , ). We are all characters, as Beverley has writtena book about us, but obviously about us in ways that speculation will nduncomfortable. You receive an image of yourself back, and who is to say thatit is distorted? You thought you were a deconstructionist and you become aneocon, you thought you were a communist and you are nothing but a neo-

liberal, you thought you were neither and you nd yourself pigeonholed andscripted, you thought you were alive, and you are dead, and there is nothing you can do about it. And most of us nd ourselves in a bad way, anticipatedby our destiny of failure, toys of it, wanting to stay but being refused, which is what Oedipus nally cannot forgive. Not all of us, which makes an interesting point to which we will return, but most of us.

We can call it cartography. Maps also locate characters, including zom-

bies, within it. Beverleys book is a map of holes with only one mountain, which is what makes me think that it is nally addressed to the Queen. Letus cut to the chase: the mountain is called postsubalternism ( , ). It isa capacious one: it can easily incorporate all identity politics people, and as we know, within Latinamericanism, they are legion. So people are alwaysalready dened and interpellated on their identity, and the ones who cannotescape this, or who can least escape, are precisely the ones whose claim to

identity refuses to make itself explicit. Te book will do it for them. Did youthink you could escape? Tink twice. Te rst thought has already captured you. And into the hole you go. At the end of the day, you climb the mountain,through the preset paths, or you remain in the hole. Tis is what I call egoLatinamericanism. For all the good it will do you.

I I . F

Latinamericanism after / is a welcome book. It is in a sense a book that weneeded, and we needed it precisely from John Beverley. It is a book that offersa chance, perhaps, for us all to pull away from what someone once called the

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Latinamericanist doldrums of the last ten years or so, and have a conversation yet again. It is in that sense a service to the academic communityif one cancall it community, which I doubt. Beverley offers a mapping of the eldofa certain eld, perhaps not the totality of theoretical Latinamericanism, nodoubt many will not feel included, no doubt many were in fact beyond Bev-erleys radar. Feminism is a conspicuous absence in anything but a genericsense, for instance, and so is queer studies, which turns this controversy intotoo much of a battle between men, also in the generic sense, and I am not proud of that. We may have trouble with the map, the map may be absurd,

the map may not quite give us the possibility of narcissistic identication weneed, or indeed it may give it to us in spades, which is equally bad or worse.But it is a map, and we can all talk about itfor celebration or denigration,for supplementation or subtraction. I nd the book generous, and essentiallyopen in that particular sense. And I am grateful for it.

I am personally grateful for Beverleys ample attention to my old work,and I could not care less that he takes distance from it or even that he takes it

as perhaps the primary example of theoretical obsolescence in the eld. I amnot primarily interested in defending myself, or the work I have doneevery piece of work I have done is obsolete to me by denitionalthough I will want to address some aspects that seem to me wrong in Beverleys remarks.Given the present stakes, what I care about is the work of critique, and the possibility of critique for the future of our eld of endeavor. (I say our eldof endeavor, and I sweat bullets. I actually do not believe that there is such

a thing, as I have already said, but the rhetoric is here more powerful thanmy personal belief, and I nd myself helplessly returning to the rst person plural).

I have formed Latinamericanist students in the past by trying to givethem a sense of something real to be done, and I would perhaps hope to beable to do so again. It is only on those grounds that I will try to reciprocateBeverleys generosity and openness, to the extent of my ability, and say a

few things about his book and its eld of inscription. It is not easy becauseBeverley places me, impossibly, as the nonconformer of a nonschool ofLatinamericanist subalternist deconstruction that was allegedly in uentialbeyond its means for a few years right around / / (Beverley ,

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). My associates in the alleged enterprise thus share my destiny, whichis possibly too unkind to them without being particularly kind to me, and which, furthermore, puts me in serious difculties at the time of claiming anonbetrayal: if I were not to speak for myself, I would refuse the opportunityto speak for them. But if I were to speak for myself, I would be falling intothe trap of accepting the very premise of my failure to conform my associatesinto a proper school, if only to rebut it. I am not interested in anything of thekind, although I will say that the people Beverley mentions at the beginningof his Chapter are nothing but the metonymy of an ample sector of perhaps

two generations of re ection on Latin American intellectual and political his-tory that decided to make a serious investment in theoretical work, whateverlimitations we may have had or still have. Whether Beverley wanted it or not,those are the people nally under collective attack in his book, mortiedor consigned to a kind of death, and the attack comes from what is at bot-tom an antitheoretical and anticonceptual position that I will not hesitateto call conservative in anything but its self-assigned name. I do not think of

Beverley as a reactionary thinker, of course, but his book plays a reactionarycard by aligning itself with a ercely reactionary abandonment of theoreticalthought in favor of merely political positioning in our professional eld. It is perhaps time to initiate a countermove, to resist our consignation to death.Nobody can say we have not been patient, even all too patient.

If Beverley thinks of himself as a postsubalternist, well then, that is all well and good, but I will not follow him, not even otherwise. I remain a sub-

alternist in Latin American Studies, and I do not want to have anything todo with that particular post that Beverley now invents. Subalternism is still very much a pending account, and nothing has been solved, and the ques-tions remain, and I nd Beverleys rather reductive denitions and attemptsat obscuring the very discussions he actually contributed to silencing, per-haps unintentionally or even unconsciously, inadequate and unsatisfying.Subalternism could actually have amounted to something, it really could

have, but the conversation around it was killed, it was forcefully interrupted,in the name of professional interests (sometimes disguised as political) that Ialways found twisted and reprehensible, and it will not do to come back andsay, Hey, lets do postsubalternism now. I do not know if what was started

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can be nished nowthere was too much opposition and too much censor-ship and too much suffering around it, and I am not talking about myself.Tat cannot be forgotten. In that context, the idea of postsubalternism, withall due respect, seems to me little more than a whitened sepulcher. So I amnot a postsubalternist, but I would have a few things to say about subaltern-ism if anyone ever asks the right questions and if, indeed, I can nd theenergy to come out of my own dark precinct in that regard.

Why should this be important to anyone? It is probably important tono one, Nemo, the nonsubject of the professional eld. But there is a certain

fatality in writing, or a fatality that opens up once one decides to write andmust say things. I have no animosity whatsoever toward Beverley or any other person willing to expose himself or herself, for the sake of intellectual debate,by speaking up and respecting the rules of the professional or intellectualgame. But many times over the last ten years or so I have been saddened by what I have perceived as the fear and self-censorship that have come to bequasi-naturalized in our eld of study. It is not only that people will not talk,

or will not talk beyond or outside their own limited circles of friendship. Itis also that people tell each other to be quiet, not to speak, not to rock anyboats or make any noise. Tere is an abandonment of professional respon-sibility in this respect that I have witnessed often and that I nd appalling.Tere is widespread fear in our professional milieufear of reprisals, fear ofnot getting hired, or of not getting tenured, or of not getting published, fearof exposure, fear of standing up for freedom of speech and the rights of open

intellectual exchange lest one suffer, it is said, the consequencesand it ishard to take it seriously, but it is meant seriously. Where does it come from?How have we allowed a certain number of theoretical discoursesor perhapsit is simply a certain kind of theoretical discourse, a certain style of doing workto become so dangerous to our professional health that a sympathyfor it can only be acknowledged secretly? How did this come to pass? Weknow that it is routine today in some quartersoh, everybody always hears

too many stories, everyone always knows a lot more than others thinktoadvise students not to mention a few given names in their job applicationletters, and we know that petty power games based on ideological alliances,sometimes simply in the name of exclusion, have become almost the norm in

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many job searches and other professional contests and competitions. Teseare just examples. Is this the way we want things to continue to be? Tereis no fatality to the present status quo, which is why it is only up to us, andto no one else, to change it. I think John Beverleys book is a step in theright direction. By critiquing peopleme, among othershe also breaks thesilence and the fear and gives us a chance to respond, openly and freely. Heengages in a mortication that should bring us all back to life. I will not shirkmy own responsibility hereat this point, come what may.

Fatal is an adjective, by the way, that Beverley applies to me. He says:

As for the comment about a rhetoric . . . as respectable [ tan respetable ] as

any other, that is, of course, the scorn of the philosopher for the demagogue,

of Plato for the Sophists. But is it in fact true to say that the rhetoric of the

Master Race and the Final Solution is as respectable as the rhetoric . . .

of Pachamama and ayllu? Moreiras confuses here, in a way that I think is

fatal for his position, the form of ideologywhat Althusser called ideology

in generalwith the content of particular ideologies. ( , )

Te stuff about the Final Solution and the Master Race is Beverleys ownimaginative creation. My sentences in question are, in Beverleys translation,

it is better to decolonize than to colonize. But the success (desired) of [Evo]

Morales will be a function of the ability of his government to encourage the

production and redistribution of wealth and to create social justice; not ofthe rhetoric, which is in any case as respectable as any other, of Pachamama

and ayllu. It is not the innite decolonization of the cultural sphere that most

matters or should matter to the Bolivian people, but social justice and the

republican capacity of the citizenry to obtain a genuinely democratic politi-

cal and economic system. (qtd. in Beverley , )

I could pretend that there is nothing fatal in those words of mine; I could pretend that they are nothing but trivial common sense; and I could pretendthat Beverleys willful association of what I actually said with the MasterRace and the Final Solution is nothing but unadulterated hogwash. I will in

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fact pretend all of it, since we are at it. As any Spaniard knows, when one usesthe idiom tan respetable como cualquier otra, one is not indulging in nihilisticrelativism. For instance, I could say and I probably have said that if only Celtade Vigo could purchase such and such a player or coach then they could be asgood as team as any other, and it would be crystal clear to my audience thatby any other I mean Barcelona FC or Real Madrid, not the Bouzas Rpido orthe Celanova Racing. So when I say that the rhetoric of Pachamama and ayllu is as good as the best ideologies out there, but it still wont particularly do forthe main purpose at hand, which is democratic justice, I am not comparing

the Pachamama to the Final Solution or the ayllu to the Master Race. So thatis that, although Beverley, we know, is not a Spaniard. Or a Galician, for thatmatter, as he wants me to be.

Beverley adds an endnote to his fatal paragraph, where he says: Moreiras would respond that the form of ideology is its content ( , n. ), and he is probably right, and I would furthermore claim that such is indeed Althussersown position. But never mind. What is at stake here is a fundamental notion

that says, on Beverleys part, that, since everything is ideology any way, andthere is no getting out of it, then some ideologies are better than others, and we should swallow them whole or, rather, we should allow the people to swal-low them whole, and even ask them to swallow them whole, as it is good forthem to feel redeemed on the basis of imaginary identications and projec-tions that give them what they consider an identity and what the academiceld in Latin American Studies has never tired of calling an identity; or on

my part, an opposite position, which says that, whereas some ideologies aredenitely better than others, and their contextual political valence must betaken into account every time, in every case, so that feminism is good in a patriarchal world and antiracism is good in a racist world and indigenism isgood in a criollo world, it is condescending and antidemocratic of ustheones who are supposed to know better and already know better because wehave read, say, Louis Althusserto accept or promote the fetishization and

reication of any ideologies, knowing full well that the reign of fetishizedideology has pernicious effects in the political sphere and militates againstany conceivable democratic desire.

When feminism, antiracism, indigenism, and any other conguration of

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rebellious desire go beyond their initial status as political positions, as theysometimes do, and become ideologies, they take over a persons imaginary world. Although this is not necessarily bad, it is not necessarily good either. We may think it is better to be a Catholic in a Protestant world, or a Prot-estant in a Catholic world, or a marrano within Christianity, and I have alot of sympathy for all of it. But I prefer to leave my options open and not toconfuse my critical interests with the adoption of an imaginary identity formyself. And if that is what I want for myself, well then, I certainly dont wantanything else for others. If Beverley wants to call his position postsubalter-

nist, and if he wants to make of it his principled reason for support of Latin American marea rosada governments, I will hold on to my subalternism and very much refuse principled support in that respect to the populist leaders,including the academic populists who follow the leaders, just as much asI may withhold it from the neoliberals or the conservatives. If I am Platoto the Sophists, then it seems to me Beverley might be a Sophist who hasalways already assumed that his students are foolish children who must be

guided with tall tales and whatever scary stories one can invent so that theysleep comfortably in the night and keep quiet while the parents do their workgood or bad, that is a different, but always open, issue, whatever the political rhetoric. Politics is, after all, the realm of praxis. Tere is nothing worse about the Pachamama than there is about the Holy rinity, I suppose,or about the Islamic notion of the godhead, and the myth of the ayllu canonly be compared, perhaps advantageously, I do not know, to the myth of the

democratic city. But my subalternism does not stop therefatal or almostfatal as that may be, and has been, within the pious parameters of the North American university and its ever so leftist guardians. Or, indeed, within the pious parameters of those who seek to do business, political business, onthe backs of the people, whether in Latin America or elsewhere. (Tis is notabout Beverley, but it is about many of the politicians he supports, start-ing, say, with the Colombian guerrillas when they were already thoroughly

implicated in narcotr co and the outright oppression of the Colombiancountryside. It does not matter that they were not the only ones doing it).For me subalternismone of those dirty words that students in par-

ticular are urged never to use, and which was always linked in my personal

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biography to an interest in deconstruction, another dirty wordis the pos-sibility of a radical critique of ideology and praxis, wherever it comes from.I try not to commune, and that is a political principle too. Te possibility ofnoncommuning critique, however, is nally what Beverley objects tosome- what clandestinely, to tell the truthas on the surface, he will not stop cri-tiquing everyone. But the cards go up when, at the end of his chapter , TeNeoconservative urn, he asks his most profound question: o what extentthen are we also, individually and collectively, invested in what I am callingthe neoconservative turn? Tis is a variant of the question that is at the heart

of the Christian Gospels: whom do you serve? ( , ). Tat is, do you serveGod or Caesar, do you serve the people or their masters, do you serve anyoneat all or only yourself? Well, once you have identied your master, put up and shut up, Beverley means. And what if the answer given to Beverley were tobe, not from the Christian Gospels, but from the Old estament: I will notserve, I will serve no one (yes, no one, the nemo or the nonsubject of theunconscious yet again)? We know from previous versions of the essay that

resulted in Beverleys Chapter that the original question behind the lamerform that appears here is whether we are prepared to drop our intellectualfaade, bourgeois critics that we are, entrenched in our academic privilegesand our pretense of freedom of speech and thought, and in fact follow theleader!whether Chvez or Morales or the Neo-Peronists. Te time of truthhas come, and Beverley needs little to kindle his enthusiasm as a follower(Lacan had already warned the ers that they should be careful not to end

up being mere seekers for a new Master)but, if follow the leader! is the precondition for postsubalternism, I think it holds a limited future. As itshould, no matter who the leader is. And that, among other things, comesfrom the democratic republicanism that Beverley nds so objectionable andfatal in my own position: Arendtian, he calls it, between perplexity and scorn.I will stick to it, though.

But it is not my interest to argue in favor of my own position in this essay.

I would rather argue in favor of the possibility and the privilege of theoreti-cal labor in our eld of study. I would prefer to argue for conceptual workas opposed to mere political position-taking and culturalist opinionating.I am guilty of thinking, at some point about twenty years ago, that a new

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generation of Hispanists would change the historical conditions of criticaldiscourse in our eld. I was obviously wrong, because I thought that newgeneration was going to be mine. It has not happened, and there is a longstory to tell there that goes well beyond the collapse of the Latin AmericanSubaltern Studies Group or any other particular event in our recent institu-tional history. And yet what follows is very much a part of it.

I I I . A D C I R

Tere is one glaring absence in the cast of characters. Anbal Quijano is men-tioned once, and Walter Mignolo is mentioned a couple of times, but no oneelse in their group is mentioned, and there is no direct engagement with theirdecolonial position. We hear about the hapless neoliberal cultural stud-ies types, and about sinister neoconservative literateurs, about desperadoneo-Arielistas, and about obsolete deconstructors, now either dead or in fulltransition toward neoconservatism, but the tendency that seems alive and

well and progressing in the eld is not mentioned, let alone critiqued. Why?It is possible that Beverley thinks of himself as a good fellow traveler of thetendency, with it if not of it, as he probably would not be accepted into it. Hisessential position is, however, different, although I would still place both ofthem within what I am calling ego Latinamericanism. So why is decolonialthought never brought to task in Beverleys book? I cant help thinking thismay have something to do with ego Latinamericanist troublesa neurotic

symptom, perhaps, this omission of a trend whose specular identicationmight have brought more baggage with it than Beverley would have bargainedfor. So the decolonial tendency (like feminism or queer studies but for es-sentially different reasons) goes without saying, which has of course the unex- pected bonus of making it, as placed outside the frame, immune to Beverleyspolitical critique. Te decolonials do, after all, follow the populist leaders,for whom they seem to have great respect; although, to tell the truth, in this

particular case, it is more a matter of expecting the leaders to follow them.So, here is what the analyst would have to say: It is probably a fact ofcontemporary discussion, in so far as it exists, that the eld of Latin Ameri-can postcolonial studies has been taken up by the decolonial tendency, to

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the extent that one reads in every other paper on the topic Latin American postcolonial, that is, decolonial studies. . . . And yet there is no reason whythis should be so, and a few of us are even working on correcting it. For me,understanding the structure and the history of Latin American postcolo-niality is essential to the intellectual task of our time. Without it we wouldnot be able to proceed adequately toward what I want to call a democraticcritique of imperial reasonanother name for the task of specifying a sub-alternist Latinamericanism beyond the pleasure principle and imaginaryidentications. Te analysts of empire have showed us to what an extraor-

dinary extent, starting with Montesinos or Las Casas, imperial reason hasalways been criticized from imperial positions, albeit alternative. Imperialreason always develops on the basis of its own critique, and the history ofimperial reason is all the more effective when it can present itself as a criticalhistory of imperial reason. Empire, in other words, always imperializes itsown critique, and it ends up absorbing it.

If that is indeed the case, one of Beverleys fundamental questionsthat

is, how can Latin America rid itself of the shadow of the North, of North American hegemony?must be answered by pointing toward the possibilityof the formation of a general democratic intellect in Latin America that is, forme, premised on the very possibility of a fundamental democratic critiqueof empire on Latin American and Iberian grounds. We, as academic intel-lectuals, may not be able to help form a general democratic intellect in Latin America, but we surely can engage in a democratic critique of empire; and

this is preparatory work, and it continues to be, if there is to be a chanceof breaking the self-perpetuating cycle of imperial reason. It has not hap- penednot yet. It is, to my mind, the potential (or mythical) solution to everyone of Beverleys problems, and it is the intellectual path that, while leavingneoliberals and neoconservatives and deconstructors and identitarians anddecolonialists behind, would trace the way for a generational endeavor for which the eldthe general eld of Latinamericanism, which is far from

being conned to the North American academy, and instead encompassesany and all re ection on the history, present, and future of the hemisphere assuchis ripe, although it does not yet know it. Instead, when it can be both-ered to, it accepts false solutions, which are not or no longer necessarily the

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old and tired clichs of multiculturalist identity. And one of those solutionsthat does not solve anything is in my opinion the decolonialist tendency. Oh,sure, they are useful enough sometimes, the decolonialists, but they do not present themselves as researchers whose partial contributions to scholar-ship are meant to be shared by others, or by anyone. Teir theory must beaccepted as a whole. Tey only understand sharing as communing, so thattheir question is only always a perhaps different but equally choking versionof Beverleys question: Whom do you serve? So why does Beverley pass upthe very possibility of criticizing that option through whose critique he could

perhaps nd an answer to his own fundamental queries?I will do it for him, much obliged for the opportunity. My thesis is the

following: Tere will be no effective decolonization of the Latin Americaneld, that is to say, no genuine democratic critique of imperial reason, onthe basis of the various alleged discoveries, revelations, and procedures of-fered by the decolonialists. Te decolonial option, to speak clearly, is not ademocratic critique of imperial reason, nor is it meant to be. Te down side,

then, is that it becomes an imperial critique of imperial reason, or, invertingthe terms but saying the same thing, a colonial critique of colonial reason.Tis could seem an exaggeration or even a paradox. After all, the decolonialoption rmly believes in its decolonializing potency, and even posits innitedecolonization as its one and only goal. Decolonials say, for instance, thatdecolonial conceptualization means to denounce the colonial matrix of power (Mignolo , ). But denouncing means nothing or almost noth-

ing. Denouncing (empire, colonial power, the coloniality of power, if I may usethe term without being accused of plagiarism) is far from establishing the possibility of a democratic critique of imperial reason. It is only its parody,and in so far as it is a parody, it remains enclosed in the universe it parodies.

Te decolonial option acts as if their denunciation automatically became,every time, an event of truth, the irruption of truth into our world, capable ofsplitting the world in two, capable of opening another history, a history capa-

ble of dividing the world, precisely, into denouncers and denounced. Whoeveris not with me is against me, they say, following Beverleys Christian Gospel.Over and over again practitioners of decolonial denunciation denounce and preach, in a double rhetorical movement that is their signature. What is

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denounced is the imperial control of the economy, of authority, of sexuality,of knowledge and subjectivity, even the imperial control of being. And what is preached is that the denunciation of imperial control is a sufcient conditionto change the world, a sufcient condition for democratic or popular mobi-lization, because it is, from its very enunciation, the sufcient condition forthe unveiling of an other economy, an other authority, an other sexuality, another knowledge, an other subjectivity, and an other understanding of being, which are never dened or specied, only invoked. Tus we read: implicitin the analytical concept of the colonial matrix of power (or coloniality of

power) is the programmatic concept of decoloniality (Mignolo , ).Te analysis is already its own total synthesis. Te concept already performsitself. Denunciation is always at the same time revelation and preaching. It would be enough to show a sandal to teach someone how to walk, or the priest becomes a saint because he denounces the sinners. Tis is no doubta peculiar colonial critique of colonial reason, full of a potentia that alwaysalready incorporates its own actus. But it is not yet, and it cannot be on its

own terms, a democratic critique of imperial reason.Te dazzling discovery, the major arcanum, the great truth that the

decolonial option claims to have discovered is the following: there is nomodernity without coloniality; coloniality is constitutive of modernity andnot derivative (Mignolo , ). Tis is the analytic dimension or the greataccomplishment of the analytic dimension in the vision of the colonialityof power. About it we are told that it encloses, rather magically, also a pro-

grammatic or performative dimension. o enter this dimension, the mereunderstanding that there is truth in it, that modernity and coloniality areinterchangeable, that when somebody says modernity she is also sayingcoloniality and when somebody says coloniality that very person is alsosaying modernity, is not enough. It is not enough to the extent that someof us can agree up to a certain point, although perhaps not for the samereasons, that modernity is a specic dimension of Western imperial reason.

But the point is that, to penetrate the hidden truth, as it is the case forany magical truth, one has to agree with it in a certain way, with a certainfaith, otherwise we will miss what is truly important. If the analytic dimen-sion of the coloniality of power always already anticipates its own program,

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that is because something within the analytic dimension opens a portent:the very concept of coloniality of power is already a decolonial move that,subsequently, opens up the gates for imagining possible futures rather than just resting on the celebratory moment of critical explanation of what the so-cial world is really like (Mignolo , ). Te denunciation is not thereforea mere critique. It is, above all, already a predication, and what it preachesis the futural dimension of another world, of another image of the worldunder the sign of innite decolonization. Opening up another world in theabjuration of the present is the only acceptable game in town for people who

would prefer to decolonize themselves and contribute to the decolonizationof the world (Mignolo , ).

Te destruction of the world opens up another world. Innite decoloni-zation is the innite opening of another world. And it goes without sayingthat such an innite opening entails, by itself, the encounter with anotherform of control of economy, authority, sexuality, knowledge, subjectivity, andbeing. Tere is no guarantee that such an alternative form of control not just

promised but performatively or programmatically uttered by the decolonialoption should be better than the rst, except that the preaching itself placesit formally as always already better. Or even: the radical improvement is infact guaranteed by the very word of the preacher, the witness, the prophet,by his or her aura or personal prestige. Te argument that the destruction ofthe authority of the coloniality of power as it is and has been, in virtue of the verbal shibboleth, automatically hands over the construction of alternative

worlds does not need any guarantee other than the very promise. But such arhetorical procedure is far from contributing to the creation of a democraticgeneral intellect. It is auratic, charismatic thinking. Or better: it requirescharismatic reception. And, to my way of thinking, the call for charismaticreception is colonial critique of colonial reason. Colonial reason, after all,has always proceeded on the basis of charismacolonial reason has alwaysalready incorporated a charismatic critique, has always already colonized

charisma itself. Te decolonial option is a charismatic critique of imperialcharisma. A democratic critique of Latin American postcoloniality, which Beverleys

identitarian position would not be prepared to accept either, always refuses

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in advance the idea that it may embody a programmatic dimension. Tere isalways a programmatic dimension to identity thinking: I will become whatI am. Except that identity thinking is always already premised on being noone, not yet. Te gap between the original absence and the xity of desirablesuccess is constitutive of a program for action, albeit never a democratic one.It amounts to the self-consecration of an ego-sovereign, which is, at bottom, what Beverley shares, as a goal, with the decolonials.

One of the radical limitations of U.S. academic thinking over the last years, post-deconstruction, has been its inability to understand a simple

thought: that the labor of the negative embodied by critique cannot be, andtherefore refuses to be, always already synthetic. A democratic critique ofimperial reason does not have recourse to the authoritarian and magicalargument that a democratic analytics includes its own world revelation,and that such world revelation opens the charisma of the world as if for therst time, hence inaugurates another history, and splits the world into two:the indel (deconstructionists? Te deconstructionists, in Beverleys sense,

have never had anything to do with deconstruction: the word, as he uses it,is shorthand for something else) and the believers.

I prefer to look for the zero degree of postcolonial thought: in fact, for postcolonial thought in a radically antichiliastic dimension. Zero-degree postcoloniality, that is, democratic critique as postcolonial thought, a demo-cratic critique of postcolonial thought, does not necessarily give up on theestablishment of a program: I would say, on the very contrary, that it prepares

for a program. But it must, by denition, actively renounce the possibility ofoffering itself up as an example of organization and command because itmust give up every possibility of charismatic self-consecration. Beverleysbook is criss-crossed by a great anxiety over his own authority to speak as aU.S. Latinamericanist, not from but about Latin America. It is a worry aboutthe lack, his own lack, of charismatic self-consecration. Lacking it is a goodthing, and this may be his main difference with the decolonials (not that the

latter, for the nondeluded observer, do not lack it as well, but they assumethey dont, or make everything possible to act and speak as if they dont),except that Beverleys desire is rather to nd a way into it, which is, for me, a

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bad thing and possibly the symptom of an unavowed or disavowed specularidentication with the success of decolonial thought, which goes a long waytoward explaining its mysterious absence, a glaring form of presence, fromthe general political critique Latinamericanism administers.

But there is no particular authority of the U.S. Latinamericanist to thesame extent there is no particular authority coming from the autochtonous, primal, pure subject of Latin American history, who, for the decolonials, and perhaps also for Beverley, would not be a Latin American in the rst place.Te discussion is moot. Going back to Lacanianism, all of us should just

traverse our fantasy and forfeit privilege on intellectual grounds. We do what we can from our position. If there is any possibility of linking up knowledgeand democracythat is, a demand for radical equality, a demand for free-dom for allknowledge must learn how to give up its own presumption ofcharismatic prestige. Is that not, incidentally, in any case, a possibility closerto those of us who must study the particular historical modality of imperialreason, the Hispanic one, that has always already abandoned knowledge for

power? As the premise of modern imperial reason, or to paraphrase Karl Marx,

as the original sin of modern imperial reason, its locus of primitive sym-bolic accumulation, Hispanic imperial reason is the one that has given up inadvance its own critical possibility, the one that does not have to proceed toself-exaltation as political theology, the one that remains and has remainedcrudely attached to its own immunity, its privilege. As such, it guards, per-

haps better than others, the possibility of its inversion into a democraticcritique. If one may call for zero-degree postcolonial thought, it is becauseHispanic imperial reason is the zero degree of modern imperial reason: theonly modality of imperial reason that does not reach constitution throughits own self-critique. But this opens the way, at the end of modernity, at theend of democracy, for the beginning of a possible democratic critique of imperial reason, which prefaces the possibilitywhich cannot be announced,

only preparedof the constitution of a democratic general intellect in Latin America. Are the marea rosada governments on the way to it? One can only wish they are, and that they may keep at it.

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I V. G

.

At the time of his republican commitment, around , Jos Ortega y Gassetindulged in prorevolutionary comments with a thought that has no doubtbecome outdated in its terms, but from which we can still learn a thing ortwo. He said, talking about the revolutionaries: Te ideal future con-structed by the pure intellect must supplant the past and the present. Tis isthe temper that leads to revolutions ( , ). But, in , he found such

an attitude petulant, and he wanted to temper it by means of a re ectionon what he termed life reason, or razn vital. Razn vital at the same timeexpands and limits the horizons of absolute reason into history, and seeks inhistory grounds for revolutionary change. But then Ortega says:

It is inconsistent to behead the prince and replace him with a principle.

Under the latter, no less than with the former, life becomes subjected to

an absolute regime. And this is precisely what should not happen: neitherrationalist absolutism, which saves reason and nullies life, nor relativism,

which saves life as it evaporates reason. Te sensibility of the epoch that

starts now is characterized by a refusal to submit to such a dilemma. We

cannot satisfactorily establish ourselves on any of those terms. ( , ;

my translation)

I think John Beverley knows about the false dilemma, but I am not certainthat he has learned not to substitute the principle for the prince. Te deco-lonials most certainly have not.

Here is Beverleys presentation of postsubalternism:

Tis book is not only after / , then, it is also in some way postsubalternist.

Tis is indicated particularly by the attention given here to the question of

the state. Te paradigm implicit in subaltern studies (and in postmodernist

social theory in general) was that of the separation of the state and the sub-

altern. . . . We are now confronted paradoxically in some ways by the success

of a series of political initiatives in Latin America that, speaking very broadly,

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corresponded to the concerns of subaltern studies . . . a new way of thinking

the relationship between the state and society has become necessary. ( ,

)

And Chapter , the last one in the book, opens with the perhaps not sosurprising claim that the question of Latinamericanism is, ultimately, aquestion of the identity of the Latin American state ( , ): here is the principle again, the principial-identitarian thinking that has always been thebane of Latin American and Hispanic thought, of which decolonial thought

is also a paradigmatic example, from its structure down to its very style, asif we could not do otherwise. Tis only seems to be the ground from whichBeverley can announce his postsubalternism in the open denunciation ofa subalternism he has now come to associate with deconstruction, andthrough it with an entire movement of theoretical thought in Latin AmericanStudies that, from a specic point in timesomewhere in the late s forsome, sometime in the early s for othersrefused principial-identitarian

thought in the attempt to seek a critical edge that the Latinamericanist tradi-tion could not and would not offer. Postsubalternism is a regressive propo-sition that returns to a collusion with the postcolonial state in the nameof identitarian thought. It is, after all, nothing but the main thought of theLatinamericanist tradition over the last two hundred years, and counting.

Te way Beverley sees it, the elective afnity between subaltern studiesand deconstruction was based on the thought that the subaltern, by denition

outside the hegemonic circle within any particular society, was thereforealso outside the state and outside any progressive narrative concerning theformation, evolution, and perfection of the state ( , ). What is a bit paradoxical here is that, on the one hand, it was John Kraniauskas that of-fered the denition of subaltern studies as a critique of the total apparatusof development, and Kraniauskas would rather be dipped in something thanaccept the tag of deconstruction attached to his name. And that, on the

other hand, the notion that the subaltern is the constitutive outside of anyhegemonic articulationhence, the subaltern cannot claim belonging, andmust therefore not claim any positive identity whatsoever: the subaltern isthe nonsubject of the politicalwas drastically rejected by most people in

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the Latin American Subaltern Studies group, including the totality of thefounding members and those members who would later claim a decolonialalignment.

It was, however, embraced, shared, cothought, although not uncritically,by many of those whose continued involvement in the discussion, had it notbeen interrupted precisely so that they could not speak, might have madeit amount to something: Gareth Williams in particular ( ), but also JonBeasley-Murray, from a different perspective (he was the one who came up with the term post-hegemony not in a deconstructive but in a Negrian

vein), Kate Jenckes, Horacio Legrs, Brett Levinson, Patrick Dove, Danny James, and others, including many who were at the time beginning graduatestudents and including people whose life and work did not happen withinthe institutional space of U.S. universities. Beverleys move is nowbut it wasnot then, when he was ercely ghting it, dismissing it, accusing itto cedethe ground to obsolete, deconstructive subalternism as dener of the eldin order to continue to reject it: the distinction [subalternity/ hegemony]

confuses the form of hegemony . . . with its content (both socialist-feminismand fascism are forms of hegemonic articulation, but obviously with quitedifferent consequences) ( , ). We are used to that argument by now,but the point is: it is not a subalternist argument, since, for the subaltern, inso far as it remains subaltern, the form of hegemonic articulation is indeedits content.

It is the argument of a state actor, as the state actor always must argue for

the logic of the lesser political evil (that is, less or more gracious dominationis better than more cruel domination; a domination by the majority, on equalforce, is better than a domination by the minority; and so forth). I will notdispute that: it is the rst, or political, articulation of subalternism, albeit notthe only one. But Beverley will not go beyond it, and arguing solely for thestate in the name of postsubalternism is what he prepares to do, explicitlynow. Chavismo is, for instance, justied on a logic of lesser evil: yes, yes:

we know it is rather terrible, mostly authoritarian-populist, mostly corruptat all levels, not really socialist, a bit violent, but, hey, it aint the Right, andthere are interactions among the state and subaltern-popular sectors that would not have occurred before the Caracazo. If that logic is the foundation

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of postsubalternism, let me be sparedI would rather stay where I am. Atthe same time, I do not reject the political argument that a lesser evil isalways better than a greater oneI have never done it, whether politically or professionally, and that was the whole point of my call for a rst register ofsubalternism in the last chapter of Exhaustion of Difference ( ). Tis rstregister is the register of political possibility. Beverley talks about it, register-ing the register, but only to say: he [Moreiras] does not appear to either wantor be able to sustain that claim ( , ). No? Who says? Tis is not a minor point, as Beverley thinks deconstruction, and by extension my position, and

by extension that of my so-called associates, may lead outside of politicsaltogether ( , ).

It is true, I think, that deconstruction, but not exclusively deconstruction,involves an impolitical gesture, but for me such a gesture, which is the veryopening of thought beyond the pleasure principle, is the very possibility of properly political engagement: that is, of an always provisional and contin-gent decision, contextual in every case, and political through and through,

not based on the mechanical application of a program. And yet deconstruc-tion, if I had any right to speak for it, which I do not, has never meant to takeover the totality of political space. Te reduction (of everything) to politics,at the expense of conceptual labor, is perhaps the real exit from the politicalinto the realm of imaginary projection, which may very well and usually does wreak havoc. I will argue for the rights of the impolitical in Latinamericanist political re ection, and will state, for the sake of argument, that the impoliti-

cal is the sine qua non condition of thought beyond ego Latinamericanism,beyond the position-taking and mere opinionating, beyond the sloganeer-ing and silencing of the concept that the ego Latinamericanist optionssay, postsubalternism, decoloniality, and, yes, also neo-Arielismseem all toooften limited to offering. But I will also argue that an impolitical thought beyond the pleasure principle, deconstructionist or not, is never and can neverbe beyond politics. In fact, that has been the problem, and the reason for

so much patent hostility, quite beyond Beverley. It is as if only some people were entitled to speak about politicsthe rest of us can only be forgiven orforgotten if we do not.

It is most likely useless to continue with any of this instead of moving on,

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after enough things have perhaps been said or after we have gotten bored with saying them. I will bring my engagement with Beverleys book to anend. Imaginary projection, that is, the charismatic-narcissistic impulse, is what is nally at stake, which is the reason I opt, in principle, for a Latina-mericanism beyond the pleasure principle, without recourse to facile desires(sometimes disguised as prophecies) and their expression. As I reject, asmuch as Beverley does, both the neoconservative and the ultraleftist posi-tions regarding my own political investment, such as it is, in Latin Americasfuture, what remains immediately important for me is perhaps the possibil-

ity of a new conversation, beyond narcissism, on the historical basis of our work. Te nature of academic intellectuality is also a political issue. I believeour eld is decient and has showed itself to be irresponsible over the lastfew yearsnot so few any morenotwithstanding the good books that havebeen published in the meantime. A lot of students in particular have paid aterrible price. I may absorb my own blame, should it matter to anyone. Mygesture of contempt, when I thought I had to leave the eld and in fact left it

for some years, was an arrogant gesture that has come to haunt me in ratherunpleasant ways. Although I would never place myself in the shoes of myerstwhile hero, Gary Cooper in High Noon, as I was saying at the beginningof this essay, old Marshal Kane can only be thought of as eating his heart outbeyond the hills. He was a fool, if not for attempting to play the hero thenfor thinking that it would be alright for him to leave town in contemptuousdignity, and it is his foolishness that ultimately brings him to the position

of mortal Oedipus. It is a good thing when we manage to get him out of hismisery and bring him back to talk to us, so that various catastrophes canonce again be averted. Once we have him out, once we bring old Oedipusoutside the grove of the Eumenides so that he can speak, perhaps a new path opens up toward a liberation of Latinamericanist desire beyond the pleasure principle and egoic projections. Tere is an awful lot to talk abouteven when, or precisely because, talk among us has become difcult. I make

no presumptions, but this is the time for a countermove against the willfulreduction of thought in our eld of endeavor.

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I am very grateful to eresa Vilars, Sam Steinberg, Gareth Williams, John Kraniauskas,

Benjamin Mayer, Bram Acosta, Federico Galende, Patrick Dove, Jos Luis Villacaas, LaurenceShine, David Johnson, Vincent Gugino, Justin Read, Alejandro Snchez Lopera, and Juan PabloDabove for their reading and feedback on preliminary drafts of this essay.

. As John has a special interest in testimonio, he will not object to the following: In theFall of , within a few days of my having given the university administration noticethat I would be leaving for an overseas position given my departmental chairs lack ofinterest in my retention, when I could not quite believe what was happening and wasconfronting, in the name of dignity, the loss of so many things that were important to

me (my home, my dogs, my garden, my habits, twenty years of Latinamericanist workin the United States), and was still desperately expecting someone, a friend, to wakeme up from a bad dream, some of my colleagues of fteen years started conspiring with the clueless deans to bring John Beverley in as my replacement. Tey establisheda pact of silence, and they kept to it: whatever happened, I was not supposed to heara single word. When, many months later, everything came out into the open, theytried either to dissemble their own involvement or to justify itHey, you are leaving,I have to continue to live here or Well, we did not have a choice, it was us makingthe decision for John or someone else for somebody else or I am not your enemy,

dont think of me as your enemy, respectively. I suppose they were trying to do what was good for them, or for their university. Who can blame them? No one ( nemo? ) canblame them. And John told me, You could cut the mess with a knife. I was not goingto accept. And he didnt.

. Or not so secret. At the end of Chapter , Beverley writes: our disillusion has notbeen thorough enough. It has not worked through the melancholia of defeat. As aresult, it leaves (or seeks to impose) a residual guilt that shades into an acceptance of,or identication with, the powers that be. . . . In that way, the paradigm of disillusionhas not prepared us to accept that the possibility of radical change has opened up

once again in the Americas, North and South ( , ). Tis is a strange logic.Because his generation, Beverley claims, was defeated in its revolutionary aspirations,they are now unable, generally speaking, to understand that the possibility ofrevolutionary change must be endorsed once again. Understanding such a thinggoes through a radicalization of disillusionment that would enable them to workthrough melancholic xations, so that their desire nds open channels yet again. Iconfess I am unable to follow John here, perhaps because I have nothing to do withhis generation, not really, and I have always been opposed to armed struggle as asubstitute for politics. But let me offer a counterreading of the situation: Beverley isnot trying to get rid of melancholia by working through it. He is simply trying to nda partial object that can act as a substitute formation, as he has done in the past withthe Central American revolutionary movements, with E A and the Basques, with theColombian guerrillas (but see note ), and with subaltern studies. In other words,

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his Latinamericanist desire has always been a substitute formation at the level ofnarcissistic identication. Tis is what I call ego Latinamericanism, of which Beverleyis an exemplary character.

. Most readers will have no reason to know with any precision that the breakdownand de facto dissolution of the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group took placethrough and at the end of a conference, Cross-Genealogies and Subaltern Knowledges,organized by Walter Mignolo and myself at Duke University in the fall of . Mignoloinitiated early in the conference discussions a move or a series of moves (laterconrmed by the introductory essay to several conference papers he published inthe rst issue of Nepantla [see Mignolo ]) oriented toward breaking, analyticallyand politically, the group of Latin American subalternists into three different groups:roughly, the founding members, among whom John Beverley and Ileana Rodrguezseemed to stand in a group of their own; the so-called properly postcolonial thinkersthat would include Mignolo himself and his allies, among whom Enrique Dussel and Anbal Quijano were certainly there (as far as I can tell , that very conference markedthe beginning of the constitution of the decolonial tendency as such in the eld);and a relatively undened and motley but large bunch of so-called postmoderniststhat were at the time starting to use a new notion, post-hegemony (whetherappreciatively or critically, that depended), and who were more or less gently accused wholesale of being nave Eurocentric sellouts.

Tings were not helped by the presence at the conference of an extraordinarygroup of Duke Latinamericanist graduate students, who seemed to hang out with the post-hegemony crowd a lot more than with the other groups. At the nal roundtable John Beverley and Ileana Rodrguez made the political blunderand I believe it was just that: a blunderof collapsing all differences between the two apparent oralleged groups that seemed not to include them and accusing both of those groupsof together attempting to hijack Latin American Subaltern Studies at the service ofa Duke institutional project. Te Latinamericanist subalternist enterprise met itsinstitutional death right then, as the three mentioned senior members, whom wethought of as the natural leaders of the endeavor, had managed to create a hostile andlabyrinthine nightmare that not only spooked the rest of us but indeed alerted us toimpending catastrophes of various kinds (which of course soon started to happen). When, a couple of years later, at the Subaltern Studies at Large Conference, organizedby Gayatri Spivak at Columbia University, and to which both John Kraniauskas andmyself had been invited as speakers, after it had become abundantly obvious forthe most innocent among us that the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group hadcollapsed and that Mignolo and his allies had decided and had been deciding to gotheir own separate way, Beverley and Rodrguez asked me, in the presence of JohnKraniauskas, who, as Britain-based, was possibly presumed unable to do it efciently,to take over the leadership of a renewed Latin American Subaltern Studies Group.I had to decline, as I knew the idea was unviable because the damage done hadbeen too profound. Some time later Rodrguez made the same proposal to Gareth Williams, who also declined.

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In retrospect, for me and for my post-hegemony friends and students, and we were all too young then, or indeed nave, the experience was nally an experienceof bitter intellectual censorship. Our commitment to the group, which had alreadycreated all kinds of difculties for us in the larger professional eld (one of us failedto get tenure at his institution on the basis of his membership in the group, and thatis simply the most egregious example of the difculties), left us high and dry. I myselfleft Duke a few years later in the wake of a chain of events whose proximate cause was my difference with Mignolo. We are still living through the consequences of thecon ict: those are the Latinamericanist doldrums people have talked about, whichhurt not only us but many students and young professionals who came behind us andfound a wasteland. Solitudinem faciunt indeed, but we did not call it peace. Perhapssomebody did. Obviously I am not talking about everyone in the larger eld, onlyabout people with certain theoretical and political commitments or interests in thesubeld of Latin American cultural and postcolonial studies. See Williams ( ) forfurther re ections on the implications of that episode.

. Inconsequentially to my mind, but not to his, Beverley devotes a footnote to wondering why I may have never come to terms with my Galician origins and why Ihave never talked about Galicia in terms of critical regionalism. He says, as far asI am aware Moreiras has not written about the critical regionalism that is pertinentto his Galician identity ( , n. ). Well, he missed, for instance, the full chapterin my book ercer espacio ( , ), where I talk about revolutionary projectionsin Galicia through the literature of my very own cousin Xos Luis Mndez Ferrn,a radical Marxist-Leninist nationalist, by the way. And it does not take a lot ofreading to nd in that chapter the beginning of the thread for the whole book, if onecontinues, say, with the rst Exergue. But never mind; the point is that John wants meto confront my own identity and thinks I havent or am somehow unable to. Not likehim: In the extensive menu of postmodern identities, I have discovered one of myown: as a child born and raised for the rst twelve years of my life in Latin Americaby WASP parents from the United States, I am a third (or trans-)culture kid or CK( , n. ). He goes on to say that such a fact makes him similar to RobertoBolao or Barack Obama, which in my opinionJohn, this is just for funis a morebecoming set of identications than the one he claimed a few years ago, shortly afterthe Lewinsky episode, when he said that he felt like a mixture of Bill Clinton and MaoZe Dong. But we all have our fantasies. Mine is somewhere between Wile E. Coyoteand the character played by Do-yeon Jeon in Sang-soo Ims Te Housemaid ( ).

. One of the questions nobody seems to want to ask is whether your religious orontological or historical or cultural beliefs provide you with an identity, or whetheridentity, used in the ideological and militant sense, is already the name of yourfailure to believe in anything and your attempt to compensate for thata common problem in postmodern, nihilistic times, far from being conned to the so-called Western world. Real believers, I have found, rarely appeal to identity; they do not needto. I nd belief systems endlessly fascinating, myself, and have a total and absoluterespect for themfor any of them, including some I have run across that have

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baf ed me. Te point of my critique is not to contest the right of anybody to believe whatever it is they believe. On the contrary, I think. Fake believers destroy belief andthe deep historical, imaginative wealth that comes with it. Fake believers representa fallen state of ethical life, which is the reason why I do not think it is the task ofacademic scholars to promote the identity business: by denition, identities can onlybe respected, not promoted (to that extent I value political programs oriented torespecting belief systems and the people who have them).

Te promotion of public identities by the state or state agents or political agents wanting to be part of the state is drastically suspect to me in every case, and itdoes not seem to me it has anything to do with democracy except as a means ofcontrolling it, hence limiting it. I am aware of important trends in contemporaryanthropology that are doing their best to suggest that indigenous belief systems, forinstance in the Andes, can force the ontological pluralization of politics and thereconguration of the political (Cadena , ), but I do not believe that it is anecessary consequence of such theorizations that politics should be ruled over bynew ontologies or even by a principled acceptance of multiple ontologies or worlds, whatever that might mean. Although I understand the political power of ontology,I still refuse to ontologize the political even in the name of the subaltern. If those very anthropologists aim to critique the Western imperialist Nature-Culture divide,as an ontological mode that has been historically used to subalternize non-Westernbelief systems, it seems hardly persuasive that newly rediscovered ontologies shouldnow be given leeway for a reconguration of the political, as opposed to seeking areconguration of political power on democratic termswhether in Latin Americaor elsewhere. o sum up: in my opinion, it is not ontology but democratic practicethat should be privileged for any reconguration of the political as it is or could be. Ifthe difference matters between a conception of politics as power disputes within asingular world and a conception that includes the possibility of adversarial relationsamong worlds, a pluriversal politics (Cadena , ), it only matters because, presumably, the latter might foster the cause of tendentially universal equality.

. I have a distinct recollection, perhaps awed, of Beverleys expression of support forthe FARC several years ago, as it made quite an impression on me. But he tells me in a private communication that he does not recall ever supporting them, and he certainlydoes not now.

. If I recall correctly, the rst version of this paper was presented at the conferenceon Marx and Marxisms in Latin America, organized by Bruno Bosteels at CornellUniversity in the fall of .

. Cf. Arturo Escobars otherwise brilliant essay Latin America at the Crossroads( ), wherein the main idea is actually to orient marea rosada governments to proper doctrinethe doctrine is, of course, highly arguable, but it constitutes perhapsthe best and most cogent formulation of a radical decolonial state project to date.

. Jos Luis Villacaas and I are preparing a volume on Iberian Postcolonialities for the Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies, with about contributors, where we hope to set some things straight. Te subtitle for our work is A Metahistory

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of Material Practices of Power. . On the at best preparatory character of intellectual work vis--vis politics, Beverleys

question is: How should we judge that claim today? ( , ). My answer is: Sameas yesterday. I have no pretensions, as a writer, that I am a political actor, and tendto think that any leaking of disciplinary work into the political sphere is for the most part based on a misunderstanding. I suppose sometimes the misunderstanding canbe productive, but that probably happens rarely.

. Mark Driscolls accusation of looting against Hardt and Negri, apparently afterextensive consultation with decolonials, because it was claimed that Hardt andNegri used the mantra coloniality of power without immediate and unmediatedattribution, gave rise to a considerable amount of possibly unintentional academicridiculousness. See Driscoll ( ).

. On this see the curious dance of complimentary quotations of each other that crossesmany of the contributions in Moraa, Dussel, and Jureguis Coloniality at Large ( ). Tere is a circular structure of the argument that hides an otherwise blatanthole: everybody talks about a great discovery made by someone else within the group, who in turn refers the attribution to another someone else within the group, but thediscovery is simply, at the end of the day, that there has been a claim of a discoveryshared by all and consecrated by the common consensus. Tis is the mechanism ofcharismatic reception: a gospel is announced, and the announcement is the gospel.

. In a general sense, of course, Spanish imperial reason is Roman, adjusted to territorialidiosyncrasies through the church and many centuries of everyday life, hence alreadya critique of Roman imperial reason. In another sense, the Spaniards developedtheir own premodern forms of imperial reason, still in nascent ways, in the everydaycontact with non-Christian life and through settlement operations, in Andalucia in particular. Be that as it may, the precise categorical determination of Spanish imperialreason needs to be undertaken with as much specicity and complexity as possible.It is a preliminary step toward the practical possibility of its democratic critique. Alot of work needs to be undertaken, conceptual and historical, and it is a generationaltask, the way I see it.

. For me, as was stated earlier, the critique of the total apparatus of Latin Americandevelopment is the ground zero of Latinamericanist postcolonial subaltern studiesand the very possibility of a radically anti-imperial, aprincipial, and democraticconguration of Latinamericanist thought. See Kraniauskas ( ) for hisdenition, and see also Kraniauskass critique of development in Difference AgainstDevelopment ( ).

. I hope it is clear that I am simply glossing, parodically, on what Beverley himselfsays. I have not been to Venezuela, and cannot pass judgment on the Chavez regime: whether or not it constitutes an improvement on its predecessor, or whether or not itis in fact better than any of the proposed alternatives within Venezuelan political life.I suspect the situation is far more complicated than it seems from a distance, and itdoes not allow for facile position-taking.

. See Esposito ( ) and Bosteels ( , ).

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Beverley, John. . Latinamericanism After / . Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Bosteels, Bruno. .Te Actuality of Communism. London: Verso.Cadena, Marisol de la. . Indigenous Cosmopolitics in the Andes: Conceptual Re ections

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