Inadequate Politics: Literature and Organic Thought in Borges, Arlt and Cuesta

By analyzing the work of Jorge Luis Borges, Roberto Arlt, and Jorge Cuesta, I address the relationship between literature and politics in the 1920s and 30s in Argentina and Mexico. Drawing on the work of Jacques Ranciere, I argue that these writers bring about a change in the visibility of literature by abandoning any hierarchy of styles and genres, and making fit for literature all manner of texts and forms of writing. In rejecting any notion of adequation, this literary politics also entered into conflict with the various nationalisms prominent at the time in Argentina, Mexico, and elsewhere, which sought to ground and define literature's place and possibilities. The politics of literature in these writers consisted therefore in changing its form of visibility, a change which I read as a critique of organic thought. Organic thought presents an image of a reconciled, organized whole, and within this whole gives a place for every person and practice. My analysis of Borges focuses on the question of literary language, and I trace a shift in his essays of the 1920s and early 1930s away from nationalist-inflected organic thought; this shift can be described as moving from philology to genealogy. I read Arlt's Aguafuertes portenas as producing a partial, improper way of looking which challenges the organization of literature and subtracts from images of a social whole. In visibly participating in the construction of literature, the aguafuertes change the visibility of literature as a category. I trace Cuesta's critique of nationalism and Marxism in post-revolutionary Mexico and argue that his essays figure literature as the place for a contingent, improper, inadequate politics. Against the state-centered projects for a cultural nationalism, Cuesta thus reserves literature as a practice incompatible with the arithmetic of the organic whole.