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Cultural Critique in Latin

America or Latin-American
Cultural Studies?
Ana Del Sarto
Version of record first published: 03 Aug 2010.

To cite this article: Ana Del Sarto (2000): Cultural Critique in Latin America or
Latin-American Cultural Studies?, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies:
Travesia, 9:3, 235-247

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 Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Vol. 9, No. 3, 2000

Cultural Critique in Latin America or Latin-American

Cultural Studies?

ANA DEL SARTO

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Cultural Studies and Cultural Critique represent two new practices

whose shared characteristic is a search for transversality, both in the
redesign of the boundaries of academic knowledge (in the case of
Cultural Studies) and in the critical rearticulations of theoretical dis-
course (for Cultural Critique). Both practices—and their relations of
dialogue, resistance, or questioning—call us to what is now the urgent
task of pushing self-reexivity beyond the format of university knowl-
edge and academic discourse to inquire into the critical borders of
intellectual labour. (Richard, 1998, p. 142)1
Taking the title of this essay, intended as a somewhat ironic question, and
setting it alongside the above quotation, I would like to reect on some border
zones and points of intersection between Cultural Critique, as practised by Nelly
Richard in Chile, and certain critical tendencies in Cultural Studies, with which
I identify my own work. Though I am interested in Cultural Critique and
Cultural Studies as competing intellectual projects and alternative practices, my
intention is to chart some coincidences and/or juxtapositions from which to
interrogate the differences that separate these practices, and from those junctures
to try to promote a constructive dialogue.

I
There are undeniably genealogical and epistemological differences separating
Cultural Critique and Cultural Studies. Regarding the genealogical differences,
their names bear witness to the fact that each privileges a distinct intellectual
tradition. Cultural Critique in Latin America is predominantly inuenced by
continental European thought (such as psychoanalysis, the Frankfurt School,
French structuralism and poststructuralism, and deconstruction), but above all,
in the case of Richard at least, French structuralism and poststructuralism,
speciŽcally the work of Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, Jacques
Derrida and Gilles Deleuze. Richard is inuenced by a combination of these lines
of reasoning in her positions on the concepts central to her work. These include:
stressing textuality and the discursive nature of any realm (be it culture, society,
politics or, even, economics); arguing for the consequent productivity of textual
practices and the notion of ‘theory as writing;’ the ‘politics of the critical act’ and
the inscription within writing of the subject’s desire; understanding the split
ISSN 1356-9325 print/ISSN 1469-9575 online/00/030235–13 Ó 2000 Taylor & Francis Ltd
DOI: 10.1080/1356932002001068 4
 236 A. del Sarto

between science and criticism as an irreconcilable opposition between ‘academic

work or explicative knowledge’ and ‘intellectual labour or interrogative knowl-
edge’; and focusing on the dissemination of the signifying chain and hence
reecting on the negativity of language.
Under the rubric of what is nowadays understood as Latin-American Cultural
Studies are gathered many different practices, discourses, Želds of study and,
despite its practitioners’ reservations, even a supposedly institutionalized disci-
pline. Yet it is precisely this lack of consensus over an accurate deŽnition of what
it means to ‘practise cultural studies’ that guarantees not only that it will never
become a closed disciplinary paradigm, but also its acute political vigour.
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Cultural studies’ roots are in part found in an eclectic mix of hegemonic and
non-hegemonic trends within European thought, including various revisions of
Marxism (such as Lukács, Gramsci, the Frankfurt School and Althusser, but also
British Cultural Marxism), the emergence of British Cultural Studies proper after
the Second World War (with Raymond Williams, Richard Hoggart and Stuart
Hall), structuralism and poststructuralism, the French sociology of culture and
postmodern philosophy, semiotics, deconstruction and so on. Yet Latin-
American Cultural Studies’ roots are also, and more importantly, to be found
intricately woven within a speciŽc Latin-American critical tradition that can be
traced back even to the beginning of the nineteenth century (from Simón Bolõ´var
and José Martõ´ onward). Though the name Latin-American Cultural Studies may
seem paradoxical or confusing, this tradition was already established in Latin
America well before the emergence of British Cultural Studies.
Regarding their epistemological differences, Richard makes it plain that she
understands Cultural Critique and Cultural Studies to have dissimilar loci of
enunciation. While the former speaks from Latin America (and so embodies a
Latin-American approach), the latter speaks about Latin America (and is a form
of Latin-Americanism) (Rochard, 1997, pp. 345–346). I would argue, however,
that the difference between the two approaches lies not in their speciŽc geo-
graphic or institutional locations, but in the distinct epistemic points from which
each project or practice strategically builds its respective locus: Cultural Critique
construes its locus from aesthetic materiality, in order to ‘critically transform the
real’ (for which see Galende), while Cultural Studies construes it from social
materiality, in order critically to produce social reality. What is the main
difference between aesthetic and social materiality? What I oxymoronically call
‘aesthetic materiality’ is related to the central role that language, writing and
reading (‘the literary’ or Literature as discourse) play in the constitution,
displacement, shattering, dissolution and reconstitution of the individual subject
within a text. That is, it concerns the way in which drives and instincts, desire,
pleasure and jouissance materialize in a text through the act of writing.
Central to this idea of aesthetic materiality is the concept of the text, as
articulated by Richard from a combination of Barthes’s and Kristeva’s elabora-
tions. Barthes emphasizes the physicality of the text when he states that ‘the text
has a human form: is it a Žgure, a body anagram? Yes, but of our erotic body’
(Barthes, 1974, p. 29); thus, ‘the text is an object of pleasure’ (Barthes, 1976, p. 3).
In El susurro del lenguaje (Barthes, 1987), he speciŽcally points out that a text is
‘a weaving of quotations that come from a thousand focuses of culture’ (p. 69),
‘a space in which any language has power over another, a space in which
languages circulate’, and ‘a social space which neither protects any language,
 Cultural Critique in Latin America 237

exterior to it, nor leaves any subject of enunciation in a situation of becoming a

judge, a teacher, an analyst, a confessor, a decipherer’ (p. 81). For Kristeva, who
elaborates on the theoretical path opened by Barthes:
… the text is deŽned as a trans-linguistic apparatus that redistributes
the order of language by relating communicative speech, which aims to
inform directly, to different kinds of anterior synchronic utterances. The
text is therefore a productivity, and this means: Žrst, that its relationship
to the language in which it is situated is redistributive (destructive–
constructive), and hence can be better approached through logical
categories rather than linguistic ones; and second, that it is a permu-
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tation of texts, an intertextuality: in the space of a given text, several

utterances, taken from other texts, intersect and neutralize one another.
(Kristeva, 1980, p. 36)
This physicality, materialized in the inscription of writing, forms a texture,
giving evidence of a peculiar density. Within this texture, utterances, voices and
tones—all conditions or indices of the subject’s desire—as well as different kinds
of languages, converge and are juxtaposed, constituting the productivity and
intertextuality of this social space. Although Barthes is always conscious of the
need to unfold different theories from a variety of disciplines (the main ones
being literary criticism, anthropology and history), Richard, following Kristeva,
overemphasizes what she sees as the subversive role of the semiotic vis-à-vis the
instrumental role of the symbolic; as a result, both leave the social untheorized.
Richard’s conception is fundamentally inuenced by Kristeva’s argument in
Revolution of Poetic Language, according to which:
… in the text the instinctual binominal consists of two opposing terms
[constituting a dialectic of the semiotic and the symbolic] that alternate
in an endless rhythm. Although the negative, aggressivity, anality and
death predominate, they nevertheless pass through all the theses capa-
ble of giving them meaning, go beyond them, and in so doing convey
positivity in their path’. (Kristeva, 1984, p. 99)2
In other words, the common objective for Barthes, Kristeva and Richard is,
therefore, to posit a material theory of the subject, capable of revealing the
subject’s process of destruction and construction or, as Barthes points out in El
placer del texto (1974) and El grado cero de la escritura (1973), a theory of the subject
that encapsulates a hedonistic aesthetic. This hedonistic aesthetic can, of course,
be traced back to the avant-garde movements and to the tradition of the ‘great
Rupture’ (for which see Paz and Berman) so central to the contradictory
evolution of Modernity. As a matter of fact, the critical practice of Richard could
be linked to the neo- and/or post-avant-garde.3
By contrast, Cultural Studies’ conception of textuality differs primarily in that
it does not privilege writing as a dynamo for productivity, but as many
disparate practices in social reality (such as political activism, tattooing and body
piercing, sports-fandom, or writing itself) capable of producing a social texture
that may adopt different forms and materialize in different matters. Therefore,
any practice directly related to social performativity is tantamount to a cultural
text, and can be interpreted as such. This is the epistemic point from which
Cultural Studies construes its locus. However, as indicated above, Cultural
Studies’ eclecticism entails various ways of understanding and reecting on
 238 A. del Sarto

‘social materiality’. As a consequence, many cultural studies practitioners have

been accused, rightly or wrongly, of ‘empiricism’ or even ‘neo-positivism’. It is
true that often cultural studies practitioners have put aside the aesthetic,
favouring instead a preoccupation with social materiality as manifested in open
political intervention, or a critical reection on cultural policies and political
cultures, and a heterogeneous use of social sciences (mainly anthropology,
sociology and communications). I think that it is time for Cultural Studies to
establish a balance between the social and the aesthetic, thus rescuing this
forgotten dimension, and reinserting it within cultural studies’ analyses, always
in relation to the production of social reality.
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In this sense, the search for ‘social materiality’ should focus not only on
ruptures and breaks, but also on the continuities and consensual sociohistorical
processes that result from the interrelations among divergent subjectivities and
identities within the continuing transformative ow of ‘the social’. Here it is that
conicting ideologies, hegemonic and subaltern articulations, social, political,
cultural and radical imaginaries, individual and collective memories, rituals and
performances are put in motion. Here too we Žnd not only fears and anxieties,
but also desires, pleasures, jouissance and jouis-senses, which materialize in the
process of production of subjectivities and social reality.

II
Despite their irresolvable differences, I maintain that Cultural Critique, as it is
practised by Richard, centred in the recovery of the ‘speciŽcity of the literary-
aesthetic’ (Richard, 1998, p. 150), could be compatible with and complementary
to the critical tendency of Cultural Studies to which I adhere. Likewise, Cultural
Studies could be compatible with and complementary to Cultural Critique. I
would even say that they are mutually necessary practices, because their
differences, in constant ‘dialogue, resistance and questioning’, can continually
detect new ambiguities, paradoxes and aporias from which to articulate new
lines of inquiry. Both practices, each metacritically constituting the darker side
of the other, would Žnd a speciŽc location in what has been repressed and
returns at the very instance of the enunciation of their own discourses; that is,
Cultural Critique installs itself at the limits of Cultural Studies in order to
become a ‘critique of the critique’, and vice versa. Both practices, in constant
dialogue, could address the ‘dispute of forces between the ideological, the
critical, the aesthetic’ (Richard, 1998, p. 151), which, according to Richard,
constitutes the speciŽcity of Cultural Critique; and that between the cultural, the
political and the social, which, I would argue, characterizes Cultural Studies.
In Residuos y metáforas, Richard (1998) points out that Cultural Critique and
Cultural Studies emerge as practices (and/or projects) of inquiry or, rather, as
quests for (practices and/or) projects; that is, they always try to evade institu-
tionalization as ‘programs that design ready-to-apply models supposedly en-
dowed with a homogeneity of forms and contents’ (p. 142). In this sense, ‘critical
vigilance’—a Derridean proposal—should be redoubled, because, on the one
hand, we should try to avoid the ‘functionalization’ of these discourses in
apparatuses or formations of power; while, on the other hand, we should always
keep in mind that the analysis of culture is focused on unŽnished processes, and
should avoid reifying and/or fetishizing ‘culture’ as a closed and static object of
 Cultural Critique in Latin America 239

study. Moreover, both practices have the same original impulse: they emerge as
‘gestures destined to modify the rules of conŽguration of traditional knowledge’
(Richard, 1998, p. 141) or as ‘transversal, critical gazes’ that turn towards the
social reorganization (the construction of new identities) of determined dis-
articulations (basically, the questioning, fragmentation and dispersion of the
monolithic modern rational subject in multiple and heterogeneous subjectivi-
ties).
At the precise moment that Modern Western thought reached its limits, those
same limits were put in question by the emergence of postmodern thought. The
beginning of the ‘end of grand narratives’ problematized certain absolute
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categories and/or concepts and their underlying binarisms, leading to the ‘crisis
of the homogeneity of the centred modern subject, the fracture of the paradigms
of reason and progress that guided historicist enterprises, the disintegration of
“social bonds,” and the fragmentation of the nexus between knowledge and
power totalities’ (Richard, 1987a, p. 307). Postmodernity led to ‘heterodox read-
ings of modernity that change the accents (and the tendencies) of the history–
progress–subject–reason conŽguration when they redistribute the emphasis of
the singular or the plural, the unique and the multiple, the centred and the
de-centred’ (Richard, 1993, p. 210). This intra-modern metacritique, as practised
from and within the metropolitan centres, provoked various discourses that
have interpellated certain resistant or rebel (peripheral) agencies that have
adopted, adapted and, in consequence, hybridized them to their own concrete-
local situations. As is well known, this modern crisis provoked different re-
sponses: some have reorganized these new perspectives, by appropriating or
co-opting them, and have established themselves as the main actors within the
new hegemonic order (this practice corresponds to the well-known case of the
Social Sciences in Chile4); while others, such as Cultural Critique and Cultural
Studies, present themselves as intrinsically resistant and metacritical discourses,
that is, they have established themselves as ‘critical practices of the critique’,
questioning precisely those hegemonic articulations.5
In effect, according to Richard, the speciŽcity of Cultural Critique lies in its
production of ‘intermediate’ texts at the margins of other discourses, ‘texts that
are located in the interstices between the essay, deconstructive analysis, and
theoretical critique, and which mix different registers in order to examine
intersections between social discursivities, cultural symbolizations, power for-
mations, and subjectivity constructions’ (Richard, 1998, p. 143). On the other
hand, Cultural Studies would not deny that its critical production, which is also
positioned at the margins and intermediate, puts into practice the same strategy
of criss-crossing diverse and sometimes conictive registers. However, this
particular tendency within Cultural Studies establishes certain limits to this
criss-crossing, according to a constant dialogical practice, not only with many
discursive traditions which are intentionally and politically intermingled (such
as the traditions named above, in section I), but also with the overdetermination6
of its own cultural materialization within sociohistorical processes. That is,
Cultural Studies privileges the articulations that overdetermine their contexts of
materialization; nevertheless, those contexts are not necessarily institutionalized
in this process, but rather, as Derrida has it, ‘the extra-institutional must inhabit
institutions without converting them into their own property’ (Richard, 1996,
p. 20).
 240 A. del Sarto

III

For Richard, the axis that links Cultural Critique and Cultural Studies within the
self-reective ‘modern’ reconŽguration, from a supposedly shared ‘post-’ hor-
izon, is their common ‘transdisciplinarity’: they share an ‘experimental and
creative vector reconŽguring new theoretical instruments for the critical analysis
of culture’ (1998, p. 142). The limit that separates Cultural Studies from Cultural
Critique constitutes itself, according to Richard, in the gap that distances
‘academic work’ or ‘explicative knowledge, which formulates and exposes the
reasons that explain why our present is as it is’, from ‘intellectual labour’ or
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‘interrogative knowledge, which does not give in to these demonstrations but

rather tries to perforate the order of proofs and certainties with the (speculative)
cut of doubt, of conjuncture, or rather of utopia’ (1998, p. 158). Therefore, for
Richard, the frontier between Cultural Critique and Cultural Studies is carved
out in the distinction between the ‘claims of writing against the didacticism of
knowledge’ (1998, p. 158). In other words: academic work or explicative knowledge
is to Cultural Studies what intellectual labour or interrogative knowledge is to Cultural
Critique.
In the construction of this topology, one cannot but hear the whispers of both
Barthes and Kristeva, indirectly spoken and reinscribed within the Latin-
American Želd by Richard’s writing. During the 1960s, Barthes, involved in a
polemic with traditional French criticism, distinguished between ‘science’ and
‘criticism’. For him, these practices encompass two very distinctive and contra-
dictory discourses. A science of literature (and of writing) is ‘a general discourse
whose object is not this or that sense but the very plurality of senses of the work’
(Barthes, 1972, p. 58). However and paradoxically, he immediately goes on to
say that ‘the object of science could not be other than to impose a meaning to the
work, in the name of which it would have the right to reject other meanings. …
It will not interpret symbols, but their polyvalence alone; in a word, its object
will no longer be the full meanings of a work but, on the contrary, the empty
meaning that supports them all’ (ibid., p. 59). Criticism, by contrast, is a dis-
course that ‘openly assumes, at its own risk, the intention of giving a particular
sense to a work’ (ibid., p. 58). It ‘deciphers and participates in an interpretation.
However, what it unveils cannot be a meaning (because that meaning unwaver-
ingly goes back to the void of the subject), but only a chain of symbols, a
homology of relations’ (ibid., p. 74). Therefore, criticism produces sense by
playing with the logic of signiŽers. Later, in El susurro del lenguaje, he restates
this split, albeit now metonymically displaced into another dichotomy according
to which practising literature—writing and criticism—is directly opposed to the
practice of teaching literature—science. ‘This antinomy [he writes] is grave because
it is directly related to the pressing current problem of transmitting knowledge;
[wherein] resides the fundamental problem of alienation’ (Barthes, 1987, p. 57).
These dichotomies are reinscribed in Richard’s texts, where a homology not only
of predicates but also of subjects comes into being: Cultural Critique is to the
practice of literature, criticism and the production of signiŽcations what Cultural
Studies is to the teaching of literature, science and the production of meanings. Here
Richard’s positions reverberate against academia, the formalization of ‘criticism’
into ‘science’ and, ultimately, with the core of the indictments sustained by
Cultural Critique against Cultural Studies.
 Cultural Critique in Latin America 241

On the other hand, Kristeva’s excellent 1970s article, ‘How Does One Speak to
Literature?’,7 an analysis of Roland Barthes’ œuvre, reminds us that Barthes
himself was torn apart by two incongruous practices: that of the ‘scholar’ and
that of the ‘critic’. Kristeva’s contribution focuses on the irruption of the semiotic
within the signifying process, ‘in which signiŽcance puts the subject in process/
on trial’ (Kristeva, 1984, p. 22). The negativity of language itself allows for the
irruption of the subject’s innermost desires through displacements and facilita-
tions of energy, discharges and quantitative cathexes (the semiotic) within the
symbolic, producing a subversion of its order. Thus, for her, ‘ “the scholar” [a
scientist] describes negativity within a transrepresentative and transsubjective
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homogeneous system: his discourse detects the linguistic formality of a shat-

tered, pluralized meaning as the condition, or rather, as the index of a het-
eronomous operation’ (Kristeva, 1980, p. 115; emphasis in original). By contrast,
‘the critic’:… takes on the task of pointing out heteronomy. How? Through the
presence of enunciation in the utterance, by introducing the agency of the
subject, by assuming a representative, localized, contingent speech, determined
by its ‘I’ and thus by the ‘I’ of its reader. Speaking in his name to an other, he
introduces desire (Ibid., p. 115). This desire for language, this desire aesthetically
materialized in writing through the introduction of various tones of the empty
subject, is what Richard considers to constitute the speciŽcity of Cultural
Critique. For the same reason, she condemns Cultural Studies for its lack of
concern with the presence of the subject’s desire within writing, due particularly
to the play of signiŽeds and their correlative production of meanings.

IV
In a sense, Cultural Critique and Cultural Studies both emerge as proposals from
which to interpellate a certain sector of the Left, or rather, speciŽc resistant or
transgressor groups, politically disarticulated not only as by-products of ‘post-
modern’ questioning, but also due to the concrete historical situation and
particular experiences that can be seen throughout contemporary Latin America.
Certainly, both projects emerge out of critical reection not only on the consen-
sual and functional positions within the globalized neo-liberal order of late
capitalism, but also vis-à-vis the strategies and positions of many traditional left
groups. The Želd of articulation from which these self-reective interrogations
were proposed was, and continues to be, in both cases, culture: the transversal
axis that, I would argue, connects and separates Cultural Critique and Cultural
Studies. Although both share an initial preoccupation with the problematic of
culture as a ‘Želd of struggle’ (see Hall) in which different processes of
signiŽcation compete to establish diverse meanings, these practices differ politi-
cally as well as ideologically, because of the many ulterior uses and abuses of the
cultural Želd expressed as a Želd of struggle. I hope this statement also serves
as a critical or self-critical warning for Cultural Studies.
Regarding the need to ‘critically transform the real’ from within the very
realm of ‘culture’ (or ‘the cultural’) as a Želd of struggle—that is, as a Želd of
production of social reality—both Cultural Critique and Cultural Studies share
a similar objective: that of de-centring traditional mechanisms of hierarchy and
control, that is, of dis-articulating hegemonic formations of power. In other
words, they both aim to ‘defeat order’ (a ‘metaphor for the institution’), ‘to
 242 A. del Sarto

transversally reformulate the problematic of domination’ (Richard, 1990b,

pp. 6–7), ‘to shake the programmatic rationality of sciences, politics and ideol-
ogy’, and ‘to transgress and subvert the settlings down of power’ (Richard,
1990a, p. 8). With these aims in mind, Cultural Critique focuses its strategy on
the need to theorize discursive fragments from a ‘theory as writing’. ‘Writing’,
another central concept within Richard’s critical ediŽce, also derives from a
fusion of Barthes’s and Kristeva’s conceptions. Barthes explains that writing is:

… always rooted in something beyond language; it develops like a

seed, not like a line, it manifests an essence and holds the threat of a
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secret, it is anticommunication, it is intimidating. All writing will

therefore contain the ambiguity of an object which is both language and
coercion: there exists fundamentally in writing a ‘circumstance’ foreign
to language, there is, as it were, the weight of a gaze conveying an
intention which is no longer linguistic. This gaze may well express a
passion of language, as in literary modes of writing: it may also express
the threat of retribution, as in political ones. (Barthes, 1993, pp. 26–27)

Displacing Barthes’s argument from the social to the psychological sphere,

Kristeva states that ‘writing would be the recording, through the symbolic order,
of [the] dialectic of displacement, facilitation, discharge, cathexis of drives that
operates-constitutes the signiŽer but also exceeds it; adds itself to the linear
order of language by using the most fundamental laws of the signifying process;
has other supplementary networks at its disposal; and produces a sur-meaning’
(1980, p. 102). Richard takes up Kristeva’s interpretation in privileging the status
of writing as the sole practice capable of subverting Order.
Through these elaborations, Cultural Critique takes on the task, from the
aesthetic Želd, to put in critical tension the problematics of ‘subject, theory, and
writing’ (Richard, 1998, p. 156), thereby constructing diverse ‘practices of the text’
or ‘politics of the critical act’. In this way, affects and desires, which manifest
themselves in the tonality or the ‘positions of voice’, are uncovered, enabling in
the same process the ‘Žgurative dimension of a blown-up (refracted and plural)
sign’ to shine (Richard, 1998, p. 152). Therefore, following Barthes and Kristeva,
Richard construes a ‘theory that thinks its forms and says how it is said, in order
to de-instrumentalize the simple “refer to” of practical knowledge with words
that house, in its reexive weaving, the memory of the undoing and redoing of
signiŽcation’ (1998, p. 148).
On the other hand, Cultural Studies emphasizes the necessity of theorizing
‘the cultural’, a realm that could very well be constituted by discursive frag-
ments heterogeneously combined in the process of writing, but which does not
limit itself to those elements. The cultural, conceived as a magma in a constant
state of ebullience, contains, additionally, not only residues of sedimented social
reality, which are appropriated for different ends and motives, and/or frag-
ments not yet inscribed in discourse (the presymbolic), but also emergent
elements which characterize proper human creativity. This creativity does not
materialize itself only through the writing process, although for Barthes, Kris-
teva and Richard this is the privileged practice. Therefore, from this Cultural
Studies perspective, the intermingling and blending of all these elements within
the cultural realm are sociohistorically overdetermined and, in the end, their
 Cultural Critique in Latin America 243

signiŽcations are elucidated in the sphere of the political through the formation
of hegemonic and/or counter- or anti-hegemonic articulations.

V
Let us examine how these differences between Cultural Critique and Cultural
Studies are materialized in the analysis of a concrete example, in which I would
like to put in tension not only the ideological, the critical and the aesthetic, but
also the cultural, the political and the social. For three years, Richard directed a
Seminar on ‘Post-dictadura y transición democrática’ (1997–99) at the Universi-
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dad Arcis, Santiago de Chile. I attended this Seminar speciŽcally in October and
November 1998. At that moment, one of the axes around which the seminar’s
dialogue revolved was precisely the critical relations between ‘Critical Think-
ing’,8 Cultural Critique and Cultural Studies, and concretely the loss(es) suffered
by Chilean culture during the Pinochet dictatorship and the mourning process
during the democratic transition. These debates established that one of the
central issues we inherit at the turn of this century is the problematic of
intellectual labour vis-à-vis academic work in relation to ‘memory, market, and
consensus’. Taken to its limits, this problematic manifests itself in a twofold
aporia. In a Žrst fold, academic work has no possibility of being critical, because
it is necessarily conceived as an always already functionalized discourse. In a
second fold, intellectual labour is either refunctionalized thanks to its constant
appropriation and co-option by globalized and globalizing powers, thus creating
newly ‘organic intellectuals’ (the case of the much-criticized culturalist tendency
within the Želd of the Social Sciences, speciŽcally that represented by José J.
Brunner); or, it is theoretically and practically reproduced in a constant and
abstract discursive reection over the unrestrained loss of meaning, which place
the intellectual in a melancholic state, and in serious danger of self-paralysis (the
speciŽc case of ‘Critical Thinking’).
In general, the problematic of the place and the role of the intellectual was
addressed elusively, diagonally or obliquely from the mourning work that the
process of thinking suffers as a consequence of enunciating certain losses. For
‘Critical Thinking’, the loss [la pérdida] is a general loss of meaning; for Richard,
the loss would materialize in a recovery of the act of speaking after a ‘loss of the
word’. Now, what is the pure state of this loss? The loss in itself does not have
any tangible material existence, because it only exists in an imaginary dimension
and, in consequence, is a construct that follows on from what has been lost [lo
perdido] in the realm of the social. What has been lost in the real, that is, in social
reality, is one thing; but the loss, that is, the manifestation within discursively
constructed reality of what has been lost in the social, is quite another thing. For
‘Critical Thinking’ and Cultural Critique, what has been lost [lo perdido] is only a
pretext from which intellectuals can produce different discourses precisely about
the loss [la pérdida]. It is certain that what, Žnally, ‘Critical Thinking’ and Cultural
Critique have discursively constructed has been the loss itself, which would be
perceived from Cultural Studies’ perspective as simply an ideological device.
This interpretation can be further advanced if we analyse the relation between
the loss and what has been lost using three Lacanian concepts, paradoxically
although intelligently articulated by Slavoj Zizek: the Real, the real or social
reality, and retroactively constructed reality.9 For Zizek, “ ‘reality” is a fantasy-
 244 A. del Sarto

construction which enables us to mask the Real of our desire’ (Zizek, 1989, p. 45)
or, in other words, the Lacanian Real. By ‘the real or social reality’, Zizek means
the external material foundations (sociohistorical relations and processes) that
are repressed at the very moment in which we enunciate—or, to put it differ-
ently, construct—reality, that is, ‘the real state of things’ (ibid., pp. 47–48).
According to Zizek, this mechanism is homologous to the ideological function-
ing, that, in the case of ‘Critical Thinking’ and Cultural Critique, would be
homologous to the loss. In consequence, Zizek argues:

Ideology is not a dreamlike illusion that we build to escape insupport-

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able reality; in its basic dimension it is a fantasy-construction which

serves as a support for our ‘reality’ itself: an ‘illusion’ which structures
our effective, real social relations and thereby masks some insupport-
able, real, impossible kernel (conceptualized by Ernesto Laclau and
Chantal Mouffe as ‘antagonism’: a traumatic social division which
cannot be symbolized). The function of ideology is not to offer us a
point of escape from our reality but to offer us the social reality itself
as an escape from some traumatic, real kernel. (Zizek, 1989, p. 45)

Allow me now to articulate my argument using these ideas proposed by Zizek.

The loss, an ideological device with which ‘Critical Thinking’ and Cultural
Critique discursively elaborate what has been lost, operates not as an illusion that
permits us to escape from reality, but as a constitutive kernel of this same reality.
The loss, permanently reworked qua reality, implies the necessary postponement
of what has been lost qua the Real. However, the Real has a double expression,
which itself corresponds to two different moments in Lacanian thinking: on the
one hand, as it was formulated in the 1950s, the Real alludes to the unsymbol-
ized real—‘the brute, presymbolic reality which always returns to its place’
(Zizek, 1989, p. 162); on the other hand, in the revision that Lacan proposed of
his own theory in the 1970s, it refers to ‘an entity which must be constructed
afterwards so that we can account for the distortions of the symbolic structure’
(p. 162). In other words, the Real has a dual manifestation: it refers to a kernel
of the real that escapes representation within reality and that is, simultaneously,
established by means of a retroactive elaboration. In other words, it constitutes
a traumatic kernel that cannot be symbolically apprehended—the unrepre-
sentable—but that, in certain circumstances, irrupts in reality as the familiar
unknown (the Freudian unheimlich) or, seen from another perspective, the
sublime. Is not what has been lost the Lacanian objet petit a? Obviously, various
contents could occupy this void: the detained and disappeared persons, the
defeat of the Left, the impossibility of making sense of the political situation or,
simply, of adopting a political position by the intellectual. The fact that the
Lacanian objet petit a is an empty space that can be occupied by various contents
could explain, perhaps, why ‘Critical Thinking’ and Cultural Critique block
themselves off from any resigniŽcation of the loss qua the ‘loss of meaning’. The
aporia of their discourse lies in this impossibility, because the very abstraction
that they build in order to prevent themselves from enunciating the loss, and
thus from repressing in the same process what has been lost, does not allow them
to perceive their external material foundation. This is the fundamental kernel
that Cultural Studies would try to unravel. Its objective is to detect those
 Cultural Critique in Latin America 245

material overdeterminations of subjects’ desires that are retroactively inscribed

in discourse through this same process of enunciation or performance.

VI
I would like to conclude these reections with a comment on a self-criticism of
Richard’s (produced via an indirect critique of ‘Critical Thinking’) with reference
to the aporia to which intellectual labour can constantly succumb: the practice of
privileging the inŽnite displacements of signiŽers without any possibility of
establishing anchorages of signiŽeds that could preclude the building of stra-
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tegic closures. In other words, Richard warns us against the priorities established
by discourses such as ‘Critical Thinking’, with respect to the oating and
inorganic position of the ‘postmodern’ intellectual who never achieves a mini-
mal consensual base of ‘social commitment’. In one of her most recent essays,
‘The reconŽgurations of critical thinking during the post-dictatorial regime’,
Richard warns against the risks involved in this unrestrained oating position,
and articulates the problem faced by Cultural Critique today. She writes:
On the one hand, if we dare to intervene in the public network of
culture, we run the risk of ending up subsuming our critical voice into
the current state of the present and we allow the former to be mixed
with the latter’s own residues, without trying to note its ‘difference’
from the dominant trivializing communicative regime. On the other
hand, if we despise the public network (while we retreat ourselves into
the self-critical exercise of passive negation and renounce intervening in
the current state of the present through an excess of ‘critical vigilance’),
we will keep a complicit silence in the face of the abuses of the present
and we will transform academia into a comfortable refuge of non-
intervention from which to avoid all risk of social commitment to the
heterogeneity and resistance of chaotic forces. (Richard, 2000, p. 8)
Clearly, Richard here demands redoubled ‘critical vigilance’. On the one hand,
we need to maintain our vigilance to avoid the Žxation of signiŽeds—this is a
necessary strategy to elude any closure and subsequent fetishization. On the
other hand, we have to be vigilant of critical vigilance, that is, to avoid by any
means the trap of transforming ‘critical vigilance’ into an insurmountable
obstacle to the very practice of Cultural Critique. In a word, Richard is calling
for some sort of resigniŽcation, ergo, for strategic closures. I want to believe that
this approach will facilitate the establishment of some sort of strategic alliance
between Cultural Critique and some tendencies within Cultural Studies. In fact,
this article is a possible map of central axes from which Cultural Critique and
Cultural Studies could establish certain minimal bases of consensus. I believe
that a contrapuntal reading of both practices/projects would allow us to illumi-
nate their contact zones, thus establishing their complementary as well as their
antagonistic aspects.10 Cultural Critique, privileging the speciŽcity of the liter-
ary-aesthetic, focuses its critical energies on the discursive nature of any reality
and on the irruption of the subject’s desire within a text, reminding us at every
moment of the conicts produced by the conjunction of ‘subject, theory and
writing’ (Richard, 1998, p. 156). Meanwhile, Cultural Studies, privileging the
cultural and the political, focuses its criticism on the residues of materiality,
 246 A. del Sarto

which are not only conictual but also consensual, and which are in tension in
any cultural practice within social reality, but are politically constructed a
posteriori, that is, retroactively inscribed as discourses.

Notes
1. I would like to express my gratitude to Jon Beasley-Murray for proofreading this article and
editing it for style. A shorter Spanish version of this text was read at the panel ‘Aportes de Nelly
Richard: balance y crõ´tica’, which I organized for Lasa2000. All translations from Spanish sources
are my own.
2. On this subject, see her Revolution, part I, speciŽcally section 13 (pp. 90–106). For an analysis of
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Kristeva’s inuence on Richard’s texts, see the Žrst part of my dissertation Paradojas en la periferia.
Nelly Richard y la Crõ´tica Cultural en América Latina (The Ohio State University, 1999).
3. I elaborate on these aspects in the second part of my dissertation.
4. For a detailed analysis on this subject, see Richard’s Arte en Chile and La insubordinación.
5. On this particular aspect I follow the deŽnition of ‘articulation ’ given by Ernesto Laclau and
Chantal Mouffe in their Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: ‘The practice of articulation, therefore,
consists in the construction of nodal points which partially Žx meaning; and the partial character
of this Žxation proceeds from the openness of the social, a result, in its turn, of the constant
overowing of every discourse by the inŽnitude of the Želd of discursivity. Every social practice
is therefore–in one of its dimensions–articulatory’ (p. 113).
6. Laclau and Mouffe re-elaborate the Althusserian concept of overdetermination, establishing: (1)
that overdetermination, as Freud deŽnes it, ‘is a very precise type of fusion entailing a symbolic
dimension and a plurality of meanings … it is constituted in the Želd of the symbolic, and has
no meaning whatsoever outside it’ (p. 97); (2) ‘it is the Želd of contingent variation as opposed
to essential determination’ (p. 99); (3) ‘to break with orthodox essentialism … through the
critique of every type of Žxity, through an afŽrmation of the incomplete, open and politicall y
negotiable character of every identity. This was the logic of overdetermination … the presence of
some objects in the others prevents any of their identities from being Žxed’ (p. 104).
7. This is chapter 4 of Desire in Language.
8. ‘Critical thinking’ is the name under which a group of philosophers and sociologists present at
the Seminar ‘Postdictadura y transición democrática’ try to accomplish the task of becoming the
new intellectual critics of Cultural Critique. Among them are Willy Thayer, Carlos Pérez,
Federico Galende, Iván Trujillo and Sergio Villalobos-Ruminott.
9. Zizek develops these concepts in his article ‘How did Marx invent the symptom?’, published
both in his Mapping Ideology and in his The Sublime Object of Ideology. The page numbers of
quotations in my text are from The Sublime Object of Ideology.
10. According to Laclau and Mouffe, antagonism is ‘the presence of the Other [that] prevents me
from being totally myself’; ‘[antagonism] is the failure of difference’; ‘[it] escapes the possibility
of being apprehended through language, since language only exists as an attempt to Žx that
which antagonism subverts’; ‘antagonism as a witness of the impossibility of a Žnal suture, is the
“experience” of the limit of the social’ (p. 125).

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