Writing of the Formless: José Lezama Lima and the End of Time

In this book, Jaime Rodríguez Matos proposes the “formless” as a point of departure in thinking through the relationship between politics and time. Thinking through both literary and political writings around the Cuban Revolution, Rodríguez Matos explores the link between abstract symbolic procedures and various political experiments that have sought to give form to a principle of sovereignty based on the category of representation. In doing so, he proposes the formless as the limit of modern and contemporary reflections on the meaning of politics while exploring the philosophical consequences of a formless concept of temporality for the critique of metaphysics. Rodríguez Matos takes the writing and thought of José Lezama Lima as the guiding thread in exploring the possibility of a politicity in which time is imagined beyond the disciplining functions it has had throughout the metaphysical tradition—a time of the absence of time, in which the absence of time no longer means eternity. MuPDF error: syntax error: invalid key in dict MuPDF error: syntax error: invalid key in dict MuPDF error: syntax error: invalid key in dict MuPDF error: syntax error: invalid key in dict MuPDF error: syntax error: invalid key in dict MuPDF error: syntax error: invalid key in dict MuPDF error: syntax error: invalid key in dict MuPDF error: syntax error: invalid key in dict MuPDF error: syntax error: invalid key in dict Cover 1 Half-title 2 Title 4 Copyright 5 Contents 8 Introduction 12 PART I. “TIMES” 38 1. Toward the Absence of Time 40 The Problem with Teleology in Cuba 40 Time, the Ungraspable: Of Latin America as Modernity 46 Badiou: Evental Time 53 Derrida: “Time” 57 From the Mastery of Time to the Formless “Time” of Infrapolitics 59 2. Sovereignties, Poetic and Otherwise 63 Dictations: The Romantic Roots of Foquismo 63 Dictations: Martí, Vitier, Guevara 67 Romanticism/Theory 73 Heidegger, Noise 83 Sovereignties Otherwise 85 3. The (Mixed) Times of Revolution 90 Why Lezama? Why Now? 90 Christianity, Apocalypse, Revolution 92 The Times of Revolution 102 4. Nihilism: Politics as Highest Value 110 Postfoundationalism as Forgetting of Being 111 Nihilism Today 115 Politics or Nihilism 122 The Time(s) of Politics 128 PART II. WRITING OF THE FORMLESS 134 Lezama’s Critique of T. S. Eliot’s Difficulty 136 Meta-phora and Out-of-Place: Aposiopesis 139 Aposiopesis and the Postsocialist Exhaustion of Literature 141 Aristotle’s Physics and “Muerte del tiempo” 143 Lezama’s “One”: Aesthetics, Avatar of Western Metaphysics 149 Infrapolitical Lezama as Reader of Valéry: Sovereignty and the Placing of the Void 159 Lezama as Reader of Baudelaire: Ennui as Nonsynthesizable Remainder 166 Killing the Scribe 169 Other/Same 177 The Allegorical Reading: Classical, Baroque, Romantic 184 Conclusion: Godard, Lezama, and the End of Time(s) 196 Acknowledgments 206 Notes 208 Bibliography 228 Index 240 A 240 B 240 C 240 D 241 E 241 F 241 G 241 H 241 I 241 J 241 K 241 L 241 M 242 N 242 O 242 P 242 Q 242 R 242 S 242 T 243 V 243 W 243 Z 243 This book proposes the "formless" as a way of thinking through the impasses of contemporary politics. The writing of the formless, as it can be traced in the work of Lezama Lima and the Cuban Revolution, is the point of departure in thinking through the relationship between politics and time