Post-autonomy and its others: notes on an Argentinian criticism

Abstract

This article seeks to investigate some aspects of the idea (crucial to certain Argentinean critics) of post-autonomy. Among others, Florencia Garramuño, Reinaldo Laddaga and naturally the pioneer Josefina Ludmer, argue that recently we have come to witness the decline of some aspects that defined modern art. Amongst these features, we find the specificity of literary discourse, which in its modern configuration could — allegedly with relative ease — be defined and characterized as a particular type of discourse, different from all others. Some decades ago (according to the post-autonomy theoreticians) such modern conception started deteriorating and made way to a post-autonomic literature, one that crosses all borders and definitions, appears as literature but at the same time does not fit in this category. My hypothesis however is that such non-specificity of art is inherent to all modern art — or, to put more precisely, it is present in the contradictory and paradoxical ways through which literature (un)defines itself in the context of what Jacques Rancière (2002) denominates “aesthetic revolution”. In this case, the topics of decline of modernity, so crucial to these Argentinean critics, the chronology that separates the autonomous modern epoch of art from its more recent counterpart is actually due to the reading and reception of authors associated with French “post-structuralism” (such as Derrida and Deleuze).