Writing of the Formless

Writing of the Formless

Jose Lezama Lima and the End of Time

  • Autor: Matos, Jaime Rodríguez
  • Editor: Fordham University Press
  • Col·lecció: Lit Z
  • ISBN: 9780823274086
  • eISBN Pdf: 9780823274109
  • eISBN Epub: 9780823274093
  • Lloc de publicació:  New York , United States
  • Any de publicació: 2016
  • Any de publicació digital: 2016
  • Mes: Desembre
  • Idioma: Anglés

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.

  • Cover
  • Half-title
  • Title
  • Copyright
  • Contents
  • Introduction
  • PART I. “TIMES”
    • 1. Toward the Absence of Time
      • The Problem with Teleology in Cuba
      • Time, the Ungraspable: Of Latin America as Modernity
      • Badiou: Evental Time
      • Derrida: “Time”
      • From the Mastery of Time to the Formless “Time” of Infrapolitics
    • 2. Sovereignties, Poetic and Otherwise
      • Dictations: The Romantic Roots of Foquismo
      • Dictations: Martí, Vitier, Guevara
      • Romanticism/Theory
      • Heidegger, Noise
      • Sovereignties Otherwise
    • 3. The (Mixed) Times of Revolution
      • Why Lezama? Why Now?
      • Christianity, Apocalypse, Revolution
      • The Times of Revolution
    • 4. Nihilism: Politics as Highest Value
      • Postfoundationalism as Forgetting of Being
      • Nihilism Today
      • Politics or Nihilism
      • The Time(s) of Politics
  • PART II. WRITING OF THE FORMLESS
    • Lezama’s Critique of T. S. Eliot’s Difficulty
    • Meta-phora and Out-of-Place: Aposiopesis
    • Aposiopesis and the Postsocialist Exhaustion of Literature
    • Aristotle’s Physics and “Muerte del tiempo”
    • Lezama’s “One”: Aesthetics, Avatar of Western Metaphysics
    • Infrapolitical Lezama as Reader of Valéry: Sovereignty and the Placing of the Void
    • Lezama as Reader of Baudelaire: Ennui as Nonsynthesizable Remainder
    • Killing the Scribe
    • Other/Same
    • The Allegorical Reading: Classical, Baroque, Romantic
  • Conclusion: Godard, Lezama, and the End of Time(s)
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • Bibliography
  • Index
    • A
    • B
    • C
    • D
    • E
    • F
    • G
    • H
    • I
    • J
    • K
    • L
    • M
    • N
    • O
    • P
    • Q
    • R
    • S
    • T
    • V
    • W
    • Z