→ Kraniauskas essay in the Archivos edition of El Señor Presidente. This book is not about the origins of the state but its nationalization. I have never read it but now want to. It is avant-garde and about the state, so I cannot lose.
→ Misplaced ideas. Roberto Schwarz came up with this term and he was under the influence of dependency theory which is where we get the terms center and periphery applied to modernity and capitalism. There is a critique of Schwarz’ concept here and it refers to other critiques. Misplaced ideas are, for instance, those of European liberalism lodged in a slavocratic country. I note that Europe and the United States were also slavocratic and liberal at the same time, so Brazil is not the only place suffering from misplaced ideas.
→ I still like the idea of peripheral modernity better than I do incomplete modernity, unfinished modernity, inferior modernity, or recalcitrant modernity. I also like Trotsky’s phrase uneven and combined development. I like these two phrases because they seem the most descriptive of the situation. This leads of course to Silviano Santiago-esque ideas of in-between places. Other people have talked about alternate modernities but these seem always to be projects for the future, not something we can easily point to examples of now.
→ Denise da Silva says racism, that is the creation of a modern and a subaltern subject, is constitutive of modernity. You have to have a light and a dark version of everything, as in Melville’s Pierre. (This of course goes against the Habermasian view that we just need more Enlightenment.) As long as we are in the modern paradigm, racial thinking will keep reasserting itself in new forms no matter what we do, since anything we do is just a mitigation strategy, I infer.
→ Hypothesis: Spain got racialized as Other, at the same time as it was trying to whiten itself and expel other Others. It does not want to be Other, although some have apparently tried to turn that otherness on its head and make it a sign of uniqueness. But on da Silva’s view it would ultimately be struggling with modernity, because modernity is what is placing it in a subaltern position. On the one hand, it has some modern characteristics and wants to be on the winning side. On the other, it is not, so it rejects the winning characteristics (the modern ones).
Ambivalent modernity, then: what do you think of my new theory of Spain? Also, Spain apparently keeps trying to articulate its uniqueness — what about using a different term, like specificity (keeping in mind the idea that every locus of enunciation is, precisely, a locus)?
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 