• DOI:10.1080/13569325.2013.771629
• Corpus ID: 154311761

A beggaring description: The republican secret in Augusto Roa Bastos's Yo El Supremo, Together With some comments on symbolic production and radical evil

@article{Moreiras2013ABD,
  title={A beggaring description: The republican secret in Augusto Roa Bastos's Yo El Supremo, Together With some comments on symbolic production and radical evil},
  author={Alberto Moreiras},
  journal={Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies},
  year={2013},
  volume={22},
  pages={71 - 87}
}

• A. Moreiras
• Published 1 March 2013
• Political Science
• Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies

Carlo Galli, Roberto Esposito, and in general the group of thinkers associated with the Italian journal Filosofia politica have made the claim many times that our contemporary world is through with the conceptuality of modern politics, that most if not all of the productive concepts of political modernity have come to the end of their productivity and now lie in ruins.1 Perhaps it is time to suggest, merely hypothetically and provided Galli, Esposito, and the others are right, that the ruin of political modernity cannot but affect symbolic production in a serious way. If so, then we would be living in a time when we can only have literature without concept, nonconceptual artistic production in general, as we await the only ever potential arrival of the new. The conceptual ruin of political action would have come to meet the nonconceptuality of symbolic production, or vice versa. ¡La primera República del Sur convertida en Reino del Terror! ¿No les consta acaso que ha sido, por el contrario, la más justa, la más pacífica, la más noble, la de más completo bienestar y felicidad, la época de máximo esplendor disfrutada por el pueblo paraguayo en su conjunto y totalidad, a lo largo de su desdichada historia? (Dr. Francia's words, in Roa Bastos, Yo el Supremo 303).