Beyond Jameson: The Metapolitics of Allegory

Abstract

What are the politics of allegory? For several decades, Latin American literary studies have been haunted by Fredric Jameson’s (in)famous claim that “all third world texts are […] national allegories,” accompanied, more recently, by a critical counter-tradition in Latin Americanism that rejected Jameson’s argument without pursuing alternative readings of allegory. What would happen if, after the death of allegorical reading in Latin American studies, we were to return to the question of allegory in the work of Paul de Man, who argued that allegory always allegorizes the impossibility of reading? This essay traces the politics, or metapolitics, of allegorical representation, and of allegorical readings, in Latin American studies and concludes with an analysis of César Aira’s El congreso de literatura as an example of the allegorization of the impossibility of a politics grounded in sovereign decisionism.