Writing of the Formless. José Lezama Lima and the End of Time by Jaime Rodríguez Matos

Abstract

Reviewed by: Writing of the Formless. José Lezama Lima and the End of Time by Jaime Rodríguez Matos Alberto Moreiras Rodríguez Matos, Jaime. Writing of the Formless. José Lezama Lima and the End of Time. Fordham UP, 2017. 232 pp. It is difficult, certainly in less than 1250 words, to provide even a summary account of the complex arguments Jaime Rodríguez Matos presents in his Writing of the Formless. Let me take a risk, then, and venture a proposition that might cut down to some of the wiring: when, back in the 1970s and 1980s, at a time in which literature was still the uncontested queen of the humanities, we used to hear, or say, that Latin American authors, or some of them at least, were great because of their "transgression of the western frontiers of understandability" (1), did we really mean it? It was already ridiculous then to posit that the various episodes of magical realism in García Márquez, or the displacing pretensions of Carpentier's real maravilloso, actually challenged Western metaphysics, although a couple of notorious professors might not have refrained from doing so. But something else could have been said of, for instance, Jorge Luis Borges, Clarice Lispector, the best Julio Cortázar, the best José María Arguedas, and certainly José Lezama Lima: that their work did push the reader all the way to the limits of Western ontotheology, in various [End Page 807] and complicated ways. It was to be the task of the (Latin Americanist) critic to elucidate those literary stances and put them at the service of a postcolonial "critical regionalism" that might create an alternative for thinking. I think it is fair to say, even if it is also risky, that such a project was cut short by the advent of cultural studies. High theory, in the precise if rather infrequent sense of a radical and rigorous confrontation of the literary from philosophical positions, took a hit on the neck from which it may not have recovered. The notion of critical regionalism had its small death then. What Writing of the Formless manages is, however, much more than a resuscitation: the book is an intricate and precise demonstration of the fact that José Lezama Lima, writing as a Catholic, and writing in ambiguous perplexity within the political atmosphere of the Cuban Revolution, brings an epochal end to political metaphysics, brings an end to literature as an aesthetic supplement to political theology, brings an end to the poetic pretensions of filling in for the lost object, of offering an alternative to the abyss of ground that revolutionary modernity had bequeathed in disavowed nihilism. This does not mean that high literature is not possible after Lezama; only that no high literature after Lezama could survive its own preposterousness if it were to understand itself either as redemption or as a way into political redemption. Writing of the Formless limits its case to Lezama, whose work stands as a monumental metonymy for a Latin American "imaginary era" of the end of epochality itself. But there is, in principle, no obstacle for work on other writers to make its own case. It was perhaps Lezama's Catholicism that led him down a path that allowed him to ignore political theology—after all, for a Catholic, only God may command. After God's death, no commanding agency is meaningful. When you cut off the head of the king, whose legitimacy is God-given, nihilist disorder necessarily follows. The age of revolutions opens the age of a fundamental void in politics—there is no legitimacy for political figuration, pace Kant, or Weber, or even Gramsci (the Hegelian-Marxian paradigm may be seen as the ultimate attempt to contain nihilism within history as law and law as history). This is a void that cannot be denied, and yet most modern thinkers have made it their career to deny it, as a matter of their own survival. In the denial of the void, a lie—something planned and plotted as a lie, compensatory in nature for the absence of truth it dissembles—is enthroned as "the highest value," and that lie is called politics. In...