The Insubordination of Signs: Political Change, Cultural Transformation, and Poetics of the Crisis (Post-Contemporary Interventions) - Tapa dura

"Nelly Richard mobilizes language into a trenchant critique of the political, academic, and market-oriented production of meaning that ushers in quiescent solutions to crises such as that of the postdictatorial reconciliation in Chile. Like the aesthetic projects she endorses, her work gives expression to the `diffuse zones of the unsaid.' Richard wrestles the materiality of critique so that it maintains the inscriptions of antagonism, making it an indispensable instrument for an effective democratic culture. In The Insubordination of Signs, her words add muscle to the Benjaminian insight into rebellious memories that will not be quashed by `final and totalizing truths.'"-George Yudice, author of The Expediency of Culture: Uses of Culture in the Global Era "The Chilean publication of this book and of its companion volume (Masculine/Feminine) confirmed and advanced Nelly Richard's reputation as one of the foremost critical voices of the age. Richard's brand of cultural critique, informed by a thorough attention to contemporary forms of subjectivity, is unmatched in the force of its theoretical articulation, its aesthetic sensitivity, and its sharp deployment of political strategies. Nelly Richard is today an essential reference for intellectual work in Latin America and beyond."-Alberto Moreiras, author of The Exhaustion of Difference: The Politics of Latin American Cultural Studies "At last, Nelly Richard's work is available for English-language readers. A leading figure in the theater of Latin American critical debate, Nelly Richard has written with unorthodox brilliance about the Chilean transition to democracy, North-South cultural relations, and the value of aesthetic intervention to rethink the politics of difference."-Francine Masiello, author of The Art of Transition: Latin American Culture and Neoliberal Crisis

Nelly Richard is one of the most prominent cultural theorists writing in Latin America today. As a participant in Chile's neo-avantgarde, Richard worked to expand the possibilities for cultural debate within the constraints imposed by the Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1990), and she has continued to offer incisive commentary about the country's transition to democracy. Well known as the founder and director of the influential journal Revista de critica cultural, based in Santiago, Richard has been central to the dissemination throughout Latin America of work by key contemporary thinkers, including Nestor Garcia Canclini, Jacques Derrida, Fredric Jameson, and Diamela Eltit. Her own writing provides rigorous considerations of Latin American identity, postmodernism, gender, neoliberalism, and strategies of political and cultural resistance.In The Insubordination of Signs Richard theorizes the cultural reactions-particularly within the realms of visual arts, literature, and the social sciences-to the oppression of the Chilean dictatorship. She reflects on the role of memory in the historical shadow of the military regime and on the strategies offered by marginal discourses for critiquing institutional systems of power. She considers the importance of Walter Benjamin for the theoretical self-understanding of the Latin American intellectual left, and she offers revisionary interpretations of the Chilean neo-avantgarde in terms of its relationships with the traditional left and postmodernism. Exploring the gap between Chile's new left social sciences and its "new scene" aesthetic and critical practices, Richard discusses how, with the return of democracy, the energies that had set in motion the democratizing process seemed to exhaust themselves as cultural debate was attenuated in order to reduce any risk of a return to authoritarianism.