Toward a Genealogy of Latin Americanism Idelber Avelar
Tulane University
Forthcoming in Dispositio/N.
“Genealogy,” in its strong philosophical sense, designates not only the study of the origin of a phenomenon, but also the unveiling of the silencing, exclusion, and violence which are always, the genealogist contends, the condition of possibility of the origin, the origin of the origin, so to speak. The Nietzschean genealogy of morals is concerned less with the origins of values than with calling into question “the value of these values themselves,” by referring every concept of moral superiority back to the political superiority - difference in power relations - that instituted them. Michel Foucault’s genealogy of power does not restore a stable and autonomous origin of power, it does not “look for the headquarters that preside over its rationality.” Never identifying power with an object simply possessed by an agent, genealogy instead locates it in immanent relations constitutive of the very subjects engaged in it. Genealogy’s relationship with the question of the origin is then highly complex. For genealogy it is crucial that nothing be a priori taken as natural, given, or historically inevitable. Every concept must be referred back to the ideological system it served, that system itself being a “non-originary origin,” that is to say, an origin which only comes into being as such through the effects retrospectively assigned to it. Under no circumstance will the genealogist assume the existence of a previous object waiting to be discovered: a genealogy of psychiatry, for example, does not assume that madness existed in a pure state, as a natural phenomenon only later captured by medicine. Instead, it tackles the ways in which that knowledge constructed its object according to certain ideological premises. That is not to say, as essentialists of various persuasions have accused, that the object would have to turn out to be a mere invention without empirical existence, or that the knowledge which does the constructing operates freely. This charge ignores the fact that the subject of knowledge only comes into being insofar as it is engaged in that production. In other words, the subject itself does not pre-exist the construction of its object, precisely because it is through that construction that it comes into being as subject. In the case of Latin Americanism, a genealogical approach does not assume the existence of an entity called “Latin America,” endowed with a certain unity and common attributes, but rather investigates how certain meanings have been attributed to that object in the very process of bringing it into being. That is to say, Latin America has no meaningful, discursive existence prior to and independently of the attributes assigned to it in the Latin Americanist tradition. That tradition, in its turn, constitutes itself as such precisely by constituting its object. It is, therefore, not a sovereign subject, but one which is produced in very act of producing its object.
This sets genealogy apart from the more conventional enterprise represented by the history of ideas. Putting it bluntly, one could say that the latter deals with the evolution of certain meanings and contents, whereas the former works with the constitution of discursive economies and fields of force, that is, with conditions of possibility. As Foucault points out,
genealogy does not pretend to restore an unbroken continuity that operates beyond the dispersion of forgotten things; its duty is not to demonstrate that the past actively exists in the present, that it continues secretly to animate the present ... Genealogy does not resemble the evolution of a species and does not map out the destiny of a people. On the contrary, to follow the complex course of descent is to maintain passing events in their proper dispersion; it is to identify the accidents, the minute deviations - or, conversely, the complete reversals - the errors, the false appraisals, and the faulty calculations that gave birth to those things that have value for us; it is to discover that truth or being do not lie at the origin of what we know and what we are, but the exteriority of accidents.
Instead, then, of narrating the continuity or the evolution of Latin American thought, a genealogy of Latin Americanism would inquire into its ruptures and breaches, its moments of non-coincidence with itself, because it suspects that it is there, in those discontinuous spaces, that the silencing that makes possible grand continuous narratives takes place. The question guiding a genealogy of Latin Americanism is not, then, what is, or has been the identity of Latin America, or not even what is or has been the history of the idea of Latin America. It is, rather, the more fundamental, more radical question - “radical” in the etymological sense that alludes to the investigation of the roots of a phenomenon - of how and through what process the postulate of a continental identity creates a field of inclusions and exclusions, assigns positions, interpellates and constitutes subjects. The genealogist refers identity back to the ground that made it possible by understanding it no longer as an ontological given, but as an interested fiction, i.e. as will to power.
The reference to identity as fiction should not, however, be taken to imply distortion or falsification of an empirical reality that could, through a more “appropriate” framework, be represented more faithfully. The critical genealogy of identity is not the unveiling of a mistake that could have been avoided. In other words, the genealogist is not concerned with judging representations and evaluating them according to their faithfulness to a pre-existing, unambiguous given. Rather, she is interested in pursuing the question of how representations are possible in the first place, what is the originary violence that installs them - for it is an axiom of genealogy that the field of representation is always demarcated by an act of violence. In the investigation of Latin Americanism the emphasis will not fall on the truth value of the attributions of identity, since the genealogist does not propose to offer a truer representation of Latin America. The entire discussion over the attributes to be assigned to Latin America blocks from view the object of genealogical inquiry, i.e. the constitution of a cultural entity through acts of exclusion. Thus, when the Mexican philosopher Leopoldo Zea states that “es mucho lo que la América Latina puede, no sólo oponer al egoísmo sajón, sino aportar positivamente a toda la humanidad. Los frutos de una larga, muy larga, experiencia humanitaria,” the genealogist does not stop at questioning these monolithic pictures of the two Americas. She goes further and asks: what if materialism, technicism, rationalization, authoritarianism, in short, all elements identified as ‘dehumanizing’ and ‘egotistic’ by this tradition were shown to share the same premises, the same sustaining ground, to be, indeed, inextricably linked with the very humanism that it claims for itself? What if humanism - the very postulate of a common human essence, of “man” as an autonomous subject and owner of his history, etc. - were made possible precisely by the technification that it superficially may appear to negate? What if Latin Americanist humanism is the unavowed accomplice of the rationalization that it seems to oppose?
The best scholarship on the constitution of a discourse on “Latin Americanness” authorizes the further pursuit of this possibility. Among its many contributions to literary criticism, Julio Ramos’s Desencuentros de la modernidad en América Latina had the merit of pointing out the organic link between, on the one hand, the aestheticist critique of modernization that begins to flourish in Latin America in the late nineteenth century - through the postulate of a spiritual and disinterested realm of “culture” defined in opposition to the market - and on the other hand, the conceptualization of a Latin American “being” or “identity” that legitimated itself precisely by means of that opposition. In his analysis of chronicles such as “Coney Island” or “Walt Whitman,” Ramos shows how an aesthetic subject emerged in Martí by organizing and hierarchizing a modern urban space perceived as a chaos. Integral to this project was an axiology of the “low versus high” by which the materials of modernity, mass culture included, were opposed to an aesthetic realm represented not only as autonomous but also as regulative and compensatory vis-à-vis the mercantile order. In addition to being crucial in the process of autonomization of the aesthetic sphere in Latin America toward the end of the nineteenth century, this opposition played a key role in the emergence of the Latin Americanist “nosotros.” We owe to Ramos’s work the insight that those two processes were not only historically coincident but also organically dependent upon one another. In other words, it was the compensatory hypostatization of the aesthetic as a reservoir uncontaminated by the market that made possible the emergence of the basic rhetorical oppositions of Latin Americanism. José Martí represents perhaps the richest unfolding of this logic, for Martí’s work - decidedly anti-colonial, anti-conservative, and anti-nostalgic in its political intervention - had, nevertheless, to resort to an aesthetic-conservative critique of mercantilization in order to ground not only the locus of the poet in the modern world but also the identity of “Nuestra América.” Still rather ambiguous in Martí and fully consolidated in the tradition that followed him, the images of the market absorption of art and the professional division of intellectual labor became for Latin Americanism the privileged metaphor of the originary fall. Throughout the twentieth century, this post-Edenic narrative structure would be crucial to Latin Americanist discourse in its various modalities.
Already operative in Martí, the Latin Americanist critique of the market absorption of art and its concurrent commodification reached its fullest expression with Rodó at the turn of the century, when the realm of high, “spiritual,” “disinterested” culture was postulated as a preservational barrier immune to mercantile reification. This realm, theorized by Rodó as the very essence of Latin America, delimited the scope and meaning that the very term “Latin America” would acquire in the twentieth century. Latin America’s privileged position in promoting a disinterested aesthetic contemplation was due to the fact that it had presumably inherited Graeco-Latin ideals in an undistorted form, whereas Anglo-Saxon cultures had contaminated them with a narrowly egotistic materialism. The central operation of Latin Americanism after Rodó (visible, as I have noted, in Martí, and even earlier in Francisco Bilbao ) was to claim for Latin America a rectorial place in that “spiritual” reaction of “culture” against the market. The first task of a genealogy of Latin Americanism is, then, to trace the discursive map of the term in its connections with a prescriptive and hierarchical notion of “culture.”
Used for the first time in France in the 1860s and linked with the “Pan-Latinism” which then oriented French foreign policy, the notion of Latin America would only gain currency on this side of the Atlantic after the publication of Torres Caicedo’s Unión Latino-Americana in 1865. It was not until the late nineteenth century that the term began consistently to be appropriated by literati attempting to formulate a humanist alternative to modernization. After the appearance of Rodó’s Ariel in 1900, the tremendous influence of arielismo popularized the opposition between the “spiritual,” “disinterested,” “cultural” values proper to “Latin America,” and the technological materialism of modern capitalism, embodied for Rodó (and for much of Latin Americanism) by the United States. Not only in Rodó, but also in the tradition that followed (Manuel Ugarte, Henríquez Ureña, Martínez Estrada, José Vasconcelos, Alfonso Reyes, Leopoldo Zea, Arturo Roig, etc.), the discourse on Latin Americanness can be traced back to the clash between modernization and its humanist critique. This clash, however, took in Latin America a specific character which differentiates it from its canonical forms in the Western world. The reaction against modernization took place in a context where the modern - associated with the instrumental, the vulgar, the uncultured - was embodied by the United States. The anti-modern rhetoric that founded modern Latin Americanism had its roots in a reaction to the very real threats of US imperialism in the years preceding and following the Spanish-American war, in a context where the US functioned almost as a metonymy for modernity itself. The reaction against modernization perceptible in the late nineteenth-century lettered culture of Latin America has, therefore, very little to do with the European décadent longing for a pre-modern, Ancient Régime. In Latin America, such reaction takes place in a context of modernization imposed against a significant portion of the local elites, who witnessed what was perhaps the definitive dissolution of the possibility of an autochthonous, self-sustained entrance into modernity. Modernization and imperialism are, then, inseparable in Latin American history. Hence the inseparability between aestheticism and Latin Americanism.
When one locates Latin Americanism in relation to the very real imperialist threats against which it emerged, the thorny challenge for genealogy becomes: how to unveil the disciplinary, regulative dimension of a body of thought which has also produced some of the most poignant critiques of US interventionism, of reification and commodification, as well as of the social Darwinist accounts of cultural difference? How to dismantle the naturalized oppositions of Latin Americanism without making any concessions to that against which Latin Americanism reacted (namely, imperialism, biologism, etc.)? If one takes into account the fact that the first essayists of Latin Americanness (Francisco Bilbao, Martí, Manuel Ugarte, González Prada) represent the most progressive and critical moments of the continent’s tradition, how can a genealogy of Latin Americanism claim, at the same time, the heritage of that progressive, critical, anti-imperialist spirit while undoing the mythical rhetoric by which that tradition reproduced itself? The progressive allegiances of part of the Latin Americanist tradition cannot blind the genealogist to the ways in which the rhetoric of identity, the rhetoric of “nosotros,” the rhetoric of the unassimilable Latin American difference has generated a mythology, one which is highly interested in preserving its position within social and economic hierarchies internal to the continent. The genealogy of Latin Americanism is, then, an operation carried out with both hands, ruthless in its critique of a number of naturalized ideologemes proper to Latin Americanism - culture (in its prescriptive sense), identity, difference, etc. - and vigilant enough to take careful distance from the instrumental rationality against which Latin Americanism reacted and in opposition to which it legitimated itself.
A genealogical inquiry into the constitution of Latin Americanism would have to reexamine, for example, Martí’s emphatic critiques of social Darwinism, the most illustrious of which being that of “Nuestra América”:
no hay odio de razas, porque no hay razas. Los pensadores canijos, los pensadores de lámparas, enhebran y recalientan las razas de librería, que el viajero justo y el observador cordial buscan en vano en la justicia de la Naturaleza, donde resalta en el amor victorioso y el apetito turbulento, la identidad universal del hombre. El alma emana, igual y eterna, de los cuerpos diversos en forma y en color. Peca contra la Humanidad el que fomente y propague la oposición y el odio de las razas.
The mythification of Martí throughout the 20th century in Latin America has precluded a clearer perception of how Martí’s critique of biological racism also included a hypostatization of the “natural man” against the realm of artifice. The highly ideological recourse to a “nature” equated with truth and goodness - “el hombre natural es bueno, y acata y premia la inteligencia superior, mientras ésta no se vale de su sumisión para dañarle” (p.28) - also allowed Martí to overturn the civilization / barbarism dichotomy: “no hay batalla entre la civilización y la barbarie, sino entre la falsa erudición y la naturaleza” (p.28). In his explicit attack on Sarmiento Martí characterized “our America” by a privileged relationship with a nature untainted by artifice: “el libro importado ha sido vencido en América por el hombre natural. Los hombres naturales han vencido a los letrados artificiales” (p.28). The consolidation of these oppositions in Martí’s work demanded that their origin remained blocked from observation and critical scrutiny, that the very conditions of production of those oppositions in Martí’s text remained unexamined. The heroicization of Martí in the 20th century guaranteed that such blindness continued unchallenged. By establishing a series of metonymic links such as the one that binds “our America” and “the natural man,” “Nuestra América” constructed a crafty equation between those two terms that allowed for the postulate of an “artificial” realm of “imported,” “bookish” knowledge to emerge on the other side of the opposition. The residual Rousseaunism that operated in Martí would later constitute one of the backbones of Latin Americanist mythology. The key operation performed by Latin Americanism upon this opposition would consist in an automatic, deliberately deceptive identification of Latin American autochthony with that Rousseuanian ideological cluster where nature and truth are collapsed into one. Martí’s “Nuestra América” provided one of the most powerful models for that rhetorical operation.
When submitted to genealogical scrutiny, fables of identity are shown invariably to rest upon certain foundational fictions. One of Latin Americanism’s most powerful articulations of this has been the notion of “lo propio,” “lo nuestro,” initially conceived as a response to, again, very real imperialist and interventionist threats. If the discourse on “lo propio” responds to very real conditions, it is nevertheless ideological, that is, it responds to those conditions imaginarily. “Lo propio” - in the inseparable senses of propriety and property, ontological identity and economic ownership - hypostatizes a continuity between past and present, among heterogeneous subjects, in order to interpellate those heterogeneities as a common substance, in the case of Latin Americanism that common substance being “lo latinoamericano” itself. In Latinoamérica en la encrucijada de la historia, Leopoldo Zea cites Francisco Bilbao’s injunction to perpetuate “nuestra raza americana y latina,” and goes on to ask: “¿qué clase de raza es ésta que pretende crear una asociación y no un imperio? Es la raza de hombres que se ha enfrentado a un imperio y que ha hecho de las cadenas instrumentos para derrotar la esclavitud ... una raza de pueblos conquistados de los que han surgido libertadores.” As heroic as the portrait may look, however, there is something mystifying about the continuity proposed here (and this mystification is, I contend, organic to Latin Americanism): by “liberators” Zea means - and he explicitly names them later in the same passage - the leaders of the independence wars: Bolívar, San Martín, etc. The mythical continuity lies, of course, in the fact that those military chiefs did not arise from any “conquered people.” The convergence of interest between the two social sectors - the criollo leadership of the independence wars and the “conquered peoples” of Amerindia - was temporary, fragile, and would, once the republics were established, give way to a relationship of domination not unlike the colonial one. Bolívar himself, decades before the constitution of Latin Americanism, avant la léttre unmasked the Latin Americanist illusion when he pointed out that the liberating armies were, “aunque vengadores de su sangre (del Inca) descendientes de los que aniquilaron su imperio.” The masterful erasing of everything uncanny, paradoxical, disturbing in this contradiction - the “freeing” of the oppressed by the descendants of the oppressors, a paradox openly admitted by Bolívar - constituted one of the privileged operations of Latin Americanism. The narrative of a “coming to consciousness” of “nuestra América” has been tributary of the erasing of this discontinuity. Only by postulating a continuity between an identity accomplished in the present and some embryonic form of it in the past could Latin Americanism formulate its historical narrative.
Martí offers one of the richest manifestations of the mythical continuity between past and present entailed by Latin Americanism’s retrospective construction of its precursors. The nucleus of Martí’s speech to the Spanish American Literary Society in 1889 (a short essay known as “Madre América”) are three long paragraphs in which he respectively presents a genesis of North America, a genesis of Latin America, and an argument on Latin America’s present condition. These three paragraphs are among the finest Martí ever wrote, both in rhetorical brilliance and political effectiveness. They represent a privileged case for the study of the constitution of Latin Americanism in one of its most vigilant and critical forms. As opposed to a North America where “los hombres nuevos, coronados de luz, [no querían] inclinar ante ninguna otra su corona” (p.20), the conquest of Latin America is “a guerra fanática,” carried out “por entre las divisiones y celos de la gente india” (p.22). Whereas in North America “la autoridad era de todos y la daban a quien se la querían dar” (p.21), colonial Latin America lived a different reality: “de España nombran el virrey, el regente, el cabildo” (p.23). If for the English-speaking settlers “no había acto de la vida que no fuera pábulo de la libertad” (p.21), in Latin America “el alcalde manda que no entre el gobernador en la villa ... y que los regidores se persignen al entrar en el cabildo, y que al indio que eche el caballo a galopar se le den veinticinco azotes” (p.23). As the contrasts go on for several pages, Martí’s use of the present tense reinforces the perception that centuries of history are unfolding before the reader’s eyes. Clearly, Martí’s attempt to explain Latin America in contrast to North America dispenses with all biological and racial referents. The entire argument shifts to a political terrain. What remains to be observed here, however, is how Martí effects the transition from pictures of despotism and obscurantism in colonial Latin America to the “Nuestra América” of which “we” are all “so proud” (p.25).
The triumphant emergence of a hitherto silent identity, blossoming much like a plant, has been the privileged Latin American metaphor for this transition. Note in the following passage all the biological anchors of Martí’s political account of the passage from the colony to the republics: “De aquella América enconada y turbia, que brotó con las espinas en la frente y las palabras como lava, saliendo, junto con la sangre del pecho, por la mordaza mal rota, hemos venido, a pujo de brazo, a nuestra América de hoy, heroica y trabajadora a la vez, y franca y vigilante (p.25). Natural metaphors, suggesting the flowering of a dormant essence that only now has been allowed to bloom, attempt to resolve the mystery of an America “natural y fecunda” (p.24) emerging out of colonial tyranny. Martí must at the same time postulate the independences as a rupture and depict them as the liberation of an essence always already present in Latin America. That is to say, the independence is a historical discontinuity that reestablishes a deeper, ontological continuity: “¿Qué sucede de pronto, que el mundo se para a oír, a maravillarse, a venerar? ¡De debajo de la capucha de Torquemada sale, ensangrentado y acero en mano, el continente redimido! Libres se declaran los pueblos todos de América a la vez. Surge Bolívar, con su cohorte de astros. Los volcanes, sacudiendo los flancos con estruendo, lo aclaman y publican” (p.23). The heroic portrait of the independences is contradicted, however, by a social reality still structured by neo-colonial relations. Between Latin America’s dauntless coming to being through the independences and the misery of its republican present there is a gap that the discourse of identity cannot bridge. Martí erases the persistence of the colonial in the post-colonial so that the process of independence can be portrayed as a triumphant coming to consciousness: “Por eso vivimos aquí, orgullosos de nuestra América, para servirla y honrarla. No vivimos, no, como siervos ...” (p.25). The deceiving first-person plural - perhaps the most powerful grammatical weapon of identitarian discourses - masks the fact that among those presumably included in it, millions do continue to be servants. The constative form takes on a performative dimension, by which in the very act of supposedly describing a state of things one in fact produces it. The performative construction of an illusory first-person plural, handled with remarkable rhetorical skill, was one of the most effective tools of Martí’s Latin Americanism, and no serious study has yet been devoted to it. A lengthier quotation is necessary to shed light on the ways in which the extra-textual referents of Martí’s nouns and pronouns slide almost imperceptibly:
Por entre las razas heladas y las ruinas de los conventos y los caballos de los bárbaros se ha abierto paso el americano nuevo, y convida a la juventud del mundo a que levante en sus campos la tienda. Ha triunfado el puñado de apóstoles. ¿Qué importa que, por llevar el libro delante de los ojos, no viéramos, al nacer como pueblos libres, que el gobierno de una tierra híbrida y original, amasada con españoles retaceros y aborígenes torvos y aterrados, más sus salpicaduras de africanos y menceyes, debía comprender para ser natural y fecundo, los elementos todos que, en maravilloso tropel y por la política superior escrita en la Naturaleza, se levantaron a fundarla? ¿Qué importan las luchas entre la ciudad universitaria y los campos feudales? ¿Qué importa el duelo, sombrío y tenaz, de Antonio de Nariño y Juan Ignacio de Loyola? Todo lo vence y clava cada día su pabellón más alto, nuestra América capaz e infatigable. Todo lo conquista, de sol en sol, por el poder del alma de la tierra ... (p.24).
Too many riddles remain to be disentangled here, the most striking of which concerns the referent of “nuestra América”: how could she, simple logic would force one to ask, be so capable, conquering, and inexhaustible if she is made up of “leftover Spaniards and sullen Indians”? How can the miserable origin have led to the triumphant present? This is the question whose stubborn obviousness Latin Americanism must repress. Whence comes the “new American”? Not, it is fit to suppose, from frozen races, horse-riding barbarians, or blind book-readers. What is the residue that allows our America to triumph, over and above the struggles between feuds and universities, if that America is itself composed of feuds and universities? Among the long phrases depicting images of degeneracy, two positive referents remain: the natural metaphors (“the superior politics written in Nature,” “the soul of the land”) and the victorious “handful of apostles.” The leadership of the independence is led to assume, through a masterful metonymic sliding, the locus of bearers of a truth of nature. Martí metonymically reduces America to the republican leadership, in order then to make of that metonymy a metaphor for a truth embedded in nature. Every other element originally present in the composition of “Nuestra América” must be engulfed, subsumed under that euphoric metaphor. A metonymy that reduces the continent to a particular singularity within it, and subsequently a metaphor that makes of the continent an image and resemblance of that metonymy: Latin Americanism demarcates a field of inclusions and exclusions through these two inseparable processes of condensation and displacement.
These inclusions and exclusions cannot function, I have been arguing, without silencing discontinuities in the past. In Martí’s rhetoric, the most salient erasure is effected upon the contradiction between a jubilant, heroic coming to consciousness with the independences, and the persistence of a backward and semi-colonial social structure that would appear to negate such triumphalism. The various narratives on Latin American identity in the 20th century have inherited this constitutive gesture. In his El pensamiento latinoamericano, Leopoldo Zea distinguishes three moments in Latin America’s coming to consciousness (toma de conciencia). According to Zea, from the 18th century through the national independences the enlightened ideals provided criollos with an instrument for a first moment of awareness of their own circumstance. Those ideals being, however, negated by the brute reality of bloody civil wars, Latin Americans were forced to enter into a second phase of consciousness, in which thinkers such as Sarmiento, Lastarria, Echeverría, etc. realized that political independence had to be accompanied by a “mental emancipation” from the colonial past. However - Zea’s narrative continues - it was not long before the positivist civilizing project revealed its limitations, for it attempted to modernize the young Latin American nations without assuming the heritage of the past. This leads Zea, then, to postulate a third moment of Latin American self-consciousness - what he calls the “proyecto asuntivo” - in which thinkers such as Martí, Ugarte, Rodó, Vasconcelos (that is to say, the first generation of Latin Americanists and founders of the tradition in which Zea himself is inscribed) formulated a critique of positivism by showing that Latin America should turn its eyes toward itself and find in itself the solution for its problems. This was the heritage of self-consciousness later assumed by the generation of the “new Latin American humanism” of the 1930s and 40s (Martínez Estrada, Octavio Paz, Arturo Ardao, etc.) and later by the generation of social critics of the 1960s. Unavowedly, then, the history of the Latin Americanist coming to consciousness culminates in a moment of plenitude in which the Latin American philosopher and historian of “lo propio” is, himself, writing.
It does not take a Jean Hyppolite to figure out that Zea’s narrative is organized according to a Hegelian syntax. The philosopher of the proper cannot dispense with an alien framework to organize his narrative. The genealogist, however, does not fling at the philosopher of the proper that particular accusation - that his “proprio” is always already contaminated by the “ajeno.” That would assume the very separation between “propio” and “ajeno,” Latin America and its others, thereby leaving that separation itself outside genealogical scrutiny. The genealogical critique of “lo propio” is not primarily interested in the content assigned to that propriety, or to the geographical origin of those contents. It is, rather, concerned with showing the mode of articulation of those identitarian ideologemes, the ways in which they operate as an epic narrative in which nothing past is ever lost, since the present - each present that climbs another step in the stairway of self-consciousness - is always ready to incorporate that past and raise it to a higher level. The narrative of identity, and the fables of self-consciousness upon which it is predicated, is a triumphant narrative. It can tell its own story as a triumph because it plows over everything that was interrupted, lost, silenced, unaccomplished in the past. It erases the failures of the past by recuperating those failures as anticipations of an always successful present. It silences all past barbarism by recuperating that barbarism as a glittering testimony to the richness of culture. It is in the unveiling of that silencing, in indicating the barbaric violence that underlies the very richness of culture, that a genealogy of Latin Americanism finds its most urgent critical task.