Piglia’s Macedonio, Klossowski’s Nietzsche: echoes of Pierre Klossowski’s "Nietzsche and the vicious circle" in Ricardo Piglia’s "La ciudad ausente"

• Matt Johnson ^[1]
  1. [1] New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology

     New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology

     Estados Unidos

     
• Localización: CiberLetras: revista de crítica literaria y de cultura, ISSN-e 1523-1720, Nº. 47, 2022
• Idioma: inglés
• Enlaces
  • Texto completo (pdf)
• Resumen

  • Ricardo Piglia’s novel La ciudad ausente (1992) depicts a conspiracy set in motion by Argentine writer Macedonio Fernández in the years before his 1952 death. This essay studies how Piglia constructs this conspiracy in dialogue with Pierre Klossowski’s landmark reading of Friedrich Nietzsche in Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle (1969). Klossowski encounters in Nietzsche’s writings a far-reaching conspiracy aimed at the foundations of the nineteenth-century social order. This essay suggests that Piglia’s depiction of the Macedonian conspiracy in La ciudad ausente emerges from his study of Klossowski’s Nietzsche. It begins by highlighting similarities between Klossowski’s work and Piglia’s conspiratorial understanding of the historical avant-gardes. It goes on to read La ciudad ausente in dialogue with Klossowski, showing how Piglia harmonizes Macedonio’s conspiratorial projects with those of Nietzsche. It concludes with a study of how, in the later essay “Teoría del complot” (2002), Piglia cites figures such as Nietzsche and Macedonio in his reflections on the possible formation of new conspiracies against the neoliberal social order of the twenty-first century. By reading Piglia with Klossowski, this essay illustrates how Piglia’s understanding of the relationship between conspiracy, literature, and the modern social order emerges out of his parallel interpretation of Nietzsche and Macedonio.