In the Shadow of Liberalism: Anarchist Reason in the Literature and Culture of the Rio de la Plata (1860-1940).

Abstract

My dissertation examines literary and popular culture in its relation to anarchist ideology at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries in Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay. From a psychoanalytic frame, I analyze anarchist contextual meanings in order to shed light on the complex relationship between writing and the modern history of culture and nation-state formation. I approach this through the study of the works of Florencio Sánchez, Rafael Barrett and Roberto Arlt. I consider these writers’ works not only as part of the national pantheon of literature, but also as an assemblage of anarchist gestures grounded in the Freudian notion of unconscious. They provided anarchist ideology with a rationality that challenged its traditional association with delinquency, barbarism, and brutality. Their understanding of reason dislocated the modern nation-state’s interpretation and aims for it. In order to grasp its contextual meanings, I trace the history of anarchist ideology from its embryonic stage in the second half of the 19th century to its full development and decline during the first quarter of the 20th. Guided by local historians of organized labor (Abad de Santillán, Gaona, Suriano, and López D’Alesandro), I review the anarchist conceptions of Proudhon (mutualism/federalism), Bakunin (collectivism), Kropotkin and Malatesta (anarcho-communism), seeking to identify its particularity among social movements. By retrieving anarchist discourse in Sánchez, Barrett, and Arlt, I am not only showing the need for a new cultural genealogy in this region, I am also pointing out their use of aesthetics as a tool to achieve immediate access to the public as well as their attempt to fulfill the goals of anarchist propaganda (freedom, autonomy, solidarity, reason-science, humanity-nature). As a consequence, this use of aesthetics under anarchist rationality disputes the nation-state’s notion of order and law in its foundation of hegemonic representations of culture. I read Sarmiento’s idealized civilization, Rodó’s discussion of positivism and spiritualism, and Güiraldes’s novel Don Segundo Sombra as ambiguous texts that reveal a certain shared perspective with anarchism. Sánchez, Barrett and Arlt, however, challenge conceptual frames such as civilization-barbarism, rationalism-passion and fiction-reality via a disagreement over the use of reason.