Exile begins with the act of displacement that removes one from the national space. Nationality removed or dislocated becomes a mark, a referential node in a network that unites multiple sites of power and meaning external to the nation of origin, but always referential to its authority to displace and ratify identity. The exile’s identity is formed by the banishing. Knowing itself to be a child of the possibility of the nation-state to distort or violate the birth promise of citizenship, exile is an originary trauma that circumscribes certain legal, ethical, and identitarian possibilities across historical space and time.

This trauma takes many forms, and the exile’s trauma is almost certainly predated by the significant trauma of the death or destruction of political possibility and expression. Prior to the possibility of displacement or banishment through exile must come the motivation of exile, at least in the political or spatial sense. And here we see a major tension that I will articulate and develop throughout the body of this chapter: that exile is a concept made up of a network of meaning that makes difficult an overall appraisal of its power for literary and philosophical analysis. Exile is seen by the writers I discuss here along a continuum of meaning that allows for each of them to specifically underwrite and deepen their personal projects of relevance. This is not to say that exile is merely a literary or philosophical experience or notion. As one of the more lucid theorists of exile in recent years, Amy Kaminsky has pointed out: “[e]xile is, as much as anything, a spatial phenomenon, and space is a condition of, and a precondition for, the body” (Prologue xiv). Exile is a physical and spatial reality that manifests itself in the signifying and signified body. The material and spatial apperception of human reality are restructured by the actual dislocations, and this change inscribes itself, makes itself visual or at least, writable in the case of many writers.

Exile is also a linguistic phenomenon, as has been most effectively seen and experienced by the vast majority of native American people, many of whom were either born or forced into a situation where their native language was repressed forcibly by institutions of colonization and cultural destruction. Languages disappear irrevocably through the oppression imposed by colonization, or the native language becomes altered in an extreme way, reflecting the role that hegemonic linguistic institutions have in the promulgation of exile. As native peoples were dislocated, their geographical experiences changed, and the very terms for space, time, and location began to incorporate the hegemonic conceptualizations imposed by colonial force. Although exile is perhaps one of the central political myths of the western world, it took on a new form with the imposition of the political relations between center and periphery that emerged with the discovery of the Americas. Scholar Aníbal Quijano names this new arrangement of political space part of the “coloniality of power.”Footnote 1

What is important to understand about exile and language is that exile rearranges the relationship between the self and self-expression at not only the cognitive level, but at the level of affect. As the reinscription of space takes place, so the body follows and language models what the body suffers during the period of exile. Beginning with Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, and discussed in Kaminsky’s book, which I shall treat below, language, affect, and exile have been brought together in critical analysis, allowing for a deepening of the critical vocabulary. Exile as a concept begins to expand, and we can see its importance across the spectrum of literary scholarship. The mythos of exile soon reshapes itself into the identity of exile, which in turn becomes the centripetal idea of many writers: it takes the form of a subjectivity, a way of engaging the world that changes utterly the way in which writing is produced. Identity is formed anew and it becomes critical to analyze the relations between exile, subjectivity, and cultural production.

It is not merely coincidental that products have flowing and free transnational and global identities, while national identity is still one of the preconditions for free movement in the world (how does one discuss the traveler’s nightmare of losing her passport and identification, only to submit herself to the consular process). Philosophers like Hardt and Negri enjoy pointing out that the current postnational stage creates the possibility for identity formation to pass out of the national confines and into a new affective dimension. Networks of labor and laborers that were part of the Fordist economic and cultural milieu are now subject to the changing rules of the transforming capitalist landscape. Immaterial labor, defined as the changing of the production process through the increasing technological and epistemic changes of labor, and on the other hand, as the increasing labor surrounding the reception of the commodity—branding, fashion, the informal communities around it, has become one of the most powerful tools in the creation of a network of connections that describe our contemporary era.

Part of the relevance of the optic of individuation that Hallward provides us, with the terms of the singular and the specific, is the development of a critical apparatus that attends to the local, situated nature of knowledge and the possibility of transcending the spheres and boundaries of mere locality. One of the ways this is accomplished is by understanding the way a discourse configures the possibility for the exchange of knowledge and meaning. Within a singular discourse, individuation through the piling on of ever denser and more distancing levels of difference achieves the reduction into a singular point, a One that is not the oneness of Deleuze, Badiou, Spinoza, or any other philosopher of the multiply singular—those philosophers who see in the world’s immanence a type of unity expressed through the manifestation of multiplicity—but rather a One that closes the circuits and connections of membership completely. As I have mentioned elsewhere in this work, the singular is formed out of the “dissolution of relationality,” the scission of connecting with a prior other or connection in order to express an immanence that is total to itself. The one of the singular admits no entrance, and it circumscribes its own space, providing only for its own enunciation.

The problem with the singular is that, ultimately, anything that emerges as singular is a closure of the possible for those unincluded within its spaces. Singularity does not admit for difference and collapses the distinctions created by the concept of difference by the imposition of a positively marked differentiation from all. In other words, there is always a broad cleavage between alterity and the singular in writing and theoretical production—despite being clothed in a seemingly liberatory project. Anything that creates its own “exclusive scale of existence” risks demarcating borders that only include it and contain it within a constant reordering of the descriptive nuances that allow the interior and exterior to mutually reinforce each other. Singular discourses create an ethical dilemma by creating a space where no contestation of meaning can occur without significantly challenging the framework, if not destroying it. Given this, it is of vital importance to take to task the singular where it manifests itself—if only where it may render accounts, as in the concept of the Nation, perhaps the most frequently invoked singularity in cultural production.

This chapter will investigate the formation of the specific by understanding the material and immaterial networks embodied by the writing and person of Chilean author Roberto Bolaño—indisputably the most important Latin American author of the last 20 years. I argue that part of the literary investigation of the specific can be located in Bolaño’s extraordinary understanding of literature and reading as a global system of displacement that occurs through the act of reading and belonging within the literary community. Readers and writers are not merely locked into the relationship of consumption and production of literary works based solely on national identity or understanding. Instead, they are part of a world-system that traces pathways of understanding and recognition along the literary circuit of reading and writing—pathways that form the identities of writers through affiliations, alliances, idolatry, and conflicts.

For Bolaño, this series of encounters challenged him to envision of his political identity as a displaced Chilean citizen in a light that takes to task what the vision of the Chilean exile then and now is. Bolaño disagrees with the concept of “the exile” vehemently, and in its place substitutes the more appropriate concept of the nomad—a traveler along the networks of the global system of literature. The nomad figures as the being who best exemplifies the relation between reader, writer, text, and, mutatis mutandis, nation. This nomadism is the result of literature—especially the novel, but in the case of Latin America, poetry as well (exemplified best through the travels of figures like José Martí, Rubén Dario, and Pablo Neruda)—operating as a world-system that inaugurates an ever-shifiting topography of intertextualities that form the nomad possibility. Readers and writers negotiate these world currents and communicate with each other their knowledge of the literary world-system. Exiled writers, with their traumatized ties to the lost homeland, display a yearning for the national space that, Bolaño argues, is dissonant with the very office of writer.

Nomad literary subjectivityFootnote 2 is critical as a way out of the trap of the singular that is part of the exile’s desire for home and serves as a model for how the specific is always a part of literature itself. I will argue, with Hallward and Bolaño, that part of literature’s great power and durability is how the specific is modeled through the world-system of literature and exemplified in Bolaño’s essay writing and his vast dramatis personae of nomadic literary travelers.

My argument does not wish to deny or occlude the material, physical, and affective consequences of the experience of exile. The costs that exile exacts upon the exiled subject are often a total reduction of the subject to its most abject biopolitical existence. Although, in some of the most important ways, the study and literary description of exile is very different from that of the refugee: the juridical status of the exile is often simply that of the refugee, and both share the biopolitical and juridico-political status of the refugee.

I show in this chapter how exile and nomad in Southern Cone writing are part of the logics of individuation of the singular and the specific, and how especially the concept of the exile, reflected upon in a certain fashion, creates a kind of singularity that excludes other conceptions of writing and narration of political displacement. By seeing instead how nomad and exile work together in the writing of Bolaño, I show how the specific operates to support an ethical perspective on the practice of writing and reading—which offers us a new way of practicing the role of literature as a form of cultural critique.

Working Toward the Specific: What the Nomad and Bolaño Can Teach Us About Politics and Being

Part of the usefulness of understanding the difference between the specific and the singular is developing the relationship between visions of individuation and distinction and the formation of a hermeneutics that has a type of political vision. This vision, if properly guided by a specific understanding, allows for the understanding of decision and motivation within a text, and the possibility of an open plurality, rife with possibilities for expression. The specific as such does not set into motion a necessary relation of individuation and grouping. Politics, as such, does not emerge from the identification of a specific form of writing. In many ways, the singular and the specified share space inasmuch as they both attempt to counter distinct political and ontological descriptions.

The singular attempts to arrest the multiple in being and the role of differentiation in subject-object relations. In an ontology where the subject and the object might be mapped and identified, the phenomenal relation of individuation is important, if only in a mathematical sense. The singular proffers a closure of this plurality, instead forcing a transcendence into play that undermines plurality and specificity, leaving subject and object to be subsumed within an extreme totality. As Peter Hallward puts it, “every singular configuration emerges through the dissolution of relationality, as the expression of a non-relational, self-creative or self-constituent force” (Hallward 329). Arguing from this position, discourses of singularity are those that wrap meaning around coordinates that produce a self-consuming and limited discourse—one that limits the possibilities of expression and reading to the mapping of an interiority that may be incomprehensibly structured to readers from the outside. Exile, often caused by the violent will of singular dictatorships, often presents its contents from this singular and radically interiorizing position.

On the other hand, the sensation or affect of singularity explored by products of exile allows for the development of expressions of experiences that map out specific and innovative details of the experience. The very real experience of a writer’s exile is always a reminder of the consequences that a singular logic can have when materialized and implemented in the world. Literature’s force certainly creates the conditions for exile—regimes of singular construction fear the plurality of high reflexivity. The repressive political forces of dictatorship return the threatening disruptions of the differences identified and produced by literature with torture or fatal violence, or the creation of conditions for exile. This illustrates that logics of individuation or differentiation carry very real effects. How the operations of multiplication and connection are expressed configures what is implemented materially and physically. This recalls that the interior/exterior relationship of a singular logic often reduces the distance between subject and object such that difference disrupts the edges of the singularity, and an already violently contrived singularity responds with cruel force. As Hermann Herlinghaus argues, “Modes of subjectivization are highly dependent on ‘aesthetico-political fields’ that delimit the horizons of a given order or hierarchy of the sayable, desirable, and performable and that which remains secret or excluded” (22).

It is relevant to imagine and understand the way literature as a system of specific ideas—the type of ideas that become distinct and individualized through writing, even without the presence of specified causes—necessarily creates the space of possibility for political repression from authoritarian regimes. Here, we may call Juan José Saer to witness. He leads us to see that there is a twofold reason for this. On the one hand, writing and representation threaten the representational schema of any authoritarian regime. Dictatorial control and hegemony rests on stifling the creation and reproduction of any representation that might threaten the control over meaning a dictatorship requires.

El exilio politico de tipo coyuntural no es exclusivo de los escritores; que un escritor sea desterrado de su propio país por que no corresponde a las consignas ideológicas de los que gobiernan es un hecho que no refleja más que un aspecto del problema y que, cuanto más, hace solidario al escritor con los otros sectores de la sociedad que sufren las misma suerte. (Saer 268)

Para una estimación correcta de las relaciones específicas entre exilio y literatura, es preciso que la praxis misma de la literatura se vuelva problemática, sin que se oponga necesariamente y de manera explítica, en sus posiciones ideológicas, al poder politico, el cual mediante el exilio, la conspiración del silencio, la represión, decide que sea inexistente. (Saer 269)

Political exile of the conjunctural type is not exclusive to writers; that a writer be displaced from her own country because she does not correspond with the ideological slogans of those who govern is an act that does not reflect more than one part of the problem, and what’s more, it allows for the writer to be in solidarity with others who suffer the same fate.

For a correct estimation of the specific relationships between exile and literature, it is necessary that the praxis of literature become problematic, without necessarily being explicit and so opposed in their ideological positions to political power, which by exile and the conspiracy of silence and repression, renders it nonexistent.

Saer’s view is that literature’s relationship to exile necessitates an active opposition by writers to dictatorial power and the “conspiracy of silence and repression” enforced by dictatorship. His injunction is indisputable, arguing that clear knowledge of how literature relates to exile requires the intervention of writing upon the political, almost certainly courting that selfsame exile and political repression. It is fitting that a politically engaged person in exile would think this, given the extraordinary power that literature has over the imagination of regimes. Self-exiled in Paris in 1968, Saer explored the consequences of exile and literature through a serious of recurring motifs and investigations on the theme.

Does this suggest that the only relationship between literature and exile is an explicit confrontation of repression by writing? Are there alternative ways of mapping how displacement and writing intersect without the explicit taking of a position by the writer? This is not to suggest that I advocate a political quietism on the notion of exile, but rather that we imagine exile as also performing a singular function, and that the singularity, the subjectivization of the single exiled victim often imagined by exile writers must also be challenged as a problem, one that makes for the emergence of collectivities, tense and difficult.

This is not the only reason to challenge singularity. As I will show, it may be that there is an affective and political disjunct between exile and the world-system of writing itself. Bolaño’s claim that literature, or the literary system of readers, publishers, and writers, precludes the possibility of any exile that is not motivated by a type of problematic nostalgia, allows us to identify a specific form of understanding and affective liberation within the space of the literary.

Theories of Exile Writing

Writing about the relationship of writing to the concept of exile also suffers from a panoply of problems for scholars who wish to explore how the status of exile affects literary production. To begin with, much of the secondary literature studying the relationship between writing and the status of the concept of exile has been subsumed under the conceptual matrix of diaspora studies. The displacement and affective dislocation of the exiled from his national origins are often questioned as having the capacity to inform literature as a category. Exile as a notion seems to suffer as from an under-theorization, while being widely considered one of the most relevant terms of contemporary political understanding.Footnote 3

In Spain, the “big exodus” of 1939, which saw 465,000 Spanish flee the persecution of the recently victorious Falangeists, created a displaced population of writers, artists, and other intellectuals that would find refuge abroad, many of whom would never return again to their homeland until nearly 40 years later, with Franco’s death in 1976. Still more never returned to see Spain ever again. Global political history has seen the massive increase of exiles and displaced persons, and the creation of a new political subjectivity—the refugee—by means of the dislocating mechanisms of contemporary political life. Yet the exile has rarely, if ever, been treated as a political force referring to the nation of origin.

The above descriptions of refugees does not cover, for example, the millions of people in exile that emerged as a consequence of the turbulence of Latin America’s twentieth century. The two most well-known examples certainly include Chile, which saw almost a million citizens exiled from its lands, and Argentina, which saw significantly fewer exiles, but who formed an equally active and vocal enclave of resistance abroad, and among whose numbers included a great number of already prominent writers.

Although I focus here on the Southern Cone, one should never forget that during this period of intense dictatorship and political struggle, almost every Latin American nation produced waves of exiled citizens. Each of these nations—from Colombia to Cuba—has a story to tell about the powerful consequences of the politics of dislocation. Furthermore, those writing on Latin America and exile have long recognized that one of the most enduring consequences of the region’s history has been the creation of a vibrant and visible diaspora created by political displacement.Footnote 4 From Brazil to the Dominican Republic, the visual and cultural geography of the hemispheres has been irrevocably changed by the flow of exiles and their effort to adapt to the unfortunate dynamism of political displacement.

This geography of exile, is of course, a geography and topography of suffering. The suffering of exile is part of the grave chronicle of torment of age that arguably can mark its political maturity with the genocide and deportation of Armenians in 1915. Exile’s historical fabric is part of the very palpable tapestry of political violence that marks what George Steiner calls a “civilization of quasi-barbarism.”Footnote 5

In this age, the concepts of exile and that of the refugee have become blended, as host-nations grant political asylum, but often do not specify the legal status of a refugee or a person in exile.Footnote 6 Much of the literary theory and analysis on this topic has not differentiated between the two statuses, and what has suffered has been a thorough-going discussion on how nationalism or nationalist sentiments seem to operate in Southern Cone literary production. This text will not address in depth the important distinction between the status of a refugee and that of a person in exile. Exile’s idiosyncracies and vintage are different enough from the status of refugee to merit deeper analysis. The following long quote from Edward Said elaborates the aforementioned nicely:

Although it is true that anyone prevented from returning home is an exile, some distinctions can be made among exiles, refugees, expatriates, and émigrés. Exile originated in the age-old practice of banishment. Once banished, the exile lives an anomalous and miserable life, with the stigma of being an outsider. Refugees, on the other hand, are a creation of the twentieth-century state. The word “refugee” has become a political one, suggesting large herds of innocent and bewildered people requiring urgent international assistance, whereas “exile” carries with it, I think, a touch of solitude and spirituality. (Said 181)

I agree with Said in two specific ways. Firstly, it is clear that the refugee is a creation of twentieth-century juridical and national development. As decolonization occurred, so too did the creation of new nations and nationalisms. The invention of these identities and borders made possible the refugee. After all, the national is the first condition of the refugee: her soil and culture is torn from her. She is landless, stateless, and her nation is that which is to be destroyed or rent asunder.

Nonetheless, the nation is at least somewhat retained as a point of reference and often recreated or reimagined from the position and place of exile. First, there is a conceptual framework for exile that implicates the re-creation of the lost land and familiar topographies—the affective, physical, or sensual loss of home. This is a phenomenon seen in many exile communities—restaurants, shops, and cultural centers emerge in response to the dislocating force of exile. In this fashion, the nation is rewritten within the framework of the new nation’s institutions itself. Without being Utopian or unnecessarily triumphant about the status of the exile in their new national home, it is possible to argue that what differentiates generations of exiles from their descendents is the capacity in which later generations see the new nation’s institutions as shells for the approximation of the lost home or a site for the creation of a hybridized identity that reflects aspects of former and current home. Of further relevance is how mythological the home nation might appear. Generations of those who were exiled in early youth, or those who were born to parents who were in exile may be said to mythologize the homeland less, seeing its vaunted institutions in a more objective light.

Yet the exile is not condemned to merely reimagine the old through a simulacral logic. Rather, as Said argues, a state of exile often carries with it a sort of double possibility for innovative and often pleasing expression and life:

For an exile, habits of life, expression, or activity in the new environment inevitably occur against the memory of these things in another environment. Thus, both the new and the old environments are vivid, actual, occurring together contrapuntally. There is a unique pleasure in this sort of apprehension, especially if the exile is conscious of other contrapuntal juxtapositions that diminish orthodox judgment and elevate appreciative sympathy. (Said 186)

Contrapuntality is Said’s way of saying that exile renders possible a negotiation of meaning between the two cultures. The displacement of exile becomes a reorienting mechanism for the new environment, and the new environment is given the capacity to decenter the land of origin. Order and commonplace logic are disrupted, leading to a new map of being. As Said puts it: “Exile is life without habitual order. It is nomadic, decentered, contrapuntal; but no sooner does one get accustomed to it than its unsettling force erupts anew” (186).

In one of the most sustained and thorough-going studies of exile in Iberian and Spanish-American literature, The Dialectics of Exile: Nation, Time, Language and Space in Hispanic Literatures, the author, Sophie McClennan, begins with a pointed investigation on exile’s configurations of space, temporality, and national identity. She identifies how the experience of exile often yields a very specific set of literary representations of national identity, spatial experience, and the experience of a new temporality experienced during exile. “Nation, Time, Language, and Space,” are all investigated in order to arrive and facilitate a detailed study of exile literature that maps the experience along crucial coordinates of cultural experience.

Although, as McClennan identifies “the history of exile literature is as old as the history of writing itself” (McClennan 3), she concurs that literary-critical analysis of exile writing has been limited to investigations which have “tended to analyze these works according to a binary logic, where exile either produces creative freedom or it traps the writer in restrictive nostalgia” (McClennan 2). Within the space produced by this binary, analysis of the relationship between writing and exile often focuses explicitly on the emotional responses produced by the experience. McClennan argues that the feelings associated with exile are sensations of exultation at freedom from the fetters of a national discourse or a sense of missing the familiar confines of home. As McClennan identifies in her study:

Scholars suggest that Exile is either a creative and liberating state, which enables the writer to function freely of the limitations of the local and the national, or they argue that exile literature is profoundly nostalgic and yearns for the lost nation. Exile either causes creative freedom and reflects a global aesthetic or its results in heightened provincialism. (2)

The binary representation of the exile thus forces the reading of any situation to operate within the strict spaces of local territorial logic or in taking the world as a deterriorializing frame of reference. Exile’s scholars have tended to operate between these poles of the globe and the nation-state, ignoring the possibility that the experience of exile might be no mere dualistic experience, but instead always a mixture of sentiments and sensations—in other words, exile as an experience might be as deterriorialized and deterritorializing as our day-to- day life.

Where previous texts have neglected to identify the affective tensions inherent in exile, McClennan identifies the aforementioned tropes of nation, space, language, and time, and the dialectical play of these ideas with exile. The “dialectics of exile,” as such, operate as a series of literary and theoretical engagements with the concept of exile at the level of a logic that does not necessarily reconcile the binary possibilities of the affective, geographical, and temporal aspects of exile experience, but rather, allows them to remain in tension. Instead, McClennen forcefully makes the claim that the tensions of the experience of exile are revealed dialectically within the textual productions of her writers—Uruguayan Cristina Peri Rossi, Spain’s Juan Goytisolo, and Ariel Dorfman from Chile—revealing a more complicated field of understanding for students of literature and exile.

What is most prominently revealed is how these tensions expand the descriptions of what is actually possible to represent in the exile experience. As we have seen with Saer’s intervention, the very function of writing within a dictatorial regime is the target of the regime’s violence. Writing emerges as the functional origin for exile—a nation where writing is not free, not practicable, by virtue of the political desire for a singular communication, enforces exile and more pernicious forms of violence as the natural consequence to the opposition of writing. What this means for the study of exile is the implicit understanding of how exile writing is a phenomenon rooted in the specificity and immediacy of the lived moment. Exile is always a product of a specific political intervention by both regime and author, binding both inexorably; as McClennen points out:

Simply put, the condition of exile is directly a result of the social and political climate occupied by the author, making ahistorical exile literature a contradiction in terms. For the exiled writer, questions of language, problems with publication and audience, and the social context of the exile as outsider and outcast make transcendence unattainable. (41)

The question of an “unattainable transcendence” is remarkable inasmuch as it equates transcendence with the capacity to speak across temporal and historical zones. But what is at stake in exile writing is often the very transcendence that McClennen speaks of. Exile writing is a difficult and naturally dialectical phenomenon, where the writer often shifts in and out of the emotions produced by the geographical change. Part of the extraordinary response of exile is a remapping of the concept and apperception of nation and nationalism.

National identity is one of the first losses felt by those in exile, and their reflections often begin by analyzing what this means. On the one hand, the loss of nation immediately felt begins to produce nostalgia, sadness, and a need to reproduce aspects of the nation in the new sphere. On the other hand, for many exiled writers, freedom of sorts from the repressive consequences of writing becomes a motivating force, and their capacity for work and intervention is given new stimulus by exile. An innovative type of writing of the present and rewriting of history is brought to bear, and history and national identity are material for literary reconfiguration: “[E]xiles tend, to some degree or another, to incorporate both seemingly contradictory strategies. They attempt to remap cultural identity, while simultaneously breaking down the externally imposed borders of cultural identity which correspond to a concept of the nation” (30).

In the field of Southern Cone literary studies, Kaminsky’s After Exile: Writing the Latin American Diaspora remains one of the most developed literary studies on the question of exile, literature and my area of study, the Southern Cone of the South American continent (Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay). Her extensive text draws on a long tradition of exile writers—some of the more famous ones from the region include Mario Benedetti, Marta Traba, José Donoso, Ricardo Piglia, and Luisa Valenzuela—to illustrate how the experience of exile and the creation of diaspora by Southern Cone writers reflects a concern with a spatial, embodied discourse of exile. Furthermore, Kaminsky attempts to deal with the affective dimensions of the spatial concerns of exile, and how the battle for an understanding of the exile space manifests a certain series of preoccupations immanent to the experience of banishment and displacement.

Of further concern to Kaminsky is the manner in which the exile writing is embodied in a gendered position. The gendered nature of exile, as women writers experience the displacements and wounds of exile in a very different fashion; physically, politically, as well as emotionally, is coupled with the experience of male writers to concretize her study of exile as a particular experience of the real.

Kaminsky describes her project in the following manner: “In looking at language and space, I am trying to hold on to the material: exile as a lived reality; language as produced in, and received by the body; space as located matter, with measurable distances, and occupied” (Kaminsky xvi). Exile for Kaminsky expresses the physical contours of displacement and the deterritorializations and reterriorializations of the exiled subject. By considering “such questions as the instability of exile itself; the mutual constitution of language and space in texts; the notion of national identity as a condition of an exile sensibility; and memory and forgetting,” After Exile serves as one of the more developed and extensive meditations upon the theme.

This chapter will now turn to describe the basic operators of the definition of exile as both a political and literary phenomenon—a state of political being that, I believe, is central to understanding Bolaño. What will become clear from the following is how the concept of exile in literature and literary analysis is a pluralized, polyvalent field, that operates—in spite of the necessarily coerced nature of exile—as a specific reflection, a type of nonsingularized and nonsingularizing writing, investigating the experience of politically motivated banishment. The specific involves the taking of sides and the creation of allegiances through a decision, one that is universalisable, and “always specific-to (though not specified by) a situation external to its operation” (250). Born of a distinct relation between external “situation” and a decision to engage that situation in order to elaborate it for a universal community, many writers on exile imagine their experience as one that is comprehensible and writeable for many.

On the other hand, there exists a tendency for exile—or any politically traumatic event—to be seen as a singularity, or a particular trauma that divides those who suffer exile from those who stay. This singularity creates a rupture in political communication. Exiles often see their positions as a singularity that imputes extraordinary distance between themselves and those who cannot or have not experienced the emotional disturbances of exile. Those who left are burdened with the necessity and duty to describe their experience, commemorating what always must be remembered: the destruction of political life, the imposition of fear; and in the case of the Southern Cone, the horrible murders, disappearances, and spiritual assault upon common life. This means that, for the Southern Cone, there is a tension between the exile and those left behind in work like Kaminsky’s. The exile is one who is not part of a singular experience, but rather one whose literature reflects a plurality of preoccupations for those writers, and other artists who reflect upon it.

One of Kaminsky’s most developed notions—one that will be pursued further in the later discussion on how the specific is formed in relation to a prior political or epistemic situation—is how exile is a spatial and a material phenomenon. It is spatial not only because it is the displacement of the subject from her home, changing the contours and physical realities of experience, but because the exile herself is given the capacity to reconfigure space through her existence in her host country. The exiled subject is in many ways as much a material agent of change on the physical space. His or her bodily difference often announces itself, her accent or language permeates the publicly audible space, and her body is changed by the deterritorialization of exile, or in Spanish, el destierro. As Kaminsky puts it: “[e]xile and all the related to it have a material component, and that component is felt, experienced and known through the body. This is not to say that it is not theorized, interpreted, and or represented through language; but that without the emplaced human body, there is nothing to know or represent about exile and its aftermath” (Kaminsky ix).

The exile’s experience is always one where the affective experiencing of exile is narrated through the place where the body lies. Out of the national space means out of the space and place where identity is rooted, at least partially, in the practices, spaces, and day-to-day movement of the physical nation. Kaminsky and McClennen both articulate an important point that other critics on exile have overlooked—the role of the material and affective circumstances that make up exile—space, nation, time, and representations of quotidian life. As writers in the Southern Cone have suffered exile, so their writing has expressed the finer points and texture of exile as an experience. Part of the power of Kaminsky and McClennen’s work is that they advance the scholarly study of exile by pointing to the lived complexity of the exile experience, and then by identifying these representations within the literature. Thus, studies of how exiles perceive time, map out their lived space, and configure their daily struggles becomes vitally important.

What Kaminsky and McClennen provide is a way toward understanding exile literature as a multifaceted written phenomenology of displacement from home. McClennen, through her dialectical technique, reveals how exile is never a singular experience of trauma and pain. Rather, exile is made up of the movement of affects surrounding the subjective experience of space, nationality, temporality, expressed through the often incomplete and unstable regime of language. Language’s vacillation between communicability and the often untranslatable affects, mirror the complexity of exile experience. McClennan’s work deepens the field in order to take studies of exile literature in a direction where its literary expressions can reveal a great deal concerning the way we deal with trauma in our most material and quotidian aspects.

Finally, McClennan and Kaminsky both develop readings of exile writing that further research into the capacity for writing to develop and express the affective experience of exile. In addition, both authors tie the experience to temporality, language, and space. Yet Bolaño moves beyond this in specifying not just the state of exile, but also a nomad, as a specific kind of exile who does not try to create a nation simply by dichotomy.

The figure of the nomad is discussed by Bolaño in his illuminating series of short articles and essays entitled “Fragmento de un regreso a un país natal” (1998). This series of texts represents Bolaño’s most explicit nonfictional engagement with the concept of the exile—a concept treated with extraordinary fictional and allegorical power in his two masterpiece novels: Los Detectives Salvajes, and 2666. Exile, in Bolaño’s lexicon, does not exist as a word, given that it lacks any descriptive force for the real state of textual and literary production and consumption in which authors function. For a prolific and engaged writer like Bolaño, the concept of the exile is disruption of the fundamental dislocation and deterritorialization that is the relationship of the reader and the writer to textual consumption, production, and circulation. Bolaño instead privileges the figure of the nomad, especially where it concerns the figure of the reader and the deterritorializing and reterritorializing networks of literature.

Here, Bolaño’s idea of the nomad emerges as a form of subjectivity that makes a significant inroad into the question of the specific, modeling a form of reading and writing, an ethic of the literary that is formed from the indifference to the specified. And the inroad made by Bolaño’s subjectivity allows us to imagine the specific in a very distinct fashion—it illustrates the actual existence of a form of relation that is indifferent to national articulations but instead offers a possibility for a relation to others that is more plural, more attentive to difference while being less attentive to differentiation; and ultimately more just. This is not a naïve perspective on the specific, for even if the specific focuses on the relation between subject and object in a clear and precise fashion, stripped clean of all overdetermined possibility of meaning, Hallward is quick to remind us that “Relation is not itself ethical or oriented toward some inherent social good. The universal criteria by which relaions are to be valued or inflected remains a matter of inter-subjective decision” (Hallward 330).

As we shall see, Bolaño does not explicitly orient his relation to produce a prearranged end, but instead provides the conditions for a specific form of relation to emerge. In the concluding remarks to this work, I will address Simon Critchley’s work on ethics in these terms, addressing alongside it Bolaño’s nomad subjectivity, in order to provide a way to work an explicitly ethical demand into the question of the specific. After my discussion of Bolaño, Critchley will be our bridge to understanding how the ethical emerges from these questions of singularity and specificity in a process of active decision and valuation. However, for that to be the case, the most appropriate field from which to begin is the specific, which does not presume anything but the very nature of relationality itself.

Bolaño’s Vision of Exile, or Why We Have Always Been Nomads

I begin by noting the irony often present in Bolaño’s work: his most thorough and explicit writing against the concept of exile takes place in a section of his magisterial collection of essays, Entre paréntesis, entitled “Fragmentos de un regreso al país natal” (Fragments of a return to the country of my birth). Fragmentary as it is, it narrates Bolaño’s one and only return to Chile after leaving the country in 1973, at the age of 20, and provides a conceptual map of some of the most important issues surrounding exile and literature, such as the relationship between remaining in the country, leaving the country in exile, and the capacity to speak for the nation as a national witness or writer, or how the canon of writers said to speak for the nation is formed after the possibility of return is realized.

Uniquely, Bolaño’s conception of exile transgresses against an idea rooted in the traditional matrix of exile and nation that I have discussed above. He differs from many writers from the Southern Cone region in his affiliation with a deeply transnational and intertextual notion of literary identity, challenging an era in which, as Kaminsky argues “a new, critically analytical way of addressing national literary culture has become a central issue for Uruguay, Argentina, and Chile” (Kaminsky 109).Footnote 7

Bolaño’s work forms a counterpoint to the renewal of national identity and literary concern, producing a discourse more in line with a specific nature of writing, relating not directly with the concept of nation, but instead inhabiting the relational space of writing, reading, and location itself.

Exiliarse no es desaparecer sino empequeñecerse, ir reduciéndose lentamente o de manera vertiginosa hasta alcanzar la altura verdadera, la altura del ser, Swift, maestro de exilios, lo sabía. Para él exilio era el nombre secreto de viaje. Muchos exiliados, cargados más de dolor que de razones, rechazarían esta afirmación. El exilio es el valor. El exilio real es el valor real de cada escritor. (Bolaño 150)

To exile oneself is not to disappear but to become smaller, to go reducing oneself slowly, or vertiginously in order to achieve one’s true height—the height of being, as Swift, the master of exiles knew. For him exile was the secret name of travel. Many exiles, bearing more pain than reasons, would reject this affirmation. Exile is value. Real exile is the real value of each writer.

Bolaño uses the Spanish word valor with the extreme double valence it carries in his native tongue. Loosely translated as value, it more closely resembles a combination of honor, integrity, and value: perhaps it approximates a sort of ethical and political pride that accompanies the sacrifice of writing and living. This valor, which can also be likened to the English valor, is the strength that comes with the writer’s office. In a type of circularity, Bolaño equates the true valor of a writer with her presence as an exile. Her integrity and strength, indeed, her honor as a writer seems to emerge from understanding her status as an exile. Coupled with the previous long statement of Bolaño’s, a theory of both exile and the writer’s craft emerges, joining them together irrevocably.

Travel is exile’s secret name, Bolaño asserts, opening the field of literary criticism to rereading the position of exile. What is at stake in this reading is a reconfiguration of exile from an entirely different affective and subjective position. Exile is often seen as the traumatic displacement, el destierro—the deearthing—of a subject from a national root that sustains the spirit, and circumscribes the identity. The very physical space of inhabitation is rewritten, and the exiled subject gains a type of identity by means of the dislocation.

As Kaminsky puts it in her seminal book: “Exile is a removal in space as well as spirit. It is a physical uprooting, an individual’s removal from a familiar place to a new space that has, at least at the beginning, no recognizable coordinates” (11). Exile creates a new cartographic subject that marks her being in the world with gravely different engagements with space, movement, and their marking therein. Space and literary production often share space for the exile, as the new bodily experience becomes the somatic impulse for their writing.

A brief aside is needed here: we are assuming that the motivations for exile are essentially the relationship a writer has with the state. Here we return to Saer’s view on literature and exile: it is precisely the taking up of what is viewed by authoritarian power as a specified position, to remind us of Hallward’s language, that makes possible the condition for exile. For Saer, literature gains its clearest relationship to exile through the problematic conditions for literary practice in the public sphere. “[S]in que se oponga de manera explícita” (65) [without opposition in an explicit manner], he states, illustrating that the very practice of writing is threatening to dictatorial forces. Whether it is allegorical or directly referential, writing’s very nature is an affront to the singularization of meaning that forms the subjectivizing principle of a politically oppressive state.

Saer provides an interesting and appropriate connection to Bolaño, as his politicized view of exile illustrates the capacity of literature and cultural production to threaten the hegemonic ideologies of the day. And Bolaño’s affirmation of the political value, or the “real” value of exile for a writer underscores how the political capacity for exile is often part of the condition of possibility for literary practice. Saer and Bolaño coincide on this point. “El exilio es el real valor de cada escritor” (151) [Exile is the real value of a writer], he notes, and the relation of the writer to exile illustrates the capacity to break with the territorial confinement of literature. The literary represents the capacity of movement and deterritorialization, of displacement and the remapping of territories of reading and inscription. Exile is the internal possibility of writing to become subject to an order of territorial management and transformation defining culture’s value as a break with the contours of nation, geography, and ideology.

However, Bolaño’s writing differs from Saer’s by articulating how exile is part of the internal mechanism of the literary, and that the networks of writing themselves are always in a state of dislocation and remapping. Exile is not the only figure that illustrates literature’s becoming and being. Furthermore, the exile begins from the zone of political contest, and not as Bolaño argues, from the being of the literary itself. Bolaño’s essay intends a rearticulation of this concept at the level of the regional ontology of literature and factors in the movements and deterritorializations that writing is capable of producing. In short, Bolaño posits the nature of writing itself as a specific discourse, a discourse of universal nomadism and traveling across vast networks of reading and writing.

The Nomad as a Figure of the Specific

What I have been building up to here is a way of figuring and writing the specific through the deterritorializing and open figure of the nomad. The nomad as war machine,Footnote 8 as a figure of tribal and local but disruptively mobile violence, opposes itself to state violence by always confronting the state from the unfixed position of the territorially unmarked space of the state. Nomads move through space, mapping an already fluid landscape, while the state circumscribes the territory with borders, and through the expression of national identity. The nation-state, in its worst manifestation, is the figure of singularity, closing off the exterior of all possible relationality through the imagining of a community that imposes physical and affective limits that are unbreachable. As Nicholas Shumway summarizes this relation:

“Every singular configuration emerges through the dissolution of relationality, as the expression of a non-relational, self-creative or self-constituent force” (Hallward 39), and the imagined community of the nation always emerges as a self-constituting order, an organism whose interiority is the source of the singular meaning. This is especially the case in the Southern Cone, where the dissolution of the colonial order was met with the invention of nations like Argentina and Chile.Footnote 9

When such relationality is dissolved, what emerges is a pure interiority, a representational node outside of which no communication is possible, no recognition of any external force or otherness exists. Singular figures are united in a situation where all is immanent to their self-constituting nature. They resemble the Leibnizian monad, but lacking relationality, the exterior touches and addresses nothing but what is within. We see the singularity represented in the political and social field through the myriad fascisms and totalitarianisms of the world that tried to create regimes where only what was interior to the regime, formed through “self-creative force” is relatable or addressable. Indeed, it is difficult to mention relation as anything but a mirror phenomenon, whereby the interiority is all that is seen by the regime.

The singular produces nothing that can be figured as alterity, not even the specified of an actual, recognizable enemy. To imagine an enemy capable of real relationality is to believe that what is outside the singular configuration is part of a creative process—the process that brings life and possibility out of a creative expression. In other words, the singular cannot abide an external creative force—this would require that any creative force be external, possibly contingent, and not purely immanent to the singular figure itself.

On the other hand, it can be readily seen how the creative power of the singular is the creation of a type of universality, a destruction of any border that might be imposed from the outside in an attempt to arrest the emergence of the singular’s creative force. The singular can be said to erupt and destroy all borders, laying out the possibilities for what Hallward calls “an unbounded sphere of inclusion,” a “Totality” which has the possibility for a transcendent singularity, as Hallward puts it “essentially unlimited by its environment” (Hallward 177).

This type of singular is not relational itself to any hermeneutic or theoretical notion of boundaries or limits. Hallward is quick to point out the dialectical tension between the singular as the disruptive force and the fact that “no singular category is merely ‘universal’ in the sense or something valid or constant within certain circumscribed parameters” (177). What this tension reveals is, and what we ultimately return to, is that “the singular is self-universalising, so to speak, in a much stronger sense; it creates these very parameters themselves. By creating the medium of its existence, a singularity effectively creates its own universe” (177).

Thus, the singular’s universe always excludes any possibility of a universal that admits for differing points of origin, other immanent energies, or creative possibilities. What is produced by the singular is always produced as a universal, and all meaning is analyzed by and analyzable through the productive power of that singular and its universal content—“a singular configuration presumes the immediate articulation of both limits of its exclusive scale of existence” (250). The exclusivity of the reach of the singular as a conceptual tool is what interests us here, given that a great part of Bolaño’s critique of the exile is precisely its resemblance to the singular as universal, which effectively delimits the capacity for a new subjectivity—a specific one—that is opened up to the space that specific possibilities entail.

It is important to examine the role which universals play in the theorizing of new subjectivities and political possibilities through specific forms of resistance and imagination. To make this point another way, we begin with a long, manifesto-like quote from Bolaño, where we can see clearly how he configures writing, literature, and the identity of the nomad in the creation of a possibility of new subjectivities through the assumption of a radical choice. We catch glimpses of the specific process of the nomad in this quote, remembering Hallward’s injunction that “[e]very making-specific is thus an irreducibly subjective process, and the subject is nothing other than a practice of de-specification” (Hallward 249).

Bolaño begins the process of “de-specification,” that is, the moving out of the specified tropes of identity (exile, national citizen, and so on), into a specification that Hallward considers to be the result of a “process that converts essentially static (habitual, coercive, unconscious…) relationships into dynamic and deliberate relations” (249). Bolaño accomplishes the above by first calling into question the exile, a notoriously singular figure, denuding the pretense of coercion, and putting into play the exile as a figure of power:

El exilio, en la mayoría de los casos, es una decision voluntaria…En el mejor de los casos el exilio es una opción literaria. Similar a la opción de la escritura. Nadie te obliga escribir. El escritor entra voluntariamente en ese laberinto, por múltiples razones… Con la gran ventaja para el escritor de que un abogado o un politico al uso, fuera de su país de origen, se suele comportar como pez fuera de agua, al menos durante un tiempo. Mientras que a un escritor fuera de su país de origen pareciera como si le crecieran alas. (Bolaño 154)

Exile, in most cases, is a voluntary decision … In the best case it is a literary option. Similar to the option of writing. Nobody forces you to write. The writer enters the maze voluntarily, for many reasons …This is a great advantage for the writer, whereas of a lawyer or a politician outside of their country of origin, generally behaves like a fish out of water, at least for a while. While a writer, outside their country of origin, seems as if he grew wings.

Bolaño is vigorous in his claim concerning the state of the exile and its relation to writing as the consequence of a process of subjectivization—that of the decision to write.

Writing, Bolaño argues, is the acceptance of a particular type of subjectivity that is radically available only in the same way certain bourgeois roles are available—it is certainly not coincidental that he juxtaposes the writer to those two most incontrovertibly bourgeois roles of politician and lawyer. The writer is not a subaltern identity, in his definition. By definition, the subaltern is an identity in search of representational justice against the silences produced by hegemonic discourse—academic, political, or literary, to name a few. Writing as a profession is the entrance into a labyrinth of social and class relations that few have the privilege to enter. A writer, in Bolaño’s depiction, is an intensely powerful figure, imbued with a will-to-write that is only possible if will is followed by the activity of decision—the writer breaks the silences imposed on subalterns.

There is no demand to write, in the sense of the Levinasian demand for recognition of the other, no call to intersubjectivity or intertextuality immanent within writing. Instead, in Bolaño’s account, what writing becomes is a particular voluntarism that exposes how imbricated writing is with the bourgeois idea of achieving one’s fortune through personal labor and luck. Becoming a writer is thus a radical decision, and in so forming writing as a decision, rather than as a calling, or a demand, gives the writer a capacity to intervene in the world, a force of possibility, that like law or politics, meets and creates obligations and connections within the field it inhabits.

Furthermore, Bolaño reminds the reader of the capacity for exile to inspire writing: “[U]n escritor fuera de su país de origen pareciera como si le crecieran alas” (151) [a writer outside of their country would seem to have grown wings]. The cliché invoked here by Bolaño hides a deeper truth. If a writer is indeed given wings, then by extension we can see how dislocation and exile work as a new configuration of possibility by virtue of altering the affective and semiotic dimensions of their possible work. As we know from Kaminsky and McClennen’s work, exile alters significantly almost every dimension of a writer’s life—space, time, language, and even bodily understanding is irrevocably transformed by the conditions of exile—no matter that their argument focuses primarily on the negative aspects of exile. Kaminsky is especially perjorative about how exile and writing negatively inform each other. She argues that a complete collapse of communication is made possible by the circumstances of exile. Kaminsky argues that exile “throws up a barrier between writer and reader” and that “writer after writer deals with this dilemma” (Kaminsky 67). In stark contraposition to Bolaño’s claim of a liberatory force for exile, then, Kaminsky radicalizes the capacity of language to collapse and lose coherence in the state of exile. Writers in exile are concerned with recovering or addressing their ideal readers—those that they have left behind in their home country. Unable to do so, they are severed from the readership and left adrift lost in the new nation, facing a new and unfamiliar readership.

Bolaño challenges such assumptions openly, arguing that the literary labyrinth is a path whose “secret name is travel.” This travel, the movement of exile, is a voluntary phenomenon, the movement along a self-created trajectory that opens up the writer to new possibilities of literary production. Writing in exile, as a voluntary phenomenon, becomes a modality of the move from the singular relation of national writer to that of a despecified writer, one who begins to reflect the possibilities of the specific in writing.

This is not to say that Bolaño denies the very real necessity of choosing exile in order to save a life for writing, so to speak: “En el peor de los casos exiliarse es mejor que necesitar exiliar se y no poder hacerlo” (Bolaño 55) [in the worst of cases to go into exile is better than needing to be exiled and not being able to do it]. We are all well aware of the consequences of what the worst of cases means for exile—death, torture, and often eventual forced exile. Under these conditions, it is certainly preferable to choose exile than to do otherwise. However, it is not the case that Bolaño is being flippant or unnecessarily cavalier about the prospects of exile. It cannot be argued that Bolaño does not understand the immense personal consequences imposed during exile.

Rather, what Bolaño does is provide a possibility to ameliorate the pain of exile through a deepening of the relationship between writing, reading, and subjectivity. Bolaño disbelieves in exile as defining for writers their very existence as literary creatures—that trope is part of a long-standing literary topography of reading that a priori places them in a condition of an already displaced and decentered subjectivity.

Toward a Conclusion: A Redefinition of Latin American Writing

The relevance of the specific to unfold the implications of this utterance cannot be undervalued, as it is among our best philosophical tools for establishing a possibility for an ethical subjectivity that is formed through the world-system of reading. Literature is a complex and multifaceted system of exchanges that has a particular autonomy and a series of traveling paths that always bring the writer and reader into a point of encounter: “pues yo no creo en exilio, sobre todo no creo en el exilio cuando esta palabra va junto a la palabra literatura” (153) [I don’t believe in exile. Most of all, I don’t believe in exile when it goes together with the word literature]. Why might Bolaño create this cleavage, especially given the immense labors of writers, and the constant struggle of exiled writers to find and produce meaning from their experiences in exile?

The answer, I believe, lies in Bolaño’s understanding of the fundamentally displaced and deterritorialized circuit of writing and textuality, driven by the ethics of a reader and a writer. Bolaño’s critique of the exile stems from an attempt to re-situate the writer in an intertextual system that relates readers and writers to each other through the connective tissue of literature. The book, poem, or literary artifact travels along a network that crosses national boundaries, deterritorializing the reader from the constraints of native identity, and forces open the possibility of a reader that travels along the paths opened up by literature and constantly moves along these networks. This movement creates a unique opportunity for subjectivity—it unites within the always specific network of the nomadic topography. I argue for the necessity of seeing nomadic topography as specific topography, a topography that is indifferent to all naming conventions and delimitations of the national.

Here, I refer again to the Deleuzian concept of the war machine, the anthropologically derived concept of a force exterior to the “state apparatus,” itself defined as the arrangement of forces within the strict confines and defensible borders of the Nation, State, polis, and so on—the ordering of space and action within a singular or minimally specified set of borders.

As Deleuze and Guattari so elegantly put it, “[t]he nomad has a territory; he follows customary paths; he goes from one point to another; he is not ignorant of points (water points, dwelling points, assembly points, etc.)… although the points determine paths, they are strictly subordinated to the paths they determine, the reverse of what happens with the sedentary” (Deleuze and Guattari 380). If we take literature to be a navigable system (and we can see from the earlier quotations that Bolaño envisions this possibility), then the figure of the nomad exists within the circuit of the literary, drawing on points and determining paths and disrupting the traditional relation of the reader as a sedentary figure to the State apparatus.

What is most important here is to understand Bolaño’s figure as a counterpoint to the traditional binary of exile and state. The literary nomad, as I name it here, reworks its territorial affiliations through an active decision to always challenge and attempt to undermine the territorializing force of the state apparatus. The exile becomes a migrant in this fashion, always deterritorializing whatever attempts to sediment his identity within this framework. Yet this decision is not one that specifies a strict relation between nomadism and the challenge to this state. Instead, this is the implicit ontology of the nomad in Deleuze and Guattari, it does not rebel or revolt against anything but the territorializing strategies of the State apparatus. Instead, the nomad is always challenging power from its exterior position to maintain his nomadic status. An exile is the specified figure of a direct challenge to the national or state apparatus, and frequently wishes to construct a new state or redeem the old state along its coordinates. The nomad always brings with him the specific as such. Unconcerned with the state, it is the pure relation that interests its (the nomad’s) movement and, if literary, its reading and writing.

The relevance of pitting the exile against the nomad as defining the political power of a certain class of Latin American writers is simply the relevance of addressing the singular and specified to the more liberatory space of the specific. In pursuing a nomadic subjectivity, we open up the field of writing and thought to the possibility of a politics and ethics that always challenges the specified fixities and unspoken restrictions of the state or the often singular affective perception of exile. The nation and the state will almost certainly never disappear, and the extraordinary trauma of exile cannot be overlooked or simply dismissed. Following Hallward, I argue that Bolaño’s literary nomads express the essence of the

specific configuration [that] provides for a decision as such, as opposed to a specified automation on the one hand or a singular inherence on the other. The movement from the specified to specific, guarded against absorption into the singular, is the only philosophical movement whose empty, contentless course has a kind of global validity (that is, a validity indifferent to particular values). (Hallward 333)

Bolaño’s work is critical to expanding this vision of a “global validity” that will increase the visibility of the essence of the ethical in writing—a vision that I believe runs throughout his novels, as well. In my conclusion, I will address how the specific allows readers and writers to envision ethical possibility along the coordinates of a demand or the decision to respond to the demand.

Here, let me simply note that Bolaño’s nomad subjectivity clears the air for the ultimate recognition of our ethical state, which Hallward succinctly describes (and which I shall simply let rest with minor commentary): “There is nothing in experience, no ultimate value or pre-ontological ethical orientation, that will save us in the last resort. The question of how any given relation is to be valued will always remain a matter of active valuing, with all the properly subjective responsibility that implies” (333).

And lastly, this nomad subjectivity is part of the emergence of a formal explosion that Bolaño prefigures in Latin American literature, illustrating the fact that the nomadic subjectivity of reading and writing has formal dimensions at the level of the text. In his recent book, Beyond Bolaño: The Global Latin American Novel, Héctor Hoyos argues for an interpretation of the “global validity” of Bolaño as a nomadic figure whose very writing is a form of globalization that operates ethically. Indeed, Hoyos links the worldliness and specificity of Bolaño’s work to the nature of immanence—a point that jibes well with the Deleuze’s specific notion of immanenceFootnote 10: “Bolaño… [is a] thinker of immanence. If literature is the world, then critics and writers cannot be ‘on the outside.’ And so description, more or less fictionalized, would already transform the ensemble—it would internally affect that world” (Hoyos 13).

Bolaño’s immanence is the position that the radical dynamism of the nomad’s movements is the immanent fictionalization of a specific sphere of purely relational possibilty and the inscription of a motile, plurivalent literary possibility, unforecloseable by the singular. And despite the fact that the circuits of literature are among the objects controlled by the commercial center/periphery model,Footnote 11 it may still be argued that Bolaño’s nomad flows in the space of open and specific play that is the logic of literature’s immanence and its modeling of individuation or differentiation. To return to Hoyos, “Bolaño reinstates the gratuity of the creative act at the heart of the world literature debate; favors a rhizomic understanding of literature on a world scale over the center-periphery logic” (14); this turns Bolaño into the Janus-faced reader and writer of the specific as cultural possibility. This is not to say that literature is a force of pure autonomy in the sphere of capital, but rather as both, a form of expression and cultural object, that it has what Hoyos calls the “semi-autonomy of art as the muddled affair that it is,” and this murky situation allows for the possibility of reimagining the logic of differentiation, at least as a model.

In alignment with Hoyos, the critic Osvaldo Zavala echoes the particularity of Bolaño’s exile/nomad ethics, citing it as a sort of example of an invention that weaves together a particular vision of literary history with the specific as a question of transcendental individuation:

Entre paréntesis presenta así a un sujeto articulador de gestos subversivos que se reconoce como el ciudadano activo de una nación transcontinental imaginada de un modo análogo a la manera en que Benedict Anderson estudia la formación del nacionalismo.

Entre paréntesis presents the writer as a subject articulating itself through subversive gestures, that also recognizes itself as an engaged citizen in an intercontinental nation imagined in a mode analogous to Benedict Anderson’s study of the formation of nationalism. (Zavala 647)Footnote 12

Zavala is proposing the specific as an imagined community that reinscribes the nation’s borders in the movement of an open, uncloseable form. The intercontinental nation is the paradox par excellence, as neither border nor topographic situation can close its parameters. What the nomad writer represents is neither more nor less than a globalization with formal hope. In the recognition of the nation, or the genre that explodes across global lines of demarcation, Bolaño imagines the writer as an agent ethically obligated to the specific. Nationality as a function is the emergence of either the specified or the singular—neither is truly ethical in an irruptive, open fashion as the foreclosure of the name always suggests the collapse of a truth into either the collapse of the enemy/friend distinction or the pure singularity of self-reference. To wit, Bolaño’s nation is merely a specific space of inhabitation; a formal space for individuation to occur.

To conclude, Bolaño’s imagination is one where the act of reading, writing, and the circuits of literary consumption model the possibility of an ethics that forms the possible form of a specific conjuncture that cannot collapse under its own weight. And although the weakness of writing as a political practice can certainly be critiqued, it cannot be understated that writing produces a series of generative possibilities for new forms of thought and practice. As Gabriele Schwab argues, literature acts as “an experimental system able to generate emergent forms of language, subjectivity, culture, and life” (Schwab 3). Thus, literature as an experimental system brings the specific into emergence as a form, and Bolaño’s work molds the specific as an emergent mode desperately needed in our crisis-prone era.