ABSTRACT
At the time of writing Exhaustion of Difference, author associated the Derridean, and Balibarian, injunction to live or dwell in the ambiguity of the double register to what he called "subalternist affirmation". That seemed to him what needed to be done, critically or academically, in the name of a politically productive deconstruction, or of a deconstructive political strategy, whether or not it could be said to constitute a certain radicalization of Marxism. Any continuation of a deconstruction turn in Latin American studies in general should probably, at this stage, attempt to move toward a clearer articulation of the stakes. If deconstruction can be politically translated as a demetaphorization of history on the impossible back of a language without metaphor, then deconstruction is the ongoing process of analyzing and destroying metaphorical investments as formations of power.
