the arcades project / walter benjamin

Re the psychoanalytic theory of memory: “Freud’s later researches made it clear that this view [the concept of repression] must be enlarged …. The machinery of repression … is … a special case of the … significant process which occurs when the ego is unequal to meeting certain demands made upon the mental mechanism, The more general process of defense does not cancel the strong impressions; it only lays them aside …. It will be in the interest of clarity for me to state the contrast between memory and reminiscence with deliberate bluntness: the function of memory [the author identifies the sphere of “forgetfulness” with “unconscious memory” (p. 130) is to protect our impressions; reminiscence aims at their dissolution. Essentially memory is conservative; reminiscence, destructive.”

Theodor Reik, Der iiberraschte Psychologe (Leiden, 1935), pp. 130-132.

[WB: K8,1]

… The medium is the memory, and with Baudelaire it was possessed of unusual density. The corresponding sensory data correspond in it; they are teeming with memories, which run so thick that they seem to arisen not from this life but from some spacious vie anteriure. It is this prior existence that is intimated by the “familiar eyes” with which such experience scrutinize the one who has them.

[WB: J79,6]

What fundamentally distinguishes the brooder from the thinker is that the former not only meditates a thing but also meditates his meditation of the thing. The case of the brooder is that of the man who has arrived at the solution of a great problem but then has forgotten it. And now he broods – not so much over the matter itself as over his past reflections on it. The brooder’s thinking, therefore, bears the imprint of memory. Brooder and the allegorist are cut from the same cloth.

[WB: J79a,1]

… Politics attains primacy over history. Indeed, historical “facts” become something that just now happened to us, just now struck us: to establish them is the affair of the memory. And awakening is the great exemplar of memory – that occasion on which we succeed in remembering what is nearest, most obvious (in the “I”). What Proust intends with the experimental rearrangement of furniture, what bother Bloch recognizes as the darkness of the lived moment, is nothing other than what here is secured on the level of the historical, and collectively. There is a not-yet-conscious knowledge of what has been: its advancement has the structure of awakening.

In this historical and collective process of fixation, collecting plays a certain role. Collecting is a form of practical memory, and of all the profane manifestations of the penetration of “what has been” (of all the manifestations of “nearness”) it is the most binding. Thus, in a certain sense, the smallest act of political reflection makes for an epoch in the antique business. …

If it is imagination that presents correspondence to the memory, it is thinking that consecrates allegory to it. Memory brings about the convergence of imagination and thinking.

[J66,3]

Between the theory of natural correspondences and the repudiation of nature exists a contradiction. It is resolved insofar as within the memory impressions become detached from individual experiences, so that the long experience stored up in those impressions is released and can be fed into the allegorical fundus.

[J66,5]

On the Passion of the aesthetic man in Kierkegaard and its foundation in memory: “Memory is emphatically the real element of the unhappy man …. If I imagine a man who himself had had no childhood, … but who now … discovered all the beauty that there is in childhood, and who would now remember his own childhood, constantly staring back into that emptiness of the past, hen I would have an excellent illustration of the truly unhappy man.” Soren Kierkegaard, Entweder-Oder (Jena, 1911), vol. 1 pp. 203-204 (“The Unhappiest Man”).

[J63,4]

 Self-photography and the unrolling of the lived life before the dying. Two kinds of memory (Proust). Relationship of this kind of memory with the dream.

“He carried about him as sorrowful trophy … a burden of memories, so that he seemed to live in a continued paranesia …. The poet carries within himself a living duree which odors call forth … and with which they mingle … This city is a duree, an inveterate life-form, a memory …. If he loved in …. A Jeanne Duval some immemorial stretch of night …, this will be only a symbol … of that true duree …

[J14,2]

Delvau[i] on Chodruc-Duclos: … His bones took more time to rot than his name took to erase itself from the memory of men,” Alfred Delvau, Les Lions du jur (paris, 1867), pp. 28-29.

[A5a,2]

“theme … of … the affirmation of a mysterious presence at the back of things, as in the depths of the soul – the presence of Eternity. Hence the obsession with timepieces, and the need to break out of the confine’s of one’s own life through the immense prolongation of ancestral memory and of former lives,” Albert Beguin, L’Ame romantique et le reve (Marseilles, 1937), vol. 2 p. 403.

[J20a,1]

 Regarding “L’Amour du mensonge” . From a letter to Alphonse de Calonne: “The word ‘royal’ will help the reader understand the metaphor, which transforms memory into a crown of towers, like those that weigh down the brows of the goddesses of maturity, of fertility, of wisdom.” Fleurs du mal, ed. Jacques Crepet (Paris, 1931), p. 461.

[J44,2]

Happiness of the collector, happiness of the solitary: tete-a-tete with things. Is not this the felicity that suffuses our memories – that in them we are alone with particular things, which range abut us in their silence, and that even the people who haunt our thoughts then partake in this steadfast, confederate silence of things. The collector “stills” his fate. And that means he disappears in the world of memory.

      [By Lisa Fiitko, reconstructed from memory, a journey with Walter Benjamin]

      Sure, sure. “But Mr. Benjamin, do you realize that I am not a competent guide in this region? I don’t really know that road, I have never been up that way myself. I have a piece of paper on which the mayor penciled a map of the route from his memory, and then he described to me some details of turns to be taken, a hut on the left, a plateau with seven pine trees which has to remain to our right or we will end up too far north; the vineyard that leads to the ridge at the right point. You want to take the risk?”

      “Yes,” he said without hesitation. “The real risk would be not to go.”

           

Google Books.

 'To great writers," Walter Benjamin once wrote, "finished works weigh lighter than those fragments on which they labor their entire lives." Conceived in Paris in 1927 and still in progress when Benjamin fled the Occupation in 1940, The Arcades Project (in German, Das Passagen-Werk) is a monumental ruin, meticulously constructed over the course of thirteen years--"the theater," as Benjamin called it, "of all my struggles and all my ideas."

Focusing on the arcades of nineteenth-century Paris-glass-roofed rows of shops that were early centers of consumerism--Benjamin presents a montage of quotations from, and reflections on, hundreds of published sources, arranging them in thirty-six categories with descriptive rubrics such as "Fashion," "Boredom," "Dream City," "Photography," "Catacombs," "Advertising," "Prostitution," "Baudelaire," and "Theory of Progress." His central preoccupation is what he calls the commodification of things--a process in which he locates the decisive shift to the modern age.

The Arcades Project is Benjamin's effort to represent and to critique the bourgeois experience of nineteenth-century history, and, in so doing, to liberate the suppressed "true history" that underlay the ideological mask. In the bustling, cluttered arcades, street and interior merge and historical time is broken up into kaleidoscopic distractions and displays of ephemera. Here, at a distance from what is normally meant by "progress," Benjamin finds the lost time(s) embedded in the spaces of things.

illuminations: essays and reflections / walter benjamin

Other thoughts fill me than the ones I am talking about – not thoughts but images, memories. Memories of cities … memories of rooms where these books had been housed …

There is nothing that commends a story more effectively than that chaste compactness which precludes psychological analysis. And the more natural the process by which the storyteller forgoes psychological shading, the greater becomes the story’s claim to a place in the memory of the listener, the more completely is it integrated into his own experience, the greater will be hos inclination to repeat it to someone else someday, sooner or later.

The more self-forgetful the listener is, the more deeply is what he listens to impressed upon his memory. When the rhythm of work has seized him, he listens to the tales in such a way that the gift of retelling them comes to him all by itself.

Memory is the epic faculty par excellence. Only by virtue of a comprehensive memory can writing absorb the course of events on the one hand and, with the power of death on the other.

[Of Georg Lukas] “Time,” he says in his Theory of the Novel, “can become constitutive only when connection with the transcendental home has been lost. Only in the novel are meaning and life, and thus the essential and the temporal, separated; one can almost say that the whole inner action of a novel is nothing else but a struggle against the power of time … And from this … arise the genuinely epic experience of time: hope and memory … Only in the novel … does there occur a creative memory which transfixes the object and transforms it  … The duality of inwardness and outside world can there be overcome for the subject ‘only’ when he sees the … unity of his entire life … out of the past life-stream which is compressed in memory … The insight which grasps this unity … becomes the divinatory-intuitive grasping of the unattained and therefore inexpressible meaning of life.”

Towering above this literature is Bergson’s early monumental work, Matiere et memoire. More than the others, it preserves links with empirical research. It is oriented towards biology. The title suggests that it regards the structure of memory as decisive for the philosophical pattern of experience. Experience is indeed a matter of tradition, in collective existence as well as private life. It is less the product of facts firmly anchored in memory than of a convergence in memory of accumulated and frequently unconscious data. It is, however, not at all Bergson’s intention to attach any specific historical label to memory. On the contrary, he rejects any historical determination of memory.

… it was indeed a poet who put Bergson’s theory of experience to the test … Proust’s work A la Recherche du temps perdu may be regarded as an attempt to produce experience synthetically, as Bergson imagines it, under today’s conditions, for there is less and less hope that it will come into being naturally … Bergson emphasizes the antagonism between the vita active and the specific vita contemplative which arise from memory. But he leads us to believe that turning to the contemplative actualization of the stream of life is a matter of free choice. From the start Proust indicates his divergent view terminologically, To him, the memoire pure of Bergson’s theory becomes a memoire involontaire. Proust immediately confronts this involuntary memory with a voluntary memory, one that is at the service of the intellect. .. One afternoon the taste of a kind of pastry called madeleine transports him back to the past, whereas before then he had been limited to the promptings of a memory which obeyed the call of attentiveness. This he calls the memoire volontaire, and it is characteristic that the information which it gives about the past retains no trace of it.

Amazon Books.

Walter Benjamin was one of the most original cultural critics of the twentieth century. Illuminations includes his views on Kafka, with whom he felt a close personal affinity; his studies on Baudelaire and Proust; and his essays on Leskov and on Brecht's Epic Theater. Also included are his penetrating study "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," an enlightening discussion of translation as a literary mode, and Benjamin's theses on the philosophy of history.

Hannah Arendt selected the essays for this volume and introduces them with a classic essay about Benjamin's life in dark times. Also included is a new preface by Leon Wieseltier that explores Benjamin's continued relevance for our times.

a lover's discourse / roland barthes

Therefore, these reminders of reading, of listening, have been left in the frequently uncertain, incompleted state suitable to a discourse whose occasion is indeed the memory of the sites (books, encounters) where such and such a thing has been read, spoken, heard.

The lover who doesn’t forget sometimes dies of excess, exhaustion, and tension of memory (like Werther).

I waken out of this forgetfulness very quickly. In great haste, I reconstitute a memory, a confusion.

… the weather, the season, the light, the boulevard, the Parisians out walking, shopping, all held within what already has its vocation as memory: a scene, in short, the hieroglyph of kindliness … the good humor of desire.

… nothing in the image can be forgotten; an exhausting memory forbids voluntarily escaping love; in short, forbids inhabiting it discreetly, reasonably.

What constitutes the voice is what, within it, lacerates me by dint of having to die, as if it were at once and never could be anything but a memory.

.. but it says something which manages to touch my desire, but because of its syntactical turn (framing), which will inhabit me like a memory.

It is already, (again, always) a memory (the nature of the photograph is not to represent but to memorialize …

… starting from a negligible trifle, a whole discourse of memory and death rises up and sweeps me away: this is the kingdom of memory, weapon of reverberation – of what Nietzsche called ressentiment.

… it is a fragrance without a support, a texture of memory;

The imperfect is the tense of fascination: … simply the exhausting lure of memory From the start, greedy to play a role, scenes take their position in memory.

Amazon Books.

A Lover’s Discourse, at its 1978 publication, was revolutionary: Roland Barthes made unprecedented use of the tools of structuralism to explore the whimsical phenomenon of love. Rich with references ranging from Goethe’s Werther to Winnicott, from Plato to Proust, from Baudelaire to Schubert, A Lover’s Discourse artfully draws a portrait in which every reader will find echoes of themselves.

Review by C. Colt

Some readers may find this book difficult. Barthes never attempts to give us a uniform narrative about love. Instead, as the title implies, he provides us with fragments--some of which come from literature and some from his own philisophical musings--of a lover's point of view. Since childhood, we are taught to think of love as a singualar entity. Whether it is God's love, marriage, passion, or patriotism, we are taught to think of love as a unique, and exclusive prize. But as Barthes' points out, love is built upon fragments, many of which are mundane.

The most compelling part of "Lover's Discourse" is Barthe's dissection of the phrase, "I love you". Drawing upon literary examples and common sense, Barthes asks us what we mean when we state that we love someone. Do we love what they do for us? Do we love how they make us feel? Do we love the idea of them? Are we in love with love itself? This concept is born out by the protagonist Merseault, in Camus' novel, "A Happy Death". The first thing Merseault says to his lover when she wakes up in the morning is, "hello image".

"Lover's Discourse" extracts love from ideology and examines it under a microscope. We may be confused by what we see, and we may not like it, but the view contains more than a glimmer of reality.

society of the spectacle / guy debord

Totalitarian bureaucratic society lives in a perpetual present in which everything that has happened earlier exists for it solely as a space accessible to its police. A project already formulated by Napoleon, that of “monarchically directing the energy of memories,” has thus been made concrete in a permanent manipulation of the past, and this is not just in respect of the past’s meaning, but even in respect of the facts themselves.

All knowledge, which is in any case limited by the memory of society’s oldest members, was always borne by the living.

Such individual lived experience of a cut-off everyday life remains bereft of language or concept … And is misunderstood and forgotten to the benefit of the spectacle’s false memory of the unmemorable.perpetual present

The spectacle, being the reigning social organization of a paralyzed history, of a paralyzed memory, of an abandonment of any history founded in historical time, is in effect a false consciousness of time.

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Review by James Pruett"Religion served the interests of the masters, expounding and embellishing what society could not deliver. Power as a separate realm has always been spectacular, but mass allegiance to frozen religious imagery was originally acknowledgment of loss, an imaginary compensation for a poverty of real social activity...the modern spectacle, by contrast, depicts what society can deliver..."

And The Promised Land, as Debord sees it, is TOTAL CONSUMPTION. This is the edict and goal of contemporary consumer society. The fact that it has grown out of and usurped religious feeling makes the SPECTACLE a competitive product to formal religion. Certainly, Islam feels its power and threat. Certainly, the Middle East is reacting to it, through individual and state sponsored terrorism against the West.

Debord is a difficult read, but ultimately worth it. His insights are penetrating, remarkable, and have proven to be more acute with the passing of time. Private and public over consumption has become a disease and the hallmark of an age that has debt financed prosperity for too long.

For me, Debord's has number of chief insights that signify trouble ahead for our current economic system. One of them is the apparent and obvious falling use value for goods in abundance (many of them pseudo goods - things we don't really need). Having long fulfilled our need for food, clothing, and shelter, our current economic growth is contingent upon consistently manufacturing pseudo needs that must feed upon the boundless desires of persons in an unending pursuit of gratification through purchasing new products and services.

The problem occurs when the next disillusionment, Debord tells us, takes place not with religion or politics but within the commodity itself. Product prestige evaporates into vulgarity soon after its purchase...at this point; the actual poverty of production stands revealed - but too late. By this time another product will demand attention...the continuous process of replacement means that fake gratification cannot help but be exposed as new models are released every year but yet remain all to similar. Why upgrade, we ask?

For the sake of Dell, GM, Microsoft, Target, Home Depot and so on, we had certainly better. Herein lies the rub picked off by Debord: "By the time that the society has become contingent upon the economy, the economy has in point of fact become contingent on society...he economy begins to lose its power."

A society/economy built upon an illusion of needs will certainly be a fragile on at best. Such a society/economy, whose growth rests upon expanding the market of pseudo commodities, has apparently developed a penchant for reporting pseudo revenue earnings (eg. Enron, World Comm, etc). This is all very predictable and very much Debordian.

Debord is reminiscent of McLuhan, full of arcane wisdom and prolix, and a prophet of the current society nonetheless. He predicted our growing devotion to quantitative trivia that arise from a juxtaposition of roles and competing spectacles, and a never-ending succession of, what he calls, "paltry contests - from competitive sports to elections." All this, he says, fuels an abnormal need for representation, to compensate for the feeling of being at the margins of existence. This seems to be modern man, slavishly devoted to commodities, celebrities, politicians, sports teams and sports heroes, compensating for the loss felt by the dividing line being the self and the world that Debord calls THE SPECTACLE.

Although it is not for lightweights or the nonchalant, I do highly recommend this book as a guide to understanding some of the psychological complexes at work in the new society/economy.

the poetics of space / gaston bachelard

... by overlaying our memory of the childhood house with daydreams leads us to the ill-defined, vaguely located areas of being where we are seized with astonishment at being.

Thus, on the threshold of our space, before the era of our own time, we hover between awareness of being and loss of being. And the entire reality of memory becomes spectral.

[… fingertip memory. How does the body, not merely the mind, remember the feel of a latch in a long-forsaken childhood home? …]

We live fixations, fixations of happiness. ‘We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection.

Of course, thanks to the house, a great many of our memories are housed.

 … to de-socialize our important memories, and attain to the plane of the daydreams that we used to have in the places identified with our solitude .

Memories are motionless, and the more securely they are fixed in space, the sounder they are.

Memories of dreams, however, which only poetic meditation can help us to recapture, are most confused, less clearly drawn.

In point of fact, we are in the unity of image and memory, in the functional composite of imagination and memory. The positivity of psychological history and geography cannot serve as a touchstone for determining the real being of our childhood, for childhood is certainly greater than reality.

It is our consciousness that crystalizes our remote memories.

To inhabit oneirically the house we were born in means more than to inhabit it in memory; it means living in the house that is gone, the way we used to dream in it.

The phenomenology of the daydream can untangle the complex of memory and imagination; it becomes necessarily sensitive to the differentiations of the symbol.

… real images are engravings, for it is the imagination that engraves them in our memories.

Great images have both a history and a pre-history; they are always a blend of memory and legend, with the result that we never experience an image directly.

How suddenly our memories assume a living possibility of being!

Our memories are encumbered by facts.

Amazon Books.

The classic book on how we experience intimate spaces.

"A magical book. . . . A prism through which all worlds from literary creation to housework to aesthetics to carpentry take on enhanced—and enchanted-significances. Every reader of it will never see ordinary spaces in ordinary ways. Instead the reader will see with the soul of the eye, the glint of Gaston Bachelard." —from the foreword by John R. Stilgoe

the psychoanalysis of fire / gaston bachelard

… fire within is all that is required to make the grieving soul give voice to its memories and sorrows …

How can it be better stated that nostalgia is the memory of the warmth of the nest, the meory of the cherished love for the “caladium innatum’.

Were it not for the memory of man made warm by man, producing as it were a redoubling of natural heat, we could not conceive of lovers speaking of their snug little nest.

… Novalis is the poet “of the little blue flower,” the poet of the forget-me-not tossed as a pledge of imperishable memory over the of the precipice in the very shadow of death.

That which fire has caressed, loved, adored, has gained a store of memories and lost its innocence.

Amazon Books.

We have only to speak of an object to think that we are being objective. But, because we chose it in the first place, the object reveals more about us than we do about it. What we consider to be our fundamental ideas concerning the world are often indications of the immaturity of our minds.

**

This little book constitutes, for me, an excellent introductory piece to the thoughts of Gaston Bachelard. Much more clearly than "Poetics of Space", or "The Right to Dream", this book gives insight into Bachelard's transition from scientist to philosopher. If you haven't yet read any of his works, you should consider doing so if only to reevaluate your own methods of analysis of the world around you, both the material and the immaterial. In the "Psychoanalysis of Fire" Bachelard turns his sciento-phenomonologist methods of analysis to the existence of fire, both as a real presence throughout the history of mankind and as a literary, symbolic presence with perhaps even more significance.

**

Writing a preface for The Poetics of Space (1958) in 1963, a year after his friend's death, medievalist Etienne Gilson noted: "We all loved him, admired him and envied him a little, because we felt he was a free mind, unfettered by any conventions either in his choice of the problems he wanted to handle or in his way of handling them."

Gilson goes on to say that this book, The Psychoanalysis of Fire (1938), was Bachelard the free mind's "first warning shot." He records the puzzlement he had upon its publication in these words: "After appointing a man to teach the philosophy of science and seeing him successfully do so for a number of years, we don't like to learn that he has suddenly turned his interest to a psychoanalysis of the most unorthodox sort, since what then was being psychoanalyzed was not even people, but an element."
As one of the truly unusual and original books anyone would hope to come upon, almost every paragraph (nay, sentence) of the book has the power to change the perspective of an engaged reader. Perspective on, yes, fire, but also on many other things. Prometheus and his "clever disobedience," which leads to a startling formulation "The Prometheus complex is the Oedipus complex of the life of the intellect." The psychoanalysis of rubbing (thus, cleaning) and heat producing in what Bachelard calls the "Novalis complex," which leads to a meditation on the nature of love. Alcohol, the eau-de-feu ("water on fire") working as eau-de-vie by setting one's being on fire instantaneously in the "Hoffmann complex." These are just most obvious themes of the book. Attentive readers will discover much, much more to cherish.
After my encounter with Bachelard, I was often awed to find myself responding to things so very differently, be it reading literature/philosophy, or everyday chores such as doing dishes and cooking. You will, for instance, never read Poe in the same way. While his most unforgettable essay on Poe appears in Water and Dreams (1942), this book too has excursions to him here and there.

**

Forget about The Poetics of Space (for now) and immerse yourself in The Psychoanalysis of Fire. Watch Bachelard circle and destroy modern rationality through a proto-rationalistic, Socratic assault on the concept of fire. Bachelard's subject is the 'concept' rather than the real thing, fire itself, the number one immaterial 'substance' prefiguring even light. Read, in amazement, as scientific scrutiny of this primordial phenomenon approaches farce. But pay very, very, very close attention to the section on Novalis, "Psychoanalysis and Prehistory: The Novalis Complex", and you'll find Bachelard's genius swooping in for the kill. "These scientific explanations originate in an arid and cursory rationalism which claims to be profiting by recurring factual evidence; but which is, however, quite unrelated to the psychological conditions of the primitive discoveries." Bachelard is not the prophet of surrationalism for nothing! It is this book (first published in 1938) that locates his critical method at the forefront of philosophical critical idealism. Unlike Ernst Cassirer, Bachelard is more than willing to take the plunge into the abyss of imagination - that Coleridgean imagination that is the mostly unacknowledged source of our collective intelligence.

the absent city / ricardo piglia

The idea of a man in love who walks through the city that belongs to him, but where the  city in which he walked with the woman he loved is lost. Because the city is a memory machine. Of course, that lost or absent city also includes other moments  of life, not just those associated with a woman, This is how Joyce’s Dublin works …

in the novel, he tries to save her [his wife], when she become terminally ill, by placing her memories in a machine … the machine then outlives the man. 

But it’s no use, if you leave, your memories still go with you.

I do not have any photographs of her, only my memories …

She … hid all the words she knew in her memory.

Her memory was a breeze blowing in the white curtains of a room in an empty house.

He hoped the sentences would enter his daughter’s memory

 Like blocks of meaning.

She had drawn up a map in her memory and was completing the diagram as they went along.

“It will be necessary to work on your memory,” Arana said, “there are areas of condensation, white nodes, which can be untied, opened up.”

They were getting closer to the truth, as if they could follow the road of the memories of her life on a map.

This is a place without memories, she said. Everybody pretends to be somebody else. The spies are trained to disown their own identities and use somebody else’s.

… the white nodes were recorded in the body like a collective memory …

He imagined the woman submerged in a false reality, stuck in someone else’s memory ..

You see it there, on the edge of language, like the meory of one’s house from childhood

He had discovered the existence of the verbal nuclei that keep remembrances alive, words they had used that brought back all the pain into his memory ..

He was thinking about the memories that survive after the body has gone, about the white nodes that stay alive even when the flesh disintegrates.

… if I try to remember, and the purity of the memory does not blind me …

I pull events out of live memories …

Amazon Books.

Widely acclaimed throughout Latin America after its 1992 release in Argentina, The Absent City takes the form of a futuristic detective novel. In the end, however, it is a meditation on the nature of totalitarian regimes, on the transition to democracy after the end of such regimes, and on the power of language to create and define reality. Ricardo Piglia combines his trademark avant-garde aesthetics with astute cultural and political insights into Argentina’s history and contemporary condition in this conceptually daring and entertaining work.

The novel follows Junior, a reporter for a daily Buenos Aires newspaper, as he attempts to locate a secret machine that contains the mind and the memory of a woman named Elena. While Elena produces stories that reflect on actual events in Argentina, the police are seeking her destruction because of the revelations of atrocities that she—the machine—is disseminating through texts and taped recordings. The book thus portrays the race to recover the history and memory of a city and a country where history has largely been obliterated by political repression. Its narratives—all part of a detective story, all part of something more—multiply as they intersect with each other, like the streets and avenues of Buenos Aires itself.

The second of Piglia’s novels to be translated by Duke University Press—the first was Artifical Respiration—this book continues the author’s quest to portray the abuses and atrocities that characterize dictatorships as well as the difficulties associated with making the transition to democracy. Translated and with an introduction by Sergio Waisman, it includes a new afterword by the author.