Beatriz Sarlo, the Languages of the Present

Abstract

Based on the premise that, for Beatriz Sarlo, a link with the present is the center of a radical critical experience, in this paper we locate, map and interpret the series of texts and interventions in which the intensity of this condition is redistributed, around the year 2007, as a turning point. Our hypothesis is that it is in this redistribution of writings and writing practices (synthesized in the volume Escritos de literatura argentina and in the journalistic articles published in the newspaper Perfil, and later gathered in Ficciones argentinas), and not necessarily in what can be considered as its first programmatic formulation of 1987 (literature written in the present as a critique of the present), that we must read in Beatriz Sarlo’s work a (critical) theory of the present. This crossover of experiences with time (experiences of clashes, of ends, of re-establishments) also and above all shows that what has changed for Sarlo after these twenty years (1987-2007), together with the place and value of the present in literature (the subject of a formal elaboration/content to be represented), is the place and the very function of criticism in relation to the present of this literature.