READING BENJAMIN IN MEXICO: BOLÍVAR ECHEVERRÍA

AND THE TASKS OF LATIN AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY1

Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado

Truth is not an intent which realizes itself

in empirical reality; it is the power which
determines the essence of this empirical
reality.
—Walter Benjamin, The Origin of
German Tragic Drama.2
Writing philosophy in Latin America is an attempt to engage with two
intellectual legacies. On the one hand, Latin American thought has
been conceived, in its diverse forms, as an attempt to grasp and
ultimately overcome its conflictive bequest of coloniality and
dependence. On the other, the region’s intellectuals are inscribed in a
history of profound cultural cosmopolitanism, through which Latin
American writing maintains an open, consistent encounter with
Western cultural production. In the past decades, these two legacies,
in their many different interactions, have configured a task that has
fueled many of the literary, cultural, intellectual and philosophical
debates in Latin America: the understanding of its complex,
conflictive and productive relation to modernity. To read Latin
American philosophy from a perspective that engages these two
legacies means to wrestle not only with a form of intellectual history
that seldom transcends its circulation within the region itself, but also
with a performance of intellectual heritage sustained in a tension
between what Couze Venn calls “Occidentalism”—the anxiety of
“becoming-modern” in Western parameters 3—, and the assertion of
universal cultural citizenship, that Alfonso Reyes, in a famous 1944
essay entitled “Notes on American Intelligence,” declared as the
central task of Latin American critique.4
This essay is an attempt to interrogate the nature and consequences
of the task of engaging modernity in Latin America, as well as the
way in which its intellectual legacies are performed, by focusing on
Bolivar Echeverría’s strategic reading of Walter Benjamin. Born in
Ecuador and a resident of Mexico since the seventies, Echeverría is
one of the leading figures of contemporary Latin American
philosophy, largely due to his work on the question of modernity and
the Baroque. His philosophy is defined by the attempt to understand,
from the framework of historical materialism, the relationship
between subjectivity and what he calls “really-existing modernity”
(modernidad realmente existente), that is, Western capitalist
modernity. In these terms, Echeverría bases his philosophical inquiry
2
on the study of four different forms or ethe—realist, classical,
romantic and Baroque—through which subjects negotiate their
problematic relationship with capitalism. While a careful and detailed
description of Echeverría’s thought exceeds the purpose and
possibilities of these pages, my intention is to show how such a theory
of modernity may emerge in Latin American philosophical practices
as a result of the creative appropriation of certain strains of Western
philosophy—in this case, Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Concept
of History” and The Origin of German Tragic Drama. In what
follows, I will develop an interpretation of Echeverría’s engagement
with Benjamin in three different moments. First, I wish to explore the
particularities of Mexico as a site for the reading of Benjamin’s work
in contrast with other approaches performed in the context of so-
called Latin American cultural studies.. Then, I will closely analyze
Bolívar Echeverría’s essay on the “Theses on the Concept of History,”
along with other texts, in order to lay out his strategic approach to—
and deliberate misreadings of—Benjamin’s work. Finally, I will
discuss the role this reading has had in the development of
Echeverría’s notions of modernity and the Baroque.

I.
Walter Benjamin’s relation to Latin American cultural and political
discourse is largely determined by the region’s conflictive relationship
with modernity. In recent years, Benjamin’s work has been
consistently invoked in many attempts to renew Latin American
critique, in its different manifestations, in order to overcome the
persistence of reading practices inherited both from the liberal-
positivist legacy that has framed Latin American thinking since the
nineteenth century and from the more straightforward Marxist-
decolonial paradigm constructed in the wake of the Cuban
Revolution. Not coincidentally, Walter Benjamin acquires his current
critical relevance in the late 1980s and early 1990s, 5 largely due to the
impact that several historical events had on Latin American thought:
the fall of the Berlin Wall, the abating of the Cuban Revolution as an
intellectual referent and the traumatic experience of military
dictatorship, amongst others. As Nicolás Casullo puts it in a 1992
essay, Benjamin’s work became a “problematic constellation” that
interrupted “those writings whose functionality consists in concealing
the conflict of knowing that [saber que]. In other words: what and
how we interrogate with ‘knowledge’.” 6 By providing a critical stance
through which Latin American thought was able to question its own
doxas in moments of intellectual and political crisis, Benjamin’s
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writings became an essential point of reference that helped open the
region’s critical discourse to more contemporary intellectual agendas.
Walter Benjamin’s work has been canonized in Latin America,
most particularly by two contexts of reading. Within the context of
Chilean cultural critique, where theory is closely related to issues of
(post)dictatorial language and memory, Benjamin’s redemptive
criticism has provided a model for the articulation of a language to
cope with trauma. In this sense, Nelly Richard, one of the leading
figures in the development of this paradigm, describes some of her
works as “an attempt to gather some of the disparate threads that
weave together a Benjaminian reading of the interrupted and assailed
memories of some cultural practices within our recent history.” 7 In
Chile, Benjamin is thus refunctionalized through a form of post-
dictatorial thought mediated by a post-structuralist concern for the
politics and structure of language,8 and is largely invoked in terms of
the role of memory in the redemption of the silenced and repressed
subjects of the military regime. This practice rests on a profoundly
Benjaminian ideal, since, as Pablo Oyarzún puts it in his introduction
to a Chilean edition of his writings, Benjamin’s critique of history
“tries to correct the arbitrarily unilateral nature of truth” by asserting
that “true knowledge is redemptive knowledge.” 9 By focusing on
Benjamin’s theory of language and its impact on the politics of
memory, Chilean theorists have produced a version of Benjaminian
thought that is largely defined by the task of accounting for a history
fragmented by the shattering violence of military repression.
A second way of reading has thrived in widespread parts of the
continent, through the construction of different versions of “cultural
studies.” According to Mabel Moraña, readings of Benjamin in this
context respond to the need for a “creative hermeneutics, capable of
connecting theory and praxis, tradition, discourse and collective
experience, from a non-prescriptive, imaginative, anti-dogmatic new
horizon.”10 In this spirit, Benjamin’s writings on Baudelaire and
XIXth century Paris, as well as on Berlin, Naples and Moscow, have
been carefully studied by Latin American scholars and writers—such
as Brazilian sociologist Renato Ortiz and Argentinian novelist and
critic Martín Kohan—in an attempt to develop a critical language for
the study of urban modernity in Latin America. While Kohan argues
that “there isn’t a theory of the city in Benjamin,”11 his work attempts
to articulate Benjamin’s writings on the four aforementioned cities as
an “urban zone” defined by four historical moments: the origin of
Western Civilization, Benjamin’s own life experience, the bourgeois
revolution in France and the proletarian revolution in Russia (Kohan
2004, 24). On the other hand, Ortiz seeks in Benjamin a measure on
4
how “the process of rationalization of society (to speak in Weber’s
terms) has an impact on the very thought that seeks to comprehend
it.”12 As we can see in both examples, a reading of Benjamin has
allowed Latin American intellectuals closely related to major cities
(Buenos Aires in the case of Kohan; São Paulo in the case of Ortiz) to
interrogate the prehistory of capitalist modernity in order to contend
with a specific urban reality that exceeds more traditional
understandings of culture in the context of Latin American critique.
This approach reaches its highest point in the work of Colombian
cultural thinker Jesús Martín-Barbero, whose first reading of
Benjamin allowed him to discover “the possibility of a critical
reading of the social that is not only free of reductionism and
determinism[…], but also capable of illuminating the very experience
of social living in its most profound interweaving [trama]:
creativity.”13 In this way, Martín-Barbero develops an important
Benjaminian insight in his major work, De los medios a las
mediaciones: the “dissolution of the center as method,” which leads to
the possibility of “discerning the fundamental mediation that allows
one to think historically of the relationship between the transformation
in the conditions of production and changes in the realm of culture,
that is, the transformations of the sensorium of modes of perception of
social experience.”14 Through this interpretation, Martín-Barbero
deploys Benjamin’s work into a hermeneutic opening that allows
critical discourse to access culture at different levels, from the
structural transformations of the imaginary propitiated by the advent
of mass modernity to the material practices of mediation involved in
the modern logic of culture and communication.
Up to this point, we can observe that Latin America has engaged
with Benjamin primarily as a way to read the materiality of cultural
practices in terms of memory and modernity. In other words, the most
canonized writings by Walter Benjamin have provided Latin America
with forms of thinking about cultural practices whose existence had
been occluded either by the interpretive gaps of the liberal legacy or
the deliberate violence of military regimes. For the most part, these
approaches to Benjamin have largely circulated in debates within the
field of “Latin American cultural studies,” where the national and
regional concerns inscribed in the aforementioned authors’ works
become intertwined with practices of reading Latin America from
academic sites located in the region and in the United States.
In the case of Mexico, the intellectual field has developed forms of
reading Benjamin that surpass the canonizing approach to works
present in other Latin American sites. Rather than articulating
particular questions about the remnants of a military regime (which
 5
Mexico did not have) or the materiality of culture (a debate that, in its
Mexican version, has no major Benjaminian angles), Mexican
readings of Walter Benjamin have emerged from two opposite
paradigms. On the one hand, Benjamin has enjoyed a longstanding
prestige among writers and literary intellectuals as a practitioner of
the essay genre, and has been read largely as a theoretician of
melancholy. A leading figure in furthering this paradigm, Christopher
Domínguez Michael, presents a highly literary portrayal of Benjamin:
“Walter Benjamin seems to me the exemplary child. He suffered from
two preoccupations [curiosidades] that he needed to dismantle, as if
they were mechanical artifacts: his past—Judaism—as well as his
present—Communism—, superficial passions—never superfluous—
that left him only with toys, their care and cataloguing. But his time
was not child’s play and he killed himself, persecuted by history, in
Port Bou, after discovering that he was incapable of taking himself to
paradise.”15 This passage clearly illustrates a reductionist reading of
Benjamin, persistent in Mexican literary circles: an attempt to portray
him as an aesthete who, in a tragic twist of fate, happened to live in an
extremely political time. This is due to the particular nature of the
Mexican literary field, where liberalism still occupies a central role as
the transcendental signifier of public intellectuals and where many
foundational figures, like Octavio Paz, formulated a critical practice
strongly opposed to socialism and communism. Within these
parameters, some literary intellectuals in Mexico resort to various
forms of aestheticist discourse as part of a practice that tends to reject
socialist ideas of community and utopia by emphasizing the narrative
of the modern individual which, in its highest incarnation, is
expressed through literary practice. By putting the political under
erasure, this form of reading, performed even by some members of the
Mexican left,16 presents a Benjamin that, according to this view, must
be saved from a Marxism to which he never quite subscribed, a
Benjamin defined by a relentlessly unique character that defied the
“vulgarities” of political history. In spite of this position, the literary
readings of Walter Benjamin have resulted in a wide circulation of his
writings in Mexican circles. Because of this, Benjamin is read in
Mexico far more than Adorno, Horkheimer or any other thinker
associated with the Frankfurt School. In addition, due to the
prominent role that liberal literary intellectuals have in the publishing
industry to this date, Benjamin is part of a canon that privileges the
reading and influence of mid-century philologists and critics such as
Mario Praz, Erich Auerbach and Ernst Robert Curtius. Through this
kind of fashioning, Benjamin’s work could overcome the liberal bias
against socialist thought, allowing his writing a greater circulation in
6
the Mexican field of cultural production than that of the oeuvre of any
other materialist critic.
In contrast to the approaches to Benjamin presented up to now,
Bolívar Echeverría develops a critical stance that underscores the
political implications of Benjamin’s work. This is not to imply that the
focus on the melancholy trope or the attempt to develop a
hermeneutics of culture constitutes a de-politicization of Benjamin
per se. The point is, rather, that the capacity to extract potential
threads from Benjamin in the project of weaving a political
philosophy largely depends on the location and form of the
engagement with his work. In other words, reading Benjamin in Latin
America is a matter both of locus and ideology, a practice that varies
deeply depending on the deep histories and political entanglements of
each country and region. Echeverría belongs to a generation of left-
wing Latin American intellectuals whose formation was marked by
the critique of Leninist doxa and by the attempt to create a more open
approach to Marxism. Within politically radicalized sites of reading
Benjamin, such as the National University of Mexico’s (UNAM)
schools of economics, political science and philosophy and letters,
many intellectuals have focused on articulating Benjamin’s ideas in
such a way as to configure a political philosophy that seeks to counter
both the loss of prestige of Marxism in the wake of the collapse of the
Soviet Union and the liberal-nationalist tradition of thinking inherited
by the Mexican Revolution and sustained by the State. In the last three
decades, the gradual weakening and collapse of the Post-
Revolutionary regime that ruled Mexico for over seventy years
allowed many left-wing thinkers and intellectuals to construct a space
of reflection and reconsideration of both official history and the task
of constructing a new progressive politics. It is thus not surprising
that, in Mexico, Benjamin is articulated by a constellation of thinkers
and ideas quite different from those in any other Latin American
context.
Perhaps the best example of this tradition of reading for the
purposes of the present essay is La mirada del ángel, a book edited by
Bolívar Echeverría17 containing the proceedings of a conference held
at the UNAM on “Theses on the Concept of History.” The first thing
that comes to the reader’s attention in these texts is the great relevance
of Benjamin’s “task to brush history against the grain.” 18 This practice
has acquired considerable importance within Mexico’s intellectual
field, as an attempt to respond to the legacy of “official histories”
produced during the XXth century. Carlos Antonio Aguirre Rojas,
founder of the journal Contrahistorias and one of the foremost readers
of Benjamin in this fashion, argues that Benjamin’s most important
 7
contribution to historiography is the reminder that a history of the
oppressed must be redeemed (Echeverría 2005, 134-135). The
importance of this position is that it has led to unprecedented links
between academic history and actual political practice. It is thus not
surprising that Contrahistorias, to which Echeverría is a regular
contributor, has close ties to the Zapatista movement in Chiapas,
whose attempt to reassert indigenous history and culture in the face of
the nationalist-mestizo paradigm inherited from the Mexican
Revolution has some clear Benjaminian undertones.
Benjamin’s work is not merely understood in La mirada del ángel
as a methodological opening of critical discourse but also as a way to
establish a dialogue between dialogue between intellectual projects
and actual politics in a Mexican liberal tradition that has historically
understood both as separate. As if responding to Mabel Moraña’s call
to politicize Benjamin’s work in a Latin American context, authors
like Echeverría and Aguirre Rojas provide a reading that actually
passes “from an analysis of cultural practices to the definition of
political praxes that actively engage with the conflictive and
heterogeneous Latin American contemporaneity” (Moraña 2004, 144).
Thus, La mirada del ángel, as a collective project, undermines
readings like the one put forward by Domínguez Michael, by actively
contradicting attempts to read Benjamin from a solely literary
perspective. It is interesting to note, as a way of approaching
Echeverría’s work, that this mode of reading Benjamin in political
practice has created an intellectual constellation in Mexico composed
of a diverse set of philosophical references aimed at the critique of the
relationship between knowledge and power. Therefore, it is quite
notable that Aguirre Rojas equates Benjamin’s notion of reading
history against the grain with the Foucaldian concept of the
construction of genealogies of official discourses of knowledge
(Echeverría 2005, 135).19
Other critics, such as Nora Rabotnikof Maskivker (Echeverría
2005: 155-171)—who, incidentally, is the translator of Susan Buck-
Morss’s book on Benjamin’s Arcades into Spanish—have identified
Benjamin’s “Theses” as a “crossroads between politics, history and
memory” embodied by Reinhart Koselleck’s idea of “futures past,” 20
one of whose main thrusts is precisely an attempt to recast received
notions of revolution and modernity. Echeverría himself has
participated in this line of thinking by tying Benjamin’s “against the
grain” to the work of Carlo Ginzburg and his notion of “clues.” 21 This
connection has two consequences that clearly illustrate Benjamin’s
impact on Mexican historiography. First, it recognizes the
fragmentary character of the historical method (and of the ontology of
8
history itself), introducing a question mark into documentary and
archival work. In other words, Mexican intellectual efforts have
countered the weight of the paradigms inherited from the Revolution
by consistently interrogating the reliability of history. Second,
Benjamin’s work is consistently related to forms of critical practice
with a clear and present genealogy in Mexico. Echeverría weaves a
web of discourses that ties Benjamin and Ginzburg to a central
signifier in Mexican historiography: “microhistory.” In San José de
Gracia,22 a book that marks the beginning of microhistory in Mexico,
Luis González traces the evolution of a small town during the
Revolutionary years. The result was the biography of the region,
untouched by the ideological reform brought about by the Revolution,
where everyday life was still inscribed in social, political and
economic practices silenced by the idea of nation that was promoted
by the center. While González’s work does not have the left-wing
political charge of subsequent microhistorical books, and while it is
not directly quoted by Echeverría, the point is that in Mexico the
Benjaminian paradigm is invoked within a particular set of
philosophical and critical traditions in order to rearticulate forms of
thinking and living silenced by colonial and national history. As we
will see in the following pages, Echeverría’s main contribution to the
act of reading Benjamin in Latin America lies in his tying the “micro-
narratives of modernity” (Moraña 2005, 138), deployed by
Benjaminian practice, with the ontological approach to the question of
modernity itself.
Before moving on to Echeverría’s texts on Benjamin, it is
important to briefly discuss the origins of his critical work. Most of
Echeverría’s earliest corpus,23 from the mid-seventies till the late
1980s, was largely inscribed in a Marxist paradigm that sought a
redefinition of Marxism following the impact of military
dictatorships, and after the Sovietization of the Cuban regime created
a need for self-assessment among many Latin American leftists. El
discurso crítico de Marx (1986), the book that gathered his earlier
writings on texts such as the “Theses on Feuerbach” (the thesis for his
Economics degree), the Critique of Political Economy and Capital,
was defined by Echeverría as an attempt to respond to the “crisis of
Marxism” by attempting to renew its contemporary relevance through

the idea that all conflicts of contemporary society

revolve, with their irreducible specificity, around a
fundamental contradiction, inherent to the capitalist mode of
social production; the contradiction between use value and
value; between two “forms of existence” of the social
 9
reproduction process: one, “social-natural,” trans-historical,
which is determinant, and another one, historically
superimposed on the first one, parasitical but dominant,
which is the form of the “value that increases in value,” the
accumulation of capital.24
While this quote reveals an attempt to sustain and redeem the
vocabulary of traditional Marxist analysis, the way Echeverría frames
his argument outlines the space in which Benjamin will eventually
become a central referent. By speaking of a contradiction defined by
the idea of “forms of existence,” Echeverría displaces the task of
political philosophy from the critique of political economy to an effort
to construct a broader ontology of the present through a system that
can account for the inherent contradictions of social reproduction. In
the terms presented above, an analytical practice with an orthodox
materialist stance would represent the “parasitical but dominant” form
of social life based on the accumulation of capital, but would lack the
vocabulary to engage the “social-natural” form of life that relies on
use value. While a full-fledged discussion of Marx’s distinction of
between value and use value exceeds the purposes and possibilities of
these pages, it is crucial to remember the importance this distinction
has in many traditions of Marxist thinking. As Timothy Bewes shows,
Marx uses this distinction to discuss the emergence of the commodity
itself, therefore establishing a sort of zero degree of capitalism. 25 By
engaging with this problematic by constructing it into a broader
ontology, Echeverría’s work is very close to some contemporary
readings of Benjamin, particularly the one offered by Eric Santner
who, in On Creaturely Life, emphasizes the idea that “at some level
we truly encounter the radical otherness of the “natural” world only
where it appears in the guise of historical remnant” 26 Benjamin thus
becomes, in Echeverría’s system, a reference in the attempt to read the
traces and fragments of the “social-natural” experience (parallel to
Santner’s Naturgeschicte, who, like Echeverría, draws from
Benjamin’s work on the Trauerspiel) through the materiality of
culture. As I will demonstrate in the third part of this essay,
Echeverría articulates an ontology of experience in the realm of
capitalist modernity through his notion of “historical ethos,” which
accounts for four different subjective positions (classical, romantic,
realist and Baroque) corresponding to modes of engaging with the
inherent contradiction between use value and value. Before delving
into these notions, I will analyze Echeverría’s concrete engagement
with Benjamin in order to show how his project intersects with and
misreads Benjaminian thought as part of his project to define the
political grounds of modernity.
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II.

One of the ways to measure Echeverría’s engagement with

Benjamin is the number of public lectures he has devoted to
Benjamin’s work in Latin American venues. In the mid-1990s,
Echeverría gave two important presentations, both included in his
book Valor de uso y utopía, that clearly outline his Benjaminian
stance.27 While neither text goes far beyond an exposition of
Benjamin’s texts, the critical points emphasized by Echeverría help to
identify how his work is framed by Benjaminian notions. In a long
paper entitled “Benjamin: Mesianismo y utopía,” presented in a 1994
conference on intellectuals and politics held in Mexico City,
Echeverría engages in a careful exposition of the “Theses” by
reframing Benjamin’s work in the political terms that other Mexican
intellectuals usually sidestep. As we have seen, this position makes
Echeverría’s reading of Benjamin fundamentally different from the
one promoted by other literary intellectuals in the country and, in a
way, reappropriates Benjamin for a political project that openly
opposes the Mexican intellectuals’ liberal consensus. Echeverría
opens his text by anticipating the problem of a political reading of
Benjamin: “To talk about the political dimension of Benjamin’s work
in search of the relevance of its discourse necessarily implies coming
into conflict not only with the current notion of “politics” but also
with the notion of “relevance” itself” (Echeverría 1998a, 119). In this
sense, Echeverría argues that a true engagement with Benjamin means
assuming the extemporaneity of his work: “The evident untimeliness
[inactualidad] of Benjamin’s “political discourse” attains, however, a
peculiar timeliness [actualidad] of a different order when, at the end
of this century—and millennium—, under conditions in which
capitalist modernity seems irrevocably fatigued, we perceive how
illusory the political scene, so apparently realist, has been throughout
the XXth century” (Echeverría 1998a 120).
In an untranslatable wordplay that moves from inactualidad
(anachronism) to actualidad (relevance), Echeverría argues that the
“inactualidad” of Benjamin’s ideas in the political scenario of the
XXth century is precisely the factor that makes his work relevant and
compelling at the turn of the century. Echeverría argues that Benjamin
presents certain modes of contemporary politics as an illusion
constructed by the privilege of value in capitalist modernity, and that
his “Theses” lay the foundations for constructing a different mode of
politics. If one follows this argument, Benjamin can only be activated
by rethinking politics and the political from the ground, by putting the
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political experience of the XXth century under erasure. At this
juncture, Echeverría distances himself from other critical theorists,
such as Alain Badiou in The Century, who have argued for a re-
assessment of the XXth century as an intensely political time. 28
Echeverría’s position is born not only from the defeat of really-
existing socialism, which, in 1994, was deeply entrenched in the
consciousness of Latin American leftists, but also from the idea that
capitalist modernity, as the only presently existing form of modernity,
has framed politics in the terms of its own ontology. Thus, in order to
take into account the “social-natural” dimension of politics that, in
Echeverría’s view, is erased by the privilege of value, a new political
ontology is needed, one that is capable of moving the political beyond
the horizon of capital without fully departing from the critical legacies
of the past. Benjamin’s “Theses” serve this function well, because, as
we will see in a moment, their extemporaneity allows them to awaken
(or redeem, to be more precise) latent elements of “social-natural”
history and to inscribe them in a new political ontology.
Echeverría’s following lecture on Benjamin, “Deambular: el
“flâneur” y el valor de uso,” a 1996 text originally presented at the
Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar in Ecuador, provides a second
important part of this engagement. If Benjamin’s “Theses” recover a
utopian stance and provide the grounds for a political ontology, his
work on the “flâneur” gives Echeverría a theoretical base from which
to tackle the problem of use value. According to Echeverría, the turn
to everyday life as an object of study results from the declining
prestige of the history of the “great days” (grandes días). This change
of focus, as I discussed earlier, is central to many critical and political
practices in Mexico, and according to Echeverría, has an ultimately
philosophical consequence:

The thematization of everyday life by the reflexive

discourse on the social only appears when its inherent
conflictuality [conflictualidad, a neologism] becomes
manifest; that is, when, in the world of life, the contradiction
between the set of things that are lived automatically and the
set of those that demand creativity can no longer be resolved
or neutralized as it was in societies foreign to capitalist
modernity, and when, consequently, the border or limit
between both sets of things acquires a previously unknown
clarity and precision (Echeverría 1998a, 52).

While Echeverría himself does not engage in the Benjaminian task

of gathering the threads of everyday life, he finds in the materiality of
12
everyday practices an instance when use value may be discerned from
value. In other words, Echeverría not only finds in Benjamin’s work a
way to expose the contradiction between alienation and creativity, but
also renders the “social-natural” life visible, not as a utopian stance,
but as a latent element in really-existing modernity. As we will see in
the next section, the potential to discern use value in the experience of
capitalist modernity is one of the conditions of possibility of
Echeverría’s own notion of Baroque modernity.
Before probing the depths of Echeverría’s project, a reading of a
third, crucial engagement with Benjamin provides a further point of
entry to Echeverría’s ontology. In a provocative text entitled “The
Angel of History and Historical Materialism,” Echeverría proposes a
highly controversial reading of the “angelus novus” figure. He starts
by pointing out that Benjamin’s metaphor actually bears little
resemblance to the famous Paul Klee painting mentioned in the thesis:
“When we confront both figures, we can see that there is no similitude
between them: the dramatic, vertiginously dynamic scene described
by Benjamin looks nothing like the bidimensional drawing, both
enchanting and enigmatic, of the angel quietly suspended in the air
presented by Klee’s painting. In my opinion, this lack of coincidence
seems to indicate that what Benjamin did with Klee’s angel was not
only to rename it, but to substitute it for another, a new angel invented
by him. One could even say that what Benjamin had before his eyes
as an initial image, an image subject to considerable alterations by his
invention, was not really Klee’s painting, but an old XVIIIth century
engraving” (Echeverría 2006, 119). Echeverría refers here to an icon
extracted from Gravelot and Cochin’s 1791 Iconologie par figures,29
with which, according to his own reading, Benjamin was familiar
from his studies of the German Baroque. As Echeverría points out, we
see an angelic figure clearly looking to the past, represented in this
image by the burning village in the background, interpreted by
Gravelot and Cochin as a symbol of the destruction of empires. In this
image, the angel of history is writing on the back of Saturn, who
represents both time and death in Baroque emblematics. In addition,
the two articles lying in the foreground carry specific meanings: the
trumpet, symbolizing the “glorious actions” of the past, and the book
of Thucydides, recognized as the founding figure of history. Going
beyond this explanation laid out by Gravelot and Cochin, Echeverría
notices two key points that Benjamin presumably erases from this
representation: first, the distance between the angel and the historical
events in the background is removed by Benjamin’s description of a
wind that sweeps the angel; second, while the past (the angel) and
time (Saturn) appear in the engraving as two distinct images,
 13
Benjamin’s angel conflates (in a gesture that one may simultaneously
call Baroque and dialectic) both images in the same allegory.30
What interests me in this reading of Benjamin is the way in which
the metaphor of the Angelus Novus is articulated to further
Echeverría’s own philosophical project. The first thing to notice is that
Echeverría makes a key displacement in the genealogy of the image.
While Klee ties Benjamin to surrealism and the Avant-garde, the
XVIIIth century icon situates Benjamin’s work in a Baroque system
of meaning. By doing so, Echeverría expropriates Benjamin not only
for his own system of thinking, but also to shape a set of referents
directly related to the problem of Latin American modernity. In his
works on the Baroque, Echeverría subjects Benjamin to an operation
that he has termed “codigophagia,” the absorption of diverse cultural
codes into the same system of thinking. Moreover, it is important to
note that the Baroque occupies a central role in Echeverría’s ontology
of modernity. As we have seen, Echeverría’s theory of modernity is
based on the disencounter between the social-natural history of use
value and the value forms of capitalist accumulation. In this
framework, subjectivity is constructed through the ways in which a
subject mediates that contradiction, developing a consistent narrative,
the historical ethe. While Echeverría identifies four different ethe
(realist, classical, romantic and Baroque), it is the latter that occupies
a central role in his thinking. The Baroque ethos, in Echeverría’s
model, is the one that holds the greatest potential to overcome
capitalist modernity, precisely because its codigophagia allows the
integration of both use value and value in the same system, without
erasing or concealing their inherent contradiction. To use Deleuze’s
terminology, the Baroque creates a fold in which both practices of
value may be part of the same monad 31 without obscuring their
internal incongruities.
Returning to Benjamin’s historiography, this argument would
mean that the Baroque form of knowledge is the one that, within the
framework of modernity, best allows for a practice of reading history
against the grain. Echeverría’s task is neither to understand
Benjamin’s works nor to develop a methodology for cultural studies,
but rather to formulate an ontology of the really-existing modernity
from the Latin American standpoint. The privileging of a “Baroque
Benjamin” over the surrealist undertones of his work is a key way to
appropriate him in Latin America, given that the Baroque has deeply
rooted historical (and colonial) undertones in the region.
The second issue at stake in Echeverría’s reading is the possibility
of countering the predominant “postmodernist” readings of Benjamin,
as an author who somehow celebrates “ruins” or “untimeliness” as a
14
desirable conceptual category. In Beatriz Sarlo’s words, the fact that
Benjamin speaks of crisis does not mean he is an apologist of it. 32
Thus, Echeverría argues: “The theoretical transformation that he
would like to achieve with his critique of the idea of progress is not a
transformation within theory as an indifferent and undefined field of
theorems, but the transformation of a concrete configuration or
historical episode specific to that theoretical field, constituted
precisely by the presence of that socialist revolutionary project in the
field of theory” (Echeverría 2006, 123). In other words, by locating
Benjamin’s angel of history in the Baroque, Echeverría also critiques
cultural studies’ appropriations of his work as a methodological guide.
Echeverría’s primary complaint here is that “postmodern approaches”
(i.e. cultural studies) do not engage with Benjamin’s notion of
dialectics and materialism. Consequently, the Baroque image invoked
by Echeverría introduces a crucial element into Thesis IX that Klee’s
painting does not contain: an unfolded dialectic of time and history
that Benjamin, presumably, refolds into his own allegory of the angel.
Within this framework, Echeverría reads another icon, the dwarf
of theology, in an equally provocative way: “By theology, Benjamin
does not seem to mean a treatise on God, but a specific use of
discourse that pursues a rational explanation of the world’s events”
(Echeverría 2006, 126). This striking presentation of Benjamin’s
notion of theology points to similar reassessments of Thesis I. At the
beginning of The Puppet and the Dwarf, Slavoj Zizek suggests an
inversion of the terms of the thesis, so that theology becomes the
puppet that enlists the service of the dwarf of historical materialism.
Following this line of thinking, Zizek defines modernity as “the social
order in which religion is not fully integrated into and identified with
a particular cultural life-form, but acquires autonomy, so that it can
survive as the same religion in different cultures.” 33 In Echeverría’s
language, Zizek’s description of modernity implies that an element of
“social-natural” life (religion) loses its use value and becomes folded
into value (the resulting process of “autonomy”), which in turn allows
religion to be integrated into the experience of any culture. By
inverting the terms of Thesis I, and by identifying this inversion with
the fact that science and rationality are esoteric discourses, while
religion captures “the imagination of the masses,” Zizek makes visible
the same tension identified by Echeverría. When Zizek suggests that
the “subversive kernel of Christianity […] is accessible only through a
materialist approach—and vice versa, to become a true dialectical
materialist one should go through the Christian experience” (Zizek
2003, 6), he is actually constructing an argument similar to
Echeverría’s idea of the emergence of the “social natural” world.
 15
However, as Echeverría’s aim is ontological rather than critical,
instead of directly identifying theology with religion, as Zizek does,
his argument rests on a radically materialist stance, in which theology
and dialectical materialism are two co-existing modes of discourse—
the “techno-scientific structure of the means of production” and their
“techno-magical” equivalents—presented by capitalist modernity as
contradictory. In this sense, what Echeverría discovers in Benjamin is
not Zizek’s validation of the “subversive kernel of Christianity” as the
means to recover the “social-natural” dimension of the political, but
an even more radical (and more clearly Benjaminian) unfolding of
both discursivities in the realm of experience. In this manner,
Echeverría constructs a Benjamin strongly inscribed in his own
version of modernity: Baroque in his allegorical language, relentlessly
secular, and committed to the task of upholding the socialist utopia.
Through this redefinition, Echeverría appropriates Benjamin for an
understanding of Baroque modernity that seeks a new space for the
political.

III.

As Echeverría constituted his theory of modernity in the 1990s,

the idea of the “Baroque” allowed him to reconcile his Benjaminian
critique of capital with one of the central legacies of Latin American
critical thinking. In other words, in accounting for the tension between
use value and value, the Baroque encompasses both the contradictory
nature of the experiential impact of the commodity in modernity and
the concrete historical legacy of Latin American thinking vis-à-vis
such a contradiction. As a mode of thinking the contradiction between
use value and value, the Baroque is a central part of the modernity
puzzle due to its capacity to fold the arbitrary relation between the
realm of the “social-natural” and capitalism into one monad. In one of
the most precise definitions of Benjamin’s engagement with the
Baroque, J.M. Coetzee argues:

Under the reign of the market, things relate to their

actual worth as arbitrarily as, for instance, in Baroque
emblematics a death’s head relates to man’s subjection to
time. Emblems thus make an unexpected return to the
historical stage in the form of commodities, which under
capitalism are no longer what they seem, but, as Marx had
warned, begin to ‘[abound] in metaphysical subtleties and
theological niceties.’ […] Allegory, Benjamin argues, is
exactly the right mode for an age of communities.34
16
This commentary not only illuminates the significance of
Echeverría’s connection of the angel of history to Gravelot’s icon, but,
more importantly, it explains why Echeverría finds in the Baroque the
best epistemological perspective from which to describe the most
critical stance produced from within capitalist modernity. Echeverría’s
goal of constructing an ontology of “really-existing modernity” rather
than prescribing a utopic landscape contains the allegorical potential
of the Baroque, which allows him to argue for a theory of modernity
that, following Leibniz, “combines philosophical theory with
hermeneutic wisdom”35. That is, Echeverría’s theory accounts for the
ontological nature of capitalism along with the epistemological
engagements of subjectivity with capital and the commodity. By
defining the “historical ethos” as “a principle of construction of the
world of life” (Echeverría 1998b, 37), and by understanding the
Baroque as one of four possible “principles of construction” in the
realm of capitalist modernity, Echeverría employs the idea of the
Baroque as an aesthetic formation in cultural history in order to
negotiate the ontological together with the hermeneutical. Thus,
Echeverría understands the Baroque as a “will to form” that reconciles
life and its critique in the same aesthetic gesture, inscribing two forms
of narrating modernity (a “victorious” one and a “vanquished” one, as
Echeverría defines them) in the same grand form. It is important to
observe here that Baroque emblems unfold into different dimensions
of Echeverría’s engagement with Benjamin. Therefore, in
Echeverría’s thought, the Baroque form ultimately becomes the ethos
that has the greatest potential to overcome capitalist modernity from
within on two accounts. First, it preserves the “social-natural”
dimension of use value in its allegory of the commodity. In addition,
following the terminology of the “vanquished” employed by
Benjamin in the “Theses” and deliberately adopted here by
Echeverría, its “will to form” allows for the preservation and potential
redemption of dimensions of life and history beyond hegemonic
formations. In short, the Baroque, for Echeverría, is a figure that
expresses ontologically the contradictory nature of capitalist
modernity and, simultaneously, provides an aesthetic of life that
preserves even its most repressed dimensions for hermeneutic
engagement.
It should be emphasized that the connection between Benjamin’s
Baroque and Latin American Baroque is not confined to Echeverría’s
theory; it is also present in some marginal but telling passages of
Benjamin’s oeuvre. In recent years, John Kraniauskas and Michael
Löwy have noted brief engagements with Latin America in
Benjamin’s work. Kraniauskas refers particularly to two short but
 17
significant paragraphs in One-Way Street. The first is a dream-image
entitled “Underground Works:”

In a dream, I saw barren terrain. It was the marketplace at

Weimar. Excavations were in progress. I, too, scraped about
the sand. Then the tip of a church steeple came to light.
Delighted, I thought to myself: a Mexican shrine from the
time of pre-animism, from the Anaquiviztli. I awoke
laughing (Ana=avá; vi=vie; witz [joke] = Mexican church
[!]).36
The second, entitled “Mexican Embassy,” takes its epigraph from
Charles Baudelaire and reads “I never pass by a wooden fetish, a
gilded Buddha, a Mexican idol without reflecting: perhaps it is the
true God.” The fragment itself is the following:

I dreamed I was a member of an exploring party in

Mexico. After crossing a high, primeval jungle, we came
upon a system of above ground caves in the mountains. Here,
a religious order had survived from the time of the first
missionaries till now, its monks continuing the work of
conversion among the natives. In an immense central grotto
with a gothically pointed roof, Mass was celebrated
according to the most ancient rites. We joined the ceremony
and witnessed its climax: toward a wooden bust of God the
Father, fixed high on a wall of the cave, a priest raised a
Mexican fetish. At this, the divine head turned thrice in
denial from right to left (Benjamin 1996, 449).

Kraniauskas reads these two images as “produced at the

intersection of ethnology, aesthetics and psychoanalysis” and “internal
to a temporal structure of modernity that narrativizes history in terms
of a master concept of ‘progress.’” The point, Kraniauskas concludes,
is that “Benjamin’s colonial Mexico is located in another, non-
contemporary time, that by definition is not present.” 37 One may
supplement this reading by introducing a term that Kraniauskas
produces by adapting the notion of “optical unconscious” from the
photography section of One-Way Street, though he does not develop
it: a “colonial unconscious.” In the context of my argument, this
concept is crucial for understanding Echeverría’s relationship to
Benjamin. If one sets aside for a moment the fact that Echeverría
resists Benjamin’s articulation of surrealism, the usage of a set of pre-
Columbian and colonial images on Benjamin’s part signals an affinity
between his notion of history and Echeverría’s theory of Baroque
18
modernity. The Baroque ethos becomes, in Echeverría’s narrative, an
instrument that allows for the unfolding of historical substrata
contained in the colonial unconscious. In other words, Echeverría’s
Baroque carries out a systematic unfolding of the same procedure at
work in Benjamin’s dream-images: the elements underlying history’s
silences emerge to disrupt the narrative of modernity. In Echeverría’s
account, engaged with a really-existing modernity rather than a
utopian one, the Baroque image, even more than the surrealist one, is
the ethos that best allows the archeological unfolding of underlying
elements into the time continuum of modernity.
This point is further illustrated by another Benjaminian reference
to Latin America: a review of Marcel Brion’s 1928 book on
Bartolomé de las Casas, brought to light by Michael Löwy. In this
brief text (only two pages long in the German edition), Benjamin
outlines a view that considers the Conquest to be a transformation of
“the recently conquered world into a torture chamber.” Thus,
Benjamin continues, the colonization process created a “new
configuration of the spirit (Geistesverfassung) that one cannot
represent without horror (Grauen)” (Echeverría 2005, 37). By
invoking the figures of Las Casas (due to his intervention in resisting
this process) and Bernardino de Sahagún (who documented and
rescued indigenous cultures and languages from extinction), Benjamin
interprets acts of resistance through what Löwy calls a “historical
dialectic in the field of morals: ‘In the name of Catholicism, a priest
opposes the atrocities (Greuel) perpetrated in the name of
Catholicism’” (Echeverría 2005, 37). Benjamin echoes Brion’s idea
that Las Casas is the first figure that sides with the vanquished in the
construction of the historical account of the Conquest, by questioning
the war’s legitimacy. 38 While Löwy cites this passage in order to
affiliate Benjamin with the aforementioned school of counter-history,
two other interpretations are relevant for the context of this paper.
First, although Benjamin’s interest in the subject may come more
from his friendship with Brion than a personal engagement with the
Americas, it is telling that his two interventions refer to the interaction
between pre-Columbian culture and the Conquest, the very historical
basis of Latin American Baroque culture. These marginal texts show
why Echeverría is able to encompass Benjaminian tropes within his
own theory of modernity, since Benjamin, particularly in his review of
Brion, offers a critique of coloniality based on the presuppositions of
what will later become the “Theses.” Second, the “historical dialectic”
identified by Löwy offers a clear example of Echeverría’s idea of the
Baroque ethos as the privileged mode of resistance within modernity.
By unfolding Catholicism into its dual role as the condition for both
 19
oppression and resistance, Benjamin offers a historical instance where
a founding discourse of modernity is the necessary condition for both
the triumph of the powerful and the vindication of the vanquished.39
This very procedure is invoked by Echeverría in Chapter 3 of La
modernidad de lo barroco. In this chapter, he provides an account of
the Jesuits’ role in Latin America, focusing on the paradoxical fact
that, while the order was founded to secure the Church’s position as a
world power, it ultimately fueled criollo and mestizo ideologies that
led to the Independence process. Echeverría argues that this
contradiction is the result of two Baroque “modes of behavior”
inscribed in Jesuit ideology: the localization of human freedom in
theology, which added a disruptive element to the religious system
that legitimized Spanish domination, and the emergence of a mestizo
and criollo “consciousness,” which contributed a hybrid element to
the cultural landscape of colonial society. In this fashion, Echeverría
argues that these changes sought “an ancient religious dramaticity
[dramaticidad],” whose activation resulted in the beginning of the
“dramaticity of the experience of the divine, proper to the modern
age” (Echeverría 1998b, 80). By acting from a perspective that
Echeverría terms the Baroque ethos, the Jesuits’ search for the past
unwittingly resulted in the unfolding of modern subjectivities that,
ultimately, led to the birth of emancipatory ideas in Latin America.
The Baroque ethos, as illustrated both by Löwy and Echeverría,
intertwines three critical impulses—a historical mode central to Latin
America, a long tradition of anti-colonial and postcolonial thought
and attitudes in the continent and the Benjaminian imperative of
reading history against the grain—into the ontological scaffold that
grounds an emancipatory notion of modernity.
From the perspective of Latin American philosophy, to claim the
notion of the Baroque implies the assumption of a term traditionally
employed to describe the region’s colonial legacy and, in recent years,
a diverse set of postcolonial cultural interventions. Indeed, the
Baroque has long been considered a foundational mode of identity
production in Latin America, and even a mark of specificity of the
region. Highly influential texts from the mid-century, such as José
Lezama Lima’s La expresión americana and Alejo Carpentier’s
famous introduction to his novel El reino de este mundo 40 contributed
to the term’s legacy. Echeverría assumes the cultural weight of the
Baroque but redefines it straightforwardly as a mode of modern
subjectivity, thus challenging its most obviously identitarian
undertones. This appropriation of the Baroque emphasizes, instead,
the peculiar position of Latin America as a (post)colonial society and
its “ex-centric”41 role in the constitution of modernity. In this line of
20
thought, Mabel Moraña has proposed “to read the Baroque as the
allegorical reproductibility of the struggles of power that are inherent
in the process of insertion of the American world in the context of
Occidentalism.”42 In recovering a “logic of Baroque disruption,”
Moraña comes close to Echeverría’s ethe by recognizing it as a
“‘machine of subjectivation’ that counteracts the ‘war machine’ of
postcolonial modernity” (Moraña 2005, 262). One may say that
Echeverría’s operation, discussed by Moraña in the latter part of her
essay, moves the Baroque from the aesthetic sphere (and the
representational nature of that “machine of subjectivation”) to a
philosophical system that fully assumes its role in modernity.
Arguably, Echeverría’s La modernidad de lo barroco is, along with
the work of Serge Gruzinski, 43 the most significant attempt within
Latin American cultural theory to take the notion beyond its statute as
a category of representational politics and identitarian pursuits to a
more properly ontological role.
In the theoretical context of the 1990s, Echeverría is not alone in
rethinking the Baroque (even the Benjaminian one) in its movement
away from its aesthetic genealogy and towards its ontological
(re)construction. In Baroque Reason, Christine Buci-Glucksmann
attempts a similar project, by reclaiming the Baroque and the angel of
history for a project that articulates Baudelaire’s imagery of the city
and the idea of the feminine as allegories to rethink modernity beyond
the crisis of socialism and instrumental reason. Echeverría’s
symptomatic convergences with Buci-Glucksmann speak clearly of
the theoretical statute of the Baroque as an alternate cultural
configuration to traditional accounts of modernity. Insofar as his four
historical ethe rest on an ontological extension of aesthetic categories,
Echeverría shares with Buci-Glucksmann the impulse to seek in the
Baroque an alternative to the traditional spaces of representational
aesthetics. Buci-Glucksmann engages Benjamin precisely in a critique
of the “dual classical and Romantic tradition,” by recognizing in his
theory of the Baroque “a real aesthetic and gnoseological reversal” of
representational totality implied by Kantian approaches to the
aesthetic.44 Echeverría takes this engagement a step further by posing
the Baroque not merely as a critique of language, but also as a critique
of ideology at large. If, for a moment, we follow Slavoj Zizek in
understanding ideology as the structuring principle (or “point de
caption,” to use the Lacanian term) of the experience of reality, 45
Echeverría’s ethe may be described as an ontology of the different
forms of experiencing reality within capitalist modernity. While
Zizek’s Lacanian undertones are absent in Echeverría, it is telling that
the former’s theory of ideology addresses the same concern as the
 21
theory of historical ethe: a critique of the idea of “false
consciousness” and, in consequence, an understanding of ideology as
the life-structuring principle in really-existing modernity. Specifically,
in the wake of the intellectual crisis that followed the fall of the Berlin
Wall, Echeverría’s theory of the Baroque moves the concept beyond
the historical as a regime of representation (in its aesthetic
incarnation) or as machine of subjectivation (in its identitarian form).
Instead, following the Deleuzian terminology invoked by Moraña’s
argument and by my previous reference to The Fold, Echeverría’s
Baroque functions as an “apparatus of capture” 46 that accounts for the
constitution of the social formation. In other words, insofar as the
Baroque historically functioned as Imperial reason, it became a device
that territorialized the complex field of social forces into a coherent
State system. Nonetheless, the idea at the core of Echeverría’s
thought, as expressed by this vocabulary, is that the Baroque does not
suppress the consistent development of lines of flight, due to the
deterritorializing potential of its constitutive principles. Or, to put it in
Echeverría’s own words:

[The Baroque is] a cognitive behavior that conceives

knowledge as placing “the other” [lo otro], in a worldly
manner [mundanamente], in words and works, rather than
doing so metaphysically in concepts. It is like a task
consisting, first, in untying the natural articulation
constituted by the sign, between expression and content, (in
breaking the contingent yet foundational conjunction present
in the sign’s arbitrariness). Immediately later, it manages to
multiply meaning by taking the signifier’s currency beyond
(metáfero) [transfer]—by re-tying or re-stitching that
articulation in the instantaneous mise-en-scène of the spoken
and understood sentence, in a form both modeled and
enjoyed—, thus fleetingly lending a name to the nameless, to
create for just a brief moment a place for the excluded or
nonexistent. (Echeverría 1998b, 224)47
To conclude this paper, I would like to address a critique of
Echeverría’s model in order to account for his understanding of the
connection between philosophy and politics, an understanding
informed by Benjamin. In Barroco y neobarroco en América Latina,
Samuel Arrarián proposes what he calls “a socialist alternative to the
Baroque ethos”48. According to Arriarán, while Echeverría’s theory
offers a sufficient account of capitalist modernity, it lacks a proper
theorization of a revolutionary alternative. Furthermore, Arriarán
argues, Echeverría fails to give a comprehensive account of “socialist
22
modernity,” as he does not fully address the communist experience of
the XXth century (Arrarián 2007, 94). Echeverría articulates a four-
point response to this critique, included in Arrarián’s volume, which
clearly lays out the political framework of his project. First,
Echeverría clarifies, as I have done in other parts of this essay, that the
Baroque ethos refers to one of four modes of existence within really-
existing modernity. The privilege of the Baroque over the romantic,
realist and classical modes of existence lies, according to Echeverría,
in the fact that it better addresses the contradiction between value and
use value and, in a way, “it refers to a version of the modern historical
ethos that, combined with the other three, subordinates the others or is
subordinate to them, and may be found in any concrete situation of
capitalist modernity” (Arrarián 2007, 96). As a consequence of this
statement, the second point is that the Baroque ethos does not refer to
“any historically identified social identity” (Arrarián 2007, 96).
However, it is a privileged mode for the configuration of life in Latin
America because of “the use of the Baroque strategy by the urbanized
remnants of indigenous populations” in order to resist the “barbarism”
that seemed to follow the Conquest. This strategy, according to
Echeverría, still plays a central part in Latin American politics and
history and, thus, a description of the relationship of the Americas
with modernity requires a theorization of the Baroque. Echeverría’s
response contests Arriarán’s claim that he focuses too much on the
past; unlike Arriarán, Echeverría never understands the Baroque (or
the Neobaroque that Arriarán invokes but Echeverría does not
address) as a historical period. The third point is that the ethe are
forms of living, “albeit reluctantly,” in capitalist modernity. Thus, the
conceptualization of a properly “revolutionary” position may not be
inscribed in any one of these strategies, as it appeals to an altogether
different configuration of life. This idea is complemented by point
four, in which Echeverría argues that really-existing socialism is, in
fact, part of the romantic and classical ethe, since they were “blind” to
the “social demand for the emancipation of life based on the ‘natural
form’ of the world of life and its use values” (Arrarián 2007, 97).
Thus, a truly emancipatory philosophy, like the socialism invoked by
Arriarán, would perforce emerge from the Baroque. The Hegelian
“negation” that socialism implies is, according to Echeverría, a
Baroque negation, not only because it dialectically emerges from
really-existing modernity (as class struggle emerges from an inherent
contradiction in capitalism), but also because the Baroque’s
appreciation of use value and the sphere of life would ultimately allow
socialism to overcome the “blindness” that led to its historical failure
(97).
 23
This extensive argument clearly points to the previously discussed
appropriation of Benjamin as a philosopher of life and use-value in
Echeverría’s work, further illustrating the connection between
Benjaminian thought and Latin American modernity. Other critics of
Echeverría have argued that his regard for the sphere of life leads him
to renounce the Marxist material critique of capital in exchange for a
sort of Weberian conceptualization of culture over economy (Gandler
2007, 281). As we can see in Echeverría’s response to Arriarán, this
assessment is not accurate, since the Baroque is fully grounded in a
critique of value in capitalist modernity. Moreover, the incapacity of
Echeverría’s critics to fully account for his productive connection
between the Baroque and use value points towards the radical
originality of his work in the context of Latin American leftist
thought. By displacing a traditional critique of colonialism, capital
and dependence to an ontological terrain where the economic and the
cultural are linked, Echeverría lays the groundwork for a politics to
come that could embrace Latin America’s legacy of conflict as a
productive potentiality that ultimately may lead to the transformation
of life and not just of economic relations. In other words, Echeverría
assumes his ontological stance as an attempt to overcome the
historical failure of strictly economic traditions of socialism by
inscribing in theory a notion of use value as life, thus expanding the
materialist critique of value beyond its traditional groundings. It
should be noted that in making this turn, Echeverría adopts a
Benjaminian stance regarding the relationship between philosophy
and politics. Zygmunt Bauman’s description of Benjamin’s view of
this issue also aptly describes Echeverría’s own work:

The strategy of Benjamin, the intellectual, is not a

strategy of redemption. It is, instead, a strategy of keeping
the ground ready for redemption, if the redemption comes;
[…] Contrary to many opinions, this strategy does not detract
from the importance of intellectual work; nor deprives it of
urgency. If anything, the contrary is the case. In a history
without a telos and a pointer, without a deterministic chain
pulled ahead and thus kept straight by its still invisible, yet
fully defined end, without a pragmatically correct
programme for what is to be done to assist that end in its
effort—in such a history, every moment, every “now”
becomes pregnant with significance, a non-contrived, and not
borrowed significance, a significance all of its own.49
In his fidelity to this stance, Echeverría’s Baroque represents a
strategy of life capable of folding and unfolding the significance of
24
“every ‘now’.” The Baroque, as well as the Benjaminian stance, are
parts of a new process of thinking in Latin America that displaces
many of its old presuppositions. The ontological task put forward by
Echeverría is an attempt to overcome an impasse, to move beyond
theories of coloniality to a world without coloniality, from a history of
conflict and alienation to the redemption of life. While Echeverría
never articulates a concrete vision of the nature and process of this
redemption, given his commitment to analyze really-existing
modernity rather than utopia, he offers the Baroque as the only ground
open to its potential coming into being. In a world and a continent
emerging from post-communist nostalgias, the ontological road may
be the remaining path for politics.

Notes
1
I want to thank David Kelman and Carl Good for the invitation to
think about Benjamin in Latin America, and to Sarah Pollack and Sara
Potter for their work in making my English prose as readable as
possible.
2
Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans.
John Osborne (London: Verso, 2003), 36.
3
See Couze Venn, Occidentalism: Modernity and Subjectivity
(London: Sage, 2000).
4
Alfonso Reyes, Obras completas XI. Última Tule. Tentativas y
orientaciones. No hay tal lugar (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura
Económica, 1997), 91.
5
Most accounts of the Latin American reception of Benjamin
agree on this point. While some isolated Latin American academics
started translating and introducing Benjamin in the sixties, his work
did not have substantial impact in Latin American thought before the
mid-1980s. Many accounts of Benjamin’s reception in Latin America
may be found in Sobre Walter Benjamin. Vanguardias, historia,
estética y literatura (Buenos Aires: Alianza Editorial/ Goethe Institut,
1993). Accounts in this book regarding Argentina, Chile and Brazil
coincide in dating Benjamin’s reception in the late 1980s.
6
Casullo, Nicolás, “A modo de prólogo: Actualidad de Walter
Benjamin en América Latina” in Sobre Walter Benjamin 13 (my
translation; emphasis mine).
7
Nelly Richard, The Insubordination of Signs. Political Change,
Cultural Transformation and Poetics of the Crisis, trans. Alice A.
Nelson and Silvia R. Tanderciaz (Durham: Duke University Press,
2004), 4.
 25
8
Ana Del Sarto, “Cultural Critique in Latin America or Latin-
American Cultural Studies?” Journal of Latin American Cultural
Studies 9.3 (November 2000): 235-236.
9
Pablo Oyarzún Robles, ed., La dialéctica en suspenso:
Fragmentos sobre Historia (Santiago de Chile: LOM/ Arcis, 1996),
10 (my translation).
10
Mabel Moraña, Crítica impura: Estudios de literatura y cultura
latinoamericanos (Madrid: Vervuert, 2004), 10 (my translation;
subsequent references cited parenthetically).
11
Martín Kohan, Zona urbana: Ensayo de lectura sobre Walter
Benjamin (Buenos Aires: Norma, 2004), 22. (My translation.
Emphasis in the original. Subsequent references cited parenthetically.)
12
Renato Ortiz, Modernidad y espacio: Benjamin en París, trans.
María Eugenia Contursi and Fabiola Ferro (Buenos Aires: Norma,
2000), 96 (my translation).
13
Jesús Martín Barbero and Hermann Herlinghaus,
Contemporaneidad latinoamericana y análisis cultural:
Conversaciones al encuentro de Walter Benjamin (Madrid: Vervuert,
2000), 13 (my translation; emphasis in the original).
14
Jesús Martín-Barbero, De los medios a las mediaciones:
Comunicación, cultura y hegemonía (Bogotá: Andrés Bello, 2003), 69
(my translation).
15
Christopher Domínguez Michael, La sabiduría sin promesa:
Vida y letras del siglo XX (Mexico City: Joaquín Mortiz, 2001), 12
(my translation).
16
This is the case in Roger Bartra’s reading of Benjamin in El
duelo de los ángeles, where he constructs a biography of Benjamin
from the trope of tedium, without acknowledging any of the political
implications of his work. Bartra is a very symptomatic case of the way
in which Benjamin is perceived in this sector of the Mexican
intelligentsia, because, regardless of his open and consistent political
commitment to the left and his many books on politics, he never
considers Benjamin as a source of political thinking. See Roger
Bartra, El duelo de los ángeles: Locura sublime, tedio y melancolía
en el pensamiento moderno (Valencia: Pre-Textos, 2004).
17
Bolívar Echeverría, ed., La mirada del ángel: En torno a las
tesis sobre la historia de Walter Benjamin (Mexico City: Era/ UNAM,
2005) (subsequent references cited parenthetically)
18
Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, volume 4, 1938-1940
(Cambridge: Belknap/ Harvard University Press, 2006), 392.
19
See Michel Foucault, “Society Must be Defended,” Lectures at
the Collège de France 1975-1976, Trans. David Macey (New York:
Picador, 2003). It is important to note here that this book is generally
26
called “Genealogy of Racism” in early Spanish editions, and, read
from this perspective, it has been claimed as part of the philosophical
corpus that sustains the struggles for indigenous rights. I am using
here the notion “genealogy” rather than archeology, following Eric
Paras’s argument that “genealogy” was used by Foucault to introduce
the political into his work of discursive systems of knowledge. See
Eric Paras, Foucault 2.0.: Beyond Knowledge and Power (New York:
The Other Press, 2007), 46-50.
20
See Reinhart Kosseleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of
Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (Cambridge: The Massachussets
Institute of Technology Press, 1985).
21
Bolívar Echeverría, Vuelta de siglo (Mexico City: Era, 2006),
135 (subsequent references cited parenthetically). Ginzburg proposes
the idea of “clue” –“indizio” in Italian, carrying in its meaning the
idea of trace, suggesting a sort of detective-like research and the idea
of an element that leads to a discovery- in order to vindicate concrete
experience and everyday life as objects of historical inquiry. See Carlo
Ginzburg, Clues, Myths and the Historical Method, trans. John and
Anne C. Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989).
22
Luis González, San José de Gracia: Mexican Village in
Transition, trans. John Upton (Austin: University of Texas Press,
1972).
23
Most of the biographical facts that I present here are discussed in
Stefan Gandler’s superb study. For a detailed review of Echeverría’s
life and work, see Stefan Gandler, Marxismo crítico en México:
Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez y Bolívar Echeverría (Mexico City: Fondo
de Cultura Económica, 2007), 82-132 (subsquent references cited
parenthetically).
24
Bolívar Echeverría, El discurso crítico de Marx (Mexico City:
Era, 1986), 15-16 (my translation; subsequent references cited
parenthetically).
25
Timothy Bewes. Reification or the Anxiety of Late Capitalism.
(London: Verso, 2002), 112-113.
26
Eric Santner, On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald
(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006), xv.
27
Bolívar Echeverría, Valor de uso y utopía (Mexico City: Siglo
XXI, 1998a) (subsequent references cited parenthetically).
28
Alain Badiou, The Century, trans. Alberto Toscano (Cambridge:
Polity, 2007).
29
Hubert François Gravelot and Charles Nicholas Cochin,
Iconologie par figures; ou, Traité complet des allégories, emblèmes
etc. A l'usage des artistes, en 350 figures (Geneva, Minkoff, 1972). A
Spanish edition was published by the Universidad Iberoamericana in
 27
1994. This edition is the likely source of Echeverría’s work with the
image.
30
In fact, Echeverría is not alone in these iconological
considerations. In an essay on Benjamin collected in Potentialities,
Giorgio Agamben devotes a considerable amount of time to discuss
the link between the Angel of History and the demonic figure of
Agesilaus Santander, explored by Benjamin in a previous text. By
virtue of this comparison, Agamben also questions the Klee referent,
an operation that, as we have seen, introduces important hermeneutic
elements in diverse philosophical appropriations of Benjamin. See
Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, ed.
and trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1999), 138-159.
31
An in-depth discussion of the notion of “monad” exceeds the
scope of this work. For a more detailed analysis of the monad based
on Benjamin’s “Theses,” see Ato Quayson, Calibrations: Reading for
the Social (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 128-
131. Of course, the connection between the monad and the Baroque is
extensively discussed in Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the
Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1993).
32
See Beatriz Sarlo, Siete ensayos sobre Walter Benjamin (Buenos
Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2000).
33
Slavoj Zizek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of
Christianity (Cambridge: The Massachussets Institute of Technology
Press, 2003), 3 (subsequent references cited parenthetically).
34
J.M Coetzee, Inner Workings: Literary Essays 2000-2005 (New
York: Viking, 2007), 55. Coetzee refers the internal quote to Walter
Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge: Belknap/ Harvard
University Press, 1999), 196. Of course the quote is originally from
Marx’s analysis of the fetishism of the commodity. See Karl Marx,
Karl Marx. A Reader, Ed. Jon Elster, (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press. 1986), 63.
35
Bolívar Echeverría, La modernidad de lo barroco (Mexico City:
Era, 1998b), 116 (my translation; subsequent references cited
parenthetically).
36
Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, volume 1, 1913-1926, eds.
Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Belknap/
Harvard University Press, 1996), 455 (emphasis and brackets in the
original; subsequent references in parenthetical citation).
37
John Kraniauskas, “Beware Mexican Ruins: ‘One-Way Street’
and the Colonial Unconscious,” in Walter Benjamin: Critical
28
Evaluations in Cultural Theory, vol. III, ed. Peter Osborne (London:
Routledge, 2005), 362-363.
38
Marcel Brion, Bartholomé de las Casas: Père des Indiens (Paris:
Plon, 1927), 58.
39
It is indeed meaningful that in his account of Thesis VII, Löwy
invokes the emancipatory rewritings of the Conquest in the Latin
American tradition as his conclusive example of rewriting history
against the grain. See Michael Löwy, Fire Alarm: Reading Walter
Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History” (London: Verso, 2005), 55-
57.
40
José Lezama Lima, La expresión americana (Mexico City:
Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1993). Alejo Carpentier, The Kingdom
of this World, trans. Harriet de Onís (New York: Farrar, Strauss &
Giroux, 2006). A detailed discussion of this concept of the Baroque
may be found in Irlemar Chiampi, Barroco y modernidad (Mexico
City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2000) and Carlos Rincón, Mapas
y pliegues: Ensayos de cartografía cultural y de lectura del
neobarroco (Bogotá: Colcultura, 1996).
41
The notion of “excentric” or “ex-centric” modernity has a
history in Latin American studies, particularly in the work of Octavio
Paz. Paz developed this notion in his works on poetry, mostly
circumscribed to poetic issues. The word “excentric” has a double
meaning in Spanish, conveying both eccentricity and periphery. It
must also be noted that Paz’s extensive treatise on Sor Juana explores
the connection between Baroque and modernity and some of
Echeverría’s work rests on it. See Octavio Paz, Obras completas 5,
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz o las trampas de la fe (Mexico City: Fondo
de Cultura Económica, 1994).
42
Mabel Moraña, “Baroque/ Neobaroque/ Ultrabaroque.
Disruptive Readings of Modernity” in Hispanic Baroques: Reading
Cultures in Context, eds. Nicholas Spadaccini and Luis Martín-
Estudillo (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2005), 243
(subsequent references in parenthetical citation).
43
Gruzinski’s work would deserve an article in itself, therefore
exceeding the scope of this essay. For his work on the Baroque, see
particularly Serge Gruzinski, Images at War: Mexico from Columbus
to Blade Runner (1492-2019), trans. Heather Mc Lean (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2001). A discussion of Gruzinski in the
context of Latin American Baroque theory may be found in Moraña
2005.
44
Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Baroque Reason: The Aesthetics of
Modernity, trans. Patrick Camiller (London: Sage, 1994), 70
(subsequent references cited parenthetically). A detailed reading of
 29
Buci-Glucksmann’s book exceeds the purposes of the present work,
but a good description of her theories may be found in Bryan S.
Turner’s excellent introduction to the volume.
45
See Slavoj Zizek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of
Political Ontology (London: Verso, 1999), 262.
46
The term comes from chapter 13 of A Thousand Plateaus. See
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism
and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1987), 424-501. Deleuze and Guattari explain that
an apparatus of capture is defined by the creation of a space of
comparison and a center of appropriation. A more detailed description
of this concept as I am using it may be found in Paul Patton, Deleuze
and the Political (London: Routledge, 2000), 123. In the case at hand,
modernity would constitute the space of comparison, and capital the
center of appropriation. Thus, the Baroque, as a historical ethos,
would be a particular mode of defining both modernity and capital,
competing with the other ethe. This notion of Baroque as space and
center is close to José Antonio Maravall’s analysis, who presents it
as a historical mode that represents the crises and tensions of XVIth
and XVIIth century Spain, while accounting for the emergence of
Imperial reason. See José Antonio Maravall, La cultura del barroco:
Análisis de una estructura histórica (Barcelona: Ariel, 2002).
47
It is pretty clear that this is one of Echeverría’s most obscure and
challenging passages. My translation rephrases the grammar of the
original (which, using flexibilities from the Spanish language, is
written in a single sentence) in order to more effectively convey the
meaning of the phrase in English. It must be noted though that this
sentence uses nongrammatical structures and a convoluted clause
structure to make a point about Baroque language. I kept metáfero,
instead of translating it directly as “transfer” to keep Echeverría’s
original term, a very rare one indeed. It is my hope that the translation
proposed here renders this somewhat, and that the impossibility of
translating this passage is clear in the very insufficiency of my own
translation.
48
Samuel Arrarián, Barroco y neobarroco en América Latina:
Estudios sobre la otra modernidad (Mexico City: Ítaca, 2007), 81
(subsequent references in parenthetical citation).
49
Bauman, Zygmunt, “Walter Benjamin, the Intellectual,” New
Formations 20 (Summer 1993): 56.