On the Possibility of a Latin American Arch-Philology

The philology of zero, says Werner Hamacher, is the origo of philosophy, and what this paper aims to do is to study the possibility of a sort of Latin American arch-philology, in which literary history would be the struggle of all discursive experiences, what Carl Einstein called invented spaces. Reading Macunaima, by Mario de Andrade, a canonical vanguard text, or the forgotten early detective novels of Medeiros de Albuquerque, which did not make it into the canon, the question rises about what the canon is, keeping in mind that it is impossible to return to things past, but only to things in the past which have a place in the future. In other words, through anamnesic and heterological means, arch-philology looks in the future for that which is missing in the past in order to reopen the file.