After the Nation: Crisis and the Reinvention of the Common

Starting from the elaboration of an ambiguous and expansive language, the novel El aire (1992), by the Argentinian writer Sergio Chejfec, explores some of the devastating effects of neoliberal modernization on the urban territory, subjectivity and social life. Moving at the pace of a crisis that is as indefinite as it is irreversible, the narrative also interrogates the power of collective practices and languages that allow for the imagination of alternatives to the imperatives of capital. Temporality, urban space, daily habits and bodies disintegrate and reconfigure themselves on the plane of a writing that makes indeterminacy its narrative engine and calls for a fruitful dialogue between the perspective of literary studies and that of the social sciences.