Heterogeneity of Being On Octavio Pazs Poetics of Similitude [Hardcover]

Marco Dorfsman, offers unprecedented readings of Labyrinth of Solitude, The Bow and the Lyre, Sunstone, and other works and presents one of the first sustained theoretical analyses of the Mexican difference. He extends Pazs dialogue with crucial philosophical and political trends of his period, reading him alongside figures such as Heidegger, Lyotard, and Derrida, and contributes to an elaboration of a poetics of temporality and inheritance.By rigorously examining the subtle interplay between culture, literature, and philosophy, Dorfsman puts forth an innovative and provocative interpretation of Octavio Pazs contributions to understanding the Mexican twentieth century. . . . Dorfsman also discloses in Paz the glimmer of a new mode of thinking that can only be called post-literary.Heterogeneity of Being goes beyond the standard interpretations of Octavio Paz as a thinker of national identity and proposes a radical rethinking of the relationship between literature and philosophy. Dorfsman analyzes how Pazs tradition of rupture properly displays a continuity between self and other, identity and difference, time and space.One hundred years after his birth, Nobel laureate Octavio Paz is considered one of the most important thinkers of Mexican identity, one of the most influential Mexican poets, and one of the main representatives of a national cosmopolitanism. Most readings of his work, whether critical or laudatory, operate within these parameters. Through a careful analysis of Latin Americanist discourses on identity and difference, Heterogeneity of Being goes beyond the standard interpretations of Octavio Paz as a thinker of national identity and proposes a radical rethinking of the rift and the bond between literature and philosophy. It puts forth the key concept of dif/herenciaa difference, a wound, an inheritance, a burden and a dispossessionand reads it through the notion of similitude in order to show that Pazs tradition of rupture properly displays alÃÃ