Improper Selves: Cultures of Precarity

The notion of precarity, central to the analysis of neoliberalism, shows a rhetorical and semantic instability between the exceptional and the normal, the individual and the collective, the social and the ontological. This instability is, I argue, at the core of the different directions in which culture responded to the neoliberal era in Latin America since the 1990s, producing contrasting renderings of precarity. In these productions, the question of subjectivity becomes a kernel of new political imagination as a site of political and aesthetic contestations. By focusing on a literary fiction by Joao Gilberto Noll and a documentary by Santiago León, the article argues that cultural representations of precarity produce a reflection on a new status of subjectivity vis a vis a redefined relation with the common.