For a Glossary of Ricardo Piglia

The present essay articulates the notions of utopia (since Nietzsche) and experience (since Benjamin) in order to make an analysis of the narrative strategies by the Argentinean writer Ricardo Piglia. By taking critique itself as a form of autobiographic fiction, the author of Artificial Respiration and Assumed Name offers a new look on the dialectics between critique and fiction, in which the reading of texts by others would be no more than the critic's own experience trying to allegorize him/herself in these texts. And such an experiencing of the present is invariably worked by Piglia from the point of view of utopia, that is, of politics.