Roberto Bolaño’s Specific Exiles

In this chapter, I argue that Roberto Bolaño’s theory of exile and nomad authorship develops the possibility for grounding a specific ethics in literary reading and writing. Rather than fall into the trap of a specified or singular logic of individuation, Bolaño suggests that artistic lines of flight from repressive identities—while limited by historical circumstance—are nonetheless possible through the imagining of the nomad as a transgressive subject and the historical condition of the exile as operators for the determination of community and individual subjectivity. Bolaño thus provides a way to negotiate the production of subjectivity with the dynamics of Latin American literature and artistic practice across the globe.