Dialectical Criticism in the Provinces of the “World Republic of Letters”: The Primacy of the Object in the Work of Roberto Schwarz: Ten Years Later

At the center of Roberto Schwarz’ work is the study of the dialectic of form and how it is that aesthetic ideas and forms in a metropolitan context are always affirmed improperly in the peripheral context of capitalismCapitalism, thereby generating a ciphering of reality according to a law of their own truth of the social world. Immanent protocols of reading have been part of dialectical Marxian aesthetics and of critical theoryCritical theory, in particular, as in the work of Roberto Schwarz. His oeuvre dislodges itself from the perennial problems of external models of analysis versus text-based interpretationsInterpretation, of levels of particularity in literature versus extrapolating general models, and more recently from surface readings and other forms of traveling forms of theory attempting to grasp the world-historical dimension of a form that has always been, as Schwarz demonstrates, a singular and local object suffused with the universal form of the order of capitalist relations.