Preguntan si....

Daniel Link might object to the label, but he is indeed a public intellectual of the most traditional sorts. His public interventions are scattered across a variety of mediums, from novels to literary criticism, blogs and weekly newspaper columns, and though diffuse they form a net that Link casts about to capture the elusive nature of the “contemporary”.
By turns authoritative and provocative, highly erudite and risqué, Link manages to bridge the divide between institutional respect as chair of 20th Century Literature at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) and champion for the young, the marginal, and iconoclastic. Amid his frenetic schedule of conferences, teaching, and writing, Link was kind enough to speak with Argentina Independent about contemporary Argentine literature, the creative uses of obsolete technology, and how “good literature” is passé.

Entrevista de Nicolas Allen para The Argentina Independent

You’re currently director of the program Estudios Literarios Latinoamericanos in the UNTREF (Universidad Nacional Tres de Febrero). How are you thinking these days about “Latin American literature”, particularly contemporary Latin American literature. Is there something about the present moment that led you to establish the program?

In the last few years I’ve been thinking more and more obsessively about the “Latin America issue” and in my last book of essays, Fantasmas, I outlined the coordinates for that obsession (which included, like the stories of Borges or the Name of the Rose, a “missing book”). The last section of ‘Fantasmas’ (‘Ghosts’) is a probing interrogation of that issue that coincides, I feel, with the turn-of-the-century, and, therefore, with a paradigm change from the Cuban dilemma to the Bolivarian trilemma [ed. The interviewee is here referring to a shift away from dualisms typical of the 20th century, i.e. liberation vs dependence; civilisation vs barbarism, etc., to a more contemporary regional and multi-polar vision of the world].
It seems to me that the experience of Chavismo in Venezuela (independent of the opinion one might form about that government) has obligated us to think about Latin America along new lines, or along lines that were already there, but had not been sufficiently examined, like MERCOSUR, whose fundamental milestone was the expansionary model of Alfonsin’s Republic.
Then, there are always the relations of friendship and fascination (in my case, for Brazil, Mexico, and the Andean cultures). Not so much a question of identification – I have nothing in common with those traditions – as one of desire. Why am I drawn to that which I am not?

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