1 45 - Subjectivities Valeria Añón Translated by Kristen Ware The question of the subject and the formation of subjectivities is a long-standing concern; a theoretical, philosophical, and epistemological problem, it unites subjectivity, identity and otherness in attempts at totalizing definitions. Articulated in the humanist tradition, in Enlightenment reasoning, and in the experience of modernity (as an “incomplete project” or as a universal achievement, always from an occidental and ethnocentric perspective), the subject—and its reflexive projection, subjectivity—has been defined as a “modern subject,” accurate and unambiguous, and with (apparently) distinguishable limits that can be verified within the paradigm that gives it shape and theoretical legitimacy. The poststructuralist perspective and debates on postmodernity and postcolonialism disrupted these assumptions by posing a non-affirmative view of subjectivities—indeed, by calling into question the very idea of “subject” and its capacity for signification. In that sense, reflection on displaced and heterogeneous subjectivities that elude reductionist definition is connected both to the Latin American essay genre of the first half of the twentieth century and to the literary criticism and cultural sociology that began early on to foreground the peculiar experience of the continent. As Gayatri Spivak shows, however, “some of the most radical criticism coming out of the West in the eighties was the result of an interested desire to conserve the subject of the West, or the West as Subject. The theory of pluralized ‘subject-effects’ often provided a cover for this subject of knowledge. Although the history of Europe as Subject was narrativized by the law, political economy, and ideology of the West, this concealed Subject pretended it had ‘no geo-political determinations.’ The much-publicized critique of the sovereign subject thus actually inaugurated a Subject” (“History” 248). This problem—which exceeds the debates and disciplinary limits of the field—has also been one of the central concerns of cultural studies since their earliest manifestations, which began revising classical Marxist theory in light of its lack of theoretical and