Marcelino Viera

My research asks what Latin American literature, theater, film, and art know about politics that political theory does not. Working with psychoanalysis, continental philosophy, and political thought, I study the cultural production of the Río de la Plata, from the struggles over nation-building in the nineteenth century to the present, as a place where desire and enjoyment unsettle the ways modern societies imagine the individual, the citizen, and the law.

My books include Modernidad sublimada: Escritura y política en el Río de la Plata (2019), on the dramatist Florencio Sánchez and the novelist Roberto Arlt, and El retorno del individuo en el Río de la Plata: El discurso del Único (2023), which rethinks individualism through the founding figure of Manuel Belgrano. I also edited Excesos: entre literatura y psicoanálisis (2024), a dialogue between psychoanalysts and literary critics on writing, reading, and the political force of language.

I am currently writing a book on the “feminine specter” in contemporary Latin American fiction, film, and art.