The Ox. Or Mansilla's Latent Archive

Abstract

The profusion and dispersion of Lucio V. Mansilla’s publications in the press fueled the idea (consolidated among historians and critics in the early 20th century and in some way reinforced by the periodic loss of materials by the author) that the edition of his complete works was impossible, even unnecessary. The archival impulse, however, runs through Mansilla’s work: materially, in the editing practice and in the practice of writing as annotation; imaginatively, in the intuition of writing as an archiving technology; ideally, in the conception of its causeries as “archaeological monument”. Here I am proposing a reading of these three dimensions of the archive in Mansilla’s writing. The framework is given by Mansilla’s own late and ironic reflection on the possibilities of editing his complete works and by our questioning about his archive as latent force.