Antonio Di Benedetto: "I am out".

Exile, desertification and the impossible autobiography

Abstract

The fictional work of Antonio Di Benedetto mobilizes a reflection on the concept of exile, an almost constant theme in his literature, capable of having arranged and defined a certain syntax very marked by ellipses, a novel montage of the signifier, a rhetoric whose effects some of his critics call estrangement and “dehumanization”, to which I add desertification of writing to an obsessive search for silence. The article proposes to read the writings of the author's exile with the theoretical support provided by Jacques Derrida's concept of otobiography and to follow the critical contributions of Josefina Ludmer to read Sombras, nada más... as a transition between dense literature, as an aesthetic project and as a work (with its marks of authorship, style, specific reflection on the world and on literature itself - self-reflection and self-referentiality - the narrator represented as the writer of what we read, etc.) and certain aspects and resources of another modality such as the so-called “post-autonomous literatures”.