César Vallejo

“This book reveals that the political reading of Vallejo's poetry demands that we radically rethink politics itself. The singular ethical force of this poetry resides there. We have to think reality from the excess, that is, from what does not fit in ideological schematisms, nor in the concepts themselves. With a great pedagogical spirit, through lucid theoretical expositions and precise commentaries on the texts, this book shows us that Vallejo wrote a poetry that is absolutely alive for our times: a poetry that demands that we live in a different way.” —William Rowe, Birkbeck College, University of London, UK “From this careful study, César Vallejo emerges as a poet-witness of the event, ready to assume the constitutive flaw of the human being but capable of affirming the radical possibility of a communist politics of equality. By following the philosophy of Alain Badiou, as well as the clues of other thinkers (from Marx to Mariátegui, from Butler to Žižek), Víctor Vich has succeeded in producing an original, new, and other Vallejo.” —Bruno Bosteels, Columbia University, USA This book argues that the poetry of César Vallejo announces the event, as a moment of irruption of a truth that destabilises the usual state of reality. It studies the emergence of a subject who affirms a truth that exceeds the law, interrupts hegemonic repetition, asserts universal solidarity, and defends "lost causes" despite political failure. The author reconfigures the traditional reading of Vallejo only as a poet of pain and human suffering, and offers new ways of understanding the relationship between poetry and politics. Víctor Vich is Professor at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú in Lima. He has been a visiting Professor at several universities in the United States and has published various books about Peruvian poetry. He won the Guggenheim grant in 2010.