"¿Por qué no preguntar quién carajos habla?": Teoría y praxis del estar-en-común en Cristina Rivera Garza

At the core of the theoretical categories Cristina Rivera Garza has developed throughout her career—from authorial de-death, necrowritings, and disappropriated writings (2011; 2013) to the more recent notions of noriginals and geological writings (2022)—lies a recurring question of Pizarnikian memory: “Who the hell is speaking?” (La muerte me da, 2008). In Rivera Garza’s literary practice, this question takes shape through the contradictory nature of the narrative or poetic voice; in her theoretical work, it confronts the fraught relationship between literature and society, and the being-in-common of writing within contexts marked by extreme violence. This question underpins her entire theoretical trajectory, from Dolerse (2011) to Escribir con el presente (2023), including Los muertos indóciles (2013) and Escrituras geológicas (2022). This essay examines CRG’s contribution not only to the philosophical and sociological category of “community”—in dialogue with Jean-Luc Nancy, Maurice Blanchot, Judith Butler, Giorgio Agamben, and Zygmunt Bauman—but also to her distinctive mode of praxis: “communality.” Through this concept, Rivera Garza returns to an inherently Latin American framework, engaging directly with Mixe Indigenous thought as theorized by Floriberto Díaz and with Gloria Anzaldúa, and indirectly with Dardo Scavino’s formulation of the “political we” as a “characterized I.” I argue that Rivera Garza reclaims a form of community that can be fully articulated only through praxis. For her, the “we” becomes “the most intimate and also the most political way of accessing my subjectivity” (Dolerse, 2011), allowing writing to function as healing (Los muertos indóciles, 2013), as gesture—“a way of extending an embrace” (Escrituras geológicas, p. 15)—and as a practice of working not only in the present but with the present (Escribir con el presente, 2023).