Language, performativity and power in Yo El Supremo by Augusto Roa Bastos

Abstract

The monumental character of Augusto Roa Bastos' Yo El Supremo continues to raise-despite almost four decades of international critique production-new questions, new articulations, and new reading perspectives. As a novel on history, on the writing of history, on writing, on power, on the power of writing, on language itself, it shapes a huge deconstruction work that systematically exposes the duplicity, the paradox, the contradiction. The constant tensions and duplicities that go through it (I/He; identity/otherness; orality/ writing; language/ reality; sign/reference; power/representation) configure the main and endless reflection objects of contemporary thinking, which at the same time, enable a transcultural work concerning some of the constitutive nuclei of the Guaraní culture.