“Study Without Ends: Aesthetic Education in Neoliberal Latin America”
7-830 EST, in English
What will have been neoliberalism? At a moment when this question has become pressing, Study Without Ends seeks answers in the cultural politics and political cultures of those Latin American societies that served as its laboratory. Drawing from aesthetic theory and heterodox Marxism, Bret Leraul studies neoliberal culture in the Southern Cone through the educational infrastructures that disseminate and reproduce it. From wide-ranging readings of the university, social movements, literature, and criticism, Leraul proposes a theory of cultural production and social transformation grounded in everyday practices of nourishment, care, maintenance, and repair, what he calls “study without ends.”
Study Without Ends uncovers the university’s role in contemporary literature in the Southern Cone to argue that poetics today is less about crafting works and more about instructing a readership. By highlighting literature’s primordially pedagogical function, Leraul reminds us that education too is a poetic process of becoming, despite the neoliberal university’s attempt to reduce it to human capital investment. By analyzing the organization of autonomous social movements, he suggests that a politics of study as reproductive labor has the capacity to institute radical change. Study Without Ends shows how shifts in university cultures during the neoliberal era reflect the current crisis of social reproduction often figured as precarious, informal, or surplus populations, for it is precisely Latin America’s precarious, informal, and surplus peoples who have wagered the future on a profoundly cultural remaking of the world.
Bio:
Bret Leraul is associate professor of comparative humanities at Bucknell University. He is the English-language translator of Chilean philosopher Willy Thayer’s The Non-Modern Crisis of the Modern University (Northwestern 2025).
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