In the Shadow of Mao by Bruno Bosteels

I mean, writing is always a particular way of reading, and in order to talk of influences (that is, of approval, of inheritance, but also of theft, of plagiarism, or in the final instance, of property), I think we should rely on a theory of reading. - Ricardo Piglia, "La autodestrucción de una escritura"

What I propose in this chapter could also be seen as a treatise on the use of epigrams or epigraphs, be they falsely or correctly attributed. At times these are relatively autonomous phrases interpolated into the body of the text, while at others they establish authentic maxims, or rules of thought, at the beginning of a book or chapter. In each case, they serve to condense the ideology of literature as well as its critique on the part of Piglia. When asked in a recent interview about the possible authoritarian effects of such maxims, he himself explained: "Why do writers use this epigrammatic style? At one point I tried to extract from Borges's texts what I called separable ideological definitions such as, for example, 'Reality likes symmetries. ' I made a list of sentences like this, and there was a Borgesian ideological dictionary. "6 Here we have another example of the creative use of plagiarism, since this idea in fact comes from the French philosopher Alain Badiou, also a Maoist at the time, who gives us a model for this kind of reading-including the expression "separable ideological statement"-in his article "The Autonomy of the Aesthetic Process," an article that Piglia included in an anthology of theoretical texts he edited, Literatura y sociedad, along with his own essay on the aesthetic ideas of Mao Zedong.7