Bonvicino, Régis - Ossos de borboleta, São Paulo: Editora 34, 1998. Whether it is the Freudian profusion of the Wolf Man or the Mallarméan hymen of Un coup de dés, we are always skirting around the problem of castration. Cf. Derrida, Jacques - La dissémination. Paris, Seuil, 1972, p. 300-1.

In other words, the sovereignty of self, the souci-de-soi, is precisely the insignificance that consist of a process of indefinite heterogeneity. Interestingly, at the end of The Devil to Pay in the Backlands, it is possible to read an echo of Bataille -or of Agamben's translation of such echo in his concept of nuda vita-: «You are a superior [sovereign], circumspect man. We are friends. It was nothing. There is no devil! What I say is, if he did... It is man who exists. The passage». Cf. The Devil to Pay in the Backlands Trans. James L. Taylor and Harriet de Onís, New York: Knopf, 1963, p. 492.

Heloísa Starling singles out the political dimension of this postmodern insignificance that is alternatively understood as exile (the dimension of need as seen in the essay of national self-reflection from Sérgio Buarque de Holanda's Raízes do Brasil to Jorge Luis Borges's El tamaño de mi esperanza) or as modernizing re-territorialization (the dimension of excess orientated toward the capitalization of rootless nomadism). The nonada, from this perspective, would constitute an allegory of a difference that may be integrated within the nation. Cf. «Grande sertão: Brasil veredas de política e ficção» in VALDES, M. et al. (ed) History of Latin American Cultural Formation. Oxford University Press, forthcoming.

I am extremely grateful to Vicky Tuma and Javier Krauel for their support in the final version of this paper.