De-forming the World. On Grammar and the Body in Denise Ferreira da Silva

Abstract

For Denise Ferreira da Silva, modern grammar implies the production of a system of definitions, stratifications, and normalizations on the condition of obliterating its modes of consolidation. Thus, grammar implies the shaping of the living, thus the decomposition of the ordering demands an exposition around grammar, the body, and the world. This paper proposes that Ferreira da Silva brings into play an anagrammatic that threatens onto-epistemological grammar. Such an anagrammatic displacement demands both the interruption of logical-ontological operators and the deconfiguration of the “ordered world” and its consequent colonial, racial, and national juridical-economic framework. In Ferreira's writing, interruption, tempo, hiatuses, hyphens, and parentheses do not operate simply as a secondary resource but as ellipsis of the logical-copulative function, as supplementary series that decline and depose the disciplinary closure by dismantling the economy of value equivalence. In this context, the paper explores the case of Puerto Rico—particularly through Rocío Zambrana’s analysis—as the locus where colonial debt inscribes itself in racialized and feminized bodies, focusing on how the refusal to pay an unpayable debt unfolds a critique of value, gendered subjectivation, and the racialized organization of the world.