“Once more the money demonstrated its changeable and unpredictable nature”: Money Objects, Texts, and Material Encounters in Sergio Chejfec’s El aire (1992) and Los incompletos (2004)

This article makes the case for the role of literary texts in grappling with experiences of Argentina’s prolonged monetary instability. Written in social contexts marked by inflationary crises, the novels El aire (1992) and Los incompletos (2004) by Argentine writer Sergio Chejfec experiment with hypothetical worlds in which money objects, far from being passive tools, display a resistant material presence which must be negotiated by humans in highly contingent encounters. In such encounters, money questions both its function as making objective equivalences possible humans, placing more widely into doubt the potential for objective measurements, and its promise of stable futures. As a result, the novels’ characters lose any notion of independence in the face of other objects and experience sensations of dislocation and despair. Moreover, the
insistence on juxtaposing the radical materiality of money objects with that of material texts troubles the exceptionality of the human in acts of reading. Drawing on the new materialist approaches of Bruno Latour and Karen Barad, this article considers the implications of Chejfec’s money objects in problematising assumptions concerning money’s role as a societal instrument. Instead, money objects display an agency of their own in economical apparatuses which hinder, rather than aid, exchange circuits.