Pornographic Economies: Metaphoricity in Alan Pauls's Historia del dinero

Abstract: This article analyzes the metaphorical play between money, gender, pornography, and literary representation in Alan Pauls's 2013 novel Historia del dinero . This novel accurately depicts the economic instability of Argentina since the 1970s when the military dictatorship imposed neoliberalism and upended state-guided economies. The ways in which neoliberal economic relations are structured by gender relations and sexual difference are also explored. In this regard, this analysis will argue that the use of pornographic tropes in Historia del dinero , while being deployed to look critically at the place of money in Argentinian society, also sheds light on the limits of metaphoric language. By dialoguing with Verónica Gago, Paul Preciado, and Jacques Derrida, this piece problematizes the interplay between economic and gendered languages that allow readers to understand these social phenomena. By using Derrida's notion of metaphoricity as the ground zero of language, it is shown that metaphors do not represent the external world accurately but rather transfer one concept across linguistic realms to create meaning. In the case of Historia del dinero , pornographic excess points to a moment in which metaphoric relations collapse, thus showing that metaphors are, despite their structural failure, the only way through which language signifies.