Towards a prologue ́s theory: about Miguel de Unamuno

Abstract

In this paper we start from the request that the danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard formulated in his book Prólogos (1844) to develop a theory of the prologue, some- thing that more than a century later carried on Gerard Genette in his study on the so-called «paratextos» and that titled precisely Umbrales, making reference to the surroundings of the text. After making a quick tour through several texts, including Cinco prefacios a cinco libros no escritos (1872) by Friedrich Nietzsche, «Fuera–de–libro (Prefaci- os)» (1972) by Jacques Derrida and Prólogos con un prólogo de prólogos (1975) by Jorge Luis Borges, we stop especially in the paradigmatic case of Miguel de Unamuno and his affiliation with Macedonio Fernández. The conclusions aim to emphasize the novelty that this «gender» acquires in the formulations of these writers: the self-referential gesture of theorizing from the prologue on the prologue in an simultaneous exercise of deconstruction and resignification. The privileged place that both assign to the theoretical problem of the marginal versus the central, the open versus the closed, the conclusive versus the unfinished responds to a common aesthetic conception that bets on the fragment, the outline or the provisional project decon- structing the realistic mimesis of the XIX century.