The essays included in The Insubordination of Signs were originally published between 1990 and 1994 as lectures or journal articles. Richard seeks to account for the ruptures, discontinuities, and fragmentation wrought on cultural expression during the dictatorship, what she calls semiotically "the catastrophe of meaning" (5). She traces the aesthetic movements, choices, and crises of obliterated memory and disillusions of identity. She celebrates, as well as interrogates, the fusion of art and politics and of forms and ideologies in Chile's literary and artistic production. The famous CADA movement (the Art Actions Collective) takes center stage in her discussion. Richard elaborates on the group's philosophy and enumerates its best-known actions: art that takes to the streets (pamphleteering about hunger), that spreads across the skies (poet Raul Zurita's sky writing), that invades public space and appropriates strategies from transportation, mass media, and the military. CADA's activity fuels Richard's analysis that, as the translators mention in their introduction, is "[s]ituated at the intersections of literary criticism, art history, aesthetics, philosophy, and feminist theory" (xv). Her analysis of the left in Latin America is particularly pointed, although likely to be obtuse to readers grasping this kind of interpretation about Chile for the first time (chapters 3 and 4). The difficult yet necessary coordination, according to Richard, among the social sciences, the humanities, and the arts comes from the pressures of years under repression, the devastation on memory, and the desperate effort to forge new collective aesthetic and intellectual discourses. The book closes with the transcription of a fascinating conversation among Richard, German Bravo (sociologist), Martin Hopenhayn (philosopher), and Adriana Valdes (literature and art critic). The four elaborate on many of the topics of Richard's work in the book, such as the role of cultural criticism,...