This paper traces a continuity between the early modern and the postcolonial picaresque in terms of a shared ambivalent response to conjunctures of cosmological capitalism. In these paradoxical constellations subaltern classes are invested with the responsibility to provide for themselves (capitalism), yet within frameworks effectively marked by social stasis and impermeable hierarchy (cosmology). Picaresque novels offer autobiographies that overcome such static social topologies, generally by resorting to delinquent acts. The picaresque narrator-protagonist takes pride in the exceptional and autonomous nature of these transgressions, but at the same time tries to be exempted from guilt, by pleading his actions as heteronomous and continuous with the vulgar conventions of his social and ethical environments. They are thus projected as eventful and plot-less at the same time. By thus tying the narrow options for survival closely to a lack of dignity, which in the postcolonial picaresque also grounds in the ecological and economic 'slow violence' of distant consumption and accumulation, the picaresque - in contrast to the enabling fiction of the Bildungsroman functions as a distinctly disabling fiction of neoliberal globalisation.
