This article intends to disclose the post-modern categories that are present in Ricardo Piglia’s work The Absent City (1992) For this purpose, the argument and structure of the novel have been compared, so that they might place us in a story that is set up in a contemporary narrative-imaginary space, where time and machine constitute the centre that articulates meaning and existence of their characters, and thus coinciding with the theoretical assumptions underlying the literary and philosophical discourse of the latter years of the XX century.