Infrapolítica en Los muertos y el periodista (2021) de Óscar Martínez

Desde el inicio de Los muertos y el periodista (2021), de Óscar Martínez, se advierte sobre el tema principal del libro, pero también sobre la diferencia radical que tiene este libro en comparación con otros escritos por Martínez. Este es también un libro en el que “hay pandilleros, pero no es sobre pandillas; hay narcos” pero “no va de narcos; hay El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, México, Estados Unidos, pero no va sobre esos países; también hay policías y jueves y presidentes y políticos corruptos, pero no pretende profundizar en ese mal endémico de la región; hay migrantes y no es sobre migración; hay reflexiones de periodismo y frases de periodistas célebres, pero no va sobre eso” (12-13). Eso que hay en, pero no “de lo que va” el libro es la diferencia radical a la que apunta Martínez. Si sus trabajos anteriores fueron ejercicios periodísticos de largo trabajo y dedicación, este libro, como se dice desde las primeras páginas, fue escrito “como vomitar” (11). Así pues, este es un libro sobre la distinción, o la diferencia absoluta, entre aquello que hay y aquello que es, entre lo que es trabajo (escribir) y lo que es orgánico (vomitar), y entre los muertos y el periodista.

Aquello que separa al periodista de los muertos es también lo que los une. La principal historia que el libro cuenta, construida a partir de digresiones, reflexiones y comentarios sobre el trabajo anterior de Martínez y otros de sus compañeros periodistas, es la de una muerte anunciada, como la de casi cualquier fuente que pueda tener un periodista como Martínez: Rudi, un dieciochero que presenció una masacre realizada por policías en El Salvador, esquiva su muerte hasta que años después policías irrumpen en su casa y secuestran a él y a dos de sus hermanos. Jéssica, la hermana mayor de Rudi, y Martínez, se encargan de identificar los cuerpos de los dos hermanos de Rudi, cuando estos aparecen. Pero de Rudi, no quedó sino un cráneo quemado, una calavera imposible de identificar. El desenlace es una ya sabida desazón, un no saber, y una absoluta impotencia. Al final, el periodista vive, una buena historia se escribe y se vende, y los muertos se apilan en un cúmulo interminable. Y aún así, es por la vida de Rudi, su confesión y su historia, que muertos y periodista guardan una relación casi irrompible. 

La diferencia entre muertos y periodista está en la completa obviedad que conllevan ambas palabras. Los muertos son muchos, el periodista es uno solo. Los muertos preceden al periodista, el segundo es un mero agregado (aquello que sigue de la “y”). Aún así, es por el agregado, el periodista, que aquello que precede puede hallar un espacio en la escritura. El asunto, claro está, es que escribir no es, para nada, un oficio feliz. Ante la famosa frase de Gabriel García Márquez, sobre eso de que el mejor oficio del mundo es el periodismo, Martínez afirma, “‘No jodás’ le respondería con muchísima admiración” (36). Para Martínez, el oficio del periodista “da un privilegio inmenso y una enorme responsabilidad: atestiguar el mundo en primera fila. Aunque a veces, casi siempre, el espectáculo sea nefasto” (36). El periodista, entonces, es aquel que ve aquello que es siniestro, lo que duele, pero que también expande la imaginación y provoca la escritura. El periodista registra un infinito incalculable donde se mezcla el dolor, el asombro y la curiosidad en el nudo machacado de las palabras.

Desde esta perspectiva, entonces, se podría pensar que la escritura es en sí una práctica que guarda las distancias insalvables, una práctica de la diferencia absoluta entre aquellos que viven y mueren, y el “individuo” que registra todo en una multitud: los muertos. Es decir, el periodista es aquel que escribe siempre sobre los muertos, es aquel que encara siempre a esa siniestra multitud. Los muertos y el periodista es un libro sobre ese espacio crepuscular donde se diferencia lo que hay y lo que es: un espacio infrapolítico, similar a aquello que Alberto Moreiras define como eso de lo que ningún experto puede hablar. Desde ese espacio siniestro, esa infinita distancia, pero también infinita cercanía, es que se invita a pensar la relación misma entre muertos y periodista, entre lo existente y su registro, lo que duele y sus marcas. Sólo desde aquí es que uno pudiera ver en Los muertos y el periodista no sólo un libro de distancias insalvables, sino un umbral hacia otra parte y diferentes comienzos.

Crisis, extenuación, y transición. Notas sobre Nuestra parte de noche (2019) de Mariana Enríquez II

Segunda parte (final)

Luego de que la amiga de Gaspar, Adela, sea atrapada por la casa abandonada que ella y sus amigos visitaron al final de la tercera parte, el grupo de amigos se desintegra. Las páginas restantes de Nuestra parte de noche (2019) dan seguimiento a estos eventos. A su vez, el resto de la novela se compone de fragmentos del diario de la madre de Gaspar, Rosario (“Círculos de tiza”); las notas de una periodista que investiga las fosas de restos humanos y desaparecidos de la dictadura (“El pozo de Zañartú”); y la última parte de la novela sigue los años de Gaspar con Luis, su tío, hasta el desenlace de la historia, cuando Gaspar se venga de “La Orden” (“Las flores negras que crecen en el cielo”). Como ya era claro al final de la tercera parte, una de las preocupaciones principales de Nuestra parte de noche es el pensar la post-dictadura argentina, la transición a la democracia. 

La novela de Enríquez invita a pensar en la transición como un proceso de intercambio. Juan engaña a “La Orden,” bloquea los poderes de Gaspar, pero para poder salvar a Gaspar, debe de entregarle Adela a “La Oscuridad.” La amiga de Gaspar, resulta ser su prima, su madre era prima de Rosario. Adela es la hija de una Bradford y un militante del “Ejército de Liberación Maoísta Leninista” (501). Desde esta perspectiva, la novela sugiere que para poder salvar los restos del peronismo (el hijo de Juan, Gaspar), se debe entregar a la “Oscuridad” los restos de la izquierda radical. Desde esta perspectiva, la transición a la democracia argentina es la traición a la izquierda radical. La cuestión, entonces, es si el peronismo puede vivir con esta traición. Por el final de la novela, la respuesta es una rotunda negación. Luis, el tío de Gaspar, intenta reconstruir su vida, y la casa donde se muda con su sobrino “una casa en Villa Elisa, cerca de La Plata, que se venía abajo, pero era hermosa y Luis quería recuperarla” (519). Luis, como un restaurador, intenta reconstruir los restos del peronismo, incluso llama a uno de sus hijos como Perón. Sin embargo, sus esfuerzos son en vano: Luis es asesinado por la abuela de Gaspar para atraer a su nieto de nuevo a la “La Orden” y retomar las tareas pendientes de su padre. 

Si bien, la novela invita a pensar en el rol de las élites en el proceso de transición, sobre todo por los personajes de la familia Bradford “los reyes. Terratenientes. Yerbateros. Rentistas. Explotadores” (591). La novela también invita a pensar en el desgaste de la clase letrada, o más bien, en el desgaste de la profesionalización laboral y artística, y el desgaste de la vida en general. La madre de Gaspar, “la primera doctora en antropología argentina graduada en Cambridge” que sentía “un orgullo ridículo” (445), contrasta radicalmente con los sentimientos de Gaspar y sus amigos frente a sus vidas y profesiones. Gaspar, por ejemplo, filmaba fiestas de quinceañeras, lo “hacía por hacer algo, para no aburrirse” (592). Y más aún, a pesar de ser un joven brillante, atractivo y millonario, es incapaz de compartir su riqueza, incluso después de vengarse de “La Orden.” Él mismo comenta “No entiendo por qué tengo que estudiar” (617), ante las insistencias de su novia Marita para que se vuelva profesor de inglés. Igualmente, los dos amigos de Gaspar, Vicky y Pablo tampoco encuentran ese orgullo que sentía la madre de Gaspar. Vicky es una doctora con una habilidad de diagnóstico infalible, pero incapaz de sentir empatía, “esa parte de la medicina, la empatía, no la tenía tan desarrollada … Le costaba ver a la gente detrás de las patologías …Ella debía ser eficiente y certera para curar. Que otro se encargara de secar las lágrimas y calmar el pánico: ella estaba demasiado ocupada” (582). Pablo, a su vez, vive con la imposibilidad de volver público su romance con un fotógrafo de éxito, a pesar de que en su círculo de artistas, la homosexualidad no es tabú. La transición, entonces, dejó las cosas sumergidas en un miasma. A cambio de eficacia laboral (Vicky); riqueza, no bien distribuida, (Gaspar); y éxito en las artes (Pablo) se sacrificó el amor, el orgullo “ridículo,” la pasión y el deseo del estudio. Los personajes de Nuestra parte de noche viven todos como Gaspar al final de la novela con “un corazón exhausto” (667). 

Civilización y barbarie revisitadas. Notas sobre Nuestra parte de noche (2019) de Mariana Enríquez I

Primera parte (bis. p 351)

Nuestra parte de noche de Mariana Enríquez es una novela entre el género de terror y el roman a clef ambientada en los años previos a y durante la dictadura y la transición a la democracia en Argentina (1960-1997). La novela se centra el la familia de Juan Peterson y su hijo Gaspar. Juan es el médium de la Oscuridad, una entidad antigua reverenciada por “La Orden,” un culto transoceánico. La historia de “La Orden” y de la familia de Juan se superpone a la historia nacional: la orden ancla sus orígenes con la llegada den el siglo XIX de capitalistas ingleses a la región del Chaco, Juan es hijo de inmigrantes del norte de Europa llegados a la Argentina en el periodo de la posguerra. Este movimiento que superpone terror e historia es, quizá, una referencia al propio título de la novela, nuestra parte de noche. Desde esta perspectiva, el terror es la parte de noche de la historia, esa parte crepuscular e indecible que aterroriza al discurso histórico, que lo hace temblar, pero desde el cual también se articula. Y Al mismo tiempo, como le dice Juan, agonizando, a su hijo, la parte de noche es el residuo, un resto afectivo “tenés algo mío, te dejé algo mío, ojalá no sea maldito, no sé si puedo dejarte algo que no esté sucio, que no sea oscuro, nuestra parte de noche” (301). En este orden de ideas, la novela, ambiciosamente, revisa momentos terroríficos de la historia argentina del siglo veinte. 

Si bien, la reevaluación de la turbulenta historia de la Argentina en la segunda mitad de siglo veinte ha sido ampliamente revisada, la vuelta de tuerca de Enríquez consiste en de disociar el terror del que muchas veces es el agente de todos los males, el estado. Así, la orden y sus rituales perversos no son una metáfora del estado, pero sí de esa parte también “malévola” en la historia argentina: los capitalistas. Juan, el médium “perfecto,” se casa con Rosario, una descendiente directa de los miembros fundadores de la orden, los Bradford (ingleses acaudalados que expandieron su capital al mudarse a la Argentina). Así, la familia de Juan y Rosario es, en buena medida, el proyecto nacional de las élites “criollas,” ésas que no quedaron dentro de la política de los caudillos, pero sí contribuyeron a la acumulación de capital. De hecho, la novela reformula uno de los temas más fuertes de la literatura nacional argentina: la civilización y la barbarie. Cuando Juan y su hijo visitan las cataratas del Iguazú. El niño le pregunta al padre porque sus abuelos maternos, tan acaudalados, no se construyeron su finca cerca de aquellos parajes, “No se puede, le contestó Juan, es un parque nacional: no es de nadie, es del Estado. ¿Qué es el Estado? Es de todos, no lo puede comprar una familia particular, eso quiere decir” (112). Los bienes “naturales” son de nadie, del estado, y por lo tanto su terror, no siempre es aterrador: Gaspar primero de asusta de la “Garganta del diablo,” la caída del agua, pero luego “se volvió a reír de lo mucho que se habían mojado” (112). Por otra parte, los abuelos de Gaspar, los Bradford, para quienes “el dinero… es un país en sí mismo” (116) mantienen otra relación con bienes similares a las cataratas, el arte (segunda naturaleza). Cuando su hija Rosario, la madre de Gaspar, le pide su pare que done obras de Cándido a los museos nacionales, pues “es robo, esto [los cuadros] es patrimonio, y él respondía que me la vengan a sacar entonces, la puta que los parió, y un carajo se las voy a dar. Rosario fingía indignación, pero Juan podía verle la sonrisa” (118). 

Desde la perspectiva de Nuestra parte de noche la civilización guarda la segunda naturaleza y la barbarie a la primera naturaleza. El asunto es que, en la novela, la barbarie está ya integrada al estado, y esa parte es ya común. Más aún, si el estado está en la “naturaleza” lo bárbaro deja de ser naturaleza, pues lo bárbaro es más cercano a las carnicerías de rituales que la orden realiza: con brazos amputados, sacrificios humanos, tortura y demás. Así pues, no es casualidad que, aunque los espectros también puedan rondar los bosques, en Nuestra parte de noche todo el terror está en las casas, el lugar de la civilización, sobre todo en las casas abandonadas o las casas de los ricos (la casa de Gaspar y Juan en Buenos Aires fue diseñada por los arquitectos O’Farrell y Del Pozo [329] y la finca de los abuelos diseñada a su vez por otros arquitectos de renombre). Si el terror está en las casas, ¿quién puede vivir en la “naturaleza” si ahí mismo es donde el estado, en la dictadura, vacía y desaparece cuerpos? El pasaje de casa a la intemperie y viceversa es también la tragedia argentina del siglo veinte: la transición. De hecho, este es el conflicto de Juan que, cercano a morirse, por órdenes de la “Orden,” debe transferir su conciencia a su hijo, que posee aptitudes de médium también, para continuar con los rituales. Juan se rehúsa y encuentra una manera de “bloquear” los dones de su hijo. Se anula esta transición, pero no se anula el proceso en sí. Al final de la tercera parte “La cosa mala de las casas solas” una amiga de Gaspar es atrapada por una casa abandonada en su barrio. Juan no canceló la transición, la volvió convertible, transformable, transferible. 

Notes on From Lack to Excess. “Minor” Readings of Latin American Colonial Discourse (2008) by Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel

Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel’s From Lack to Excess. “Minor” Readings of Latin American Colonial Discourse (2008) departs from the understanding that writing in times of the Spanish Crown expansion in America in XVI is, in more than a way, a minor discourse. It is not that the Spanish “Empire” completely captured and controlled the ways writing was produced. This means that beyond any possibility of turning the Chronicles of indies a simple mirror that reflects the agendas of homogeneus/unitary nationalist ideas, understanding the writing of the Chronicles as a minor discourse “allows us to make the transition from the ambivalence of the colonial subject to the rhetorical ambiguity of a colonial discourse” (36). After this, it becomes visible that the Chronicles are “sites of intervention within the hegemonic discursive matrix that can still be effectively elucidated by the particular exercise of reading” (38) in a minor key. What the texts analyzed by Martínez-San Miguel offer is the description, or depiction, of a radical change between orality and writing, between “verbal” lack and “linguistic excess”. The Chronicles, as texts that mix both colonial discourses (“those textual moments in which the project of colonization and conquest is depicted from an Americanist perspective” [39]) and imperial discourses (“conceived from within a metropolitan perspective, and they endorse a European colonizing project” [39]) are knotted by the transition from lack to excess. The awe that emptied the conquistadors and colonizers soon was supplanted by a dominant control. 

Martínez-San Miguel revisits a vast collection of canonical texts. Her insights on Colón, Cortés, Las Casas, Cabeza de Vaca, el Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, Sigüenza y Góngora and Sorjuana Inés de la Cruz illustrate the stated progression from lack to excess. In other words, the depiction of an empty discourse in the chronicles is filled with a baroque overwhelming presence as a general teleology. At the same time, it seems that Martínez-San Miguel, suggests that the complete domination of the “imperial interpretative matrix/paradigm” of the Spanish Crown was never fully achieved. For instance, when closing her argument about Sor Juana’s silence, as something that brakes and “produce[s] an eccentric intellectual, a colonial and feminine subjectivity that attempts to correct, complete, and reconfigure interpretation of herself and her works produced in the metropolitan centers” (182), Martínez-San Miguel suggests that as much as writing was still “a response to a required dialogue to achieve a reinscription as a colonial subjectivity” (183) the imposed logic of the “empire” was incompetent. After all, as all minor writings, this serve, or have “an unsurmountable hermeneutic limit” (183) where the domination of the empire sees their deformed and fake idea of hegemony. It is, then, that minor discourses in colonial times sometimes were able to depict a voice “that incorporate itself but also ‘corrects’ its official representation within an hegemonic discursivity” (184). Martínez-San Miguel sees this as something that is “beginning to exhaust its capacity of capture [of the imperial hermeneutic matrix]” (184). With this, From Lack to Excess finishes its argument and its meaningful insights. Yet, the pretended progression insisted in the book, might suggest to reflection on some arguments of the beginning of the book.

If aphasia serves as the foundational moment where lack emerges as the necessary “void” of the expression of the conquistadors, excess would be a sort of “plug” that in an ominous way cancels the depth of the void. The thing is that as much as “aphasia signals the failure of language to apprehend or grasp the complexity of the American reality as a discursive strategy parallel to the lack of epistemic and material control over the newly discovery lands and subjects” (45), as it happens eminently to Colón, aphasia is already, and always in the Chronicles, a catachresis because the lack of epistemic-voice is already deposited writing. That is lack is always a conglomerate of writing, and this writing as the one of Sor Juana is already showing how “fast” the limit of the imperial hermeneutic is reached. If “the admiral” cannot fully capture all the marvelous things he sees, his aphasia is a stasis that turns to be active, an active passivity. The limit was not only reached by the imperial logic, but also by writing itself. After this, then, it might be possible to rethink how the transition from lack to excess is not a process that started and finished, but a constant strategy in Latin American temporality in general (and perhaps elsewhere). Lack is always a void but never a place that misses something. Lack does more than a silenced and fascinated face, lack writes. From this perspective, the lack in Cortés, or any other colonial writer, is a result of something that exceeds it, something that forces writing as emphasis, as repetition, as enumeration, as a list. If “what is visible cannot be contained by language” let the writing turned it form and content so that the yes might see it, so that at least the illusion of readability be achieved.

Notes about Accumulation(s)

More (disorganized) notes (and some comments to the process of writing)

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Accumulation(s) IIII

These entries have been very messy. Yet, I do believe it is becoming clearer where I want to get with all this (or at least, I have that small certainty…)

1. With the first post I tried to open a possibility of rethinking the relationship between history, politics and literature in Latin America and its “integration” into capitalism as an economic system. This, of course, is nothing new, many have formulated this (I don’t know any names in particular. I can think about the “Feudalism and Capitalism in Latin America” by Ernesto Laclau [an article in which Laclau discusses some ideas about Andrew Gunder Frank, who believed that Latin America triggered capitalist expansion and rule in the years to come. Consequently, L.A was/is a place where the passage from capitalism to socialism is possible without mediation. While Laclau criticizes Frank very wide idea of capitalism, he also recognizes that some of what Frank says is right. Here, perhaps, the departing point from where Laclau will later formulate his further thoughts about radical democracy]). My purpose with the first post was to show how similar (somehow) the idea of the literary “Boom”, from the mid 20^th century, is to the Chronicles of Indies. I see the Chronicles of Indies as texts that mix testimony, fiction, non-fiction and also some figures that could be closer to “modern” ideas of the literary. In a way, many other “medieval” texts —as many medievalists would argue (specially texts about mystics)— have already mixed testimony with “fiction”, storytelling and “high arts” (namely poetry, and so on). However, the Chronicles of Indies were the first ones to spread efficiently, motivate other “writers” (explorers, lettered conquerors, or anyone that could go in a ship to the “new land”) and also open the possibility for the writing of “fantasy”. In a way, then, the further Boom and later the so-called post-boom is a repetition of that initial “literary movement”.  

With this first post, I also was trying to formulate a concept (not that I achieved it, far from it) —namely, accumulation— that could connect the literary, the historical, and (somehow) politics. Departing from Marx’s famous “so-called” primitive accumulation, I suggest that what is at stake in any process of accumulation is the (necessary) production of systematic violence that changes the pattern of “cumulation”. That is, that “accumulation” is a process of ordering, changing, transforming and creating second nature: only after terror can bodies be reordered via habits (this is, I believe, close to what Jon Beasley-Murray’s posthegemony theory argues). From this perspective, capitalism always requires, as John Kraniauskas suggests, a process of so-called primitive accumulation. The thing is that, or at least from our current situation, things have changed, not for much, but the small changes in the last 30-40 years have reached a point where what is (was) accumulated cannot be perpetuated in a single regime. There is, overall, uncertainty. Now we see that what was accumulated (pollution for instance) is in “una ofensiva de lo sensible” as Diego Stzulwark argues. 

The first post is very limited. But I think it opens some minimal possibilities. There is, I think, a connection with the third post: if stories have, in a way, displaced history, wouldn’t it be because our ways of historizing, and of writing stories have been “novellized”? 

2. The second post tries to connect some of the ideas of the first post with, more or less, a specific context. What can be said about the way fiction is currently being written? As I tried to show, while it might be said that fiction these days is merely “itemising” the aesthetic, the thing is that “itemising”, as a narrative process/figure, is showing something that comes “naturaly” when producing a work of “fiction”, or writing in general. It isn’t that works like Luiselli’s or Knausgard’s are merely exposing the “phantom threads” that support the whole process of writing (we could say that this is the purpose of Marx after he formulates the process of “so-called” primitive accumulation and then comments the bloody legislations and so on), but that their “itemisation” is an attempt to count (to tell) without accumulating, that is to prepare the terrain for a line of flight, or to simply trigger it. 

What interests me, then, are works of writing (fiction) that exhibit the process of writing as “accumulation” while also they attempt to suspend and/or trigger a line of flight. These works, as I later tried to suggest in the third post, would be connected to the way certain things “crack-up”. I aim to work with “authors” like Reinaldo Arenas, Burgos-Menchú and Moya (here it becomes very obvious that I have a problem with temporalization); Roberto Bolaño [not sure about this one] and Mario Levrero (the space trilogy and La novela luminosa); and César Aira and Valeria Luselli. My intention is to divide the thesis in three. The first part would be dedicated to Arenas and “testimonio” / Menchú-Moya; the second part would be an intermezzo with Bolaño and Levrero, and the third one would be dedicated to Aira and Luiselli. 

This division is motivated by my intention to “connect” works of fiction and “critique” to history and the political. The first part of the project would be guided by the Fitzgeraldian question, “how things came to be like this?”. The third part by the Leninist one, “what is to be done?”. What I pursue with these questions is not to propose a contradiction between them. My intention is neither to show how these two perspectives are to a certain extend closer to each other, as Erin Graff Zivin has pointed out about the “tragic” and “utopian” political left perspectives (Anarchaeologies 31-32), but to point out that these two questions (the Fitzgeraldian and the Leninist one) are part of an assemblage that opens and closes possibilities for the left. These two questions are part of an abstract machine. The intermezzo, in the other hand, seeks for both the suspension and the possibility of a line of flight. Bolaño and Levrero recount the possibility of the machine to move on. 

(This section —from this post— is very loose and not very specific)

3.  With the third post, I tried to connect the first and the second post’s ideas about history and the “literary”. At the same time, I tried to question what is really at stake with “stories”. That is, if the “novellation” of history and of the novel has somehow “mixed and confused” perceptions, what place do stories hold? The question (problem?) of stories is not about differentiating truth from lies. But it is true that fiction is close to lies and once we hear enough lies, we are closer of not recognizing truth at all but still able to enjoy fiction. At the same time if we cannot stop narrativization (fiction, good or bad) or lying in general, what can we do with lies, errors, mistakes, evil? What is to be done? How things have become to be like this without us knowing it? When did we crack-up? All this questions of course demand a political (Lenin) and a pre-political (Fitzgerald) stand. Clearly, stories share things with lies, (errors and so on). But there is also the chance that both stories (and lies too) could open and call for the exodus, to abandon even the hope of truth and content ourselves instead with stories (?) —or better to escape while also adding. 

At the end of the third post, I suggested (poorly and confusing [but I think I want to save some of these ideas] that “stories” have a way of “adding”, counting (as EGZ recalls from Rancière). This process of “addition” is similar, or close, to what happens to an addict, a body that persists but is unstable and destabilizing but stable in his repetition of habits. Addiction is, then, a way of hanging to being, but also a path without clear ending, a brief line of flight. I would like to argue that there is a thread that connects Arenas and Luiselli (passing through testimonio [Menchú, Moya], Bolaño and Levrero and Aira). 

(This is too vague, I know)

Comments: 

-It is all too general, and I might be a little lost. At the same time, I think the idea of accumulation could be very productive. Specially if I start developing it more. I would like to work with 3 (ar least) different ways that accumulation happens: in capitalism (addition by subtraction [a.k.a accumulation by dispossession]); as addiction; and then as addition [a form of accelerationism (?).

-I have a (severe) problem with temporalization. Two posts dwell in “colonial” times. I need to work on this. 

-I need to connect the dots with the intended authors that I would like to work with. I also need to clarify the connection between history, literature and politics. 

-Something I’ve been thinking about and, so far, I merely named in the posts, is the idea of literature as a sphere a la Sloterdijk. I think this is an interesting idea, but I haven’t developed it more. 

Notes on Strategic Occidentalism: On Mexican Fiction, the Neoliberal Book Market, and the Question of World Literature (2018) by Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado

World literature is one that is read using a “distant reading, in which a comparatist reads only what individual experts in the national literatures produce” (189). This is the method that Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado uses in his Strategic Occidentalism: On Mexican Fiction, the Neoliberal Book Market, and the Question of World Literature (2018). Sánchez Prado displays virtuously an erudite monograph about 7 mexican authors (Sergio Pitol, Jorge Volpi, Ignacio Padilla, Pedro Ángel Palou, Carmen Boullosa, Ana García Bergua and Cristina Rivera Garza). Strategic Occidentalism “is understood as the way in which specific writers, particularly from a ‘semiperipheral tradition’ like Mexico’s, adopt a cosmopolitan stance to acquire cultural capital within their national tradition” (19); that is, an strategy of appropriating of the cultural means of production, value and work in the literary field that certain authors perform. For Sánchez Prado, then, the seven writers that he studies (among others) resist certain imperatives of writing. That is, Pitol resist the “hegemonic” imperative of writing nationalist narratives; the “Crack” writers (Volpi, Padilla and Palou) resist the ‘magical realism’ imperative of following the steps of “Boom” writers; and the three female writers that analyzed at the end of this book (Boullosa, García Bergua and Rivera Garza) resist the imperative of the market when offering non-stereotyped female narratives. 

A “world literature” needs to acknowledge that “the limits of one’s material access to the world” (15). For this reason, Strategic Occidentalism offers “the product of concrete cultural labor —including material practices of translation, cultural contact, and publishing— that must be [are] accounted in their full historicity” (15). The book addresses authors that have paved the way for the success of prominent Latin American writers, such as Roberto Bolaño. Hence, Bolaño as part of the so-called “world literature” is not but the successor of a series of writers, specially Mexican writers —in Sánchez Padro view—, that already were participating and negotiating their place in the literary world and in the “world literature”. 

As much as Sánchez Prado offers a flair erudition of the critical reception of the writers that he studies and maps the cultural field of the second half of the XX century in Mexico, he forgets a key figure in the foreground of the reproduction and production of cultural capital: the state. The authors analyzed in Strategic Occidentalism appropriate the objectified and the institutionalized states of cultural capital yet the embodied state of cultural capital, that is the “long-lasting dispositions of the mind and body” (Bourdieu 17) is not addressed. While Sánchez Prado recognizes this (186), it is uncertain that the resistance to the imperatives of the market, whether these are to write in a nationalistic, magical realism or stereotyped gender manner, happens only through the appropriation of the literary public sphere, especially if a Mexican world literature “will invariably play an important role in countering stereotypes against Mexicans” (193) coming from the, now defeated and dented—and yet scary— figure of president Trump.

Notes on Capitalism and its Discontents: Power and Accumulation in Latin-American Culture (2017) by John Kraniauskas

The essays compiled in John Kraniauskas’ Capitalism and its Discontents: Power and Accumulation in Latin-American Culture (2017) depart from the understanding that Marx’s “so-called” primitive accumulation is a repeated process throughout modernity (and postmodernity) and not a singular an “original” one. Capitalism has spread all over the world not by the expansive force of the “primitive” accumulation, that process “written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire”, but rather because of the compulsive necessity of capitalism of reproducing its “mythological” origin. If modern history is an accumulation of photographs, whilst revealing them it also comes to sight the existence of a “[colonial] unconscious” (15) and also, I would say, “an accumulative one”. Early modernity found ways of disavowing capitalism and state logics. Both Benjamin and Mariategui, as Kraniauskas rightly points out,  read in Charlie Chaplin’s cinema “a kind of historical comedy of accumulation across nations and forms of labour” (24). The two authors laugh “at capitalism factory time” (27) by recognizing Chaplin’s performances a body “always at work, but also resisting subsumption and commodification in flight” (25) and a strong affective force that gathers bodies while dispersing the discipline of modern societies. The description of Chaplin’s body, as “always [being] at work, but also resisting subsumption and commodification in flight” is a thread shared by all the texts analysed by Kraniauskas. 

While cinema, at least Chaplin’s cinema, could reveal both a flight and a capture from capitalism regime of signs, literature is a disputed space. The literary form is related to the democratic processes in general, this also means that the “lettered city” served as both “public sphere” and also as nest of/for the “civil society”. Latin America particular case relies, following Kraniauskas, in the key role that the state has played in the region. That is Latin America’s “historical processes of commodification, that is, the ‘economic’ and its institutions (the market and civil society) [both spheres very close to the literary phenomenon], were subordinated to the institutions of the state” (xx). From this perspective, the Latin American “letrados” are not only dealing with capitalism but also with the state. 

Overall, capitalism is the regime of signs where the socius “not only produces but records too, bearing the marks of its history and origins whilst appropriating the history of others” (151). The radical change that neoliberalism offers to the double scripting of capitalism is not only that of a “violent form of disciplinary reterritorialization in which the [state] government idea of ‘poblar’ is revealed as ‘des-poblar’ and ‘re-poblar’”(210) as Kraniauskas signals when analysing Walsch “Carta abierta de un escritor a la Junta Militar”. Neoliberalism also “abrogates”. 

When analyzing The Wire, Kraniauskas repeatedly states that the shift from the M-C-M’ formula to the “abridged formula (M-M’)” does provide a clue of neoliberalism necessity of “‘freeing’ capital from its commodity basis” (193). In the case of The Wire, the switch from M-C-M’ to M-M’ is not possible since the commodity (drugs) of the criminal organizations cannot be replaced, abridged, yet, what could be thought from the recent theorized and conceptualized “narco-accumulation”?

The thing does not consist on saying that the shift to M-M’ is a way of understanding the world merely in terms of speculative capital, but rather, that capitalism dreams of abridging its processes of circulation (and accumulation). Capital in neoliberalism is completely presupposing all its formulation (let’s remember that the Marxian formulations could be as long as an element from the chain-formula could be bisected), it wants to appear fully formed and ready to go. If “C” is something that capitalism is disposing, both the components that bonded C also vanish (these are LF and MP). Capitalism reduces itself to its own reflection, its only sign to encode is itself superposed on top of the “flattened” history of others. But where did “C” go, or how was it “abridged”? Kraniauskas reflections not only suggest that the process of primitive accumulation is never original, but also that the state subordinates and captures not only the process of commodification but also the process of capitalism chain of equivalencies and production not only in Latin America. While the invisible hand holds capitalism missing “letters”, capitalism is now forging its sentences “with blood and fire” with no restrain, erasing and repeating its sentences as if an inner voice, or a voice from above/below, would be dictating it an aural test. As the state became immanent in affect, capital became obsessed with its writing and repetition as did the state before for itself. As both exchanged roles and re/de- territorializations, we still are always “at work, but also resisting subsumption and commodification in flight”, laughing less, but laughing still.

Notes on Literature and “Interregnum.” Globalization, War, and the Crisis of Sovereignty in Latin America (2016) by Patrick Dove

Patrick Dove’s Literature and “Interregnum.” Globalization, War, and the Crisis of Sovereignty in Latin America (2016) offers a vastly informed dialogue between key literarily figures of the XX century Latin American Fiction (Cohen, Aira, Eltit, Chejfec and Bolaño) and “a range of theoretical perspectives” (1), from Continenal philosophy, political thought, psychoanalysis, to sociology of globalization. With the Neoliberalism’s control over Latin America, and the rest of the world, it is obvious, that certain political and aesthetic concepts no longer work, if they ever did. Dove takes the challenge to describe, analyze and theorize “interregnum”, which is not to be understood as a “gap or a crisis that could potentially give rise to revolution” (11), neither a gap or interruption that belongs to the order of imperial history. Interregnum is “a need to fashion a new critical and theoretical vocabulary” (11), a concept under erasure, a la Derrida, because the stark neoliberal world needs new ways of reading it and at the same time requires us to keep in mind our previous grammars. 

When analyzing Amalfitano, one of the main characters of Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, Dove deepens in what we should be understanding as interregnum. The particularity of Amalfitano depends on the Duchampian “ready-made” that this character repeats. Dove sees in this gesture, “seen by very few” and likely “understood by no one”, a “reminder (if there is anyone who knows how to read it) that the here-and-now is always already different from itself, both because it is already marked by the remnants of a past that may or may not be legible to it and because it remains open to what is —perhaps— still yet to come” (254). Interregnum would be a place of suspension, where one, if one is able, could read the “reminders” of the past while also acknowledging one’s incapacity of changing the past and also one’s impossibility and renouncement of announcing or naming what is yet to come. Later on, Dove will complete that “interregnum”, as a possible alternative to the never ending of neoliberal accumulation —illustrated by Bolaño— that both announces the persistence of the old and yet announces something different to come, is “persisting within the ruins of the modern in a way that illuminates their ruination, albeit without being able to imagine or inaugurate a new order” (254). Interregnum, thus, is a thought that renounces to continue in the logic of instrumentalization and commodification of capital but persists in interrupting the logic of Neoliberalism (capitalism).

The Heideggerian spirit of interregnum knows very well that thinking “cannot think its own origin in the world, [since it is] the call to which it is itself a response” while also being “likewise unable to disown its debts and separate itself from the specific ways in which it is enjoined to wonder and ask questions about things” (36). Thought is always within being. What would happen if we were to think capitalism and neoliberalism as “thinking” a la Heidegger? Would this mean that at the limit (if it has any) of capitalism the state is merely waiting as a Stimmung to intervene and regulate the “free” and chaotic flows of capital? If so, the waiting of the state is everything but an absence, since by disavowing its “will”, the state implants its immanent and affective sway over capital. The state operates from a place where it rejoices watching how his “fruitful” exception allows all types of accumulation, as it was in the beginning of its relationship with capitalism and as it is now. With this in mind, would interregnum be pointing to the elastic void that expands and shrinks in-between capitalism and the state as the void between literature and philosophy?

Notes on Cruel Modernity (2013) by Jean Franco

“Nobody knows more about Latin American culture and politics than Jean Franco” is written at the back of Jean Franco’s Cruel Modernity (2013). While the statement is a praise, it is also true. Franco offers in Cruel Modernity a detailed monography on how cruelty has painted the clear skies of our current time. The book recovers a vast and diverse archive of violence, from the massacre of Haitians by the Trujillo regime in Dominican Republic in 1937 to the “showcase of contemporary atrocity” (21) that contemporary (2012[?]) Mexico expresses. Through listing examples of “the dehumanization of the victims [of the listed massacres], the attempted suppression of their memory, and the legacy of inexplicable loss belatedly registered in literary texts” (7), the XX century Latin American history unveils its true face, that of cruelty, that which points to the end of “‘civil’ society and the start of a dark time in which humanity reaps the reward of its fecklessness, giving rise to the apocalyptic forebodings” (22) that Franco conspicuously enlists. 

Humanity, as we know it, is fading away. But maybe this is only happening for some. When “analyzing” photography (photodocumentaries and photography-exhibitions) about memory in Perú, Argentina, Guatemala and El Salvador, Franco states that while “documenting cruelty [this] does not mean reproducing its initial impact” (199), she also recognizes —as she does repeatedly in the book— that documenting cruelty we are attracted to these images, “drawn to it [them] because to some degree we too want sensation, a show of violence that we can safely watch” (212). To this extend, Latin America and its cruel modernity, humanity and life is merely feeding “the global North’s” thirst for “sensation”. Franco constantly compares the Latin American cruel modernity to the one experimented by other “peripheries” of the world, like the Balkans in relation to Central Europe, for instance. If modernity is revealing itself to be cruel then it is doing so for the sake of the “good modernity”, for the one of the “anxious” readers who would like to taste what is like to see horror but not live in it. 

No scholar can evade the fact that they cannot, or are not able to, account for how the cruelty of modernity affects the subaltern (i.e. the indigenous, the poor, the minorities, etc.). Actually, the ending of Cruel modernity makes it very clear, “However profound the impression left on them by the testimonies, readers are still at a distance and free to be in some other place. And that is a huge problem that no scholar can evade” (251). This problem, thus, is unavoidable even for a person who “knows more than anyone about Latin America.” If knowledge and critique have become what Franco illustrates, a disempowered and anxious list of atrocities narrated at times virtuously, at times imprecisely (the reading about Bolaño’s 2666 is defective and there are severe confusions in plot that Franco summarizes), what is to be done about modernity and its cruelty? Is there a possibility for critique to open up a new/different space that could address cruelty and violence without despairing in the anxiety of those who know too much?

Notes on Afterlives of Confinement. Spatial Transition in Postdictatorship Latin America (2012) by Susana Draper

Susana Draper’s Afterlives of Confinement. Spatial Transition in Postdictatorship Latin America (2012) analyzes the shift from closed spaces of imprisonment and discipline to open spaces of control in Latin America’s XX century. Draper problematizes the understanding of postdictatorship in Latin America by shredding some light on the spatial transformation of prisons and detention centers in Uruguay, Chile and Argentina. The spaces of imprisonment turned into shopping malls, museums or memorials and by doing so they “can be read as acting out forms of imprisonment and surveillance of uncomfortable parts of the political past that are still kept under control to avoid a disruption of the scheduled time of the market” (3). Thus, a prison turned into a shopping mall is still a prison, the difference now is only that instead of keeping “prisoners”, the shopping mall is now “guarding” memory and history. 

The book proposes to read the “post” in the postdictatorship as a multiplicity of “afterlives”. This means, following W. Benjamin, that “afterlife poses an instance of dislocation of the teleological enframing of time thus deconstructing the supposedly ‘common’ understanding of the dominant narrative of redemocratization as an opening up and passage toward neoliberal modes of freedom” (5-6). By dislocating the teleological enframing of time with afterlives, Draper shows how certain echoes and affects of the past could shape a different “writing of history and the possibility of creating other ways of imagining (quoting [a la Benjamin]) political histories” (12). The prison, and later mall, of Punta Carretas in Uruguay, along the testimonies of political prisoners who fled the prison, open the space for a minor epic, this means an epic that both is enslaved by neoliberalism while it also mines it, like the tunnels excavated by those who escaped the prison. In Chile, the mall depicted by Diamela Eltit in Mano de obra and the “house” in Roberto Bolaño’s Nocturno de Chile, specially the last one, illustrate a literary that both exhausts literature and “reconfigures other possibilities [of literature] by exploring the presentation of the obvious as an act of defamiliarization” (145). And finally, in the Argentinian cinema, this process of defamiliarization is displayed in the analysis of Buenos Aires viceversa by Alejandro Agresti and Garage Olimpo by Marco Bechis. 

The opening for different accounts of history, epic, the “literary” and the gaze are presented as cross-out concepts, exposing their ruins but also their afterlife. After showing that “the prison and the consumer world [are] as coimplicated in the regime of neoliberal freedom” (176), Draper concludes proposing the possibility of a different frame for the “post”, the “now”, the present. That is, if the past (as a place of punishment) and the current-time (the neoliberal democratic control) in Latin America both are coimplicated in the creation of the frame that produces our gaze, how to “compose a frame that is not the effect of binary frame, without creating images as a voluntarist gesture ex nihilo?” (200) is now the question. The possibility that Draper points out suggests that the gaze would produce an opening itself, as the magic of cinema, and art, reproduces its gift of “making visible modes of invisibility” (200). As much as this is true, where do we leave affects? That is, how come the fear of being prosecuted and put in jail switched to the joy of consuming or of the rage of (dis)learning about memorial centers? Would it be that eyes and images where not the only things involved in the changes that the afterlives had?