“Barely Audible Voices”: Impersonal Justice And The Crisis Of Human Rights Discourse In Roberto Bolaño’s 2666

Abstract

The article starts from the premise that much of the critical work dedicated to Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 centres upon the idea of depersonalisation, generally understood as a subtraction of what is most properly personal in the human individual. The thesis put forward is that Bolaño’s style and technique of characterisation, particularly in the passages dedicated to the victims of human rights abuses, is best appreciated by recurring to the idea of “impersonality”, conceived as a third pole between personality and depersonalisation. The first section of the article is dedicated to connecting the idea of literary incorporation to that of human rights, thus showing how historically situated conceptions of “person” often influence readers’ expectations of what would constitute a dignified and just rendition of victims of real abuses in fiction. In the second section, it is suggested that Bolaño’s project intentionally diverges from the aims of literary incorporation and is more finely attuned to the philosophy of the impersonal which is to be found in the work of Maurice Blanchot and Simone Weil. The article concludes by interpreting Bolaño’s literary gesture in relation to existing critiques of human rights discourse.