Dis/articulations and the writing of Aporias in Cristina Rivera Garza’s El mal de la taiga

Abstract

In Cristina Rivera Garza’s El mal de la taiga (2012) the search for bodies that are absent yet residually present serves as a self-realizing allegory for the limits of language to express reality and human experience. This essay explores these themes through the lens of the aporia, defined by Jacques Derrida as undecidable propositions whose very conditions of possibility are the same conditions that lead to their impossibility. Through an analysis of the various aporetic propositions in the novel that reflect the undecidable nature of language, violence, and communal experience, this article contends that the metaphor of the taiga as a geographic space becomes substituted with that of the taiga as labyrinth where the unresolved tension between articulation and disarticulation invites readers to appropriate the narrated experience in an act of mutual creation and contestation. Paradoxically, the uncertain nature of narrating the corporeal experience enables communal communication and creation through which subjectivities are made absent only to be affirmed and created anew.