Abstract
This article discusses the political uses of eros and mourning in Raúl Zurita’s 1985 work Canto a su amor desaparecido (Santiago: Metropolitana). I argue that the poet relies on eros and mourning as the few remaining sources of shared meanings in Chile during the Pinochet dictatorship, which was characterized by a breakdown in communication. Zurita’s critical strategy exploits two paradoxes: the reality of eros as both spatializing and universal, and the disappeared as both temporal and intemporal presences/absences. The situational conflation of these two paradoxes allows love to act as a refraction against the regime’s appropriation of history and public discourse. At the same time, Zurita’s work distinguishes itself from that of his contemporaries writing against the dictatorship by proposing love as a transcendent, objective reality: a Tao or universal which neutralizes the regime’s aims.
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