The ‘Multitude’ in Luis Rafael Sánchez's La Pasión según Antı´gona Pérez: A Genealogy of a Future Unknown

Abstract

In Foucault, there are always material determinations, concrete meanings: there is no development that is level onto an equilibrium, so there is no idealist schema of historical development. If each concept is fixed in a specific archaeology, it is then open to a genealogy of a future unknown. (Antonio Negri)Luis Rafael Sánchez's theatrical piece, La pasión según Antı´gona Pérez, traces the genealogy of the struggle for democracy at the heart of Latin American republics oppressed by dictatorial regimes in America. Written in the year 1968, the play appears at a historical turning point that marks the beginning of an analysis of the political and micropolitical impact of minoritarian agencèments against the apparatus of capture of the state. In the play, this state machine is personified in the authoritarian figure of the sovereign, Creón. The libertarian potential of these multitudinous acts of agency is expressed, both discursively and performatively, by the character of Antı´gona Pérez. While at times she is portrayed in a manner evocative of a hegemonic reordering (as representing a Spanish-American and mestizo ideal), her character also offers the lines of flight necessary for a reading of the constitutive power of the multitude.In an analysis regarding the multitude as a class concept within the logic of capital, Antonio Negri emphasizes the need to consider its corporeal dimension:[t]he concept of capital (on the one side the production of wealth, on the other the exploitation of the multitude) must always be realistically looked at also through the analysis of how far bodies are made to suffer, are usurped or mutilated and wounded, reduced to production matter. Matter equals commodity. We cannot simply think that bodies are commodified in the production and reproduction of capitalist society; we also have to insist on the reappropriation of goods and the satisfaction of desires, as well as on the metamorphosis and the empowerment of bodies, that the continuous struggle against capital determines. Once we recognise this structural ambivalence in the historical process of accumulation, we must pose the problem of its solution in terms of the liberation of bodies and of a project of struggle to this end.