Thinking from the ‘Desamparo’ in Los Incompletos by Sergio Chejfec

Abstract

This essay explores the ontological dislocation of the nation and the world after the fall of the communist promise and the rise of the neoliberal market through a reading of Los incompletos (2004) by Sergio Chejfec. This novel denarrativizes the neoliberal fantasy of a free community of ‘global citizens’ beyond the nation-state's power. The promise of communism provided a beyond; it marked the ultimate limit of capitalism and, therefore, its telos towards a human world-community beyond nationalisms and capitalism. Mourning the loss of this promise, the novel questions the unbounded eternal present of neoliberal capitalism. In doing so, Los incompletos imagines a new history and a new spectral geography not grounded on an ontology of presence. In reflecting critically upon the utopia of globalization, this text does not retreat to the space of the nation. The spectral space of Moscow confronts the neoliberal fantasy of global citizenship and the end of the utopia of communism. The world imagined by the narrator has lost the ontological promise of its own presence. Against the ideal of a global community with a smooth surface, where people (and capital flows) travel free from the power of the nation-state, Chejfec composes a dislocated topography, where characters are suspended in time and space, and the world's presence loses the fantasy of its ground.