‘un día más de trabajo’: Liberalisation Processes and the Precarity of Women in Roberto Bolaño’s 2666

Emily Baker

doi:10.3828/mlo.v0i0.141

Abstract

This article explores the nexus between liberalisation processes, violence, gender, and ethics in Roberto Bolano’s final novel 2666 (2004). It does so first, with reference to a postcolonial framework, through the examination of a passage that juxtaposes different instances of gendered violence and precarity over time, associated with economic liberalisation; second, with reference to Slavoj Žižek’s classifications of violence (also bound up with his critique of contemporary economic and political systems), it explores Bolano’s denunciation of the symbolic violence associated with the discursive construction of gender in Mexican society, which, in turn, reinforces systemic violence. Finally, I deploy Emmanuel Levinas’ notion of the ‘face’ (in conjunction with Judith Butler’s reading of it in Precarious Life) to draw attention to the ethical imperative contained in the haunting of wealthy women by their murdered subaltern counterparts. I suggest that the presentation of the women in their tortured and murdered state strengthens the testimonial power of Bolano’s denunciation by disrupting the hegemonic landscape of representation which had previously succeeded in hiding them from view and silencing debates about the causes of their deaths. Tweetable abstract: Gender, liberalism, violence, and the ethics and politics of precarity in Roberto Bolano’s 2666

Highlights

This article examines Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 (2004), with a particular focus on the fourth section ‘La parte de los crímenes’
In the novel as a whole, hundreds of plots emerge and fade throughout the narrative. Critics such as Jean Franco, Cathy Fourez, and Grant Farred have convincingly argued that despite there being many other significant stories and characters, the main preoccupation of the novel is the murdered women of ‘La parte de los crímenes’, with references to the feminicides reverberating in the other sections
In the first section of this article, I widen the temporal frame of reference in economic terms, arguing that is it not just neoliberalism, the late twentieth century’s ‘successful hegemonic project voicing the interests of financial and/or transnational capital’ that is the target of criticism in 2666, and historical liberalisation processes such as those associated with the Latin American independence movements

Summary

Introduction

This article examines Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 (2004), with a particular focus on the fourth section ‘La parte de los crímenes’. As I highlight in section two, this is a concern of Bolaño, and I argue that his decision to represent the murdered women of the fictionalised Ciudad Juárez in the linguistic style of a police/forensic report is an attempt to reverse the ‘visual spectacle that numbs the senses and, like the sublime itself, put out of play the very capacity to think’ that Butler accuses the media of in relation to the Iraq War [148].

Results

Conclusion