Diamela Eltit Research Articles

El insilio: cierta deuda de la crítica literaria en América Latina

Within the broad scope of themes and aesthetic currents that Latin American literature has produced, displacement in its multiple faces - migration, exile, diaspora - has played a prominent role. However, it is important to note that there are aesthetic projects built on a non-geographic type of human displacement, the insile, which represents one of the great gaps in Latin American literary historiography. In this sense, the aim of this analysis is to compile, through a non-exhaustive bibliographical review, a series of theoretical reflections that can serve as a preliminary systematization on the theme of insile. This compilation will be carried out from the analysis of certain critical and literary works, aiming to propose a reconfiguration of the critical cartography of Latin American literature. For this purpose, the corpus of the work is composed of critical texts by authors such as Jacques Derrida, Elena Palmero González and Eduardo Lalo, in addition to the novel Los Vigilantes (1994), by Chilean writer Diamela Eltit (1949).

Domestic service and Chilean literature: fictional experiments in narrating the household

This article shines light on the interconnectedness of reproductive labour and Latin American literature through two Chilean novels that explore the relationship between peripheral capitalism and domestic servitude: José Donoso's The Obscene Bird of Night and Diamela Eltit's Mano de Obra. The study of these texts allows for a periodisation of the reproductive sphere under different phases of capitalist accumulation, and exposes an association between the literary treatment of domestic service and the achievement of highly experimental narratives in Latin America. My reading of Obscene goes beyond viewing this novel as postmodernist fiction, by showing how its nightmarish poetics are a consequence of the transformation of the oligarchic household vis-a-vis the collapse of systems of bonded labour in the 1960s. Whereas the prose of Obscene provides a harrowing descent into the intimate connections between master and servant at the moment of their decline, Mano de Obra unveils a surgical prose capable of expressing the new impersonality of social reproduction in the subsequent neoliberal period. Of special interest to this analysis is how Eltit suggests that even the proletariat household can recreate exploitative patterns of domestic servitude to guard against complete immiseration. Three main conclusions result from this reading. First, Latin American fiction is an important literary archive from which capitalism's exploitation of the reproductive sphere can be excavated. Second, Latin American literature shows formal uniqueness when representing domestic service in the periphery. Lastly, fictional representations of domestic service help us understand the institution not as remnant of previous modes of production, but as capitalist strategy for the reproduction of social forces that underpay the cost of life-making processes.

Cuerpo-mundo en la escritura ensayística de Diamela Eltit. Una lectura inicial

This article is focused on Diamela Eltit’s critical discourse present in three books: Emergencias (2000), Signos Vitales (2008) and Réplicas (2016). They comprise a variety of texts and topics and a vast diversity of primary sources, such as conferences, literary critique, art critique, forewords and book presentations, collaborations in magazines and newspapers, among others. We are interested in the representation of the body in Diamela Eltit’s essay writing, which we find anticipated, considering the current discussions revolving around corporality in contemporary theoretical exchange of points of view. We read the body from the subjectivity of the essay writer, in a style that breaks the body-mind duality, establishing a fissure which allows an intrusion in the materiality of emotions and not only in the essay construction as an instrument of thinking and knowledge. Considering that, the body in Eltit’s essay writing is presented as subject, recognition and emancipation, this proposal has been developed from the categorization of body/pain, body/market and body/social class/memory of women’s body in her writing.

Mujer, cuerpo, y violencia en Sumar de Diamela Eltit

This text proposes that in the novel Sumar (2018) by Diamela Eltit, counterhegemonic practices or about resistance to power are made visible, which appears configured as an entity of political control. These counterhegemonic practices not only take place in traditionallysubversive activities, such as the protesting march, but also in the protesters' own bodies, which becomes the stage of the systemic violence. On the basis of the above, I can assert that in this novel its characters raise the utopia of emancipation to the neoliberal model, from bodies that operate as refractory signs to a patriarchal-war logic; framed in a context of defeats of doctrines and practices that in the past pointed towards a path of liberation.

Una máquina neobarroca: la escritura de Diamela Eltit

The article analyzes the conformation of a neo-baroque repertoire in the narrative of the Chilean writer Diamela Eltit (Santiago, 1949). For this, the reflection focuses on a reduced corpus made up of the novels: El cuartomundo, Los trabajadores de la muerte and Fuerzas especiales. From an approach that attends to the intersections between literature and society, it is assumed as a presupposition that the neo-baroque manifests itself as a form of aesthetic experimentation and political interpellation regarding discourses and social practices traversed by violence. The hypothesis holds that the author’s novels combine a series of discursive operations that highlight the complex articulation between the historical forms of violence, the social conformation of citizen subjectivities, and the materiality of language. The work is oriented in two directions: reconstructing some theoretical debates referring to the modulations of the neo-baroque in Hispanic American Literature (Bustillo, Richard, Rojas and Sarduy, among others) and characterizing the operations and meanings associated with this movement in Eltit’s novels.

Americánas, Autocracy, and Autobiographical Innovation: Overwriting the Dictator by Lisa Ortiz-Vilarelle

Reviewed by: Americánas, Autocracy, and Autobiographical Innovation: Overwriting the Dictator by Lisa Ortiz-Vilarelle Renata Lucena Dalmaso (bio) Americánas, Autocracy, and Autobiographical Innovation: Overwriting the Dictator Lisa Ortiz-Vilarelle Routledge, 2021, ix + 236 pp. ISBN 9780367893477, $170 hardcover; ISBN 9781032335919, $48.95 paperback. Lisa Ortiz-Vilarelle's Américanas, Autocracy, and Autobiographical Innovation: Overwriting the Dictator investigates life narratives by women who have attempted to counter discourses about womanhood and personhood in Latin American dictatorships. Throughout its five chapters, the author explores different dictatorial contexts in the Americas and how women have employed innovative techniques of self-representation to establish themselves as subjects against authoritarian regimes or in the aftermath of regimes that spanned most of the twentieth century. Each chapter presents the historical context of a specific country and its corresponding dictatorship, along with works by writers who sought to overwrite the constraints of writing the self in such repressive situations. The efforts of these writers in finding novel ways to approach life writing—be it through poetry, aliases, or autofiction—subvert what Ortiz-Vilarelle refers to as the impossible character of autobiography under autocratic governments. The book's main question is how these authors have been able to write the self in the midst of censorship and the actual danger of challenging expectations of womanhood in repressive contexts. However, the book does not only include those who opposed dictatorial regimes. It also explores how the wives, children, siblings, and grandchildren of dictators have attempted to overwrite history through their own perspectives. These works offer ambivalent memories of the dictatorships, ones often imbued with nostalgia for the rulers they represent. The impossibility of writing can be seen both in the works that write against authoritarianism as well as those narratives that attempt to deny, downplay, or even defend these regimes. Faced with such impossibility, Ortiz-Vilarelle argues that the "diversity of voices and experiences represented here demonstrates how autocratic methods of control can actually give way to autobiographical methods of self-construction and establish shared, global-practice autobiographical work for Américanas both in their countries and in exile" (5). The first chapter, "I Remember Trujillo/Trujillo en Mis Memorias: Denial, Shame, Martyrdom, and Nostalgia in Dominican Women's Memoir," explores the impossibilities in life writing by women dealing with Rafael Trujillo, who ruled the Dominican Republic from 1930 to 1961. Specifically, it focuses on the publications [End Page 107] marking the fiftieth anniversary of his assassination. Four works that examine the "Era of Trujillo" are analyzed: one of artful abnegation by his granddaughter Aída Trujillo (2008); one of shame and psychological trauma by his troubled daughter, Flor de Oro Trujillo (2009); one of testimony and martyrdom by Dédé Mirabal, sister of the three murdered heroines involved in an assassination attempt against Trujillo (2009); and one of privileged nostalgia by his favored daughter Angelita Trujillo (2010). (18) Each memoir proceeds from a different perspective of memory in relation to the Era of Trujillo, competing for the authority of remembering the dictator, the closeness to his many public and private personas, and the impact of his years in power. The second chapter, "Dueña y Señora de Su Canto: Autobiographical Depictions of the New Nicaraguan Woman," focuses on Nicaragua, which was controlled by the Somoza Dynasty from 1936 to 1979, a period combining the dictatorships of Anastasio Somoza Garcia, his older son, Luis Somoza Debayle, and his younger son, Anastasio Somoza Debayle. Fighting against the dynasty was the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN) movement, in which women played a strong role. Drawing from the Sandinista movement and its poetry programs, Ortiz-Vilarelle analyzes six authors published between the 1960s and 1990s—Vidaluz Meneses, Daisy Zamora, Gioconda Belli, Yolanda Blanco, Michele Nails, and Rosario Murillo—who attempted to reconcile their womanhood with the Somoza years through autobiographical writing. Their autobiographical poetics overwrite the restrictions forced on the female subject by both the Somoza family and the Sandinista regimes that followed. In the third chapter, "'Distinguished Ladies' and the Doctrine of Chilean Womanhood: The 'Anti-manuals' of Diamela Eltit, Isabel Allende, and Marjorie Agosín," Ortiz-Vilarelle explores the three authors' works for "echoes" of...

Against the Authoritarian Orator and His Pater familias: Deviant Literarity and Orphaned Speech in El padre mío by Diamela Eltit and Lotty Rosenfeld

Published in the last year of Augusto Pinochet Ugarte’s military dictatorship saw its end, My Father (El padre mío) constitutes an interprofessional, collaborative work between Chile National Literature Prize winner Diamela Eltit and visual artist Lotty Rosenfeld, composed of unaltered transcriptions of three monologues (dis)articulated by a schizophrenic vagrant who referred to himself as My Father. By re-enacting the vagrant’s irrational utterances in a truthful but parodic manner, Eltit and Rosenfeld “orphaned” these spoken words into a work of written literature that mocked the authoritarian voice of the dictator who had imposed himself as the Grand Orator of the Nation and the Father of Chile. The main objective of the present work, which is principally based on the conceptualization of Mute Speech by Jacques Rancière, is to examine the political dimension of Eltit and Rosenfeld’s aesthetic endeavor: through an exploration of the possibilities of political emancipation that the vagrant’s fatherless monologues fostered in My Father, our study demonstrates that what neoliberal civil society presupposes as objectionable animalistic noises may be capable of intervening in what Rancière refers to as the “distribution of sensible” and its consolidated aesthetics of hierarchy, thus subverting the fable of pater familias and pater patriae concocted by Pinochet’s right-wing military regime.

Nothing But Workers: Reading Class Struggle In Diamela Eltit’s Mano de obra

In this essay I study the supermarket in Diamela Eltit’s Mano de obra as a site of class struggle. Despite readings that see in the novel a representation of post-work society, several scholars have noted that Mano de obra can be productively read as a novel that explores the centrality of labour in present-day capitalism. In this article I suggest that Eltit’s novel offers, at the level of form, a powerful reflection on labour exploitation as mediated by the sale and purchase of labour-power. I emphasise two processes that the novel registers in relation to the neoliberal working-day: the changes in the inward notation of time brought about by the expansion of the service industry, and the compenetration between the disciplinary practices of the workplace and the affective structures of the household. I conclude the essay by showing how the punctuation of the novel, in particular the overabundance in the use of parentheses, gives formal expression to the fundamental reality hidden behind the sale and purchase of labour-power: the dispossession of the worker from her own living body.

A Failed Link between Chilean Workers’ Subversive Past and Submissive Present in Diamela Eltit’sMano de obra

Mano de obrais one of the most studied novels written by the Chilean author Diamela Eltit (b. 1949). Scholars have paid particular attention to the novel’s socioeconomic commentary at the level of the plot. They have not, however, conducted a close examination of how the novel expresses this criticism through its narrative form. Nor have they explored the relationship of the novel’s literary techniques to the politico-cultural context that it portrays. This article engages in a close reading of the literary techniques thatMano de obraemploys to depict a certain social context. It also addresses some politico-cultural implications of the novel’s narrative form in the context of Chile’s contemporary society to demonstrate that the novel foregrounds a sense of pessimism and hopelessness about linking Chilean workers’ subversive past with their submissive present.

Speaking of Lotty Rosenfeld: “Gestures Dangerous, Simple, and Popular”

Abstract This dialogue centers on the artwork and legacy of Chilean artist Lotty Rosenfeld, including such solo projects as One Mile of Crosses on the Pavement and her collaborations with CADA (Colectivo Acciones de Arte). It argues for a queer feminist reading of Rosenfeld as it considers her anti-dictatorship spatial practices, her intimacies with the writer Diamela Eltit, and her political and aesthetic commitments.

Clausura: universalidade desconhecida

This text is about the enclosure. Precisely for this reason, in no way does it appear to be different from the others. Like any other textuality – submitted to the game of signification of authorship, of form, of content –, perhaps it is a possible manifestation of the knowledge that the closure produces. Maybe its differential is to accept that its contingencies produces their own significance. Jacques Derrida contributes with the hospitality to other authors, such as Roberto Bolaño, Diamela Eltit and Giorgio Agamben. In different ways, they seem to announce questions about the enclosure. These perceptions do not exhaust the issue, but point to the slippery path of any significance. This text, therefore, is about uncertainties, or about the closure of the certainties. This text is, rather, about the importance of responsible uncertainty.

Sumar de Diamela Eltit: el excedente radical de la ficción

Reflecting on Diamela Eltit’s novel, Sumar (2018), Julio Ramos revisits the netting that binds life, literature and politics. In his lecture, Ramos interrogates the forms and categories that make up the bodies of a political unit, within the framework of speculative fiction and scopic environments, as well as the transformations of work and life under contemporary cybernetic and pharmacological regimes. Ramos observes that Eltit’s novel distances itself from the more recognizable practices of contemporary meta-fiction, and rather revitalizes fiction writing as a “craft of language through the relay of voices as the very matter of the act of novelizing”. In particular, Ramos’ reading highlights the danger of the extinction of an entire guild, that of street vendors: the last guardians of a certain for

Literatura chilena de la postransición: Una lectura a los determinantes sociopolí­ticos de la narrativa de Eltit y Fuguet*

Este trabajo examina la relación entre literatura y polí­tica, proponiendo una mirada de la literatura chilena publicada a partir del año 2000 como literatura de la postransición. Toma como ejemplos semicanónicos a Diamela Eltit y Alberto Fuguet, enfocándose en sus novelas Fuerzas especiales y Aeropuertos, respectivamente; en particular, en los medios modernos de control social y potenciales ví­as para resistirlo que sugieren estas obras. El artí­culo tiene como objetivos desvelar las maneras en que las representaciones literarias de dos autores "”aparentemente disí­miles como Eltit y Fuguet"” interactúan con determinantes sociopolí­ticos propios de la postransición chilena, y demostrar el rol polí­tico-cultural que dicha literatura juega en la creación de un cierto imaginario social de la postransición, más allá de las diferentes perspectivas con las que los autores puedan contribuir.

Constelaciones metafóricas de la memoria: Sumar de Diamela Eltit

En este artí­culo me propongo analizar la novela Sumar (2018) de Diamela Eltit a partir de la configuración discursiva de tres tópicos que funcionan como metáforas asociadas a la problemática de la memoria: el cuerpo de la narradora, el desplazamiento de los ambulantes hacia La Moneda y la idea de nube/archivo. Sostengo, a modo de hipótesis, que la noción de memoria se presenta en esta novela como un punto de exploración estética y como una preocupación polí­tica central para pensar el presente.

Tentativa Artaud and Its Double: Performing Surveillance, Dividing Time

The legacy of dictatorial violence in Latin America has called into question the possibility of linear histories, instead demanding a focus on the way the past continues to surface in the present. Yet, as one Chilean performance and its archives reveal, thinking about history spatially as opposed to temporally reveals the way that the future can also inflect meaning in the present. This article traces the history of a building in Santiago that first served as the stage for an anti-dictatorship performance by students at the University of Chile, and was then subsequently taken over as a center for surveillance by Augusto Pinochet’s secret police. Led by philosopher Ronald Kay, this art action, called Tentativa Artaud, emerged from a seminar including artists such as Raúl Zurita, Catalina Parra and Diamela Eltit, who would explore similar performance tactics in their later work. What began as a secretive performance about sound and language in Antonin Artaud’s writing gained subsequent meaning when the same building became the site of violent espionage. This performance, as I will argue, confuses the temporality of past and future by demonstrating that in the context of surveillance, spaces can be charged with meaning that resonates across time.

Selling Literature/Selling the Race: Diamela Eltit's Decolonial Feminist Critique of the Neoliberal Marketplace

Selling Literature/Selling the Race: Diamela Eltit's Decolonial Feminist Critique of the Neoliberal Marketplace

Política y autoficción performativa en Zonas de dolor, de Diamela Eltit

El presente artículo emplea el concepto de autoficción, creado por Serge Dubrovsky en los años setenta, para interpretar las implicaciones políticas que se derivan de la puesta en acción de la performancede Diamela Eltit Zonas de dolor I. La participación de la autora en estas performances, y su registro y edición posterior en formato video, ponen de manifiesto una clara intencionalidad de plasmar su pensamiento político a través de la acción estética, inseparables estos entre sí desde la perspectiva de Jacques Rancière. En estas propuestas el cuerpo es usado como campo de batalla, y así hay que entender el hecho de que se inflija heridas. A través del análisis del uso del cuerpo como arma política, y usando las obras The Lips of Thomas, de Marina Abramović, y Anfaegtelse, de Angélica Liddell, donde la sangre emanada de los cortes en el cuerpo se constituye también en un elemento estético central, se analizará el dispositivo empleado por Eltit para soliviantar las conciencias y revelarnos otra dimensionalidad en torno a la marginalidad, ya se trate esta de vagabundos o de burdeles.

La producción de subjetividades marginales en Fuerzas especiales de Diamela Eltit: la emergencia de un enfoque guattariano.

El presente artículo propone analizar la producción de subjetividades marginales en la obra Fuerzas especiales de Diamela Eltit. Para ello se examinará en la narración, desde el planteamiento teórico desarrollado por Félix Guattari, la conformación material que se gesta entre sujeto, espacio y tecnología. La propuesta de lectura es concebir Fuerzas especiales como una performance escritural, en donde la palabra-acción busca romper con la homogeneidad estética y conceptual de la literatura canónica para, desde allí, abrir un campo de experimentación que conjuga nuevas corporalidades, espacialidades y sonoridades desde el margen (social y estético).

Diamela Eltit: la noción de periodismo tétrico, ideología y discurso en la prensa (neo) liberal chilena

Este artículo analiza la historicidad del concepto de “periodismo tétrico”, formulado por la escritora Diamela Eltit, para designar un conjunto de prácticas comunicativas que componen el discurso ideológico de la prensa liberal chilena. Las reflexiones de Diamela Eltit sobre el accionar del sistema de medios en Chile, se insertan en una tradición de estudios teóricos sobre la comunicación, iniciada a fines de la década del 60, que identificó las estrategias discursivas para construir la realidad social definida por la amenaza al orden social instituido, despojando de sentido a las demandas sociales. El artefacto conceptual periodismo tétrico, reactualiza el campo semántico del discurso periodístico liberal en la modernidad globalizada. Permite abarcar la emergencia de nuevos géneros periodísticos de representación de la realidad en clave “espectacular”, sobre la base de la función alegórica del mito, la violencia simbólica y los efectos de realidad. El periodismo tétrico es una operación discursiva que reproduce en las noticias la desigualdad estuctural del sistema, y más aún, fragmenta esta desigualdad en oposiciones binarias que omiten lo ominoso del contexto social en que emergen los sucesos noticiados. De este manera, provoca una desconección sintática entre el sujeto de la noticia, el relato social que la envuelve y el predicado que la nomina.

Gritos en la piel, sonidos del dolor. A propósito de Zona de Dolor 1 de Diamela Eltit

Abordando una perspectiva teórica proveniente de la disciplina teatrológica, el escrito tiene por objetivo realizar un análisis de la performance Zona de dolor 1 o “Maipú” de Diamela Eltit de 1980. Para ello me detengo en la piel, el cuerpo, la voz y el dolor como superficies de una experiencia sensible generadora de conocimiento que se perciben del visionado del video disponible de la performance. El análisis de la performance requiere de un rescate historiográfico en el que se discuta la parcialidad con que el concepto de “escena de avanzada” (Richard) interpretó Zonas de dolor (1980 y 1982), situando una lectura de las filiaciones y entrecruzamientos de Eltit con Ronald Kay y el seminario que le dedicó a la sabiduría de Antonin Artaud el año 1974. El pensamiento en torno al cuerpo, la carne y el dolor del teatrista francés acompaña las siguientes reflexiones y permiten presentar el poder de lo performativo en la voz de Diamela Eltit en algunas escenas del video de Zonas de dolor 1.