Diamela Eltit Research Articles

Feminismo y escritura: los ensayos de Diamela Eltit

En este artículo me propongo indagar en los ensayos de Diamela Eltit haciendo especial hincapié en dos tópicos: el feminismo y la escritura. Para ello, analizo un corpus de textos publicados en los libros los libros Emergencias (2000), Signos vitales (2008) y Réplicas (2016) a partir de tres operaciones ideológico- discursivas: la deconstrucción del cuerpo, la reconstruccion de genealogías literarias femeninas y la reflexión sobre la escritura. Sostengo, a modo de hipótesis, que la práctica ensayística de la autora constituye un ejercicio crítico a través del cual se convoca a una multiplicidad de voces para desnaturalizar y repensar los recorridos del cuerpo, la subjetividad y el lenguaje en el marco de las sociedades contemporáneas. El marco teórico- metodológico propende a articular conocimientos de los estudios culturales y de la crítica feminista. En este sentido, el trabajo pretende no solo explorar una faceta escasamente abordada dentro de los estudios en torno a Eltit sino también caracterizar las variaciones y tensiones referidas al feminismo y a la escritura que gravitan dentro de su producción literaria.

Lesión de anatomía: Diamela Eltit o la autora sobre‐expuesta en la escritura como crítica de lo Real

El presente ensayo se concentra en dos libros inclasificables de la narradora chilena Diamela Eltit: El Padre Mío (1989) y El infarto del alma (1994). A partir de la sobre-exposición de la autora que allí se manifiesta en primera persona como volcada hacia el afuera ineludible de un encuentro con la diferencia, encarnada en la locura y el desamparo de los cuerpos del vagabundaje y el aislamiento psiquiátrico, respectivamente, así como de la responsabilidad que emerge como posición de discurso ante el acto problemático de darle forma a la materialidad de su presencia recuperada, recorro las maneras en que se perfila en ellos la otra escritura de una crítica de lo Real. Anudados en torno al estremecimiento subjetivo de quien se dispone a dar cuenta del “otro” en la escritura, en ambos textos atípicos dentro de la productividad teórico-ficcional de la escritora, y atópicos en el marco de lo que podría pensarse como un trabajo de no-ficción, la literatura y el arte se convierten en potentes espacios de lectura para el despliegue de una crítica cultural descolocada y políticamente comprometida en la visibilización de un Real inscrito en la Letra a través de los efectos que supone su inquietud.

Recreating the Womb Space: The Unborn Narrator and the Female Body as a Site of Power Struggle in The Fourth World by Diamela Eltit

Recreating the Womb Space: The Unborn Narrator and the Female Body as a Site of Power Struggle in The Fourth World by Diamela Eltit

Las tensiones entre lo global y lo local en Lumpérica, de Diamela Etit

Lumpérica, de la escritora chilena Diamela Eltit (1983), pone en tensión las relaciones entre lo local y lo global al menos en dos dimensiones. En primer lugar, en el plano temático y político, en el que se juega el problema de la identidad (nacional), del cual participan los contextos globales (económico-capitalistas) y los locales (la dictadura de Pinochet). Éstos delinean ciertas formas de existencia socioeconómicas de la (pos)modernidad que tendrían incidencia sobre las formas de construcción de una identidad local, “chilena” paradójicamente a partir de la priorización de aquellas identidades no canónicas en relación a la nacionalidad: los excluidos y los marginados. Y en segundo lugar, la díada global-local se juega también en el plano teórico y estético, a partir de las elecciones implícitas y las afirmaciones metapoéticas de orden explícito que asdcriben a corrientes estéticas y teóricas postestructuralistas que permiten no sólo un ocultamiento o disimulo del aspecto contextual, sino también una apropiación estética, a partir de ese entre-lugar latinoamericano (Santiago, 1978).

Cuerpo, escritura y biopoder en Vaca Sagrada , de Diamela Eltit

Imaginary communities inscribe the body in concrete semiotic and semantic possibilities, within a system of engendered power relations. In this article, we study the imaginary and symbolic bodily constructions in Vaca Sagrada, novel by Diamela Eltit. Our reading explores embodied subjectivity not only as a literary problem in the novel, but as biopower, a political situation whereby material life itself becomes a specific object of power since Chile´s dictatorship in the 70´s. The old, enlightened “lettered city” is subjected to the transformative potential of the “embodied letter”, revealing a central aspect of Eltit´s aesthetic post dictatorial vision.

La imaginación política de la inmunidad. Del "cuerpo social" a la "comuna del cuerpo"

En este artículo realizamos un análisis de dos textos literarios de Diamela Eltit: «Colonizadas» (2009) e Impuesto a la carne (2010). Para esta tarea, nos apoyamos en los desarrollos teóricos de una serie de autores fundamentales de la filosofía en las últimas décadas, como Georges Canguilhem, Michel Foucault, Donna Haraway o Roberto Esposito. En diálogo, especialmente, con la categoría de «inmunidad» (en tanto que categoría biopolítica) que propone este último, llegamos a la conclusión de que los textos de Eltit detectan las claves de la imaginación política de nuestra época. A partir, primero, de la imagen de un mundo convertido en hospital, en el que el (bio)poder y la (bio)medicina se confunden y ocupan todas las franjas de la vida; y a partir, en segundo lugar, de un conjunto de imágenes corporales, desde los cuerpos enfermos a la «comuna del cuerpo», las narraciones de la escritora chilena ponen en escena, en efecto, una imaginación que podríamos reconocer como la «imaginación política de la inmunidad». La disposición de estas imágenes, no obstante, no solo nos ayuda a entender el modo en que dicha imaginación funcionaría (en tanto que parte de una forma específica de gobierno), sino que también nos ofrece las claves (tal es, al menos, nuestra hipótesis) para cuestionarla y transformarla. El recorrido, si seguimos la lectura de Impuesta a la carne, podría ser el que va de la imagen de un «cuerpo social» inmunizado a la imagen de una «comuna del cuerpo».

Un caso de desmonstrificación: la lógica siamesa como artefacto crítico cultural en El infarto del alma (2010) de Diamela Eltit y Paz Errázuriz

El presente ensayo analiza la categoría cultural “monstruo” como un modo de desarticulación que evidencia la naturalización de los funcionamientos sociales, mediante una representación simbólica a través de la cual se revierte el orden dado. A esta operación estética y cultural de los objetos estéticos la hemos denominado desmonstrificación, asignando esta nueva categoría a aquellas representaciones e intervenciones “monstruosas” que, más que “normar” la diferencia, proponen una mirada crítica. El objeto estético desmonstrificado o portador de la representación e intervención de lo monstruoso funciona como artefacto cultural: como un objeto que, mediante formas heterogéneas, fronterizas, ambiguas, “extrañas”, produce textos que trascienden la noción tradicional del arte, para posicionarse como objetos críticos culturales. En este sentido, la desmonstrificación estética se establece a través de un artefacto cultural que evidencia el funcionamiento de un orden, de los poderes y de la norma. No se trata aquí del cuerpo del monstruo clasificado por la biología, la medicina y/o la ley, sino del artefacto cultural que visibiliza, desnaturaliza y hace delirar los discursos de la biología, la medicina, la política, ley y hasta de la lengua. Para nuestra lectura, nos centraremos en el texto El infarto del alma (2010), de Diamela Eltit y Paz Errázuriz; texto siamés, creado a cuatro manos que pone a dialogar escritura y fotografía desde una posición crítica, con el fin de visibilizar el funcionamiento desmostrificador que dicho texto propone

La literatura entre fragmentos de pérdida y exploraciones autorreferenciales

Se pretende problematizar algunas cuestiones del sentido del lenguaje literario y del estatuto de la ficción. Se tendrán en cuenta una selección de textos de la obra de dos imprescindibles pensadores: Maurice Blanchot y Michel Foucault, además de otros textos críticos de Paul de Man y Walter Benjamin. La intención es partir de estos acercamientos para dar cabida a obras representativas de la literatura hispanoamericana actual, que hacen precisamente de la exploración de la pérdida de la palabra, sentidos de ficción, y una auténtica poética auto-reflexiva sobre el mismo acto de escritura. Presento una selección de relatos de tres escritoras contemporáneas. De Sylvia Molloy (Argentina), Desarticulaciones; de Diamela Eltit (Chile), Padre mío; y de Piedad Bonnett (Colombia), Lo que no tiene nombre.

“Distinguished Ladies” and the Doctrine of Womanhood: Auto-surveillance and Auto-performance in Diamela Eltit’s E. Luminata

This essay reads Diamela Eltit’s E. Luminata as form of auto-performative ‘anti-manual’ which employs a range of autobiographical forms and functions in protest of codes of womanhood published in an actual manual of women’s con-duct authored by Augusto Pinochet’s First Lady and enforced by his regime’s National Secretariat of Women which organized forms of auto-surveillance by which women policed themselves and one another. It argues that if the NSW functioned as a mechanism for the surveillance and discipline of women in Pi-nochet’s police state, Eltit’s text functions as a subversive auto-performance of Chilean womanhood offered in protest against the state censorship of women’s autobiography. The reading demonstrates the ways in which E. Luminata stra-tegically performs Eltit’s own public self-representation of womanhood which, although meant to be impossible, is not unattainable in the regime.
 This article was submitted to the European Journal of Life Writing on October 19th 2015 and published on October 17th 2017.

Monstruosidad posthumana: resistencia diálogica y corporal en Impuesto a la carne de Diamela Eltit

As Ariel Dorfman stated in Imaginación y violencia, Latin America’s violent past has had a big influence on its literature and has shaped its collective imagination. Likewise, the natural fear towards technology expressed in other world literature classics has been affected in Latin America by this turbulent past, full of political and economic experiments. Thus, Latin American literature, instead of imagining the utopic northern Harawayan cyborg, turns to its dialogical strength and its corporeal memory to join posthuman criticism. This article will analyze Diamela Eltit’s novel, Impuesto a la carne, where technology, still conceived as a threatening machine associated with the memory of a violent past, turns the body into an area of conflict, a scientific and technological public space, a biological reminder of a population whose last bastion of privacy has been invaded.

Cartografías quebradas y cuerpos marginales en la narrativa de Diamela Eltit

This paper analyzes three novels by Chilean writer Diamela Eltit: Lumpérica, Los vigilantes and Los trabajadores de la muerte, considering geographical space and the body as the center of power relations and the materiality of the body as a container for a historical violence that attempts to subject it to various forms of normalization. Despite the violence inflicted, this body is also a form of resistance that enshrines, in its own materiality, narrative memory in order to retell the past and criticize the present. The aim is to develop a political interpretation of history through the body in order to interpret the signs of social and mental distress of a society that continually attempts to erase its past.

Beyond Bolaño: The Global Latin American Novel by Héctor Hoyos

Reviewed by: Beyond Bolaño: The Global Latin American Novel by Héctor Hoyos Juliet Lynd Héctor Hoyos. Beyond Bolaño: The Global Latin American Novel. New York: Columbia UP, 2015. ix + 283 pp. Héctor Hoyos's Beyond Bolaño: The Global Latin American Novel brings Latin American novels (in addition to those written by literary superstar Roberto Bolaño) to the forum of world literature and makes a case for Latin Americanism to seriously engage the world literature paradigm. The result is a multifaceted approach to a set of literary texts that allow for critical discussion of globalization, understood here as the manifestation of late capitalism in different locales since 1989—that is, since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. Hoyos's effort to put Bolaño in dialogue with his contemporaries is a valuable contribution to scholarship on world literature and Latin Americanism alike. As the title suggests, Bolaño has become a household name (at least in literary circles), which Hoyos attributes to the Chilean author's ability to theorize the present in novel form. One of Hoyos's principal concerns is the singularity of Bolaño's success, which belies the existence of other Latin American authors who similarly offer insights into the cross-cultural flow of people, ideas, and goods in a world no longer defined by center-periphery models. Rightly criticizing the tendency to take one writer as representative of a region, Hoyos brings a number of talented writers into the conversation: Jorge Volpi, Ignacio Padilla, Chico Buarque, Diamela Eltit, Alberto Fuguet, César Aira, Fernando Vallejo, Homero Aridjis, and Mario Bellatin. He offers sustained close readings of these authors' "global novels"—that is, [End Page 588] "novel[s] that can have a world literary standing" (6)—as texts that reflect and refract distinctly global experiences of the post-1989 world in Chile, Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, and Argentina. The literary corpus Hoyos creates is not culturally derivative; these are novels that determine what the global novel is and can be. Drawing on cultural studies, critical theory, and rhetorical and ideological critique, he scrutinizes each text with and against the grain, each chapter interrogating novelistic representations of a particular discourse or symptom of the post-1989 world. "Nazi Tales from the Americas" examines Latin American takes on the legacy of World War II, including Bolaño's Nazi Literature in America, Volpi's In Search of Klingsor, and Padilla's Shadow Without a Name. Given Latin America's distance from this history, Hoyos sees evidence of how Nazism has become part of a global cultural imaginary and—particularly in the case of Bolaño, who interrogates the Nazi theme more thoroughly than his peers—a broader interrogation of the roots of fascism, which has in fact plagued Latin America. Hoyos reads these forays into the topic (and also Volpi's polemical, if obvious, declaration that literature from Mexico need not be about Mexico) as points of entry into important conversations about divorcing Latin American literature from national frameworks. In "The Cosmopolitics of South-South Escapism," Hoyos quickly departs from the globetrotting theme of Bolaño's work to explore Buarque's Budapeste. Hoyos is certainly critical of the novel's shortcomings: the uninterrogated machismo and individualism of its characters, as well as its apolitical inattention to history, politics, and even language in its unique choice of locales, Brazil and Hungary in the 1990s. Nevertheless, Hoyos not only signals the disappearance of a metropolitan world center in this tale of travel from the former Third World to the former Second but also exploits the critical potential of reading against the grain to show how discourses of globality shape novels and readers and vice versa. "All the World's a Supermarket (And All the Men and Women Merely Shoppers)" utilizes this globally recognizable scenario as a site to interrogate the state of "market-driven transnationalism" (28). Beginning with a reading of Eltit's Mano de obra in relation to the Chilean labor history the novel explicitly evokes, Hoyos examines Eltit's critique of the current lack of solidarity among an exploited labor force. He goes on to read...

Beyong Bolaño: The Global Latin American Novel by Héctor Hoyos

Reviewed by: Beyong Bolaño: The Global Latin American Novel by Héctor Hoyos Sergio Gutiérrez Negrón Hoyos, Héctor. Beyong Bolaño: The Global Latin American Novel. New York: Columbia UP, 2015. 296 pp. To read Bolaño is, unavoidably, to read beyond Bolaño and Héctor Hoyos knows this very well. Beyond Bolaño: The Global Latin American Novel moves through Bolaño so as to go beyond him, to “narratives of the global” embodied in the post-1989 “global Latin American novel,” which conceptualizes and problematizes “globality” from a multiplicity of perspectives. For Hoyos, Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives is not only the internationally best known instance of this novelistic form, but also the ideal point of departure for a greater investigation into what has become a widespread formal disposition of contemporary Latin American literature. Hoyos’s objects of study—penned by a diverse cast of characters that spans from Bolaño to Diamela Eltit, Alberto Fuguet, Mario Bellatin, Fernando Vallejo, César Aira and Chico Buarque—are works that, like Chilean author’s previously mentioned novel, not only represent, but also and more importantly consolidate both the world and Latin America as their horizon and chamber of resonance. For the author, these novels offer a critique of hegemonic ideologies of globalization and, in the best of cases, a paradoxical articulation of the global as a whole that destabilizes and reveals world consciousness. A critical interrogation of the field of “world literature” from the perspective of Latinamericanism frames Hoyos’s study. He understands world literature as a critical movement that attempts to consolidate a transnational canon in the contemporary age of globalization. In this sense, it is an “ism” (“worldliteraturism,” Hoyos calls it), which imagines itself as an organizing principle for literature and literary criticism and seeks to rise above linguistic, national, regional, and genealogical categories. But Hoyos is not interested in simply claiming a world-literary status for Latin American literatures. His engagement with the field of world literature stems from literary works which inscribe themselves in the global and offer “literary representations of the world” that question and problematize the rules which organize the category and its drive towards transnational literary consolidation. These works, he believes, think the experience of globalization and situate themselves beyond the boundaries of national literatures through counterfactual exercises that denaturalize the global and articulate it under the sign of negativity. Moreover, they theorize the global, the “world,” and the status of literature in the world. In order to make a space for these works in the field of world literature, Hoyos proposes a methodology characterized by what he calls “critical hospitality.” This approach proceeds by making the emergent academic fields of “wordliteraturism” and that of Latinamericanism bear upon each other in a contrapuntal fashion. The resulting Latin American-inflected vision of world literature can draw and benefit from what Hoyos sees as Latinamericanism’s long tradition of a praxis of multiple positionalities. A praxis capable of “generating discourse about a complex region, rich in particularities, while also accounting for the commonalities”—a project which mirrors that of world literature and which would not reproduce globalization’s drive to cultural homogenization (10). Hoyos’s Latin Americanist [End Page 204] approach is, of course, explicitly partial, but so are the approaches to world literature that present themselves as disembodied and ecumenical. Through his gesture, Hoyos seeks to counteract the political apathy that he believes characterizes certain hegemonic trends of world literature, politicizing the paradigm and bringing it closer to the texts themselves. That said, Hoyos’s Beyond Bolaño does not entail the performance of its proposal for a Latin Americanist “world-literaturist” criticism per se. Instead, its body chapters are firmly grounded in a regional taxonomy of the global Latin American novel, and proceed by breaking down the genre into five key, but not exhaustive, continental “developments”: the Nazi novel, the novel of South-South escapism, the novel about the supermarket, the novel about the narco, and the “art statement” novel. By studying these formal variations, Hoyos shows how their different authors negotiate, capture, reproduce, counter, affect, or are affected by the ideologies of globalization. More specifically...

Escrituras ilegíveis e comunidade literária

Resumo As escrituras de Héctor Libertella e Diamela Eltit operam como máquinas de corrosão da linguagem, desestabilizando os sentidos cristalizados do literário que remetem aos mandatos de representação do nacional ou continental. Trata-se de escrituras que, ao apelar ao traço singular e único dos idioletos, questionam todo regime de representação e renunciam à nitidez tranquilizadora do comunicável no seio da comunidade. Porém, esses autores também exploram o ensaio como forma discursiva que oferece uma condição de diálogo que permite restabelecer esses vínculos com o comum, sem deixar de problematizá-los. Por meio do ensaio, esses escritores buscam intervir criticamente no debate acerca da representação do latino-americano como variável determinante da literatura. Esse trabalho propõe indagar qual é a relação que se estabelece entre a singularidade expressiva dessas escrituras e o comum que o ensaio convoca.

Heridas abiertas: biopolítica y representación en América Latina ed. by Mabel Moraña and Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado

Reviewed by: Heridas abiertas: biopolítica y representación en América Latina ed. by Mabel Moraña and Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado Rebecca Janzen Moraña, Mabel and Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado, eds. Heridas abiertas: biopolítica y representación en América Latina. Madrid: Iberoamericana / Vervuert, 2014. 304 pp. We recently commemorated the first anniversary of the forced disappearance of 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ School. This small, but well-known, example of the Mexican state’s action against its people in recent years, is a microcosm of the estimated 26, 000 people disappeared in Mexico since the War on Drugs was re-ignited in 2000. It reminds us that such actions have occurred in Latin America since contact. This edited collection, though written before Ayotzinapa, is now more urgent than ever. Its contributions encourage us to reflect on similar countries and the way the effects of biopower are represented in various forms of culture. Heridas abiertas is part of the South by Midwest conference series, whose earlier topics have dealt with affect, intellectuals, culture, and change. Mabel Moraña’s introduction places Agamben, Esposito, Foucault, Hardt, and Negri’s theories of biopolitics in dialogue with Latin American history and culture. Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado’s preface complements Moraña’s thorough survey, problematizes the definition of biopolitics and questions the lack of conversation around these topics in Latin American literature and culture. The first essay in the collection, by Horacio Legrás, then explores the limits of the term, dialogues with various theoretical interventions on the topic and concludes that biopolitics can only be understood as a function of history (38). The collection’s other chapters discuss topics that range from photography and performance to narrative fiction. Oswaldo zavala, for instance, critiques [End Page 169] the conceptualization of Mexico as a failed state. He establishes instead that by rereading narconovels, a genre typically used to justify the position that Mexico has failed, we see that through the War on Drugs Mexico has recovered state power. In this way, his approach to biopolitics and literature adds a new dimension to the sociopolitical study of literature. Another valuable contribution comes from Sergio Villalobos-Ruminott, who suggests that an approach to literature rooted in biopolitics has rich analytical potential. If we were to approach literature in this way, he posits, “la literatura ya no sería el festín de la identidad, sino el refugio para recomenzar una crítica de los procesos de valoración y de fragmentación de la existencia” (62). These two chapters, the most significant in the collection, demonstrate that bringing together biopolitics and Latin American literature leads to new understandings of statehood, subjectivity, and approaches to literary criticism. Other contributions in this collection suggest that biopolitics can advance the identity-based study of literature and culture as they approach topics closely related to biopolitics, such as race, gender and disability. Beatriz González-Stephan, for instance, describes 19th- and early 20th- century calling cards in the Andean region. She argues that these photographs, which highlight typically racialized features, represent the devastating effects of imperial power. Jean Franco’s chapter also examines a biopolitical topic, population control in Puerto Rico, and using women there to test out the first birth control pills. She explains this context as represented by Diamela Eltit’s novel, Impuesto a la carne. She concludes that given the historical situation, and the novel, Puerto Rican women are doubly marginalized, and thus must struggle against intersecting nodes of oppression. Lawrence LaFountain-Stokes’s work also deals with a topic related to Puerto Rico, Erika López’s performances, online presence, and comics. López’s work, we learn, represents poverty in order to counter official discourse on welfare. According to LaFountain-Stokes, it demonstrates the relationship between the United States and Puerto Rico as well as the effects of the welfare system in the United States. Similarly, Susan Antebi uses disability studies to consider the Mexican human genome project and the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly’s advertisements for drugs that can treat diabetes. These fascinating essays only hint at biopolitics, however, and do not bring...

Entrevista a Diamela Eltit: una literatura no consensual. Cuerpo, lugares border y resistencia

Diamela Eltit (1949-). Escritora chilena, cofundadora junto al poeta Raul Zurita del Colectivo Acciones de Arte (CADA). Incursiono en el ambito literario desde los anos 1970, aunque su nombre adquirio notoriedad a principios de la decada de 1980, con la aparicion del libro de ensayos Una milla de cruces sobre el pavimento (1980). Ha publicado numerosas novelas, entre las que se destacan en el inicio de su carrera: Lumperica (1983), Por la Patria (1986), El cuarto mundo (1988) y Los vigilantes (1994). Entre su produccion mas reciente encontramos: Jamas el fuego nunca (2007), Impuesto a la carne (2010) y Fuerzas especiales (2013). Ha obtenido numerosos premios y reconocimientos, como el Premio Iberoamericano de Letras Jose Donoso 2010 y el Premio Altazor 2014, en la categoria narrativa por su ultima novela, Fuerzas especiales . Se desempena ademas, como Distinguished Global Professor de escritura creativa en espanol, en la New York University (NYU), USA. Esta entrevista fue realizada el 2 de mayo de 2014, en ocasion de la visita de la escritora a la Argentina para participar en el encuentro Dialogo de Escritores Latinoamericanos, realizado en la 40 a Feria Internacional del Libro de Buenos Aires. Antes del encuentro, Diamela Eltit se presto, con amabilidad, a la entrevista en un viejo hotel del barrio de Palermo, cafe de por medio. Palabras clave: Diamela Eltit; cuerpo; genero; escritura DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.19137/anclajes-2016-2015

Violence and Bodies under Siege in the Works of Diamela Eltit, Lina Meruane and Fátima Sime

Violence and Bodies under Siege in the Works of Diamela Eltit, Lina Meruane and Fátima Sime

<i>IMPUESTO A LA CARNE</i>: MEMORY OF DISASTER

This article analyzes the narrative dimensions of Diamela Eltit’s Impuesto a la carne. Written as the memory of a failed nation in Chile, product of the authoritarianism that characterized its history since its emancipation, the novel derives into dystopian tale that denounces how political power made it the reason for its establishment. This bad calved nation has captured and with it is still experiencing; however, this nation in ruins still screams from it inside detention. Eltit, with this novel, faces the neoliberal imaginary that made us forget the social conquests, especially of the Chilean women.

Allegorical Specters and the Rhetorics of Mourning in Diamela Eltit's Jamás el fuego nunca

It has been four decades since the military coup d'état in Chile; however, legal and criminal questions regarding the disappeared bodies of Pinochet's regime are still unanswered, not only because the perpetrators remain unpunished, hence, the question of the viability of justice and the proper closure of national trauma are still in suspense, but also because the conditions of death and disappearance are not clear. The search for the disappeared body has turned towards forensic anthropology in order to assist with the identification of remains and the causes of death. In this article, I study Diamela Eltit's novel Jamás el fuego nunca (2008) and argue that her work questions the place of unidentifiable and unlocalizable remains have within the rhetorics of mourning in a post-dictatorial context. I argue, furthermore, that by recurring to the figure of the specter as an allegory of the forcefully disappeared, Eltit is creating a spectral ontology of the remains in order to interpellate the world of the living with regard to the repressed past.

Corpse Photography in Roberto Bolaño's Estrella distante and Cristina Rivera Garza's Nadie me verá llorar

This article considers corpse photography in novels by Bolaño (1996) and Rivera Garza (1999) and argues, following the ideas of Elizabeth Bronfen, that it serves male characters as a technique for the disavowal of two enigmas that permanently threaten the male subject: death and femininity. Parallels are drawn with necropornographic precedents in the novela negra and with contemporary Post-Boom novels by Diamela Eltit and Tomás Eloy Martínez. Artistic practice in the novels is related to the photographic theories of Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes, affirming a profound association between the photographic medium and death, as well as to the Surrealist doll photographs of Hans Bellmer and the work of contemporary corpse photographers Joel-Peter Witkin and Andrés Serrano. Corpse photography is considered as an exemplary manifestation of major trends in twentieth-century art and mass-media culture, as described by theorists such as Néstor García Canclini (‘morbid spectacularity’), Alain Badiou (‘passion for the real’), Hal Foster (‘return of the real’) and Paul Virilio (‘pitiless art’). Corpse photographs are shown to set up a dynamic of approximation and distancing termed ‘t(h)an(a)talization’. The article concludes by arguing both photographic and literary representation, converging at the textual site of the corpse photograph, fail incessantly in their aspiration to apprehend the real.