Ethics and Literature in Chile, Argentina, and Paraguay, 1970-2000: From the Singular to the Specific

211 Pages·2016·1.84 MB·English

by  Carlos M. Amador (auth.)

ETHICS AND LITERATURE IN CHILE,
ARGENTINA, AND PARAGUAY, 1970-2000
From the Singular to the Specific
CARLOS M. AMADOR
Literatures of the Americas
Literatures of the Americas
About the Series
This series seeks to bring forth contemporary critical interventions within
a hemispheric perspective, with an emphasis on perspectives from Latin
America. Books in the series highlight work that explores concerns in lit-
erature in different cultural contexts across historical and geographical
boundaries and also include work on the specifi c Latina/o realities in the
United States. Designed to explore key questions confronting contem-
porary issues of literary and cultural import, Literatures of the Americas is
rooted in traditional approaches to literary criticism but seeks to include
cutting-edge scholarship using theories from postcolonial, critical race,
and ecofeminist approaches.

Series Editor
Norma E. Cantú currently serves as Professor of US Latin@ Studies at
the University of Missouri, Kansas City, USA. She has published widely in
the areas of folklore, literary studies, women’s studies, and border studies.
Her numerous publications include the award-winning novel C anícula:
Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Frontera that chronicles her coming-of-age in
Laredo, Texas. The (co)edited volumes: C hicana Traditions: Continuity
and Change ; Dancing Across Borders: Danzas y Bailes Mexicanos; P aths
to Discovery: Autobiographies of Chicanas with Careers in Mathematics,
Science, and Engineering ; Moctezuma’s Table: Rolando Briseño’s Chicano
Tablescapes ; and Ofrenda: Liliana Wilson’s Art of Dissidence and Dreams.
She is cofounder of CantoMundo, a space for Latin@ poets and a member
of the Macondo Writers Workshop; her poetry has appeared in V andal ,
Prairie Schooner , and Feminist Studies Journal among many other venues.
More information about this series at
http://www.springer.com/series/14819
Carlos   M.   Amador
Ethics and Literature
in Chile, Argentina,
and Paraguay,
1970–2000
From the Singular to the Specifi c
Carlos   M.   Amador
Michigan Technological University
Houghton
Michigan
USA
Literatures of the Americas
ISBN 978-1-137-54871-9 ISBN 978-1-137-54633-3 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-54633-3
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016936408
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P
REFACE
It is 2015 now. More than 32 years have passed since the terminus of
the Falklands War, and the NO! plebiscite that ejected General Augusto
Pinochet Duarte from power has been immortalized in a fi lm, starring
global heartthrob Gael García Bernal.1 Bolivia, once the home of the Criollo
dictator Hugo Bánzer, knows its fi rst indigenous leader Evo Morales of
twentieth- and twenty-fi rst-century Latin American democracy, and is
devoutly a m ovement toward socialism. 2 As of the writing of this preface,
on June 30, 2015, no nation in South America is governed by a military
dictatorship of the bellicose and vampiric variety of the Operación Cóndor
nations.3 Instead, the once most noteworthy dictatorships on the con-
tinent—Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, and Paraguay—either enjoy
governments of the marea rosada —the locally gestated social democratic
response to neoliberalism—or they are governed by democracies that,
1 No, 2012, dir. Pablo Larraín.
2 In 2006, Aymara coca farmer Evo Morales became the fi rst indigenous president in the
history of Bolivia, winning an absolute majority in the election and transforming his
Movimiento al Socialismo–Instrumento Político por la Soberanía de los Pueblos into the undis-
puted majority party of Bolivia. For a detailed and sober history of Morales’ rise to power,
please see Betilde Muñoz-Pogossian’s Electoral Rules and the Transformation of Bolivian
Politics: The Rise of Evo Morales. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, Print.
3 Operación Cóndor names the collective efforts of South American dictatorships working
in conjunction with the CIA and US government to create a regime of cooperative terror and
domestic genocide in the regime. See Dinges (2004) and McSherry (2007) for a developed
history of Condor’s formation and activities.
v
vi PREFACE
despite insuffi ciency, corruption, and the malaise of conciliatory postdicta-
torship politics, are a signifi cant step beyond their authoritarian histories.
No account of a politics is ever suffi cient without an account of eco-
nomics, and despite critical attempts to roll back neoliberalism and market
expansion in the region by Bolivia, Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay, to
name but a few, the tense relationship between neoliberalism as a way
of conducting business—or what Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval call
a way of life4 —and the Latin American state continues apace. Part of
the groundwork for the incursions of neoliberalism was laid during the
period of the dictatorship, most thoroughly with Pinochet’s University of
Chicago-led “Chilean miracle”. But a large majority of the other nations
under the aegis of O peración Condor are still dancing with the neoliber-
alist incursions of previous regimes and the development of progressive
economies that will push away from long-standing situations of inequality
and precariousness.
When I defended the dissertation that makes up a large part of this
book, Argentine General Jorge Videla—the most noteworthy survivor of
the P roceso de reorganización nacional junta—was still alive and impris-
oned for his crimes, having fi nally been convicted on July 5, 2010. Videla
died a few years later, in early May 2013, unrepentant for his crimes,
and still signaling the putative Marxist threat embodied by the Kirchner
regime.5 A bit earlier, in late 2012, Videla’s confession was heard by the
intrepid investigative reporter Ceferino Reato. Its title, D isposición fi nal ,
is one of those curious and dark phrases that cross juridical, military, and
governmental lexicons. From d isposal site , fi nal resting place , or the fi nal
disposition of assets, Videla’s language speaks of the attitude of complete
biopolitical administration and the construction of a disposable enemy
whose remains and corporeal existence are simply registers for the designa-
tion of disposal or utter ejection. Those subjects submitted to the logic of
disposición fi nal —a logic that goes beyond the logic of bare life into the
administration of subjects submitted to a t otal thanatopolitics —one where
disposal and d isposition of body reframes the human being as a total s ubject.
For Videla, the logic of fi nal disposition is the consequence of a process
of framing the enemy as a subject. The insurgent marks the proper name of
a subject that confi gures the disposición fi nal of the proceso junta itself.
4 See Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval’s The New Way of the World: On Neoliberal Society,
New York Verso, 2014, Print.
5 Reato, Ceferino. “Videla: La Confesión.” La nación Print. Accessed: June 30, 2015.
PREFACE vii
The linkages between violent subjectifi zation, or the creation of individual
subjects, to be termed i ndividuation in the present project, as processes
of individuation rarely mark the difference between individual subjects
qua singular members of the human species versus collective enunciations
of the individual. In the case of the examples we shall study in this book,
individuation is the process that undergirds and stabilizes the semiotic and
identitarian claims for/of violence.
It was precisely at this point that I began to imagine an interpretation
of the cultural and political discussions of the dictatorship in a more pro-
foundly p olitical dimension, one more allied with the political theology
of Carl Schmitt, or the work on agonisms and antagonisms of Chantal
Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau. Part of this inspiration came from the truth
of the insuffi ciencies of Marxist critiques of dictatorship with regard to
the rhetorics of individuation deployed by the regimes themselves or cri-
tiqued by artists, writers, and other intellectuals. The dictatorships and
their critics, in my estimation, all coincide on one point—that there is a
foundational claim for the logic of individuation, and that politics itself
is not simply the product of the capitalist totality, but its most primary
forms—friend/enemy, singular world, or the open future name—speak to
confi gurations of logic enacted through rhetoric, ritual, and other forms
of material symbolic culture that help ground a s lightly separate sphere for
the political from political economy.
Part of the motivation behind this search was an unwillingness to
accept the facile representation of South America’s “dictatorship” era as a
preparatory phase for neoliberal transition or simply as the capital-favoring
moves of the military elites to protect their countries for Catholicism and
market-based economic policies. In Argentina’s case, for instance, scholars
from Hugo Vezzetti to Jonathan Brown articulate how the junta’s coup
d’état garnered extraordinary popular support for being a stabilizing force
after decades of post-Perón instability and economic stagnation.
This is not to suggest that the political economies of the 1970s dic-
tatorships—as well as their postdictatorship versions—are not exemplars
of the development of a global capitalist order that would develop into
modern neoliberalism. In the case of Brazil (a nation that lies outside
of the purview of this text, but whose unique case of a putative “soft
dictatorship” I intend to take up in a further piece), only a year after the
1964 coup would the military government declare its wish to strengthen
ties with the IMF and World Bank, and pursue an alignment with the
USA. In order to pursue the government’s wish of industrialization and
viii PREFACE
a diminished reliance on import-substitution and commodity exports, a
policy of neoliberal-s tyle debt-taking would become the law of the land a
decade before the term n eoliberalism would fi nd new life with the Pinochet
regime.6
Logics of modernity and modernization, pressures assumed in the Cold
War era, and the wish by local and international elites for a governmentality
that would ensure stability—all these were factors that contributed to the
development and perpetuation of dictatorships. And in the case of cultural
critics or witnesses of the era, it serves as substance for cultural refl ection,
if not as the very substrate of textual and artistic engagement with the
regimes. There is a nearly inexhaustible web of connections between the
strengthening and expansion of capitalism with the regimes themselves.
But this is not the entire story. Part of the struggle for understanding
the historical consequences and developmental aspects of Southern Cone
dictatorship is to elaborate how what Ernesto Laclau named t he rhetorical
foundations of society operate in order to instantiate and persuade political
action, and furthermore, how the logic of language and form create the
very conditions for politics.
Here then is where Peter Hallward’s book A bsolutely Postcolonial:
Writing toward the Singular and the Specifi c (2004) became for me more
than just a book on postcolonial literature and theory, but the possibil-
ity for a clear-eyed assessment of the logics of intersubjectivization oper-
ant within the historical moments I was choosing to analyze. Early on
in my research on this fractious time in Southern Cone cultural produc-
tion and political life, I recognized that the enemy/friend distinction of
the political that forms the antagonistic core of all political situations was
itself a politics of i ndividuation —the very axis of the capability to form
the subject itself—whether it be decentered or singular. In the era of the
challenge to the subject, I recognized that theories of cultural produc-
tion often began i n media res with regard to subjectivization. Theories
of the subject emerging from readings of European philosophy seem to
forget that it is material processes that form the subject. G overnmentality ,
as Foucault argues, bears the mark of the epistemic possibilities of forming
community and subjective possibility.
In short, what I wanted from this book was a way of developing a criti-
cal rhetoric of individuation capable of contributing something to Latin
6 See Juan Gabriel Valdes’ Pinochet’s Economists, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2008, Print.
PREFACE ix
Americanist cultural criticism. Moving toward an explicit engagement
with Left communism and Anarchist communism with an analysis of the
historical logics of individuation is only achievable if there is no abandon-
ment of some of the basic praxiological tools of materialist historiography:
communist critique of power structures and a fi rm commitment to revolu-
tionary practice—either in the weakened form of reading or the vigorous
form of mass resistance or institutional political change. Take the fi gure of
Roberto Bolaño’s e xile , for instance. Osvaldo Zavala signals that Bolaño’s
fi gure is a committed part of a form of imagination that signals the essen-
tially p olitical , and specifi c nature of exile:
El conjunto de la producción literaria de todos los países occidentales
sumaría desde esta visión una identidad cultural compartida por la comuni-
dad intelectual y en particular por ciudadanos multiculturales como Bolaño,
que transita de una tradición a otra sin las limitaciones del nacionalismo
y estableciendo, en cambio, diálogos horizontales con interlocutores que
reducen su condición de extranjero a una mera circunstancia política.
(Zavala 649)
The collection of literary production from western countries forms in this
vision, a cultural identity shared by the intellectual community, and in par-
ticular by multicultural citizens like Bolaño, who travels from one tradition
to another without the limitations of nationalism, instead establishing hori-
zontal dialogues with interlocutors who reduce their condition of foreign-
ness to a mere political circumstance.
The “mera circunstancia política” (mere political circumstance) is precisely
the s pecifi c ethics and logic of the writer as exile, to begin using Hallward’s
terminology.
Bolaño’s work goes beyond the politics of translatability and untrans-
latability into a global vision of writing as a specifi c condition of exile
permitting a new form of literary ethics. With the specifi c, questions of
literary solidarity emerge before the act of reading with the act of acknowl-
edgment and articulation of a conjunctural identity of the specifi c. The
specifi c ’s open signature and its development of an identity with both
trace and openness reveals the possibility of an ethical and political iden-
tity that grounds political possibility in an era of diminished subjective
possibility. This is especially critical, given that one of the most powerful
concerns for cultural theory is the formation of communities and collec-
tives where ethical and political aspirations operate effectively, where the
specifi c opening of individuation is the fi rst step toward a genuinely ethical