Etica Literatura

ETHICS AND LITERATURE IN CHILE,
ARGENTINA, AND PARAGUAY, 1970-2000

From the Singular to the Specific
CARLOS M. AMADOR
Literatures of the Americas
About theSeries
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erature in different cultural contexts across historical and geographical
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the University of Missouri, Kansas City, USA.She has published widely in
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of the Macondo Writers Workshop; her poetry has appeared in Vandal,
Prairie Schooner, and Feminist Studies Journal among many other venues.
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CarlosM.Amador
Ethics and Literature

in Chile, Argentina,
and Paraguay,
19702000
From the Singular to the Specific
CarlosM.Amador
Michigan Technological University
Houghton
Michigan
USA
ISBN 978-1-137-54871-9 ISBN 978-1-137-54633-3 (eBook)

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-54633-3
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PREFACE
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 film, starring
global heartthrob Gael Garca Bernal.1 Bolivia, once the home of the Criollo
dictator Hugo Bnzer, knows its first indigenous leader Evo Morales of
twentieth- and twenty-first-century Latin American democracy, and is
devoutly a movement 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 Operacin Cndor
nations.3 Instead, the once most noteworthy dictatorships on the con-
tinentArgentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, and Paraguayeither enjoy
governments of the marea rosadathe locally gestated social democratic
response to neoliberalismor they are governed by democracies that,
1
No, 2012, dir. Pablo Larran.
2
In 2006, Aymara coca farmer Evo Morales became the first indigenous president in the
history of Bolivia, winning an absolute majority in the election and transforming his
Movimiento al SocialismoInstrumento Poltico por la Soberana 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 Muoz-Pogossians Electoral Rules and the Transformation of Bolivian
Politics: The Rise of Evo Morales. NewYork: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, Print.
3
Operacin Cndor 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 Condors formation and activities.
v
vi PREFACE
despite insufficiency, corruption, and the malaise of conciliatory postdicta-

torship politics, are a significant step beyond their authoritarian histories.
No account of a politics is ever sufficient 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 businessor what Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval call
a way of life4and 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 Pinochets University of
Chicago-led Chilean miracle. But a large majority of the other nations
under the aegis of Operacin 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 Videlathe most noteworthy survivor of
the Proceso de reorganizacin nacional juntawas still alive and impris-
oned for his crimes, having finally 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 Abit earlier, in late 2012, Videlas confession was heard by the
intrepid investigative reporter Ceferino Reato. Its title, Disposicin final,
is one of those curious and dark phrases that cross juridical, military, and
governmental lexicons. From disposal site, final resting place, or the final
disposition of assets, Videlas 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
disposicin finala logic that goes beyond the logic of bare life into the
administration of subjects submitted to a total thanatopoliticsone where
disposal and disposition of body reframes the human being as a total subject.
For Videla, the logic of final disposition is the consequence of a process
of framing the enemy as a subject. The insurgent marks the proper name of
a subject that configures the disposicin final of the proceso junta itself.
4
See Pierre Dardot and Christian Lavals The New Way of the World: On Neoliberal Society,
NewYork Verso, 2014, Print.
5
Reato, Ceferino. Videla: La Confesin. La nacin Print. Accessed: June 30, 2015.
PREFACE vii
The linkages between violent subjectifization, or the creation of individual

subjects, to be termed individuation 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 political 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 insufficiencies 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 pointthat 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
formsfriend/enemy, singular world, or the open future namespeak to
configurations of logic enacted through rhetoric, ritual, and other forms
of material symbolic culture that help ground a slightly 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 Americas 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 Argentinas case, for instance, scholars
from Hugo Vezzetti to Jonathan Brown articulate how the juntas coup
dtat garnered extraordinary popular support for being a stabilizing force
after decades of post-Pern instability and economic stagnation.
This is not to suggest that the political economies of the 1970s dic-
tatorshipsas well as their postdictatorship versionsare 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 Iintend 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 governments wish of industrialization and
viii PREFACE
a diminished reliance on import-substitution and commodity exports, a

policy of neoliberal-style debt-taking would become the law of the land a
decade before the term neoliberalism would find 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 stabilityall 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 reflection,
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 the 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 Hallwards book Absolutely Postcolonial:
Writing toward the Singular and the Specific (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 individuationthe very axis of the capability to form
the subject itselfwhether it be decentered or singular. In the era of the
challenge to the subject, I recognized that theories of cultural produc-
tion often began in 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. Governmentality,
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 Pinochets 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 firm commitment to revolu-
tionary practiceeither in the weakened form of reading or the vigorous
form of mass resistance or institutional political change. Take the figure of
Roberto Bolaos exile, for instance. Osvaldo Zavala signals that Bolaos
figure is a committed part of a form of imagination that signals the essen-
tially political, and specific nature of exile:
El conjunto de la produccin literaria de todos los pases occidentales

sumara desde esta visin una identidad cultural compartida por la comuni-
dad intelectual y en particular por ciudadanos multiculturales como Bolao,
que transita de una tradicin a otra sin las limitaciones del nacionalismo
y estableciendo, en cambio, dilogos horizontales con interlocutores que
reducen su condicin de extranjero a una mera circunstancia poltica.
(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 Bolao, 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 poltica (mere political circumstance) is precisely

the specific ethics and logic of the writer as exile, to begin using Hallwards
terminology.
Bolaos work goes beyond the politics of translatability and untrans-
latability into a global vision of writing as a specific condition of exile
permitting a new form of literary ethics. With the specific, questions of
literary solidarity emerge before the act of reading with the act of acknowl-
edgment and articulation of a conjunctural identity of the specific. The
specifics 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
specific opening of individuation is the first step toward a genuinely ethical
x PREFACE
politics, especially where it concerns the literary function of modeling pos-

sibilities for action, affect, and thought.
Hallwards three modes of individuation/differentiationthe singular,
the specific, and the specifiedrepresent the development of a problem-
atic that cannot be avoided within cultural theory or political analysis. As
it stands, we cannot, even in the figure of the subject who abandons the
political or cultural sphere, be extricated from the logic of individuation.
To extend that observation as a tool for cultural studies, I elaborate a
study that situates the ethical and the political sphere in a realm of genuine
accountability to a reading of differentiation that exposes the knot that ties
all forms of political and philosophical discourse to how relationality itself
is formed between subjects.
READINGS OFTHESINGULAR
In a region famous for novels of dictatorships and dictators, Augusto
Roa Bastos 1973 novel Yo, el Supremo stands as a monument to the
rhetorical power of the novel to frame the notion of the singular as an
auto-immanent and self-consuming gesture. The novel stands, I argue,
as what Gabriele Schwab titles an imaginary ethnography that represents
through metonymic replacement the self-consuming totality of indi-
viduation at work in the concept of the singular. Otherness is totally
subsumed within the positionality of Doctor Jos Gaspar Rodrguez de
Francia, el Supremo: Paraguays nineteenth-century dictator who closed
the nations borders to the outside world, reigning over an economically
prosperous but completely isolated nation through dictatorial fiat. What
the novel explores, and I daresay in ways exceeding its cohorts in the
genre,7 is the extraordinary analysis of how Paraguayan social individua-
tion collapses through the linguistic process of el Supremo. Put another
way, the very condition of possibility of subjectivization is readable
exclusively through the first-person enunciations of de Francia, whose
power over language and meaning seem to make the very cartography of
otherness an epiphenomenon.
No novel better elaborates the modality of the singular nor makes
clearer the dynamics of how dictatorial discourse can, in its most extreme
7
See John King, (2005), The Boom of the Latin American Novel, in Kristal, Efran, The
Cambridge Companion to the Latin American Novel, NewYork: Cambridge University Press,
pp.5980.
PREFACE xi
iteration, perpetuate the utter collapse of meaning and relationality as a

political reality. Roa Bastos famed novel exceeds its allegorical dimension
by structuring de Francia regime as the very excession of communication
by a dictatorship for which all communicability and subjectivity cannot
but emerge from itself. The book explores the ways in which singular
logics of differentiation bring into being a kind of total dictatorship or
nonrelational politics, illustrating the critical importance of intersubjective
modalities of expression for ethical and political thought.
THE SPECIFIED ONES

It is not surprising to observe the way in which the specified operates
with respect to political violence. If we take but one articulation of the
specifiedthat of the naming of a compliance of actors with a presumed
nature, and the consequent supervision of the relative authenticity of this
compliance (Hallward 40), then the specified as a philosophical descrip-
tion elucidates the condition of possibility for the friend/enemy distinc-
tion in politics.
As I elaborate later in the book, the specified must be understood as
another basic modality for intersubjectivity that makes the process of dif-
ferentiation and individuation the essential process underlying political
and ethical practice.
With this heuristic in place, we can expand our understanding of the
military dictatorships of the Southern Cone united under the aegis of the
battle against insurgency, while the relation between enemy and friend
was drawn by the genocidal actions of the states. The regimes were rooted
in a culture of domestic fear and the vampiric practice of domestic geno-
cide in the very being of relationality itself, bringing into being a logic of
becoming and recognition that evacuated the field of the political from
any ethical possibility untied to murder and fear. State terrorism across the
Southern Cone was woven into the tapestry of a political logic that united
aspects of the singular and the specified. It is one where the apparatus of
genocide would develop a psychic and affective order, emerging from the
undergirding logics of individuation, that became the spiritual and psychic
architecture for an entire generation of murderers, politicians, and sympa-
thizers with the unbridled right-wing terror.
In this projects introduction, I develop an account of a Hallwardian
notion of individuation elaborating its efficacy and suitability for literary
and cultural analysis. In a sense, I launch a move beyond the traditional
xii PREFACE
theoretical frameworks of cultural studies, which, for the most part,

attempts to analyze culture either from the position of Marxist ideas
implicated with the critique of totality, or from the vantage point of
anthropological understandings of cultural products that often sub-
stitute the Marxist notion of a totality for the universal categories of
human lifeworlds. My argument suggests that there is still room for a
philosophical exploration of logics of individuation not strictly contin-
gent upon the relationship between capitalist accumulation and political
institutions or a purely historicist evaluation of the period. Historicisms
weakness, after all, lies in imposing a view upon philosophical notions
that idealizes the role of historical events without evaluating some of the
basic philosophical structures that might render these selfsame notions
thinkable. Arguments from the position of totality are much more suit-
able, given their developed and rigorous study of forms of knowing,
capitalist accumulation, and cultural genres, as is the case with Fredric
Jamesons work.
That notwithstanding, I have elected to focus on logics of individua-
tion and differentiation to develop a philosophical reading of Southern
Cone writing and expression during the period. A rigorous treatment
of the expression during the era of dictatorshipwhether it be in the
dynamic form of the novel in the expression during the era of dictatorship
or whether it be in the dynamic form of the novel in Yo, el Supremo or
Diamela Eltits Lumprica, or in the unpitiable lament of Adolfo Scilingo
in El Vuelopursues a line of critique that allows for the dynamic ten-
sions and flow of ideology, linguistic expression, and the ethical within the
political to register the individual/collective relations that are the reality
and the promise of politics in either a real or a critical mode. Following
both Peter Hallward and Alain Badiou, I assert that there cannot be any
ethics that is not first a structure of determination between the individual
subject and the collective moment.
There is no sense of nominalism in either my work or Hallwards as,
simply put, the question as he outlines it is not one of asserting the truth of
universals or particulars, but rather, as Simon Critchley writes with regard
to Levinas, we need a metaphysics of the ethical. We recall, then, the basic
structure of the relations between the singular, specific, and specified: the
singular is nonrelational, the specific is openly and indifferently relational,
and the specified is rigidly relational to an other, be it a notion, people, or
other distinct alterity. Relationally, the structure of a Hallwardian reading
allows for a deepening of how difference and individual subjectivity are
PREFACE xiii
woven into a text, and how the decisions involved in reading and writing
bear the traces of this.
CHAPTER BREAKDOWN
In the Introduction, I illustrate the overall theoretical structure of the
book, highlighting the way in which the text departs from both the stan-
dard reading of Latin Americanist Cultural Studies and deconstructionist
influenced thought, focusing upon the hope for an original contribution
to Southern Cone literary studies. My contribution seeks to understand
how cultural products such as novels, intellectual debates, essays, and con-
fessional texts denote neither primary nor secondary, but rather synthe-
size the immanent logic of differentation within expression itself. In other
words, pace deconstruction, if only for a moment, there is an affirma-
tive relation of either singularity, specifiedness, or specificity at the heart
of the production of meaning. For Hallward and myself, the structure
of individuation or the production of differentiation is the crucial philo-
sophical point allowing for a powerful exegesis of the relationship between
verbal and written expression and the content of the community it both
addresses and attempts to bring into being. Hallwards method attempts
to produce a clear method for the evaluation of critical attitudes toward
difference and cultural practice. As Hallward writes: this interpretation
will allow, I think, for a relatively precise description of such discourse in
terms that acknowledge or even foreground its resistance to distinctly spe-
cific understandings of individuality and difference (Hallward xiv). And
since a hallmark of this text is to support literature and cultural production
that is specific and open to the possibility of an ethics, then it is critical to
analyze in depth the dynamics of individuality and difference as the very
center of ethics.
Chapters 2 and 3 elaborate this method through a developed reading
of two of contemporary Chilean intellectual lifes most important happen-
ings: the decades long debate between philosopher Willy Thayer and cul-
tural critic Nelly Richard concerning the political and philosophical legacy
of the escena de avanzada during and after the era of the dictatorship. In
a sense, these chapters are the centerpiece of the book, as they interpret a
debate that has never truly abated, as both Richard and Thayer continue
to write and work actively, returning to some of the most important details
of their debates in later works. As recently as 2014, with Sergio Villalobos-
Ruminotts seminal book, Soberanas en suspenso: Imaginacin y violencia
xiv PREFACE
en Amrica Latina, the Richard/Thayer dialogue continues its relevance

as a critical touchstone for the cultural politics of both the dictatorship era
and the transition to democracy. It can be easily said that Villalobos book
renews interest in the debate and gives the dialogue the added dimension
of revealing essential interactions with the development of neoliberalism
in Chile.8 Moreover, as Villalobos argues, the concertacion administrations
continue the progress of the suspension of sovereignty formed by the
forward momentum of neoliberalism, while the dream of both cultural
critics is the mediation of a new form of this suspension that opens up
the possibility for a political thought without recapitulating the politi-
cal agreements that effectively reproduce the Pinochet eras cultural and
economic policies, if only in a mediated and debilitated fashion. Alongside
readings of Ral Zurita and Diamela Eltits work, the Richard/Thayer
dialogue forms the matrix of a dispute over logics of individuation that is
essential to comprehending the role and reality of social theory in the era
of neoliberalism.
Chapter 4 explores one of the most powerful and well-known, indeed
canonical, novels of the Latin American boom period: Augusto Roa
Bastos Yo, el Supremo (1973) recounts the extreme tyranny and hegemony
of Paraguays nineteenth-century dictator, Doctor Gspar Rodrguez de
Francia. De Francia ruled the nation through a series of edicts and controls
over the linguistic and intellectual life of everyday citizens and the power-
ful alike, all organized around the singular status of his name. Foreign visi-
tors to the nation would find themselves marooned in the country due to
el Supremos draconian regulations over ingress and egress, and all aspects
of bureaucracy and governmentality were ordered by the Doctor himself.
De Francias regime is almost a living satire of dictatorship inasmuch as his
overall control over communication and the quotidian affairs of his nation
seem like hyperbole. And indeed, the novel denies itself no genre or liter-
ary conceit in its quest to establish for its key figure a kind of embarrass-
ment of textual richness.
This excess of literary potential has led critics across the decades since
its publication to comment on the novel as an almost postmodern affair
where the polysemic nature of the textual work avers a deconstructive
vision of the novel that is almost liberatory. Many of these readings fail
to remember that there is almost onto-theological singularity to all of
the differing vocalizations in the novelthe voices in it are all singular
8
I will discuss this aspect later in Chaps. 3 and 4.
PREFACE xv
emissions of the Doctors voice. I argue that, in a specific allegorical range,

Roa Bastos attempts to write the novel of pure dictatorial singularity and
exemplifies a singular individuation and differentiation matrix. The canon
of Latin American literature and the subgenre of the dictator novel achieve
in Yo, el Supremo an exemplification of the mode of differentiation that
restructures the very conditions for the literary and political event. The
singular as the expression of totality itself, as Hallward puts it, forms
the contours and structures of a discourse where relation utterly relates
only to itself. Any linguistic and semantic possibility forms exclusively its
self-completion.
As an allegory of the Alfredo Stroessner regime, then, Yo, el Supremo
deftly exceeds any mimetic equivalence with the Paraguay of the novels
writing through the strong style of mapping of all singular discursive
emanations. There is no alterity to be seen that is not formed of the very
self-relationality of de Francia to himself. I show how a singular mode
of differentation always lies under the surface of the dictatorial govern-
mental form.
Chapter 5 investigates the confessions of naval captain Adolfo Scilingo,
who personally executed nearly 30 political prisoners, and that of General
Videla, the de facto leader of the Proceso de reorganizacin nacional, the
junta behind the Dirty War period of Argentine history. These confessional
texts are critical examples of the logic of the specified and the political and
ethical emergences that accompany this modality of subjectivization, espe-
cially with respect to a specified that is steeped in the practice of violence.
With Scilingos confession to journalist Horacio Verbitsky in the book El
vuelo (The Flight), we have the narrative of a murderer struggling to under-
stand how the logic of his political enmity could have been so easily broken
down, even in the face of the transition to democracy. After the transition
to democracy, the upper echelon of the military dictatorship refused to
acknowledge the systematic program of domestic genocide against political
insurgency, both real and imagined. This denial causes Scilingo to question
his actions and confess them to the leftist journalist Horacio Verbitsky.
I read this event as the destruction of the ethico-political makeup of
the specified enemy-friend relationship, and suggest this as a historical and
theoretical heuristic for understanding how authoritarian political situa-
tions require a particular type of logic of differentiation in order to sub-
stantiate and strengthen their political claims. This purchase on the social
landscape goes well beyond the Schmittian enemy-friend distinction as the
specified is written as the relation of alterity itself.
xvi PREFACE
Chapter 6 investigates the writing of Bolao as a model for the spe-

cific ethical condition of individuation and the underwriting of an ethics
that opens up the participatory frame for collective work and recognition
of intersubjectivity that models an ethics for future cultural and politi-
cal practice. In recent years, Bolaos work has become the model for a
transnational Latin American mode of literary practice and thought that
has invigorated Spanish-language criticism and literature in translation.
An explosion of work around Bolaos oeuvre explores everything from
Bolao as a historical novelist to his work as an heir apparent to Jorge
Luis Borges. Attention to his small but fruitful production of essays has
outlined how Bolaos vision of the exile or nomad rewrites global literary
history along the vectors of a world-literary practice that prefigures some
of the current trends in vogue in world literatures.
But more important than this added emphasis on the literary as a
global, nomadic practice that unites Latin American literary tastes and
practices with a world of literary progenitors and interlocutors is the struc-
ture of intersubjective differentiation that affirms Bolaos theorization
of the nomad as the prime ethical figure. I argue that any ethical, and by
extension political, configuration must be formed from the unstable des-
ignation of the specific identity: an identity that seeks to unite all subjects
under the barest designation that can never be fully contained or fore-
closed upon itself.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Any fault in this book is, of course, to be solely attributed to me. However,
any success gained is exclusively the fruit of the collaborative effort that
my interlocutors shared with me.
Katherine Arens work on this book is incalculable and her influence on
my thought and attitudes continue to mark my thinking to this day. She
has saved countless students from their own excesses, and she did no dif-
ferently with me. Her generosity and brilliance are certainly dulled by my
translation, but I continue to benefit from them daily.
Luis Crcamo-Huechantes labors on the original drafts and the train-
ing of his refined and precise mind are no doubt obscured by my writing,
but the presence of his thought is everywhere in this text.
Hctor Domnguez-Ruvalcabas tireless pushing and loving challenges
of my theoretical ideas tempered any excess that I might have had, and
have since altered for the best many of my notions on individuation and
intersubjectivity. The exigencies of life and the profession are a poor excuse
for omissions, but I stand behind the fact that many ideas left out of the
final version will be taken up in other works in the future.
Csar Salgado, Arturo Arias, and Joe Straubhaar were deft readers, and
intellectual fellow travelers whom I am pleased to now call friends and
colleagues. Jill Robbins, Janet Swaffar, and Jossianna Arroyo-Martnez
helped make my time at the University of Texas at Austin, truly idyllic.
The spirit of work and dialogue is something that I hope is conveyed to
even the most ungenerous of readers.
xvii
xviii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My friends James Staig Limidoro, Sam Cannon, Dorian Lee Jackson,

Meg Dowdy, Ingrid Robyn, and Jason Roberts all appear in this book in
refracted ways. Thank you all for your presence in my life.
Lastly, my family is the taproot of every intellectual labor that I real-
ize. Elizabeth, Keating, and Ronan: thank you for your love and support.
You are my reasons. To the Gbel family: you are better than I deserve.
Thank you for truly embodying an ethics of kindness and love. This world
is immeasurably richer with you in it.
Again, all mistakes are my own.
CONTENTS
1 Introduction: Reading Ethics andLogics

ofIndividuation intheSouthern Cone 1
Politics asEvents: Languages and
Logics ofIndividuation 5
Ethics, Memory, andReconciliation in
theEvents oftheSouthern Cone 14
The Field ofWriting asanEthics oftheEvent 17
References 19
2 Theorizing Art inChile During Dictatorship:

TheConditions fortheSingular andtheSpecific
inCultural Debate 21
Opposing Pinochets Regime ofCensorship
Through Signification 23
Avanzada andtheSpecific Ethics oftheAvant-Garde 33
Lumprica andCorporeality, Biopolitical Rejection,
andtheIncarnation oftheAllegorical 36
References 40
3 The Cultural Politics oftheSingular andtheSpecific:

Chile, Avant-Garde Art, andTheBody 41
Willy Thayers Problematic Singular 43
The Body asSpecific Discourse: Nelly Richard anda
New Analysis ofResistance 57
xix
xx CONTENTS
Lumprica andtheBody: Some Final Implications 66

Suspensions ofSovereignty: TheContinuity oftheSingular 70
References 75
4 Yo, el Supremo astheSingular 77

Yo, el Supremo 78
Archive, Myth, andRepresentation 82
Conclusion 94
References 97
5 The Scilingo Effect andtheSpecified 99

The Specified andPolitics 100
Medio siglo de proclamas militares: TheEra Begins 107
El vuelo andtheScilingo Effect 114
A History ofViolence 122
Post-Junta Genres 130
La disposicin final: Videlas Voice 134
Justifying War: TheSpecified asBellic Subjectivity 139
Reconciling Scilingo andVidela 142
Conclusion 143
References 144
6 Roberto Bolaos Specific Exiles 145

Working Toward theSpecific: What theNomad and
Bolao Can Teach Us About Politics andBeing 149
Theories ofExile Writing 152
Bolaos Vision ofExile, or Why WeHave Always Been Nomads 161
The Nomad asFigure oftheSpecific 164
Toward aConclusion: ARedefinition ofLatin
American Writing 168
References 173
7 Conclusion 175
Bibliography 183
Index 191
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Reading Ethics andLogics

ofIndividuation intheSouthern Cone
Although there is no precise date or moment of encounter for an ethical

turn in Latin Americanism, a large number of books have come out
attempting to read how ethics operates in the literary and cultural field
in Latin America. Overall across the academic landscape, ethics has
taken on newfound importance in an era where large-scale conflicts with
neoliberalism no longer seem to have the affective attraction they once
had. Capitalism as neoliberalisms greatest success might be the foreclosure
of imagination about new projects envisioning its destruction, especially in
light of the academic/intellectual division of labor that I have identified as
a problem in understanding the nations of the Global South.
The link between politics and ethics (political and narrative alike) that
I make here is not mine alone. In a recent text, The Ethics of Latin American
Literary Criticism (2007), Erin Graff Zivin signals how important the
notion of ethics has become, but I believe that, overall, the approach
I outline here constitutes a call to a new generation of work, applying a new
optic that makes ethics a part of available cultural signification and subjects
consciousness of it, rather than a project of absolutes or contradictions.
I have focused my attention on Peter Hallwards work because his
notion of a logic of individuation and relationality is an emergent form of
analysis that integrates well into the concerns and theoretical productions
elaborated by some of the most significant Latin American thinkers of the
last few decades. Hallwards work focuses on going beyond the regional
The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 1

C.M. Amador, Ethics and Literature in Chile, Argentina, and
Paraguay, 19702000, DOI10.1057/978-1-137-54633-3_1
2 C.M. AMADOR
and national distinctions implicit in theoretical models and instead inter-

rogates the basic intersubjective structure they assert.
If, for instance, we take Antonio Cornejo Polars notion of heteroge-
neity, it is possible to see how he reads the precise sociohistorical details
of the constant tension between the orality of the precolonial indigenous
cultures and the textuality and repression of the colonial apparatus, a
tension which emerges as a distinct conflict between the specifying logic of
Spanish textuality and the specific, situated but transcontinental orality of
the indigenous societies. Cornejo Polars work situates the historical con-
sequences, at least partially, as a debate concerning the clash of intersubjec-
tive frames of indigenous and European colonizers: el sujeto, individual o
colectivo, no se construye en y para s; se hace casi literalmente, en relacin
con otros sujetos, pero tambin (y decisivamente) por y en relacin con el
mundo (The subject, individual or collective, is not constituted by and
for itself; it is done almost literally in relation with other subjects, but also
(and decisively) by and in relation with the world) (Cornejo Polar 15).
This statement illustrates how fundamentally a logic of individuation
operates as the intersubjective substrate for any ideological project. Indeed,
I would assert that part of the central force of Hallwards work is how it
opens up a different view of evaluation for cultural analysis. As we can see
in the aforementioned quotation by Cornejo Polar, the colonial apparatus
countered the oral tradition as one way to specifiy their project and trans-
form the western hemisphere into a zone of wealth extraction and racial-
ized hegemony. Colonial modernity carried with it the actual project of
specifying, directed against the wealth of difference that the Spanish colo-
nists encountered among the cultures of the western hemisphere. Looking
at this project through Hallwards account, it is possible to imagine the
essential intersubjective quality of a cultural project in terms of the specific
itself. Hallwards work critiques the implicit intersubjective formations of
some of the most canonical versions of postcolonial theory. And it can be
extended to investigate and situate rhetorics of intersubjective relation, as
well. Each of these forms of meaning, in turn, produces ethical and political
consequences in the form of structuring possible actions between subjects.
By examining critical texts through Hallwards work on relationality,
I assert that an analysis of the implicit possibilities for ethics and politics is
more visible, as a theory of relationality organizes intersubjective relations
discursively.
Part of the motivating factor behind the turn to ethics has again been
the now regular use of Derridean thinking as a baseline for investigation
within the humanities, an innovation of the millennium by scholars of
READING ETHICS AND LOGICS OF INDIVIDUATION IN SOUTHERN CONE 3
western literatures and memory culture. Derridas challenge to the signify-

ing fieldhis early work on deconstructionand some of his later work
on the nature of cosmopolitanism, the neighbor, and the politics of friend-
ship, remain vital to the academic field for situating how nation, proxim-
ity, and friendship work in Latin American discourse.1 Among some of
the most important critics in the transnational field of Latin American
studies today, deconstructive thinking ranks as the point of departure for
a thorough-going investigation on the ethical in literature and cultural
studies.
The problem with this type of critique through opposition, as I have
already noted, is its point of origin in older Marxist dialectics or new think-
ing about the Other of criticism (including subaltern studies): what Derrida
calls the ethical relationshipa nonviolent relationship to the infinite as
infinitely other, to the Otheras the only one capable of opening the
space of transcendence and of liberating metaphysics (Derrida 83).
Beyond Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, in particular, has been instru-
mental in these debates, postulating a way of thinking that locates the
importance of the ethical, or the metaethical, in Latin American discourse,
particularly in the work of Anbal Gonzlez in, Killer Books: Writing,
Violence and Ethics in Modern Spanish American Narrative (2001), and in
Zivins edited collection The Ethics of Latin American Literary Criticism
(2007). Levinasian philosophy has molded the concerns of many through
its attention to the fundamental experience of alterity and the breaking up
of any essential identity or name gained from that experience. Instead, the
Levinasian ethic is one that models a process of radical responsibility to the
other derived from the phenomenological experience of alterity without
signification.
Yet Southern Cone writers such as those I discuss here seem to have
recast their roles as public intellectuals away from these models: they real-
ize that politics needs to be enacted from sites and optics other than those
of official governments, present or pastand that even retheorizing the
others defined in opposition to these official governments actually pro-
longs the impact of this restrictive logic. In their novels, as we will see in
later chapters of the present project, they refresh and thus reclaim what
emerges as an ethical perspective on politics, through literature that recasts
1
Walter Benjamins work on the Critique of Violence (1922) emerges, especially among
supporters of a deconstructive mode of thinking, as a new way to identify the effects of rep-
resentations of violence within the ethical field and the literary camp.
4 C.M. AMADOR
the relationships between history, intersubjectivity, and memory. Many of

these novels address the specifics of the generation of experience after the
fall of the dictatorships, a comparatively late occurrence in the Southern
Cone. They have to not only oppose external forces like neoliberalism,
but also assess the lingering consequences of the dictatorial era and the
prevalence in memory of its politics of torture and violence for national-
istic purposes.
Many of these writers argue for the retention of an unforeclosed space
to reestablish the possibility of nation after such public breaches of trust,
as is indicated in the interminable name of the Argentinean dictatorship:
El proceso de reorganizacin nacional.
This introductory chapter will start from these observations to make
the case for how and why a theory of narrative ethics unfolds aspects of the
literary production in the Southern Cone. I call for a Latin Americanist
critique of politics through opposition and a model of public critique
based on intersubjectivity, experience, and memory rather than the struc-
ture of the public sphere.
The theoretical frame that I evolve here is taken from the work of two
thinkers: Hallward and Alain Badiou, each of whom will be treated in
some detail below.
From Hallwards Absolutely Postcolonial (2002), I take the terms the
singular and the specific as the two vectors that model the logics of distinc-
tion in ways other than the simple dichotomies of deconstructionthat
is, as two different ways in which language tends to mark out distinctions
between us and them, inside and outside. His model allows us to
expand literary analysis, adding the insight that the logics of otherness and
distinction do not all function the same way (to which I return below).
Mention of Badious Ethics (2005) will help frame how such new logics
of distinction work to model ethico-political possibilities for collectivities.
His work moves beyond deconstruction to show how the logics of desig-
nation and enunciation straightforwardly force certain ethical patterns of
behavior and evaluation into existence. And finally, in the conclusion, I will
turn, as a supplement to these theoretical positions, to Simon Critchleys
work. His view of ethics allows us to make a connection to the logics
of desire and totalitarianism, modeling how dictatorships imagine ethi-
cal and political possibilities through language as something to be imple-
mented at the level of governance, turning ethical distinctions of language
into practices, often totalitarian or violent in nature.
POLITICS ASEVENTS: LANGUAGES AND

LOGICS OFINDIVIDUATION
One of the most exciting trends in cultural criticism and philosophi-
cal scholarship of recent years has been the near explosion of popular-
ity of academic philosophers working against the deconstructive tradition
that has dominated so much of recent Latin American thought. Slavoj
Zizek, Jacques Rancire, Sylvain Lazarus, Giorgio Agamben, Catherine
Malabou, and Alain Badiou have each contributed much to renovate the
thinking and study of politics, aesthetics, ethics, and ontology itself. Zizek
and Badiou are, of course, the most familiar of these names, given the
massive publication and translation industry that accompanies both men.
Zizek, in particular, has become an international phenomenon, occupying
simultaneous and prestigious chairs at Birkbeck College, London, and the
New School for Social Research.
For the present purposes, this new generation of theory shows us how
to take up the project of reconceiving what politics means: instead of
seeing it as inherent in a public sphere conceived structurally, that theory
helps us to evolve a new model stressing the participation of individuals
as members of a broad new collective space in that public space, especially
as an ethical call to identity. This is necessary because the language and
behavior of the Southern Cones national subjects were heavily inscribed
by largely indigenous dictatorships, built on the basis of local experience
and intending to manage national identity. In retrospect, and in Badious
terms, these dictatorships and their national politics may be defined as
unique manifestations of what is known as radical evil. This radical evil
has a specific character as constitutive of the public sphere: it is not
a privative evil that seeks to take something away from individuals (free-
dom, property, life) or finds its origin in a situation of lack. Instead, this
Southern Cone evil works through a network of identification, values, and
projects that define, implement, and reify the ethical and semiotic public
spheres of dictatorship, through language. Because this evil is language-
based, literature, as we shall see, emerges as critical to the politics of this
public sphere, in order to analyze this evils affective, metaphoric, and
sometimes even allegorical persistence in memory, long after the govern-
ments that created them have passed.
The basis for this argument is the realization that any official communi-
cation functions in ways that may be characterized as literary, if that term
6 C.M. AMADOR
applies to the ability of these texts to reify a world that is in many ways
factual, but which also interpolates its readers into a specific affective and
cognitive space. That is, any language shared within a community works
to map, using Deleuzes language, subjects and subjectivity at the deep-
est levels of ontico-politico-ethical subjectivity and to bind them into a
specific understanding of shared experienceinto a national identity, an
imagined community, or any other designation for a collective, set apart
from individuals. This somewhat abrasive neologism for identity (ontico-
politico-ethical subjectivity) is necessary, I believe, for thinking through
the analysis of politics as a process of enunciation. It captures how speak-
ing, writing, or understanding texts within such a space is the essential act
that positions individual subjects within a collective (in relations of posi-
tionality), inculcating in them a set of ethical and political justifications
for the brutality of the era (an ethos), and a set of comprehensible acts
of power. Not just fiction, but even the language of dictatorships in the
public sphere (speeches, news releases) participates in this particular mode
of mapping the subject. Here, as we shall see below, the works of Hallward
and Badiou help generate analyses of ideology and political consequences,
help illustrate the impressive power of radical evil to construct a name, and
a national project of eliminating particular others.
For the moment, Badious logic of Ethics helps us to reconceptualize
as a political space, what has often been seen as a historical paradox in
dictatorial regimes. Much like the German Nazi regime, the dictatorships
of the region structured their politicial projects by bolstering them with
an ideological scaffolding that justified their interventions on an ethico-
political plane. Political violence through state terrorism became the oper-
ating currency of states whose economic plans necessitated the ethical
claim that no individual or collective group may be permitted to derail the
momentum of the regimes claimed return to order. The effect of codify-
ing such exclusionary imperatives into state pronouncements familiar to its
citizens is to co-opt the ideas of good and evil into functioning principles
that make sense only within the system of their enunciationusing the lin-
guistic ground as the basis for a new and imaginary national community.
The result is that the systems fundamental logic subjects ethical norms
to itself, and then it bolsters its credibility affectively, through a logically
articulate dichotomy between the selves within the space of the dictatorial
regimes and the others who exist to be excluded from itthe systems site
of enunciations2 provides a set of coherent ethical principles, expressed

in certain narrative forms, that help individuals evade certain traditional
ethical norms if they are to function as part of the new collectives.
Some of this is grounded on analyses based on Jacques Lacans idea
of the Symbolic Order and its master signifiers, but it is useful to call
Badious impressive new vocabulary for ethics into play to see what else
is going on in this situation. Badiou extends this model to introduce new
terms: the event, the immortal name, and the unnameable. Event refers
not to a historical moment, but rather to a framework of understanding
which calls the memory of history into being, sometimes through the
agency of groups and sometimes by other hegemonic forces. By designat-
ing an event, a field of enunciation forms a nexus that becomes memorable
in new ways. That event framework, in the case of the Southern Cone
dictatorships and other political dominants, is usually structured around
an immortal name, a master signifier, a signifier posited as the reference
point to the structure of life within the public sphere, and then bolstered
by the calling into existence of the unnameable, an other from the outside
of that life, posited by that reference point.
Thus, deconstructions analysis reveals itself as somewhat limited, as it
neglects the effects of the emergence of such an immortal name on both
community and individual consciousness, and on the whole structure of
public memory and community ethics. When a name emerges, it excludes,
in an effect that Badiou calls the closure of the event. This overt strategy
of introducing such a name as a fixed and finite point of reference is part
of the enunciation of a national projecta name such as martyr or a sav-
ior or a victim, chosen as an immortal name by a government, creates a
historical singularity, a discrete event that can be used to structure the
verbal and practical justifications for greater networks of governmental
and private action in this specific state. The act of naming posits the
existence of an event, a moment in which individuals are interpolated
into the network of such enunciations as national subjects (Maos Cultural
Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the vision of a Left-governed Spanish
America opposing the USA). Conversely, it also interpolates them into
2
This term is in broad use in poststructuralism to refer not only to the language generated
by such a system, but also behaviors, and other systems of signifying practice that correlate
with language proper. An archive of enunciations demarcates a field of enunciation.
8 C.M. AMADOR
their own positions of subjectivication, as it offers narratives about acts

and statements of ethical agency within the community. As they assume
such subject positions structured by these names, individuals become uni-
fied into a community (here, a national community) within the horizon of
the subjectivizing force of the event.
In these cases, Badiou continues, the immortal name also designates the
Good by specifying the purportedly primordial point at which the ethi-
cal claims of any system originate. Once that (arbitrary, sometimes even
imaginary, but always fictive, in the sense of narrative) point is established,
then the Good begins to instantiate itself by interpellating individual
subjects into its logic.3 The mechanism functions, no matter how evil that
good may seem in retrospect, when ideals like a strong nation become
identified with acts of genocide against that nations others. Clearly, the
world understanding reified in that event and the name that grounds it
and its ethics is always threatening to dissolve under the centripetal pres-
sure of individual experience. Or put another way, the names and events
form official narratives of ethical justification that transform individuals
into national subjects and agents, as they orient their loyalty to this name.
Traditionally, deconstruction has seen this process of subjectivification
as principally a defectas a moment when the systems logic becomes
oppressive as it attempts to foreclose traces of other forms of logic that
might also make individual and collective experience comprehensible in
other narratives outside its control. What is different for Badiou from the
deconstructive ethics he challenges is his placement of the event and the
name as not only the originary moment for collective (and in this case,
state-supported) ethics, but also understands that moment as productive:
it makes the systems ethics imminent and hence accessible to the subjects
produced by the eventa property of the network of understanding and
action posited by these reference points, rather than a position somehow
outside that system as an Altogether-Other dissociated with it. This point
is critical because it makes subjects and their ethical choices part of the
system of government (no matter how perverse) required to turn this
repertoire of reference points into guideposts for everyday action.
At this point, the question is how does this new model for ethics needs to
be looked at, if it is to be understood as more than the conventional neolib-
eral situational ethics. Here, two new concepts become particularly useful:
3
This is a process summarized in more neutral terms in Deleuze and Guattaris What is
Philosophy? (1996), but whose ethical dimensions are the core of Badious project.
the singular and the specific, as defined by Hallward. These two terms can
help us observe the nuances of how the mechanisms for subjectification
that I have just outlined with reference to Badiou actually work on that
everyday level, as logics of individuation. These logics of individuation
are the basic narrative components on which individual identities are based,
the basic arrangements of how subjects conceive of the contours of com-
munity and agency: in other words, how the national collective conceives
of who belongs and who can belong to a particular social arrangement.
They encompass, as indicated above, origin moments, narratives of specific
political motivations through which pasts are reconfigured in memory and
futures posited as a result of present practice, and definitions of alterity
and nonalterity motivating ethical attitudesthe forms of subjectivity and
intersubjectivity through which a community forms itself and functions.
As yet, the most extensive and probably the only work directly dealing
with the representation of logics of individuation in literature has been
Hallwards groundbreaking text: Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing Between
the Singular and the Specific (2002). Here, he analyzes and explains the
concepts of the singular and the specific, which are essential to seeing how
narrative creates the kind of rhetorical and epistemic spaces I have out-
lined here, where enunciations (acts of writing and speech) exert their
power to create or secure communities in expressing political and ethical
possibilities.
It is critical to remember that maps of relations among subjects are
instantiated by power institutions, preserved in discourses, practices, and
even architecture, and have the potential for plural uses. They not only
mark the communitys network or conceptual map of ethically marked
choices defining subjectivity, they can also persist as logics instantiated in
everyday life long after they are first imposed by regimes or other institu-
tions of power. Each such logic, however, not only maps the relational-
ity between subjects and their others within one system, but also allows
for agency: for the production of comprehensible narratives that might
reconfigure social space according to the terms inherent in a particular
conceptual framework or map, but even moving beyond it to alter the
patterns of negation, othering, silencing, delegitimation, and legitimation
correlating with its original event. What this will mean for literature is that
writing always contains within its pages the possibility of championing a
way of arranging the epistemic and aesthetic figures it produces to leave
out or include othersa specific political power to remap individuation as
well as political and ethical values.
10 C.M. AMADOR
Hallward outlines how any such community formed by discourses in

this way actually contains at least two general logics of individuationtwo
general logical patterns in which the individual subject is interpolated into
the community and distinguished from its others, two different ways of
imagining a subjects relation to alterity and exteriority, to that which is
not-I and not-us within a collective.
The first of these might most profitably be associated with Badious
description of the establishment of an immortal name as the event consti-
tuting a communtiy. Hallward identifies this as a logic of singularity, which
recognizes only one entity as fully individual (which does not exclude the
potentially infinite multiplicity of modes of this individual). The singular cre-
ates the medium of its own substantial existence or expression (Hallward 2).
Thus dictatorship is revealed as a singular logic,
in the sense that it is [not] constrained by any logic outside the immanent
criteria of its own operation historical examples of singular logics include
the monarch of absolutist political theory becom[ing] what fundamen-
tally is through its transcendence of relations with other sorts of social or
political power. (Hallward 3)
Dictatorships tend to define who and what is and is not part of the collec-
tive which it administers, ethically and in practice.
In contrast to singularity, the logic of specificity functions with greater
reference to Badious concept of the event, a collective frame of reference.
The logic of specificity exerts force compeling into existence a mode of
distinction among subjects, one which yields elements whose individual-
ity can only be discerned through the relations they maintain with them-
selves, with their environment, and with other individuals (Hallward 4).
The logic of specificity means that concepts central to such a public, like
alterity, do not just individuate the subject not in isolationnot just as a
dichotomy between I and not-I. Instead, the specificity of a particular
events logic insists that even a designation of alterity forces an individual
to takes sides within the public sphere, and thus always posits the funda-
mental relationality of its position to a larger framework, in its ethical and
practical claims. [Specificity] implies a situation, a past, an intelligibility
constrained by inherited conditions. The specific is the space of interests
in relation to other interests, the space of the historical as such, forever
ongoing, forever incomplete (Hallward 5).
It is worth remembering in this context how Badious ethics ties these

two logics of distinction together by situating the emergence of ethics in
a momentin a so-called event born out of a radical decision and com-
mitment to reconfigure social relations along a specific logic. Badious
event of ethics, seen through Hallwards lens, must also be seen as a plural
field of potential social action marked by more than one logicby either
singularity or specificity. An individual in that field of social action will be
subject to an ethical system that operates sometimes in a logic of specifics,
characterized by radical openness and inclusivity to various others, or, in
its most reactionary or totalitarian formation (or administration), around
a singular identity. All revolutionary moments that seek to innovate the
social sphere operate by acknowledging the potential of both logics in
conditioning individual choice and ethical claims within the architecture
for collective expression. In this sense, Badious philosophical project
emerges as a metadiscourse of power and knowledgeto intentionally
distort a bit of Foucauldian language in order to underscore the absolute
immanence of Badious work against the more metaphysically driven work
of Levinas and Derrida that drives the deconstruction- and oppositional-
ity-directed politics that they require.
The theoretical importance of his description of the public sphere as an
imminent ethical structure cannot be underestimated in the case of Latin
America. Remember that the structure of debates about politics and eth-
ics in the region have been most often configured along deconstructive,
oppositional lines, taking a deconstructive, Levinasian approach to the
argument. If Hallwards idea is taken to extend this paradigm, then that
older paradigm about the public sphere as imposed on individual subjects
emerges as representing a logic of the singular, one which insists, in the
tradition of Marxist dialectics, on the absolute uniqueness of a single polit-
ical dialectics of opposition. In contrast, it is possible to also construe that
public sphere of discourse as supporting a logic of the specific, and hence a
different image of what ethics means within it.
Critchley, in Infinitely Demanding (2007), speaks of a public sphere as
sponsoring at least one additional ethical demand over that described by
deconstruction (reading as he does, very generously, both Levinas and
Badiou), an ethics of approval, as well as the more traditional ethics of
opposition. An ethics of approval, of course, can only ultimately be achieved
either in the specific logic of the collective, as described by Hallward. Only
there does the individual take sides actively within the communityan
12 C.M. AMADOR
active subjective individuation through ethical acts relating the subject to

an other. Yet in the more traditional framework of deconstruction, ethi-
cal acts are construed in terms of singularities, even radical singularity,
that is not necessarily linked to a particular politics within the collective.
In contrast, Hallwards distinction between singular and specific logics of
cultural enunciation allow for a deeper political interrogation of the rela-
tion between the event, its immortal name and its unnameable, since they
place under scrutiny the claims for cultural liberation made from the posi-
tion of opposition or marginality.
It is difficult to argue that a nation or culture and its others have one
particular relationship, a claim which narrows investigation in two dimen-
sions. First, it reifies the ground for the comparison, making it seem like
the values imputed to the difference are more than locally comprehen-
sible as ethical in some more absolute sensethat traditional theoretical
ground makes ethics inaccessible to local communities. Second, it simul-
taneously renders each individual national site as a state of exception, an
absolutely singular site that appears to have little or no connections with
other historical moments.
Hallward calls attention to the problem with these emphases on sin-
gularity in understanding the claims for subjects and their access to ethics
and politics:
To the degree that the writers considered here [by Hallward] write in or
towards this singular mode, they actively seek to transcend the specific or
the relational. Even though their projects are often explicitly motivated
by an interest in difference, they actively seek to transcend the specific or
relational. Even though their projects are often explicitly motivated by an
interest in difference, the hybrid or the other, their singular conception of
reality effectively absorbs or undermines the whole dimension of relation-
with-others. (Hallward 2)
This extraordinary quotation establishes the criteria and need for an analy-
sis that pushes the boundaries of discourses attuned to polyvocal or het-
erovalent modes of thinking. And I believe that the Southern Cone writers
provide that analysis in their extraordinary texts, often preceding the work
of Latin Americanist scholars.
Hallwards text argues explicitly that much postcolonial writing and
theory has indeed been driven by the logic of the singular, pointing away
from the specifics of historical sites and meaning and toward logical for-
malisms that are made to seem absolute, with the result that dictatorships
and colonial hegemonies have been seen as the grounds for comparison
with their oppositions, rather than as two moments within a single shared
space of discourse. For Hallward, remember, the singular cannot be asso-
ciated with the kind of difference dealt with in more democratic politics,
only in discourses (like dictatorships) that subsume difference into expres-
sions that reify them as radically and purely immanent (purely human,
for instance). These discourses achieve the power of singularity by uniting
the origin of the expression, its audience, and the position of the speaker
into a single position of solidarityit reduces the plurality of human
voices to a single position, reified within a discourse of absolute truth, by
the individual who speaks for the group.4
The effect of the singular propagates itself through these discourses, in
representations that have a transcendent effect, encompassing all possibly
independent logics into an image of uniqueness:
Examples of historical logics [that have been made to seem singular]

might include the monarch of absolutist political theory, the sovereign of
Rousseau or Robespierre, and the proletariat according to Stalin or Mao.
Each becomes what it fundamentally is through its transcendence of rela-
tions with other sorts of social and political power. (Hallward 3)
To this list we must certainly add the concept of nation and ethnicity as
conceived by a variety of groups in the twentieth century.
4
The position of the writer (and by extension, the political orator) is of central importance
in logics of the singular, as the immanence inaugurated by the discourse is only fully realiz-
able through its central figure. Only one type of person has the power to innovate:
A singular conception of individuation recognises only one entity as fully individual
(which does not exclude the potentially infinite multiplicity of modes of this individ-
ual) [Hallward] will refer to such an individual as Creative as distinct from the
given or created (always capitalised, for the sake of clarity). (Hallward 2)
Singular discourses, through the Creative individual, produce the conditions of possibility
of difference through its plenitude as Creative entity. The Creative is, in the twentieth
century, often political, exercising an ability to innovate and at the same time assert complete
control. That position is neither paradoxical nor viciously circular, but rather a facet of that
creative individuals capacity to produce immanence itself. The singular creates the
medium of its own substantial existence. The singularity of a Creator-god provides the concept
with its exemplary form (ibid). Forming the autopoetic deity, singular discourses contain
exclusionary modes that, as Hallward reminds us, are functionally infinite but totally
immanent to their source. In this fashion, singular discourses unify expressive possibility
around the coherence of a thought-form, name, image, or concept.
14 C.M. AMADOR
In the Southern Cone, dictatorships did indeed enact events of the

Badiouian type to implement and exercise the logics of singularity as they
justified the authoritarian violence. The threat of Badious unnameable,
unspecified acts of subversion or national disintegration led the majority
of the regions nations5 to adopt singular discoursesthe most promi-
nent ones being the elimination of subversion and the consolidation of
a fractured national order. On the surface, these discourses looked to be
restorative and oriented toward the salvation of the nation, but they ulti-
mately collapsed under the weight of their own work, as their ethical logics
were challenged by individual experienceby immanence, and hence by
historical specificities.
Following Hallwards strategy of explanation, one would say that these
dictatorships collapsed under the pressure of the violence that necessarily
accompanied the implementation of the regime as a singularity, as a frame-
work of understanding that justified the regime as an absolute index for
ethical behavior. Argentinas Proceso de Organizacin Nacional, Pinochets
dictatorship, and the other authoritarian regimes practiced a form of
rhetorical construction of a singularity that exploited the existence of the
alterities it created to genocidal effects. In the case of Argentinas Proceso
dictatorship, a whole vocabulary, a lexicon of terror in Marguerite
Feitlowitzs words, was constructed to ratify the singular description of
the enemies of the regime.6
ETHICS, MEMORY, ANDRECONCILIATION IN

THEEVENTS OFTHESOUTHERN CONE
Hallwards supplemental explanation of how the public sphere sup-

ports more than one logic of individuation does not exhaust the issues
that deconstructive, oppositional approaches to the politics confront in
addressing Latin American situations. Not only identity, power, and the
ideology within the public sphere of events need to be addressed, but also
the problem of memory, which has taken such a prominent place in literary
scholarship about Latin America.
5
In the case of Paraguay, the regime of Alfredo Stroessner predated the Cuban Revolution,
but strongly opposed Communism and used this to consolidate his regime.
6
Marguerite Feitlowitzs seminal book A Lexicon of Terror: Argentina and the Legacies of
Torture (1997) is the definitive work on the vocabulary the torturers used in media res to
construct a peculiar singularity for their project.
Memory as a form of critical analysis in the Southern Cone emerged

as the aftermath of the tortures, murders, and other brutal biopoliti-
cal crimes that marked the period. The history of memory studies and
discussions of the testimonio as related to sites of lost collective memory
are familiar to most. Studies of trauma that are also part of memory stud-
ies emerged from the experiences of Holocaust survivors attempting to
deal with the psychic consequences of Nazi violence. Texts like Shoshana
Felman and Dori Laubs Testimony7 (1991) and Cathy Caruths Trauma:
Explorations in Memory (1994) established definitively the relationship
between trauma, violence, and the restorative power of testimony and
memory, especially in narrative form. Not surprisingly, suffering, political,
and personal violence became a crucial part of the legal and political appa-
ratuses of reconciliation and justice in the post-Holocaust, post-Vietnam
generation, at sites where domestic violence needed adjudication, from
Cambodia and South Africa through Europe and the Americas. Memory
studies, scholars believed, became crucial to preventing the obfuscation
of crimes by inheritor regimes, more interested in adapting to democracy
and making a future than in providing a thorough-going accounting of
past injuries to the polis, especially before evidence and memories faded.
The upshot of this area of scholarship is the acknowledgment that
memory too has a set of rhetorical and structural functions that speak to
the construction of an ethics, originating in the individual yet influencing
the collective. The basic division of memory in the period under question
in the present study is the conventional distinction between victim and
perpetrator, a conceptual dichotomy which configures the political acts
of even the highest levels of government within the public sphere. Yet a
second-level division of memory with more instrumental claims becomes
important in postdictatorial situations, as well: the disjunction between
those who are remembering the struggles and violence of the past, and the
subjects wishing to move on with the business of nation-building through
an active, but inconsistent process of forgettingtwo different orienta-
tions toward the national project.
In many postdictatorial situations under the aegis of neoliberalism,
confronting the past by remembering it in traditional terms was seen as a
divisive gesture that made moving forward with national reintegration too
7
Laub and Felmans text is perhaps the seminal text elaborating how active witnessing and
the representational structures of psychoanalytic practice and literary investigation negotiate
the testimony of the traumatized victim.
16 C.M. AMADOR
difficult and fractious. For example, Argentinas Laws of Due Obedience

and Final Stop, both of which were designed to give amnesty to the vast
cadre of perpetrators of violence, were among the most famous examples
of an acceptance of moving forward with the recreation of the nation
through neoliberalism without commemoration.8 Part of the reasoning
behind these gestures of forgetting through legal amnesty is the attempt
to reform the singularity that is the nation. Yet we have already seen that
politics through singularity is by definition an abstraction.
The need to analyze these networks of national identity, political resis-
tance to it, and the traumas it imposes as parts of a single regional net-
work is clearly suggested by the argument I am making for recasting the
public sphere as an ethical space of politics. For instance, these imperatives
appear in testimonies about the violence and trauma imposed by military
dictatorships like Plan Cndor (or Operation Condor, as it was known
in English), a US-sponsored counterinsurgency program that united the
military dictatorships of the Southern Cone in their functions and gov-
ernmental legitimacies in resistance to Left-leaning insurgencies. In the
terms I am using here, Cndor qualifies as a radically evil ethical event
in Badious sense that achieved much more than the implementation of
a political ideology onto a population, and so any testimonies (literary or
legal) that document positions of individuals in such a regime document
not only the facts of government repression, but also the ethical network
of choices made by individuals in navigating that situations potential for
violence and enacting alterity.
Here again, a profound disjuncture between a dominant strand of
Latin American studies and actual practices of politics through testimonies
emerges. As the regions literary writing takes up the historical events of the
region as known in official history, and turns them into events of very dif-
ferent sorts, these accounts supplement testimonies, recasting the network
of official names and events to provide new ethico-political imperatives for
readers, forcing them to question the position of individual identity within
national narratives. Fidelity to such a history- and identity-making event
in a political sense requires literary authors to reclaim different descrip-
tions of the historical situation, often through the specificities of various
sets of memories and experiences of it. In so doing, this body of writing
also actively positions the readers as subjects within the memories of the
8
For further information on these laws, please see Chap. 3 of Carlos Santiago Ninos
Radical Evil on Trial (1997).
events and within the image of the national community. In consequence,

this writing also reclaims an ability to pose ethical questions to individu-
als situated within events, rather than interrogating the forces associated
with governmentality alone. Instead of identifying governments and their
oppositions in terms of a pregiven ethical grid, therefore, this writing pays
particular attention to the agency of political subjects within these histori-
cal moments (events) of dictatorship in the Southern Cone.
THE FIELD OFWRITING ASANETHICS OFTHEEVENT

These theoretical points about the reformulation of ideas of the public
sphere have revolved around the conceptual divide between nation states
conceived as singularities and those defined as specificities. That distinc-
tion has been pursued to define several points that in unison can provide
a novel critical vocabulary for the study of Southern Cone literaturea
set of distinctions that can move the study of Latin America toward a
new paradigm, away from Levinasian ethics of the other and toward
a positive ethical project as espoused most visibly by Badiou, Hallward,
and also by Simon Critchley and Oscar Guardiola-Riveratwo scholars
I will discuss in my conclusion.
I believe that it is particularly the cultural productions of writers and
journalists from the Southern Cone that has most comprehensively tracked
the function of their nations public sphere in this. That is, instead of cast-
ing the ethics of such political situations (and the ethics of the various
narratives associated with them, such as historical and personal memory
narratives) in strictly humanist or neoliberal terms, they approach politics
as an ethical imperative for analysis from the point of view of individuals
rather that from the collective or the state.
The literature that I represent by individual case studies in the subse-
quent section of the present project presents the kind of political analysis
in their narrative practice that I have outlined in theoryand both move
clearly beyond the Boom and Post-Boom generations of novelists and
public intellectuals in making ethics and intersubjectivity, not power or jus-
tice, the focus of political analysis. In Badious sense, they portray events
rather than victims and victimizer, and thereby problematize the function
of individual memory and official narratives alike, in insisting that any
truth to be found in political critique in these events must be found in the
network of subject positions and enunciations, not in simple oppositional
critique of states of affairs. Instead of embracing a definition of politics
18 C.M. AMADOR
correlated with the Levinasian ethics of alterity, they seek rather what
I term an ethics of liberation (defined following Enrique Dussel,9 but also
with direct engagement with Badious ethics).
These novels model such charged events that are memorialized in the
traumas of individuals and nations to move beyond the binaries of older
concepts of politics. They choose instead to model politics as an ethical
experience of the sort that I have been discussing here.
Thus, I am quite explicitly suggesting that the literary production of
the Cone creates a possible new realm of ethical and political imagination:
its literary praxis stresses an ethics in which subjects become subjects by
occupying their position in the political order and thus become complicit
with it, even if they are nominally opposed to it. The literary praxis illus-
trates a central argument: that the space of the political in the Cone is con-
figured at least partially through the imaginings of literature and cultural
practice. Part of the justification for literature, after all, has always been
the creation of new methods of understanding the connections between
subjects and the logics used to deploy and ratify those linkages. This has
been the particular case for the Southern Cone, where authors have been
at special pains to address the persistent legacies of political dictatorships
that were not necessarily imposed from outside (unlike the majority of
colonial projects), but which in contrast rather represent in some sense
the will of the people.
We do well to remember, therefore, that the production of literature
rests not only on the rhetorical devices of the literary, but also on the
preoccupations of an eras intellectuals. The preoccupation of modernity
as an era has been generally identified as the effects of the modern and
modernization on the human consciousness, in tandem with consider-
ations about how modernity has utterly reconfigured and rearranged
space. For the postCold War era, Hallward has identified the chief con-
cerns of intellectuals in other terms: perhaps the most salient charac-
teristic of contemporary literature and philosophythe assertion of an
essential heterogeneity or plurality of subject positions (Hallward 1).
This is the best description, I believe, of both the theoretical positions
I have modeled above and the literary production of the Southern Cone.
One final note: in making this analogy, I am aware that a large part of
the theory in this text is derived from European, Anglo-American, and
North-Latin American (to use Hugo Achgars phrase) sources. The
9
Enrique Dussel, Etica de la liberacion en la edad de la globalizacion y la exclusion (1998).
condition of intellectual and academic production that the contemporary

era falls under, for better or for worse, has inaugurated an international
network of ideas and tropes (Ethics, Politics, Nation, Biopolitics, etc.) that
reflect the continual expansion of Empire across the globe. Empire as an
open tendency structures the intersections of memory, justice, and cul-
ture throughout the Southern Cone, just as it has in the evolution of Latin
American studies in academic and all too many public situations, as well.
REFERENCES
Critchley, Simon. Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of
Resistance. London: Verso, 2007. Print.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. What is Philosophy? Trans. Hugh Tomlinson
and Graham Burchell. NewYork: Columbia University Press, 1996. Print.
Dussel, Enrique. Etica de la liberacion en la edad de la globalizacion y la exclusion.
Madrid: Trotta, 1998. Print.
Hallward, Peter. Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing Between the Singular and the
Specific. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002. Print.
CHAPTER 2
Theorizing Art inChile During

Dictatorship: TheConditions
fortheSingular andtheSpecific
inCultural Debate
It is certainly the case that one of the most important casualties of dictator-
ship is neither truth nor meaning but the very fabric of signification and
communicability when it turns to censorship and terror. Part of the discur-
sive regime of an authoritarian situation is to impose a sovereign ban1 on
the sign and signifying chain itself, by forbidding the circulation of certain
signs and fostering others. Censorships power thus attacks the modali-
ties of the sayable and reconfigures the possibility for sites of language to
occur. No expression is safe: the historical, artistic, and even the most banal
forms of making meaning are subjected to the transformative power of
the sovereign state. Walter Benjamins well-thought-out adage defines the
history of oppression as proof of the state of exception as being the rule2;
an addendum to that adage might take into account that the history of sig-
nification seems to assert that, as well. All signification operates within its
local circumstances, and dictatorships are only the most extreme of these.
When signification is challenged to the extent that it collapses, leaving
a ruin of sense, the possibility for a specific discourse is created that take
1
I argue that this is the essential meaning of sovereignty that is explored in Giorgio
Agambens Homo Sacer (1998). Sovereignty for Agamben is an assertion of the capacity for
monopoly over power, meaning, bodies, and the very condition of legality itself: The sov-
ereign creates and guarantees the situation as a whole in its totality. He has the monopoly
over the final decision (Agamben 16).
2
Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (1968): 257.

Paraguay, 19702000, DOI10.1057/978-1-137-54633-3_2
22 C.M. AMADOR
sides against a challengein what Hallward says, somewhat less strongly

than his inspiration, Badiouto produce relations that oppose political
others. Those ways of seeing, reading, and thinking form in opposition to
the otherness of a specific identitarian or political name, but they do not
create an identity that forecloses meaning. Therefore, notions like the
proletariat, or the people are not structured by their internal limits,
but rather by the openness of membership made possible by the name
that brings them together. And they become militant insofar as they imag-
ine themselves producing a radically open situation, united under a name
or particular cause that does not attempt to circumscribe completely the
possibility for different and differing collective expression. El control
politico-administrativo de la expresin pblica mediante restricciones
impuesta al lenguaje y sus estructuras de comunicacin socio-culturales,
fue la manera ms eficaz que adopt el regimen para mantener a la produc-
cin de sentido bajo vigilancia3 (Richard 22). [The politico-administrative
control of public expression by means of restrictions on language and their
sociocultural communicative structures was the most efficent manner
adopted by the regime to maintain control under surveillance.]
Such oppositional discourses, then, have a dual function, one negative
(opposition) and the other positive (the creation of a particular communi-
cation community that will function differently than the regime opposed).
To understand oppositional discourses, therefore, it is critical to exam-
ine a dictatorial regimes goals to see how the construction of a particular
type of meaning, or realm of signification would perform two key goals
that limit the emergence of alternate communication communities. First,
of course, such a regime works overtly toward the repression of resis-
tance and the fomentation of a realm where no signifying that was not of
the regime would take place. [S]tructures of communication become
refined through the exercise of power to channel the expressions content
and force. Foucaults work on the relations between power and knowl-
edge, and Bourdieus work on signifying practices4 have clearly revealed
how political regimes reshape the expressive sphere to impose disciplinary
matrices upon its citizens. Of course, as Bourdieu has shown in Distinction,
3
Nelly Richard, Mrgenes e instituciones: Arte en Chile desde 1973 (2007).
4
Much work has been done detailing the role that censorship played in the consolidation
of Pinochets regime. For the most extensive analysis, please see Jos Joaqun Brunners
Cultura autoritaria en Chile (1981). See also Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended:
Lectures at the College De France (2007), and Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction (1991).
THEORIZING ART IN CHILE DURING DICTATORSHIP 23
even art itself is a social field of discourse that imposes restrictions of the
possible upon its practitioners. The regimes imposition of a state of fear
that constantly reminds of the sense of vigilancia, or surveillance, thus
reveals only part of the story about how signification and opposition func-
tion under dictatorial regimes, especially in the case of art of all kinds.
The present chapter thus takes up the case of Pinochets Chile and a
partial history of the philosophical debates emerging from the art move-
ment, Escena de avanzada, in order to provide a case study on political
and aesthetic debates of the singular versus the specific. It will start by
outlining how a group of artists sought a new tradition of opposition
that situates itself as a communication community not just in opposition
to the regime, as the Left had traditionally done, but as a positive, open
space. The expressive content of signification itself had become part of
Pinochets concern, and artists from all fields of practice were forced to
respond in kind. The heart of this chapter will thus focus on avanzadas
centrality in the realm of reordering the very conditions of expression
in response to this political scene. Finally, it will take up various theories
about how this space functioned.
OPPOSING PINOCHETS REGIME OFCENSORSHIP

THROUGH SIGNIFICATION
The censorship from the Pinochet regime was totalitarian, totalizing,
and had the definitive goal of altering the ideological structure that pre-
ceded itthat of Salvador Allendes Popular Unity government. As Nelly
Richard, one of Chiles most notable theorists summarizes:
El rgimen de censura que opera en Chile durante el perodo autoritario se

vale de numerosas medidas de prohibicin que afectan la produccin cul-
tural: medidas que se aplicaron, primero, en suprimir los vnculos de ideas
y/o personas ligadas a la ideologa del programa de la Unidad Popular.
(Residuos y metforas, 25)
The regime of censorship operating in Chile during the authoritarian
period is comprised of numerous prohibitive measures affecting cultural
productions: measures that were first applied to suppress the link between
ideas and people tied to the Unidad Popular ideological program.
The challenge for the regime was to break the aforementioned links of
traditional society, reordering the possible conditions of enunciations
24 C.M. AMADOR
(what sorts of statements could be made in and about the social order)
and bringing into relief the insufficiency of the inherited cultural program.
Without a doubt, the repressive organs of this dictatorship were quite
powerful, and they were turned specifically against the bearers of the tra-
ditional regimes messages, in almost every domain of public discourse
civil speech, artistic speech, and political life.5 Nonetheless, what emerged
most prominently within Chiles public culture was the self-censorship
of artists. Self-censorship (auto-censura) carved out the possibilities for
expression within the tightly regulated public sphere for both avant-garde
and more traditionally minded artists. The regime further complicated the
enunciatory position of artists with an inconsistent application of censor-
ship norms: las condiciones de censura de modifican debido a que los
lmites que separan lo autorizado de lo prohibido no permanecen fijos.
Existen fases de mayor o menor permisividad que varan de acuerdo al cri-
terio ms o menos aperturista que se ve obligado a manejar el gobierno
(Richard 25). [the conditions of censorship were modified due to the fact
that separating the authorized from the prohibited do not remain fixed.
There exist phases of greater or lesser permissiveness in accordance with
the criteria of openness perceived as necessary by the government.]
The regimes inconsistent censorship made artistic expression a situa-
tion of radical instabilitythe responses were varied and avanzada art-
ists had to stagger between the fases de mayor o menor permisividad
(Phases of greater or lesser permissiveness). Pinochets Chile, despite its
repressiveness and brutality, did not operate with the consistency of other
Southern Cone regimes, which would ultimately leave its mark on its
opposition and its art.
Unstable modalities of censorship provide artists with a motile space
in which to practice art, even as the fact of censorship always helps the
artists retain their liminality within the cultural sphere. Censorship
operates in this case not so much to silence, but rather to make pos-
sible certain paths of expression, in spite of the discursive impossibilities
imposed by censorshipthe artists of the opposition and the regimes
faithful, each gain access of particular signifying resources for the pub-
lic mind. It bears mentioning that the power of censorship is ultimately
not the main impulse behind the expressive qualities of one of the most
5
For a more detailed exploration of the role of the dictatorship in Chilean daily life, please
see Steve J. Sterns Battling for Hearts and Minds: Memory Struggles in Pinochets Chile
19731988 (2006).
aesthetically and intellectually powerful of the opposition movements, the

avanzada, but rather a movement away from the very field of signification.
In order to work within the confines of the dictatorship, while produc-
ing a work of critical and aesthetic significance, the artists of the avanzada
utilized a new set of tropesthe body, urban space, and personally coded
poeticsto challenge and insert their work in the new world of the
Chilean dictatorship.
Avanzada, as noted above, was central in the realm of reordering
the very conditions of expression under the pressure of this censorship.
Destablizing the semantic order is one of the key practices that establish
the singular modality of individuation that orders the field of expression
in any caseany opposition within the field of culture will aim at claiming
a unique voice and political power. Singular individuation as a philosophi-
cal concept, of course, corresponds to various historically attested modes
of expression. In the case of the artists of Chiles escena de avanzada, that
individuation oddly but explicably is grounded in radically plural and pas-
tiche modes of representation, perhaps because of the irregular censorship
that led various discourses of opposition to emerge and then be suppressed.
The members of the loosely united Escena de avanzada worked across
the variegated choices of artistic representation. One of particular interest
here is an emphasis on the singularity of the human body and its material
situation. The body as a rhetorical space was a key site for the debate on
art during the period, especially in a new dialogic concerning the interior-
ity and exteriority of public and personal space. Throughout its duration,
avanzadas project shifted between the public and the private, creating
and structuring a world of critique that in the end, led to a series of art-
works and reflections that have made it critically important for study.
Augusto Pinochet Ugartes regime in Chile (19731990) worked on
the principle of a singular model of signification that refigured language
and expression to order the social habitus of the nation. To create that
singular order of expression, the censorship was rigorous, and the creation
of a legitimate and singular state language was attempted.6 Pinochets
regime (and all of the regimes of the Southern Cone) dominated through
aggressive challenges to symbolic reality and the very nature of possible
expression. The legitimacy of their claims was founded upon the puta-
tive need for combating insurgencya nearly fictitious claim shared by
6
Please see Hernn Vidals Chile: Poetica de la tortura politica (2001) for a discussion of
this point.
26 C.M. AMADOR
the cohort of Southern Cone nationsand reintegrating and shoring up

a national sphere previously threatened by illegitimate democratic expres-
sion.7 Pinochets linguistic signs, however, had specific geopolitical refer-
ents to issues that he saw as central to his state; they were coupled with the
expansion of the neoliberal market and the emergence of new vocabularies
to justify and legitimize that transition to what was supposed to appear
as a freer market. Bourdieus work on how language is a market that is
comprised by legitimate and illegitimate systems of exchange (Distinction,
1990) is not coincidental in the Chilean situation, given the regimes
extraordinary effort at the regulation of both meaning and money that
took place during the era.
Chile had once been seen as the model democracy and economy in the
region by the world. It had been the jewel of Kennedys Alliance for Progress,
and governments across the developing and industrialized world cited the
nation as a model for political pacificity and stability, and more importantly in
the eyes of global capital, economic innovation, and market freedom.8
Chiles economy was not the sclerotic and cronyistic Argentinean
economy, dominated by rival elites and besotten by the weakness of its
institutions of civic governance. Since the 1930s, Chile had leveraged
itsconsiderable resource wealth to provide an extraordinary situation for
its national bourgeoisie. However, the vitality of its economy would not
last long. In the catastrophic crash of commodity prices in the1960s, long-
term underinvestment in key sectors of the economy and a still too-large
class of chronically impoverished citizens united in a crucible of discontent
and malaise that would see Chileans galvanized by left-wing sentiments
within the Unidad Popular9 and behind Salvador Allende as their leader.
The election of Allende and his socialist cohort was seen by the USA
as a consequence to be avoided at all costs. Even before his election in
1971, the CIA under Nixons mandate constructed elaborate plots involv-
ing bribery, espionage, and political proxies to prevent the ascension of
Allendes popularly driven coalition rising to power.
7
This topic is discussed in greater detail in John Dinges The Condor Years (2005).
8
There is a large and substantial bibliography concerning the international image of Chile
during the 1960s. Please see Peter Kornbluhs The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on
Atrocity and Accountability (2003): 27.
9
There are many good accounts of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissingers involvement in
the 1973 coup on Allendes democratically elected government. One of the best is Peter
Kornbluhs The Pinochet File (2003), and Heraldo Muozs The Dictators Shadow: Life
Under Augusto Pinochet (2008).
What is central to the Chilean situation is the manifestation of power

within the realm of signification and individuation itself. As both Richard
(1993) and Willy Thayer (1997) point out, the Pinochet coup represented
a death to the field of signification as an independent sphere. The coup
dtat marks and represents an event that makes all possibilities of repre-
sentation impossible that are not conducted within the imposed field of the
regime. The military regime ruptured the narrative of historical progress
of history that had represented the Allende government, and concomi-
tantly the possibility of collective comprehension in terms inherited by that
narrative. Despite the genuine fractiousness of the relationship between
Allendes government and the pluralized Chilean Left,10 the avanzada
group, Thayer and others all envision the Unidad Popular and Allendes
government as the event of Chilean politics, the center of a specific genera-
tion of historical narrative truth.
The onus for Pinochets regime, in consequence, was to erase the past,
fetishizing un olvido (a forgetting), that will emerge not only as destruc-
tion of culture, but of the human beings, as well:
el modelo autoritario entr en sucesivas fases de redefinicin poltica que

condicionaron las actuaciones del movimiento cultural opositor: el primer
momento (19731977) es de negacin del pasado, y se caracteriza por
medidas fuertemente represivas que buscan confiscar la memoria de lo colec-
tivo que an retiene la fuerza ideolgica y simblico-cultural del gobierno
de la Unidad Popular. Es el momento ms silenciador y represivo del rgimen
que, adems de las desapariciones de personas, se define por ordenar los
cierres de espacios y las desarticulaciones de organismos. (Richard 125)
the authoritarian model entered in successive phases of political redefini-
tion that conditioned the actions of the opposition cultural movement: the
first (19731977) is denial of the past, and is characterized by strong
repressive measures that seek to confiscate the collective memory still retains
the ideological and symboliccultural force in the Popular Unity govern-
ment. It is the most repressive and silencing moment of a regimealong
with the disappearance of personsdefined by ordering the closure of
spaces and dislocations of organisms.
Thus, the Pinochet regime used the mechanism of violent power to

impose a regime of amnesia onto its citizens and destroy through silence
10
For an exhaustive account of the struggles for unity among the Chilean Left, please see
Katherine Hites When The Romance Ended: Leaders of the Chilean Left 19681998 (2000).
28 C.M. AMADOR
the spaces of speaking and public signification. avanzadas emergence

would focus on the remains left by Pinochets destruction:
Lo cultural, bruscamente cortado de sus fuerzas de correlacin social, se

sumerge en la tarea de juntar los pedazos de una totalidad rota realizando
manifestaciones que se coordinan a travs de talleres, agrupaciones, etc.
(Richard 125)
The cultural, brusquely cut from its forces of social correlation, becomes
submerged in the task of joining together pieces of a broken totality by real-
izing happenings coordinated in workshops, art groups, etc.
Escena de avanzada as a group11 practiced a novel form of artistic repre-

sentation that situated it in a sphere apart from any discursive regime
whether authoritarian or contrarian in originso as to (re)open the space
of signification outside the frameworks defined by the dictatorship. As we
shall see later in this chapter, the escena writers were an avant-garde group
challenging the vanguardism of the Chilean Left in favor of a regime of
signs born of a rigorous sense of externality or marginalization:
La marginalizacin social y poltica de la <<nueva escena>> sancionaba los

des-bordes de prcticas ubicadas en las fronteras del pacto sociocomuni-
cativo de la cultura mayoritariamente compartida. El fuera-de-marco (es
decir, la rotura de las convenciones de formato de las tradiciones cannicas)
que practicaba la <<nueva escena>> metaforizaba la voluntad de transgre-
dir la lgica concentracionaria de los espacios vigilados <<levantando otras
seales, smbolos plurales () que rompieran el trazado hegemnico del
encuadre>> (21), tanto territorial como ideolgico. (Richard 65)
The social and political marginalization of the new scene sanctioned
the breakages of practices located on the borders of the sociocommunicative
cultural pact shared by the majority. The outside-of-the frame (or rather, the
breaking of the conventions of form of canonical traditions) practiced by the
new scene, metaphorized the will to transgress the concentration camp
logic of the surveilled spaces sending other signals, plural symbols ()
that would break the hegemonic trace of the framing as much territorial
as ideological.
11
As Nelly Richard points in La insubordinacin de los signos (1994), Escena as a name is a
metatitle given to the many artists, poets, and writers united in practicing artistic languages
opposed to both the Pinochet regimes official modes of expression, and the Chilean Lefts
nationalist, proletarian vision of art as a redeemer for the disruption of historical teleological
progression that was the Pinochet Regime. I use Escena de avanzada, to signal the positionality
and modes of practice that signaled this different vector for Chilean national artistic practice.
Escenas marginalization from both the established Left and Right of Chile
made for allied artists a scene of artistic practice that they theorized as radi-
cally disruptive to signification and to any one type of singular representa-
tion. Plurality and an investment in a radical decentering or designifying
of the (dictatorial-authoritarian) semiotic field available to them led to the
extraordinary opportunity for providing works of such profound depth
that they have, somewhat ironically, entered the international canon of
Chilean art and literature.
Avanzada produced a field of art that structured what might best be
called the situational aspects of art with respect to the Chilean national
landscape at the end of the fractious era of the 1970s. Part of the impor-
tant work that avanzada would do, for instance, is refiguring how genre
and art engaged the social space of the era. Under the backdrop of the
viciously authoritarian Pinochet regime, avanzada produced art works of
a diverse natureperformance, poetry, photographythat were part of
the national landscape, while inhabiting the margins of popular and offi-
cialized artistic discourse.
In spite of their proclaimed distance from the official and the popular,
the avanzada artists, after a period of artistic and cultural resurgence in
1977,12 became one of the most important and prized groups of artists
working in Chile during the period. Local and international prizes were
awarded to a large number of the groups most renowned artists, and the
writers and intellectuals within the group (Richard, Ral Zurita, Diamela
Eltit, and Gonzalo Muoz), have become consecrated members of the
international Latin American canon. Many of the writers worked abroad
in foreign universities as well, representing the Chilean cultural sphere in
either open or silent exile.
In 1986, still well before the 1989 plebiscite that would remove
Pinochet from power, the Australian art journal Art & Text published
a special dossier called Mrgenes e institucine: Arte en Chile desde 1973
(Margins and Institutions: Art in Chile Since 1973). The contents of the
dossier are a series of short, critical pieces that lay out the theoretical
engagements and fields of practice of the avanzada group. Each of the
articles lays out the topography of ideas that shaped the work and that
helps to clarify what kinds of disruption of Chilean signification they
sought.
12
This is detailed in the historical introduction of the 2006 exhibition chronicling the last
25 years of Chilean Art, Gerard Mosqueras Copiar el Edn (2006).
30 C.M. AMADOR
The first essay, Introduccin, draws the historical and theoretical schema
of the group in the context of the post-Golpe era. Richard introduces the
avanzada Group in this way:
El movimiento de obras sobre el cual reflexiona este texto pertenece al

campo no oficial de la produccin artstica chilena gesta bajo el regimen
militar. Ese campo es aqu referido en una de sus tantas dimensiones: la
configuradura de una escena llamada de avanzada que se ha caracter-
izado por haber extremado su pregunta en torno al significado del arte y las
condiciones-lmites de su prctica en el marco de una sociedad fuertemente
represiva. Por haberse atrevido apostar a la creatividad como fuerza disrup-
tora del orden administrado el en el lenguaje por las figuras de la autoridad
y sus gramticas del poder.
Por haberse propuesto reformular el nexo entre arte y poltica fuera de
toda correspondencia mecnica o dependencia ilustrativa, fuera de toda sub-
ordinacin discursive a la categora de lo ideolgico: pero de una manera
que a la vez insiste en anular el privilegio de lo esttico como esfera ideal-
mente desvinculada de lo social (y de su trama de opresiones) o exenta de la
responsabilidad de una crtica a sus efectos de dominancia. (Richard 119)13
The movement of artworks reflected upon in this texts belong to the
unofficial field of Chilean artistic production under the military dictatorship.
This field is here named by one of its many dimension: the configuration of
a scene named de avanzada characterized by having taken to extremes the
question of the meaning of art and its limiting-conditions of practices in the
frame of a society under strong repression. For having dared on creativity as
a disruptive force for the language administered by figures of authority and
their grammars of power.
For having proposed to reformulate the link between art and politics
beyond mechanical correspondence or illustrative dependency, beyond dis-
cursive subordination to the category of ideology: but in a way that simul-
taneously insists and overrides the privilege of aesthetics as a sphere ideally
detached from the social (and its oppression frame) or exempted from
responsibility for a critique of the effects of dominance.
El movimiento that Richard talks about opened a space in Chilean arts

and letters that had been foreclosed by the brutal repression of the regime
and the politics and exposed to a cultural limit-situation that, according to
Richard, was a una plena zona donde ha naufragado el sentido, debido
no solo al fracaso de un proyecto histrico [the Allende Unidad Popular
13
Residuos and Metaforas 188 (2006).
government], sino al quiebre de todo el sistema de referencias sociales y

culturales que, hasta 1973, articulabapara el sujeto chilenoel manejo
de sus claves de realidad y pensamiento (Richard 119).
[an entire zone where sense is shipwrecked, due not to the failure of a
historical project (the Allende Popular Unity government), but the break-
ing of every system of social and cultural references that, until 1973, artic-
ulatedfor the Chilean subjectthe conduction of its codes of reality and
thought.]
The Pinochet coup dtat had exploded the nations traditional land-
scape of expression, disrupting the previous cultural projects attached to
the Allende regime and produced by a conjunction of socialist-leaning
artists that were attempting to construct a new, national expression that
would comment on and represent the ambitions of Allendes govern-
ment.14 Thus, avanzada postulated the cultural field of the coup dtat as
a national ruin, evacuated of the possibilities for the inscription of politics
through art in any of the traditional strategies that place art over and
against party politics or in its service.
The positionality of Escena de avanzada at the margins of the cul-
tural field produced by the coup was a conscious attempt to reduce the
power that both the nationalist Left and the approved Rightist organs
of expression15 wielded in the frame of public power. avanzadas vision
was to challenge the very possibility of expression within the mappings of
symbolic, social power that both sides wielded during the regime (in a new
version of the traditional figuration of Right versus Left). As Bourdieu has
argued, power is exercised by state and other organs within the official
realm of language.16 Languages legitimation of state power occurs at the
very level of syntax, ordering the realm of possible utterances within the
determined social field. Dictatorships ordering of the field of significa-
tion, in consequence, meant that the problems of language and censorship
createdalbeit ironicallya crisis of legitimation among practitioners in
the cultural field, an ongoing question about the authority of speaking oth-
erwise, not in terms legitimated in that official signification. Censorships
force, enforced by the Pinochet regimes penchant for kidnapping and
14
The full text elaborating this point appears in Escena de avanzada y sociedad FLASCO
documento no. 46 in Mrgenes e instituciones (2007).
15
In his text La cultura autoritaria en Chile (1981), Jos Joaqun Brunner outlines the
debilitated social sphere that asserted quietist corporate-owned media organs as what was
closest to officially accepted cultural organs for expression.
16
Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power (1991), 138.
32 C.M. AMADOR
torture meant that the formal language of legitimate power enforced its
claim through the vicious application of power in the biopolitical realm
language practices had immediate physical consequences. Torture and
imprisonment by the regime thereby restructured the relations of power
to the corporeal, launching an assault on subjectivity itself, as new ways of
being subjects were forced into existence.
Claims of legitimacy to torture and censor are, in turn, always validated
through the semantic field of the official state discourse. The first field of
state discourse, is of course, designed to reinforce the legitimacy of this
state apparatus and to fundamentally reify the relations of power.
The nueva escenas work neither acceded to nor confronted this
enforced legitimation, but rather engaged a liminal sphere, seeking a
way of reading and engaging with the scene of Chilean representation
that would fracture the totalizing content of the Chilean regime of signs.
They sought instead a radical liminality that would undermine the rep-
resentational hegemonies of standard political language. The margin
became both their figure for expression and their site of enunciation, as
Richard points out:
La escena de avanzada marca el surgimiento de practices del estallido

en el campo minado del lenguaje y de la representacin; practicas para las
cuales solo la construccin de lo fragmentarioy su ellipsis de una totali-
dad desunificadalogra dar cuenta del estado de dislocacin en el que se
encuentra la categora de sujetos que estos fragmentos retratan ahora como
una unidad devenida irreconstituible. (Richard 16)
The escena de avanzada marks the emergence of practices of explosion in
the field mined by language and representation; practices for which only the
construction of the fragmentaryand its ellipsis of a disunified totality
achieves realization of a state of dislocation where there can be found the
category of subjects that these selfsame fragments draw as a totality that has
become unreconstitutable.
With the appearance of that September 1986 issue of Art & Text, the
avanzada artists achieved international recognition for this program and
were given a uniquely international moment of collective expression.
For the present purpose, it is critical to note that the issue is comprised
of a long essay divided into small sections written by Richard, followed
by photographs, images from slides, and other articles commenting on
the works therein. For more than 20 years, the issue of Art & Text stood
as the primary document concerning avanzadas theoretical status, as it
claimed a central position in cultural signification within Pinochets Chile.
AVANZADA ANDTHESPECIFIC ETHICS

OFTHEAVANT-GARDE
Situating struggle on the margins of possible expression, outside recog-

nized political discourses, during one of the hardest periods for Chilean
expression was a gesture of extraordinary audacity on the part of avanzada
artists and writers. Vanguardism became a disruption against dictatorships
foreclosure of the symbolic-semiotic realm and an active engagement with
the plural as cultural contenta diversity that was conceived as being radi-
cally different from the complicitous culture enfranchised by Pinochets
regime and the critical Left.
Idelber Avelar has termed what avanzada produced as overcodifi-
cation of the margins, indicating the immense scale of the critical dis-
ruptions of marginal discourses that were the movements principal
concernsa concept I will return to in the next chapter. Challenging
the conditions of possibility of enunciation, according to Pablo Oyarzn,
were the principle goals of avanzadas work (118). Instead of addressing
directly how dictatorship alters the conditions of possibility of expression
through censorship, avanzadas goals were set more abstractly and aimed
at challenging expression itselfredefining the enounceable, or in the
words of Avelar the sayable, became the avanzadas object of linguistic
exploration. Avelar avers: [o]ne of the avanzadas consistent concerns
was the limits of the sayable, not as a result of external determinations
such as censorship but instead as consequence of languages very limits
(Avelar 167).
As these artists occupy the outer rim of the possible in language, they
produce a series of theoretically sophisticated works of poetry, literature,
and visual artsmost notable of which in the literary field are Eltits nov-
els from the mid 1970s and 1980s, Lumprica and Los Vigilantes. Such
works present a constant performative of artistic exploration that surged
against the contours of the putatively sayable. Richard concurs on this
point, but is quick to point out that part of the situation of avanzadas
explorations of the limits of the sayable occurred by virtue of the Chilean
Lefts insufficiency of address to languages limits. Instead, Avelar high-
lights avanzadas deconstructive nonmetaphysical metaphysicalitythe
fact that, as I will show later, avanzada attempts to produce a singular
reading of the ethical moment in experience through its art, a more criti-
cal analysis of the potentially generalizeable ethical claims of the system.
In fact, avanzada is a sophisticated and extraordinary interrogation of the
ethical possibilities of the specific, as I will return to later in this argument.
34 C.M. AMADOR
As I have argued in the introduction, situations of crisis and/or limiting

situations seem to always produce those speakers who will take the inter-
rogation to its deepest possibilities,17in Chiles case, where avanzada
art always struggled to produce work within the ethical sphere. Ethics,
according to the Levinasian frame, reveals itself to be a radical mode of
singularity that only names the encounter between the subject and its
otherthat frame defines all ethics as a set of unique encounters, with lit-
tle under cover. If artists adhere to this singular ethics, it means they con-
front a deep and abiding problem of creating an artistic modality for both
the specific and the specified content of imagining the collective sphere, to
figure out how to signify ethical choices in ways that speak more generally.
In contrast to this, avanzadas labor within the margins did provide for
a conceptual reimagining of the possiblities of signification, differentia-
tion, and individuation to some degree, withinor at the margins ofthe
space of dictatorship, and hence for statements about values and actions
that make ethical sense to the collective. This position is notable in the
work of Eltits novels, which I read as indicative of avanzadas specific
position, and as examples of specific statements addressing the ethical-
political sphere in terms that make sense to communities of marginalized
Chilean citizens during and after dictatorships. Of especial importance is
how the specificthe appeal to a comprehensible place and time, ground-
ing ethical decisions and allowing new ethical discussions to emerge
forms a positionality of radical political possibility within the statements
available to the marginal communities, moving them beyond the dicta-
torships resources. Reading Eltit as a specific author who creates literary
space to help his readers imagine a form of politics that (despite a cred-
ible and coherent challenge to signification itself) will, as we see, take
the space of the body as a place where the building of a multitude might
commence.18
Yet for the moment, let us stay with the generation of new Chilean lit-
erature, of which Eltits work was a part, which was decisively informed by
17
It is here that we can build a sophisticated and relatively simple exemplification of the
phenomenological process in Levinas work and teach students how art has the possibility to
do a phenomenology of the ethical. This is mapped out in more explicit detail in Levinas
Ethics and Infinity (1990).
18
This idea is explored in more depth in Michael Hardt and Antonio Negris Multitude
(2005). The essential argument is that within the frame of contemporary capitalisms increas-
ingly biopolitical and global reach, there exists the possibility of a common politics, perhaps,
a specific one, that will unite disparate communities in a pluralized response to domination.
critical theory and the visual arts. In this sense, an inevitable debate over
clarity of meaning, as their concern over the conditions of production of
art, led into an investigation of its own existence: [t]he aspect of opac-
ity that typifies many of these works [is] not due to arbitary hermeticism,
but rather to an overcodification of its elements and denotations: a certain
version, then, of a ciphered language (Avelar 168). As Avelar summarizes
Eltits great novel from the movement and its solution to this challenge:
Lumprica is an affirmative allegory, a true allegory of affirmationfor this

is one of the definitions of allegory: a mimetic relation with the impossible.
Hence Lumpricas overcodification: because it opts to affirm only what
is radically outside the codifiable by dictatorial and antidictatorial doxa.
It can only dwell on the impossible. The condition of possibility of such
impossible affirmation is its submission to the cycle of the eternal return of
the same. (168)
That is, the novel seeks to specify its enunciations in an engagement with
what dictatorship has declared impossible, as part of a necessary return to
a repressed normal.
Avelars concept of overcodification is of interest here as it lets us
explore how avanzadas seemingly arbitrary hermeticism works to
expand the linguistic and political possibilities of dictatorships singularity.
avanzadas techniques of writing are indeed exemplified in Eltits classic
novel of avanzada, Lumprica (1983), as we shall see in the next section
of this chapter. There, we find a straightforward example of how an author
actually intends an allegorical relation to the impossible to function, as a
disruption of political possibility in the specific register, albeit, in a speci-
fied way: the novel positions itself as an utterance that is part of a repre-
sentational schema at a particular, situated moment. In this sense, it plays
with the margin, overdetermining the existing schema of representation
with a cryptification that in Avelars view works in the allegorical regis-
ter to address what dictatorship has declared as extrinsic to the social field,
thus making both dictator and counterdictatorship doxa (approved
practices, in this case, artistic norms), a problematic expression at all lev-
els. The right design or style of artistic practice becomes unimportant in
this cryptificationright is a designation that functions only within a
particular system, and so there can be no right style when an utterance
is no longer linked to a particular allegiance, to a national resurgence or
discourse of legitimation, when it functions at the margins, not within
the discourses and their counters. Against the illegitimacy of the aesthetic
36 C.M. AMADOR
terrain set by dictatorshipindeed, one could even say that a question

of legitimacy did not play out, given avanzadas focus on disruptive and
unstable social fields of artistic practicethe movements praxiological
sphere emerges as a self-legitimizing point of contention against other
spheres, not just artistic styles. In other words, the practice of artistic pro-
duction becomes the only point of reference necessary and important to
the avanzada; its claim to a possible field of social concerns are mitigated
by its goal of destabilizing the very condition of the social.
The destabilizing engagement with signification inaugurates a field of
representational practice that looks forward to a world where the experi-
mental practices of the avant-garde function to reconfigure the possibili-
ties for collective engagementwhere art actually creates new worlds, on
new premises of signification. However, this hope begs the more practical
question: How does collective engagement occur in the limit case of
total repression? Does the regimes closure of making meaning require a
challenge to the very nature of expression? The answer for avanzada was
an affirmative. The consequences of this affirmative remind the reader of
the turn toward the metaethical that Levinas and other thinkers produced,
partially as a consequence of their own engagements with the radical limit-
occurrences of the Second World War and the Holocaust. Working within
this metatheoretical frame, this I argue, is part of the important work done
on the body by several of the avanzada artistsCarlos Leppe, Eltit, and
Zurita have already been mentionedthey answer this question by pre-
supposing the body as a place of specific engagement, and as a site for the
introduction of an ethics of the other, defined through a solidarity with
bodily suffering.
LUMPRICA ANDCORPOREALITY, BIOPOLITICAL REJECTION,

ANDTHEINCARNATION OFTHEALLEGORICAL
One of the most important gestures that avanzadas artists initiate within
the cultural field is the shift toward a corporeal register in the plastic arts
and literary production that opens a possible plural space for signification
and collective political work. This space makes possible a set of possible
inscriptions for the body as a site of protest, as a place comprehensible
to the collective in ways that other forms of signification are now com-
prehensible. Part of the importance of the body as a site of collectivity
is the capacity for a bodily performance of any kind to be both singular
and specific: to incorporate the particularized body of the performer that
nonetheless communicates to us through the recognizable and generaliz-

able frame of the body. Bodies can be acculturated or transformed, they
can inhabit the collective mind as palimpsestic surfaces on which societys
messages can be written, and they can function to propogate signs, as sig-
nifying machines that make specific claims to the social field.
Bodies, furthermore, are the most intimate sites of both public and
private oppression. This of course, is the most infamous legacy of the
Southern Cone dictatorships in Latin American discourse: they plied
their trade with vast techniques of biopower (picanas, chupados, torture,
el quirfano, el traslado), each designed to inscribe the private body of
the citizen into public consciousness as a public discourse of warning and
discipline. Rendering docile the corporeal forms of the citizenry during
the era of Southern Cone dictatorships was a project that required nearly
constant vigilance from the regimes. The Proceso junta, Pacheco-Areco
and Bordaberrys Uruguay, the military dictatorship in Brazil, all formed a
knowledge/power circuit that wrote the body as a space to be controlled
utterly and unmercifully.
In other words, the body was revealed through torture to be a site
of extraordinary textual and semiotic relevance through the representa-
tion of the body as a political symbol and the carrying out of torture
designed to reify this claim. The political violence of torture reveals what
the originary sacred life of Agamben reveals: lifes subjection to a power
over death and lifes irreparable exposure to the relation of abandonment
(Agamben 83).
Avanzadas bodily discourses in literature and art reveal a precise and
elegant counterargument to any singularizing of the avanzada moment as
oppositional and abstract. The new Chilean literature of which Eltit was
a part was also decisively informed by critical theory and the visual arts,
adding an additional dimension of physicality to the question of body
discourses. In this sense an inevitable cryptification ensued, as concern
over arts conditions of production led into an investigation of its own
existence. [t]he aspect of opacity that typifies many of these works [is]
not due to arbitary hermeticism, but rather to an overcodification of its
elements and denotations: a certain version, then, of a ciphered language
(Avelar 168).
Said another way, Eltits novel serves as both a model and an expan-
sion of the specific politics of the Escena de avanzada enacting through
literary, the theoretical and practical principles of the group. One of the nov-
els chief assets is the destabilization of meaninga meaning nonetheless
38 C.M. AMADOR
grounded in the public space of the plaza, a public space that is nonethe-
less specific, indifferent to essential identities, other than those of bodily
desire and practice.
One of the key scenes in the novel is an interrogation scene, between an
unspecified and unnamed interrogator and an equally anonymous respon-
dent. The anonymity of both participants evade the possibility of direct
censorship by the Pinochet Regime, producing instead a moment of alle-
gory to elucidate how the inner dynamics of politically motivated inter-
rogation works, without invoking a direct, representational stability. It is
an operation of the distancing and estranging power of literature in the
era of political crisis.
The destabilizing engagement with signification that avanzada and Eltit
both try inaugurates a field of representational practice that looks forward
to a world where the experimental practices of the avant-garde function to
reconfigure the possibilities for collective engagement. However, this begs
the question: How does collective engagement occur in the limit case of
total repression? Returning to Richards quote:
[el] regimen de censura que opera en Chile durante el perodo autoritario

se vale de numerosas medidas de prohibicin que afectan la produccin cul-
tural; medidas que aplicaron, primero, en suprimir los vnculos de ideas y/o
personas ligadas a la ideologa del programa de la Unidad Popular (durante
la fase del regimen inmediatamente posterior al quiebre politico de 1973) y
luego en reprimir y castigar toda manifestacin disidente que se opusiera a la
voluntad de dominancia del nuevo aparato oficial. (Richard 25)
[the regime of censorship that operates in Chile during the authoritarian
period takes advantage of numerous prohibitive measures that affect cultural
production; these were methods applied in the first instance to suppress the
links with ideas of persons tied to the ideological program of the Popular
Unity (during the phase of the regime immediately posterior to the political
destruction of 1973) and in later instances to repress and punish all dissident
demonstrations in opposition to the will of dominance of the new official
culture.]
Total repression in the Chilean context, despite the aforementioned incon-

sistency of the regimes techniques of censorship, was ubiquitous and the
danger of injunction was clear:
Tampoco el control de la censura se aplic con igual estrictez a todos los sec-
tores de la actividad cultural: el arte neovanguardista fue el menos daado
por sus efectos obliterantes. El refinamiento de los juegos de los signos y las
operaciones de despiste quea modo de disimulacin y camuflajeelabo-

raron las obras de la avanzada las llev a ocupar una franja muy restringida
del campo de recepcin de las artes visuales. (Richard 26)
Nor was control of censorship applied with equal strictness to all sectors
of cultural activity: neovanguardista art was less damaged by obliterating its
effects. The refinement of the games of the signs and after the operations
as a disguise and camouflageproduced works of the avanzada that led
them to occupy a very restricted field of visual arts and its reception.
Lumpricas layers of signification and the emphasis on the corporeality of

the figures in the novel speak to the reality of a collective engagement that
is part of a specific political engagement at the level of corporeality.
The novel can be read in a straightforward manner as being specific, and as
providing a model for a showing how it tries to draw out of it the meaning it
produces, the start of a political process that asserts a position from the situ-
atedness of the lumpen depicted in the novel, and unites all other subjects
within the bodily discourses of suffering, desire, and movement. Within the
space of the public plaza, it is not only that the space is democratically con-
ceived to welcome all, the plaza contains and negotiates the flow of subjects
within the municipal space. Bodies in Eltits novel suffer the surveillance
of the Pinochet regimes repressive social apparatus to differing degrees:
the bodies of homosexual men and women, those suffering from mental
illness, and those who traditionally identified with the lumpen proletariat.
Nonetheless, Eltits novel imagines the possibility of a vast lumpen with the
capacity to imagine a unity through bodily discourse that undermines the
ability of politics to imagine a fully closed space for the body. Eltits novel
imagines a possible position against corporeal and heteronormative oppres-
sionone that unites all bodies in a field of desire and exploration.
The logic of the specific that I have been using to guide my investiga-
tion implies the taking of a position, and constructing a medium and a
frame for individuation, one that is, however, already involved in a collective
frame, whether realized or not. The notion of collective is important here,
as we are always assuming a sense of relationality for the subject in both the
historical sphere and in the political sphere. Following Badiou, specific ges-
tures emerge from the structure of the name that motivates and makes pos-
sible further action. Badious description of how the specific environment,
named from an actively assumed position, shapes the way the possibilities of
individuation are formed. Individuation, in the specific frame, is a produc-
tion of subjectivity that specifically works within the frame of a collective or
collectively asserted name or identity. The essence of taking sides is at the
40 C.M. AMADOR
heart of the specific, and what is necessaryindeed crucial, is the elabora-

tion of a series of choices that force ethical and/or political action.
The singularity in expression and the expression of the singular identi-
fied in the vanguard artists of avanzada is still always a singular modality
that disrupts the connection to an exterior space of enunciation in which
collective possibilities can emerge. Beginning in the space of rebellion that
is the artistic challenge, the avanzada transformed its content into a criti-
cal challenge to the possibility to enunciate with others.
Productively, avanzada nonetheless rooted its intentionality in the
frame of writing and production that emerges from the confrontation with
the brutality of Pinochets regime. And when that regime began to shift,
avanzadas theoretical framework also needed to evolve. How it did so
was, however, heavily under the aegis of neoliberalism and a fundamental
transformation in Chilean politics. That shift, and the new theories that
came out of it, will be the topic of the next chapter, that shows a further
evolution of the idea of the avanzada in the 1970s and 1980s.
REFERENCES
Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel
Heller-Roazen. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1998. Print.
Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Trans.
Richard Nice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991. Print.
Brunner, Jos Joaqun. La cultura autoritaria en Chile. Santiago: FLASCO, 1981.
Print.
Dinges, John. The Condor Years: How Pinochet and His Allies Brought Terrorism to
Three Continents. NewYork: The New Press, 2005. Print.
Eltit, Diamela. Lumprica. Santiago: Editorial Cuarto Propio, 1983. Print.
Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of
Empire. NewYork: Penguin, 2005. Print.
Kornbluh, Peter. The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and
Accountability. Washington: National Security Archive, 2003. Print.
Levinas, Emmanuel. Ethics and Infinity. Trans. Richard A.Cohen. Philadelphia,
PA: Duquesne University Press, 1990. Print.
Muoz, Heraldo. The Dictators Shadow: Life Under Augusto Pinochet. NewYork
Basic Books, 2008. Print.
Richard, Nelly. Fracturas de la memoria: Arte y pensamiento crtico. Buenos Aires:
Siglo XXI Editores Argentina, 2007. Print.
Stern, Steve J. Remembering Pinochets Chile: On the Eve of London 1998. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2006. Print.
Vidal, Hernn. Chile: Potica de la tortura poltica. Santiago, Chile: Mosquito
Editores, 2001. Print.
CHAPTER 3
The Cultural Politics oftheSingular

andtheSpecific: Chile, Avant-Garde Art,
andTheBody
After the era of avanzada, a new period of philosophical and aesthetic

exploration emerges that takes up the question of signification spe-
cifically, offering theoretical accounts of the space that avanzada and
authors like Eltit were trying to mark out, claiming a specificity that
challenged the dictatorship. Out of the embers of a still unreconciled
Chile in the 1990s, however, cultural workers like Eltit, Nelly Richard,
and Willy Thayer recognized the upcoming era as one that would be
circumscribed by a new kind of totalitarian (if not dictatorial) force:
neoliberal market logic that produces grids of consumption and produc-
tion, drawing the lines of aesthetic possibility away from the sphere of
criticism and reflection. Thus, instead of following up on the program
of avanzada and theorizing about its problem of specific signification,
these theorists worked in more general terms on the conditions of the
sayable, tracing what is foreclosed with the impositions of the market
system.
Transicin is the name given to the era of change from a cultural sphere
marred by dictatorship to a radically uncensored civic space that is domi-
nated instead by the market hunger for difference and saleable merchandise.
The problem of signification becomes relevant and it is combined with a
more sophisticated critique of governmentality. Neoliberalism, which had
been let loose upon Chile by the Augusto Pinochet Ugarte regimestill
hampered a bit by the protectionism of the 1980sspread through Chile
to become the main ideological factor impelling the cultural realm, and thus

Paraguay, 19702000, DOI10.1057/978-1-137-54633-3_3
42 C.M. AMADOR
the main point of post-avanzada cultural practice.1 This period of transition

from dictatorship to democracy, underwritten prominently by the impo-
sition of the logic of the neoliberal marketplace, has been of vast critical
importance to scholars from Chile to the USA.
In the sections that follow, I unfortunately bypass a large number of
works on the transition era in Chile to focus briefly on examining how the
critique of neoliberalism in the cultural sphere occludes, to some degree,
how the market nonetheless still reverberates for these theorists as reveal-
ing a deep possibility for critical opposition and the formation of a specific
site of struggle. Although I am deeply critical of the imposition of the
market upon the high and low cultural spheres in Chile, I cannot in
good conscience, misread the emergence of neoliberalism as merely the
banalization of culture by the market. Rather, the market in Chileas it
did in Italymakes possible a particular theoretical approach to the con-
nection between expression of political antagonism to capitalism, and the
challenge of the rights of the multitude.
To make this case, this chapter will first outline in historical terms how
neoliberalisms marketing of every aspect of the cultural spherethe thirst
for differenceled Chilean thinkers from avanzada to the new moment
of reflection upon their conditions of political possibility within the new
commercial environment.
Neoliberalisms even greater expansion into the Chilean frame, as I have
mentioned earlier, is considered the most notable feature of the postdictator-
ship transition era of the nations history.2 The earlier politics of the Pinochet
Ugarte regime was, of course, linked expressly with the reinforcement of
neoliberalism as the only viable option to the state economics supported
by the Allende regime. The Market as a figure or a system for thought,
in turn, was to be imposed forcefully by the Pinochet regime as a conse-
quence of the Chilean coup detat. Almost immediately after Pinochets
triumph, the regime instituted a series of changes to the economic land-
scape which opened the nation up to neoliberal transformation. Milton
1
Nelly Richard, Residuos y metforas: Ensayos de crtica cultural sobre el Chile en transicin
(1998).
2
This has been widely commented on by Chilean critics and other scholars of the region.
One of the more interesting analyses is Marcus Taylors From Pinochet to the Third Way:
Neoliberals and Social Transformation in Chile (2006), which attempts to analyze how
Chiles neoliberal transition took its cues from the ideas and changes implemented by so-
called Third Way policiesa different conception of the role of the state and market from
traditional neoliberal thinking.
THE CULTURAL POLITICS OFTHESINGULAR ANDTHESPECIFIC 43
Friedmans University of Chicago students, named the Chicago Boys,

became the intellectual authors of a market reformation plan that instituted
wide changes in the Chilean economy. Much of the Chilean banking system
was privatized, tariffs were dropped, and save the copper industry, a vast
swath of Chilean national resources were opened to foreign investment and
purchase. In short, Chile was exposed to a vast neoliberal project that was
directly in alignment with some of the most prevailing intellectual trends of
free market economic thought, personified in Milton Friedman, who met
with Pinochet for a brief meeting shortly after the coup.3
The aperture of the nation to neoliberalism created the opening of
the artistic space to the market forces that render cultural products into
pure objects of consumption, and thereby undermine the attempt of art to
engage the cultural sphere as a form of radical, critical expression.
WILLY THAYERS PROBLEMATIC SINGULAR

The name of Chilean philosopher Willy Thayer recurs throughout the
body of this current project due to his almost unparalleled influence on the
world of postdictatorship Spanish American letters, due in no small part
to a single textLa crisis no-moderna de la universidad modernawhich
came out in 1997, in Richards edited journal Revista de crtica cultural,
and which has since been expanded into a book, and translated and pub-
lished in a major academic journal4 in Latin American studies across the
Western intellectual world. Crisis (as it shall heretofore be called) issued
a clarion call to intellectuals, writers, and artists across Latin America to
rethink the status of the university in the face of Latin Americas full emer-
gence into neoliberalism. At the time that this text was written, before the
emergence of emboldened leftist regimes in the region and this current
eras massive economic crisis, Thayers work helped push to new levels, the
critical reflection on the status of knowledge and power in Latin America
that had started with avanzada and others who saw the limits to dialecti-
cal opposition.
Thayer begins his seminal text El Fragmento Repetido: Escritos en estado
de excepcin (2007) with two essays that specifically engage the historical
and artistic legacy of avanzada de avanzada: El Golpe como consumacin de
la vanguardia (1997) and Crtica, nihilsimo e interrupcin: La avanzada
3
See Simon Colliers A History of Chile, 18082002 (2004).
4
Nepantla: Views From The South, Vol.1, Issue 1 (2000).
44 C.M. AMADOR
despus de Mrgenes e Instituciones (1998). With the two texts, Thayer

provides a critical reading of vanguardism that is crucial in understanding
how the ethical and political problem of the avant-garde is oftenif not
alwaysa concern of how the representational possibility is grounded on
a state of exception that disrupts the relational in art. Thayer takes up a
critical position concerning the state of exception to locate the connec-
tion between the avant-garde of avanzada, how the state of exception that
avanzada embodies, and the possibilities of an understanding of the social
field of Pinochet-era Chile. Thayer is explicit on this point:
El Golpe deflaciona las totalizaciones ideolgicas de la historia de la pintura,

de la narrativa, y la poesa articuladas en la modernizacin estatal; disuelve
las tradiciones efectivas del Estado nacional republicano, que se constituy
entre otras cosas, como despliegue de aquellas historias o campos especfi-
cos. En este sentido, las prcticas disolventes del sistema-arte, ms que dis-
olver, descompaginar, cismatizar, iteran superestructuralmente lo que est
de hecho y transversalmente descompaginado en el Golpe mismo (la super-
estructura llega tarde, post-festum). (Thayer 24)
The Coup deflates that ideological totalizations of the history of paint-
ing, of narrative, and poetry articulated in the modernization of the state; it
dissolves the effective traditions of the national republican state, constituted,
among other things, as the unfolding of those histories or specific fields.
In this sense, the dissolving practices, more than dissolving, decompagi-
nate, schismatize, and iterate superstructrually what is given and transver-
sally decompaginate in the coup itself (the superstructure that arrives late,
post-festum).
Thayer makes a powerful point concerning how avanzada structured its

work within the binary situation of the bourgeois frame, leading the reader
to see the art movement as having little revolutionary critical power.
Avanzadas work created a field of practices and conceptualizations of
the artistic frame to draw the map for what they considered a destablized
field of artistic practice. Thayer rightfully lists the various words that
signify the praxiological-ethical stance of the avanzada. They inhabit a
putatively polyvalent mode of artistic production that, based in the insub-
ordination of signs that the Golpe produces, provides the ground for the
disruptive, rhizomatic, and deconstructive way of practicing Art. The
ethical and political contravention that Thayer identifies as central to this
movement begins on this point, with the argument concerning the shar-
ing of the no-frame, produced by the emergence of solidly neoliberal
institutions and the destruction of a truly national cultural frame that allows
for the possibility of positive meaning creation in the realm of the sign.
The ethics of neoliberalism are ultimately that of the radical
exchangeability of the market, and the devaluing of the national prod-
uct. Said another way, the market eliminates the frame of the national by
rendering all products subject to the circuit of production and capitalist
consumption. Part of Thayers unique power is to imagine the Pinochet
coup detat as an incident, as part of the forward momentum of capitalist
expansion. He continuously reminds the critic that part of the legacy of
Pinochet was the destruction of the incipient historical logic and the pro-
gression of a system-wide imagining of alternate economic and cultural
arrangementsThe Allende-led Popular Front.
Of vital importance is the confrontation with the writers, artists, and
theorists of escena de avanzada, and most specifically with avanzadas chief
theorist, Richard. A philosophical reading will highlight how Richard and
the avanzada artists actually founded their work on the individuated logic
of singularity and shows that it, maximally, forecloses the possibility of
building a collective enunciation, unless you are already within the space
of enunciation. That is, they argued for the space of dictatorial signification
as totalitarian in essence, and for its resistance to sponsoring new concepts.
Minimally, this foreclosure also makes it difficult to reach a consensus and
connect with others outside of the sphere of the singular modality, thus
isolating any possible opposition within what it tries to oppose. Here, I
would also underscore how Thayer has reconfigured his historical reading
of the era to argue for the extraordinary necessity of a postdictatorship
theoretical period that needs to open up spaces for the radically specific in
cultural and political criticisma more flexible opposition, construed as
thinkable alterities rather than opposites.
Thayers argument is thus an interesting and sophisticated one that
marks how avant-garde practices and the repressive vision of the signify-
ing field of dictatorships share a common connection and representational
politics, a relationship that conditions the possibility of historical change.
However, Thayers argument is also ultimately unsatisfactory as it postu-
lates the emergence of the Chilean vanguard as a singular event that fore-
closes the specific connection with other communities (real or imagined),
at and beyond the margins of the space of the dictatorship, overlooking the
role that the ground-level practices of art and literature actually had in the
creation of a sphere of specific ways of engaging with the larger groups of
individuals. Rather than imagining the possibilities of a vanguard practice
46 C.M. AMADOR
that might work toward a generalized, specific cultural scene that worked
against the dictatorship, from the example, Thayer believes that the sin-
gularity of the event of the dictatorship extends to the escena de avanzada
community, which effectively invalidates their project as a movement that
critiqued the Pinochet regime.
The details of this positions logic is critical to characterize the space of
enunciation appropriate to postdictatorial eras, which, in Thayers argu-
ment, is not a function of a group like the avanzada. In his opinion,
their project is based on what he terms the avant-garde as consumma-
tion of the coup dtat (Thayer 36). Thayer thus writes avanzadas his-
tory as part of the transformation of the specified situation of the Allende
regimes Unidad Popular government. Allendes government, which was
a coalition made of up elements from the radical Left, the more traditional
but Left-leaning Christian Democratic Party, and nationalist elements of
the labor classes, provided a united front that was meant to usher in the
next phase of cultural politics. Of course, the Unidad Popular project was
frustrated by the Pinochetista coup.
For Thayer, vanguardisms change of the representational field actually
parallels this political change, and their alternative is much like one of the
basic movements that the Allende regime was making prior to Pinochet:
Entre 1970 y 1973, fue al gobierno popular de Salvador Allende el que
se constituy en sujeto transversal de la vanguardia. El gobierno popular
oper, desde la representacon, el descontrol programtico de la represent-
acin dispuesto en la teleologa de la revolucin. El descontrol programtico
de la representacin puesto en la rbita de la revolucin, tuvo su hperbole
y cifra siniestra en La Moneda en llamas que recorri el planeta videada y
fotografiada en colores en blanco y negro. La Moneda, La Repblica, el
Estado en llamas es, a la vez, la representacin ms justa de la voluntad de
acontecimiento de la vanguardia, voluntad cumplida siniestramente por el
Golpe de Estado como punto sin retorno de la vanguardia, y como big bang
de la globalizacin. (Thayer 12)
Between 1970 and 1973, the popular government of Salvador Allende
constituted itself as the transversal subject of the avant-garde. The popular
government operated from the place of representation, by means of the
programmatic decontrol in the service of the teleology of revolution. This
programmatic decontrol, in the service of the orbit of revolution, reached
its hyperbole and sinister cipher with La Moneda in flames that traveled the
globe in flames filmed and photographed both in color and black and white.
La Moneda; The Republic; The State in flames is, at the same time, the
fairest representation of the will for the event of the avant-gardea will
realized in a sinister fashion as the point of no return of the avant-garde, and

the big bang of globalization.
Displaying a fiery and precise conviction, Thayer lays down the gauntlet
against vanguardism during the period of dictatorship, perhaps because of
a perceived failure of vision.
In fact, Thayer links the emergence of avanzadas vanguardist strate-
gies of representation for new politics with what he titles el descon-
trol programtico (programmatic chaos) of the realm of signification
brought to bear on the bourgeois sphere by Allendes Unidad Popular
government and incorporated as a telos of their political program. This
dictatorial realm of signification, like all nationalist imaginings, is a goal-
oriented process that ostensibly unites the citizenry under the sover-
eign image of the signified sphere of political unity. Its politics proceeds
from the programmatic chaos to the teleology of the revolution
to attempt the inscription into public mind and memory of a possible
modality of meaning that brings together the expectations of how the
emergent Chilean nation would elaborate on the hopes of the emerging
Socialist government.
Thayer reminds the reader that the Unidad Populars programmatic
chaos over the making of meaning in order to move forward with the
social revolution was a gesture of vanguardism that singularized the possi-
bilities of representation to the extent that they would be absorbed by the
Pinochet regime, as it operated in an opportunistic modality:
El Golpe de Estado realiz la voluntad de acontecimiento, epitome de la

vanguardia, y abri la escena post-vanguardista en que ya no ser posible
corte significativo alguno. La escena post-vanguardista solo posibilita rup-
turas insignificantes. A partir de septiembre de 1973 no es posible consid-
erar ninguna prctica como crtica de la representacin ni como voluntad de
presencia, porque no hay una representacionalidad en curso sino, ms bien,
escena sin representacin. (Thayer 16)
The coup detat realized the will of event, epitome of the vanguard,
and opened the post-avant-garde scene that would not make possible any
significant rupture. The post-avant-garde scene only makes possible insignif-
icante ruptures. From September 1973 on, it is not possible to consider any
practice as a critique of representation nor as the will to presence, because
there is no representationality as a path, but a scene without representation.
La condicin experiencial, la anmica provocada por los seis aos de
Golpe dista mucho de cualquier pica de lo nuevo, del olvido activo,
48 C.M. AMADOR
del rupturismo con la representacionalidad, del sublime revolucionario.

Ninguna lgica de la transformacin y descompaginacin, de la innovacin,
es posible en rayano del acontecimiento, del hundimiento, del desmayo del
sujeto en el Golpe. Es la insubordinacin de los signos del Golpe la que
disuelve transversalmente el estatuto de la representacionalidad, la democ-
racia moderna. Y lo disuelve en su doble polaridad de la promesa de una
presencia impresentable y del principio formal de articulacin del mundo.
(Thayer 16)
The experiential and psychic condition triggered by the six years of the
coup is far from any epic of the new, active forgetting; of rupturism with
representacionalidad; or the revolutionary sublime. No logic of transfor-
mation or delinking, or of innovation is possible in the event of sinking,
and fainting of the subject in the coup. It is the insubordination of the
signs of the coup which transversally dissolves the status of representa-
tionalitymodern democracy. And it dissolves it in its dual polarity of the
promise of a unpresentable presence and the formal principle of articula-
tion of the world.
Intentionally recapitulating the title of Richards work on the same topic,

Thayer argues that Pinochets coup insubordinates the traditional signs
of its culture, much as the avant-garde has been shown to, in order to
challenge the frame of representationality transversally and to undermine
the bourgeois-liberal democratic sphere they inherited. In other words, in
both cases (Pinochets coup and the avant-garde), there is a breakdown
and collapse of the space of writing and enunciation that occurs through
the event of the dictatorship.
Thayer thus makes the avant-garde event structurally equal to the
coup dtat, making avanzada, in turn, an interesting escena sin repre-
sentacin. As a scene without representation, the Chilean public sphere
under dictatorship satisfies the condition of singularity, given that, without
possibility of representation, there is only the collapsing of possibility into
a pure point from which there is no escapeall representation aligns itself
around one official set of signifiers. Both dictatorship and vanguard thus
sponsor discourses that cannot represent but can delimit, and as they do
so, they prevent representation from occurring by means of a peculiar
arrangement of force (compulsory signs) and silence. In the aforemen-
tioned citation, it is clear that Thayers argument rests on the idea that the
experiential condition brought to life by the coup dtat is one where
there is no opportunity for the building of specific community, any com-
munity that serves local, real interests rather than the declared and official
representation.
Avanzada, Thayer argues, is thus not an avant-garde group per se, but
nonetheless it shares critical features with the politics of signification of
vanguardism (the logic that of course, defines the Golpe as such):
Las prcticas de la avanzada no podran ser consideradas bajo la resonancia

unilateral del vanguardismo en trminos de voluntad de desmantelamiento
de la institucin representacional. Porque en 1977, cuando esas prcticas
emergen, no slo los aparatos de produccin y distribucin de arte, sino
toda forma institucional ha sido suspendida en una seguidilla de golpes, seis
aos de golpe (1973/1979).5
Avanzadas practices could not be considered under the optic of the
unilateral resonance of vanguardism according to the will to dismantle the
representational institution. Because in 1977, when these practices emerge,
not only the apparatuses of production and distribution of art, but all insti-
tutional formations are suspended by a series of coupssix years of coups.
As with other authoritarian regimes, the condition for signification and hence
for individual experience emergent from the dictatorship becomes what it
fundamentally is through its transcendence of relations with other sorts of
social or political power. And Thayer clearly asserts that the escena artists fail
in their representational mission, as they are subject to the political disrup-
tion of artistic networks. Thayer makes an explicit connection between the
political base and the superstructural capacity of art to intervene culturally.
This is a classic definition of what I have been calling singularity, a condi-
tion where the transcendence of relations is imposed by creating boundaries
to communicationthat is, the structure of communication communities is
based on restrictions of the sayable. The voluntad de acontecimiento (will
to the event) that Thayer presents appears to be the desire or the will of the
event (here: the coup dtat) to disrupt all continuity with past relations
the histories of the art movements preceding avanzada, the hopes of the
National Left, and finally, the very representational order itself. Only such
a singularitya moment of historical rupture, the initiation of a state of
5
An important point in Thayers argument is how the Constitutional Decree of 1980 initi-
ated a transition from the total state of exception of the coup dtat to a legal and societal
rooting for Pinochets regime. As Lois Hecht Oppenheim recounts: The 1980 constitution
reshaped Chiles political institutions; Pinochet called the future democracy a protected or
authoritarian democracy. The new Constitution prevented organized Marxist groups from
participating in politics, gave the military a permanent political role, and enhanced presiden-
tial power. There was to be period of almost a decade before even this truncated democracy
was to take full effect (Hecht Oppenheim 104).
50 C.M. AMADOR
exceptioncould produce this kind of disruption of the representational

order. As this happens, the events logical structure eliminates specificity
(any form of the local or the condition) and forecloses representation itself
in its consolidation of all signifiers into the official realm, as an event that
has collapsed under its own weight.
In Thayers reading, in consequence, the event of the Golpe (and hence
avanzada) subsumes the possibilities of expression within the silence of
the event of the coup dtat. The events structure builds the silence that
disrupts even avanzadas capacity to work artistically. Thayer thus believes
that avanzada cannot precisely be called avant-garde, because it cannot
function to initiate other than the given, as he nonetheless categorizes
their significatory possiblities as having been destroyed by the same even-
tal structure:
Mrgenes e Instituciones explicit desde el comienzo su relacin incmoda

con la vanguardia. Seales de esto encontramos por doquier. Pero tambin,
la comprensin de las prcticas de la avanzada como vanguardismo, la
encontramos por doquier en expresiones recurrentes como: desarmadura
de las representaciones, explotacin de las roturas, quiebres de sen-
tido, trizar, hacer caer, triturar, fracturar el sistema de la represent-
acin, ....violar el sentido, violar los sistema de senalizacin, etc. Y los
binarismos del tipo centro/periferia, mrgenes/instituciones, que aunque
se pongan, a veces, en el sentido de lo minoritario, regularmente reiteran la
estructura oposicional de la institucin burguesa de la representacin, la cual
incluye se negacin, es decir, la vanguardia. (Thayer 20)
Margins and Institutions makes explicit from the beginning his uneasy
relationship with the avant-garde. Signs of this are everywhere. But also
the understanding of the practices of advanced and avant-garde, is found
everywhere in recurring expressions such as: dismantling representations,
exploitation of the breaks, breaks sense, Shatter, bring down
crush, fracture the system of representation,....violating the sense,
violate the signaling system, etc. And the binaries of center/periphery,
banks/institutionsalthough they sometimes seem to be in the sense of
the minority, regularly reiterate the oppositional structure of bourgeois
institution of representation, which included negation, or the avant-garde.
(Thayer 20)
The possibilities of a Chilean modern democratic order become proscribed

by the coups destruction of signification outside of the immediate present
of the Pinochetista sphere. In turn, the capacity for the sign that would
be used by any group (its restriction of all signification to the present
archive) advocating change, according to Thayer, has also been dissolved

by the gesture of presentism of the regime, that is, encouraging a focus on
questions of the immediate present, and their mode of destroying the pos-
sibilities for signification. Here, Thayers philosophy may be inadequate to
the historical facts. Although the radically constant presence of censorship
during the regime did indeed change signification during the period, we
know from Richards text that censorship was not a totalizing force, but
an inconsistent and irregular series of norms that were applied to artists
across the disciplines. Hence, Thayer is underestimating the spaces for
signification that were available in Chile and overestimating the totalizing
impact of this particular dictatorship. The sovereign ban on the realm of
inscription was, of course, still intact; however, the regimes maintenance
of the instability made the inscribable spaces for art radically plural.
One of the important gestures that avanzada seems to take to disrupt
the official signification of the Chilean society of the time is a gesture
invoking a type of commemorative positionality toward the regimea
summoning to representation of events of the past, and present in the
form of a commemoration. It is hard to imagine how what Francisco
Galende calls the one true event6 in Chilean historythe triumph of
Allendes Unidad Popularcould have been commemorated and remem-
bered by an avant-garde group so deeply invested in the destruction of the
sign and the pluralization of the field of art, but nonetheless, Thayer seems
to argue that one of the great functions of avanzada was to commemo-
rate the fallen past and erect a type of discursive monumentality to the
previous regime. Part of this symbolic monumentalization of the political
history of Chile is based on the possibilities for writing and memory that
mourning allows. Thayer calls this, elegantly, the Antigonal move, one
that, like Antigone, erects a monument that openly challenges the hierar-
chical situation of the previous regime by calling attention to the death of
the previous order:
Erigir smbolos cvicos en el imperativo de que el luto pueda ser sancionado

en la polis, forzar al reconocimiento pblico de la irreductibilidad de la pr-
dida (cenotafios, monumentos) fue el gesto de Antgona, y dede ese gesto
I.Avelar lee un sector de obras de la avanzada. Ms que un sector, ese gesto
batallante se erigir, con Mrgenes e Instituciones, como la hegemona
6
[E]l verdadero acontecimiento nicoeste s, en su historia: el acontecimiento de la
dignidad de Chile: el de la llegada de la Unidad Popular al poder (Frederico Galende, Esa
extraa pasin de huir de la crtica Revista de Crtica Cultural, 2005: 31).
52 C.M. AMADOR
dela avanzada, que as afinada ya no se dicierne del progresismo de la van-

guardia. (Thayer 31)
To erect civic symbols with the imperative of pointing out that mourn-
ing could be positively sanctioned by the polis, forces the public recog-
nition of the irreducibility of the loss (cenotaphs, monuments) that was
Antigones gesture. And from this gesture, Avelar reads a sector of the
oeuvre of avanzada. More than a sector this battling move erects the
movement, along with Mrgenes e Instituciones, as the hegemony of the
avanzada, and so configured, becomes indiscernible from the progressiv-
ism of the avant-garde.
Such gestures remind the public of what has been foreclosed or has forced
the regime to behave in a totalitarian fashion, throwing its full force against
individuals engaged in what would seem quite ordinary acts.
As Thayer points out, avanzada7 made a point of erecting civic sym-
bols with the imperative of pointing out that mourning could be positively
sanctioned by the polis, and elevated itself to the position of the Antigonal
figure that calls attention to both the murder of the previous king and
the illegitimacy of the regime, but from within the regime. This gesture
serves a double function, according to Thayer, insofar as it reveals the
extreme need that avanzada had for recognition from the polis, even while
it underscores the immense power of the Pinochet hegemony to absorb
mourning into its ideological framework.
Thayer is right to point out how the hegemony of avanzada achieved
by the Antigonal gesture makes it difficult to identify el progresismo de
la vanguardia (The progressivism of the avant-garde). Part of the prob-
lem here, of course, is how such a bivalent move can be constructed so
that it can be located in the state of exception that the avant-garde shares
with the Golpe. To explain how this is possible, it is useful to refer to
Alain Badious idea of an unnameable name, a kind of master signi-
fier around which all other public logics are constructed, but one which
remains essentially unspecified, and hence unconfrontable.8 First, avan-
zadas hegemony and practice in such gestures are, in Thayers view, not
7
As I have pointed out earlier, although the publication of Mrgenes e instituciones in 1986
by the Australian art journal Art & Text is not the origin point of avanzada, it nonetheless
represents the most coherent consolidation of the project of avanzada and a type of anach-
ronistic unification of the movementtype of reverse manifesto.
8
The unnameable name, for Badiou, is the essence of any revolutionary politics that con-
structs a point of departure for political work:
linked to a specific collective project, but rather achieve a level of address

beyond any individual politics. Constructing gestures of resistance at the
level of the generally human, as Antigone did, allows for a politics of the
nameless name, a politics that indifferently unifies groups of the Chilean
artistic communitymany groups find themselves united in affirming
such acts. The politics of the nameless name, which Badiou co-opts from
his reading of Sylvain Lazarus, argues simply for the existence of a name
that is tied to an event, which nonetheless never fully forecloses or realizes
a circumscription of collective identityusing this signifier is a gesture
that ruptures boundaries between groups. A notable example might be
an anarchists vision of the concept of the individual or the community:
both terms are abstract references to indexes of subjective and plural
arrangements that have no distinct identity as such, but which seem to
be meaningful in many discourses. An Antigonal move would build a
myriad of possible connections from within these two concepts and in
making such a statement, it achieves a basic specificity in the here and now
that the statement is made that does not impose a hegemony by virtue
of a singular name. In Antigones case, burying her brother is a perfectly
meaningful gesture, with several possible interpretations about religiosity,
resistance, and lawful/lawlessness that do not need to be disambiguated
for most groups seeing it.
In the Chilean case, this would of course be the name of the nation
imposed by the Pinochet regimea community emerging as a fact of dis-
course but with few real references. The hegemony that such a gesture
creates is grounded in its claim on the polis sanction for mourning, and
so an act that is potentially politically progressive can, outside its specific
context, become unrecognizable by virtue of its requirement to be recog-
nized by the state apparatus. Thayer seems to be arguing for a version of
politics that is located in the fidelity of an eventa politics that exceeds
The name is unnameable, and in this sense, the pure historicity of singularity, its
there is as such, remains unthinkable. But the categories of the name, or the
intellectuality of its prescriptive nature, are nameable, and therefore authorize a
thought of this intellectuality. This thought will proceed in interiority, because it
will assign the category to nothing other than singularity and, never proceeding
by way of definitions, will provide it with no other extension than the seizure of
the names prescriptive nature. (Badiou 32)
Here we can imagine a political name that has a discrete identity but does not limit the
participants who work under its name, as what is of central importance is that the prescriptive
nature of the name is continuously being reorganized within its designations.
54 C.M. AMADOR
the limits of the given (even while existing completely within it), previ-
ous modes of writing (by making statements with multiple meanings),
disrupts the hegemony, and (they hope) ushers in a new way of living, a
politics deployed in the act of truth, as Badiou would highlight.
Of course, it is easy to say that politics should be exterior to the
hegemonythat any gesture that is cast in terms recognizable to the
dictatorship would, by definition, not be revolutionary. Such a logic is
implicit in Thayers critique, along with his accusation that the avanzada
lacked a type of ideological purity. Yet I believe that what Thayer is com-
menting on is not so much that Antigonal politics needs to be linked to
an event in the Badiouan sense, but rather that avanzadas Antigonal ges-
ture reduces progressive practices to a strict singularity of the traumatized
victim and the recognized other. He reads it as a gesture of trauma and
inability to articulate, rather than as a gesture forcing the regime to func-
tion specifically, as opposed to abstractly, providing concrete evidence of
its unreasonableness.
The question of how avanzada dealt directly with Arts function in the
political sphere clearly needs to be answered in light of Thayers critique.
Thayer notes that avanzada differed fundamentally from previous van-
guard movements by focusing on a self-criticismof its own condition
of possibility. This allowed the group to be more aware of the inherent
problems brought on by practicing Art within a political framework like
authoritarian Chile. Thus, Thayer notes how avanzada functioned in
regard to previous avant-garde movements in the nation:
La vanguardia exiga que el arte volviera a ser prctico, dejara de estar

separado de la praxis vital. Esta exigencia no quiere decir, en principio, que
el contenido des las obras se vuelva socialmente significativo, que responda
a un mensaje. La exigencia de practicidad no opera respecto del contenido,
sino que opera directamente respecto de la exigencia de funcionamiento del
arte en la sociedad. Como sea, la vanguardia a mediado de los sesenta cay
ms en una cuestin de contenido ideolgico que de crtica de sus propias
formas de funcionamiento. Y esto s que constituye una diferencia entre la
neo-vanguardia de los 60 y la neo-vanguardia post-Golpe que Mrgenes e
Instituciones subraya. (Thayer 53)
The vanguard demanded that art return to be practical, and stop being
separated from vital praxis. This demand does not mean in principle that the
content of these works must become socially meaningful or responsive to a
message. The requirement of practicality does not operate on the content,
but directly to the requirement of the function of art in society. At any
rate, the vanguard in the mid-sixties fell more over matters of ideological
content than because critiques of their forms of function. And this really is a
difference between the neo-avant-garde of the 60s and the neo-avant-garde
post-coup that Margins and Institutions underscores.
However, in spite of this self-reflexivity, Thayers avanzada will never

achieve the status of a fully realized art movement, unlike its predecessors.
Thayer grounds this claim in the movements structural relationship to
the coup dtat, one which in many ways directly resembles the state of
exception of the Pinochet regime:
Lo que en El Golpe como consumacin de la vanguardia qued indicado

fue la complicidad estructural entre Golpe de Estado y la Escena de avan-
zada comprendida por N.Richard como refundacin del campo visual; esto
es como prcticas que abren el estado de excepcin de las reglas de arte para
refundarlo desde otras reglas, otra constitucin poltica trazada en Mrgenes e
Instituciones. La complicidad estructural tena que ver con la reiteracin del
estado de excepcin fundacional de la Dictadura que suspende la Constitucin
y refunda la Constitucin. (Thayer 78)
What in The coup as the consummation of the vanguard was indicated
was the structural complicity between the Coup and Advanced Scene under-
stood by N.Richard and recasting of the visual field; this is like practices
that open the emergency rules to re-found art from other rules, another
constitution-drawn Margins and Institutions. The structural complicity had
to do with the reiteration of the dictatorship as the founding state of excep-
tion that suspends and recasts the constitution.
Avanzada is thus charged with resembling the juridical frame of dictator-

ship, in its reduction of the visual field and its claim for a state of excep-
tion in artistic practice itself.
Thus, Thayer initiates a very particular critique about what the practices
and rules of art ought to be when not determined by the kind of state
of exception that avandaza claimed for itself. Said another way here by
Thayer:
Mrgenes e Instituciones de Nelly Richard es, en este sentido, un texto o

una crtica soberana que declara el estado de excepcin, da por suspendida
la regla que rega en las artes visuales, y dispone bajo la fuerza constitui-
dora de su discurso, la nueva constitucin poltica del arte, subsumiendo en
su operacin fundadora a un conjunto de obras con el nombre Escena de
avanzada. (Thayer 78)
56 C.M. AMADOR
Nelly Richards Mrgenes e Instituciones is, in this sense, a text or a sov-

ereign critique that declares the state of exception, and it suspends the rule
that governed the visual arts, and makes possible by means of the constitu-
tive force of its discourse, a new political constitution for art, subsuming
under its foundational operation as a series of works with the name Escena
de avanzada.
The groups foundational gesture, its definition of its practice of art

as political, is, as Thayer perceives it, based on the claim of a state of
exception, a claim which he finds illegitimate. Like the Golpe itself, the
claim for unique (singular) solutions in unique states of exception reveals
avanzadas work to be grounded in the logic of singularity that reduces
all discourses into a self-consuming, abstract logic of interioritya state
where all statements mean the same thing, since they all support either
the revolution or the critique. Thayer will claim, further, that avanzada
cannot found anything new or critical through the position of singularity
that it takes in appealing to a state of exception; it can only create a self-
referential law. In this fashion, any discourse appealing to a state of excep-
tion is revealed as an illegitimate singular discourse and politics, since
it denies access to reinvigoration of its immanent conditions.9 Thayer,
in short, seems to negate the possibility that forms of signification that
disrupt or call to witness from a place beyond clear political references can
be politically effective. Rather, he argues that working within the discourse
logic of a dictatorship renders one the tool, wittingly or unwittingly, of the
logic and ethics of that dictatorship.
To conclude in more theoretical terms, what Thayer is arguing is that
avanzada needs to be seen as a pure singularity that follows along with
the violent state of exception brought to life by the coup dtat. It is a
product of Chiles dictatorship rather than a way beyond it, because it does
not function in explicit opposition to it. In consequence, he can render
avanzada politically illegitimate in this way. However, part of Thayers
problem is his constant reference to the structure of avanzada as part
of the event of dictatorship and the violence to signification and bodies
that is its logical conclusion. He concomitantly ignores ground-level argu-
ments of artistic practice and representation that will perform a series of
important political functions, even within a heavily overdetermined field
9
Alain Badiou, Metapolitics (2008): 43.
of dictatorial signification (and particularly when, as in Chiles case, that

field is regularly altered in effect).
I believe, in contrast, that avanzadas practices have legitimate claim to
be considered the best possible attempt at being specific for the timethat
they well understood the Antigonal gesture as political in the way that a
limiting partisan program could not be, because it would delegitimize the
entire field of signification claimed by the dictatorship. Secondly, the groups
work indicates how the current social order is marked by the presence of a
biopolitical dominance over social life itselfhow the threat of violence to
the body is the ultimate ethical solution for all of the states problems, a
very limited set of logics. Finally, I believe that how avanzada managed to
claim specific ethical gestures within a space of the singular event of dicta-
torship opened up a space of hope (albeit frustrated) for a genuine artistic
politics in Badious sense of the word. avandaza, in short, pointed the way
beyond dictatorship rather than outside of it.
THE BODY ASSPECIFIC DISCOURSE: NELLY RICHARD

ANDANEW ANALYSIS OFRESISTANCE
The politics that I am claiming for avandaza lies at the level of representa-
tion, the specific, and the embodied community. Remember that one of
Thayers major criticisms rests on the incapacity of the avanzada group to
build a sense of relation or collective struggle through the tools of artistic
production. Art and literature as discourses, he posited, were part of the
same evental structure as the Golpean event that produced a dissolu-
tion of the traditional estatuto de representacionalidad (the statute of
representationality) as it inaugurated a new order (Thayer 16). The sense
of a broken statute of representationality reveals the depth of crisis that
was felt during the period. The burden of the deadly repression and the
destruction of the historical progressive discourse of the Allende regime
opened a chasm in representation affecting all levels of societyall those
who wished to express something knew what was not ethical (part of the
old regime and its lack of social justice), but not necessarily did so.
As I have shown earlier, singular logics like those imposed in a dicta-
torship refer to themselves with the consequences of producing a pure
immanenceto make themselves the sole reference points for all mean-
ing and all ethical decisions. Singular discourse thus forecloses possibili-
ties of entrance into communication and community, shutting down any
set of relations that may be brought into being by a specific exteriority, by
58 C.M. AMADOR
an identifiable group functioning outside the discourses of the dictator-

ship. The dictatorship as a singular entity despecifies and thereby total-
izes discourse, and thus falls out of relation with its exterior through an
auto-circumscription of its relation to whatever discourses are external to
itit seeks to co-opt all issues that are not present in its discourse space and
thus to enlarge its community while eliminating the possibility of speak-
ing from the outside. The singular configuration of the Pinochet regime,
for instance, presumes the immediate articulation of both limits of its
exclusive scale of existencethe infinitely large with the infinitely small,
the infinitely far with the infinitely near (Hallward 251). The scale of
existence that is set up by the regime extended to the field of significa-
tion, creating the scene of the ruins of the statute of representationality
in which all representation has been rendered static and totalitarian, and
all speakers flattened to the same abstract values.
For the avanzada artists, one of the counters to both the elimination
of political and representational possibilities, and one of the most powerful
tools of specification was the development of a series of new retoricas del
cuerpo. These new rhetorics of the body ushered in a radical new form
of specification through art and literature that would distress the singu-
lar discourses in Chilethe kind of distress caused by an Antigonal ges-
ture. Thus, the innovations we have seen in Zuritas Paradiso and Eltits
Lumprica, or in Perchero and Sala de Espera by Carlos Leppeall of these
works would be representative of this new point of critique. They situ-
ate the body as a new starting-point for individuation and intervention
within the cultural field. A focus on the body during this period reveals
how the imposition of rigid and seemingly unassailable singularities by the
prevailing thought-forms of the time (Pinochetista political thought and
the nationalist Left), required a new form of thought and production. In
counterpoint to the exclusive scale of existence that the abstractions
of the regimes discourse imposes, retoricas del cuerpos acts as a specific
understanding of individuation [that] interrupts this articulation by dis-
tinguishing relatively autonomous levels of analysis. Discernment of these
levels identifies the various planes of description and action that make up
any particular situation (Hallward 250). That is, these artists used the
body to evoke specifics about the scale and implications of the dictator-
ships ethical and communal claims, calling them into question without
necessarily drawing Utopian alternatives.
In the previous chapter, I have discussed specifically how Lumprica
and Paradiso utilize representations of the body and corporeal discourse
to put into play, new forms of participation during the period. Now, how-
ever, I will focus on delineating the specific components of the corporeal
rhetoric that avanzada artists utilized to call attention to the extraordi-
nary political and biopolitical situation of the day.
In the subsection of Mrgenes entitled Retricas del cuerpo, Richard
cites several reasons for the use of the body in avanzadas discoursemost
particularly, the concept of the suffering body (el cuerpo dolorido) as a
unifying thread, and the citationality of the body through performance
(the ability to use bodies in many situation). Concomitantly, the body as a
site of discourseas the ultimate bearer and victim of discourseis one of
the keys through which to comprehend how everyday life is coordinated
through discourses of power and metaphor10:
Es en el plano del cotidianode los microcircuitos e relaciones intersubje-

tivas que se tejen a nivel de la pareja y de la familia, del trabajo, de la orga-
nizacin domstica, del recorrido urbano, etc.donde se traza la divisin
entre lo pblico y lo privado. Esta divisin deviene estratgica en sociedades
como la chilena donde el autoritarismo penetra el cotidiano y escamotea la
construccinde por s polticade lo que separa lo exterior de lo interior,
es decir, lo masculino de lo femenino, lo poltico de lo apoltico. (Richard 77)
It is in the plane of the quotidianof the microcircuits and intersubjec-
tive relations tethered at the level of the couple and the family, of labor,
of domestic organziation, of the urban sphere, etc.where the division
between public and private is traced. This division becomes strategic in
societies like the Chilean, where authoritarianism penetrates daily life and
obscures the constructionby nature politicalof what separates the inte-
rior from the exterior; the masculine from the feminine; and the political
from the apolitical.
Quotidian life unites the microcircuits of power, and during Pinochets

time, the discourses of power and authority that controlled Chile imposed
very distincitve binary spaces, defining intersubjective relations that
would reinforce the highly gendered, heteronormative, and top-down
repressive discourses of the nation.
As scholars like Steve J. Stern have pointed out, over the course of
the dictatorship period, the reconfiguration of the once progressive social
10
Note that I am using coordinate in the technical sense of the German Nazi partys
insistence on Gleichschaltung, the coordination or bringing in line with each other of all
political programs in the space.
60 C.M. AMADOR
space (under Allende) was achieved by means of the imposition of more

traditional and conservative forms of memory and representation to
achieve the death of the political, or what Stern terms policide,11 in a
coordination of the nation to a singular ethics of being. The binary spaces
produced by the policidal Pinochet regime, in contrast, revealed a space
through which the role of power and ideology could often be seen more
clearlythe body:
El cuerpo es el escenario fsico donde mejor se nota esta divisin estratgica.

En su condicin, adems, de reproductor social de los modelos de domi-
nacin sexual, el cuerpo se presta para que una prctica crtica desmonte la
ideologa de lo masculino y lo femenino que el poder encarna en rituales
prcticos y en simbologas culturales. (Richard 78)
The body is the physical stage where this strategic division can be seen
best. Also in its condition as the social reproducer of models of sexual domi-
nation, the body lends itself to a practical critique that will deconstruct the
ideology of the masculine and the feminine that power will physicalize in
rituals and cultural symbologies.
Richard presents us here with a topography of the body as the stage

where the strategic divisions authorized by Pinochet played out their
consequences. The scene that the body produces is that of a modeling
form that easily allows for the reproduction of forms of hegemony in
11
As Stern succinctly puts it: Policide meant building a regime of systematic violence and
fear so that the old ways of understanding, organizing, and practicing politics could be
annihilated and replaced by technocratic and authoritarian governance. In Chile, the old
democratic ways had built politics on a foundation of organized social mobilization, com-
petition, and conflict. This foundation was accompanied by a culture of fiercely contending
political parties, endemic institutional rivalry between the legislative and executive branches
of government, rhetorical appeals and promises by professional politicians to voting con-
stituencies, and populist redistributive and subsidy programs that secured the loyalty of key
groups. For the advocates of policide, the old ways blocked economic advance and ulti-
mately led to an irresponsible politics of revolution (whether the revolution in liberty of
the Christian Democrats or the socialist revolution of the Popular Unity) that brought
disorder and ruin to Chile. Eventually, as the new regime moved past its ad hoc and almost
purely reactive phase, the foundational dimension of its project would come into
clearer focus. The new project envisioned a future shaped by economic neoliberalism, politi-
cal authoritarianism, and technocratic decision making. It sought to grant the new scheme
durability by institutionalizing it in a new Constitution and guaranteeing it in the personal
rule of Augusto Pinochet. (Stern, Remembering Pinochets Chile, 2006: 31).
concrete form, accessible to communication. The form of the body in

Richards designation is thus a type of performative space that allows for
critical counterpractice.
Much current academic literature is engaged with investigating how
the corporeal aspects, like affect and habit, have been historically part of
the discourse of national identity. Let me turn now to how the body, for
avanzada, becomes a crucial, specific mode of contestation against the
singularizing politics of everyday bodily life in Chile. Richards work helps
to show how working with the body as a performative space is one forms
of despecifying, as Hallward says, with the intent to build collective pos-
sibilities. The logic underwriting the possibility of the body as a specific site
of discourse, the logic that will allows for despecifying to occur, is based
on the corporeal form as a node in a rhizomatic conjunction of forces and
ideas with connections to the social, cognitive, and political fields. That is,
the body is a concrete point at which practices, concepts, and social-ethical
norms converge and are tested.
Two main lines of conceptualizing the body mark avanzadas work
the body as the transvestite site of a mimtica de camuflaje y simulacro
y el cuerpo como zona sacrificial de prctica del dolor (the mimesis of
camouflage and simulacrum and the body as the sacrificial zone of the
practice of pain) (Richard 78). The first line of approach is the one inhab-
ited by the performance art of Leppe, and is connected to the inherent
theatricality of the exhibition/public art/museum space. The second line
is, as we have seen, one pursued by writers like Ral Zurita and Diamela
Eltit, which explores the capacity of literature and writing to transmit a
collective understanding of trauma and suffering.
It is critical here to amplify what Leppe means within the context of
avanzadas theorizing. According to Richard, there is no significant
record of any use of the body in Chilean Art prior to 1973.12 Soon after,
in 1975, two works of bodily performance became part of the avanzada
vocabulary. Leppes Perchero, a mixed media performance that includes
la primera comparecencia fotogrfica en el arte chileno de un desnudo
masculino travestido de mujer (the first photographic appearance in
Chilean art of a masculine nude cross-dressing as a woman) (Richard 78),
instrumentalizes transvestism for the purposes of a politics of simulation
12
Nelly Richard, in Coco Fusco, ed., Corpus Delicti: Performance Art in the Americas.
(2000): 240.
62 C.M. AMADOR
that opens fields of semiotic practice. The second is a photograph of the

esteemed poet Zuritas face, self-mutiltated by a burn. The photograph,
which appears as a liminal representation of a mugshot or a self-portrait,
inspires the first line of Zuritas magnificent work of poetry, Purgatorio:
Mis amigos creen

que estoy muy mala
porque me quem mi mejilla. (Purgatorio)
My friends believe I am very sick because I burned my cheek.
Leppes performances can be seen in the terms we are pursuing here, as

producing a politics of the body that illustrated the fundamental citation-
ality of body discourses. His parody of an artists portrait, for example,
also exposes the crucial role that conceptions of the body have in the het-
erosexist hegemony of the period. As Richard reminds us:
C. Leppe realiz numerosas performances-video en las que aparecen dife-

rentes tcnicas de travestimiento de la identidad (la pose y su cosmtica;
la teatralizacin de personajes y la copia de retratos) que se oponencon
su fantasa de retoquea la tirana de los procedimientos de enrolamiento
social y sexual que obligan a las identidades a permanecer iguales a s mismas
segn el modelo socialmente prescrito. (Richard 80)
C.Leppe realized numerous video performances in which appear differ-
ent techniques of the transvestism of identity (the pose and its cosmetics, the
theatricalization of characters and the copying of portraits) that oppose
with its retouching fantasythe tyranny of the procedures of social and
sexual interpellation that oblige identities to remain self-consistent with the
prescribed social model.
Asserting a cross-dressing identity pluralizes the sphere of a social struc-

ture which predicates the status of men and women in the strict binary
of heteronormativity. Transvestite performances expand the role of the
signifying field by pluralizing the signs through what Baudrilard terms
a parody of sex through over-signification.13
In her book Crossing through Chueca: Lesbian Literary Culture in Queer
Madrid (2011), Jill Robbins argues that drag performance has multiple
implications, for both the performer and the audience, many of which are
socially and historically determined.14 A drag performance operates via
13
Jean Baudrillard, Seduction (1979): 132.
14
Jill Robbins, Crossing through Chueca: Lesbian Literary Culture in Queer Madrid (2011): 88.
the possibility of a constant resignification and possible multiplication of

what is readable by both viewer and performer, and so it is rich in political
potential, particularly in a situation like dictatorship, where it bears witness
to states of being, outside the forced national discourse.
Transvestism or drags power is not only in the space of multiple sig-
nifications, but also in how the body is a space of primary experience
albeit conditioned by discourses of powerthat can be altered and
resignified through performance. The body in drag, however, remains
a relatively stable sign for both performer and audience, transmitting
meaning through at least a minimal recognition of the fundamental
corporeality of each human subject. The drag performance puts into
the play, the constant covering and uncovering of the body, disrupt-
ing the codes of hegemonically configured conduct, dress, and gender
roles. The body is thus reconceptualized as a palimpestitic surface that
allows the viewer to shift in and out of heteronormative and trangres-
sive meanings.
Of further importance for the present discussion is how the body oper-
ates in a space that treads the line between the specific and the specified and
thus allows for a constant process of despecification through corporeal
performance. Despecifying is the active mode of choosing a side against,
through, or in conjunction with the specified content of your historical
subjectivity15in other words, the active making specific of a subject, and
the attendant acts of recognition that make it specified:
The specific comes to exist at a critical distance from the specified, for the
same reason that every subject comes to exist by standing apart from the
objectified. That the specific is subjective simply means that this standing
apart is a thoroughly active, altogether non-automatic process. The specific
does not pre-exist its distance from the specified, it is itself the distancing
as such. (Hallward 49)
Leppe and company make this particular point clear with their regular ref-
erence to the multiplicity of their struggles, identities (generally marginal
ones), and subjective responses as artists that made up their activity in the
Pinochet era. At the same time, avanzadas artists highlighted the speci-
fied content of the imposed identities of Pinochets regime through such
performances.
15
Please refer to the introduction for a longer exegesis on the concept of despecification.
64 C.M. AMADOR
One of the principal techniques of despecifiying, used in the era, for

example, was the use of the self-portrait as the initial substrate of the artis-
tic challengea very personal claim of the self as an Antigonal gesture.
During this period, Leppe, Zurita, and Eltit all share similar concerns with
how the body connects with the audience, as well. Eltit and Zurita would
explore this work in more depth through literary work, but Leppe would
explore the boundaries of the body asdespecifiable locus of performance:
Desde el desnudo masculino de El perchero en 1975 que vesta la retrica

de lo femenino como cadena de artificios, el cuerpo de C.Leppe se postula
como un cuerpo de citas: una zona intercitacional de referencias cosm-
ticas, fotognicas y teatrales a modelos corporales que descontruyen y recon-
struyen su identidad en la diferencia y la alteridad. (Richard 81)
Since the male nude El perchero (The Rack) in 1975 that dressed the
rhetoric of the feminine as a chain of artifice, the body of C.Leppe is postu-
lated as a body of citations: An intercitational zone of cosmetic references,
photogenic and theatrical that deconstruct and reconstruct their identity in
difference and otherness.
What I have been calling the intercitationality of the body is again criti-
cal to understanding how the specific operates in such performances by
postulating a space where sides are taken, and explicit connections are
attempted through the performance of the body-art piece.
Leppe and companys pieces dislocate the body from the singular des-
ignation of the Pinochet state, and specifying. avanzadas bodily perfor-
mances display a vision of the fundamental relationality between subjects
that marks a full understanding of the specific as something enforced,
declared, and hence usable, even in a dictatorial regime. Rather than
become mired in the ruins of signification, their work assumes that:
[s]pecific individuals are what they are only in relations to other individuals.
Relationality thus implies both the original and irreducible distinction of its
terms (distinct from the very beginning of relation), as well as their equally
original co-implication: the self is only distinct from the other as co-implied
with the other. (Hallward 250)
In this fashion, the body operates as a first sign of engagement with the rela-
tional in terms of a specific engagement with the dictatorial. In fact, body
arts citational politics opens a space of connection that cannot be fore-
closed by either a collapse of the representable, nor by an overcodification
of signsthe body, present in front of the observer, cannot be eliminated

by running it through abstract mechanisms of designation.
As Levinas ethics focuses on the initial experience of the others nondis-
tinct face, therefore, the body in avanzadas work grounds its practice on
the incontrovertible status of the relational itself, as a first approach to claim-
ing public ethics and meaning for specific, imminent situations, despite the
totalizing and abstracting discourse of dictatorship which tries to foreclose it:
This is why there can be no question of deconstruction relationality as

such: the related terms only have the degree of self-identity that they have
because they are differed and deferred through the medium of relation itself.
Relational terms are constitutively ex-centric, and it is this very ex-centricity
that endows them with the potential to sustain a consistent self-identity
which means: to maintain a consequential practice of deliberation. In short,
only relational beings can maintain an active fidelity to the universalisable
implications of a specific decision. (Hallward 250)
The body as a discourse is argued here to be part of the very structure of rela-
tionality, and, I believe, as a key confirmation for the reading of avanzada
I have been offering here.
We are, of course, tying the specific to the performativity of the corpo-
real discourse as defined by Judith Butler (Bodies That Matter, 1993). As
she and her interlocutors explain, discourses of the body are always tied to
a network of power and symbolization that prefigures them, shapes them,
and creates a route of comprehensibility for performances of imaginings
of the body. Citationality of the body that allows for the specific to be
imagined through artistic performance is simply an effect of the power
and knowledge that forms the body in the first place. Disruption of this
network is achieved by calling attention to it, trangressing the singulariza-
tion it imposes on the performance, and building a trajectory of specific
identities that are themselves despecifiedby reclaiming a biopolitics in the
hands and bodies of individual artists.
In this way, the theories of avanzada, like their artistic work, offer a
distinct claim to being political in ways that can move their work beyond
the too-simple critiques of the avant-garde that Thayer cites, and into a
sphere uniquely able to answer the challenges of dictatorship and ethics.
This reading argues that it is possible to envision the avant-garde Escena
de avanzada as a specific space of transformation and cultural production,
one that values a plurality of signification and constant reevaluation of
66 C.M. AMADOR
what it means to art under the burden of censorship. One of the great
specific contributions of the Escena de avanzada is imagining the body as
a site of specificity, where the political is constantly refigured by a corporal
practice that takes no side other than that of its own expression.
LUMPRICA ANDTHEBODY: SOME FINAL IMPLICATIONS

One of the most important gestures avanzadas artists initiate within the
cultural field is the shift toward a corporeal register in the plastic arts and
literary production that opens a possible plural space for signification and
collective political work. This space makes possible a set of possible inscrip-
tions for the body as a site of protest. Part of the importance of the body
as a site of collectivity is the capacity for a bodily performance of any kind
to be both singular and specific; to incorporate the particularized body
of the performer that nonetheless communicates to us through the rec-
ognizable frame of the body. Bodies can be acculturated, transformed,
and can inhabit the collective mind as palimpsestic surfaces and signifying
machines that make specific claims to the social field.
Bodies, furthermore, are the most intimate sites of both public and
private oppression. This of course, is the legacy of the Southern Cone
dictatorships in Latin American discourse: they plied their trade with
vast techniques of biopower (picanas, chupados, torture, el quirfano, el
traslado), designed to inscribe the private body of the citizen as a public
discourse of warning and discipline. Rendering docile the corporeal forms
of the citizenry during the era of Southern Cone dictatorships was a proj-
ect that required nearly constant vigilance from the regimes. The Proceso
junta, Pacheco-Areco and Bordaberrys Uruguay, the military dictatorship
in Brazil, all formed a knowledge/power circuit that wrote the body as a
space to be controlled, utterly and unmercifully.
This is, of course, the side of biopower designed not to maximize the
efficiency of the bodys inclusion in capital, but rather the machinations
of biopower. In other words, the body was revealed through torture to be
a site of extraordinary textual and semiotic relevance through the repre-
sentation of the body as a political symbol and the carrying out of torture
designed to reify this claim. The political violence of torture reveals what
the originary sacred life of Agamben reveals: lifes subjection to a power
over death and lifes irreparabale exposure to the relation of abandon-
ment (Agamben 83). avanzadas bodily discourses in literature and art
thus reveal a precise and elegant counterargument to Thayers singular-

izing of the avanzada moment.
The new Chilean literature was decisively informed by critical theory
and the visual arts. In this sense, an inevitable cryptification ensued, as
concern over arts conditions of production led to an investigation of
its own existence. As Idelber Avelar argues: [t]he aspect of opacity that
typifies many of these works [is] not due to arbitary hermeticism, but
rather to an overcodification of its elements and denotations: a certain
version, then, of a ciphered language (168).
Lumprica is an affirmative allegory, a true allegory of affirmationfor
this is one of the definitions of allegory: a mimetic relation with the impos-
sible. Hence, Lumpricas overcodification: because it opts to affirm only
what is radically outside the codifiable by dictatorial and antidictatorial doxa.
It can only dwell on the impossible. The condition of possibility of such
impossible affirmation is its submission to the cycle of the eternal return
of the same (168). And, as such, the novel allows for the resignification of
experience during dictatorship and its vicissitudes. Allegory becomes a way
of coding the immediate and decoding alternative paths for the future.
Avelars concept of overcodification is of interest here as it lets us
explore how avanzadas seemingly arbitrary hermeticism works as a
structuration of the linguistic and political possibilities of singularity.
avanzadas techniques of writing played with the margin, overdetermin-
ing them with a cryptification that in Avelars view works in the allegor-
ical register to address the extrinsic to the social field. In this context, we
will reference below Eltits classic novel of avanzadaLumpricaand
analyze how its allegorical relation to the impossible is actually a disrup-
tion of political possibility in the specific register, albeit, in a specified way:
a way that positions itself as part of a representational schema that is part
of a situated moment.
Dictator and counterdictatorship doxa made problematic, expres-
sion at all levels. The right design or style of artistic practice becomes
unimportant insofar as it is no longer linked to a particular allegiance to a
national resurgence or discourse of legitimation. Against the illegitimacy
of the aesthetic terrainindeed, one could even say that a question of
legitimacy did not play out, given avanzadas focus on disruptive and
unstable social fields of artistic practicethe movements praxiological
sphere emerges as a self-legitimizing point of contention against other
spheres. In other words, the practice of artistic production becomes the
68 C.M. AMADOR
only point of reference necessary and important to the avanzadaits field

of social concerns are mitigated by the destablization of the very condition
of the social.
The destabilizing engagement with signification inaugurates a field of
representational practice that looks forward to a world where the experi-
mental practices of the avant-garde function to reconfigure the possibilities
for collective engagement. Lumpricas layers of signification and empha-
sis of the corporeality of the figures in the novel speak to the reality of such
a collective engagement that is part of a specific political engagement at
the level of corporeality. I read the specific in the novel away from Avelars
position on the allegorical to draw out of it the meaning it produces, as
part of a political process that asserts a position from the situatedness of
the lumpen depicted in the novel. I argue that the lumpen in Eltits novel
is not strictly defined in a Marxist senseas those who have lost their pro-
ductive possibility and as such, live in the liminal spaces of capitalist pro-
ductivity and abandonment from the productive spherethose members
of social life called by Marx as the refuse of all classes.16 Instead, Eltit
creates, through her images of the plaza and the exchange of bodies and
desires that occur within its confines, a lumpen proletariat that is despeci-
fied, and embodies the possibility of a specific political dialogue that unites
all of us within the matrices of bodily desire and expression.
Lumprica is a novel rich in literary effects that complicate reading and
inaugurate an instability of meaning and reception. It is a collection of
observations, scenes of interrogation, poetic commentary, and production
notes for a film that centers around the experience of bodies and individu-
als within an unnamed plaza where bodies walk, run, hide, and copulate
all under the neon lights that bathe the plaza. The principal character,
L.Iluminada, who shares the root of her name with the moniker given to
the light source that brightens the plazael luminososheds her clothes,
inhabits, and circulates through the plaza, her bodily performance destabi-
lizing the public square as a zone of surveillance and military domination.
She, instead, makes visible the capacity for public space to include a diver-
sity of bodies that highlight a practice of bodily performance that includes
all possible exchanges of desire.
Her text is rife with bodies that perform their desire and blur the lines
between corporeal signification and writing. Lumprica acts a text that
16
Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, p. VII (downloaded from
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/18th-Brumaire.pdf ;
accessed March 10, 2012).
disrupts the singularity of bodily representation in order to specify and

create a tacitly open plurality of performances. In the section, La escritura
como seduccin, Eltit draws a combinatorics of bodily desire and writing:
Mezcla equilibrada en serie saliendo de una cavidad subterrnea. Incidental

altura que choca a ras de suelo para comenzar a ornamentar todo el espa-
cio [] Escribi: prteme con las ramas madona, enardceme con las
hojas. (134)
Balanced admixture serially exiting from a subterranean cavity. Incidental
height that crashes on the ground to begin to ornament all space. Wrote:
split me apart with branches, madonna, burn me with the leaves.
The subterranean cavity she mentions blurs the body and physical
space as dictated by the poetics of writing. The text moves back and forth
from comprehensibilty to confusion so as to make specific what a body
in textual form can do. An incidental height illustrates how a bodys
individual dimensions are less important than the seductive motion all
extended bodies have as their possibility. Eltit renders corporeal the pos-
sibility of a seduction embodiedness that allows all subjects to imagine
their specific capacities for desire and connection. To be opened and
burned are metaphoric devices that cross gender and class distinctions,
and provide a potential point of identification for subjective desire. To
wit, Eltit specifies the body with the results of a specific discourse of bodily
political practices that challenges the singular and hegemonic notions of
appropriate action.
Eltit challenges Thayers notion of the possibilities of vanguardism
as ineffective within the pitched combat of neoliberal politics. Bodies
exchange and share themselves over vast and often transgressive networks
of connection. And while not diminishing the immense repressive force
applied to bodies, sexuality, and movement during the Pinochet regime
and after, with neoliberal transitions, it nonetheless suggests that bodies
have enormous potential to challenge hegemony and repression.
Also included within the book is a famous picture of the author herself
with her forearms slashed by a razordozens of deep cuts and open wounds
that display the visceral reality of the bodily discourse that is at the heart of the
novel. This photo, which confuses the reader as to whether the wounds are
from deliberate self-harm or for pleasure through picquerism, reminds the
reader/viewer of the centrality of the body in Eltits work. Bodies are more
than mechanisms for carrying an egoic selfthey are circuits of exchange
and connection that mark and are marked by the presence of others.
70 C.M. AMADOR
The performance of self-harm speaks to a transcendent but local way of

altering the body in a public fashionthe scars on the arm are represented,
not hidden. The photos transcendence is the bodys universality: the
arms represent the possibility of all subjects harming themselves and being
harmed by others. The locality of Eltits body argues for the immediacy
of the individuals response through self-harm. The photograph reveals a
tension between public signification and visibility or representability and
the private moments of pain. I argue that the photograph is not merely
a personal representation of trauma, but rather a public display of bodily
performance, signaling both a continuation of the local bodily practices of
the Escena de avanzadawe recall here Zuritas photograph of his own
destroyed face, and Leppes El da que me quierasand the political pos-
sibility of identifying with the mutilated body in an indifferent, universal
fashion. The wound becomes the insertion point of any subject capable of
relating with the suffering represented.
Wounds manifest the continuing importance of locating the body as a
crucial site of political and cultural engagement. They manifest anxieties,
joys, pains, and scars that work in order to point directly at the conditions
that form them. Bodies have both an allegorical quality and a referential
quality, signifying that hegemonic discourses cannot fully contain bodies
unless they are destroyed or incarcerated. Eltit and the other artists reveal
that the bodys power lies not only in its ability to signify visually, but also
to create a logical possibility of individuation.
It is the specific that leads the artists and critics of Escena de avanzada
to imagine their work. Their artistic protest transcends the singularity of
the regime and specifies a global, indifferent politics of experience that
illustrates the foundational role that logics of subjectivization play in the
imagination of culture.
SUSPENSIONS OFSOVEREIGNTY: THECONTINUITY

OFTHESINGULAR
A recent book by the Chilean critical theorist Sergio Villalobos-Ruminott takes

up this Richard-Thayer debate anew, focusing upon the manner in which the
theorists work frames the question of political sovereignty in the era of neo-
liberalism. Soberanas de suspenso: Imaginacin y violencia en Amrica Latina
(2014) imagines a ThayerRichard debate in which neoliberalism in Chiles
capacity to undermine all political possibility, save its own condition of sover-
eignty, is subjected to both the scrutiny and critique of the theorists.
As they see it, the Chilean general elections of 1989 produces the
Concertacin de partidos por la democracia, a Center-Left coalition that has
ruled the nation mostly without interruption for the last 25 years.17 As a
transitional political party that emerges as the hegemonic Chilean political
institution, Villalobos-Ruminott and Thayer coincide in seeing the coalition
both as inheritors of the control mechanisms over the political and the neo-
liberal economic agenda enjoyed and pursued by the Pinochet regime. What
is unique about Villalobos-Ruminott is how the critical dialogue between
Richard and Thayer articulates the controls over popular sovereigntya
nearly total suspension that can trace its formal history to the elision of the
popular sovereignty of the democratically elected Salvador Allende regime
by the US-backed coup of September 11, 1973. In Soberanas en suspenso,
the political possibilities for popular struggle and institutionalized hege-
mony are seen through the optic of how Thayer and Richard represent
models of sovereignty and suspension.
It is worth exploring this most recent intervention before I conclude,
since it allows me to argue that finally, the question of sovereignty, while
pertinent and basic to any discussion of Chilean political and cultural his-
tory, nonetheless requires a foundation in the processes of individuation
and differentiation. In short, I argue that no suspension of sovereignty
as such exists without the establishment of a particular logicgenerally
either the specified or the singularof differentiation/individuation.
In his essay Nihilsmo y vanguardia, Villalobos-Ruminott links the
the debate directly with the nihilism of possibility brought about by the
continuation of neoliberalism. The continuing epistemic and sociopolitical
development of neoliberalism in Chile restricts, according to Villalobos-
Ruminott, the horizon of political possibility
Villalobos-Ruminott is clear about the conditions and terms for the
ThayerRichard engagement. Beyond the description of the philosophical
development of two of Chiles singular thinkers, the dialogue makes pos-
sible a particular vision of the totality of the art historical apperception of
Chile since 1973:
De manera bastante precisa, lo que est en discusin aqu es como se debe

escribir la historia del arte en Chile, qu papel se debe asignar a las prcticas
asociadas con la neovanguardia y como debemos pensar nuestra relacin
17
For an excellent, albeit neoliberally inflected history of this development, see Silvia
Borutzsky and Lois Hecht Oppenheims After Pinochet: The Road to Democracy and the
Market, 2006, Gainesville, University Press of Florida, Print.
72 C.M. AMADOR
actual con la avanzada, con sus promesas y fracasos, con las lecturas que
hay y con todas las que faltan, no para abastecer una extica poltica cultural,
sino para des-obrar lecturas cannicas que conspiran con la indiferenciacin
y el olvido. (Villalobos-Ruminott 141)
In a fairly precise manner, what is under discussion here is how art history
in Chile should be written, and what role should be assigned to the practices
associated with the neo-avant-garde and how we should imagine our cur-
rent relationships with the avanzada, with its promises and failures; with
the readings there are and the ones we still need. This is not to nourish an
exotic cultural politics, but to de-work canonical readings that conspire
with indifferentiation and forgetting.
Following the author, a point that emerges is the reimagining of the

debates of the era, in order to eliminate the possibilties of forgetting and
canonizationitself a form of forgetting inasmuch as the authorization of
a canon often proscribes the emergence of counterintuitive and challenging
interpretationsand the additional requirement of identifying the failures
and promises of the history of art to come. This problem of writing, is of
course, critical as questions of memory, justice, and the historical legacy of
the dictatorship and the future of Chilean democracy arise unabated. Thayer
and Richard represent both the horizon of possibility for further innovation
in art historical writing and the conditions of possibility for an exploration
of what Villalobos-Ruminott terms the nihilism of neoliberalism.
There can be little dispute that the effect of neoliberalism is so thor-
oughly imbricated with cultural existence and political expression, that dif-
ferentiation of expression risks collapse into utter singularization. Indeed,
both Villalobos-Ruminott and Thayer share this particular vision of the
possibility of thought: that, in the era of neoliberalism, any individuation
and differentiation is but a recapitulation of the singularity of the market.
And of course, this is both the market as epistemic unity and neoliberalism
as a set of political notions that seek to implement the knowledge base of
neoliberalism in every situation:18
Lo que est est en juego en esta deriva entonces, no puede ser confundido con
una antropologa negativa o una poltica pudorosa y realista, sino que se trata
de una reformulacin radical del trabajo intelectual, esto es, de la crtica en un
18
The thesis that neoliberalism is an epistemic movement has been advanced and effectively
proven by a series of scholars across the disciplines. For greater understanding of this issue,
please see Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwes The Road from Mont Pelerin: The Making of
the Neoliberal Thought Collective, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2009, Print.
sentido no convencional, ms all de la mmesis identitaria y productivista que

est a la base de la moderna divisin social del trabajo intelectual. (150)
What is in play in this drift then, cannot be confused with a negative
anthropology or a shameful or realist politics. Instead, it is the radical refor-
mulation of the intellectual labor; this is (a) critique in an unconventional
sense, beyond the identitarian and productivist mimesis at the base of the
modern social division of intellectual labor.
The stakes of this debate can, however, only be understood from the posi-
tion of a mode of knowing that has not abandoned all subjectivity and pos-
sibilty to neoliberalism as a singular discourse. Both Villalobos-Ruminott
and Thayer, in point of fact, replicate the nihilism and singularity of neo-
liberalism in order to foreclose the possibility of any individuating and dif-
ferentiating logic that does not emerge from the beyond of politics. Indeed,
to continuously call beyond to politics ungrounded in a discourse of the
specific or to deconstruct the idea of relationality itself is to substitute a
hermeneutics of critique for the actual positive creation of a politics
however mediated or mitigated it may be.
But for Villalobos-Ruminott, the question of avanzada formulates the
interrogation for a politics that exceeds the continuous problem of rela-
tionality and cultural production. He links the politics of avanzadas prac-
tice to the production of a Rancirean distribution of the sensible and the
dematerializing force of the interruption of the circulation of exchange:
No se trata, por lo tanto, de sancionar un fin de la historia o un agotamiento

de la poltica desde una suerte de a priori trascendental, sino de elaborar una
interrogacin orientada a la condicin eminentemente poltica de las prcticas
artsticas que est concernida con sus formas acotadas y precisas de interrup-
cin de la circulacin y distribucin de lo sensible. (Villalobos-Ruminott 154)
It is not about the sanctioning of the end of history or the exhaustion of the
political from the position of a sort of transcendental a priori, but the elabo-
ration of a questioning oriented to the eminently political condition of the
artistic practices that here are concerned with its precise and delimited forms of
the circulation and the distribution of the sensible. (Villalobos-Ruminott 154)
Following this, some concluding remarks become immediately appropriate.

The debate between Richard and Thayer is not exclusively an epi-
phenomenon of the dictatorship or transition eras, but rather an
interrogtation of the modalities of intellectual circulation and the contours
of the sensible as political practice. Villalobos-Ruminott recognizes the
74 C.M. AMADOR
essential conditions of artistic practice as an engagement with the forma-

tive principles of politics. It is certainly the case that Thayer and Richard
are attempting to frame the distribution of the sensible as a series of
regional, but ontological claims about the relationship between hege-
monic forms and aesthetic practice. However, it remains crucial to articu-
late how the forms of sensibilty and the modalities of interruption operate
as contributions to the logic of differentiation that, as I argue, is an inex-
tricable part of ethical and political representation. Villalobos-Ruminott
poses brilliant questions concerning how historicism restrains the ethical
and ontological claims of art, forcing cultural practice into a merely his-
torically descriptive modality, or that of a positivist evidentiary claim for
a limited theoretical exploration of the regime of the sensibleone that
does not take into account the dialectical subtleties of artistic practices on
the broader social realm.
However, part of the question that I am pursuing is the more funda-
mental question of relationality with respect to how any of the plastic or
literary arts form concepts of alterity and membershipespecially when
the possible outcome of an immanent aesthetic gesture is the produc-
tion of a nonrelational singularity. Villalobos-Ruminott assists us in this
endeavor, by reminding the reader that the question of multiplicity is
always part and parcel of the political question:
Sin embargo, al desmonumentalizar la historia del arte y al cuestionar el

peso de la neo-vanguardia, debemos estar advertidos de la condicin axi-
omtica, segmentada y discontinua de dicho orden mundial, pues solo as
evitaremos re-monumentalizar el poder, desapercibiendo su condicin de
ensamblaje. (Villalobos-Ruminott 158)
However, to demonumentalize art history and to question the weight
of the neo-avant-garde, we must be aware of the axiomatic, segmented and
discontinuous condition of the world order, because only then we will avoid
re-monumentalizing power and ignoring its condition as assemblage.
Villalobos-Ruminott ties the question of the historical neo-avant-garde to

historicisms reductive qualities while forcing into question the assembled
and discontinuous nature of the contemporary world order, burdened by
neoliberalism. Thayers collapse into the singular, despite his best inten-
tions, makes it difficult to recognize the dynamically deterritorializing
functions of Escena de avanzadas hope for a specific politics of aesthet-
ics. Of course, no politics of aesthetics can supplant political practice that
crosses the assemblage of state power and capital. What it can do, I argue,
is suggest a continuous ethics of practice that never forecloses a space for
the continual reinscription of possible and radical identities.
REFERENCES
Borutzky, Silvia, and Lois Hecht Oppenheim, eds. After Pinochet: The Chilean
Road to Democracy and the Market. Gainesville: University Press of Florida,
2006. Print.
Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter. NewYork: Routledge, 1993. Print.
Collier, Simon. A History of Chile, 1808-2002. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2004. Print.
Fusco, Coco. Corpus Delicti: Performance Art in the Americas. London: Routledge,
2000. Print.
Galende, Federico. Esa extraa pasin de huir de la crtica. Revista de Crtica
Cultural 31 (2005). Print.
Mirowski, Philip, and Dieter Piehwe, eds. The Road to Mont Pelerin: The Making
of the Neoliberal Thought Collective. Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2009. Print.
Richard, Nelly. Residuos y metforas: Ensayos de crtica cultural sobre el Chile de la
transicin. Santiago, Chile: Editorial Cuarto Propio, 1998. Print.
Robbins, Jill. Crossing through Chueca: Lesbian Literary Culture in Queer Madrid.
Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. Print.
Taylor, Marcus. From Pinochet to the Third Way: Neoliberalism and Social
Transformation in Chile. London: Pluto Press, 2006. Print.
CHAPTER 4
Yo, el Supremo astheSingular
Augusto Roa Bastos Yo, el Supremo represents the most singular example
of dictatorial discourse in the Latin American canon. Published in 1974,
fully 20 years after Alfredo Stroessner became dictator of Paraguay through
a military coup detat, the novel instantly became widely known as the most
realized effort in the young subgenre of the dictator novel.1 This subgenre
is one of the widest known iterations of the SpanishAmerican novel. It
continues to be purchased and to have weight in todays era, in spite of the
absence of dictatorssave Fidel Castroin the Latin American context.
The great list of novels cannot be ordered by virtue of prestige, nor of
capacity of execution. Each of them has entered Latin American canonical
literary studies, producing a discourse that crosses national and transna-
tional boundaries2 that continues to inform the reception and production
of literature in the region.
1
The dictator novel has produced a sustained and robust scholarship. One of the better
and more recent accounts is Juan Carlos Garcas El dictador en la literatura hispanoameri-
cana (2000). An older but excellent alternate discussion of the theme focusing on the impor-
tance of periodizing the novelistic output is Adriana Sandovals Los dictadores y la dictadura
en la novela hispanoamericana (18511978) (1989).
2
Dictator novels had their own boom during the 1970s and 1980s, further developing
the investigation of the history that Latin American writers were producing during the latter
part of the twentieth century. For more development on this issue, see Seymour Mentons
The New Latin American Historical Novel (1993).

Paraguay, 19702000, DOI10.1057/978-1-137-54633-3_4
78 C.M. AMADOR
In this chapter, I argue that the novel is the most thorough-going

example of Peter Hallwards concept of the singular in dictatorship litera-
ture and displays a virtual map of possiblities for the types of enuciation
and control over discourse that dictatorships and other repressive political
organs need to operate. Roa Bastos writing maps out a conceptual geog-
raphy and topography of how the singular in both literature and power
are produced through representational and archival political gestures that
expose the absolute power of the singular in the political sphere. My sec-
ondary goal in this chapter is to map how the singular produces a very
particular type of political archaeology that can be used to better under-
stand how representation operates with material power to create political
actionspecifically the action of violent repression of differences.
YO, EL SUPREMO
Yo, el Supremo occupies a unique position in the canon due to its extraor-
dinary density, complexity, and historical specificity. Other novels, such as
Garca Mrquez El otoo del patriarca (1980), Vargas Llosas La fiesta del
chivo (2000), Carpentiers Recurso del mtodo (1974), to name a few, are
written in allegorical styles that often seem to mythologize dictators and
their figures, creating an unintended sense of nearly celebratory appreciation
for the political and personal audacity of dictators. The dictator in El otoo
del patriarca, for instance, ruminates upon his memory in the autumn
of his lifehis violent and problematic reign is nonetheless unsettled by
the misty haze of nostalgia. The novel effects a kind of nostalgic miasma
over dictatorship, which makes the figure of the colonel a tragic antiheroa
figure deeply dissonant with many of the dictators of the twentieth century.
By contrast, Yo, el Supremo creates a massive figure of the dictator
Francia, but spares the reader the sympathetic effects of nostalgia by push-
ing to the forefront the question of archive and memory. El Supremo as a
figure is created through the layering of an overwhelming textual and ver-
bal performance that unifies the semantic field of Paraguayan history and
politics under the figure of el Supremo. Roa Bastos dictator exceeds the
figuration of the autarch, going beyond the traditional historical represen-
tation and semiotic construction of the dictator, instead providing a model
for dictator and dictatorship as a unity of the possible details pertinent to
all dictators. As Domingo Miliani suggests:
Supona no limitarse a una figura individual, sino abarcar en un modelo, la

clase de objetos incorporables en ella. No es ya una novela de un dictador
YO, EL SUPREMO ASTHESINGULAR 79
sino de todos los dictadores habidos en el continente hispanoamericano o,

al menos, extensible a ellos. (Miliani 108)3
It proposes not limiting itself to an individual figure, but to include
within (it) a model, the objects incorporable within this figure. Thus, it is
not a dictator novel, but the novel of all the dictators there have been in the
Spanish-American continent, or at least, extensible to them.
Miliani illustrates how the novel operates as a fictional unity that consolidates
the defining aspects of the concept of dictator. Milianis argument suggests
that Yo, el supremo goes beyond the historical mode of Paraguayan history
in order to provide a discursive frame for the possibility of a totalizing rhe-
torical figure of the dictator. For Miliani, the dictator is the creator of an
environment, un entorno, that defines a relationship between collective and
individual subjects in a relationship of reflexive support and configuration of
power: [e]l entorno del dictador esta integrado por el conjunto de indi-
viduos humanos que lo respaldan -como expresiones de clase o sectores de
clase social- y lo manipulan hasta aislarlo de la sociedad, pero igualmente son
manipulados por el (The environment of the dictator is integrated by the
collection of that support it--as expressions of class and sect, or the network
of social class, and they manipulate the dictator to the effect of distancing
him from society, but they are equally manipulated by him.) (105).
The relationship between collective, governed subjects and the dictator
does not eliminate the imbalance of power between the ruled and ruler.
Instead, what is suggested is that the relationship between the two is one
that expresses the contingency and immanence of the political situation.
In other words, Maniani illustrates what I will show later in this chapter:
How Roa Bastos dictator becomes a model for the dictatorial singular
that models a total, self-enclosing immanence that represents a destruc-
tion of political intersubjectivity.
Along with a transhistorical and international form of dictatorship, Yo,
el supremo has also been read as an allegorical expression of the representa-
tional schema under the Stroessner dictatorship, which lasted from 1954
until 1989, and created a regime known globally and specifically for the
extraordinary extent of his power. So vast was his power and reach that
it is widely believed that the only thing restraining his control was the
presence of an increasingly activist Roman Catholic Church.4 Although,
3
Miliani wrote the article El Dictador: Objeto narrativo en Yo, El Supremo, in Revista de
Crtica Literaria Latinoamericana 2.4 (1976): 10319, soon after the novels publication.
4
Please see Ren D.Harder Horsts The Stroessner Regime and Indigenous Resistance in
Paraguay (2010).
80 C.M. AMADOR
in principle, the Partido Colorado (Colorado Party) was the political party
that ruled Paraguay, Stroessners control over the political process and
discourse effectively foreclosed any possibility for party change or political
engagement with his regime.
Of further consequence were his extensive human rights abuses,
revealed through the discovery of the secret terror archives in 1992,
which chronicled in exhaustive detail the fates of nearly 500,000 murdered,
disappeared, or imprisoned persons across Latin America. Discovered by
Dr. Martn Almada, almost by chance, the files confirm the extent of the
violence of the Operation Cndor period and indict the various South
American regimes of the 1970s and 1980s as terrible criminals against
their own people. Moreover, Stroessner was singular among his peers in
dictatorship for his suspicion and manipulation of his own military classes
and political supporters. Stroessner jailed loyal soldiers and civil servants in
order to consolidate control over his nations power brokers.
This type of control is mirrored in both the literary and the historical
figure of de Francia, the core of the novel. The allegorical connection
works to further illustrate the extent of dictatorship as a logic of singular-
ity manifested by a particular organization of meaning, archive, language,
and the personage of the dictator: El Doctor, El Supremo. The Doctor
or El Supremo, as he will be known throughout the length of this chap-
ter, is singularity taken to an almost absurd apogee: nearly every piece of
archival information presented in the novel is comprised of utterances,
manuscripts, writings, and other enunciations singularly produced by de
Francias hand. In other words, [t]he various pieces of the interpretative
schematext, reading, reading of reading, history of reading, and so on
are all immanent aspects of a single divine figuration or signification
(Hallward 141). The immanence of the figuration or signification col-
lected in this achive is part of the linguistic apparatus of the state as it oper-
ates in all of its forms. El Supremo manifests the singularity of signification
by instantiating himself as a unity of expression and reception, and only
ever speaking to himselfeven when putatively addressing his secretary
or any other interlocutor. This matrix of language shows the design and
effect of power as assumed and expressed by El Supremo, who imagines all
discourse as self-contained, even at the level of breaks and discontinuities:
en El Supremo por lo menos hay dos. El Yo puede desdoblarse en un
tercero activo que juzque adecuadamente nuestra responsibilidad en rel-
acin al acto sobre el cual debemos decidir (Within The Supreme there
are at least two. The I can unfold itself in an active third that adequately
judges our responsibility in relation to the act that we are to decide on.)
(Roa Bastos 111).
The I that divides itself, the desdoblarse,or unfolding, contains

within it the connotation of both a historical unfolding and the unfold-
ing of a self from within itself. The dictator as a subject unfolds his own
historical reality, as well as the nations, through his complete reorder-
ing of the linguistic and semiotic possibilities through his writings, pro-
nouncements, and political desires. This type of singularity is only possible
within the configuration of the singular inasmuch as it arranges meaning
and communication to reflect itself as both origin and recipient.
So complete is this singularization that the third term, one which rep-
resents the capacity to reflect from an exterior position upon the Yo/El
relationship, is produced through the enunciatory pattern of the unfold-
ing of the dictator. As the I and the other are produced from an immanent
unfolding, the dictators third term is not an unfolding of a true other that
is capable of deciding. Instead, it operates as a fictitious tertiary party that
disguises the collapse of the intersubjectivity that El Supremo represents.
This is one of the essential aspects of the novelit defines the singular
relationality that connects the state apparatus with the person of the dicta-
tor, and reconfigures the notion of the state. The state becomes the vocal-
ization of El Supremo, and he incorporates himself in the very semiotics of
state communication.
A central part of any state apparatus is the production of meaning that
penetrates the corridors of political and private consciousness and configures
behavior accordingly. But what is of principal importance is how ElSupremo
understands that the immanence is tied to a contiguity between his person,
the force of enunciation, and the material power ofthe enforcement of his
word through acts of violence and incarceration. The essence of dictatorial
power is never solely the ability to capitalize on the immanent singularity
that lies at the heart of its possibilitythe dictatorship or dictator never
fully needs the power of its enunciation, nor can it ever really achieve the
power of its enunciation. The immanence is always grounded by an ability
to enforce power in the material realm. Jailings, disappearances, and torture
underwrite the possibility of every dictatorial enunciation. In Yo, el Supremo,
this is expressed specifically through the myriad instances of torture and
executionculminating in the destruction of his secretary, Policarpo Patio.
Part of this immanence, as has been suggested by Helene Carol Weldt-
Basson, is part of a dialogic apparatus designed to represent the plurality
of historical, political, and social voices that form the Paraguayan national
sphere. The dialogic aspect of the novel illustrates the totality of the oral
and textual frame that Roa Bastos was working with. El supremo is the sin-
gular, and single voice that narrates history, and marginalizes other voices
under his immense solipsism.
82 C.M. AMADOR
ARCHIVE, MYTH, ANDREPRESENTATION

One of the signal factors that highlight the singular nature of Yo, el
Supremo is the complete domination of all forms of public and private
discourse by El Supremo. The dictators understanding of the relevance of
the relation between archive, representation, and his represented figure
all work in unison to create a total figure that fully understands the power
of the singular to foreclose alternative discourses around the insularity
and unassailable power of his figure. The basic form of the narrative is
comprised of six narrative expressions, including handwritten notes by El
Supremo, his private notebook; a unique perpetual circular, which serves
a sort of constant vocalization of de Francias political and personal opin-
ions transmitted throughout the houses of government; notes or apuntes,
maundering reflections, and a series of other types of articulations in the
dictators voice. These narratives are joined with an ever-increasing series
of footnotes and marginal notes provided by a mysterious and unnamed
compiler that calls attention to the materiality of the archive by signaling
the physical status of El Supremos written corpus: (quemado el borde
del folio) (Roa Bastos 184). The last bit of the novel is a strange series of
reports by doctors and anthropologists concerning the physical remains of
the dead El Supremo, and a fascinating note by the compiler of the dicta-
tors corpus.
Part of the power of the narrative is that the archive itself is turned into
the structural feature of the singularity. As we know from earlier chap-
ters, the singular is the foreclosure of discursive possibility by the opera-
tions of a metadiscursive feature, that is, the postcolony, for Hallward,
and for Roa Bastos, it is the Supremo itself. Akin to the Name of the
Father in Lacanian discourse, the singular configures all language, writ-
ing, and signification itself around the supreme figure without concern
for the representational possibility of the other. Indeed, all representa-
tion is filtered through the being of the dictator and creates a situation
where consciousness itself is inscribed and circumscribed through the
enunciations of the dictator.
One of the salient features of the novel is the congenial but definite
understanding of the singular that El Supremo presents throughout the
novel to the reader. The very nature of El Supremos direct discourse is not
directed at an anonymous or yet-to-come reader, but rather to himself as
creator of the epistemic totality of the singular. De Francias narrative style
insinuates at a reader, teasing the novels readership with a recognition of
the truism that every written word requires a reader, or that, in a Lacanian
sense, every letter arrives at its destination.
However, it is clear that de Francia is simply his own reader and inter-
locutor. He draws himself as the singular figure of the body, memory, and
contours of Paraguayan political and historical reality. Akin to the body of
God, El Supremo is a singularity as such, and recognizes this in his speech
and writing. He suggests through commentary that the singular mimics an
interlocutor but requires no actual specific connection to reader, compiler,
or even archive. Every singular configuration emerges through the dis-
solution of relationality, as the expression of a non-relational, self-creative
or self-constituent force (Hallward 255). Despite the overwhelming
literariness necessary for the configuration of the singularthis is one of
the paradoxes of the singular: it forms itself through the invocation of
specific semiotic forcesthe dictators speech destroys all relation and
specificity by continual dissolution of all relationality to the political and
archival field through the constant reference to his absolute supremacy.
Political and epistemic supremacy are the fields for de Francia and the
only process for achievement is the singularization of his identity through
discursive means.
El Supremos references are taken from the actual archival material of
de Francias regime, producing a powerful epistemic effect that unites
Paraguays historical memory with the allegorical possibilities of the novel.
The singular is served here by virtue of the dictators control over the
mythic and historiographic origins of his nation. As Milagros Ezguerro
argues:
Se trata de un verdadero testamento politico, pues a travs de ese docu-

mento, cuya eficiencia deber ser perpetua, el Supremo explica y justifica su
papel histrico de Fundador de la Nacin independiente y soberana; y a la
vez lega el smbolo de su legitimidad, la nica que un Dictador pueda legar,
el relato de la fundacin o mito de los orgenes. (Roa Bastos 54)
[The novel] is a true political testament, and through this document,
whose efficiency should be perpetual, El Supremo explains and justifies his
historical role as the Nations sovereign and independent founder; and at
the same time he bequeaths through the text the symbol of his legitimacy
the only that a dictator can bequeath: the story of [the nations] foundations
or the myth of its origins.
Of course, Ezguerro underestimates the capacity of a dictator to bequeath

a symbol of legitimacy through the structuring of the institutional
84 C.M. AMADOR
frameworks of power. Part of my argument is that singularity as a dis-

cursive practice is produced through the form of the discourse itself. The
structure of the archive is that it is centripetally arranged around specific
types of writing, communiqus, and forms of textualities displayed in the
novel. The journals, notes, perpetual circular, and the poster at the begin-
ning of the novel (el pasqun) are all intimately and inextricably related
to the pen and the voice of the dictator himself. The dictator operates as
the epistemic center and origin of all truth and falsity within the novel.
Mutatis mutandis, the dictators words and assertions become external-
ized and the dictator himself falls under the sway of his own rhetoric, pro-
ducing doubt in himself in a comic moment of self-reflexive uncertainty.
A crucial part of the singularization process in the novel is the man-
ner in which El Supremo communicates through and with his amanuen-
sis, Patio. Patios figure is almost singular in literature. He is a scribe,
who seems to writes, with nearly inerrant fidelity, the words of his master
in all of the personal and singular textualities of the dictators archive
circular perpetua, personal journal, and the bitacora (notebook for jotting
down ideas). What can be read as conversations between Patio and de
Francia give the reader a sense of de Francias capacity for dialogue with
an other. De Francia queries Patio, discusses points of policy and per-
ception with him, and commands the scribe to take dictation, remember
important facts, and keep a running tally of pertinent family and political
affairs. El Supremos singular dialogues and running commemorations and
ratiocinations are regularly disrupted by his talking to Patio.
Yet, on the other hand, almost immediately after an exchange with
Patio, the dictator undermines his writers credibility, refers to himself,
criticizes Patios intelligence, necessity, and labors in a manner that runs
the gamut from diffident and utterly self-referential musings, to direct
criticism and authoritarian bullying of Patio. The self-reflexive ignoring
of Patios material presence in the text reveals the difficulty of restraining
this texts capacity to produce solid, and specific moments of truth, mem-
ory, and readability. This process is echoed by el compilador, the archi-
vist who putatively arranges the textual reception of the dictators archive
functions. The novel uses rigorous intertextuality to create a type of blur-
ring of the epistemic lines to further the singular possibilities of dictatorial
writing and textuality. The role of the archive itself in asserting authority
and consolidating the historical reception of a figures legacy is challenged
by the relation of the archivist to the archivemost specifically, with the
textual insertions that flow in and out of the knowable. As Ezguerra
identifies: la frontera entre las citas textuales y la ficcin es a menudo

borrosa, y cuando el compilador aparece como individuo es para ser inte-
grado maliciosamente a la ficcin (Roa Bastos 64). [the border between
the textual citations and the fiction is frequently blurry, and when the
editor appears as an individual it is to be incorporated maliciously into
the fiction.] Ezguerras use of the term ficcin here speaks of his political
conviction against seeing the words of El Supremo as veridical or having
a truth value. There is concern with this position as a hermeneutical pos-
sibility, given that the dictators words themselves are the archive. Thus,
what Ezguerra conceives of as a fiction, bespeaks his unwillingness to see
El Supremo as a figure capable of truth. In this fashion, he lapses into a
fiction of archival guarantee and hegemony, rather than confronting the
possibility of El Supremo as a possibility of memory and truthas a testi-
mony, that despite its horrible status, may have the capacity for witness
something una ficcin has serious trouble doing.5
In other words, I argue that the archivist is part of the singularizing
force of the text, as the archivist becomes yet another member of the
singular dimension of the political that El Supremo creates by the force of
his words, deeds, and textual arrangements. As we know, the presence of
Patio, the amanuensis, is a constant part of the communication that de
Francia has with the reader and the archive. Patio is regularly criticized,
bemoaned, corrected, and virtually negated by El Supremo in the novel.
Eventually having him murdered, the dictator uses Patios powers as a
scribe to reinforce his utter control over meaning itself. Gone from the
text is the possibility of the disruptive or problematic reception due to the
textual presence of the amanuensis hand. The strict devotion to his total,
singular identity that de Francia demonstrates allows for the collapsing of
all scriptorial and hermeneutic boundaries into a singular unity, where any
difference collapses into a self-replicating immanence that presumes the
immediate articulation of both limits of its exclusive scale of existence
(Hallward 250).
The compilador at the end of the novel collapses into the game of sin-
gularization of de Francia, by taking up the archive itself and repeating as
5
I, along with Cathy Caruth and other scholars, argue the point nonetheless that part of the
power of fiction is to model testimony and witnessing, thereby enframing memories that are
often too harrowing to be articulated through normal speech. Caruth develops this point in
detail in Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (1996). The text establishing
standard discussions of the role of literature and testimony is Dori Laub and Shoshana
Felmans Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (1991).
86 C.M. AMADOR
a reflection of Patio, the editorial actions that allow for El Supremos total
control of meaning.
El Compilador es tambin el doble de Patio, pues su trabajo, como el sec-

retario, consiste en copiar, reproducir, repetir documentos, textos, discur-
sos,. Pero es adems el doble del Supremo en la medida en que reproduce
su discurso y para eso se identifica con l. La Nota final del Compilador es
una muestra significativa de la identificacin de la escritura del Compilador
con la del Dictador: juegos de palabras, exageracin, mistificacin, plagio
deliberado, todas las caractersticas del discurso dictatorial estn reunidas.
The compiler is also Patios double, and his role as secretary consists
in copying, reproducing, repeating documents, texts, and discourses. But
he is also El Supremos double inasmuch as [the compiler] reproduces his
discourse and for that reason is identified with him. The Nota final del
Compilador is a significant proof of the identification of the Compilers writ-
ing with that of the dictator: word games, exaggerations, mystifications,
deliberate plagiarism, and all of the characteristics of dictatorial discourse are
collected herein. (Ezquerro 65)
Given the above, can we not now argue that the very textual possibility
of any specific or specified power by virtue of the compilador is sublated
within the game of doubles and identitarian collapse between Patio, El
Supremo, and the compiler itself? Thus, in any type of undermining or
critical intervention that attempts to divide the editorial from the autho-
rial, we can see how singularization as a force powerfully configures the
possibility of meaing itself, collapsing the distinction between dictator and
archivist.
Another point of importance is where Ezquerro provides an interest-
ing counterpoint to my reading of Yo, el Supremo as a novel performing
the logic of the singular. The novel itself is an archive compiled by an
unknown compiler that structured the narrative reception of this novel for
its readership. The compilers note that ends the text provides the reader
with an understanding of the function of arranging and structuring an
archive as a gesture of political and epistemological power. Further, there
is the intermittent but fascinating presence of the editor or el Corregidor,
who comments on, corrects, and signals the materiality of the text. It
further alludes to the connection of political authority to the corporeality
of the dictator himself. The archive, once inviolable, is now affected and
touched by the unknown compilers pen after El Supremo has met his
corporeal death. It is possible to read a curious symmetry between the
body of the dictator and the body of the archive itself. The dictators exis-
tence continuously produces material that becomes part of the archive.
And especially in El Supremos case, the archive of work is intimately and
directly tied to all possible conceptualizations from his pen.
Throughout the novel, the dictator recognizes the necessity and truth of
seeing the Paraguayan nation as a manifestation of his singular and personal
discourse. I argue explicitly that the singular manifests, at least partially,
through the correlation of a possibility of the singular self-recognizing its
singularity through the writing process. Alterity, although mentioned and
ultimately present, is reduced through the constant reidentification of the
singular El Supremo with his power to write and guarantee truth. The dic-
tators power is centrally arranged through the continuous production of a
discourse that emerges from the dictators mouth and pen itself. Everything
that El Supremo utters is guaranteed by his being, while simultaneously
authorizing and legitimizing his existence as Paraguays supreme power.
At the same time, it functions as a novel does, creating a unique rep-
resentational schema for literature inasmuch as it deals directly with the
possibilities of first-person speech, archival intercalations, and the dubi-
ousness of the written itself. The multiple modalities of the novel suggest
that at the core of the written itself is the differnce, la Jacques Derrida
that explodes writing into the network of multiple differentiations of tex-
tual possibility. Despite the fact that the archive, as such, is a production
of the differentiating logic of writing itself, the construction of archival
difference is an attempt over the indeterminancy of writing. Creating dif-
ferences in genres and written modalities is an attempt to enact the specific
of politics in written form. All forms of the archive and genre take specific
distance and difference from others in order to achieve a type of legislation
against the eruption of meaning that is writing.
After a fashion, it can be said that every archival moment is a specific
gesture against the singularization of writinga speech that would itself
resemble the voice of God. Nonetheless, enunciation itself is arguably the
source of diffrance and of the possibility of the multiple archival and
generic stylespasquin (a wall poster, often lampooning its subject), diary,
perpetual circularmay be one of the minimum conditions necessary for
enunciation itself. This is precisely why the singular is so important to
Roa Bastos as a novelistit is the deepest illustration of how dictatorship
requires control over enunicatory possibilities for power to fully engage
and control the networks of power that would challenge its supremacy.
88 C.M. AMADOR
El Supremo becomes the supreme singularity by attempting to repress

the differentiating networks of meaning itself through the unification of
writing through his own dictatorial figure and persona. The following pas-
sage serves to illustrate how singularity is vital to understand the discursive
power that makes a type of politics possiblethe politics of pure interior-
ity that is created from the unifying of all minor parts into the complete,
singular whole that is El Supremos body:
Origen de la escritura: El Punto. Unidad pequea. De igual modo que las

unidades de la lengua escrita o hablada son a su vez pequeas lenguas..El
principio de todas las cosas es que las entraas se forman de entraas ms
pequeas. El hueso de huesos ms pequeosLa naturaleza trabaja en lo
mnimo. La escritura tambin.
Del mismo modo el Poder Absoluto est hecho de pequeos poderes.
Puedo hacer por medio de otros lo que esos otros no pueden hacer por s
mismos. Puedo decir a otros lo que no puedo decirme a m. Los dems son
lentes a travs de los cuales leemos en nuestras propias mentes. El Supremo
es aquel que lo es por su naturaleza. Nunca nos recuerda a otros salvo a la
imagen del Estado, de la Nacin del pueblo de la Patria. (Roa Bastos 163)
Origin of writing: the point. Small unit. Just as the units of the written or
spoken language are themselves small languages. The beginning of all things
it is that the bowels are formed smaller gut. Bones of bones smaller Nature
works in the least. The writing also.
Similarly absolute power is made of small powers. I can do through oth-
ers what those others cannot do for themselves. I can tell others what I can-
not tell myself. The others are lenses through which we read our own minds.
The Supreme is one who is by nature. Never reminds us of others except to
the image of the State, Nation, people of the country.
The interiority produced by the dictators discourse is what makes the

singular so relevant in both Latin American Literature and political his-
tory. As the history of the Southern Cone and Paraguay, in particular,
began to become more entrenched in political dictatorship, the capacity
of each nation to produce a specific vision of national and political iden-
tity became diminished. Stroessners dictatorship, which emerged prior to
the historically galvanizing agent of the Cuban Revolution, worked on a
model of paranoia and self-protection that did not require the urgency of
a supposed communist overthrow to underwrite the singular condition.
El Supremo imagines alterity as a lens through which others merely read
themselves, signifying the incapacity of intersubjective relations to have
an impact upon the other. The dictator signifies alterity only as a way of
describing the component parts of his subjectivity, and his vision of lan-
guage reflects this vision-languages component parts, which are merely
incidences of a totality, a whole that is unbreakable and unitary. This is
almost certainly the essence of the singular logic of configurationone
that magnifies and centers all discourse within
There was no reactive condition that putatively justifies the project of
dictatorshipas with de Francia in history and in the novel, it is the pure
instrumentality of power itself that circulates the necessary conditions for
singularity. Part of El Supremos logic of control and power is that the dic-
tator becomes the total reference for all immanence through the transfor-
mation of his own subject/object divide. As I have mentioned earlier, the
method of the dictators existence is created by the continuous structuring
of literary methods that revolved around his identity (as the father created
his own law-of-the-father, in the Lacanian sense), and by the continuous
shouting and speaking of his name and being in every possible context.
When, in the novel, during an English language lesson, de Francia is con-
fronted with the myth of the double-sexed Egyptian goddess Nuit, he
discusses the concept of a peculiar and personal sort of autopoesis:
La nica maternidad seria es la del hombre. La nica maternidad real y pos-

sible. Yo he podido ser concebido sin mujer por la sola fuerza de my pensam-
iento. No me atribuyen dos madres, un padre falso, cuatro falsos hermanos,
dos fechas de nacimiento, todo lo cual no prueba acaso ciertamente la false-
dad del infundio? Yo no tengo familia; si de verdad he nacido, lo que est an
por probarse, puesto que no puede morir sino lo que ha nacido. Yo he nacido
de m y Yo solo me he hecho Doble. (Nota de El Supremo) (Roa Bastos 250)
The only serious maternity would be a mans. The only real and possible
maternity. I have been able to be conceived without woman through only
the power of my thoughts. Do they not attribute to me two mothers, a false
father, four false brothers, two birthdatesall of which only proves with
certainty the falsehood of that malicious lie. I have no family; if I had truly
been born, which remains to be proven, given that to die something must
first have been born. I was born of me and I alone have made myself double.
This paragraph reveals how El Supremos singularity extends to the very

redefinition of human ontological possibility. El Supremo creates himself
through the capacity of his own thoughtsinaugurating a new subject/
object divide where once he was pure immanence.
90 C.M. AMADOR
The immanent power of the dictators mind is the creation of the field
of lived possibility for himself, and his immortal identity remains secure,
as his words are birthless revealing the immanent as an unbirthed, sin-
gular quality. El Supremo is born of an enunciatory moment that needs
no other to guarantee recognition of fundamental alterity or inscription
within a network of interpellation. Leaving aside the question of why El
Supremos immanent autopoesis takes place through the intensely social
phenomenon of writing, we also leave aside the riposte that the utterly
self-referential archive adds weight to the illusion of immanence, it is then
utterly within reason to suggest that El Supremos function is to singularize
the political and identitarian field of political dictatorship itself. It is also
logical to see how the singularity of El Supremos identity brings to the
theoretical field, the very centrality of singularity as a possible and often
necessary modality for political identification.
If, as Bill Brown puts it, literature provides access to an otherwise
unrecuperable history, then can it not be said that literature also pro-
vides access to an otherwise unrecuperable political ontology?6 In Yo El
Supremo, we find a politics that is radically other, based on how the sin-
gular identity of de Francia reconfigures even the most basic antagonistic
relationship of politics in a Schmittian context. One of the factors around
this point is the argument of how the state plays into the illusion of an a
priori political identity prior to the originary friend/enemy distinction in
politics. In Carl Schmitts seminal text, The Concept of the Political, the
division of subjects along the friend/enemy distinction is prior to any state
or governmental arrangement. The centrality of the political is the capacity
to arrange opposition along the coordinates of this originary distinction.
Implicitly, we put aside Chantal Mouffes identification of the political as
the fundamental antagonism between social relations as expressed through
the friend/enemy distinctiona definition that she argues is ontological in
nature and not ontic7 and instead use Badious ideas from Metapolitics
as a more relevant and ultimately satisfactory model for elaborating the
political ingredients of dictatorship coupled with the discursive function
of singularization inasmuch as it is the point of contrast and comparison
6
Cited from Bill Browns professional website: http://english.uchicago.edu/faculty/
brown (accessed March 15, 2012).
7
Here, Mouffe uses the language of Husserlian and Heideggerian phenomenology to
reveal the difference between the basic structure of the political (the ontological) and the
specific, worldly expression (the ontic) of political antagonism in the social fieldthe liberal
state, dictatorship, and so on. See On The Political (2007).
against the legitimate political expression that Badiou argues for: politics
as an event, a truth procedure, the product of a militant collective expres-
sion united under a name that is always open to membership for all.
As Badiou illustrates this point: [w]e can therefore say that politics is
of the masses, not because it takes into account the interests of the great-
est number, but because it is founded on the verifiable supposition that
no one is enslaved, whether in thought or in deed, by the bond that results
from those interests that are a mere function of ones place (Badiou 73).
Politics for Badiou requires envisioning of a collective enterprise that
unites all political subjects in a collection of tension and individual ideas,
nonetheless agreeing upon the possibility of freedom. This thought is in
stark contrast to the political ideas of El Supremoplurality is simply a
detail of the singular and not the condition for the political itself.
It is here that we can see why a novel like Yo, el Supremo stands out as a
masterpiece of Latin American and Global literatureit expresses through
a fictional situation, the contours of what is politically and theoretically
possible and probable. Literary works like those of Roa Bastos create new
forms of understanding the distinct social reality of the dictatorship era,
and avail themselves of the capacity of literature to bring into relief, unseen
aspects of experience.
Of necessity is a discussion on how the political is discussed by Hallward,
Mouffe, and Badiou, in order to further the analysis of the singular against
the specific. The specified, we know, takes a specific stance against a political
or conceptual operation. It rejects or allies itself with a concept or name, and
transforms the social field by means of this connection. Said in Mouffes lan-
guage, the specific is the ontological possibility of relating toward, through,
or away from a fundamental antagonism in the social, while the specified is its
ontic identitycommunism, liberal democracy, or any other political form.
Part of the issue, is of course, that the political in its most authentic
state, according to Badiou, is fully social and negotiated by an unfixed,
unsettled but named identity that is always imposing and reinvigorating
the conditions of the political. Politics (of an authentic, ethical kind) is
the event that arranges multiple individuals under this name: the proletar-
ian, the nation of immigrants, the commune. And for Mouffe, the politi-
cal reflects the enemy/friend distinction that produces the fundamental
antagonism that allows for the formation of communities and basic, and
inexorable social differences. What this means for the literary project of
Yo, el Supremo is that the political finds itself inexpressible through the
legitimate means by either Mouffe or Badiou, instead the singularization
92 C.M. AMADOR
of the dictators identity swallows whole the enemy/friend distinction and

creates a pure, fixed name under El Supremo. The countrys existence,
material and otherwise, is also subsumed within the total identity of the
dictator, and both exterior and interior for the nation is merely a drawn
circle with El Supremo at its center.
The politicals utter foreclosure within the novel underwrites the read-
ing of the singular as the destruction of possibility and hope itself: all poli-
tics is impossible within the space of the singular for even the distinction of
difference is said to be merely a facet or an aspect of the unity of the singu-
lar form. This is the truest goal of dictatorshipan interiority that circum-
scribes the contours of the nation as a isolating solipsismin other words,
the condition under El Supremo and the virtual condition under Stroessner.
Working with Badious definition, we find that Yo, el Supremo provides
us with a difficult but rewarding understanding of the intimate relation
that the political has with the logics of differentiation and individuation
in singularity and specificity. The dictators discourses reveal how the
individual name of the dictator, individuated by the singularity of its own
identity, forms the impossibility of politics that includes any citizen mem-
ber of the polis. Questions of citizenship and issues of collective or individ-
ual subjectivity are completely foreclosed within the absence inaugurated
by de Francias total dominance of the political spherethe absence of the
collective. After a fashion, even that which comprises the sovereignthe
assumption of the social, collective body into the plural, but singular body
of the sovereign is transformed by a unique singularization through El
Supremos continuously auto-reflexive discourse.
Some of the fascination with Yo, el Supremo certainly lies with the
extraordinary adeptness concerning the possibilities of the political and
political theorization in its pages. Of all the Latin American dictator nov-
els, it is inarguable that the text presents a vastness of political scope and a
characterization of dictatorial self-reflexivity unmatched among its frater-
nal texts. No other literary dictator demonstrates the adroitness in under-
standing the tensions between writing, reading, and political authority
that El Supremo demonstrates. El Supremo is a constant referent to his
own power and expansive hermeneutic and written power as a totality,
self-generated through the acts of writing and reading.
Returning to Schmitt, it can be argued that at the core of El Supremo is
the production of an identity that embodies Schmitts conception of the
statethe expression of state of exception that allows for the injunction
to kill the enemy through war as the founding power of the political: to
the state as an essentially political entity belongs the jus belli, i.e., the real
possibility of deciding in a concrete situation upon the enemy and the abil-
ity to fight him with the power emanating from the entity (Schmitt 45).
There is a certain vapid truth to this, given El Supremos extraordinary
power and extension over Paraguay in every fashion and how killing as a
political tool was implemented during the period in which the novel takes
place, not to mention the violence perpetrated by Stroessner. Nonetheless,
the importance of the states responsibility for killing is represented as a
power that emanates from a politics of the singular name, rather than the
law. Legitimating killing is modeled in Yo, el Supremo through the dictators
evocation of his own principles of legality and jurisprudence implemented
through a reinscription of the connection between the symbolic representa-
tion and proliferation of writing and the law. El Supremo is, as he is in most of
his writing, discerning about the relation between representation and power:
Quienquiera que seas, impertinente corregidor de mi pluma, ya ests

comenzando a fastidiarme. No entiendes lo que escribo. No entiendes que
la ley es simblica. Los entendimientos torcidos no pueden captar esto.
Interpretan los smbolos literalmente. As te equivocas y llenas mis mrgenes
con tu burlona suficiencia. Al menos leme bien. Hay smbolos claros/
smbolos obscuros. Yo El Supremo mi pasin la juego a sangre fra. (77)
Whomever you be, impertinent corrector of my pen, youve already
begun to annoy me. You do not understand what I write. You do not under-
stand that the law is symbolic. Twisted understandings cannot capture this.
Interpret the symbols literally. That way youll be wrong and fill my margins
with your laughable sufficiency. At least read me well. There are clear sym-
bols and opaque symbols. I, the Supreme express my passion in cold blood.
El Supremos statement on the law challenges his editors to recognize the

essential plasticity of the law as a symbolic field and the essential power
behind the law is the ability to activate the representation of the law
through a deciding power. As a singular figure, El Supremo is the con-
summate decider and symbolizer. His text continuously inveighs against
his imagined editors and biographers collective stupidity surrounding the
power of inscription and editing to reconstruct identity and truth. And
at the same time, the dictator gives a solid account of the political leger-
demain implemented to maintain rigorous control over his identity, his
people, and the integrity of the nation and his political powerwhich are
identical in his estimation.
In short, we confirm how the singular name of the dictator oper-
ates as the symbolic representation for the law that collapses all power
and significatory possibility. Power is diverted from the possibility of
94 C.M. AMADOR
confronting another to the constant reevaluation of the mode of singularity

(as even the nations citizens are conceived as physical and symbolic parts
of El Supremos body). The concrete and the abstract are united in order
to produce the perfect singularitythe imagining of the raw singular that
is de Francia, and the concomitant development of an innovative theory
of dictatorship and identity as an enduring contribution of the novel. The
power to kill, the ability to decide, and the right of inscription and adju-
dication is channeled into the singular representation of El Supremo. This
move is critical, as the immanence that the singular requires for its con-
summation is always the ultimate goal of the singular process. In textual
and political criticism that is brilliant, Roa Bastos shows the power of dic-
tatorship to transcend the very content of the social and create a claustro-
phobic, horrible singularity: a dictatorship of terror.
CONCLUSION
In this chapter, I have shown how Yo, el Supremo is one of the most sin-
gular representations in Southern Cone Literature and perhaps the best
example of how the dictator novel as a genre allows readers to discover
an unrecuperable history of the political oppression of two periods in
Paraguayan historythat of the novels main character, de Francia, and
through the allegorical content of the novel, Paraguays most recent dicta-
tor, Stroessner.
Part of the novels deftness lies in the execution of a type of literary and
philosophical language that draws out the topography of singularity. In turn,
this singular study allows for an understanding of how the true political con-
sequences of a discourse that attempts to defeat alterity by the creation of a
radical interiority manifest. As Hallward says: singularisation points toward
coherence in which the general distinction of subject and object no longer
applies (Hallward 100). In this case, the distinction is one of subject and
object between the speaker and the object of speech itself, or, after a fashion,
the dictator as supreme subject and the Paraguayan nation as object itself.
This collapsing of subject and object at the national level takes place in the
language and textuality itself. Outside of El Supremos written and oral com-
munication lies the reality of the Paraguayan nations daily reality, unwritten
and unspoken, mediated only by the words of the dictator[T]he singular
is self-universalising, so to speak, in a much stronger sense; it creates these
very parameters themselves. By creating the medium of its existence, a sin-
gularity effectively creates its own universe (177).
Throughout the novel, de Francia reminds the reader of his unrivaled

power to create and destroy meaning, individuals, and the very fabric of
history. As the supreme authority over life and death, even a seditious
document, el pasqun found nailed to the cathedral door asserts this:
Yo El Supremo, Dictador de la Republica

Ordeno al acaecer mi muerte mi cadaver sea decapitado; la cabeza puesta
en una pica por tres dias en la Plaza de la Repblica donde se convocara al
pueblo al son de las campanas echadas a ruelo.
Todos mis servidores civiles y militares sufrirn pena de horca. Sus cadav-
ers seran enterrados en potreros de extramuros sin cruz ni marca o memoria
sus nombres.
Al trmino del dicho plazo mando a mis restos sean quemados y las ceni-
zas arrojadas al ro. (93)
I, The Supreme, Dictator of the Republic,
Order upon my death that my corpse be decapitated; my head placed on
a pike for 3 days in the Plaza of the Republic where we will gather the people
by the sound of the tolling bells.
All of my civil and military servants shall suffer death by hanging. Their
bodies to be interred in distant, paupers graves, without a cross nor mark-
ings nor memory of their names.
After the end of the term, I order my remains burnt and my ashes scat-
tered in the river. (Roa Bastos 90)
Looking back at our conceptual tools, we can see how understanding the
singular versus the specific as a hermeneutical tool allows the reader and
student of political and literary discourse to draw in an almost visual fashion,
the conditions for describing the effects of dictatorship and other forms of
political oppression. I define a genuine politics as collective, as a procedure
that unites a multiplicity, a community, under a specific direction or name. As
the specific is the minimum condition of a pluralizable decision, so the pos-
sibility of differentiation comes from the exposure to the limit of community
and the communicative possibilities of the political or ethical action. Politics
is specified through the particularities of the community. Thus, almost as
a self-regulating mechanism, the end of the specific articulates against the
inscriptions of the community. As Hallward argues: The limit of the specific
is a function of subjective perspective, and characterizes the medium of any
divisively universalisable engagement or decision (Hallward 215).
Taking a position as a political entity, whether collective or individual,
is the essence of the specific. The subjective perspective taken creates the
96 C.M. AMADOR
necessary field for the possibility of a political project to become universal

by means of the individual looking within and without itself to find a point
of universalizable connection with others. This operates both in terms of
creating communities and connections for the political, as well as oppo-
sition, as the specified is always taken against a particular opponent or
position. A properly specific discourse does not foreclose the possibility
of membership to anyone by virtue of an identity other than that which
allows the basic differentiation necessary for specification. In other words,
despite the minimum condition of specifying, there is no extreme limit as to
who gets to be a part of a specific concept. The name of the specification is
an open identity that functions as the basis of a set that is radically opposed
to somethingcapitalism, colonialism, oppression, imperialism, and so
onbut that leaves open its membership in a putatively abstract fashion.
What Yo, el Supremos singularity reveals is the intensity of how the dic-
tatorial in Paraguay, and most of Latin America, was based on the attempt
to create a pure singular point, an interiority that blots out the points of
entrance and gains members through erasure and destruction of iden-
tity. The Latin American dictatorships of Stroessners period lacked the
supreme obsession with the enemy that the great European dictatorships
did, but did indeed have enemies. The brutality of the Southern Cone
nations was directed at courageous women and men who opposed the
darkness shrouding their nations at the time, often paying with their lives.
Yet the regimes public discourses made less of the enemy and more of the
constant need to reorder the memory, identity, and future of their nations
from within. The dictatorships attempted to achieve through violence,
fear and representation a singularity that would inaugurate a unique phase
of dictatorial power.8 Yo, el Supremo narrates in exhaustive detail. the
discursive possibilities of singularity, teasing out its ethical and political
consequences, and ultimately bringing to the Latin American canon one
of the supreme novels of historiography, political theory, and philosophi-
cal density. Roa Bastos novel uses the power of literatures autonomy to
explore the magnitude of singularity, and opens vital questions on the
power of literature to model what is lived but unseen in our world.
8
There is a significant scholarship on the unique form of the Stroessner regime and its role
in helping shape the mid-twentieth-century dictatorial culture in Latin America. Two of the
more interesting recent accounts in Spanish are Alfred Boccia Pazs Diccionario Usual del
Stronismo (2004), and Alcibades Gonzlez Delvalles Contra el olvido: la vida cotidiana en
los tiempos de Stroessner (1998). Two notable accounts on Stroessner in English include Paul
H. Lewis Paraguay Under Stroessner (1980), and Carlos R. Mirandas Stroessner Era:
Authoritarian Rule in Paraguay (1990).
REFERENCES
Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins 1996. Print.
Delvalle, Alcibades Gonzlez. Contra el olvido: la vida cotidiana en los tiempos de
Stroessner. Madrid: Intercontinental, 1998. Print.
Garca, Juan Carlos. El dictador en la literatura hispanoamericana. Santiago:
Mosquito Comunicaciones, 2000. Print.
Horst, Ren D. Harder. The Stroessner Regime and Indigenous Resistance in
Paraguay. Gainsville: University Press of Florida, 2010. Print.
Laub, Dori, and Shoshana Felman. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature,
Psychoanalysis, and History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991.
Print.
Lewis, Paul H. Paraguay Under Stroessner. Durham: University of North Carolina
Press, 1980. Print.
Menton, Seymour. The New Latin American Historical Novel. Austin, TX:
University of Texas Press, 1993 Print.
Miliani, Domingo. El dictador: objeto narrativo en Yo, el supremo. Revista de
Crtica Literaria Latinoamericana 2.4 (1976 ): 10319. Print.
Miranda, Carlos R. The Stroessner Era: Authoritarian Rule in Paraguay. NewYork:
Westview Press, 1990. Print.
Mouffe, Chantal. On the Political. London: Routledge, 2007. Print.
Paz, Alfredo Boccia. Dccionario usual del stronsmo. Asuncin, Paraguay:
Servilibro, 2004. Print.
Sandoval, Adriana. Los dictadores y la dictadura en la novela hispanoamericana
(1851-1978). Mexico City: UNAM, 1989. Print.
CHAPTER 5
The Scilingo Effect andtheSpecified
This chapter investigates how, in Argentina, during the last dictatorship,

a type of evil, known as Radical Evil, marked by the rigorous practice of
violence and subjection to power was formed by the construction of a spec-
ified, precise enemy. In other words, I argue that, in this case, the partici-
pants and intellectual authors of the extrajudicial tortures, murders, and
arrests perpetrated in Argentina during the Dirty War period are defined
by their direct relationship to a cause whose nature requires destruction
and countering. The rhetorical and intersubjective structure of the last
Argentine dictatorship is that of rigorously opposing a subject or com-
munity that goes beyond the distinction of friend and enemy proposed
in Carl Schmitts The Concept of The Political (1923). Instead, I will fol-
low Peter Hallwards notion of the specified, from Absolutely Postcolonial:
Writing Between the Singular and the Specific (2001), which argues that
this idea of the specified is a description of a closed circle of subjectivization
through opposition and classification. I argue that the specified carries
within it the seed of the possibility of the type of opposition that sustains
the practice of Radical Evil.
The Proceso de reorganizacin nacional dictatorship, which took over
the nation on March 24, 1976, and left power in 1983, enacted a system-
atic campaign of torture, murder, and the creation of a culture of fear that
has led indisputably to its designation as a regime of Radical Evil: a regime,
as noted jurist Carlos Santiago Nino comments, whose massive human

Paraguay, 19702000, DOI10.1057/978-1-137-54633-3_5
100 C.M. AMADOR
rights violations involve human dignity so widespread, persistent, and

organized that normal moral assessment seems inappropriate (Nino vii).
The Procesos violence as Radical Evil seems to surpass the boundaries of
moral discourse (Nino ix), and exceeds the conceptual frameworks for evalu-
ation and assessment. Regimes of Radical Evil commit crimes against human-
ity of such violence that assessment of their crimes makes it nearly impossible
to comprehend the reasons behind their crimes. They defy the standard
understanding of the instrumentality of political violence, and are attributed
as evil because these acts seem to be a spontaneous, immanent form of vio-
lence, resembling the otherworldliness of spectral or demonic forms of evil.
Despite the excession of sense that Radical Evil suggests, there is some-
thing behind the commission of such evil acts that is a type of a sense, a
kind of logic that organizes the possibilities of ethical and political action.
Radical Evil as a concept suggests an irrational response to an irratio-
nal series of events. Yet, political violence has an intersubjective form, a
modality of the organization of human beings that structures the relations
of violenceeither in complicity, active participation, or victimhood.
In this chapter, I suggest how Radical Evil can, at least partially, be
accounted for by understanding how a certain version of the specified forms
the patterns of thought that structure the relations behind the violence of the
Dirty War period. These patterns of thinking were structured by the specified
logic of the dictatorship and can be identified through analysis of the way
the regime represented and understood its own intersubjective conditions.
I take as my examples two texts, El vuelo (1995) and Medio siglo de procla-
mas militares (2002), both by Horacio Verbitzky, which are texts that present
nonfictional accounts of the extraordinary conditions behind the violence in
this historical period. These texts describe the extraordinary relationship that
military dictatorship has to both singular representations of individuation and
the specifiedbeing the relationship that a specified logic of individuation has
with the possibility of political actions against a specific enemy or antagonist.
THE SPECIFIED ANDPOLITICS

The specified as an analytical description of the way in which subjects are
inscribed with meaning proceeds via the naming of term that allows the
specified discourse to impute a type of meaning upon the other. The specific
must be scrupulously distinguished from the specified. The specified can
only define the realm of the essence of essentialist, where the demarcation
of an individual (subject, object, or culture) follows from its accordance with
recognized classifications. (Hallward 40)
THE SCILINGO EFFECT ANDTHESPECIFIED 101
In the quotation above, the specified operates with the logic of the
essence, the identity that forecloses membership by virtue of taking a
specified stance toward a singular, recognized classification. Whether
it be national or ethnic identity, political fealty, or religious confession,
the specified operates by the fundamental mechanics of demarcation,
irrespective of the origin of the logic of inscription. Thus, any name or
form of identity can be used to create an essence, against which a type
of violence is committable. Recognized classifications, in Hallwards
words, are terms that work as vessels of creation for the possibility of an
index that facilitates the creation of an essence. And it is the essence that
asserts the possibility for violence, as the demarcation of the individual
(subject, object, or culture) can serve as the condition of possibility for
the commission of violence. Or, minimally, the classification of an identity
becomes the point of departure for a type of political and ethical practice
designated by the negative value imputed on the essential identity.
The specified logics of individuation are not by necessity addressed
toward a radical or progressive end. If we are to take the progressive as
being implied with a universalist possibility that operates for all subjects
regardless of their unique situation, then only the specific qualifies as the
possibility for a radical politics. The specific is defined by virtue of its indif-
ference to any specified notion of soil, people, nation, or space. A logic of
the specific demands a type of universality underwritten by a complete lack
of overt or restrictive definition. In this way, the specific operates as a type
of radical, transcendentonly by virtue of its universality for all subjects
democratic possibility.1
1
Hallward argues against this point, saying instead that to accept a specific configuration
is to drop the notion of an intrinsic orientation or automatic prescriptionsay, an inherently
ethical responsibility for others (333). Instead, he argues that the specific must remain as
part of the realm of decision, as the point of departure for individuation and community
signification:
All we can say is that only a specific configuration provides for decision as such, as
opposed to specified automation on the one hand and singular inherence on the
other. The question of how any given relation is to be valued will always remain a
matter of active valuing, with all the properly subjective responsibility that it implies.
I suggest that Hallward here falls into an aporia, as the active valuing of the specific
requires a form of valuation that incorporates the radical possibility of indifference to the
contingencies of the subject and his community. Valuation must be a decision against a type
of difference that reduces communitarian possibility. Although as Hallward suggests, any
specific process is value-neutral, I argue that only the possibility of a radically pluralistic and
102 C.M. AMADOR
There is a large critical and historical bibliography of the economic,

political, and social motivations that inspired the turn toward authoritar-
ian and genocidal violence, symptomatic of the Proceso de Reorganizacin
Nacional regime.2 And while there are certainly recognizable motiva-
tions for this brutal shiftthe threat of insurgency, the mistaken but sen-
sible belief that a rigid and strong social order would return stability to
Argentina; serious economic uncertaintythese threats were formed ini-
tially by a particular logic of individuation, a formation of subjectivity and
arrangement of the socially possible that justified the treatment of other
subjects in brutal and overwhelmingly violent ways.
Here, I argue that what begins as a specified logic of individuation
directed toward the threat of insurgency is transformed through practice
into a specified modality of ethical and political deciding that underwrites
the crimes of the Argentine junta. Of course, there is a tension betweenthe
specified, which is more recognizable as a logic of individuation and
the singular as a form of inscription for the subject and the community
predicated upon the autoimmanence of the singular term. Pointedly, the
singular supposes the ability to self-generate a point of identity that pre-
sumes no otherness and actively represses the other through blindness or
denial. While, the specified figure is individuated against another identity,
positing an interior relationship to that alterity, it is crucial to recognize
that part of the specified is the closure of the term it opposes. Situating
itself around a name, it presumes to identify the other through a closure
of the others ability to self-identify. As such, it is possible to argue that
in dictatorship-era Argentina, there was an explicit tension between the
singularizing discourse of the regime and its specified antagonists.
This tension is plain in the description of the project that General Jorge
Videla, military president of the regime, disseminated in his public pro-
nouncements. In his first presidential address Videla says:
Pero debe quedar claro que los hechos acaecidos el 24 de marzo, no mate-
rializan solamente la cada de un gobierno. Significan, por el contrario,
subjectively neutral configuration can satisfy the specificin other words, a radical democ-
racy that unites all subjects in the decision-making process of their specific possibilities.
2
The literature on the development and definition of the Proceso de Reorganizacin Nacional
is extensive and continues growing nearly 30 years after the fall of the dictatorship. Two of the
most widely cited and discussed works are Hugo Quirogas El tiempo del proceso: Conflictos
y coincidencias entre polticos y militares, 19761983 (2004), and Guillermo ODonnells Las
Fuerzas armadas y el estado autoritario del Cono Sur de Amrica Latina (1985).
elcierre definitive de un ciclo histrico y la apertura de uno nuevo, cuya carac-

terstica estar dada por la tarea de reorganizar la Nacin.3
But it should remain clear that the actions that fell on the 24th of March
do not realize exclusively the fall of a government. On the contrary, they
mean the definitive closure of one historical cycle and the opening of another.
The definitive closure of one historical cycle and the opening of another,
Videla proclaims, reveals how the singularity of the regime is based on
the closure and repression of its antecedent: the numerous and frustrated
attempts at democracy and the regular disruption by military dictatorships.
Videlas pronouncement illustrates the steps at differentiation from the
past cycle of brief democratic regimes and military coups that Argentina
experienced since 1930. Videlas statement declares the collapse of his-
torical time and the instauration of a new era of historical possibility that
empowers the regime with the autoimmanence of the singular.
Yet this closure is not the self-contained singularity that emerges from
within immanence, but rather emerges by dint of the destruction of a previ-
ous era. Forcibly, Videlas words bring to bear the extraordinary enmity of the
regime for the previous regimeswhether military or democraticand the
left-wing insurgency and the everyday supporters of alternatives to military
dictatorship and moribund democracy. The regime expressed a tension against
singularization sustained by its attention to the problem of Argentinas radical
groups, expressing itself as an aporia within its very makeup:
Las proposiciones y definiciones de los militares golpistas del 76 permiten

hoy a la distancia no slo mostrar la incompletud de sus enuciados sino
tambin sealar las intenciones confusas y contradictorias de sus enunciad-
ores. Ellos estn unidos sin fisuras por el solo objetivo de la lucha contra la
subversin. (Quiroga 83)
The propositions and definitions of the military coup of 76 allows from
the the distance of today to not only demonstrate the incompleteness of
its decrees but also to signal the confused and contradictory intentions of
those who decree. They are united without divisions by the sole objective
ofthe battle against subversion.
The singular formations represent the trajectory of the dictatorships plans,

and as such show how political and ethical practices are formed from the
3
La Prensa June 31, 1976, n.p.
104 C.M. AMADOR
ways in which we frame ourselves and our communities to ourselves as

subjects. The consequence of this framing is the creation or destruction of
a moral order of practice. The subsequent readings analyze how the order
of representation is determined by the singular, specific, or the specified,
and how this unleashed a way of seeing that became a way of killing and
incarcerating, and a way of remembering.
In Argentina, the uses of torture and arrest for political purposes was
known and supported by most regimes from the time of Juan Peron,4 but the
Proceso junta was singularly more aggressive, sanguine, and ultimately more
systematic about the use of violence to extract information, enact revenge,
and propagate fear among the citizenry. Prior to the regime, victims of state
arrest and torture were quite small in number, but the Dirty War regime
practiced a type of brutality that produced tens of thousands of victims.5
From the inception of the coup, members of the military were well dedicated
to the brutal destruction of anyone associated with political subversion.
As historian Paul H.Lewis documents,6 military officers approached the
possibility of mass murder with alacrity and malice of forethought. He writes:
As the military took power, General Luciano Benjamn Menndez warned,
We are going to have to kill 50,000 people: 25,000 subversives, 20,000
sympathizers, and we will make 5,000 mistakes (Lewis 147). The numbers
cited by the general illustrate not only the regimes pugnacious and sanguine
attitude toward subversion, but the clarity of the extent of their project. The
juntas repression was part of its design, as it saw the destruction of an exag-
gerated subversion as part of a social infection it was divinely mandated to
eradicate. Beyond Menndezs numeration of future victims was the chilling
pronouncement made by General Rafael Videlawho would become the
president of Argentina after the coupcited in Marguerite Feitlowitzs study
of the period: As many people as necessary must die in Argentina sothat the
country will again be secure (Feitlowitz 7). Videlas words would become
effective truth after the triumph of the coup.
4
Jos Luis Romero, Breve historia de la Argentina (1998).
5
There is still notable discrepancy around the numbers of disappeared victims. The
CONADEP report numbered approximately 9000 dead, while as recently as in 2009, former
Argentine president and current Secretary of Human Rights has supported the current num-
ber of 30,000 murdered (La Nacin, August 4, 2009 Online edition) as a credible figure.
Nonetheless, the question of counting the victims of the dictatorship is still part of a fractious
political and historical debate.
6
Paul H.Lewis, Guerrillas and Generals: The Dirty War in Argentina (2002).
Another chilling thought is how close the regime came to the overall
mark set by Menndez. Lewis again, speaking of Menndez:
According to some investigators, his prediction proved to be very accu-

rate. After civilian rule was restored in 1983, a National Commission on
Disappeared Persons (CONADEP) prepared a report that charged the
former regime leaders with the permanent disappearance of an estimated
8,961 people, but the report added that in the absence of records or other
documentation it was impossible to give a definite figure and the actual
might be much higher. Thus estimates have ranged widely, from the rather
conservative 6,000 by the Organization of American States Human Rights
Commission to Amnesty Internationals 20,000. (Lewis 147)
Other accounts number approximately 30,000 as dead and permanently

disappeared.7 The truth of the total number of disappeared and mur-
dered may never be fully known. Yet there is the repeated and necessary
call to account for the eras dead. For the families of the permanently
disappeared, the continual demand is the return and identification of
their remains or final resting placessome indication of closure that
would allow those who survived them to exercise their right to mourn
their dead. As the years since the fall of the dictatorship pass, this call
becomes even more pronounced, as those responsible for the violence
age and die, leaving a devastating silence as a wound still far from healed.
The reasons for the reckoning of accounts will never put an end to dis-
cussion or study of the era, as the Nunca ms! Declaration that the
CONADEP (National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons)
took for its report should not be read as a sigh of relief for the end of
the dictatorship, but an imperative statement exhorting vigilance and
attention from all those unwilling to accept any further violence of this
type: an imperative with its basis in the possibility of a specific conception
of human rights.
CONADEPs report argues for the necessity of a Nunca Ms! that
goes beyond asserting a stop to torture and violence in Argentina. The
program of the CONADEP exhorts the Argentine government to prohibit
the commission of similar violence in all situations, irrespective of politi-
7
The seminal document on the victimization of the era is certainly that of the National
Commission on the Disappearance of Persons: Nunca Ms: informe de la Comisin Nacional
Sobre la Desaparicin de Personas (1984).
106 C.M. AMADOR
cal affiliation, and under the consideration of a specific, universal logic of

the inviolability of human rights. At the end of the CONADEP report,
a series of recommendations appear that illustrates the commitment of
the CONADEP to framing the Argentine question as a concern of global
human rights:
1. Declarar crimen de lesa humanidad la desaparicin forzada de personas.

2. Apoyar el reconocimiento y la adhesin a las organizaciones nacionales e
internacionales de Derechos Humanos.
3. Establecer la enseanza obligatoria de la defensa y difusin de los
Derechos Humanos en los organimos docentes del Estado, sean ellos
civiles, militares o de seguridad.
4. Fortalecimiento y adecuacin plena de los medios con que debera contar
la Justicia Civil para la investigacin de oficio en relacin a la violacin de
Derechos Humanos.
5. Derogar toda la legislacin represiva que se encuentre vigente.
(CONADEP 478)
1. Declare forced abduction a crime against humanity.

2. Support the recognition of and adhesion to national and international
human rights organizations.
3. Make the teaching of the defense and diffusion of human rights obliga-
tory in state educational establishments, whether they be civilian, mili-
tary or police.
4. Strengthen and provide ample support for the measures which the courts
need to investigate human rights violations.
5. Repeal any repressive legislation still in force.
I suggest that it was the context of the specified dictatorship that

helped motivate the production of such a specific response from the
CONADEP committee. Reeling from the consequences and the crimes
of the dictatorship era, the CONADEP rejected the idea that what
occurred was merely a question of national trauma or the excess of
nationalism. Instead, they circumvented falling into another trap of
the specified and situated the question of retributive justice within the
field of universal human rights. This goes beyond the possibility of
retributive justice, as merely a question of national reconciliation and
retribution. Elegantly, it argues for the capacity to weave a reading of
specific, universal, and indifferent human rights, within the immanence
of the national frame.
MEDIO SIGLO DE PROCLAMAS MILITARES:

THEERA BEGINS
Defining the Proceso de reorganizacin nacional as a problem of individ-
uation helps situate the order of violence as the creation of a program
that attempted to reconfigure the whole of society by means of a specified
engagement defined by the directed conflict against the forces of puta-
tive subversion and national disintegration. In his anthology of military
pronouncements, Medio siglo de proclamas militares, journalist Verbitsky
presents the very first pronouncements of the Proceso group and their
intensely directed ideology, from the first targeting subversives and taking
sides against a host of social ills.
The following quotations, which bear presentation in their long form,
detail the unambiguous stance the dictatorship took against all of its puta-
tive enemies:
La Junta Militar fija como propsito y objetivos bsicos del Proceso de

Reorganizacin Nacional en desarrollo, los que se enuncian a continuacin:
Propsitos
Restituir los valores esenciales que sirven de fundamento a la conduc-
cin integral del Estado, enfatizando el sentido de moralidad, ido-
neidad, y eficiencia, imprescindibles para reconstituir el contenido y
la imagen de la Nacin, erradicar la subversion y promover el desar-
rollo econmico de la vida nacional basado en el equilibrio y partici-
pacin responsible de los distintos sectores a fin de asegurar la posterior
instauracin de una democracia, republicana, representativa y federal,
adecuada a la realidad y exigencias de solucin y progreso del pueblo
argentino. (Verbitsky 146)
Objetivos bsicos
1) Concrecin de una soberana poltica basada en el accionar de institu-

ciones constitucionales revitalizadas que ubiquen permanentemente el
inters nacional por encima de cualquier sectarismo, tendencia or
personalismo.
2) Vigencias de los valores de la moral Cristiana, de la tradicin nacional,
yde la dignidad del ser argentino.
3) Vigencia plena del orden jurdico y social. (Verbitsky 146)
108 C.M. AMADOR
The military junta fixes as its purpose and basic objectives of the National
Reorganization Process in development, those set forth below:
Purpose
Restore the essential values that are the basis for the comprehensive man-
agement of the State, emphasizing the sense of morality, competence, and
efficiency necessary to reconstitute the content and image of the nation,
eradicating subversion and promoting economic development of national
life based on balance and responsible participation of the different sectors
to ensure the subsequent establishment of a democratic, republican, rep-
resentative and federal, adapted to the reality and demands for solutions
and progress of the Argentine people.
Basic objectives
1) Specification of political sovereignty based on revitalized constitutional

institutions that permanently locate the national interest above any sec-
tarianism, bias or favoritism.
2) The enforcement of the values of Christian morality, national tradition
and the dignity of the Argentine.
3) The full promotion of the legal and social order. (Verbitsky 146)
Beginning with the restitution of the essential values that serve as the foun-
dation of the integral operation of the state, the junta proposed a set of
ideals that presume a type of argument against the establishment of a state
where democracy occurs as part of the will of the people. Instead of the
establishment of a democracy based on the will of a plurality of citizens,
the emphasis lies on the construction of a state based on a corporativism
that guarantees that the values of democracy will integrate the precepts and
prescriptions of the military dictatorship. Part of the motivation behind this
change was the fear of the possibility of insurgency threatening the stability
of the national sphere. In lieu of imagining a plurality of democratic possibil-
ity, a conservative body politics imagines a putatively ideal, moral, and
efficient polity that emerges as the juntas conceptual map for Argentina.
As a form of right-wing, corporativist, political imagination, the junta
describes antecedent political and national expressions in a broad rhetorical
flourish and premises that stagger between the poles of the singular and the
specifiedperhaps the only possibilities for a junta. Nonetheless, the eva-
sive rhetoric indicates how intensely specified the regimes opponents were.
The terms personalismo, sectarismo, and tendencia read as a metonymic
highlighting strictly corresponding to the terms Peronismo, Montoneros,

and left-wing insurgency.
Unable to create a singularized regime, the Proceso junta describes its
enemies in abstract nouns that signal its direct confrontation with its ene-
mies. This direct engagement with their adversaries reflects the specified
nature of the regime. Pointedly, it took as its point of individuation the
antagonist of subversion, and in so doing, the regime undermines the
immanence provided by a singular contentthat defines the subject and
others as a creation of its own internal logic and without any external
parameters or criteria for its formation. Instead, the Proceso articulates a
relationality based on radical opposition to insurgency based on the [v]
igencias de los valores de la moral Cristiana, de la tradicin nacional, y
de la dignidad del ser argentino [the validities of the values of Christian
morality, of the national tradition, and the dignity of being Argentine]
(Verbitsky 146). The vigencias here indicate the bringing into force of
values that will form the nation as a state that opposes, relating only in
opposition to the possibility of plurality of freedom of confession, a ques-
tioning of the national historical tradition, and the dignity of an Argentine
state of being for any and all opponents. As such, the Proceso junta config-
ured itself around the idea of an antagonism that goes beyond Schmitts
idea of the basis of the political being the distinction between enemy and
friend. Instead, what occurred was an active configuration of the others
identity by virtue of the public pronouncements of the regimes platform.
Without restraint, the Proceso junta made a specified content the core of
its project of violence. It bears theorizing that political violence as a prac-
tice requires a distinction between those subjectivities marked or vacated
by the internal logic of the subjectivization process itself. Subversion for
the regime can be seen not only as an other that requires a specific inter-
vention, but as the very core of the identity that defines the regime. This
is an essentialism that structures the relationality of the insurgency and the
dictatorship in a functionally unbreakable sense. This action of specifying
provides the substrate necessary to individuate the regime and make itself
recognizable to itself as a subject capable of self-definition and action. In
terms of the logic of individuation, it is an uncomplicated move to argue
that part of specifying against something is the possibility of a more basic
opposition to the specified opponents alterity. A politically motivated oth-
erness then becomes the very structure that requires the act of opposition.
For the regime, all aspects of the nation were to be integrated against an
other that formed the fundamental source of their self-definition.
110 C.M. AMADOR
The following long quotation illustrates the centrality of the specified

in the rhetorical expression of the regimes more detailed explanation of
its reasons for assuming control of the country:
Esta decisin persigue el propsito de terminar con el desgobierno, la cor-

rupcin y el flagelo subversivo Es una decisin por la Patria y no supone,
por lo tanto, discriminaciones contra ninguna militancia cvica ni sector
social alguno, rechaza por consiguiente, la accin disociadora de todos los
extremismos y el efecto corruptor de cualquier demagogia.
Las Fuerzas Armadas desarrollarn durante la etapa que hoy se inicia, una
accin regida por pautas perfectamente determinadas. Por medio del orden,
del trabajo, de la observancia plena de los principios ticos y morales, de la
justicia, de la realizacin integral del hombre, del respeto a sus derechos y
dignidad, as la Repblica llegar a la unidad de los argentinos y a la total
recuperacin del ser nacional, metas irrenunciables para cuya obtencin se
convoca en un esfuerzo comn a las hombres y mujeres, sin exclusines, que
habitan este suelo.
Tras esas aspiraciones compartidas, todos los sectores representativos del
pas deben sentirse claramente identificados y por ende comprometidos en la
empresa comn que conduzca a la grandeza de la Patria. (148)
This decision pursues the goal of ending misrule, corruption and subversive
scourge Its a decision for the country and does not, therefore, sup-
pose discrimination against any form of civic activism or social sector, rejects
therefore the disruptive action of all forms of extremism and the corrupting
effect of any demagoguery.
The military will develop during the stage that begins today, an action
governed by certain perfectly determined guidelines. Through the order,
the work, the full observance of ethical and moral principles of justice,
the full realization of man, and respect for their rights and dignitythe
Republic will reach the Argentine unity and full recovery of the national
beingindispensable goals whose attainment is convened in a common
effort among the men and women, without exception, who inhabit this
land.
United by these shared aspirations, all representative sectors of the coun-
try should feel clearly identified and therefore engaged in the joint venture
that will lead to the greatness of the country.
Here, the military junta instrumentalizes and reifies the specified ethical
relation through the rhetoric of opposition that nonetheless attempts
to singularize the nation into a complacent and unified body against
subversion here clearly demarcated. As the communiqu cites, all the

countrys representative sectors should feel clearly identified, illustrating
the direct situating of subversion as a complete antipode to the regimes
plans. This rhetorical move creates the persuasive structure necessary for
the political violence, and underscores the extraordinary measures of spec-
ification supporting their acts of political violence.
Echoes of Schmitts concept of the political (1932) again ring here, as
the specified relationship between the junta and insurgency seems to match
the friend/enemy distinction that creates the validity of the political for
Schmitt. For Schmitt:
The political is the most intense and extreme antagonism, and every con-
crete antagonism becomes that much more political the closer it approaches
the most extreme point, that of the friend/enemy grouping. In its entirety
the state as an organized political entity decides for itself the friend-enemy
distinction the substance of the political is contained in the context of a
concrete antagonism expressed in everyday language. (Schmitt 2930)
The concept of the political that Schmitt proffers is based on the argument
that the truest expression of the political is the capacity of the political
entity to determine its enemy and justify the capacity to engage in war or
destroy it. Politics is not necessarily the making of war, but the capacity
for a political entity to justify the possibility of war as the possibility that
emerges from its determination of the friend-enemy divide. Rather than
instantiate the possibility of war, the friend-enemy distinction that Schmitt
posits is a type of possibility that guarantees the immanence of the politi-
cal. In other words, the firmament of the political is the capacity to iden-
tify and articulate an enemy that legitimizes the potential for war. Politics
is built out of this primordial antagonism because it is one that identifies
and motivates the possibility of approval or negation of the enemy. As
Schmitt argues: [A] political entity possesses, even if only negatively,
the capacity of promoting that decisive step, when it is in the position of
forbidding its members to participate in wars, i.e. of decisively denying the
enemy quality of a certain adversary (37).
Schmitts writing suggests that the political entity affixes its power to
the capacity to maintain the enemys status as an enemy, while denying it
the particularity as an antagonist. War is not the necessary consequence of
Schmitts politics, but it is the power over negation of some quality of the
112 C.M. AMADOR
other that allows the entity to become political: antagonism for Schmitt
fundamentally comes with the call to the possibility of power over the
enemy. The work of the junta in defining itself against an enemy reflects
this concept of the political, inasmuch as it was defined in no small part
through its antagonism to its political enemies. However, for Schmitt, this
type of enmity is a logical mode and not a necessary call to violence.
Instead, Schmitts argument is that part of the imperative of the politi-
cal is a call to discern the appropriate modality of enmity. The enemy is
not simply a potential member in a violent circuit, but rather an exteriority
that allows the political entity a positive affirmation of identity through
the logical negation of a particular aspect of the other party. As Schmitt
puts it, War is neither the aim nor the purpose nor the very content
of politics (34). War is the most extreme possibility, disclosing the
possibility which underlies every political idea, namely the distinction of
friend and enemy (35). And as such, the Schmittian political is a logical
conclusion derived from a historical reading of the political, and is not a
prescriptive mode of practicing politics.
The error of the friend-enemy distinction, in the case of the Proceso de
reorganizacn nacional, is that it founded itself upon a specified content of
the enemy, one rife with antagonisms and meaning that putatively justified
the violent interventions of the Dirty War. While, for Schmitt, this is cer-
tainly within the possibility of the political, it is fundamentally unnecessary
and suggests a lack of discernment over the basic criteria of political life.
Schmitt claims that:
Every religious, moral, economic, ethical, or other antithesis transforms into

a political one if it is sufficiently strong to group human beings effectively
according to friend and enemy. The political does not reside in the battle
itself, which possesses its own technical, psychological, and military laws, but
in the mode of behavior which is determined by this possibility, by clearly
evaluating the concrete situation and thereby being able to distinguish cor-
rectly the real friend and the real enemy. (37)
Again, then, we return to the notion of the relationality of the specified.

The Dirty War was a failure of proper political identification, an imposi-
tion of an essential identity to nearly the whole of Argentine society with
its origin in the psychological laws of hatred and violence that lay at the
heart of the military junta. The specified, in this case, is the essentialism
that transgresses the judgment of the real friend and real enemy that
Schmitt proposes.
Instead, the fundamental antagonism of the regime, the search for a

national interest that would go beyond sectarianism, and other forms
of political definition operated to justify the mass incarcerations, tortures,
and murders. By going beyond the fundamental antagonism of friend-
enemy through the specifying essentialism of defining a vast number
of Argentineansmost of them innocent of actual acts of sedition or
insurgencythe regime reconfigured nearly the whole of society as speci-
fied foes. This action was ultimately an attempt to reform or consolidate the
state along a logical trajectory that admitted for almost exclusively enemies.
Consolidation of the state is a negation of the possibility of a specific
nationalism, as Hallward calls it:
the specific conception of the nation that this book defends, in passing, is
one that grounds the validity of its self-determination purely in terms of the
(oppressive, exploitative) relations it proposes to change. Very briefly, this
conception presumes: that any a priori condemnation of political nation-
alism is unjustifiable; that what determines the validity of any particular
nationalist engagement is the nature of the relation involved (the national-
ism that encourages imperialist aggression has nothing in common with the
nationalism that resists it); that the only defensible criteria for inclusion in
the nation must be indifferent to all specified differences. (Hallward 129)
The aforementioned long quote helps describe and define the illegitimacy
of the Proceso de Reorganizacin Nacional project, as the nationalism
they avouch is from its inception a specified nationalism or, one could say,
counternationalism (one against the putative subversives) that assumes the
opposition, the instauration of difference that brings the ethical option of
violence directly to the forefront of the juntas imagination. [E]rradicar
la subversion, as a proposition, reveals the inherent possibility of violence
and destruction when a nationalism is specified in such a way that it a
priori asserts itself against an other. What this says about the specified logic
of individuation is that it is always threatened by the other, and leads to
the imagining of the other as a broadly conceived enemy (the subversive)
or as an other that has no identity outside of the specified moment.
Following Hallwards quote, the nature of [the Procesos] relation
was one that was illogical and indefensible, as it requires the specified
difference of the insurgency to found its national project. Critically,
Hallwards quote illustrates that underneath the logic of individuation is
a sense of being of the difference specified. Nationalisms founded upon
the presumption of a specified difference that requires destruction makes
114 C.M. AMADOR
the very project of a nation difficult to sustain as there is a fundamental

opposition between nationalisms. Certainly, there may be a shared space
between nationalisms, as fundamental names or national concepts may
be invoked regularly on both sides, as was the case between the radical
Argentine guerrillas and the military dictatorship. Both sides claimed
access to the national identity of Argentina, and both sides believed in the
redemptive possibilities of their respective political project.
Clearly, the capacity of a specified mode of individuation to encourage
and create political action cannot be underappreciated. Although torture
and extrajudicial detentions had been a part of the Argentine political
landscape since the triumph of the first military coup, no project of tor-
ture and detention was as widespread and bloody as that of the Proceso
government. Specifiying the enemy, united the sentiments and the activi-
ties of thousands of men willing to commit, with little questioning or self-
reflection, crimes against humanity. Such is the ethical and political force
of specifying the enemy that when logic breaks down, it can create violent
anxiety and fury, leading to public denunciation of the architects of the
Dirty War. Such was the case with Adolfo Scilingo, a former captain of the
Argentine Navy, responsible for over 30 murders committed by throwing
his victims from a plane in the Rio de la Plata. His confession of his crimes
during the early 1990s is a unique moment for understanding the power
that a specified logic of distinction has over a persons emotional life.
EL VUELO ANDTHESCILINGO EFFECT

Verbitskys text, El vuelo (1995), is a harrowing document that encom-
passes a variety of genreshistory, chronology, polemic, and interview
centering on the confession of Argentine naval captain Scilingo, who
personally attests to weekly flights, vuelos, or in the pseudoeuphemistic
speech of the Proceso de reorganizacin nacional junta, traslados (transfers)
that involved the drugging of putative subversives and their ejection from
a plane into the Argentine Ro de la plata. His base of operations was the
most famous of Argentinas clandestine camps, la ESMA, or the Naval
Petty Officers Mechanics School. Here, more than 5000 people were tor-
tured and murdered, and only 150 survived the horrors.8
8
For a representation of this situation, see http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/
3673470/Argentinas-dirty-war-the-museum-of-horrors.html (accessed March 17, 2012).
The text opens with a chance meeting of the author with Scilingo in
a Buenos Aires subway station, who at first, mistakes him for one of the
survivors:
Yo estuve en la ESMA.Quiero hablar con usteddijo al abordarme en

el subterrneo.
Bajo, de nariz grande y bigotes, de unos 45 aos. Con pantaln azul,
camisa a rayas de manga corta y un portafolios barato, se pareca a tantos
otros sobrevivientes del ms famoso campo clandestino de concentracin de
la dictadura militar [] Lo tom por uno de ellos y le respond con una frase
comprensiva por sus sufrimientos.
No. Usted me entendi mal. Yo soy compaero de Rolnaclar. Es
decir, no era vctima sino victimario. (Verbitsky 15)
I was in the ESMA.I would like to speak to you, he said as I boarded the
subway.
Short, with a big nose and moustache, around 45 years old. Wearing a
blue pants and a short-sleeved striped short, and carrying a cheap briefcase,
he looked like so many other survivors of the most famous clandestine con-
centration camp of the military dictatorship I took him for one of them
and responded with a phrase sympathizing for his sufferings.
No. You misunderstood me. I was a comrade of Roln, he clarified.
Rather, he was not a victim but a victimizer.
So begins the harrowing encounter between Verbitsky, a journalist who

was himself a Montonero who participated in violent struggles, and
Scilingo, the former naval officer who put so many of his comrades to
death during the Dirty War. Once aware of Scilingos status, Verbitsky
gave Scilingo the opportunity to discuss his participation in the violence,
and confess a series of crimes that causes Scilingo to remark: Usted va a
ver que hicimos cosas peores que los nazis (18) [You are going to see that
we did worse things than the Nazis].
Scilingos statement followed a series of earlier statements by victim-
izers, who in Verbitskys words, se sintieron abandonados por la Armada,
decidieron hablar y desataron una reaccin en cadena. Hasta entonces, los
militares haban negado los hechos y descalificado a los testigos, a quienes
acusaban de continuar por otros medios su lucha poltica contra las Fuerzas
Armadas (17). [They felt abandoned by the Navy, and decided to talk,
setting off a chain reaction. Until then, the military men had denied their
actions and disqualified their witnesses, whom they accused of continuing
by other means their political struggle against the Armed Forces.]
116 C.M. AMADOR
After the democratic transition in 1983, the then president Ral

Alfonsn began a series of criminal indictments against the leaders of the
military junta and several of the most notorious military that followed
orders of torture and execution.
Certainly, the criminal trials were immensely irritating to Scilingo and
his comrades, many of whom believed themselves to have been serving as
soldiers in a battle that took on theological ramifications from its incep-
tion. Scilingo fancied himself a Christian warrior of mercy, whose partici-
pation was spiritually beneficial for the nation, and justified by the highest
levels of the Catholic Church.9 He received absolution for his crimes dur-
ing the sacrament of reconciliation. It was on this occasion that the mili-
tary chaplain who absolved him named the flights a Christian form of
death (Verbitsky 27).
Early on, the highest members of the junta argued that their soldiers
had exceeded or misunderstood their orders, creating the illusion that the
Dirty War had been a case of excessive ardor in the fight against subver-
sion. The leaders of the junta openly denied the systematic design and
explicit approval of executions, torture, and illegal arrest. The series of
civil, criminal trials indicting the perpetrators of violence further delegiti-
mized Scilingos actions, as the nation that he murdered for renounced
the violence through acts of retributive justice.
The specific forms of assassination were seemingly justified by the mili-
tary dictatorshipthe putative existence of an insurgency dedicated to the
destruction of the regime, the imposition and creation of a culture of fear
designed to pacify a population into tacit acceptance of the juntas eco-
nomic and cultural policies, and the need to establish a culture of strength
that would negate any possibility of criticism.10 The Dirty War generals
and admirals who were certainly the intellectual authors of this vicious
brutality, imagined an Argentina ruled by the frissons of terror brought
on by the ubiquitous Ford Falcons, the vehicles most regularly used by the
9
His own military chaplain, the well-known Father Alberto ngel Zanchetta, director of
the Military Bishopric of Argentina absolved Scilingos sins during a confession and labeled
the death flights una forma cristiana de la muerte (Verbitsky 22).
10
Paul Lewis text Guerrillas and Generals: The Dirty War in Argentina (2002) is one of
the most detailed histories specifically treating the relationship between insurgency and the
attitudes of the military dictatorship. Lewis central thesis is that the Dirty Wars violence was
a legacy of the fundamental antagonism against civil society, ubiquitous since the earliest
manifestation of democracy in the 1920s.
police and military agents to chupar (suck) targets destined for incarcera-
tion and torture, and often, extrajudicial murder.
To accomplish these tasks, they not only manipulated and distorted
the legal landscape of Argentina, but they created a whole vocabulary of
euphemisms and justificatory terms that described their moral landscape.
Prisoners on the way to be murdered were said to be given their ticket
for transfer. Those on the corridors leading from their cells to the oper-
ating theaters of torture were said to walk the Avenue of Happiness.
A vast vocabulary of the dark, parasitic humor of the powerful made up
the shibboleth of the victimizer. The torturers language was, as Feitlowitz
writes, a lexicon of terror rife with sarcastic, brutal comedy for the tor-
turers to enjoy. Theirs was an ideology of brutality that, despite the real
presence of insurgency and political violence, was nonetheless marked for
its excesses and boundless promiscuity in selecting targets for kidnapping
and torture.
As narrated by Feitlowitz in her seminal book on the era, A Lexicon of
Terror: Argentina and the legacies of torture, this encounter was strange,
but fortuitous, as it launched a whole series of moments of truth-telling
and renewed discussion on the era. As Feitlowitz points out: In Scilingos
wake, a half-dozen other ex-military men directly involved in kidnapping,
torture, and murder in the secret camps also came forward and were
featured, day after day, on radio and television, in newspapers and maga-
zines (Feitlowitz 227).
This era, brought into being by Scilingos testimony, has been named
by some as the Scilingo moment, and the flood of confessions and
statements by those complicit with the eras secret violence dubbed the
Scilingo effect. Whether defined as a period or by the spate of confes-
sional moments, the Scilingo effect was a central historical moment, creat-
ing an opening for deeper understanding of the attitude of the military
during this barbaric period.
Scilingos confession was conducted over the course of several inter-
views with Verbitzsky and documented in great detail the manner in which
the young lieutenant personally threw 30 political prisoners from the cabin
of a naval airplane.
His confession set into motion an interrogation of the past that altered
the way in which members of the active and retired military who had
served during the era conceived of their personal and collective histories
118 C.M. AMADOR
and memories of the war. During the 1990s, when Scilingo began to talk
about his experiences, Argentina was in the process of legal reconciling
with their past through a series where to commanders of the junta were
being tried for their crimes against the people.11 These trials were eventu-
ally stopped and their convictions repealed due to two laws passed by the
Alfonsn governments: the Debida Obediencia law (due obedience) and
the law known as Punto Final (final stop).
The Ley de Punto Final, passed in 1986, was intended to arrest the
process of trials against military officers who had participated in the Dirty
War, after the junta leaders themselves had been tried and convicted in a
large-scale trial popularly known as the trial of the Juntas. Punto Final
put a stop to indictments against lower-level officers, ceasing the wave of
acts of retributive justice that the Alfonsn government had promised as
part of its platform. Alfonsn himself was initially opposed to the passing
of this law, but stiff pressure from the Armed Forces and the possibility of
another coup forced his hand.
Less than a year later, the Ley de Debida Obediencia was passed,
granting a further final amnesty to those military personnel who partici-
pated in crimes perpetrated during the dictatorship. The law stipulated
that military officers could not be tried for these actions, as they were
assumed to have been acting in due obedience of orders given by
higher ranking officers. These two laws were widely decried by Human
Rights organizations and Argentine citizens: nonetheless, their passing
was implemented in the rhetoric of national reconciliation by Alfonsn
himself.12 A few years later, then President Carlos Sal Menem would
declare a general amnesty for all the top leaders of the military junta,
arguing that this action would bring about much needed healing and
further reconciliation.
In an extreme fashion, these laws arrested the progress of retributive
justice, creating a safe haven in the country for those military men that had
once tortured submission from the land. A secondary effect of the laws
was the creation of public space for those who had directly committed acts
11
Marguerite Feitlowitzs chapter The Scilingo Effect: The Past is a Predator, from her
book A Lexicon of Terror (2011), serves as the historical substrate for this chapter. There are
a wide number of sophisticated and powerful histories on this era, several of which are
included in the bibliography of this current project.
12
For a detailed account of Alfonsns capitulation to military pressure, please see Jonathan
Browns A Brief History of Argentina (2011).
of violence against so-called subversives to confess publicly their crimes

and critique the role of the military junta. More pointedly, it created a
culture of outcry where those associated with the eras villany could speak
with absolute legal impunity:
The accounts of Scilingo and the other enforcers, all immune from prosecu-
tion because of the Punto Final and Due Obedience laws, set off a dramatic
chain of reactions, throwing into relief not just the day-to-day methods of
the repression but also the wide spectrum of internal factors that enabled it
to function. (Feitlowitz 228)
The outcries of participants in the extrajudicial killings certainly ring hol-

low, but they nonetheless express an important point concerning the role
of everyday citizens and their complicity, active or passive, in the fight
against subversion.
Regardless, Scilingos confession to Verbitsky illustrates how the tacit
and explicit approval of the regimes crimes rested upon a specified political
program. And as such, given the regimes historical and political devel-
opment, we can begin to see how a specified logic of individuation can
turn into a brutal set of premises under the right series of circumstances.
Ironically, Scilingos confessions were in large part motivated by the
amnesties his superiors and fellow military officers received. Scilingo per-
ceived these actions as an admission of the essential illegality of the Dirty
War, and an undermining of the premises of national protection and salva-
tion he killed in order to maintain.
Thus, we can see that the breakdown of trust and faith in the Proceso,
was a failure of those who chose to maintain the specified essence he had
murdered to uphold. The judgments against Videla and his cohorts, and
the subsequent amnesties represented the acceptance of the fundamental
illegality of their deeds and the rupture of the force of justification found-
ing the Dirty War. Scilingo found this state of affairs fundamentally unten-
able, as it expresses a hypocrisy that destabilizes the ethical ground of the
specified that supported him during the commission of his deeds.
Scilingos anxiety is palpable, disturbing in its directness, yet an under-
standable consequence of the breakdown of rhetorical justification.
It is only after this collapse of meaning and signification that Scilingo
reconfigures his understanding of his deeds. The quote below situates
120 C.M. AMADOR
the beginning of his transformation from willing participant to anxious

doubter and denouncer. As he comments to Verbitsky:
Usted me est preguntando lo que hicimos. Y yo estaba totalmente con-

vencido. Cuando asume Alfonsn son juzgadas las juntas. Se dice que es
un problema poltico. Son condenados. Se insiste en que es un problema
poltico. Pero despus son indultados y se acepta sin ningn problema.
Entonces, qu pas con todo lo anterior? Si se acepta el indulto quiere decir
que se acepta la condena, todo lo anterior, el juicio. Quiere decir que todo es
veraz y nada fue juego poltico, quiere decir que se actu fuera de la ley. (37)
You are asking me what we did. And I was totally convinced. When
Alfonsn takes power the juntas are judged. It is called a political problem.
The juntas are condemned. They still insist it is a political problem. But after
all this, they receive amnesty and what happened with everything before? If
amnesty is accepted it means that they accept the condemnation; everything
before it; the judgment. It means that everything is true and nothing was a
political gameit means that they acted outside of the law.
His belief is that accepting the amnesty is a tacit acceptance of the illegiti-
macy of the Dirty War and the actions necessary to combat the insurgent
threat. The generals were tried by the civilan courts and found to be guilty
of crimes against humanity, and their later amnesty is a process of history
that forces Scilingo to reassess the strength of his convictions and his sense
of historical participation.
Scilingo had once demonstrated and believed utterly in the project,
stating plainly that todos estbamos convencidos de que estbamos en
una guerra distinta, para la que no estbamos preparados y que se emplea-
ban los elementos que se tenan al alcance (38). [we were all convinced
that we were in a different war: one that we were not prepared for and we
had to employ the tools we had at hand.]
The state of exception of Argentina during this period was framed as
a point of specified possibility, in Hallwards terms, for Scilingo and his
fellow military men, and its dismissal by the regime transformed them
in Scilingos words into delinquents, who became complicit in a crim-
inal enterprise transformed by the abandonment of a logical fidelity to
the specifieda fidelity that, despite the horrible crimes attached to the
identity it specifies, denotes the structure of individuation implicit for the
regime.
Furthermore, the hollowness of his denunciation notwithstanding, it
nonetheless demarcates the fundamental ethical relationship that emerges
from the logical process of individuation and its maintenance through

language.
Denial of the project of the specified has the capacity to change the very
conception of habit and subjective identity. As Scilingo states:
Si usted cumple rdenes y pasado el tiempo suficiente para que dejen de

ser secretas por razones operativas, se siguen ocultando o se miente directa-
mente, como lo hizo Videla diciendo que reconoca que algunos subversivos
se haban ido del pas, otros estaran muertos y no identificados y que habra
habido algn exceso, eso es mentir en forma alevosa. En funcin de eso digo
que nos transformaron en delincuentes. Porque todos los estbamos subor-
dinados dentro de la organizacin naval creamos que eran rdenes serias y
coherentes. Pero despus se oculta la verdad. Por qu se oculta? Se oculta
cuando se est haciendo algo que no corresponde. (41)
If you follow orders and, past the alloted time necessary to remain secret
for operational reasons, they keep being hidden or lied about directly, as
Videla did by saying that some subversives left the country; others were dead
or unidentified, and there might have been some excessesthis is lying in
a treacherous manner. In light of that I say they transformed us into delin-
quents. Because all of us that were subordinates within the naval organiza-
tion believed that they were serious and coherent orders. But later the truth
was hidden.Why was it hidden? It is hidden when something is being done
that does correspond to the truth.
Through Videla and companys denial of the validity of their actions,

Scilingo and his cohorts lose their status as dedicated followers of a politi-
cal legitimate mode into criminals who have lost their status by virtue of
their leaders false representation of their project. He becomes a delin-
quent precisely because the subjective mode that he believed in was evac-
uated of meaning through the denials of his highest commanders. His
orders were serious and coherent to him, and he followed them to the
letter of the brutal law imposed by the regime. His subjectivity collapsed,
Scilingo proceeded along an aimless path, descending the ranks of naval
officer, and eventually settling as the owner of a videoclub, far from the
military career he began.
Scilingos denunciation speaks directly to the idea that a logic of indi-
viduation is not merely an indexical process but one that is the point
of inception for an ethical project. Ethical attitudes and possibilities are
formed out of the subjective conditions that precede them. The individual
forms its subjective possibilities through the model of individuation that
122 C.M. AMADOR
allows for the production of an ethical imaginary. In short, the terrifying

but very real lesson we take from Scilingo is that he felt he was behaving
ethically, and it was only when the dictatorship denied its ethical project
that he understood how deeply evil the regime was. It was as if he only
saw the consequences of his actions when he could no longer take comfort
in his relation to the specified enemy he helped annihilate. The history of
violence he participated in was the history of an attempt to name a part
of the community as an enemy, and the creation of an everyday life and
language for the commission of crimes against humanity.
A HISTORY OFVIOLENCE
This commission of violence was more than an antisubversive sentiment
taken to a fever pitch. This horrific brutality was the product of a vast
culture of persecution that began, at least, in the latter half of the 1950s,
with episodes of torture and political violence committed against enemies
of Peron. With each successive military dictatorship (after Perns exile in
1956, only 3 of 12 governments were democratically elected), the use of
violence became ever more pronounced, as if percolating beneath the sur-
face, ready to emerge in the apotheosis that would be the Dirty War era.
This era was unique, as the dictatorship created a culture of complicity and
aggression that united nearly all of its soldiers, sailors, and air force service-
men in activities nearly exclusively geared toward the repression and death
of those deemed subversives, defined as enemies of the state, putatively
engaged in active clandestine violence and political activity against the
regime.
There were certainly acts of violence by members of the Montoneros
(a Peronist collection of workers, students, and other Argentine activ-
ists, who effectively ranked as the left-wing of Peronism, with the ERP
[Ejrcito Revolucionario del Pueblo])the military wing of the Argentinean
Trotskyist Party, the Partido Revolucionario de los Trabajadores, or the
PRT.These two groups were the most powerful and visible, violent anti-
government groups in the nation, each claiming a membership number-
ing in the many thousands. Both groups were sanguine about the use of
violence, kidnapping, robbery, and assassination to achieve their political
aims, and both had internationally famous acts of violence to their credit.
One of the Montoneros most reknowned acts of violence was the
assassination of the then deposed military dictator and former president,
Pedro Eugenio Aramburu, on May 29, 1970. The Montoneros abducted
him easily from his apartment in Buenos Aires, and he was assassinated
3 days later, after a secret trial conducted by the Montoneros. The pre-
text behind his abduction and extrajudicial execution was retribution for
the 1956 killing of 27 Montonero participants in a failed insurrection
against the Aramburu dictatorship that same year.13 This kidnapping was
notorious throughout the country, gripping the nation for a month, as
they awaited news of Aramburus fate. The assassination proved to the
Argentine populace that the insurgent movement was clever, resolute, and
capable of committing sophisticated acts of insurrection.
Although this may be seen as the acme of insurgent action in Argentina
during the time, the Montoneros were famous for bank robberies, assaults
upon the military and police, and were an organized, intelligent force
that many Argentineans openly and actively feared. Actual insurgency and
the possibility of the revolutionary Left triumphing over the traditional
forces of Argentine politics, many have argued, opened the way for the
Proceso dictatorship, who framed their intervention in a more oblique
fashion than previous dictatorshipsmost of which imagined out loud
the eventual transition to a democratic government, or actively instituted
puppet governments. On this last point, it is important to recognize that
many Montoneros/ERP members saw in the Proceso de Reorganizacin
Nacional the possibility of a regime that would motivate, through nega-
tive pressure, the populace toward a left-wing revolution similar to Cubas
1959 revolution.
Left-wing political violence, despite being a reality, was nonetheless
poorly situated to take over the sprawling nation for a variety of reasons.
Speaking of the Montoneros, their numbers were too small, their Peronist
base divided in a long-standing, and seemingly intractable internecine
battle of Left versus Right that undermined their wishes for mobilization.
Furthermore, while a significant portion of the population sympathized
and aided the Marxist ERP, they too suffered from an even greater crisis
of numbers, and there was no genuine mass base from which to launch
a Marxist uprising. Furthermore, Argentinas size, landscape, and infra-
structure made it prohibitively difficult to support an insurrection like the
Cuban one.
13
This moment in history is narrated in elegant and near exhaustive detail in Rodolfo
Walshs book on the Jos Len Surez killings, Operacin Masacre (2006 [1957]). Walsh, a
Montonero himself, was one of the most renowned victims of the Proceso junta, died defend-
ing himself against Navy soldiers attempting to extrajudicially arrest him.
124 C.M. AMADOR
In other words, so-called insurgency existed, but historical research has

shown that, even in the fraught time of the late 1970s, no real threat
to sovereignty or possibility of national revolution was on the horizon.14
The Montoneros-ERP coalition was sophisticated and sanguinary but not
likely to achieve the desperately needed liberation of the Argentine polis.
Indeed, as many scholars have suggested, the greatest threat to Argentine
stability at the time were the confused economic policies of the Proceso
junta, and the traditional rivalry between branches of the military.
This quest to defeat insurgency became the motivating force for the
violence that occurred, creating a culture of violence, repression, and jus-
tification, seemingly structured along the coordinates of a specified logic
of individuation against the insurgency. Scilingos testimony speaks to a
typology of the world where on the one hand, there are those who were
insurgents, whose specified rebellion rendered them legally subject to
destruction, and on the other hand, those whose work was to counter
this rebellion through the commission of horrific, but seemingly justifi-
able violence. The insurgents were subject to the legal injunctioncreated
through the specified logic of the regime in order to perpetuate the war
against putative insurgencythat rendered their lives null of any value, as
anything but bodies to be tormented and eventually murdered.
Part of the exemplary power of investigating this period through the
scope of the logics of individuation is that it denudes and denaturalizes the
underlying relationality that a group or an individual has with the other. It
would seem that one of the more immediate effects of a specified position,
is that alterity is read through the optic of the affiliation with the event
that marks the specified group. A subject external to this ethico-political
event is necessarily formed in an exteriority that is not open to member-
ship to anyone with a position distinct from the specified. Here, we can
see how the specified is always the production of a particular interest, or
the distinct manifestation of the self-description of a community against
those external to its naming. Here then, it is possible to articulate how
an evil situation (one of radical destruction of the human animal, to
use Badious term) is located precisely within the relationship between
14
There is an extensive bibliography of histories on the Dirty War period that help substan-
tiate the overall powerlessness of Argentinas subversives to effect radical regime change.
Some of the most interesting and detailed, concerning the strength of the insurgency are:
Mara de los ngeles Yannuzzis Los aos oscuros del proceso (1991), Marcelo Larraquys De
Pern a Montoneros: La violencia poltica en la historia Argentina (2010), and Patricia
M.Marshaks Gods Assassins: State Terrorism in Argentina in the 1970s (1999).
a specified position and its other. As Badiou argues: we are entitled to

say, in this case, that the link between politics and Evil emerges precisely
from the way both the collective (the thematics of communities) and the
being-with (the thematics of consensus, of shared norms) are taken into
consideration (66).
In this way, despite the nature of dictatorship, which is a rupture of
community through the force of a state of exception, in Agambens terms,
by means of politicized violence: it nonetheless requires a particular the-
matics of communities that is expressed in the Argentine case as the
relationship between the nation and those insurgents doomed to disap-
pearance and murder by the regime.
And it is precisely here that Scilingo initially found the personal ethi-
cal justification for his commission of heinous crimes against humanity.
Under the putative threat of subversion and destruction of national integ-
rity, the tacit Scilingo was utterly convinced of the ethical correctness of
his actions, based in no small part on the public sentiments of community
at the time:
Algn exceso en los procedimientos, como se hablaba en aquel momento,

no era rechazado. Era aceptado. Se alzaron muy pocas voces de repudio. Si
la mayora de la ciudadana se hubiese manifestado en contra, las cosas hubi-
eron sido distintas. Hoy le digo que fue una barbaridad. En ese momento
estbamos totalmente convencidos de lo que hacamos. En la forma en que
estbamos mentalizados, con la situacin que viva en el pas, sera una men-
tira total si le dijiese que no no lo hara de nuevo en las mismas condiciones.
(Verbitzky 32)
Some excess in the proceedings, as was discussed during that moment, was
not rejected. It was accepted. Very few voices we raised in protest. If the major-
ity of the citizenship had protested against the regime, things would have been
different. Today I say it was an atrocity. In that moment we were totally con-
vinced that what we were doing was right. Given the way we had been men-
tally trained and the situation in the country, it would have been a complete
lie if I were to tell you that I wouldnt do it again under similar conditions.
Scilingo makes clear how part of the justification of his participation

in the murderous flights was situated in the thematics of a community
unwilling to contravene against the excesses commited during the time.
Arguing that part of the underwriting of the criminal activity was the lack
of community will against the crimes, Scilingo justifies his behavior based
on an evaluation of the being-with of a community described through
126 C.M. AMADOR
the being-against others. This opposition to community is structured

through the belonging to a community unable or unwilling to protest
against genocidea genocide that Scilingo readily admits was at least par-
tially obvious to the Argentine public.
Scilingos testimony was motivated by an abandonment and abrogation
of responsibility and legitimacy by the junta. During the series of trials that
preceded the Punto Final and Debida Obediencia laws, Videla and others
vigorously denied the systematic application of violence that they had sup-
ported. Consistently, the junta leaders, like Videla, blamed the mayhem
of the era on excesses committed by lower-ranking officers, essentially
displacing the blame upon those who lacked the power and political will to
create this nationwide violence. After a fashion, those in the dictatorships
most vaunted corridors of powers undermined the structure of norms
underwriting their project of violent repression.
Moreover, the shared norms of the day do not lie underneath the sur-
face of Scilingos words, but rather speak directly to the specified content
of the day. Opposition to others structured in an implicit consensus is still
a consensus, directing this united position against an enemy that must be
addressed in some way. French philosopher Alain Badiou addresses the
relation between consensus and opposition in his work on ethics and evil
(2002). Badiou touches in his own manner how the political inscription
of the specified notion of enmity necessarily creates a closure that facilitates
an oppressive apparatus. Badiou illustrates how part of the apparatus that
justifies a consensus that would be capable of committing crimes against
humanity is the creation of a political order designed around a specified
content of opposition. To deny how a particular history of opposition was
based on the direct construction of an extraordinary and definitive enemy
is to deny the historical particularity of whatever community suffered the
violence. If, as Carlos Santiago Nino claims, the Proceso junta is a case of
Radical Evil, then it is possible to deny the specified content of their politi-
cal program and imagine the eras crimes as part of the incomprehensibil-
ity of Radical Evil.
In the following quotation, Badiou illustrates how the imagining of
Radical Evil must be challenged by an understanding of the political deter-
minationsa specified political determinationof the historical moment:
The defenders of ethical ideology are so determined to locate the singularity

of the extermination directly in Evil that they generally deny, categorically,
that Nazism was a political sequence. But this position is both feeble and
cowardly. Feeble, because the constitution of Nazism as a massive sub-
jectivity integrating the word Jew as part of a political configuration is what

made the extermination possible, and then inevitable. Cowardly, because it
is impossible to think politics through to the end if we refuse to envisage
the possibility of political sequences whose organic categories and subjective
prescriptions are criminal. (Badiou 65)
While Badiou asks readers to imagine the organic categories and sub-
jective prescriptions in their historical particularity, he nevertheless situ-
ates the procedure in the logic of individuation necessary to produce the
political configuration behind the criminal violence of the Holocaust.
Somewhat counterintuitively, Badiou invites us to think simultaneously
about political violence without the burden of the incomprehensibility
of Radical Evil as both a unique historical moment and the product of
the consistent logic of subjectivization and individuation. Incomparable as
historical singularities, the Holocaust and the Dirty War nonetheless share
the strict design of political configuration that allow for their violence to
be possible and inevitable.
This design occurs at the level of the formation of subjective identity,
forming the possibility for the commission of evil by means of the inau-
guration of an identitya specifed onethat allows the political name of
the regime to produce a regime of destruction. In his example about the
relation between the Nazi regime and its treatment of its Jewish popula-
tion, Badiou avers:
The Nazi category of the Jew served to name the German interior, the
space of a being-together, via the (arbitrary yet prescriptive) construction of
an exterior that could be monitored from the interiorjust as the certainty
of being all French together presupposes that we persecute, here and now,
those who fall under the category of illegal immigrant. (Badiou 65)
The construction of the exterior for the Proceso junta was certainly the
figure of the subversive, and while not as explicitly mentioned or inscribed
as the Jew, it nonetheless registers as the logical and practical founda-
tion for the project of the being-together, the dictatorship proposed as
for national reintegration. Framed in a different rhetoric, Badious way
of depicting the logical mode of dictatorship is virtually identical with
my working of the specified works via the same philosophical dynamics
of Peter Hallward and looking at the second sentence in Badious quote,
clearly, an affirmative external identity (Jew, Subversive, Communist, etc.)
is not required for the creation of an oppressive content.
128 C.M. AMADOR
Returning to Badious quotation, the citation reveals a connection with

Schmitts vision of the political and its assessment of the essential friend/
enemy distinction implicit in the construction of the grounds for politi-
cal unity. As Schmitt argues: [t]he specific political distinction to which
political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and
enemy. This provides a definition in the sense of a criterion and not as an
exhaustive definition or one indicative of substantial content15 (Schmitt
26). Thus, the friend/enemy distinction is conceived neither as the partic-
ular context of a state against its enemies, but rather that the very concept
of the state is implicated with the division between the interiority of the
friend with the exteriority of the enemy. Notwithstanding, what Badiou
and Hallward are both arguing, and what was expressed during the time of
the Argentine dictatorship was the problematic interplay between a logic
of subjectivization where one subject is ratified through opposing another,
and how the operation of a consensus politics bases itself on this notion,
often to terrifying effect.
Consensus in the Argentine situation was built, at least partially, upon
the state of agreement grounded upon the immanent structure of the
specified. Specifying a community requires a type of ordering of the multi-
plicity (subjects, ideas, notions, metaphors), where their essence is revealed
as ordered by the very immanence that inaugurates their beingthat of an
opposition to an exterior form. Immanent then to the specified as a logic
of individuation is coherence and fidelity to a particular form of expression.
This fidelity is not one that is part of the subjectivization of a beingthe
subject does not need to take up the mantle of the specified, although this
is often what tends to happen, especially in cases of extreme political affilia-
tion. Since this is the case, it is only fitting that the specified be understood
as a logic that requires a type of management of identity, both from within
the immanent situation, and from the exterior, where the identity of the
other might be argued to govern the creation of a specified situation.
Hallward clearly allows for the reading of the specified as a position that
is defined against another identity. As he puts it:
The specified can only define the realm of the essence of essentialist, where
the demarcation of an individual (subject, object, or culture) follows from
its accordance with recognized classifications. The specified, as the participle
suggests, extends only to the realm of the passive or the objectified. Whether
15
Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (1996).
what is specified is identified as narrowly nativist and particularist, or on the

contrary, as humanist and universalist, makes little real difference here. In both
cases, what counts is the compliance of actors with a presumed nature, and the
consequent supervision of the relative authenticity of this compliance. (40)
Compliance with the presumed nature is the critical phrase in the aforemen-
tioned quote, as it illustrates that compliance is a type of naming of the other,
structured with the built-in possibility of failure. Compliance with the speci-
fied name of an essence can always be seen as a point where the actors refuse
to participate with the presumed essence they have been marked with. The
past participle that Hallward invokes, makes certain that the stakes of the spec-
ified involve the tension between compliance and naming, and that this ten-
sion can be expressed through a logic that undermines the self-determination
of a group to name its own identity. The usefulness of Hallwards work on the
specified is that it fully investigates how individuation necessarily carries with
it a logical cost that marks the other. The realm of essence becomes the
place where we locate the otherits identity is a type of circumscription that
flows from without, and it is therefore subject to the operations of any tool
designed to guarantee its adherence to the imposed identity.
Hallward is less than sanguine in naming some of the historical modes
of generating and guaranteeting compliance with a specified identity, but
a close reading of his terms allow us to comprehend how a need or desire
to enforce compliance of a group with a particular identity is a type of pos-
sible violence against alterity. An essence thus specified is an essence that is
born from without, at least partially, and yielding to that identity is always
an assent to an extrinsic, identitarian claim.
Returning to the Scilingo effect, part of Scilingos anxiety, as we have
seen, is precisely that the violence he committed in the name of the speci-
fied combat against subversion was undermined by Videla and the other
officers, when they refused to offer an open declaration of the putative
validity of the violence. The violence, in the initial history of the dicta-
torship was justified by the supposed danger Argentina faced from the
threat of subversion. Their barbaric actions, while in no way justifiable
even under the threat of antistate violence, nonetheless were marked by a
specified contentthat of the subversives essential essence as a danger to
Argentina. However, when Videla and the other leaders of the junta were
tried for their war crimes, instead of displaying an attitude asserting the
fundamentally specified nature of their actions, they recoiled, resorting to
a weakened argument citing lack of complicity, excesses, and a presumed
130 C.M. AMADOR
ignorance concerning the actions of their subalterns.16 For an officer

tortured by the guilt and terror of his crimes, to be dislocated in this fash-
ion was too much to take.
The Scilingo effect produced a wide series of testimonials from other
members of the Argentine military, and a large number of them were
motivated by the dismissal of their activities as excesses committed dur-
ing a period of crisis and not part of the systematic policy of destruction,
supported and implemented actively by the highest echelons of power.
Soldiers, both noncommissioned men and officers, who participated in
the crimes against humanity represented a population whose actions could
only be justified by recourse to the actions deemed necessary to main-
tain the specified relation between the subversive and the so-called citi-
zen. In other words, it is possible to argue that immanent to the specified
distinctionor the compliance matrix necessary for the maintenance of
the specifiedis a moment of violence that must occur in order to force
compliance with an essence. This is clearly seen through the trajectory of
violence implemented during the period.
A second effectthe one expressed through the anxiety of those
marked by the Scilingo momentis that of the anxiety that results from a
breakdown of the specified from within the originary zone of the specified
naming or individuation. As the Argentinean upper ranks of power began
to undermine the integrity of their project, Scilingo and others suffered a
crisis of conscience: a disintegration of the specified essence: He and the oth-
ers followed this moment with their public outcry, dealing, in effect, with
the consequences of the utter collapse of sense that this hyperspecified era
produced. In short, Scilingos testament to Verbitsky served to confirm
what no Argentine citizen, nor military officer could deny: the resolute
willingness of the regime to carry out crimes against humanity against
their specified enemy.
POSTJUNTA GENRES
The Scilingo effect was more than just the production of a series of texts
concerning the militarys appraisal of the situation. Verbitskys interview
opens up a change in the literary fabric of the Dirty War period. El vuelo
16
For a deeper development of Videlas public pronouncements and vacillations concern-
ing the Dirty War, please see Mara Seoane and Vicente Muleiros, El Dictador: La historica
secreta y pblica de Jorge Rafael Videla (2001).
is certainly a confessional text and brief history of the periods violence,

but it is also an inversion of the traditional postdictatorship relationship
between power, testimony, and the circulation of literary texts.
I call El vuelo a postjunta text in order to achieve two goals. The
first is to distinguish Scilingos confession from the wide selection of
postdictatorship literature written from the perspective of victims of tor-
ture. These literary works are broadly configured under the rubric of
postdictatorship literature, and include novels, poetry, histories, and tes-
timonial texts that elaborate the experiences of those who suffered under
the regimes violence. Postdictatorship literature of this type works as part
of struggle for memory and justice in the region, lifting the veil of secrecy
and lies draping the period.
As Feitlowitz says [t]estimony is where the public and the secret
Argentina intersect (18), and the exposure of this connection continues
to provide the grounds for the attempts at reconciliation and justice that
mark the current period of Argentine history. Postdictatorship texts from
the literary to the testimonial map the networks of power, memory, and
historical suffering that produce subtle rends in social and community
narration.
Testimonial literature and the genre of testimonio17 has been tradi-
tionally linked to the concern of subaltern subjects whose possibility of
speech has been frustrated, restricted, or outright negated by hegemonic
political and social practices. The literary act of testimony is traditionally
imbricated with the witnessing of the most silenced occasions of Latin
American social historygenocide, popular revolution, struggles for jus-
tice and democracy.
As John Beverley, seminal critic and scholar of testimonio documents,
testimonio-like texts have existed for a long-time at the margin of litera-
ture, representing in particular those subjectsthe child, the native, the
woman, the insane, the criminal, the proletarianexcluded from autho-
rized representation when it was a question of speaking and writing for
themselves rather being spoken for (Beverley 31). Following from the def-
inition provided by Beverley, testimonio and testimonial literature has been
a literature of counterhegemony, working within the printed medium and
the networks of literary production and reception to inform, resist, build
affiliations, and attempt a transformation of social and political conditions.
17
The seminal text on the issue of testimony in Latin America is John Beverleys, Testimonio:
On The Politics of Truth (2004).
132 C.M. AMADOR
Testimonio as literature works in the struggle for representation and vis-

ibility, and challenges power by speaking alongside many whose voices are
far beyond the corridors of political visibility. Beverley continues: It [tes-
timonio] allows the entry into literature of persons who would normally,
in those societies where literature is a form of class privilege, be excluded
from direct literary expression, persons who have had to be represented
by professional writers (35).
I argue that El vuelo is a perversion or, minimally, a dark mirror of tes-
timonio literature, that, alongside with the other texts that followed the
Scilingo effect,18 inaugurated a change in the literary and memorial land-
scape of Argentina. El vuelo acts as a type of testimonio from the position of
the victimizer displaced from power, now subject to the enunciatory frame
of a nation rendering accounts at the level of memory, retributive justice,
and the hope for a future free of the specter of Scilingos type. Verbitsky,
himself once a Montonero and a figure of the political margins (who dis-
tanced himself from the group due to his renunciation of violence), is
now in the position of power over enunciation and the point of entry into
official discourse for Scilingo.
Verbitskys interview and the publication of his text allows for the con-
sideration that testimonio as a genre always suffers from the possibility
of the inversion of its critical and progressive core, when power shifts.
Verbitsky gives voice to Scilingo in order to depict the rationality of the
dictatorship, and provide context to the violence from the perspective of
the victimizer. Verbitsky transposes the traditional ethics of testimony by
allowing Scilingo to participate in a discourse where his marginalization is
highlighted, and his truth of the experiences comes to light in the double
mode of a confession and an implicit denunciation of his role as a torturer.
Verbitsky achieves the denunciation by presenting Scilingos words
within the historical moment of the trialsa moment where the Argentine
military was scrambling for its own peculiar and disturbing form of rec-
onciliationas they stand. Asking only questions that allow Scilingo to
expose the ideological trappings of his compatriots (Scilingo never shies
from speaking of his ideas as collective notions), Verbitsky allows for the
unmasking of the official deception perpetrated during the regimes ten-
ure and after their demise. In his capacity as a journalist, with access to
18
Immediately after the publication of El vuelo, a series of texts emerged from former tor-
turers such as Miguel Etchecolatz, Alfredo Astiz, and others.
textual circulation and reception, Verbitsky mirrors the role of the writer
in earlier, more progressive forms of testimonio, and creates a new charge
as facilitator of the exposition of crimes.
In order to achieve this position, Verbitsky invokes a detachment and
presumption of objectivity that allows Scilingo a space for dialogue with
little in the way of judgment. As, in testimonial literature, the victims
interlocutor serves a function of discursive legimitation and archival
authority, Verbitskys power as a journalist is to inscribe Scilingos confes-
sion in a comprehensible structure that allows him to confess his senti-
ments and integrate his experiences into the Argentine collective memory.
In this way, Verbitsky and Scilingo intervene from a new direction in
debates on memory by putting forward a text that articulates the relevance
of understanding how power and dominance operated during the period
from the perspective of those who wielded it. This type of intervention
effectively alters the ways in which remembering operates in the public
sphere, allowing for the explicit contravention of denials of responsibility
from the upper echelons of power.
Furthermore, the text operates to begin a conversation on how the
specified works as an ethical precept. Scilingo was utterly convinced of the
moral validity of his actions, as were those who acted with him. Only
doubting his role when the junta denied its participation and program
during the first wave of trials, Scilingo invokes his capacity to testify in
order to redeem his specified condition as a soldier:
[A]ctuamos nosotros creyendo que ramos fuerza armada Hasta el

moment de los indultos yo senta que haba cumplido rdenes y que la con-
dena a mis jefes era poltica. Pero todo se me derrumb cuando acceptaron
irse tranquilamente a sus casas y Videla empez a decir barbaridades. Me
afect tremendamente. Me di cuenta de que algo andaba mal. Lo que yo
haba hecho, estaba bien o estaba mal?
Si hubieran rechazado el indulto, yo, militarmente hubiera pensado:
el juego poltico sigue, pero estos seores se estan portando como corre-
sponde. Pero irse a la casa como se fueron, eso no lo acepto porque me
hace cuestionar todo lo que yo hice en la Escuela de Mecnica. (65)
We acted believing we were the Armed Forces Until the moment of the
pardons I felt I was following orders and the sentences against my bosses
were political in nature. But everything collapsed when they accepted going
home quietly and Videla started saying terrible things. It affected me tre-
mendously. I realized something was wrong. What I had done, was he right
or was wrong?
134 C.M. AMADOR
If they had refused the pardon, I would have thought militarily: the polit-
ical game goes on, but these guys are acting accordingly. But to go home as
they went, that I do not accept that makes me question everything I did
in the School for Mechanics. (65)
Thus, the Scilingo effect is, at least partially, a change in Argentinas

historical and memorial archive inasmuch as it puts into play a register of
the admission of criminality that maps out more thoroughly the obscured
cartography of beliefs, emotions, and practices of the victimizers. These
admissions, while unnecessary for the legal judgments against the regime,
are still necessary to describe and prevent the emergence of the politi-
cal and social factors that precipitated the violence. In short, Scilingos
testimony produced a genre of testimony whose implications deepen the
exploration of Argentinas past.
The second reason behind the name postjunta literature is to address the
emergence of confessions like Scilingos, whose purpose was to express
the collective and personal anxieties of those who believed that they
were fighting a just war during the Proceso period. When the junta and its
military cast began to be tried for their crimes against the state, their aban-
donment of their subalterns and public deception concerning their actions
tore through the lower ranks, creating a furor that led Scilingo to confess
his participation and seek his moment of recognition. Scilingos compatri-
ots produced a series of texts that addressed the juntas hypocrisy and the
vacuum of support for a project they believed essential to the preservation
of the Argentine nation.
LA DISPOSICIN FINAL: VIDELAS VOICE

Claro que Videla, al contar su conduccin de guerra en clave de omisiones
elocuentes y dando por supuesta siempre la evidencia de lo tcito, va a sentirse
habilitado a su vez para ocupar el lugar del hermeneuta de lo implicito.
Of course Videla, while recounting his behavior at war in the key of elo-
quent omissions and by taking for granted evidence of what is tacitly clear,
would feel capable at the same time of occupying the space of the reader of
what was implicitly the case.
Martn KohanLibros de guerra (2014)
In this passage, Argentine novelist and critic Martn Kohan issues a striking
description of junta leader Jorge Videla. In a 2012 book titled Disposicin
final by journalist Ceferino Reato, after decades of silence while incarcerated,
and shortly before his death, General Videla finally spoke in a declarative
fashion on his role during the bloody Dirty War. In a brief summation of the
relationship between tacit evidentiary claims of the juntas criminality and
the implicit significance of Videlas speech, Kohan ascribes to the general, the
crucial position of hermeneuta or interpreter. Furthermore, he allows for
Videlas silence to impel a type of hermenuetic curiosity that conditions the
horizon of expectations for both his silence and his speech:
Tampoco importan ya, en este sentido al menos, las razones por las antes
que callaba, diciendo poco o diciendo nada, ms all de los requerimientos
judiciales, manteniendo un prolongado silencio en apariencia impasible que,
como suele pasar con los silencios de apariencia impasible, despert no pocas
veces la inquietud de un impulso hermenetico (Kohan 254)
Neither does it matter, in this sense at least, the reasons why he was silent
before; saying little or nothing; beyond the judicial requirements; maintain-
ing a prolonged silence in an impassible appearance that, as tends to happen
with silences of an impassible appearance, frequently awoke the disquiet of
a hermeneutic impulse.
When Videla finally speaks up, what emerges from the confession is a cer-
tain reinscription of the logical space for oppression within the empirical
space of incarceration.
The generals speech is a call to his interlocutors to imagine that the
circumstances for state terrorism are part of the procedure of material
violence and intersubjective justification. Simply put, he manages to make
visible once again the terrifying becoming of the Dirty War. As the initial
epigraph suggests, Videlas confession lays bare the fact that there is a
tacit/implicit ordering initially created by a dialectics of silence with the
public sphere. This is to say that the tacit and the implicit are not strictly
synonymous in this particular mode, but rather express slightly different
vectors of representation and accuracy. Since the day the coup took power,
little doubt was cast on the tacit meaning of the Procesos goals, as I have
shown earlier in this piece. An interminable campaign of violence remade
Argentina into a nation where violence and fear tacitly operated as hege-
monic expression, without question. But where the implicit splits from
the tacit is where the modality of Videlas jailhouse confession expresses
a type of obscured, but not altogether hidden meaning, with respect to
the capacity of Videla to expand the density of the historical and political
narrative behind his crimes.
136 C.M. AMADOR
In a sense, Kohan is conceding to Videlas silence the capacity to hold

open a space for deeper, less visible or audible meaning. Somewhat eerily,
Videlas silence and speech allows us to return to the point of the emer-
gence of a hermeneutic for the selfsame silences and speeches that mark
the specified dictatorship. Without conceding hegemonic power over nar-
rative and meaning, Kohan nonetheless draws out the fact that Videlas
confession forms the opening for a destructive ethics of the specified in an
expanded sense.
This is critical for our analysis as it further grounds the specified as the
basic logic of differentiation for the Dirty War. Videlas confession and
bellic logic operates on the ground of a declared, specified conflict that
exposes the dynamics of individuation supporting the discursive enun-
ciations of the Dirty War. In this section of the book, I illustrate the
other side, so to speak, of Scilingos specified breakdownthe logic of
the very architects of Argentinas horror and the nuances of their modes
of thinking. I show how the specified, despite being the most readily
accessible and comprehensible mode of differentiation, is nonetheless
a sophisticated, almost overly complex discursive phenomena. I add
Videlas voice to the mix as a counterpoint to Scilingos lament on the
specified breakdownthis supports the essential argument concerning
logics of differentiation as the bases for political and ethical subjectivity. I
briefly shift between Ceferino Reatos text and Martin Kohans nuanced
review of the book, not in a contrapuntal fashion, but rather to create a
series of harmonics that establish the condition of the specified in Videlas
discourse.
The term disposicin final refers to the multiple status of victims of dic-
tatorial violencetheir physical death, final resting place in a clandestine
grave, and the generic attitude toward political enemies. The relationality
of the specified here takes on a brutally indifferent tenor, one where the
act of the disappearing postmortem victim is merely a part of political
instrumentalization.
As Scilingo pointed out, Videlas silence and denial marked the major-
ity of the experience of the post-Dirty War era. The general maintained
a kind of bulwark against expression that evacuates the capacity, at least
provisionally, to create a truly collective experience of the Dirty War era
one that includes much more necessary accounts and images of the victims
of state terrorism, strengthened by the understanding of the terrifyingly
Radical Evil of the persecutorial classes. The archive of accounts does
not require Videlas confession. Indeed, sufficient accounting is made
by the thousands of stories and testimonies that make up not only the
CONADEP report, but the public, popular memory of the generation
who suffered the era.
The critical purpose of Videlas speech, I argue, is neither justification
nor an easing of conscience, but rather a structural, procedural accounting
of the conditions of the war grown from the relationality of the specified
to itself. The following insertion attempts to briefly discuss Videlas tardy
confession and the harrowing depiction of the disposicin final that sets
up but one articulation of a specified logic of differentiation at the heart
of the Dirty War. I find it crucial to understand how ethics can never fully
be described by a metaethics, as the practical violence always exceeds the
metaphysical structure it is formed from. Kohan affirms this, arguing that
Videlas confession reifies the relationship between moral justification,
specified logic, and the politics of war:
la testitura de Videla no estoy arrepentido de nada (Reato 34) declina la

opcin confesional, y se ofrece ms bien como un alegato, si es que no, ms
decidamente an, como un reivindicacin. Videla elige reivindicar su accio-
nar como comandante en jefe de guerra, en la convicin de que, vencedor
vencido, victorioso pero preso, necesita despejar y ajustar el tramado narra-
tivo de ese captulo de la historia argentina que le toc protagonizar, y que
es tambin, como tantos, como casi todos, captulo de un relato de guerra.
(Kohan 255)
Videlas Im not sorry about anything attitude declines the confessional
option, and proves more like a plea, if not, most decidedly still, as a claim.
Videla chooses to vindicate his actions as commander-in-chief at war in con-
viction that as a conquered conqueror, he needs to clear and set the narrative
straight for this chapter of Argentine history, like so many others, or almost
all of them, a chapter of a story of war. (Kohan 255)
Thus, we can see that the disposicin final is the ethico-political extension
of an inscription of the enemy into a destructive mode that is merely a
procedural extension of the commision of violence. Videlas and others
averral of the moral beneficence of their acts of state terror and geno-
cide pushes at the boundary of the intersubjective logic necessary for any
validation of an act of war. Bodies are destroyed and discarded beyond
the very naming of the enemy relationa situation that can only be pos-
sible if either a singular, self-justifying becoming is in power, as singular
nonrelationality admits for no alterity, or if the specified is overdeter-
mined through a relation of inequality. Part of the interrogation of logics
138 C.M. AMADOR
of differentiation must be to admit that there is no pure, deconstructive

realm of individuation, where conditions of possibilty and impossiblity are
strictly assertable in the philosophical register. Empirical evaluations and
political decisions make visible the character of the specified, and in the
case of Videla and the Proceso de reorganizacin nacional, the disposicin
final marks how the political question of differentiation can be the very
question of state genocide.
Returning to the question of subjectivity, we can begin to articulate a
different origin for the contemporary subject that exceeds the ability to
assume or take on guilt, or even recognize an interior secretone that
is putatively given as the condition of possibility and impossibility of the
subject.19 Instead of torture revealing the secret name, or as Graff Zivin
argues, the executioners cut off the prisoners tongue as a way to rob him
of his status as a speaking subject (Zivin 116), the heart of torture and
state terrorism for the Dirty War and Southern Cone dictatorship refuses
the formal structure of the secret inasmuch as there is no knowledge to
be derived, nothing contained within the subject but its bare life as the
inscriptive resource through horrific physical mayhem for a culture of fear
and horror. The disappearing worked as a form of formal silencing of
the political speaking subject, at the material and the philosophical level.
Whatever archives or lists the dictatorship had were burned just before the
transition,20 and the generals themselves disputed the value of creating
and publishing the lists. In short, as human lives continued to be tortured
and murdered, the problem of the disappeared persons would emerges as
a political thorn in the side of the dictatorship.
However, I argue that there is no hidden secret here, but a mere for-
mality of the most horrific violence that stabilizes the specified content
of the juntas integrist, anticommunist policies. The sheer mass of dis-
appearances and the public presence of street battles between insurgen-
cies, public disappearances, and extrajudicial murders opened up a space
of excessive openness and not, as is argued, secrecy. The secret at the heart
19
Here I am referring to two seminal works in the Levinasian tradition of subjectivity stud-
ies, Gabriela Basterras Seductions of Fate, Tragic Subjectivity, Ethics, and Politics, NewYork,
Palgrave Macmillan, 2004, Print; and Erin Graff Zivins Figurative Inquisitions: Conversion,
Torture, and Truth in the Luso-Hispanic World, Chicago, Northwestern University Press, 2015,
Print. I address these notions influenced by Levinasian phenomenology and Derridean
deconstruction in order to deconstruct the notion of an unstable core to subjectivity by
illustrating the immutability of force in the interpellation of a subject.
20
Reato p.44.
of torture then is not, tragically, the sufferers hidden meaning, but rather
the constant need for the other to form subjectivity itself can never be
reimagined by violence and torture, only repeated.
Torture in an era where intelligence is valueless simply recapitulates the
idea of violence as inscriptive mechanism. Neither the secret nor the fact
of communicative possibilty is brought into being, but rather the specifed
vulnerability of the bodys relation to the world, along with the relational-
ity of subjects with each other. In other words, despite our best philosoph-
ical attempts, the hidden core of the torturers power is how corporeal
suffering interpellates and is interpellated as a political instrumentality, and
is not capable of being deconstructed according to the hidden logic of
the secret, nor that of an identity beyond the interpellation. Rather, the
chain is of inexorable relationality of a specified typology that brakes the
possibility of dissolution.
JUSTIFYING WAR: THESPECIFIED ASBELLIC SUBJECTIVITY

This section begins with an interrogation of the Specified as the descriptive
and individuating mechanism power which contributes to much of the
dictatorships ferocity and warlike disposition. I begin with a citation from
Kohans seminal El pas de guerra (2015): [l]a guerra, por lo tanto, es lo
que se hace hacer. Su imposicin es doble en ese sentido. Y Videla va a
situarse como objeto de esa imposicin, para poder derivar de eso el lugar
de sujeto de decisin que no solo va a admitir, sino tambin a reivindicar
(Kohan 259).
War is therefore what is made to be. Its imposition is double in this sense.
And Videla will situate himself as an object of that imposition, in order to
derive from this the place of the subject of a decision that will not only
admit, but also vindicate.
Kohan here suggests that the instantiation of the Dirty War is lo que se
hace hacer, or what it is made to be. What is brought into becom-
ing is the realization of a political relationality written from the continu-
ous invocation of one sides interpellation of the other. Especially in the
case of state terrorism, which was formed from the entirety of possible
Argentine citizens. As Thomas C. Wright argues, [p]recise definitions
were unnecessary, of course, because the officers were both judge and jury.
In practice, any degree of real or imputed dissidence from the militarys
140 C.M. AMADOR
mission and values made one a potential target (Wright 107). Potential
and actual dissidence are immaterial and irrelevantwhat is of stake is the
identity and relationality of what Hallward would term an overly speci-
fied conception of culture.21
Fue una guerra justa, en los trminos de Santo Toms; una guerra defensiva.
No acepto que haya sido una guerra sucia; la guerra es siempre algo horrible,
sucio, pero Santo Toms nos introduce ese matiz importante de las guerras
justas, y sta lo fue. (Reato 32)
It was a just war in the terms laid out by Saint Thomas Aquinas: a defen-
sive war. I do not accept that it was a dirty war. War is always something
horrible, but Saint Thomas introduces the important idea of the just war,
and this it was.
Just war justifications are part of the armament of Videlas confession, but
this does not simply illustrate the manner in which the ethics of war is tied
not only to a moral valuation. Rather it shows how just war itself emerges
from a precise way of inscribing the relation between a moral proof and
the intersubjective structure of the act of war. Said another way, there can
be no question that the form of justice conceived of by Videla exceeds the
capacity of Thomistic just war, as it is forged from a type of relationality
that is always already the specification of a necessary victimization.
But, if the real enemy of the insurgency was roundly defeated by
approximately 1979, what purpose did torture and murder retain? What
is the foundation of the revenants of violence that continued to haunt the
practice of the Proceso juntas powerful military apparatus? One contem-
porary reading that works in concert with the logic of the specified rela-
tionality is Erin Graff Zivins suggestion that the true function of torture
is grounded in the possibilty for intersubjectivity and differentiation in a
realm that crosses the putatively impermeable boundary between the spec-
ulative register and the empirical one. Graff Zivin writes: what torturers
really seek to create is the difference between same and other (Graff
Zivin 6). Torture is the instrumentalization of the specified modality of
differentation, a proper naming through violence of the determined speci-
fied relation that underwrites the Schmittian enemy/friend distinction:
21
Hallward, 22.
Yo creo que en el contexto de la guerra contra la subversin un oficial no

tena escapatoria si quera seguir en el Ejrcito, y que no caba la calificacin
de orden inmoral. No es que estaban bajo coercin irresistible; no era el
caso. (Reato 37)
I believe that in the context of the war against subversion, an officer had
no other choice if he wanted to continue in the Army, and that there was
no room for the refuse of an immoral order. Its not that they were under
irresistible coercion; thats not the case.
Videla clearly states that the fighting of the war against insurgency and
the comission of crimes against humanity required clear commitment and
dedication. Lack of participation in military violence for reasons of con-
science, according to Videla, simply obligated the soldier, including those
at the highest rank of the officers corp.
In concert with the contemporary military notion of supporting the
refusal to obey orders on this basis of moral objection, Videlas account
situates the commission of war crimes not as a political gesture but as
one ratifying the capacity of the ethical subject to undermine the political
itself. This assertion is not made in order to support the seeming benevo-
lence of the military to provide balm for the souls of its members, but
rather to illustrate how the ethical position imbricated with the specified is
critical for the structuring of the possibilty of military violence and politi-
cal crime. A mutiplicity of perspectives of the conscious is reduced to the
operations of mere military policya policy whose support, both tacit
and explicit, configures the justification for murder on the basis of the
specified enemy.
To further ground this, it is necessary to imagine Videlas confession
not only as a justification, but as the components of a theory of war sup-
ported not by Thomistic just war theory, as Videla would argue, but by
the instrumentalization of the specified enemy as the abstract insurgent.
Videlas integrist Roman Catholicism is but one of the motivations that
steels the move toward a specified relationality, as the specified is rela-
tionality in a historical lock of sorts; in an ineluctable circuit of being and
becoming with an alterity formed by the discourse of individuation as an
enemy. This moves beyond the political ontology of Schmitt and speaks to
the deeper possibility behind the enemy/friend distinctionthat alterity
itself is fraught with the very capacity for violence and the creation of a
fundamental enmity.
142 C.M. AMADOR
RECONCILING SCILINGO ANDVIDELA

I put Videla in this chapter in order to illustrate the intersubjective evi-
dence of the specified as bellic interpellation, psychic modality, and a mode
of relationality. What is necessary in the study of the era is further analysis
of how intersubjective modes of differentiation may be pathways to dark
patterns of political behavior. The specified itself operates as a form of sin-
gularisation whereby the collapse of subject and object discussed earlier in
this book is kept from fully emerging. Instead, what Scilingo and Videlas
military logic produces is a type of amphibolous logic that maintains the
insurgent in the position of subjectivizing agent for the relational specified
of the dictatorship and the very object capable of being destroyed.
The operation of this duovalence rigidly configures the specified in a cir-
cuit of repeated becoming through interpellation by power, and of course
mutual interpellation. However, despite the logical necessity of acknowl-
edging mutual interpellation, the scission at the heart of the specifieda
scission that comes from empirical power over relationalityrealizes an
ethics of immutable destruction. Scilingo and Videla were both murderers
whose homicides form the quotidian vocabulary of the cultural produc-
tion of fear and state terrorism. Domestic genocide as a visible societal
project unites the two, what divides them is the motivation behind their
confessions. Scilingos confession stems from the breakdown of relational-
ity while Videlas is the attempt by dictatorship to provide a hermeneutics
for the specified.
Scilingo was tried and sentenced in 2005, long before the publication
of Reatos book, and well before the Kirchner administration began try-
ing and sentencing war criminals in earnest. While not the first or most
famous war criminal sentenced, Scilingo is nonetheless remarkable for nar-
rating the breakdown of his logic of differentiation. His work stands as
the counterpoint to Videlas attempt to reassert dominance over the nar-
rative of political violence. Scilingos confession works singularly to allow
readers to assess what some of the psychic consequences of a breakdown
in social logic might be, while Videla is almost a paper-thin characteriza-
tion of the Roman Catholic integrist anticommunist dictatorship. Yet, the
counterpoint is necessary in order to illustrate the continuous temptation
for the specified to collapse into an utterly singular logic, realized through
the destruction of mediation: once fully de-specified, singular percep-
tion will be immediate to what it perceives, i.e. to its own self-expression
(Hallward 3).
Scilingo and Videla were never fully singularized, having never defeated
the mediation by insurgency and the quest for an antiauthoritarian
Argentina. However, as exemplars of a violent intersubjectivity, they serve
as continously useful examples of how a politics of the enemy, or even
one of the Other, forms the contours for a possible situation of extreme
violence.
CONCLUSION
Understanding the victimizers attitudes allows for the development of
new methods of political and textual analysis that tie specific attitudes
and practice to the potential and actual commission of violence. Seeing
the specified from the inside tracks with added clarity the ways in which
specified violence requires the creation and perpetuation of distinct
concepts of enemy, friend, and community, In other words, Scilingos
testimony reminds us that violence is defined as a very real set of intersub-
jective attitudes and actions. Naming an enemy through an oppositional
discourse neither necessitates the commission of genocidal violence nor
the realization of a systematic plan of destruction. However, understand-
ing this procession helps expand the role of social memory in order to
prevent the emergence of similar ideas and attenuate challenges to the acts
of forgetting that often challenge the process of national remembering.
Thus, I conclude by arguing again that understanding Scilingos text
(and the other, less well-known texts that followed El vuelo) as a postjunta
genre opens up the possibility of studying violence from within. Scilingos
text is more than a possibly misguided attempt at being understood or
justifiedit is a document of the extraordinary exercise of power and vio-
lence that adds to the archive and the fight against this type of horror from
ever happening again.
In Argentina, the dictatorship instituted the most extreme form of
the political state of exception, and then attempted exculpation through
denial, and finally a type of procedural justification that serves little retrib-
utive function. Videlas earlier silence leads to Scilingos breakdown of
confidence, which must be understood as a consequence of destruction of
the specified. Through this, we can see how contained within the very pos-
sibility of a logic of individuation is an affective and ethical realm that car-
ries with it the possibility of justifying criminality in a widespread political
fashion. A logic of the specified contains the kernel of an atavism that can
authorize a politics where violence becomes the axiom of confrontation
144 C.M. AMADOR
with the specified other, and where contempt and disregard for suffering
and pain become part of everyday life.
REFERENCES
Badiou, Alain. Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. Trans. Peter Hallward.
London: Verso, 2002. Print.
Basterra, Gabriela. Seductions of Fate: Tragic Subjectivity, Ethics, Politics. NewYork:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Print.
Beverly, John. Testimonio: On the Politics of Truth. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2004. Print.
Comisin Nacional sobre la Desaparicin de Personas. Nunca ms: informe de la
Comisin Nacional Sobre la Desaparicin de Personas. Buenos Aires: Editorial
Universitaria de Buenos Aires, 1984. Print.
Kohan, Martn. El Pas De La Guerra. Buenos Aires: Eterna Cadencia 2015. Print.
Larraquy, Marcelo. De Pern a Montoneros: Historia de la violencia poltica en la
Argentina. Buenos Aires: Alfaguara, 2010. Print.
Lewis, Paul H. Guerrillas and Generals: The Dirty War in Argentina. NewYork:
Praeger Publishers, 2002. Print.
Marshak, Patricia M. Gods Assassins: State Terrorism in Argentina in the 1970.
Montreal, Quebec: McGill University Press, 1999. Print.
Quiroga, Hugo. El tiempo del proceso: Conflictos y coincidencias entre polticos y
militares, 1976-1983. Rosario, Argentina: Editorial Fundacin Ross, 2004.
Print.
Romero, Jos Luis. Breve historia de la Argentina. Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura
Econmica, 1998. Print.
Seoane, Mara, and Vicente Muleiro. El Dictador: la historica secreta y pblica de
Jorge Rafael Videla. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 2001. Print.
Verbitsky, Horacio. El vuelo. Buenos Aires: Planeta, 1995. Print.
Walsh, Rodolfo. Operacin Masacre. Buenos Aires: De la Flor, 1957. Print.
Yannuzzi, Mara de los ngeles. Los aos oscuros del proceso. Buenos Aires,
Argentina: UNR Editora, 1991. Print.
CHAPTER 6
Roberto Bolaos Specific Exiles
Exile begins with the act of displacement that removes one from the national
space. Nationality removed or dislocated becomes a mark, a referential
node in a network that unites multiple sites of power and meaning exter-
nal to the nation of origin, but always referential to its authority to dis-
place and ratify identity. The exiles identity is formed by the banishing.
Knowing itself to be a child of the possibility of the nation-state to distort
or violate the birth promise of citizenship, exile is an originary trauma
that circumscribes certain legal, ethical, and identitarian possibilities across
historical space and time.
This trauma takes many forms, and the exiles trauma is almost certainly
predated by the significant trauma of the death or destruction of politi-
cal possibility and expression. Prior to the possibility of displacement or
banishment through exile must come the motivation of exile, at least in
the political or spatial sense. And here we see a major tension that I will
articulate and develop throughout the body of this chapter: that exile is a
concept made up of a network of meaning that makes difficult an overall
appraisal of its power for literary and philosophical analysis. Exile is seen
by the writers I discuss here along a continuum of meaning that allows for
each of them to specifically underwrite and deepen their personal projects
of relevance. This is not to say that exile is merely a literary or philosophical
experience or notion. As one of the more lucid theorists of exile in recent
years, Amy Kaminsky has pointed out: [e]xile is, as much as anything, a
spatial phenomenon, and space is a condition of, and a precondition for,

Paraguay, 19702000, DOI10.1057/978-1-137-54633-3_6
146 C.M. AMADOR
the body (Prologue xiv). Exile is a physical and spatial reality that mani-
fests itself in the signifying and signified body. The material and spatial
apperception of human reality are restructured by the actual dislocations,
and this change inscribes itself, makes itself visual or at least, writable in
the case of many writers.
Exile is also a linguistic phenomenon, as has been most effectively seen
and experienced by the vast majority of native American people, many
of whom were either born or forced into a situation where their native
language was repressed forcibly by institutions of colonization and cul-
tural destruction. Languages disappear irrevocably through the oppression
imposed by colonization, or the native language becomes altered in an
extreme way, reflecting the role that hegemonic linguistic institutions have
in the promulgation of exile. As native peoples were dislocated, their geo-
graphical experiences changed, and the very terms for space, time, and
location began to incorporate the hegemonic conceptualizations imposed
by colonial force. Although exile is perhaps one of the central political
myths of the western world, it took on a new form with the imposition of
the political relations between center and periphery that emerged with the
discovery of the Americas. Scholar Anbal Quijano names this new arrange-
ment of political space part of the coloniality of power.1
What is important to understand about exile and language is that exile
rearranges the relationship between the self and self-expression at not only
the cognitive level, but at the level of affect. As the reinscription of space
takes place, so the body follows and language models what the body suf-
fers during the period of exile. Beginning with Deleuze and Guattari in
A Thousand Plateaus, and discussed in Kaminskys book, which I shall
treat below, language, affect, and exile have been brought together in
critical analysis, allowing for a deepening of the critical vocabulary. Exile
as a concept begins to expand, and we can see its importance across the
spectrum of literary scholarship. The mythos of exile soon reshapes itself
into the identity of exile, which in turn becomes the centripetal idea of
many writers: it takes the form of a subjectivity, a way of engaging the
world that changes utterly the way in which writing is produced. Identity
is formed anew and it becomes critical to analyze the relations between
exile, subjectivity, and cultural production.
1
See Anbal Quijano, Colonialidad del poder y clasificacin racial (2000), for a deeper
understanding of the role that colonial power had over the topographical and epistemologi-
cal life of Latin America.
ROBERTO BOLAOS SPECIFIC EXILES 147
It is not merely coincidental that products have flowing and free trans-
national and global identities, while national identity is still one of the
preconditions for free movement in the world (how does one discuss the
travelers nightmare of losing her passport and identification, only to sub-
mit herself to the consular process). Philosophers like Hardt and Negri
enjoy pointing out that the current postnational stage creates the possibil-
ity for identity formation to pass out of the national confines and into a
new affective dimension. Networks of labor and laborers that were part of
the Fordist economic and cultural milieu are now subject to the changing
rules of the transforming capitalist landscape. Immaterial labor, defined
as the changing of the production process through the increasing tech-
nological and epistemic changes of labor, and on the other hand, as the
increasing labor surrounding the reception of the commoditybranding,
fashion, the informal communities around it, has become one of the most
powerful tools in the creation of a network of connections that describe
our contemporary era.
Part of the relevance of the optic of individuation that Hallward pro-
vides us, with the terms of the singular and the specific, is the development
of a critical apparatus that attends to the local, situated nature of knowl-
edge and the possibility of transcending the spheres and boundaries of
mere locality. One of the ways this is accomplished is by understanding the
way a discourse configures the possibility for the exchange of knowledge
and meaning. Within a singular discourse, individuation through the pil-
ing on of ever denser and more distancing levels of difference achieves the
reduction into a singular point, a One that is not the oneness of Deleuze,
Badiou, Spinoza, or any other philosopher of the multiply singularthose
philosophers who see in the worlds immanence a type of unity expressed
through the manifestation of multiplicitybut rather a One that closes
the circuits and connections of membership completely. As I have men-
tioned elsewhere in this work, the singular is formed out of the disso-
lution of relationality, the scission of connecting with a prior other or
connection in order to express an immanence that is total to itself. The
one of the singular admits no entrance, and it circumscribes its own space,
providing only for its own enunciation.
The problem with the singular is that, ultimately, anything that emerges
as singular is a closure of the possible for those unincluded within its
spaces. Singularity does not admit for difference and collapses the distinc-
tions created by the concept of difference by the imposition of a pos-
itively marked differentiation from all. In other words, there is always
148 C.M. AMADOR
a broad cleavage between alterity and the singular in writing and theoreti-
cal productiondespite being clothed in a seemingly liberatory project.
Anything that creates its own exclusive scale of existence risks demarcating
borders that only include it and contain it within a constant reordering
of the descriptive nuances that allow the interior and exterior to mutu-
ally reinforce each other. Singular discourses create an ethical dilemma by
creating a space where no contestation of meaning can occur without sig-
nificantly challenging the framework, if not destroying it. Given this, it is
of vital importance to take to task the singular where it manifests itselfif
only where it may render accounts, as in the concept of the Nation, per-
haps the most frequently invoked singularity in cultural production.
This chapter will investigate the formation of the specific by under-
standing the material and immaterial networks embodied by the writing
and person of Chilean author Roberto Bolaoindisputably the most
important Latin American author of the last 20 years. I argue that part
of the literary investigation of the specific can be located in Bolaos
extraordinary understanding of literature and reading as a global system of
displacement that occurs through the act of reading and belonging within
the literary community. Readers and writers are not merely locked into the
relationship of consumption and production of literary works based solely
on national identity or understanding. Instead, they are part of a world-
system that traces pathways of understanding and recognition along the
literary circuit of reading and writingpathways that form the identities
of writers through affiliations, alliances, idolatry, and conflicts.
For Bolao, this series of encounters challenged him to envision of his
political identity as a displaced Chilean citizen in a light that takes to task
what the vision of the Chilean exile then and now is. Bolao disagrees with
the concept of the exile vehemently, and in its place substitutes the more
appropriate concept of the nomada traveler along the networks of the
global system of literature. The nomad figures as the being who best exem-
plifies the relation between reader, writer, text, and, mutatis mutandis,
nation. This nomadism is the result of literatureespecially the novel, but
in the case of Latin America, poetry as well (exemplified best through the
travels of figures like Jos Mart, Rubn Dario, and Pablo Neruda)oper-
ating as a world-system that inaugurates an ever-shifiting topography of
intertextualities that form the nomad possibility. Readers and writers nego-
tiate these world currents and communicate with each other their knowl-
edge of the literary world-system. Exiled writers, with their traumatized
ties to the lost homeland, display a yearning for the national space that,
Bolao argues, is dissonant with the very office of writer.
Nomad literary subjectivity2 is critical as a way out of the trap of the

singular that is part of the exiles desire for home and serves as a model
for how the specific is always a part of literature itself. I will argue, with
Hallward and Bolao, that part of literatures great power and durability
is how the specific is modeled through the world-system of literature and
exemplified in Bolaos essay writing and his vast dramatis personae of
nomadic literary travelers.
My argument does not wish to deny or occlude the material, physi-
cal, and affective consequences of the experience of exile. The costs that
exile exacts upon the exiled subject are often a total reduction of the sub-
ject to its most abject biopolitical existence. Although, in some of the
most important ways, the study and literary description of exile is very
different from that of the refugee: the juridical status of the exile is often
simply that of the refugee, and both share the biopolitical and juridico-
political status of the refugee.
I show in this chapter how exile and nomad in Southern Cone writing
are part of the logics of individuation of the singular and the specific, and
how especially the concept of the exile, reflected upon in a certain fashion,
creates a kind of singularity that excludes other conceptions of writing and
narration of political displacement. By seeing instead how nomad and exile
work together in the writing of Bolao, I show how the specific operates
to support an ethical perspective on the practice of writing and reading
which offers us a new way of practicing the role of literature as a form of
cultural critique.
WORKING TOWARD THESPECIFIC: WHAT THENOMAD

ANDBOLAO CAN TEACH US ABOUT POLITICS ANDBEING
Part of the usefulness of understanding the difference between the spe-
cific and the singular is developing the relationship between visions of
individuation and distinction and the formation of a hermeneutics that
has a type of political vision. This vision, if properly guided by a specific
understanding, allows for the understanding of decision and motivation
within a text, and the possibility of an open plurality, rife with possibili-
ties for expression. The specific as such does not set into motion a neces-
sary relation of individuation and grouping. Politics, as such, does not
emerge from the identification of a specific form of writing. In many ways,
2
The term was coined by Rosi Braidotti in Nomadic Subjects (1994) to describe feminist
subjects.
150 C.M. AMADOR
the singular and the specified share space inasmuch as they both attempt to
counter distinct political and ontological descriptions.
The singular attempts to arrest the multiple in being and the role of dif-
ferentiation in subject-object relations. In an ontology where the subject
and the object might be mapped and identified, the phenomenal relation
of individuation is important, if only in a mathematical sense. The singular
proffers a closure of this plurality, instead forcing a transcendence into play
that undermines plurality and specificity, leaving subject and object to be
subsumed within an extreme totality. As Peter Hallward puts it, every
singular configuration emerges through the dissolution of relationality, as
the expression of a non-relational, self-creative or self-constituent force
(Hallward 329). Arguing from this position, discourses of singularity are
those that wrap meaning around coordinates that produce a self-consuming
and limited discourseone that limits the possibilities of expression and
reading to the mapping of an interiority that may be incomprehensibly
structured to readers from the outside. Exile, often caused by the violent
will of singular dictatorships, often presents its contents from this singular
and radically interiorizing position.
On the other hand, the sensation or affect of singularity explored by
products of exile allows for the development of expressions of experiences
that map out specific and innovative details of the experience. The very
real experience of a writers exile is always a reminder of the consequences
that a singular logic can have when materialized and implemented in the
world. Literatures force certainly creates the conditions for exileregimes
of singular construction fear the plurality of high reflexivity. The repressive
political forces of dictatorship return the threatening disruptions of the
differences identified and produced by literature with torture or fatal vio-
lence, or the creation of conditions for exile. This illustrates that logics of
individuation or differentiation carry very real effects. How the operations
of multiplication and connection are expressed configures what is imple-
mented materially and physically. This recalls that the interior/exterior
relationship of a singular logic often reduces the distance between sub-
ject and object such that difference disrupts the edges of the singularity,
and an already violently contrived singularity responds with cruel force.
As Hermann Herlinghaus argues, Modes of subjectivization are highly
dependent on aesthetico-political fields that delimit the horizons of a
given order or hierarchy of the sayable, desirable, and performable and
that which remains secret or excluded (22).
It is relevant to imagine and understand the way literature as a system
of specific ideasthe type of ideas that become distinct and individualized
through writing, even without the presence of specified causesnecessarily

creates the space of possibility for political repression from authoritarian
regimes. Here, we may call Juan Jos Saer to witness. He leads us to see
that there is a twofold reason for this. On the one hand, writing and repre-
sentation threaten the representational schema of any authoritarian regime.
Dictatorial control and hegemony rests on stifling the creation and repro-
duction of any representation that might threaten the control over mean-
ing a dictatorship requires.
El exilio politico de tipo coyuntural no es exclusivo de los escritores; que

un escritor sea desterrado de su propio pas por que no corresponde a las
consignas ideolgicas de los que gobiernan es un hecho que no refleja ms
que un aspecto del problema y que, cuanto ms, hace solidario al escritor
con los otros sectores de la sociedad que sufren las misma suerte. (Saer 268)
Para una estimacin correcta de las relaciones especficas entre exilio y lit-
eratura, es preciso que la praxis misma de la literatura se vuelva problemtica,
sin que se oponga necesariamente y de manera expltica, en sus posiciones
ideolgicas, al poder politico, el cual mediante el exilio, la conspiracin del
silencio, la represin, decide que sea inexistente. (Saer 269)
Political exile of the conjunctural type is not exclusive to writers; that a
writer be displaced from her own country because she does not correspond
with the ideological slogans of those who govern is an act that does not
reflect more than one part of the problem, and whats more, it allows for the
writer to be in solidarity with others who suffer the same fate.
For a correct estimation of the specific relationships between exile and
literature, it is necessary that the praxis of literature become problematic,
without necessarily being explicit and so opposed in their ideological posi-
tions to political power, which by exile and the conspiracy of silence and
repression, renders it nonexistent.
Saers view is that literatures relationship to exile necessitates an active

opposition by writers to dictatorial power and the conspiracy of silence
and repression enforced by dictatorship. His injunction is indisputable,
arguing that clear knowledge of how literature relates to exile requires the
intervention of writing upon the political, almost certainly courting that
selfsame exile and political repression. It is fitting that a politically engaged
person in exile would think this, given the extraordinary power that lit-
erature has over the imagination of regimes. Self-exiled in Paris in 1968,
Saer explored the consequences of exile and literature through a serious of
recurring motifs and investigations on the theme.
Does this suggest that the only relationship between literature and exile
is an explicit confrontation of repression by writing? Are there alternative
152 C.M. AMADOR
ways of mapping how displacement and writing intersect without the

explicit taking of a position by the writer? This is not to suggest that
I advocate a political quietism on the notion of exile, but rather that we
imagine exile as also performing a singular function, and that the singu-
larity, the subjectivization of the single exiled victim often imagined by
exile writers must also be challenged as a problem, one that makes for the
emergence of collectivities, tense and difficult.
This is not the only reason to challenge singularity. As I will show, it
may be that there is an affective and political disjunct between exile and
the world-system of writing itself. Bolaos claim that literature, or the lit-
erary system of readers, publishers, and writers, precludes the possibility of
any exile that is not motivated by a type of problematic nostalgia, allows us
to identify a specific form of understanding and affective liberation within
the space of the literary.
THEORIES OFEXILE WRITING

Writing about the relationship of writing to the concept of exile also suf-
fers from a panoply of problems for scholars who wish to explore how the
status of exile affects literary production. To begin with, much of the sec-
ondary literature studying the relationship between writing and the status
of the concept of exile has been subsumed under the conceptual matrix of
diaspora studies. The displacement and affective dislocation of the exiled
from his national origins are often questioned as having the capacity to
inform literature as a category. Exile as a notion seems to suffer as from
an under-theorization, while being widely considered one of the most rel-
evant terms of contemporary political understanding.3
In Spain, the big exodus of 1939, which saw 465,000 Spanish flee
the persecution of the recently victorious Falangeists, created a displaced
population of writers, artists, and other intellectuals that would find ref-
uge abroad, many of whom would never return again to their homeland
until nearly 40 years later, with Francos death in 1976. Still more never
returned to see Spain ever again. Global political history has seen the mas-
sive increase of exiles and displaced persons, and the creation of a new polit-
ical subjectivitythe refugeeby means of the dislocating mechanisms of
3
In her introduction to Displacements: Cultural Identities in Question (1994), editor
Angelika Bammer argues that the separation of people from their native culture through
physical dislocation is one of the most formative experiences of this century (xi).
contemporary political life. Yet the exile has rarely, if ever, been treated as a
political force referring to the nation of origin.
The above descriptions of refugees does not cover, for example, the mil-
lions of people in exile that emerged as a consequence of the turbulence
of Latin Americas twentieth century. The two most well-known examples
certainly include Chile, which saw almost a million citizens exiled from its
lands, and Argentina, which saw significantly fewer exiles, but who formed
an equally active and vocal enclave of resistance abroad, and among whose
numbers included a great number of already prominent writers.
Although I focus here on the Southern Cone, one should never for-
get that during this period of intense dictatorship and political struggle,
almost every Latin American nation produced waves of exiled citizens.
Each of these nationsfrom Colombia to Cubahas a story to tell about
the powerful consequences of the politics of dislocation. Furthermore,
those writing on Latin America and exile have long recognized that one of
the most enduring consequences of the regions history has been the cre-
ation of a vibrant and visible diaspora created by political displacement.4
From Brazil to the Dominican Republic, the visual and cultural geography
of the hemispheres has been irrevocably changed by the flow of exiles and
their effort to adapt to the unfortunate dynamism of political displacement.
This geography of exile, is of course, a geography and topography of
suffering. The suffering of exile is part of the grave chronicle of torment
of age that arguably can mark its political maturity with the genocide and
deportation of Armenians in 1915. Exiles historical fabric is part of the
very palpable tapestry of political violence that marks what George Steiner
calls a civilization of quasi-barbarism.5
In this age, the concepts of exile and that of the refugee have become
blended, as host-nations grant political asylum, but often do not specify
the legal status of a refugee or a person in exile.6 Much of the literary
theory and analysis on this topic has not differentiated between the two
4
There has been significant work on the issue of Latin American exile and diaspora. Please
see Mario Sznajder and Luis Ronigers The Politics of Exile in Latin America (2009), for an
excellent transnational history that gives a detailed analysis of the political history of exile in
the region.
5
This quote is located in an unsourced quotation in Edward Saids essay Reflections on
Exile in Reflections on Exile (2000).
6
While the United Nations Refugee Agency maintains a division between migrants, refu-
gees, and exiles, it nonetheless addresses the legal and political ambiguity of the status of
refugees in their recent report on the issue globally: The Office of the United Nations High
154 C.M. AMADOR
statuses, and what has suffered has been a thorough-going discussion on

how nationalism or nationalist sentiments seem to operate in Southern
Cone literary production. This text will not address in depth the impor-
tant distinction between the status of a refugee and that of a person in
exile. Exiles idiosyncracies and vintage are different enough from the sta-
tus of refugee to merit deeper analysis. The following long quote from
Edward Said elaborates the aforementioned nicely:
Although it is true that anyone prevented from returning home is an exile,

some distinctions can be made among exiles, refugees, expatriates, and mi-
grs. Exile originated in the age-old practice of banishment. Once banished,
the exile lives an anomalous and miserable life, with the stigma of being
an outsider. Refugees, on the other hand, are a creation of the twentieth-
century state. The word refugee has become a political one, suggesting
large herds of innocent and bewildered people requiring urgent interna-
tional assistance, whereas exile carries with it, I think, a touch of solitude
and spirituality. (Said 181)
I agree with Said in two specific ways. Firstly, it is clear that the refu-
gee is a creation of twentieth-century juridical and national development.
As decolonization occurred, so too did the creation of new nations and
nationalisms. The invention of these identities and borders made possible
the refugee. After all, the national is the first condition of the refugee: her
soil and culture is torn from her. She is landless, stateless, and her nation
is that which is to be destroyed or rent asunder.
Nonetheless, the nation is at least somewhat retained as a point of ref-
erence and often recreated or reimagined from the position and place of
exile. First, there is a conceptual framework for exile that implicates the re-
creation of the lost land and familiar topographiesthe affective, physical,
or sensual loss of home. This is a phenomenon seen in many exile commu-
nitiesrestaurants, shops, and cultural centers emerge in response to the
dislocating force of exile. In this fashion, the nation is rewritten within the
framework of the new nations institutions itself. Without being Utopian
or unnecessarily triumphant about the status of the exile in their new
national home, it is possible to argue that what differentiates generations
of exiles from their descendents is the capacity in which later generations
see the new nations institutions as shells for the approximation of the lost
home or a site for the creation of a hybridized identity that reflects aspects
Commissioner, The State of the Worlds Refugees: Human Displacement in the New
Millennium (2006).
of former and current home. Of further relevance is how mythological

the home nation might appear. Generations of those who were exiled in
early youth, or those who were born to parents who were in exile may be
said to mythologize the homeland less, seeing its vaunted institutions in a
more objective light.
Yet the exile is not condemned to merely reimagine the old through a
simulacral logic. Rather, as Said argues, a state of exile often carries with
it a sort of double possibility for innovative and often pleasing expression
and life:
For an exile, habits of life, expression, or activity in the new environment inevi-
tably occur against the memory of these things in another environment. Thus,
both the new and the old environments are vivid, actual, occurring together
contrapuntally. There is a unique pleasure in this sort of apprehension, espe-
cially if the exile is conscious of other contrapuntal juxtapositions that diminish
orthodox judgment and elevate appreciative sympathy. (Said 186)
Contrapuntality is Saids way of saying that exile renders possible a nego-

tiation of meaning between the two cultures. The displacement of exile
becomes a reorienting mechanism for the new environment, and the new
environment is given the capacity to decenter the land of origin. Order
and commonplace logic are disrupted, leading to a new map of being. As
Said puts it: Exile is life without habitual order. It is nomadic, decen-
tered, contrapuntal; but no sooner does one get accustomed to it than its
unsettling force erupts anew (186).
In one of the most sustained and thorough-going studies of exile in
Iberian and Spanish-American literature, The Dialectics of Exile: Nation,
Time, Language and Space in Hispanic Literatures, the author, Sophie
McClennan, begins with a pointed investigation on exiles configurations
of space, temporality, and national identity. She identifies how the experi-
ence of exile often yields a very specific set of literary representations of
national identity, spatial experience, and the experience of a new tempo-
rality experienced during exile. Nation, Time, Language, and Space,
are all investigated in order to arrive and facilitate a detailed study of exile
literature that maps the experience along crucial coordinates of cultural
experience.
Although, as McClennan identifies the history of exile literature is
as old as the history of writing itself (McClennan 3), she concurs that
literary-critical analysis of exile writing has been limited to investigations
which have tended to analyze these works according to a binary logic,
156 C.M. AMADOR
where exile either produces creative freedom or it traps the writer in restric-
tive nostalgia (McClennan 2). Within the space produced by this binary,
analysis of the relationship between writing and exile often focuses explic-
itly on the emotional responses produced by the experience. McClennan
argues that the feelings associated with exile are sensations of exultation at
freedom from the fetters of a national discourse or a sense of missing the
familiar confines of home. As McClennan identifies in her study:
Scholars suggest that Exile is either a creative and liberating state, which
enables the writer to function freely of the limitations of the local and the
national, or they argue that exile literature is profoundly nostalgic and yearns
for the lost nation. Exile either causes creative freedom and reflects a global
aesthetic or its results in heightened provincialism. (2)
The binary representation of the exile thus forces the reading of any situa-
tion to operate within the strict spaces of local territorial logic or in taking
the world as a deterriorializing frame of reference. Exiles scholars have
tended to operate between these poles of the globe and the nation-state,
ignoring the possibility that the experience of exile might be no mere dual-
istic experience, but instead always a mixture of sentiments and sensations
in other words, exile as an experience might be as deterriorialized and
deterritorializing as our day-today life.
Where previous texts have neglected to identify the affective tensions
inherent in exile, McClennan identifies the aforementioned tropes of
nation, space, language, and time, and the dialectical play of these ideas
with exile. The dialectics of exile, as such, operate as a series of literary
and theoretical engagements with the concept of exile at the level of a logic
that does not necessarily reconcile the binary possibilities of the affective,
geographical, and temporal aspects of exile experience, but rather, allows
them to remain in tension. Instead, McClennen forcefully makes the claim
that the tensions of the experience of exile are revealed dialectically within
the textual productions of her writersUruguayan Cristina Peri Rossi,
Spains Juan Goytisolo, and Ariel Dorfman from Chilerevealing a more
complicated field of understanding for students of literature and exile.
What is most prominently revealed is how these tensions expand the
descriptions of what is actually possible to represent in the exile expe-
rience. As we have seen with Saers intervention, the very function of
writing within a dictatorial regime is the target of the regimes violence.
Writing emerges as the functional origin for exilea nation where writing
is not free, not practicable, by virtue of the political desire for a singular
communication, enforces exile and more pernicious forms of violence as
the natural consequence to the opposition of writing. What this means for
the study of exile is the implicit understanding of how exile writing is a
phenomenon rooted in the specificity and immediacy of the lived moment.
Exile is always a product of a specific political intervention by both regime
and author, binding both inexorably; as McClennen points out:
Simply put, the condition of exile is directly a result of the social and politi-
cal climate occupied by the author, making ahistorical exile literature a con-
tradiction in terms. For the exiled writer, questions of language, problems
with publication and audience, and the social context of the exile as outsider
and outcast make transcendence unattainable. (41)
The question of an unattainable transcendence is remarkable inasmuch

as it equates transcendence with the capacity to speak across temporal
and historical zones. But what is at stake in exile writing is often the very
transcendence that McClennen speaks of. Exile writing is a difficult and
naturally dialectical phenomenon, where the writer often shifts in and out
of the emotions produced by the geographical change. Part of the extraor-
dinary response of exile is a remapping of the concept and apperception of
nation and nationalism.
National identity is one of the first losses felt by those in exile, and their
reflections often begin by analyzing what this means. On the one hand,
the loss of nation immediately felt begins to produce nostalgia, sadness,
and a need to reproduce aspects of the nation in the new sphere. On the
other hand, for many exiled writers, freedom of sorts from the repressive
consequences of writing becomes a motivating force, and their capacity
for work and intervention is given new stimulus by exile. An innovative
type of writing of the present and rewriting of history is brought to bear,
and history and national identity are material for literary reconfiguration:
[E]xiles tend, to some degree or another, to incorporate both seemingly
contradictory strategies. They attempt to remap cultural identity, while
simultaneously breaking down the externally imposed borders of cultural
identity which correspond to a concept of the nation (30).
In the field of Southern Cone literary studies, Kaminskys After Exile:
Writing the Latin American Diaspora remains one of the most devel-
oped literary studies on the question of exile, literature and my area of
study, the Southern Cone of the South American continent (Argentina,
158 C.M. AMADOR
Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay). Her extensive text draws on a long tradition

of exile writerssome of the more famous ones from the region include
Mario Benedetti, Marta Traba, Jos Donoso, Ricardo Piglia, and Luisa
Valenzuelato illustrate how the experience of exile and the creation of
diaspora by Southern Cone writers reflects a concern with a spatial, embod-
ied discourse of exile. Furthermore, Kaminsky attempts to deal with the
affective dimensions of the spatial concerns of exile, and how the battle
for an understanding of the exile space manifests a certain series of preoc-
cupations immanent to the experience of banishment and displacement.
Of further concern to Kaminsky is the manner in which the exile writ-
ing is embodied in a gendered position. The gendered nature of exile, as
women writers experience the displacements and wounds of exile in a very
different fashion; physically, politically, as well as emotionally, is coupled
with the experience of male writers to concretize her study of exile as a
particular experience of the real.
Kaminsky describes her project in the following manner: In looking
at language and space, I am trying to hold on to the material: exile as a
lived reality; language as produced in, and received by the body; space as
located matter, with measurable distances, and occupied (Kaminsky xvi).
Exile for Kaminsky expresses the physical contours of displacement and
the deterritorializations and reterriorializations of the exiled subject. By
considering such questions as the instability of exile itself; the mutual
constitution of language and space in texts; the notion of national identity
as a condition of an exile sensibility; and memory and forgetting, After
Exile serves as one of the more developed and extensive meditations upon
the theme.
This chapter will now turn to describe the basic operators of the defi-
nition of exile as both a political and literary phenomenona state of
political being that, I believe, is central to understanding Bolao. What
will become clear from the following is how the concept of exile in litera-
ture and literary analysis is a pluralized, polyvalent field, that operatesin
spite of the necessarily coerced nature of exileas a specific reflection, a
type of nonsingularized and nonsingularizing writing, investigating the
experience of politically motivated banishment. The specific involves the
taking of sides and the creation of allegiances through a decision, one that
is universalisable, and always specific-to (though not specified by) a situ-
ation external to its operation (250). Born of a distinct relation between
external situation and a decision to engage that situation in order to
elaborate it for a universal community, many writers on exile imagine their
experience as one that is comprehensible and writeable for many.
On the other hand, there exists a tendency for exileor any politically
traumatic eventto be seen as a singularity, or a particular trauma that
divides those who suffer exile from those who stay. This singularity creates
a rupture in political communication. Exiles often see their positions as a
singularity that imputes extraordinary distance between themselves and
those who cannot or have not experienced the emotional disturbances of
exile. Those who left are burdened with the necessity and duty to describe
their experience, commemorating what always must be remembered:
the destruction of political life, the imposition of fear; and in the case of
the Southern Cone, the horrible murders, disappearances, and spiritual
assault upon common life. This means that, for the Southern Cone,
there is a tension between the exile and those left behind in work like
Kaminskys. The exile is one who is not part of a singular experience, but
rather one whose literature reflects a plurality of preoccupations for those
writers, and other artists who reflect upon it.
One of Kaminskys most developed notionsone that will be pursued
further in the later discussion on how the specific is formed in relation
to a prior political or epistemic situationis how exile is a spatial and
a material phenomenon. It is spatial not only because it is the displace-
ment of the subject from her home, changing the contours and physical
realities of experience, but because the exile herself is given the capacity
to reconfigure space through her existence in her host country. The exiled
subject is in many ways as much a material agent of change on the physical
space. His or her bodily difference often announces itself, her accent or
language permeates the publicly audible space, and her body is changed
by the deterritorialization of exile, or in Spanish, el destierro. As Kaminsky
puts it: [e]xile and all the related to it have a material component, and
that component is felt, experienced and known through the body. This is
not to say that it is not theorized, interpreted, and or represented through
language; but that without the emplaced human body, there is nothing to
know or represent about exile and its aftermath (Kaminsky ix).
The exiles experience is always one where the affective experiencing of
exile is narrated through the place where the body lies. Out of the national
space means out of the space and place where identity is rooted, at least
partially, in the practices, spaces, and day-to-day movement of the physi-
cal nation. Kaminsky and McClennen both articulate an important point
that other critics on exile have overlookedthe role of the material and
affective circumstances that make up exilespace, nation, time, and repre-
sentations of quotidian life. As writers in the Southern Cone have suffered
exile, so their writing has expressed the finer points and texture of exile
160 C.M. AMADOR
as an experience. Part of the power of Kaminsky and McClennens work

is that they advance the scholarly study of exile by pointing to the lived
complexity of the exile experience, and then by identifying these repre-
sentations within the literature. Thus, studies of how exiles perceive time,
map out their lived space, and configure their daily struggles becomes
vitally important.
What Kaminsky and McClennen provide is a way toward understanding
exile literature as a multifaceted written phenomenology of displacement
from home. McClennen, through her dialectical technique, reveals how
exile is never a singular experience of trauma and pain. Rather, exile is
made up of the movement of affects surrounding the subjective experience
of space, nationality, temporality, expressed through the often incomplete
and unstable regime of language. Languages vacillation between com-
municability and the often untranslatable affects, mirror the complexity
of exile experience. McClennans work deepens the field in order to take
studies of exile literature in a direction where its literary expressions can
reveal a great deal concerning the way we deal with trauma in our most
material and quotidian aspects.
Finally, McClennan and Kaminsky both develop readings of exile writ-
ing that further research into the capacity for writing to develop and
express the affective experience of exile. In addition, both authors tie the
experience to temporality, language, and space. Yet Bolao moves beyond
this in specifying not just the state of exile, but also a nomad, as a specific
kind of exile who does not try to create a nation simply by dichotomy.
The figure of the nomad is discussed by Bolao in his illuminating
series of short articles and essays entitled Fragmento de un regreso
a un pas natal (1998). This series of texts represents Bolaos most
explicit nonfictional engagement with the concept of the exilea con-
cept treated with extraordinary fictional and allegorical power in his two
masterpiece novels: Los Detectives Salvajes, and 2666. Exile, in Bolaos
lexicon, does not exist as a word, given that it lacks any descriptive force
for the real state of textual and literary production and consumption in
which authors function. For a prolific and engaged writer like Bolao,
the concept of the exile is disruption of the fundamental dislocation and
deterritorialization that is the relationship of the reader and the writer to
textual consumption, production, and circulation. Bolao instead privi-
leges the figure of the nomad, especially where it concerns the figure of
the reader and the deterritorializing and reterritorializing networks of
literature.
Here, Bolaos idea of the nomad emerges as a form of subjectivity

that makes a significant inroad into the question of the specific, model-
ing a form of reading and writing, an ethic of the literary that is formed
from the indifference to the specified. And the inroad made by Bolaos
subjectivity allows us to imagine the specific in a very distinct fashion
it illustrates the actual existence of a form of relation that is indifferent
to national articulations but instead offers a possibility for a relation to
others that is more plural, more attentive to difference while being less
attentive to differentiation; and ultimately more just. This is not a nave
perspective on the specific, for even if the specific focuses on the relation
between subject and object in a clear and precise fashion, stripped clean of
all overdetermined possibility of meaning, Hallward is quick to remind us
that Relation is not itself ethical or oriented toward some inherent social
good. The universal criteria by which relaions are to be valued or inflected
remains a matter of inter-subjective decision (Hallward 330).
As we shall see, Bolao does not explicitly orient his relation to pro-
duce a prearranged end, but instead provides the conditions for a specific
form of relation to emerge. In the concluding remarks to this work, I will
address Simon Critchleys work on ethics in these terms, addressing along-
side it Bolaos nomad subjectivity, in order to provide a way to work
an explicitly ethical demand into the question of the specific. After my
discussion of Bolao, Critchley will be our bridge to understanding how
the ethical emerges from these questions of singularity and specificity in a
process of active decision and valuation. However, for that to be the case,
the most appropriate field from which to begin is the specific, which does
not presume anything but the very nature of relationality itself.
BOLAOS VISION OFEXILE, OR WHY WE

HAVE ALWAYS BEEN NOMADS
I begin by noting the irony often present in Bolaos work: his most
thorough and explicit writing against the concept of exile takes place in
a section of his magisterial collection of essays, Entre parntesis, entitled
Fragmentos de un regreso al pas natal (Fragments of a return to the
country of my birth). Fragmentary as it is, it narrates Bolaos one and
only return to Chile after leaving the country in 1973, at the age of 20,
and provides a conceptual map of some of the most important issues sur-
rounding exile and literature, such as the relationship between remaining
in the country, leaving the country in exile, and the capacity to speak for
162 C.M. AMADOR
the nation as a national witness or writer, or how the canon of writers said
to speak for the nation is formed after the possibility of return is realized.
Uniquely, Bolaos conception of exile transgresses against an idea
rooted in the traditional matrix of exile and nation that I have discussed
above. He differs from many writers from the Southern Cone region in
his affiliation with a deeply transnational and intertextual notion of literary
identity, challenging an era in which, as Kaminsky argues a new, critically
analytical way of addressing national literary culture has become a central
issue for Uruguay, Argentina, and Chile (Kaminsky 109).7
Bolaos work forms a counterpoint to the renewal of national identity
and literary concern, producing a discourse more in line with a specific
nature of writing, relating not directly with the concept of nation, but
instead inhabiting the relational space of writing, reading, and location
itself.
Exiliarse no es desaparecer sino empequeecerse, ir reducindose lenta-

mente o de manera vertiginosa hasta alcanzar la altura verdadera, la altura
del ser, Swift, maestro de exilios, lo saba. Para l exilio era el nombre secreto
de viaje. Muchos exiliados, cargados ms de dolor que de razones, rechaz-
aran esta afirmacin. El exilio es el valor. El exilio real es el valor real de cada
escritor. (Bolao 150)
To exile oneself is not to disappear but to become smaller, to go reducing
oneself slowly, or vertiginously in order to achieve ones true heightthe
height of being, as Swift, the master of exiles knew. For him exile was the
secret name of travel. Many exiles, bearing more pain than reasons, would
reject this affirmation. Exile is value. Real exile is the real value of each writer.
Bolao uses the Spanish word valor with the extreme double valence it
carries in his native tongue. Loosely translated as value, it more closely
resembles a combination of honor, integrity, and value: perhaps it approxi-
mates a sort of ethical and political pride that accompanies the sacrifice of
writing and living. This valor, which can also be likened to the English
valor, is the strength that comes with the writers office. In a type of cir-
cularity, Bolao equates the true valor of a writer with her presence as an
exile. Her integrity and strength, indeed, her honor as a writer seems to
emerge from understanding her status as an exile. Coupled with the pre-
vious long statement of Bolaos, a theory of both exile and the writers
craft emerges, joining them together irrevocably.
7
Kaminsky, p.109.
Travel is exiles secret name, Bolao asserts, opening the field of liter-
ary criticism to rereading the position of exile. What is at stake in this
reading is a reconfiguration of exile from an entirely different affective
and subjective position. Exile is often seen as the traumatic displacement,
el destierrothe deearthingof a subject from a national root that sus-
tains the spirit, and circumscribes the identity. The very physical space of
inhabitation is rewritten, and the exiled subject gains a type of identity by
means of the dislocation.
As Kaminsky puts it in her seminal book: Exile is a removal in space
as well as spirit. It is a physical uprooting, an individuals removal from a
familiar place to a new space that has, at least at the beginning, no recog-
nizable coordinates (11). Exile creates a new cartographic subject that
marks her being in the world with gravely different engagements with
space, movement, and their marking therein. Space and literary produc-
tion often share space for the exile, as the new bodily experience becomes
the somatic impulse for their writing.
A brief aside is needed here: we are assuming that the motivations for
exile are essentially the relationship a writer has with the state. Here we
return to Saers view on literature and exile: it is precisely the taking up of
what is viewed by authoritarian power as a specified position, to remind us
of Hallwards language, that makes possible the condition for exile. For
Saer, literature gains its clearest relationship to exile through the prob-
lematic conditions for literary practice in the public sphere. [S]in que se
oponga de manera explcita (65) [without opposition in an explicit man-
ner], he states, illustrating that the very practice of writing is threatening
to dictatorial forces. Whether it is allegorical or directly referential, writ-
ings very nature is an affront to the singularization of meaning that forms
the subjectivizing principle of a politically oppressive state.
Saer provides an interesting and appropriate connection to Bolao, as
his politicized view of exile illustrates the capacity of literature and cultural
production to threaten the hegemonic ideologies of the day. And Bolaos
affirmation of the political value, or the real value of exile for a writer
underscores how the political capacity for exile is often part of the condi-
tion of possibility for literary practice. Saer and Bolao coincide on this
point. El exilio es el real valor de cada escritor (151) [Exile is the real
value of a writer], he notes, and the relation of the writer to exile illustrates
the capacity to break with the territorial confinement of literature. The
literary represents the capacity of movement and deterritorialization, of
displacement and the remapping of territories of reading and inscription.
164 C.M. AMADOR
Exile is the internal possibility of writing to become subject to an order

of territorial management and transformation defining cultures value as a
break with the contours of nation, geography, and ideology.
However, Bolaos writing differs from Saers by articulating how exile
is part of the internal mechanism of the literary, and that the networks
of writing themselves are always in a state of dislocation and remapping.
Exile is not the only figure that illustrates literatures becoming and being.
Furthermore, the exile begins from the zone of political contest, and
not as Bolao argues, from the being of the literary itself. Bolaos essay
intends a rearticulation of this concept at the level of the regional ontol-
ogy of literature and factors in the movements and deterritorializations
that writing is capable of producing. In short, Bolao posits the nature of
writing itself as a specific discourse, a discourse of universal nomadism and
traveling across vast networks of reading and writing.
THE NOMAD ASA FIGURE OFTHESPECIFIC

What I have been building up to here is a way of figuring and writing
the specific through the deterritorializing and open figure of the nomad. The
nomad as war machine,8 as a figure of tribal and local but disruptively
mobile violence, opposes itself to state violence by always confronting the
state from the unfixed position of the territorially unmarked space of the
state. Nomads move through space, mapping an already fluid landscape,
while the state circumscribes the territory with borders, and through
the expression of national identity. The nation-state, in its worst manifes-
tation, is the figure of singularity, closing off the exterior of all possible
relationality through the imagining of a community that imposes physical
and affective limits that are unbreachable. As Nicholas Shumway summa-
rizes this relation:
Every singular configuration emerges through the dissolution of relation-

ality, as the expression of a non-relational, self-creative or self-constituent
force (Hallward 39), and the imagined community of the nation always
emerges as a self-constituting order, an organism whose interiority is the
source of the singular meaning. This is especially the case in the Southern
Cone, where the dissolution of the colonial order was met with the inven-
tion of nations like Argentina and Chile.9
8
This refers to a pendant piece of Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattaris Thousand Plateaus
that is published under the title Nomadology: The War Machine (1986).
9
Nicolas Shumway, The Invention of Argentina (1993).
When such relationality is dissolved, what emerges is a pure interiority,

a representational node outside of which no communication is possible,
no recognition of any external force or otherness exists. Singular figures
are united in a situation where all is immanent to their self-constituting
nature. They resemble the Leibnizian monad, but lacking relationality,
the exterior touches and addresses nothing but what is within. We see the
singularity represented in the political and social field through the myr-
iad fascisms and totalitarianisms of the world that tried to create regimes
where only what was interior to the regime, formed through self-creative
force is relatable or addressable. Indeed, it is difficult to mention relation
as anything but a mirror phenomenon, whereby the interiority is all that
is seen by the regime.
The singular produces nothing that can be figured as alterity, not even
the specified of an actual, recognizable enemy. To imagine an enemy
capable of real relationality is to believe that what is outside the singular
configuration is part of a creative processthe process that brings life and
possibility out of a creative expression. In other words, the singular cannot
abide an external creative forcethis would require that any creative force
be external, possibly contingent, and not purely immanent to the singular
figure itself.
On the other hand, it can be readily seen how the creative power of the
singular is the creation of a type of universality, a destruction of any border
that might be imposed from the outside in an attempt to arrest the emer-
gence of the singulars creative force. The singular can be said to erupt and
destroy all borders, laying out the possibilities for what Hallward calls an
unbounded sphere of inclusion, a Totality which has the possibility for
a transcendent singularity, as Hallward puts it essentially unlimited by its
environment (Hallward 177).
This type of singular is not relational itself to any hermeneutic or theo-
retical notion of boundaries or limits. Hallward is quick to point out the
dialectical tension between the singular as the disruptive force and the fact
that no singular category is merely universal in the sense or something
valid or constant within certain circumscribed parameters (177). What
this tension reveals is, and what we ultimately return to, is that the sin-
gular is self-universalising, so to speak, in a much stronger sense; it creates
these very parameters themselves. By creating the medium of its existence,
a singularity effectively creates its own universe (177).
Thus, the singulars universe always excludes any possibility of a univer-
sal that admits for differing points of origin, other immanent energies, or
creative possibilities. What is produced by the singular is always produced as
166 C.M. AMADOR
a universal, and all meaning is analyzed by and analyzable through the pro-
ductive power of that singular and its universal contenta singular con-
figuration presumes the immediate articulation of both limits of its exclusive
scale of existence (250). The exclusivity of the reach of the singular as a
conceptual tool is what interests us here, given that a great part of Bolaos
critique of the exile is precisely its resemblance to the singular as univer-
sal, which effectively delimits the capacity for a new subjectivitya specific
onethat is opened up to the space that specific possibilities entail.
It is important to examine the role which universals play in the theoriz-
ing of new subjectivities and political possibilities through specific forms
of resistance and imagination. To make this point another way, we begin
with a long, manifesto-like quote from Bolao, where we can see clearly
how he configures writing, literature, and the identity of the nomad in
the creation of a possibility of new subjectivities through the assumption
of a radical choice. We catch glimpses of the specific process of the nomad
in this quote, remembering Hallwards injunction that [e]very making-
specific is thus an irreducibly subjective process, and the subject is nothing
other than a practice of de-specification (Hallward 249).
Bolao begins the process of de-specification, that is, the moving out
of the specified tropes of identity (exile, national citizen, and so on), into
a specification that Hallward considers to be the result of a process that
converts essentially static (habitual, coercive, unconscious) relationships
into dynamic and deliberate relations (249). Bolao accomplishes the
above by first calling into question the exile, a notoriously singular figure,
denuding the pretense of coercion, and putting into play the exile as a
figure of power:
El exilio, en la mayora de los casos, es una decision voluntariaEn el mejor

de los casos el exilio es una opcin literaria. Similar a la opcin de la escritura.
Nadie te obliga escribir. El escritor entra voluntariamente en ese laberinto,
por mltiples razones Con la gran ventaja para el escritor de que un abo-
gado o un politico al uso, fuera de su pas de origen, se suele comportar como
pez fuera de agua, al menos durante un tiempo. Mientras que a un escritor
fuera de su pas de origen pareciera como si le crecieran alas. (Bolao 154)
Exile, in most cases, is a voluntary decision In the best case it is a liter-
ary option. Similar to the option of writing. Nobody forces you to write. The
writer enters the maze voluntarily, for many reasons This is a great advan-
tage for the writer, whereas of a lawyer or a politician outside of their country
of origin, generally behaves like a fish out of water, at least for a while. While
a writer, outside their country of origin, seems as if he grew wings.
Bolao is vigorous in his claim concerning the state of the exile and its
relation to writing as the consequence of a process of subjectivization
that of the decision to write.
Writing, Bolao argues, is the acceptance of a particular type of subjec-
tivity that is radically available only in the same way certain bourgeois roles
are availableit is certainly not coincidental that he juxtaposes the writer
to those two most incontrovertibly bourgeois roles of politician and law-
yer. The writer is not a subaltern identity, in his definition. By definition,
the subaltern is an identity in search of representational justice against the
silences produced by hegemonic discourseacademic, political, or liter-
ary, to name a few. Writing as a profession is the entrance into a labyrinth
of social and class relations that few have the privilege to enter. A writer, in
Bolaos depiction, is an intensely powerful figure, imbued with a will-to-
write that is only possible if will is followed by the activity of decisionthe
writer breaks the silences imposed on subalterns.
There is no demand to write, in the sense of the Levinasian demand for
recognition of the other, no call to intersubjectivity or intertextuality imma-
nent within writing. Instead, in Bolaos account, what writing becomes is
a particular voluntarism that exposes how imbricated writing is with the
bourgeois idea of achieving ones fortune through personal labor and luck.
Becoming a writer is thus a radical decision, and in so forming writing as a
decision, rather than as a calling, or a demand, gives the writer a capacity to
intervene in the world, a force of possibility, that like law or politics, meets
and creates obligations and connections within the field it inhabits.
Furthermore, Bolao reminds the reader of the capacity for exile to
inspire writing: [U]n escritor fuera de su pas de origen pareciera como
si le crecieran alas (151) [a writer outside of their country would seem
to have grown wings]. The clich invoked here by Bolao hides a deeper
truth. If a writer is indeed given wings, then by extension we can see
how dislocation and exile work as a new configuration of possibility by
virtue of altering the affective and semiotic dimensions of their possible
work. As we know from Kaminsky and McClennens work, exile alters
significantly almost every dimension of a writers lifespace, time, lan-
guage, and even bodily understanding is irrevocably transformed by the
conditions of exileno matter that their argument focuses primarily on
the negative aspects of exile. Kaminsky is especially perjorative about how
exile and writing negatively inform each other. She argues that a complete
collapse of communication is made possible by the circumstances of exile.
Kaminsky argues that exile throws up a barrier between writer and reader
168 C.M. AMADOR
and that writer after writer deals with this dilemma (Kaminsky 67). In
stark contraposition to Bolaos claim of a liberatory force for exile, then,
Kaminsky radicalizes the capacity of language to collapse and lose coher-
ence in the state of exile. Writers in exile are concerned with recovering
or addressing their ideal readersthose that they have left behind in their
home country. Unable to do so, they are severed from the readership and
left adrift lost in the new nation, facing a new and unfamiliar readership.
Bolao challenges such assumptions openly, arguing that the literary
labyrinth is a path whose secret name is travel. This travel, the movement
of exile, is a voluntary phenomenon, the movement along a self-created
trajectory that opens up the writer to new possibilities of literary produc-
tion. Writing in exile, as a voluntary phenomenon, becomes a modality of
the move from the singular relation of national writer to that of a despecified
writer, one who begins to reflect the possibilities of the specific in writing.
This is not to say that Bolao denies the very real necessity of choosing
exile in order to save a life for writing, so to speak: En el peor de los casos
exiliarse es mejor que necesitar exiliar se y no poder hacerlo (Bolao 55)
[in the worst of cases to go into exile is better than needing to be exiled
and not being able to do it]. We are all well aware of the consequences
of what the worst of cases means for exiledeath, torture, and often
eventual forced exile. Under these conditions, it is certainly preferable to
choose exile than to do otherwise. However, it is not the case that Bolao
is being flippant or unnecessarily cavalier about the prospects of exile. It
cannot be argued that Bolao does not understand the immense personal
consequences imposed during exile.
Rather, what Bolao does is provide a possibility to ameliorate the pain
of exile through a deepening of the relationship between writing, reading,
and subjectivity. Bolao disbelieves in exile as defining for writers their
very existence as literary creaturesthat trope is part of a long-standing
literary topography of reading that a priori places them in a condition of
an already displaced and decentered subjectivity.
TOWARD ACONCLUSION: AREDEFINITION

OFLATIN AMERICAN WRITING
The relevance of the specific to unfold the implications of this utterance

cannot be undervalued, as it is among our best philosophical tools for
establishing a possibility for an ethical subjectivity that is formed through
the world-system of reading. Literature is a complex and multifaceted sys-
tem of exchanges that has a particular autonomy and a series of traveling
paths that always bring the writer and reader into a point of encounter:
pues yo no creo en exilio, sobre todo no creo en el exilio cuando esta
palabra va junto a la palabra literatura (153) [I dont believe in exile.
Most of all, I dont believe in exile when it goes together with the word
literature]. Why might Bolao create this cleavage, especially given the
immense labors of writers, and the constant struggle of exiled writers to
find and produce meaning from their experiences in exile?
The answer, I believe, lies in Bolaos understanding of the fundamen-
tally displaced and deterritorialized circuit of writing and textuality, driven
by the ethics of a reader and a writer. Bolaos critique of the exile stems
from an attempt to re-situate the writer in an intertextual system that
relates readers and writers to each other through the connective tissue
of literature. The book, poem, or literary artifact travels along a network
that crosses national boundaries, deterritorializing the reader from the
constraints of native identity, and forces open the possibility of a reader
that travels along the paths opened up by literature and constantly moves
along these networks. This movement creates a unique opportunity for
subjectivityit unites within the always specific network of the nomadic
topography. I argue for the necessity of seeing nomadic topography as
specific topography, a topography that is indifferent to all naming conven-
tions and delimitations of the national.
Here, I refer again to the Deleuzian concept of the war machine, the
anthropologically derived concept of a force exterior to the state appara-
tus, itself defined as the arrangement of forces within the strict confines
and defensible borders of the Nation, State, polis, and so onthe ordering
of space and action within a singular or minimally specified set of borders.
As Deleuze and Guattari so elegantly put it, [t]he nomad has a terri-
tory; he follows customary paths; he goes from one point to another; he
is not ignorant of points (water points, dwelling points, assembly points,
etc.) although the points determine paths, they are strictly subordinated
to the paths they determine, the reverse of what happens with the seden-
tary (Deleuze and Guattari 380). If we take literature to be a navigable
system (and we can see from the earlier quotations that Bolao envisions
this possibility), then the figure of the nomad exists within the circuit
of the literary, drawing on points and determining paths and disrupting
the traditional relation of the reader as a sedentary figure to the State
apparatus.
What is most important here is to understand Bolaos figure as a coun-
terpoint to the traditional binary of exile and state. The literary nomad,
as I name it here, reworks its territorial affiliations through an active
170 C.M. AMADOR
decision to always challenge and attempt to undermine the territorializing

force of the state apparatus. The exile becomes a migrant in this fash-
ion, always deterritorializing whatever attempts to sediment his identity
within this framework. Yet this decision is not one that specifies a strict
relation between nomadism and the challenge to this state. Instead, this
is the implicit ontology of the nomad in Deleuze and Guattari, it does
not rebel or revolt against anything but the territorializing strategies of
the State apparatus. Instead, the nomad is always challenging power from
its exterior position to maintain his nomadic status. An exile is the speci-
fied figure of a direct challenge to the national or state apparatus, and
frequently wishes to construct a new state or redeem the old state along
its coordinates. The nomad always brings with him the specific as such.
Unconcerned with the state, it is the pure relation that interests its (the
nomads) movement and, if literary, its reading and writing.
The relevance of pitting the exile against the nomad as defining the
political power of a certain class of Latin American writers is simply the
relevance of addressing the singular and specified to the more liberatory
space of the specific. In pursuing a nomadic subjectivity, we open up the
field of writing and thought to the possibility of a politics and ethics that
always challenges the specified fixities and unspoken restrictions of the state
or the often singular affective perception of exile. The nation and the
state will almost certainly never disappear, and the extraordinary trauma of
exile cannot be overlooked or simply dismissed. Following Hallward, I
argue that Bolaos literary nomads express the essence of the
specific configuration [that] provides for a decision as such, as opposed to a

specified automation on the one hand or a singular inherence on the other.
The movement from the specified to specific, guarded against absorption
into the singular, is the only philosophical movement whose empty, con-
tentless course has a kind of global validity (that is, a validity indifferent to
particular values). (Hallward 333)
Bolaos work is critical to expanding this vision of a global validity that will
increase the visibility of the essence of the ethical in writinga vision that I
believe runs throughout his novels, as well. In my conclusion, I will address
how the specific allows readers and writers to envision ethical possibility along
the coordinates of a demand or the decision to respond to the demand.
Here, let me simply note that Bolaos nomad subjectivity clears the air
for the ultimate recognition of our ethical state, which Hallward succinctly
describes (and which I shall simply let rest with minor commentary):
There is nothing in experience, no ultimate value or pre-ontological ethi-
cal orientation, that will save us in the last resort. The question of how any
given relation is to be valued will always remain a matter of active valuing,
with all the properly subjective responsibility that implies (333).
And lastly, this nomad subjectivity is part of the emergence of a formal
explosion that Bolao prefigures in Latin American literature, illustrating
the fact that the nomadic subjectivity of reading and writing has formal
dimensions at the level of the text. In his recent book, Beyond Bolao: The
Global Latin American Novel, Hctor Hoyos argues for an interpretation
of the global validity of Bolao as a nomadic figure whose very writing
is a form of globalization that operates ethically. Indeed, Hoyos links the
worldliness and specificity of Bolaos work to the nature of immanence
a point that jibes well with the Deleuzes specific notion of immanence10:
Bolao [is a] thinker of immanence. If literature is the world, then crit-
ics and writers cannot be on the outside. And so description, more or less
fictionalized, would already transform the ensembleit would internally
affect that world (Hoyos 13).
Bolaos immanence is the position that the radical dynamism of the
nomads movements is the immanent fictionalization of a specific sphere of
purely relational possibilty and the inscription of a motile, plurivalent liter-
ary possibility, unforecloseable by the singular. And despite the fact that
the circuits of literature are among the objects controlled by the commer-
cial center/periphery model,11 it may still be argued that Bolaos nomad
flows in the space of open and specific play that is the logic of literatures
immanence and its modeling of individuation or differentiation. To return
to Hoyos, Bolao reinstates the gratuity of the creative act at the heart of
the world literature debate; favors a rhizomic understanding of literature
on a world scale over the center-periphery logic (14); this turns Bolao
into the Janus-faced reader and writer of the specific as cultural possibility.
10
As Deleuze writes in Pure Immanence: A Life: Immanence and a life thus suppose one
another. For immanence is pure only when it is not immanent to a prior subject or object,
mind of matter, only when, neither innate nor acquired, it is always yet in the making; and
a life is a potential or virtuality subsisting in just such a purely immanent plane (13). Thus
we can see how the virtuality of the immanent is the inability to close around the distinct
identity of a singular or specified plane, but the constant recirculation of the ungovernable
contours of an inclusive, specific plane.
11
See Pascale Casanovas seminal text The World Republic of Letters (2004), for a thorough
analysis of the commercial and cultural flows of literature as a center-periphery model.
172 C.M. AMADOR
This is not to say that literature is a force of pure autonomy in the sphere
of capital, but rather as both, a form of expression and cultural object, that
it has what Hoyos calls the semi-autonomy of art as the muddled affair
that it is, and this murky situation allows for the possibility of reimagin-
ing the logic of differentiation, at least as a model.
In alignment with Hoyos, the critic Osvaldo Zavala echoes the particu-
larity of Bolaos exile/nomad ethics, citing it as a sort of example of an
invention that weaves together a particular vision of literary history with
the specific as a question of transcendental individuation:
Entre parntesis presenta as a un sujeto articulador de gestos subversivos

que se reconoce como el ciudadano activo de una nacin transcontinental
imaginada de un modo anlogo a la manera en que Benedict Anderson estu-
dia la formacin del nacionalismo.
Entre parntesis presents the writer as a subject articulating itself through
subversive gestures, that also recognizes itself as an engaged citizen in
an intercontinental nation imagined in a mode analogous to Benedict
Andersons study of the formation of nationalism. (Zavala 647)12
Zavala is proposing the specific as an imagined community that reinscribes

the nations borders in the movement of an open, uncloseable form. The
intercontinental nation is the paradox par excellence, as neither border nor
topographic situation can close its parameters. What the nomad writer
represents is neither more nor less than a globalization with formal hope.
In the recognition of the nation, or the genre that explodes across global
lines of demarcation, Bolao imagines the writer as an agent ethically obli-
gated to the specific. Nationality as a function is the emergence of either
the specified or the singularneither is truly ethical in an irruptive, open
fashion as the foreclosure of the name always suggests the collapse of a
truth into either the collapse of the enemy/friend distinction or the pure
singularity of self-reference. To wit, Bolaos nation is merely a specific
space of inhabitation; a formal space for individuation to occur.
To conclude, Bolaos imagination is one where the act of reading,
writing, and the circuits of literary consumption model the possibility of
12
Osvaldo Zavala is arguably one of the more astute critics of Bolao, despite his focus on
literary genealogy. Notwithstanding, for a developed idea of Bolaos Entre parntesis as
both political text and sophisticated work of literary historiography, please read Zavalas El
ensayo Entre parntesis: Roberto Bolao y el olvido de la modernidad latinoamerican
(2012).
an ethics that forms the possible form of a specific conjuncture that cannot
collapse under its own weight. And although the weakness of writing as
a political practice can certainly be critiqued, it cannot be understated
that writing produces a series of generative possibilities for new forms of
thought and practice. As Gabriele Schwab argues, literature acts as an
experimental system able to generate emergent forms of language, sub-
jectivity, culture, and life (Schwab 3). Thus, literature as an experimental
system brings the specific into emergence as a form, and Bolaos work
molds the specific as an emergent mode desperately needed in our crisis-
prone era.
REFERENCES
Bammer, Angelika, ed. Displacements: Cultural Identities in Question. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1994. Print.
Braidotti, Rosi. Nomadic Subjects. NewYork: Columbia University Press, 1994. Print.
Casanova, Pascale. The World Republic of Letters. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2004. Print.
Office of the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees. The State of The
Worlds Refugees: Human Displacement in the New Millennium. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2006. Print.
Shumway, Nicolas. The Invention of Argentina. Berkeley, CA: University of California,
1993. Print.
Sznajder, Mario, and Luis Roniger. The Politics of Exile in Latin America. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2009. Print.
Zavala, Osvaldo. El Ensayo Entre Parntesis: Roberto Bolao Y El Olvido De La
Modernidad Latinoamericana. Revista Iberoamericana LXXVIII.240 (2012):
63756. Print.
CHAPTER 7
Conclusion
Everyone will readily agree that it is of highest importance to know

whether we are not duped by morality (Levinas 21). I begin with the
aforementioned quote as a point of departure in order to illustrate a
line threading through this project. Whether or not we are duped by
morality is one of the most important political and ethical considerations
possible. Being duped signifies the presence of a lie, a fundamental untruth
that guides belief and activity. An illusion persists over the content of our
actions as we are performing them or reflecting upon them, and when the
falsehood is revealed, a moment of trauma occurs that forces the subject
into consideration of its historicity, its way of being; indeed, the very con-
ditions of possibility for being-in-the-world become subject to a near-total
personal dislocation, if only for a brief period of time.
To be duped by morality, then, is to mistake ethics as morality and
as a moral code grounded in maxims and decisions. Rather, ethics is at its
most fundamental form a description of intersubjectivity and the responsi-
bility instantiated by the encounter between two subjects. This encounter
and the possibility for ethics is what has been operating throughout this
investigation, guiding and shaping my confrontation with the texts, art,
and public discourses of Latin Americas Southern Cone.
I framed this project using Hallwards logic of individuation and rela-
tionality in order to assert two fundamental claims. The initial claim
I make is that understanding individuation and relationality is a simple
and theoretically profound tool to mark and highlight how any and all

Paraguay, 19702000, DOI10.1057/978-1-137-54633-3_7
176 C.M. AMADOR
rhetorical and narrative strategies have a basis in the primordial construc-

tion of subjects and community. Literary writing, I argue, always imagines
an intersubjective possibility: first, between the reader and the text, second
within the frame of narrative, structuring the relations between the actants
and actors within the narrative. Relationality is formed of the capacity to
individuate, to draw a collective and particular identity that will structure
communication of conceptsas well as their transmission and articulation.
If, as Levinas claims, we can see that the very foundation of ethics is inter-
subjectivity as a primordial category, then relationality and its concomitant
logic of individuation exists as the basis and the emergence of the ethical.
A logic of individuation reflects the direct encounter of individuals with
the possibilities of ethical action and consideration while, I argue, point-
ing toward an explanation of the necessary frame of ethical life. In other
words, without an understanding of how subjects are formed rhetorically
and thereby given choices which are prestructured as moral or not, the
basic configuration of ethical sentiments and actions are made visible,
allowing the reader to imagine how communities and individuals relate.
A hermeneutics of relationality, as I would like to call it, can also be use-
ful to challenge eurocentric and colonial assumptions in Latin Americanist
critical theory. The ideas of the singular, the specified, and the specific are
terms that define primordial relations of intersubjectivity that, if applied
judiciously, can serve as a substrate for a nuanced and situated reading of
their local manifestations in Latin American culture. These terms show us
the rhetorical situations into which subjects are interpolated and which
structure their moral and ethical choicesthat define the ethical impera-
tive innate in understanding a particular cultural situation. Specified proj-
ects are not all the same, as rhetorics of membership for cutural structures
like class, ethnicity, and national identity have their own historical and
geographical situatedness. Yetall forms of identity and community and all
historical projects share the common thrust of structuring as intersubjec-
tive modes of relating that determine how we belong and we relate.
The Southern Cones letters, as I have argued, reveals an essential ques-
tioning of the connection between ethics and community that has been
marked by a historical era that underscored the need to analyze relation-
ality and its consequences for ethical and political life. The post-World
War II era of Southern Cone dictatorship was unique for its articulation
of political projects through dictatorship that transformed day-to-day
understanding of political and ethical life. From the singular regime of
Adolfo Stroessner, to the more specified regime of the Argentine Proceso
CONCLUSION 177
de reorganizacin nacional juntanot to mention Pinochets hybrid of

the singular and the specifiedthe era of dictatorship in the Southern
Cone transformed political discourse in a fashion that challenged the
writers, thinkers, and artists of the region to reimagine the very condi-
tions of possibility of literary and artistic discourse against a rhetoric that
completely restructured the conditions of possibility of ethics and ethical
choice for every individual in those states, directly complicit or not. The
transformation of the public and private spheres effected by these rhetorics
of dictatorship made impossible direct challenges to dictatorial hegemony,
but the unique brand of secret violence, public censorship, and political
brinksmanship formed the moral imperative for art and literatures chal-
lenge to oppression.
In the second chapter of this project, I laid out the central debate
between the specific and singular forms of relationalitythe logic of
individuationthrough an analysis of the debate between two central
thinkers of Chilean cultural productionNelly Richard and Willy Thayer.
Richard, chief theorist of Chilean avant-garde movement Colectivo Accin
de Arte, or as it is more widely known, Escena de Avanzada, attempted
in her earliest written works to provide an account of the singular and
the specific concepts of relationalityin other words, the formation of
an individual and its subjective communitarian possibilities. Richards
position, in my analysis, represents the possibility of the specific as best as
could be achieved during the repressive era of Pinochets Chile.
Escena de Avanzada was a unique aesthetic community whose inter-
ventions blurred the defining lines between performance art, litera-
ture, film, photography, and public art; laboring under conditions of
the near-total silence and evacuation of the publica Hallmark of the
Pinochet regime. Its members were a unique agglomeration of artists
laboring under the reduced possibilities and expectations of an almost
totally absent public sphere. This status forced them to rethink the con-
ditions of the private/public boundary itself in order to approach the
gaps in Pinochets mechanism and to push at their limits. Artworks like
Carlos Leppes El da que me quieras and the collectives Ay Sudamerica!
focused on admixing oblique, allegorical language and visual forms like
photography, film, and aerial pamphleteering, with the goal of rearrang-
ing the connections between the interstitital spaces between speech and
silence in Chileto reclaim an ethics by finding rhetorics not completely
occupied by the regime, in a situaiton where they were essentially power-
less to shift their grounds.
178 C.M. AMADOR
In her main works during the period, Richard thus argues for the
capacity of avant-garde art to mediate and facilitate a reordering of pub-
lic discourse even within the nearly nonexistent public sphere. Her work
argues for the possibility of avant-garde art to open pathways for civic
and personal expression resisting the closure of discourse, endemic to a
dictatorial regime. I cite Richards theories in order to locate her work as
a notable example of the push toward specific relationality that made the
Escena de avanzada unique among avant-garde movements.
Rather than promote an agenda of their singularity as artistic representa-
tives of a small, rarefied community conceived of leaders of an artistic move-
ment, Richards work situates the escena as members of a collective bound by
the same insufficiencies and impossibilities as the general population. They
eradicated the traditional distance between the artist and the spectator1
and performed the role of subverting the hegemonic organization of cul-
tural reception imagined by the Pinochet regime. Their artistic movement
and Richards theoretical substrate proposed that the general public was
capable of instating an entirely new concept of artone that could over-
come traditional, elite boundaries and become part of public life.2
Thayer, Chilean Marxist philosopher, however, saw the escena move-
ment as the consummation of the public sphere of the Pinochet regime.
He argues that the groups semiotic logic was an atypical vanguardist
mode of signification, working in a mode asymptotic to the daily political
needs of the repressed Chilean people. Instead of intervening in public
life, Thayers argument rests on the idea that any notion of the avant-garde
that does not attempt to reconfigure politics at its most basic levelhere
seen as the capacity to encourage actual restructuring of the relations of
production and powerfalls into the trap of producing a singular regime
of signification and logic of individuation because it cannot use the inter-
stitial spaces left by the regime. Rather than provide an opening for public
reorientation of the semiotic sphere, Thayer attempts to undermine the
counterhegemonic privilege of the escena de avanzada by framing their
work as part of a general logic of foreclosure of relationality.
Arts power, for Thayer, is always circumscribed by the relational pos-
sibilities of class and politics. And as such, he refuses to acknowledge the
1
Ay Sudamrica! [Unedited Footage]. 2010. March 28, 2011. http://hidvl.nyu.edu/
video/003209318.html.
2
Ay Sudamrica! [Unedited Footage]. 2010. March 28, 2011. http://hidvl.nyu.edu/
video/003209318.html.
CONCLUSION 179
possibility of counterhegemonic practices that are not fundamentally revo-

lutionary in the traditional sense of the word. In his theoretical mode,
cultural production untied to a complete transformation of the public
sphere is debilitated, and ultimately unable to create the restructuring
force necessary for political change.
This debate is critical to understanding the role of a relational logic
or logic of individuation as a hermeneutic for cultural production. Both
Thayer and Richard frame their theoretical reflections and disagreements
upon the capacity of thought and art to produce a cartography of rela-
tions, a way of imagining community and social organization. Art and
logic always have a substrate of social organization that emerges from their
rhetorical or philosophical descriptionsit is here that a logic of individu-
ation emerges. Culture and philosophical thought produces possibilities
for subjectivity and individual participation in community that are in the
most basic sense, the conditions of possibility for the intersubjective itself.
The chief problem with Thayers account is his use of a singular logic
to ground his own work. By denying identities extrinsic to a revolution-
ary framing, he falls into the trap of singularity, effectively destroying the
possibility for a differing view of escena de avanzadas reformulation of the
public sphere. Thayer constructs an argument whose chief accusation is that
true political and ethical reformulation requires a more pronounced form of
singular discoursein other words, a revolutionary and exclusionary logic.
Reading intellectual debates through the lens of individuation and rela-
tionality creates the possibility to frame ethico-political thought as com-
munitarian in principle without losing the individual subject. A singular
logic of individuation is a fundamentally repressive and enclosing logic.
No matter how progressive or radical a political program might be, if it
is constructed by means of the closure of subjectivityout of a singular
world that forecloses the possibility of alternate identities or alterity in the
broadest senseit cannot be seen as substantiating a truly powerful ethics
or politics. The singular, simply put, collapses alterity through its negation
of external identities and names.
The third chapter uses Diamela Eltits Lumprica, a classic text of
1980s Chilean literature and a chief text of the Escena de avanzada, to
argue alongside Richard, asserting that the escena movement represented
the best possibility for a specific relationality during the Pinochet regime.
Lumprica was a text that transgressed and transcended traditional litera-
ture through the creation of a resistance to literature, as Idelber Avelar
puts it, by collapsing the traditional modalities of literary and novelistic
180 C.M. AMADOR
practice with a goal toward expanding the frame of possibility inherent in

literature. In this fashion, Eltits literature as both an individual exercise
and a representative of the escena de avanzada can be accurately described
as a specific literatureone designed to expand the rhetorical and enuncia-
tory potential of the dialectical relationship between reading and writing.
By using Eltits work as a model for the relational, literature is shown to
be a chief instrument of imagining individuation and its discursive effects.
Eltits writing attempted to reframe the political challenge to Pinochets
regime as one that required a specific form of action. Art and writing were
not to be merely terms to be adjoined to a strictly vanguardist, revolu-
tionary practice. Instead, Eltits writing reflects the literatures capacity
to exceed either a singular designation or specified confrontation with
an enemy. By focusing on disrupting writing itself while depicting the
polyvalent struggles of Chileans in their local public spaces, Eltit points
toward the possibility of an ethic that is indifferent to difference: a specific
possibility that might pave the way toward an inclusionary social reality.
With Augusto Roa Bastos text Yo, el Supremo, I showed how one of
the canonical texts of twentieth-century literature is a powerful model for
understanding how the logic of dictatorship can be seen as a singular logic,
which collapses all intersubjective possibilities to the caprices of a power
that locates its power in the supremacy and totality of its proper name.
Roa Bastos novel operates both as an allegory of Alfredo Stroessners
Paraguayan dictatorship and as a theoretical model for understanding
the pernicious elimination of alterity that is a personalist dictatorship
like el Supremos. Understanding the mode of the singular in literature
especially a text as allegorically significant as Yo, el Supremoallows for
the modeling of discourses of relationality and individuation that deepen
readings of local ethical and political practices. Furthermore, by reading
the novel in this fashion, literatures compromise with the social sphere is
given more texture, as allegorical texts like el Supremo can be used as pre-
ventative readings to what occurs in the world. Literature can serve again
to model and engage the social and political sphere, similar to Raymond
Williams concept of a structure of feeling.
By citing the case of Adolfo Scilingos confessional El Vuelo, I under-
score the importance of how the fundamental logic of individuation under-
writing a social project can have drastic personal and public consequences.
Scilingos confession was born of a failure by the remnants of the Proceso de
reorganizacin nacional to maintain the integrity of their specified project
for Argentina. When given the opportunity to address the nation during
CONCLUSION 181
their trials for war crimes, the top echelon of the Argentine junta denied
the tenor and reality of their actions, dislocating Scilingo and instigating
his harrowing confessions of violencewhich only served to confirm what
did not need to be confirmed by anyone in power: those who suffered
under their hands were witnesses enough.
I do not sympathize with Scilingo, but I believe that it is critical to see
in his case how the breakdown of the specifiedthe logic of relationality
that created the enmity that putatively justified the regimes violenceis a
tool useful for furthering ethical and political study. Evaluating the role of
relationality in discourse situates the basic relational premises of practice,
and helps order and make visible the most basic premises of the politi-
cal itself. Furthermore, reading Scilingo and the Proceso era in this way
grounds politics in a sphere that asks it to anchor its premises in the way
in which community and subject are constructed. Scilingos case asks us
to understand how enmity itself is formed, and what are the psychic and
collective consequences of a project of relation that requires a fundamental
opposition.
Ending with my chapter on Roberto Bolaos concept of nomadism,
I further my argument concerning the importance of a specific logic in
intellectual practice,by using Bolaos challenges to the role that exile plays
in literary culturea consideration of an intellectual position in the region
that is all too often ignored as part of its politics or reduced to a too-simple
dichotomy. Challenging the role of exile as a proper designation for a
writer or writing, Bolao instead imagines nomadism as inherent to writ-
ing itself, as the relationship between reader and author has always been
one of a global, transnational network of ideas. And while this does not
take away the role that coloniality has played in the dissemination of ideas
across the Southern Cone, it nonetheless speaks to the idea that literature
can be framed as a specific discourse if one takes into account the flow of
ideas and the power of readership in writing, not just the geopolitical posi-
tion of the author inside or outside the space of the nation.
As the sixth chapter in this work, Bolaos role as a global intellec-
tual speaks to the ethical nature of indifference that plays in the specific
relationality I argue for. For ethics to be relevant and vital, and for politics
to reflect the ethical, only a specific logic can ground them. For the speci-
fied can collapse into the type of totalitarianism and brutality that comes
from the establishment of an opposition that grounds identity, and the sin-
gular collapses the very realm of signification itself around a sole identity.
The singulars violence is that difference itself is negated, and silence con-
182 C.M. AMADOR
cerning alterity leads to a blindness and deafness that can reduce violence
to a mere incidence of singularity, as I have shown in the model that Roa
Bastos Yo, el Supremo offers readers.
To conclude, I assert that much work can still be done concerning the
role that relationality plays in understanding the potential political force of
literature and cultural productionas a rhetorical means to challenge the
ground for all concepts of politics in terms of the construction of the indi-
vidual, not just particular political policies. Cultures power, beyond its role
in collective self-reflection, is the imagining of what lies beneath the spheres
we inhabit. Writing and the plastic arts are able to reframe reality with the
consequence of exposing how we live; how it is possible to live; and how
we can seldom imagine living.
Yet literature as philosophy often lags behind the political realities it
mapsas I showed with the case of Scilingo and General Jorge Videla in
my penultimate chapter. The last Argentine military dictatorship declared
a specified war against its enemy that was effectively transformed into a
program of genocide. This brutal case serves to remind readers that rela-
tionality is not merely a theoretical mode or a literary hermeneutic: it is a
structure of ethics and politics, and as such often leaves a terrible and very
real impact.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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hidvl.nyu.edu/video/003209318.html.
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INDEX
A avanzada, 33
Absolutely Postcolonial : Writing cryptification, 35, 67
Between the Singular and the overcodification concept, 35, 67
Specific (Hallward), 4, 9, 99
Agamben, Giorgio, 21n1, 37, 66, 125
Alfonsn, Ral, 116 B
Allende, Salvador, 23, 2631, 42, Badiou, Alain, 22, 39, 52, 125
4547, 51, 57, 71 Bastos, Augusto Roa, 7779,
aporia, 101n1, 103 81, 82, 87, 91, 94, 96,
avant-garde 180, 182
avanzada and specific ethics, 3336 Benjamin, Walter, 3, 21, 21n2
Escena de avanzada, 65 Beverley, John, 131
avanzada. See also Escena de Bolao, Roberto, 148, 161164, 167,
avanzada 168, 181
Avelar, Idelber, 33 Borges, Jorge Luis, xvi
body as specific discourse, 5766 Butler, Judith, 65
censorship from Pinochet regime,
2332
centrality, 23 C
Eltit, Diamela, 3335, 37, 39, 41 Castro, Fidel, 77
Lumprica and body, 6670 censorship
specific ethics, 3336 from Pinochet regime, 2332
Thayer, Willy, 4357 power, 21
Avelar, Idelber, 68, 179 continuity of singular, 7074

Paraguay, 1970-2000, DOI10.1057/978-1-137-54633-3
192 INDEX
contrapuntality, 155 censorship from Pinochet regime,

Cornejo Polar, Antonio, 2 2332
criminal trials, 116 deterritorializing functions, 74
Critchley, Simon, 4 local bodily practices, 70
Critique of Violence (1922) specific contributions, 66
(Benjamin), 3 specific politics of, 37
Ethics (Badiou), 4
exclusive scale of existence, 148
D exile, 145146
Delueze, Gilles, xvi Bolaos vision, 161164
Derrida, 3 conceptual framework for, 154
dialectics of exile, 156 geography, 153
dictator novel, 77, 77n1, 77n2, 79, for Kaminsky expresses, 158
92, 94 literatures force, 150
dictatorship motivations, 163
casualties of, 21 mythos of, 146
plans, 103104 products of, 150
Stroessner, Alfredo, 79, 88 Southern Cone literary study, 157158
theorizing art in Chile During, 2140 writing, 152161
transhistorical and international Ezguerro, Milagros, 83
form, 79
The Dirty War, 112, 114, 116n10
Disposicin final (Reato), 134, 136, 137 F
Feitlowitz, Marguerite, 117, 131
Foucault, Michel, 22
E Friedman, Milton, 4243
El otoo del patriarca, 78 friend/enemy distinction, 112, 128
el Supremo. See Yo, el Supremo
Eltit, Diamela, 179180
avanzada, 3335, 37, 39, 41 G
La escritura como seduccin, 69 genre of testimonio, 131
Lumprica, 6670, 179180 Guattari, Felix, 8, 146, 164, 169, 170
and Thayer, Willy, 69
and Zurita, Ral, 61, 64
Eltits novels, 3335, 39 H
El vuelo, 100, 114122, 132n18 Hallward, Peter, 61, 82, 94, 99,
post-junta genres, 130132 101n1, 120, 127, 129, 150
Scilingo effect, 114122 Absolutely Postcolonial, 4
Entre parntesis, 161, 172, 172n12 colonial modernity, 2
enunciation, 6, 7 individuation and relationality, 12
Escena de avanzada, 23, 25, 46, 56, logic of individuation, 175
177179 philosophical dynamics, 127
avant-garde, 65 recognized classifications, 101
INDEX 193
singular and specific, 1213 Ley de Punto Final, 118

singular concept, 78 literary writing, 16, 176
specific discourse, 22 logic of individuation, 175179
specific nationalism, 113 Lumprica, 3540, 179
Herlinghaus, Hermann, 150 Eltit, Diamela, 6670, 179180
overcodification, 67
I
immaterial labor, 147 M
individuation, languages and logics of Margins and Institutions: Art in Chile
colonial modernity, 2 Since 1973, 29
heterogeneity, 2 Marx, Karl, 68, 68n16
memory, 1415 McClennen, Sophia A., 159160
politics as events, 58, 10 McClennan identify, 156
reconciliation, 15 Medio siglo de proclamas
writing as an ethics, 1719 militares, 100
Infinitely Demanding (Critchley), 11 basic objectives, 108
objetivos bsicos, 107
Proceso junta, 109
J propsitos, 107
Jameson, Fredric, xii purpose, 108
Menem, Carlos Sal, 118
Miliani, Domingo, 7879, 79n3
K modes of subjectivization, 150
Kaminsky, P., 158160, 167 Montoneros, 122123
Kissinger, Henry, 26 Mouffe, Chantal, 9091,
Kohan, Martn, 134136 90n7, 91
Kornbluh, Peter, 26
N
L National Commission on
Lacan, Jacque, 7 DisappearedPersons
Laclau, Ernesto, vii, viii (CONADEP), 105, 105n7
La disposicin final, 134139 global human rights, 106
Latin America exile, 153n4 national identity, 147, 157
Laval, Christian, vi the nature of [the Proceso s]
Leppe, Carlos, 58, 6164, 177 relation, 113
Levinas, Emmanuel, 3 neoliberalism, 4143
Levinasian tradition, 138n19 ethics of, 45
Lewis, Paul H., 104105, 104n6, suspensions of sovereignty, 7074
116n10 ThayerRichard debate, 70
A Lexicon of Terror: Argentina and The Nixon, Richard, 26
Legacies of Torture (Feitlowitz), nomadism, 164168
117, 118n11 Nomadic Subjects, 149n2
194 INDEX
O S
oppositional discourses, 22 Saer, Juan Jos, 151
Oyarzn, Pablo, 33 Schmitt, Carl, 90, 92, 99, 128,
128n150
antagonism, 112
P Schwab, Gabriele, 173
Partido Colorado (Colorado Party), Scilingo, Adolfo, 142143, 180181
7980 Scilingo effect
patterns of thinking, 100 anxiety, 119120
pendant piece, 164n8 confession, 117, 119
Peter Hallwards notion, 99 El vuelo, 114122
Pinochet, Augusto, 42 post-junta genres, 130134
censorship through signification, public sentiments, 125
2332 violence, 130
linguistic signs, 26 self-censorship, 24
Plan Cndor (Operation Condor), 16 Shumway, Nicholas, 164
political forces, 150 singular
politics, 149150 continuity of, 7074
Popular Unity government, 23, 27, 38 creative individual, 13
post-junta genres, 130134 discourse, 147, 148
post-junta literature, 134 Hallward, Peter, 78
presumed nature, 129 individuation, 25
Proceso de Organizacin Nacional, 14 Stroessner, Alfredo, 176
Proceso de reorganizacin nacional Thayer, Willy, 4357
dictatorship, 99, 102, 102n2, Yo, el Supremo, 7781
107, 113, 123, 138, 180 Southern Cone, individuation in
Proceso junta, 104, 109 colonial modernity, 2
Punto Final, 118 heterogeneity, 2
Pure Immanence, 171n10 memory, 1415
politics as events, 510
reconciliation, 15
Q writing as an ethics, 1719
Quijano, Anbal, 146n1 Sovereignty, suspensions of, 7074
specific discourse, 21
body as, 5766
R specific ethics, avanzada, 3336
radical evil, 5, 99, 100 specified
recognized classifications, 101 alterity, 10
rhetorical and intersubjective structure, as bellic subjectivity, 139141
99 definition, 101, 128
Richard, Nelly, 22n3, 23, 28n11 logic of differentiation, 137
new analysis of resistance, 5766 logic of individuation, 102
and Thayer, Willy, 7274, 177179 military junta instrumentalizes,
Rodrguez de Francia, Gaspar, x, xiv 110111
INDEX 195
and politics, 100106 vanguardism, 49

Proceso junta, 109 avant-garde group, 28, 33
state of fear, 23 and Thayer, Willy, 44, 46, 47, 69
state power, languages Verbitsky, Horacio, 107, 115, 119,
legitimationof,31 120, 129, 130, 132, 133
Stroessner, Alfredo, 96, 180 Videla, Jorge Rafael, 102103, 135,
singular regime of, 176 142143
Yo, el Supremo, 77, 79, 80, 88, 93 vigencias, 109
suspensions of sovereignty, 7074 Villalobos-Ruminott, Sergio, 7074
violence
acts of, 122123
T commission of, 122
testimonial literature, 131 Montoneros, 122123
testimonio Nazi category, 127
genre of, 131 presumed nature, 129
seminal critic and scholar, 131 Schmitt argues on, 128
Verbitskys interview, 132 Scilingo effect, 130
Testimony (Laub and Felman), 15
Thayer, Willy, 27, 65, 178
Eltit challenges, 69 W
intervening in public life, 178 war justifications, 139141
problematic singular, 4357 The World Republic of Letters, 171n11
Richard, Nelly and, 7274, 177179 Wright, Thomas C., 139140
vanguardism and, 44, 46, 47, 69
Villalobos-Ruminott, Sergio and,
7174 Y
Thomistic just war theory, 141 Yo, el Supremo
torture, 139, 140 archive, 8294
Trauma: Explorations in Memory Badiou, Alain, 9092
(Caruth), 15 Bastos, Augusto Roa, 7779, 81,
trial of the Juntas, 118 82, 87, 91, 94, 96, 180, 182
description, 7781
myth and representation, 8294
U Stroessner, Alfredo, 77, 79, 80,
unattainable transcendence, 157 88,93
United Nations Refugee Agency,
153n6
Z
Zavala, Osvaldo, 172, 172n12
V Zivin, Graff, 138
valor, 162 Zurita, Ral, 58, 6162, 64, 70

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ETHICS AND LITERATURE IN CHILE,

ARGENTINA, AND PARAGUAY, 1970-2000

More information about this series at

Ethics and Literature

Literatures of the Americas

ISBN 978-1-137-54871-9 ISBN 978-1-137-54633-3 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016936408

The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

despite insufficiency, corruption, and the malaise of conciliatory postdicta-

The linkages between violent subjectifization, or the creation of individual

a diminished reliance on import-substitution and commodity exports, a

Americanist cultural criticism. Moving toward an explicit engagement

El conjunto de la produccin literaria de todos los pases occidentales

The mera circunstancia poltica (mere political circumstance) is precisely

politics, especially where it concerns the literary function of modeling pos-

iteration, perpetuate the utter collapse of meaning and relationality as a

THE SPECIFIED ONES

theoretical frameworks of cultural studies, which, for the most part,

en Amrica Latina, the Richard/Thayer dialogue continues its relevance

emissions of the Doctors voice. I argue that, in a specific allegorical range,

Chapter 6 investigates the writing of Bolao as a model for the spe-

My friends James Staig Limidoro, Sam Cannon, Dorian Lee Jackson,

1 Introduction: Reading Ethics andLogics

2 Theorizing Art inChile During Dictatorship:

3 The Cultural Politics oftheSingular andtheSpecific:

Lumprica andtheBody: Some Final Implications 66

4 Yo, el Supremo astheSingular 77

5 The Scilingo Effect andtheSpecified 99

6 Roberto Bolaos Specific Exiles 145

Introduction: Reading Ethics andLogics

Although there is no precise date or moment of encounter for an ethical

The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 1

and national distinctions implicit in theoretical models and instead inter-

western literatures and memory culture. Derridas challenge to the signify-

the relationships between history, intersubjectivity, and memory. Many of

POLITICS ASEVENTS: LANGUAGES AND

of enunciations2 provides a set of coherent ethical principles, expressed

their own positions of subjectivication, as it offers narratives about acts

Hallward outlines how any such community formed by discourses in

It is worth remembering in this context how Badious ethics ties these

active subjective individuation through ethical acts relating the subject to

Examples of historical logics [that have been made to seem singular]

In the Southern Cone, dictatorships did indeed enact events of the

ETHICS, MEMORY, ANDRECONCILIATION IN

Hallwards supplemental explanation of how the public sphere sup-

Memory as a form of critical analysis in the Southern Cone emerged

difficult and fractious. For example, Argentinas Laws of Due Obedience

events and within the image of the national community. In consequence,

THE FIELD OFWRITING ASANETHICS OFTHEEVENT

condition of intellectual and academic production that the contemporary

Theorizing Art inChile During

The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 21

sides against a challengein what Hallward says, somewhat less strongly

OPPOSING PINOCHETS REGIME OFCENSORSHIP

El rgimen de censura que opera en Chile durante el perodo autoritario se

aesthetically and intellectually powerful of the opposition movements, the

the cohort of Southern Cone nationsand reintegrating and shoring up

What is central to the Chilean situation is the manifestation of power

el modelo autoritario entr en sucesivas fases de redefinicin poltica que

Thus, the Pinochet regime used the mechanism of violent power to

the spaces of speaking and public signification. avanzadas emergence