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De Forming Woman Images of Feminine Pol PDF
De Forming Woman Images of Feminine Pol PDF
by
Michael Martínez-Raguso
July 20, 2015
Doctor of Philosophy
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Michael Martínez-Raguso
2015
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For my mother, who speaks in silence.
Y para mi hijo, que todavía no lee.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Like most solitary intellectual endeavors, this project was a communal effort. Dr. Justin
Read has been an enthusiastic advisor, mentor, and friend at every step in this process. He has
continually challenged me, and his criticism and suggestions have been invaluable. I thank him
for sharing his passion for Latin American thought, for holding me to such rigorous intellectual
standards, for imparting both wit and wisdom, and for paying for the drinks. Dr. Margarita
Vargas has provided me with years of guidance, feedback, support, and friendship in addition to
welcoming me to her home so often. Dr. David Castillo has shaped my own thought with his
criticism, encouragement, and advice, particularly in the linking of theory and culture. I am
grateful for your scholarly and professional guidance, thank you all.
I thank Dr. Joan Copjec for her seminars on psychoanalytic criticism, as well as for the
attention which with she read my work. This project is not only firmly grounded in her thought,
but has its roots in her lectures on the image that I was fortunate to attend. I also thank Dr.
Colleen Culleton for providing me with the tools for narratological analysis, and Dr. Shaun Irlam
for imparting a critical perspective of human rights in relation to literature. I thank Dr. Alberto
Moreiras for his support and attention to my work, and for demonstrating to me the importance
of (infra)political thought. I owe a great deal to the late Dr. Hans Seigfried, the philosopher who
set me on this path years ago with the words, “If you really want to do philosophy, go to a
This project was made possible through the generous support of an Advanced PhD
Fellowship from the Graduate School. My deepest thanks to Dr. Erik Seeman and Dr. Elizabeth
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Otto of the Humanities Institute, to Dr. Kari Winter of the Gender Institute, and to my fellow
I thank the faculty and staff of the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at
the University at Buffalo. Dr. Amy Graves-Monroe has offered me excellent professional
guidance and support, and Dr. Bárbara Ávila-Shah has tirelessly devoted herself to producing
generation after generation of self-aware pedagogues. Nothing would happen at all without the
dedication of Shelley Palmieri and Susan Walker; thank you for making life so much easier. I
have had wonderful colleagues and friends at the University at Buffalo. To Greg Przybyla,
Cynthia Jones, Laura Arribas, Jesús Muñoz, Beth Kuberka, Sarah Hart, Andrea Pérez Mukdsi,
Brian Phillips, Elizabeth Robinson, Reyna Vergara, Aubrey Kubiak, Leticia Pérez Alonso, and
anyone else I have forgotten—thank you for your friendship and for making my years here so
whose sacrificial generosity this dissertation would simply not have been possible. My father-in-
law Senén also provided selfless assistance at a critical moment. In the throes of the project I
simultaneously lost a parent and became a father, and am eternally grateful for the sympathy,
assistance, and support I received from so many people. My father, Joe, has been an incredible
example of fortitude, and my sisters Maureen and Carolyn have offered their love and advice, as
always. Adequate acknowledgement of my wife Sandra’s support would require a book unto
itself, so in the interest of space I will simply thank her for fighting alongside me through life—
for our child and our happiness—which she does with tenacity and grace. My mother raised me
to be a feminist, even if she wouldn’t have worded it that way—though maybe she would have. I
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ........................................................................................................ iv
II. Ekphrastic Reflections: The Elizondian Shift from Object to Image .......................... 22
II. The Scopophilic Gaze: The Passive Paradox of the Spectacle .................................... 88
III. The Specular Gaze: Narcissism and the Melancholy Mirror ...................................... 94
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PART TWO. THE UNDERSIDE OF DISAPPEARANCE:
CONFINEMENT IN VALENZUELA’S “CAMBIO DE ARMAS”
VIII. On the Gaze: The Photo-graphic Subject and the Dark Well ................................ 129
IV. The Infra-regime: The Mexican Border in the Wake of NAFTA ............................ 182
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ABSTRACT
The question at the root of this study is why the political formation of state power in
Latin America always seems to be accompanied by violence against women. Two threads run
throughout: an analysis of the relation between image, violence, and subject formation; and the
application of this theory to the political violence exerted upon feminine subjectivity in relation
to state formation in Latin America. I trace the marginalization of women through experimental
dictatorial fiction of the Southern Cone up to the crisis of femicide that has emerged alongside
the so-called narco-state in Mexico in the wake of NAFTA. I argue that Latin American feminist
thought has sought to articulate itself as a post-hegemonic force of interruption from within the
dominant order, a project that is problematized in the face of the perverse seriality of the
femicide crimes and the intolerable yet enigmatic power of which they become a forced
representation.
The first chapter stages a close reading of Salvador Elizondo’s Farabeuf (1965), locating
in the novel’s engagement with a photograph of the Chinese Leng Tch’é execution a theory of
the relation between cut, image, and the female body that understands the subtraction of the
feminine as the foundation of the political. The second chapter turns to the structure of dictatorial
violence in Argentina, looking at Alejandra Pizarnik’s La condesa sangrienta (1965) and Luisa
Valenzuela’s “Cambio de armas” (1982) alongside the Argentine Revolution and the Dirty War,
fetishization of the subversive body and the inevitable failure of sovereign power to designate
itself. Valenzuela’s fragmentary story deconstructs the notion of erasure at the heart of the
environment of domestic confinement. The third chapter examines Diamela Eltit’s critique of
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neoliberalism during the Pinochet regime in Chile through her cinematographic novel Lumpérica
(1983) before following this economic trail northward to the femicide crisis that has ravaged the
Mexican-U.S. border since 1993. I demonstrate that both oppressive power structures—official
and unofficial—are founded on the fusion of economic and gender violence. A reading of
Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 through the notion of the exquisite corpse situates this urgent crisis in
relation to globalization and the postmodern world of images, technology, efficiency, and
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INTRODUCTION:
THE FEMININE MISE-EN-SCÈNE
The freedom of literature from the limitations of empirical facticity endows it with unique
political power. This is especially true when the sociohistorical conditions of literary production
are characterized by clandestine politics, ones that stage interventions in dark chambers into the
bodies of those deemed to threaten the security or identity of the nation. Writer J. M. Coetzee has
made the provocative observation that the “dark, forbidden chamber is the origin of novelistic
fantasy per se; in creating obscenity, in enveloping it in mystery, the state unwittingly creates the
preconditions for the novel to set about its work of representation” (364, my emphasis). Fiction
is uniquely poised to engage such moments of historical, political, and personal trauma, for what
cannot be known must be imagined. The dark chamber may therefore only be represented in
images, textually produced. Like photography, literature bears a mediated relation to the truth,
and it is in the very mediation of the images it produces that we will locate its critique. The
present analysis of feminine political subjectivity in Latin America takes as its point of departure
the image of the dark chamber as the mise-en-scène that simultaneously frames, stages, conceals,
and deforms the feminine for the sake of the production of a new national subject. Coetzee’s
localization of fantasy within the dark chamber is therefore doubly apt: this clandestine space of
violence that opens public wounds becomes the mise-en-scène of literary imagination—in its
This interdisciplinary study engages experimental literature through and alongside the
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formation from the dictatorships of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s to the current crisis of femicide on
the Mexican-U.S. border. In Latin America—as in other parts of the world such as Coetzee’s
South Africa—the state has established and sustained itself through the juxtaposition of public
narratives of duty and service with tactical deployments of terror and violence that emerge from
its clandestine underside. The dark chamber took on a central role in the production of Latin
American states during the dictatorial decades of the twentieth century: authoritarian military
regimes in the nations such as Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile implemented terror through
forced disappearance, torture, rape, and murder, and communicated with one another so as to
collectively stamp out the threat of left-wing subversion. I will analyze the specific cases of
regimes in Argentina and Chile, the latter of which would become ground zero for the fantasy of
literary production (which has largely been produced against official narratives of that history),
the region’s authoritarian politics have founded themselves on the subtraction of the feminine.
Indeed, as the erogenous fixation of dictatorial tendencies of disappearance and erasure, feminine
subjectivity negatively encodes the grammar of power that is consistently inscribed into the flesh
that the state sustains the illusion of its own continuity within a dictatorial history of ruptures and
coups—until we move beyond official military regimes and delve into the enigmatic and illicit
powers that rule the Mexican border. This project will therefore culminate in an examination of
the unofficial power structures—both criminal and corporate, in a globalized site of drug
trafficking and manufacturing-assembly plants—through which the crisis of femicide has erupted
in post-dictatorial Latin America. While Latin America has transitioned to democracy (a return
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that is in itself problematic and in some ways spurious), the Mexican border becomes
symptomatic of the repetition of the violent consumption of the feminine that defined the
formation of its authoritarian states. Within this apocalyptic landscape—which is to say, one that
lies beyond the limits of history—a power with no face inscribes itself continually onto the
bodies of women and girls in senseless and arbitrary displays that serve no historical
post/dictatorial conditions, I make contributions to three realms of criticism: the political, the
literary, and the theoretical. To this end the project will shed light on the structures of political
power in Latin America since the 1960s, stage close readings of key works of experimental
fiction that explore images of violence against feminine (or feminized) bodies, and elaborate a
theoretical consideration of the relation between cut, image, and feminine subjectivity within
In the first chapter a close reading of Salvador Elizondo’s novel Farabeuf: o la crónica
the cut and the image in relation to the formation of both feminine subjectivity and the state
itself. At the heart of Elizondo’s labyrinthine text lies a traumatic photograph: that of the Chinese
Leng Tch’é execution in which we see a man staring at the sky in seeming ecstasy as he is slowly
skinned and dismembered. The novel’s eponymous surgeon will reproduce this image in the
mirrors within the bedroom of an apartment in Paris where a woman awaits, as the text produces
a chain of ekphrastic image-relations that deform the feminine through a process of formative
negation. For the instant chronicled in Farabeuf is that of feminine subject formation by means
of violence inscribed into a body (and not necessarily a female one). This is not creation ex
nihilo: it begins—and ends—with the flesh, that of the pharmakós, the political scapegoat of the
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ancient world, the spectacle of whose death established the limits of the state. The body thus
sacrificed becomes the boundary of political power, as the sovereign exerts his ultimate will in
the biopolitical declaration that a particular subject may no longer live—within that state, or at
all.
Through his narrative manipulation of this haunting photograph, Elizondo thus encodes
in Farabeuf a politics of ritualized, exclusionary sacrifice that he explicitly (in multiple senses)
reimagines as a negation of the feminine. I take this novel as theoretical text, the interpretation of
which yields essential concepts regarding the production and consumption of images in relation
to the body, concepts that frame the rest of the project as it delves into oppressive power
structures in Latin America from the 1960s to the present. Following Elizondo’s lead, I explore
this notion of foundational violence against feminine subjectivity as it bears on the specificity of
Latin American state formation from a trans-historical perspective. Such violence takes
numerous forms: it will variably surface in physical, psychological, sexual, ontological, political,
structural, or economic incarnations (or any combination thereof), as the feminine undergoes
forcible transformations in distinct sociopolitical contexts. Looking at the Southern Cone from
the 1960s through the 1980s, I analyze Latin American authoritarianism through the
experimental fiction of three women writers who stage distinct engagements with the question of
Turning to dictatorial Latin America, in the second chapter I analyze two Argentine
regimes: those of the Argentine Revolution and the Process of National Reorganization. These
periods of oppression are read alongside Alejandra Pizarnik’s La condesa sangrienta [The
Bloody Countess] and Luisa Valenzuela’s “Cambio de armas” [“Other Weapons”], respectively.
In La condesa sangrienta Pizarnik establishes two modes of relation to the image through her
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dark meditation on the Hungarian countess Erzsébet Báthory, who is believed to have murdered
over 600 young women around the turn of the 17th century. The first is Báthory’s narcissistic
obsession with her youth as she melancholically consumes her own mirror image for hours on
end. Yet she also stages macabre spectacles within the dungeons of her castle, subjecting her
victims to elaborate and often automatized forms of torture. I argue that what I refer to as the
“politics of the image” emerges in the space between these two poles of identification and
perfection (the Freudian ego-ideal) that a sovereign power determines a course of biopolitical
action (intervention) that in turn produces fetishized images of the subversive body. I read in
Pizarnik’s prose poem on Báthory a process of eroticization that defines the relation between the
sovereign and the social body, an erotics that informs the subsequent analysis of state terror in
Argentina.
the Argentine Revolution, while Valenzuela’s short story collection Cambio de armas (1982)
appeared just before the end of the Dirty War; in this way these texts frame nearly twenty years
of state terror in Argentina. Having expatriated herself, Valenzuela used her freedom to
meditations on the sexual relation. In the title story this critique emerges from the perspective of
one of the disappeared: Laura, a guerrilla, was captured by the Colonel she was sent to
assassinate, a man who then erased and reconstructed her memory by posing as her husband. The
violence of torture and sexual assault underlies the hazy domesticity of Valenzuela’s fragmented
narrative, whose female protagonist struggles to find stable ground for thought or action from
inside her spatio-linguistic confinement—within her domestic prison as well as her shattered
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relation to a symbolic order that slips away at every attempt to signify. The so-called Laura is
tormented by the so-called keys that she knows will not unlock the so-called door. Rather than
preserve the openness of the text. I read Laura’s final action of aiming a revolver at her captor in
terms of Derridean deferral, which becomes a critique of the notion of disappearance that has
come to define the Dirty War. Valenzuela maintains the aperture of a wound—physical, psychic,
social, and textual—that simultaneously signals and interrupts the dictatorial drives of closure
and erasure that seek to remake the nation through authoritarian violence masquerading as moral
duty.
The project concludes with an analysis of the neoliberal economic factor in Latin
American dictatorial power through a reading of Diamela Eltit’s Lumpérica (1983) before
moving from Chile to the apocalyptic landscape of the Mexican-U.S. border’s free trade zones,
looking at the femicide crisis through Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 (2004). The largely psychic wound
opened in Valenzuela’s work is taken to its corporeal extreme in Eltit’s novel, part of which she
read aloud in front of a brothel after cutting and burning herself and then washing the sidewalk in
a performance piece called “Maipú” (1980). Both the novel and its companion performance are
about the inscription of pain in public space, a space that is determined by a neoliberal system
foundational exclusion outlined in Farabeuf are transposed onto an economic framework after
Pinochet’s rise to power on September 11, 1973: Eltit depicts in Lumpérica the nocturnal life of
a ragged homeless woman in a public plaza, the comforting darkness of which is interrupted by a
neon sign. The author stages a disavowal of the transcendence claimed by the state by setting the
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darkness—in which an anonymous collective of marginal figures engage in eroticized acts of
rubbing—against the artificial light that violently penetrates the square from above. Like
Farabeuf, Eltit’s novel is visual in nature; yet whereas Elizondo writes around the trauma of an
image of sovereign exclusion in the open wounds of the Leng Tch’é photograph, Lumpérica
reconsiders the cut as an act of self-opening that creates the wounded space in which another
image emerges. From the marginal zones of exclusion established by the neoliberal state, this
image disrupts and appropriates the very means of dictatorial control: cutting as the inscription of
In following the neoliberal trail to the border of northern Mexico we leave the dictatorial
state for a distinct constellation of power: a new political order that lies beyond or beneath the
law, variably associated with either international corporations, drug cartels, or both as they
establish an unofficial network of hegemony that defines the borderlands. As though this shadow
regime had adopted Farabeuf as an instruction manual for the political consolidation of power,
the image of the dismembered female body has become tragically emblematic of the globalized
border. In 1993, only three years after the end of the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile, feminist
activists began to speak of a disturbing crisis of violence against women: an epidemic of murders
in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua (Mexico) whose victims—mostly factory workers, prostitutes, and
students—suffered extreme violence and torture, often of a sexual nature. I analyze these
femicides as a product of the neoliberalism that has increasingly defined the border through the
establishment of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994. More than a product, the
violated female body is a byproduct of both licit and illicit border economies: it becomes an
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image of abject discard within the logic of expulsion that sustains and genders power in the
region.
My engagement with Bolaño’s decentralized epic 2666 therefore remains confined to “La
parte de los crímenes” [“The Part about the Crimes”], a several-hundred-page litany of forensic
reports of the femicidal violence in Santa Teresa, Bolaño’s fictionalization of Ciudad Juárez. I
approach this text through the notion of the exquisite corpse: a surrealist game for the
composition of texts or images in which each element is blindly added onto that which precedes
it. While this form of writing through arbitrary relations of non-relation informs a reading of
Bolaño’s textual composition of actual cadavers produced through sexual violence, the exquisite
corpse becomes deeply significant for the femicide crisis through its role in psychoanalytic
theory. Analyst Maria Torok has explored the erotic charge of the cadaver for the bereaved, who,
if not prepared for the loss, may preserve the absent love object within an intra-psychic tomb in a
melancholic refusal of mourning. The monthly discovery of bodies in 2666 thus generates a
(textual) exquisite corpse of exquisite corpses, the loss of whom is so arbitrary and traumatic as
to make them impossible to mourn. The novel’s narration of these murders presents an
unintelligible excess that perverts the very notion of the series (a feminist concept within the
thought of philosopher Iris Marion Young), reducing seriality to a mere vehicle for its own
Thus what begins with an image of a singular male body—the feminized and
dismembered Leng Tch’é victim—will end with a disjointed series of abject female corpses as
the neoliberal logic of accumulation and exclusion increasingly defines Latin America’s place in
a globalized world while unleashing intolerable violence in its margins. This trans-historical
project links dictatorships of the Southern Cone to the contemporary (post-NAFTA) Mexican
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border for the sake of tracing the production of politicized images of the feminine in their
forcible transformation from mise-en-abyme to mise-en-scène. That is to say, from the macabre
perversion of the Lacanian mirror stage in the feminine subject’s relation to her own multiplied
reflection in Farabeuf, to the framing of the feminine image as a spectacle for public (masculine)
consumption and the political (also masculine) constitution of power. The deformation of
feminine subjectivity is traumatically staged within each of the texts analyzed, such that each
theorizes in its own way the process of subject formation itself in relation to gendered political
power. Latin American political theory grounds this project in historical structures of power;
psychoanalysis highlights the psycho-sexual iterations of this power in relation to desire on both
ends of its spectrum; and feminist criticism outlines the reappropriation of feminine subjectivity
as a force of post-hegemonic interruption that disrupts and destabilizes the illusion of order. In
tracing the cutting of the image and the emergence of the image within the opening of the cut,
this analysis situates itself at the intersection of the visual, the corporeal, and the political in its
confrontation with a power that has diachronically transformed itself into one that, while it
cannot be grasped, may (and must) nevertheless be approached through literary imagination and
cultural critique.
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CHAPTER ONE
differential relation between what he calls the studium, “a field of cultural interest,” and the
punctum, “that unexpected flash which sometimes crosses this field” (94-95). Yet toward the end
of the work he discovers that “there exists another punctum (another ‘stigmatum’) than the
‘detail.’ This new punctum, which is no longer of form but of intensity, is Time, the lacerating
emphasis of the noeme, (‘that-has-been’), its pure representation” (96). Barthes arrives at this
realization through a reflection on Alexander Gardner’s 1865 photograph of Lewis Payne, sitting
in a cell awaiting execution for the attempted assassination of Secretary of State W. H. Steward.
He writes that “the punctum is: he is going to die. I read at the same time: This will be and this
has been; I observe with horror an anterior future of which death is the stake;” the photograph
simultaneously contrasts and equates the “absolute past of the pose” with the “death in the
future,” leading him to the conclusion that every photograph deals with the catastrophe of death
Barthes’ reflections on the photograph of Payne greatly inform another image, one which
will be of the utmost importance for the present study: that of the Leng Tch’é, the death of a
thousand cuts, an old Chinese form of execution made famous in a photograph reproduced in
Bataille’s The Tears of Eros. These images resonate with each other not only conceptually
(portraying the final moments of a human life), but discursively, through the discourse of slicing:
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the punctum being a stigmatum, a lacerating emphasis, a catastrophe. The notion of the cut
In a sort of atemporal signifying chain, the movement from Barthes to Bataille leads us
directly into another thinker, whose work will be the object of study for this chapter. The
violence of the image—its catastrophic, lacerating quality—lies at the heart of Mexican author
Instant] (1965). Only four years after Bataille’s 1961 meditation on the Leng Tch’é image,
Elizondo published the same photograph within his novel, the entirety of which is based on the
horrific photograph of the execution and its traumatic effects. Significantly, the text not only
reimagines the Leng Tch’é victim to be female, it functions in its entirety as a chronicle of
feminine subject de/formation. In Farabeuf Elizondo has articulated a dark parable of this
process: rather than assuming that the feminine subject exists in the first place, the novel
imagines the formation of such a subjectivity in a traumatic instant of existential horror. The
instante of the novel’s apt subtitle will be seen to be the instant of the feminine itself, of the birth
of feminine subjectivity under the violence of state power, an instant which is paradoxically also
her unmaking and death. The Leng Tch’é photograph, equal parts disturbing and captivating, thus
constitutes a primal scene not only for Elizondo, but for my own theorization of the travails of
feminine subjectivity in Latin America. Through a close reading of Farabeuf, this chapter will
explore the relation between image, cut, and political subjectivity (relations of power based on
the inherent constraints of hegemonic closure) in order to determine how the de/formation of the
feminine subject impacts the thinking of Latin American difference and gender.
read. It is not so much that the novel is nonlinear as that it refuses to engage in the recounting of
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any narrative, chronological or otherwise. Elizondo based this morbidly erotic text on the
historical personage of Dr. Louis Hubert Farabeuf, a French surgeon who designed several
medical instruments still in use and who published important booklets on surgery (particularly
his Précis de Manuel Opératoire, on amputation). As is evidenced in the subtitle of the text, each
of the novel’s nearly two-hundred pages is devoted to recording in the minutest detail every
aspect of a brief series of seemingly banal events: the doctor Farabeuf climbs an old staircase in
a building in present-day Paris on the rue de l’Odeon and enters an apartment in which a woman
referred to as “the Nurse” is playing the Chinese divination game of I Ching (which in other
retellings of the same episode becomes a Ouija board). The doctor crosses the threshold of the
room, bangs his foot on a table (although other times it is the woman who collides with the table)
and brushes the nurse’s hand while passing in front of a mirror reflecting Titian’s Sacred and
Profane Love on the opposite wall. He prepares himself for a surgical operation, examines his
While the chronology of the story ends here, there are a few other events that occur in
other spaces in the text. At times the narrative takes place on the beach of Honfleur where a man
and woman walk without touching; she suddenly runs ahead of him to pick up a starfish while he
looks on without seeming to recognize her. At other times we find ourselves in Peking in 1901
witnessing the slow dismemberment of a Chinese assassin, where Farabeuf is apparently the
photographer who captured the infamous image of the instant of death, a photograph which will
appear reproduced in the novel. The final space is that of a show, the Instantaneous Theater of
Master Farabeuf, in which the doctor displays and explains various images to an audience.
The novel repeatedly cycles through each of these times and spaces, recounting every detail in
contradictory ways. In his study Sacred Erotism Juan Carlos Ubilluz characterizes the text as
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following a “spiral movement in which every repetition sheds new light on how Farabeuf is a
kaleidoscopic text where Bataille’s sacrificial eroticism, the I Ching, and the aesthetics of the
nouveau roman are meticulously orchestrated mirrors that produce a myriad of different images
that nevertheless allude to the same experiences of the Real” (140). The narrative mode of the
text is primarily concerned with the production of images. Instead of referring to “scenes” in his
analysis of the novel, Ubilluz coins the term tableau mutant: rather than clear narrative action
based on movement, we find characters and relations presented in repetitive images, frozen as if
in a tableau vivant in which living people replicate famous paintings. Ubilluz replaces this
second term with mutant in order to illustrate “the narrative’s palimpsestual quality,” referring to
the novel’s constant rewriting of its own actions and images as it completely destabilizes the
In order to clarify further the nature of the novel, I will also mention Ubilluz’ neologism
hypercharacter: rather than employing traditional, individual characters, according to the critic
of names and identities.” They are sexually divided since the men and women in the text display
a consistent relation to the notion of transgression: while males are the instigators, women “are
portrayed in a state of inner-restlessness brought about by their conflicting desires for self-
preservation and jouissance” (143). Rather than stable identities, the characters must be
understood in terms of their encounter with the Real in each of their imaginations, their coming-
comprehension of the novel. The text even evokes Freud’s fundamental rule of psychoanalysis:
that the patient must say whatever goes through his or her mind. “Es preciso recordarlo todo,
absolutamente todo, sin omitir absolutamente nada, pues todo puede tener una importancia
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capital... Todo puede contribuir a darnos la clave de este misterio” (104) [“It is vital to remember
everything, absolutely everything, without omitting a single detail, since any one thing might be
of capital importance… Virtually anything might provide us with the key to this mystery” (64-
5)]. As if narrated from the analyst’s couch, the novel displays an obsession with remembering
and will endlessly sift through images in its search for something unnamed.
While there are numerous compelling pieces of scholarship on Farabeuf, nearly all have
limited themselves to exegesis of the novel’s formal structure and overt themes of sexual
violence, the feminine, and the relation between death and the erotic (usually through the lens of
transitions between what the critic terms “instant-planes” (planos-instantes) in order to theorize
the temporal simultaneity of the three distinct space-time configurations evoked by the narrative:
“here” (the Odeon apartment in Paris, from which the text is narrated), the site of the Leng Tch’é
execution in Peking, and the beach at Honfleur (74-5). Hildegard Marth employs a nearly
mathematical approach in her detailed narratological analysis of the novel’s structure, chapter by
chapter. At times it seems that the text’s phantasmagoric, aesthetic spirals so overwhelm that
they obstruct deeper discussions of content: in Carol Clark D’Lugo’s interpretation, for example,
Elizondo “effects a change in the reader’s focus from content to form by making the content so
impenetrable that readers must grasp whatever patterns, images, and repetitions they can,” which
leads her to assert that the novel is “all vehicle and no tenor—unless the readers provide it”
(165). While no one would dispute the level of complication that Elizondo achieves in form,
such a reading so closely confines itself to the novel’s meandering, repetitive structure and
fragmentary aesthetic that it seems to miss the dire political implications of the text’s obsession
with the penetration and consumption of the feminine. A truly political reading of the text
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requires that one read creatively into its gaps and lacunae, which Alberto Moreiras has achieved
The following analysis of Farabeuf is divided into several sections that outline a theory
of the feminine political subject in Latin America through the literary vision of Elizondo’s novel,
a text that repeats incessantly the horrific relation between foundational violence and the female
body. The first section explores from a psychoanalytic perspective (to which this exceedingly
psychological novel readily lends itself) the visual nature of feminine subject formation, which is
based on the sacrificial loss of an object and its subsequent paradoxical inclusion within the
subject as lack in a relation aligned with Lacanian “extimacy.” The next section initiates the
exegesis of Farabeuf, tracing the extimate object throughout the novel, an object that Elizondo
significantly transforms into an image. The third section explores the novel’s framing of this
image and its politicization, the process by which the image of the feminine as lack—her
then turns to the Brazilian roots of cultural cannibalism, which I identify as matriarchal in nature,
and outlines the perverse transformation of anthropophagy into gynophagy as the feminine
subject is negatively incorporated into the political realm through imaginary acts of
consumption. The final section seeks a strategy of resistance in the wake of such sexualized
violence, examining the novel’s conflation of torture and writing through Nelly Richard’s post-
hegemonic notion of the feminization of writing. In this way the chapter lays the theoretical
groundwork for an understanding of feminine subjectivity in Latin America and its relation to the
15
I. THE SUBJECT BY SUBTRACTION: EXTIMACY AND FORMATIVE NEGATION
Rather than developing a linear plot, Elizondo’s novel repetitively cycles through a series of
images: Titian’s Renaissance painting Sacred and Profane Love, an amputation sketch from one
of Dr. Farabeuf’s instructional manuals, the Leng Tch’é photograph, and finally the phantasmic
presence of Titian’s The Flaying of Marsyas (detectable only at the point of the intertextual
intersection of the previous images, according to Alberto Moreiras). Each of these highlights a
distinct aspect of the feminine subject’s formative process within Farabeuf. In a reading
performed primarily through the lens of psychoanalysis, I approach the novel as a theoretical text
outlining the nature of the feminine political subject. The Lacanian notion of extimacy, building
on the Freudian view of negation, theorizes the relation between interior and exterior, as it posits
that subject formation implies the inclusion of that which it excludes, just as the symbolic order
incorporates—is founded on—the gap in signification opened up by the real. We will analyze
how Elizondo transforms the subject’s extimate relation to objects into an extimate relation to
images through the development of the notions of ekphrasis (the textual representation of an
object) and the spectacle, as well as the primacy of a visual mode of consumption, all in the
service of the production of a politicized image: one that ultimately founds the social order
In her seminal study The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, Elaine
Scarry defines pain in terms of negation, arguing that if it were not an aversive experience it
could no longer occupy the phenomenological category of pain: “the very content of pain is itself
‘against.’” Significantly, she takes this argument further and introduces a certain distance
between the subject and this overwhelming experience of immediate and intense negation: “Even
though it occurs within oneself, it is at once identified as ‘not oneself,’ ‘not me,’ as something so
16
alien that it must right now be gotten rid of” (52). Though she does not speak of it in such terms,
here Scarry touches upon the essence of the Lacanian notion of extimacy, a concept that will
greatly inform a reading of the curious (and related) processes of sexuation and subject formation
that take place in Elizondo’s novel. In Seminar VII Lacan describes extimacy as an internal
negation that founds the subject: “something strange to me, although it is at the heart of me”
(71). It is telling that such a concept should be aligned with the unmaking of the subject in the
Leng Tch’é photograph that functions as the traumatic kernel of Farabeuf—this image is indeed
the Elizondian primal scene—as well as in Scarry’s analysis of pain and the structure of torture.
This discussion of Farabeuf begins with a phenomenological focus on interiority, for the
division between inside and outside is to be found within the subject. In her essay “Vampires,
Breast-Feeding, and Anxiety” Joan Copjec explains that our constitution as subjects depends on
our initial separation from Freudian “objects” such as the gaze, breast, or phallus; we establish a
self by identifying and rejecting these objects as non-self. Yet this rejection is a complicated
matter, for it “can only be accomplished through the inclusion within ourselves of this negation
of what we are not—within our being, this lack-of-being.” Separated, cut off, and yet
simultaneously internal, incorporated in their very amputation, these objects are referred to as
“extimate, which means they are in us that which is not us” (128-9). The relation of internal
exclusion that characterizes that between the subject and the extimate object a is aligned with
that between the symbolic and the real, respectively. The subject flees into the symbolic when
confronted with lack at the heart of the anxiety that heralds an encounter with the real; yet this
negation of the real is ultimately inherent within the symbolic order, which fails “to coincide
with itself, to guarantee itself.” Copjec therefore defines the subject as “the failure that maintains
the symbolic, [that] prevents it from collapse” (125). The subject’s encounter with the extimate
17
object erupts in an anxiety-ridden experience of the uncanny, as we brush up against something
foreign within ourselves, an opening unto the real, that enigmatic excess called jouissance (129).
distance, it seems to be a partial object, one that we yearn to recover in order to become whole
(129). This distanced perspective is our normal relation to the extimate object, which thus
functions as “the object-cause of desire that lends things their only value, their desirability”
(139). Yet in moments of overproximity to this object, it appears “as a complete body, an almost
exact double of our own, except for the fact that this double is endowed with the object that we
sacrificed in order to become a subject” (129). It is this encounter of overproximity that we must
explore, for it acts as a sort of ontological state of exception. It disrupts not only our relation to
objects but also our very relation to the self, for in it we confront a monstrous, uncanny double.
While Copjec approaches the double through its incarnation as a vampire drinking from the
extimate breast of his victim, in Farabeuf it is manifested as the eponymous surgeon, who
specializes in the removal of (extimate) corporeal objects and therefore disturbs the feminine
subject’s relation to the symbolic order she inhabits. The surgeon’s intervention is a colonization
of the body, and thus of feminine subjectivity, but it also exerts control over her relation to
language and to the world. In short, it is not only physical and ontological, but ethical and
political.
In bridging the gap between psychoanalytic theory and Latin American political realities,
we may read the construction of national sovereignty in terms of Freudian negation. One need
only think of Argentina’s Dirty War, referred to by the military regime as the National
subtraction? Such a phrase echoes that of Brazilian critic Roberto Schwarz in his essay
18
“Nacional por subtração” (less so in the translation, “Brazilian Culture: Nationalism by
argues that focusing on the problem of imitation obfuscates the issue, for it diverts attention onto
the relationship between “elite and model.” Such an approach excludes the marginal and poor
from the production of culture and therefore reveals the very concept of culture to be founded on
the negation of an entire social class (Schwarz 247). Similarly, our engagement with such
negation in the present study theorizes the process in the realm of the political in order to critique
the state’s production of a national subject. In the example of Argentina’s Proceso, the
subversive (aligned here with the feminine political subject), or any undesirable, is excised from
the social body via forced disappearance, yet nevertheless remains incorporated within the state
biopolitical equivalent of the Freudian negation operative within extimacy. While the
combination of such political acts of negation with state terror has been implemented throughout
the world (such as in the Nazi strategy of forced disappearance called Nacht und Nebel, “night
and fog”), desaparición has nevertheless acquired a uniquely Latin American status, particularly
with respect to the dictatorships of the Southern Cone. In the words of Ernesto Sábato in the
prologue to the Nunca Más report, the vanished victims of the Dirty War came to occupy “a dark
and ghostly category: that of los Desaparecidos. A word—sad Argentine privilege!—that today
is written in Spanish in the world press” (9). Just as the psychoanalytic subject is produced via a
unique process of negation that incorporates the very exclusion that it effects, so is the Latin
American dictatorial state itself formed through political acts of violent subtraction in which
would-be subjects are surgically removed from the body politic only to be reincorporated
19
elsewhere, in controlled sites. Hence Sábato’s lamentation that the disappeared “ceased to have
civil presence” (9). The dictatorial state founds itself on this active negation, a construction by
subtraction. Reading the feminine political subject (in her incarnation as subversive, she who
becomes associated with any non-hegemonic political ideology) as the inscription of the
regime’s hegemonic discourse, we may reformulate Copjec’s phrasing to assert that the feminine
political subject constitutes the absence that maintains the regime, preventing it from collapse.
extimate object sacrificed by the body of the state in the latter’s effort to constitute itself as
imperial power. More generally, regarding the political implications of this psychoanalytic
our freedom as subjects. For it is the object a as object-cause of desire that affords the subject
with the luxury of choice; without it, Copjec maintains that “the subject is condemned to wander
in pursuit of one thing after another... without any hope of choosing a path that is not dictated by
the objects themselves” (139). The goal is therefore to recuperate some distance from the
extimate object, to flee the anxiety of the uncanny that arises from an encounter of overproximity
through which the object a presses so nearly that it paradoxically appears as a whole body
endowed with a monstrous excess that we experience as horrifying, sublime, surplus jouissance.
For the state, this means that sovereign power will thrive by maintaining controlled distance to
the extimate feminine subject through the establishment of biopolitical institutions. Yet for the
feminine subject, recovering distance (insofar as it implies reinstating the object a as object-
cause of desire) means recuperating feminine desire itself. In this sense, desire and anxiety are
antithetical forces that determine the political realities of subjects; it is thus no accident that these
are precisely the affects that Elizondo maintains in agonic tension in Farabeuf.
20
It should be evident by now that Copjec’s wonderfully cogent explication of extimacy
lends itself to a political reading of state-formation and state violence in Latin America. Yet
rather than uncritically assuming that this linkage between psychoanalysis and biopolitics exists
a priori, it is indeed one of the aims of this dissertation to forge such a connection across the
scope of the project. To that end, we begin with Farabeuf, a novel situated at the nexus of
psychoanalysis, biopolitics, and feminism (if negatively so, through its obsession with masculine
physical and psychical penetration of the feminine), which may be considered the three pillars of
this study. Little distance is afforded in the labyrinth of images constructed within Farabeuf; as
the following sections will demonstrate, the novel—focalized through the feminine subject—
draws us ever closer to the uncanny encounter with the extimate object a. We will read the
existential and corporeal nightmare that Elizondo crafts as the inexorable emergence of
overproximity, culminating in las imágenes ansiadas [“the desired images”] that conflate the
polar affects of desire and anxiety as the female protagonist experiences her final, horrific
surgical intervention. It is feminine desire that is violently curbed in Farabeuf, through what we
may call a biopolitical aesthetics of repression. The obsessive repetition that characterizes the
novel’s narration corresponds to the negation inherent within the process of subject formation by
subtraction, which implies “the signifier’s repeated attempt—and failure—to designate itself”
(Copjec 121). This failure forms a spiral that circumscribes the lack at its heart; whereas in
psychoanalysis this constitutes the impossible, traumatic opening of the real within the symbolic,
in Farabeuf it indicates the impossible emergence of feminine desire that elicits the chain of
ekphrastic, extimate images leading up to the image that reveals itself as their proleptic
inspiration: the unmaking of the feminine subject as reflected in the surgeon’s mirrors in the
21
II. EKPHRASTIC REFLECTIONS: THE ELIZONDIAN SHIFT FROM OBJECT TO IMAGE
This section will trace the trajectory of the extimate object in Farabeuf across distinct images
and ekphrastic representations in the novel, locating the instant of its removal in the Leng Tch’é
photograph, the relation of distance in an amputation sketch from Dr. Farabeuf’s Précis, and its
uncanny overproximity in Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love. Ultimately these textual images
serve to produce a politicized image in the surgical encounter between feminine subject and
doctor. Through this focus on the ekphrastic repetition of images, Elizondo transforms the
extimate Freudian object of psychoanalytic theory into an image itself, thereby asserting that the
formation of a feminine subject is imaginary in nature. That is to say, it is the image as the
presence of an absence that constitutes the ontological basis for feminine subjectivity. She
sacrifices images, and is in the end sacrificed as image in the mirror, “en cuya superficie nos
estamos viendo morir” (171) [“on whose surface we watch ourselves die” (112)].
Before examining the extimate relations established through the more visually innocuous
images presented in Farabeuf, we will delve into the dramatic presentation and sexuation of the
Leng Tch’é photograph, as it corresponds to the sacrificial instant of removal of the extimate
object in the process of subject formation. The seventh chapter of the novel, which deals most
closely with the experience of the Leng Tch’é, begins with an exhortation to look: “Tienes que
concentrarte... No quieras cerrar los ojos cuando los verdugos gesticulen en torno a su cuerpo
desnudo” (135) [“You must concentrate… Do not try to close your eyes as the executioners
hurry around his nude body” (87)]. This passage constitutes the evocation of a memory from
January 29, 1901 as though it were happening before the eyes of the narratee. It relies on the
traumatic strength of the memory as image in order to present itself, to make itself present, in the
present and as the present, in the form of a visual object entering into contact with the gaze. The
rest of the chapter consists almost entirely of a meditation on the photograph of the Leng Tch’é
22
execution, presented as the detailed analysis of Dr. Farabeuf as he ponders every instant of the
process and the skill of each of the men who so subtly manipulate the poles providing various
points of tension on the body of the victim, as well as that of the men in front who actually wield
In an entirely performative gesture meant solely for the reader, at the start of this
meditation Elizondo includes a full page reproduction of the infamous photograph in question,
the image of a dying man looking to the sky in apparent ecstasy, an expression that so captivated
Bataille. The narration’s assertion that “el suplicio es una forma de escritura” (135) [“torture is a
form of writing” (87)] gains heft through the presence of such a gruesome photograph, which
Bataille and others idealize as having captured the precise moment of death itself. The torturing
communication between the state and its citizens; the regime carves a political message into the
body of the victim, as is clearly the case in the spectacle of a public execution. Language is
undeniably an essential element in the formation of a subject, as it is that which characterizes our
inscription within the symbolic order. Yet it seems that at the level of politics subject formation
demands the materiality of a written inscription (for example through a birth certificate or social
security card), of which torture—as the inscription of state discourse onto the very flesh of the
Despite the overwhelming presence of the violent Leng Tch’é image, Elizondo does not
fail to incorporate this dichotomy of presence and absence into Farabeuf, for the narration
emphasizes from the outset the notion of absence in relation to both the ekphrastic and visual
experience of the photograph. On the first page of the chapter we read that “Tienes que
embriagarte de vacío: estás ante un hecho extremo” (135) [“You must intoxicate yourself with
23
emptiness: you are in the presence of an extreme event” (87)], a rite of witnessing the demise of
the other which will result in the subject’s traumatic acquisition of secret knowledge.
“[C]onocerás el sentido de un instante dentro del que queda inscrito el significado de tu muerte
que es el significado de tu goce” (136) [“You will know the feeling of an instant in which the
meaning of your death, which is the meaning of your pleasure, is inscribed” (87)]. The
paradoxical relation between presence and absence (or emptiness, for Elizondo) constitutes the
very essence of the image. In his essay “Distinct Oscillation” philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy states
that “The image gives presence to the text,” and more specifically that it “gives a presence that it
lacks… to something that, being absent, cannot receive it” (66). The image is fundamentally
concerned with the formation of meaning, “making absense a presense,” bringing forth, imaging,
this immaterial, incorporeal sense (67). Emptiness itself lies at the heart of the image, as Nancy
essentially, it presents absence. The absent are not there, are not ‘in images.’ But
they are imaged: their absence is woven into our presence. The empty place of the
absent as a place that is not empty: that is the image. A place that is not empty
does not mean a place that has been filled: it means the place of the image, that is,
in the end, the image as place, and a singular place for what has no place here: the
Reading Farabeuf in these terms—the image as the place of metaphor, an empty place that is not
empty—Elizondo’s chosen metaphor in this passage becomes significant: the presentation of the
image corresponds to a process of intoxication (“you must intoxicate yourself with emptiness”).
As in Nancy, this is not an act of filling an absence, but one of incorporating an emptiness. The
subject herself becomes the space of the non-empty which is not filled. Intoxication implies a
24
kind of taking-into-oneself, yet also losing oneself to something else, as well as a certain
enjoyment in this Dionysian loss of self and disruption of Apollonian order, to read it in
Nietzschean terms.
Nancy’s reflections on the image as the presentation of absence serve to link the image to
the Lacanian notion of extimacy. The extimate object a, as that which signifies the failure of the
symbolic order precisely through its failure to adopt a signifier—and thereby announces the
uncanny intrusion of the real—here becomes the image that signifies lack, emptiness, or absence
by means of a visual displacement. The subject’s incorporation of this emptiness by means of the
visual consumption of the image (Elizondo’s “intoxication”) constitutes the uncanny encounter
with the extimate as it closes in on her. As the addressee of Farabeuf’s narration, the feminine
subject is therefore confronted with her own distorted double in the Leng Tch’é photograph. This
point is emphasized at the end of the chapter when the narration presents the Leng Tch’é as a
mirror reflecting the death of the female protagonist. After remarking on the beauty of the face,
with its androgynous features bordering on the feminine, Elizondo writes “Mira ese rostro. En
ese rostro está escrita tu verdad. Es el rostro de una mujer porque sólo las mujeres resisten el
dolor a tal extremo” (152) [“Look at that face. Your truth is written on that face. It is the face of
a woman because only women can withstand such extreme pain” (99)]. The text goes on to
discuss the Leng Tch’é as an amputating procedure focusing on disconnecting the limbs, and
asks “¿por qué, entonces, esos tajos por encima de las tetillas? Esas incisiones sólo se explican
por el hecho de que en el lugar en que se encuentran existieran volúmenes o masas musculares
protuberancias del cuerpo” (153) [“Why then, those slices above the nipples? Those incisions
can only be explained by the fact that they were made in an area where volumes of muscle exist
25
that are sufficiently prominent to be considered extremities or protuberances of the body” (100)].
In Elizondo’s fictional reworking of history, the sex of the subject of this real photograph is
reinterpreted based on the wounds displayed; the horrific, massive gashes on the victim’s chest
lead the narrator to read the body as a text, a sexed text, whose breasts (as Freudian objects) have
been removed.
The Leng Tch’é photograph acquires a special status within Farabeuf, acting as the
ontological ekphrasis of feminine subject formation (by subtraction, through sacrifice) in that the
male Chinese assassin comes to represent visually the fictional female (hyper)character of
Mélanie Dessaignes. The identification of the wound as the literal removal of the extimate breast
retroactively posits the subject in question as feminine; that is to say, it is not until the breast is
lost through sacrifice that it ever existed in the first place. The Leng Tch’é photograph depicts
neither the breast as object-cause of desire, nor its appearance in the image of a double in
possession of the lost object, but rather the incision itself: the interior negation of the extimate in
which the object is manifested merely as the presence of an absence. The novel is indeed aptly
subtitled La crónica de un instante [The Chronicle of an Instant], for this photograph (along with
the very instant in which the feminine subject is founded, formed through deformation. Given
that the Freudian object in question here is the breast rather than the phallus, we may assert that
first that of a male body into female (along with its respective extimate objects), and furthermore
that of the object itself into image. As a theoretical text, Elizondo’s novel posits that the feminine
subject is constituted through the sacrifice of an image in an act of visual deformation. In this
way the text not only reworks psychoanalytic theory, but goes so far as to carve it into the flesh
26
of an actual human being. Farabeuf links the psychological experience of the feminine subject to
the body in a concrete (and political) way: through surgery. Thus we may call the novel, in all of
From the association of the Leng Tch’é with the foundational act of feminine subjectivity
in the instant of extimate removal, we move on to the normal relation of distance to the extimate
object a, which appears in Farabeuf through the inclusion of a small amputation sketch.
Appearing four times in the novel (three of which occur in the seventh chapter, discussed above),
the drawing is lifted straight from the historical Dr. L. H. Farabeuf’s Précis de Manuel
Opératoire. In it we see a surgeon’s disembodied hands emerging from the sleeves of a suit, the
left holding the patient’s bare thigh in place while the right guides a large blade downward in
order to illustrate the placing and direction of an incision for a circular method of amputation.
The image establishes an intertextual relation between Elizondo’s novel and the French
surgeon’s own medical legacy of the Précis, suggesting that the novel itself is an instruction
manual of sorts, one that outlines the horrific process of formation by subtraction to which the
The final appearance of the drawing occurs in the midst of the following passage
regarding the Leng Tch’é photograph: “Es una mujer. Eres tú... Ese rostro contiene todos los
rostros... es el rostro del Cristo... el Cristo chino” (150-1) [“It is a woman. It is you... That face
contains all faces... it is the face of Christ... the Chinese Christ” (98)]. In Juan Carlos Ubilluz’s
view, this association between victim, woman, and Christ indicates woman’s centrality in
Elizondo’s thought, for “the replacement of the image of God as presence for that of woman as
orgasmic absence ultimately introduces a void at the heart of the Other and unsettles the self-
sufficiency of Christian Dogma” (153). The amputation sketch itself acts as an Elizondian
27
object-made-image that interrupts the text in seemingly random fashion, just as the extimate
object disrupts the symbolic order of signifiers. Yet in this particular context it is intruding on the
chain of signifiers that links the Chinese assassin to Christ, the feminine, and Farabeuf’s surgical
victim. In this way the image emphasizes the institutionalization of torture: its conflation with
surgery, medical science, and even religion. Let us not forget that the Leng Tch’é is the
punishment mandated by the state for attempted regicide, a ritual which, as Alberto Moreiras
observes in Tercer espacio, “reproduces upon the body the damage that the assassin could have
caused in the social fabric: dismemberment” (337, translation mine). This surgical relation to the
extimate object is one of distance, for it presents the object as such: one that has been amputated,
a partial element forcibly removed (even in its political incarnation as the subject that disrupts
the hegemonic order and must be internally excluded within the institutional limits of the state).
As we trace the three distinct configurations of extimate objects that Elizondo transforms into
images, let us recall that this results in the conversion of the feminine subject herself into image.
This image of the feminine will ultimately become a politicized image, as the process of subject
formation through extimacy is itself transformed into the deformation of the feminine subject, a
The relation of distance to the extimate object illustrated by the surgeon’s amputation
sketch (characterized by desire for the object that we wish to recover) contrasts directly with
Elizondo’s elaborate ekphrasis of Titian’s painting Sacred and Profane Love, which constitutes
the uncanny overproximity of the extimate associated with the image of the double. The painting,
hanging on the wall of the Odeon apartment in Paris, is presented as depicting two female figures
thus: the one on the right, dressed in splendid clothing, gazes lustfully at the viewer, while the
one on the left, nude, raises an amphora to the heavens in a sacred gesture. Yet a glance at the
28
original painting will reveal that this splendidly clothed figure actually appears on the left, not
the right, as the ekphrastic passage would have us believe. It turns out that what we receive here
is not a description of the painting itself, but rather of its reflection in the mirror on the opposite
wall, the presence of which “suscita un equívoco esencial en nuestra relación de los hechos” (66)
This “fundamental error” is the encounter with the double that stems from the uncanny
overproximity of the object a and destabilizes the existential ground of the feminine subject. The
narration proceeds to investigate in detail the reversal of the female figures in the ekphrastic
description of the painting evidently offered by the Nurse as she sits at a table playing a
divination game (which the text hesitates to identify as either I Ching or Ouija, Eastern and
Western methods, respectively, and a set of worlds in which Latin America is distinctly absent)
and sees in the hallway mirror a woman walking past a man on her way to the window. Here
arises “la llamada ‘imagen de los amantes’” (67) [“the so-called ‘image of the lovers,’” (39)], an
event in the mind of the Nurse in which the other woman’s right hand grasps that of the man
standing in the hallway next to the painting while she passes by the mirror on her left. The
narrator reasons that since the Nurse could only see the couple’s reflection in the mirror (and
thus the left side of the woman), she could not have witnessed the woman’s right hand touching
that of the man. The Nurse’s “image of the lovers” must therefore be either a lie, a hypothetical
[“a definitely disturbing parallel”]: that the Nurse and the woman passing the man in the hallway
as he contemplates the reflection of Titian’s painting “son la misma persona que realiza dos
espejo, y otra de orden activo: cruzar velozmente la estancia” (68) [“are one and the same person
29
carrying out two totally distinct actions at exactly the same time: one passive—looking at her
own reflection in the mirror, and the other active—briskly crossing the room” (40)].
In its pervasive use of second person narration, the text addresses directly the feminine
subject, dividing her into active and passive functions: “¿Quieres ahora ser la Enfermera, ser el
testigo y ya no el testimonio?” (169) [“Do you now want to be the Nurse, the witness rather than
the testimony?” (110)]. The Nurse (like the reader) becomes the incarnation of the passive
witness, while the lover constitutes the active subject who gives testimony to corporeal
experience. This last category is particularly interesting, for one could think of the lover as the
passive victim of the surgeon’s torture, yet Elizondo seems to conceive of corporeal experience
itself as fundamentally active, or perhaps existentially productive. This reading of the feminine
subject is consistent with Juan Carlos Ubilluz’s aforementioned notion of the hypercharacter,
which denotes the sexually differentiated encounters with the real established in Farabeuf
between male and female. The ekphrasis of Titian’s painting introduces a chain of signifiers that
self/other, even male/female. The image inverts and displaces; it is all that links the various
aspects or incarnations of the female hypercharacter, and ultimately allows for the overproximate
The double may be read in any number of images that perform different functions: we
have already spoken of the surgeon (who doubles as the lover) as a vampiric double whose desire
feasts on the anxiety of the feminine subject, yet there surface further doublings in the duality of
the Nurse/lover as passive and active feminine modes (distinguished by their traumatic relation
to the surgical encounter) as well as the reflected image of Sacred and Profane Love, itself a
doubling of the feminine. The novel reveals Titian’s painting to be of the utmost importance
30
when the narrator grafts the hypercharacters’ relation onto the work of art, so that it may remain
“para siempre, fijo en la actitud de esos personajes representados en el cuadro: un cuadro que por
la ebriedad de nuestro deseo creíamos que era real y que sólo ahora sabemos que no era un
cuadro, sino un espejo, en cuya superficie nos estamos viendo morir” (171) [“forever, fixed in
the expressions of the characters depicted in the painting: a painting which, through the
drunkenness of our desire, we thought was real and which only now we know was not a painting
but a mirror on whose surface we watch ourselves die” (111-2)]. The overproximate image (the
lost object-turned-image that we desire) is manifested here as a double reflecting not only our
own image but our lack, and constitutes an encounter with death for Elizondo.
Recalling the text’s demand that the subject intoxicate herself with emptiness before the
extreme event of the Leng Tch’é, we find a parallel in this passage in the experience of the
subject as she views the painting: the association previously established through the thought of
Nancy between the image, intoxication, and absence (or emptiness) indicates that this, too, is an
encounter with the interior absence of the extimate object. If the Leng Tch’é corresponds to the
instant of sacrifice or removal of the breast, in Sacred and Profane Love we encounter a series of
doubles in possession of the extimate breast that the mutilated feminine subject lacks: the very
definition of extimate overproximity. This is an image of two sexualized female figures (one
gazing lustfully, the other nude) that is repeated—or uncannily inverted—in the mirror that
finally forms a mise-en-abyme once the text characterizes the painting itself as a mirror. The
feminine subject of Elizondo’s novel therefore finds herself caught in the middle of a visual
abyss, surrounded on either side by the infinite repetition of the extimate object that she lacks.
The overwhelming overproximity of the doubles that surround her (including that of the surgeon
with whom she here establishes physical contact) and that strip her of the freedom of desire,
31
ultimately signifies her death. Just as the presence of the breast in the painting signifies its
extimate absence in the viewing subject, so do the whole, intact female bodies it depicts evoke
the horrific unmaking of the feminine subject that will soon occur; the flawless alabaster flesh
that issued forth from beneath the brush of the Venetian master will be stained red as the
surgeon’s knives reveal its interior secrets within the dark chamber.
Of the feminine subject’s relation to the aforementioned images of extimacy we may now say
that the photograph posits the instant of her (de)formation by subtraction (for it also heralds her
death), while the painting inscribes her subsequent lack. The novel maintains these particular
images in relation to one another such that each becomes the ekphrasis of the other, as the
feminine subject oscillates repeatedly between sacrificial amputation and the anxiety-ridden
return of the lost object in the image of the double. This section will examine the mise-en-abyme
formed by these images, an abyss occupied by the feminine subject, as it is represented spatially
first in the novel’s Instantaneous Theater and once again in the dark chamber where the final
surgical intervention takes place. The link between these distinct abymes is the notion of the
spectacle, which is further developed through what Alberto Moreiras uncovers as the secret
ekphrasis of Farabeuf, an image unnamed in the novel that nevertheless lurks behind its scenes:
Titian’s The Flaying of Marsyas. The political implications of this painting—its evocation of the
image as the novel’s aim, as the feminine subject herself becomes an extimate image of internal
Toward the end of the sixth chapter we read of the memory of El Teatro Instantáneo del
Maestro Farabeuf [The Instantaneous Theater of Master Farabeuf], in which a mirror that
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served as the back of the stage reflected its own image thanks to another mirror at the back of the
theater, behind the audience, forming a mise-en-abyme. The doctor appears on stage as an elderly
man in a black Chinese robe, while his assistant, dressed as a nurse, lights a magic lantern in the
dark theater. This illuminates “la realidad de una imagen aterradora” [“the reality of a terrifying
image”], which otherwise lacks description. The Nurse asks questions of the doctor, who then
describes the details of each image as it is shown. When Titian’s painting appears suddenly,
“intempestivamente” [“in an untimely manner”], the Nurse scolds the doctor for including it and
quickly changes the image such that “volvíamos a ver, como si fuera desde otro punto de vista, la
imagen de aquella escena escalofriante cuyos detalles se veían acentuados por una explicación
(131) [“once again we saw, as if from another point of view, the image of that chilling scene, its
the art of torture” (82-3)]. The spectacle concludes as the Nurse begins to sell to the audience a
Légion d’Honneur, etc. This strange memory of the spectacle begins with the image of the Leng
Tch’é, though it is not initially named. It is referred to as terrifying and yet the narrator also
[“fascination of that damned and immensely beautiful flesh” (82)]. Interestingly enough, it is
only when an image of the painting Sacred and Profane Love appears that the narrator employs
the word intempestivo, indicating not only the inappropriate timing or out-of-jointness of the
image, but the storm-like violence with which it interrupts the show.
The spectacle of this abyme is deepened when one takes into account the etymology of
the mirror: Spanish espejo stems from Latin speculum (“mirror”) and speciō (“to observe, look
33
at”), from which spectaculum (“show, spectacle”) and Spanish espectáculo also derive. Master
the mise-en-abyme into the mise-en-scène: the abyss established by the mirrors becomes the
arrangement of the stage itself. Spectacle, mirror, and framing are made synonymous as the
abyme between painting and photograph is complicated: for it is now the innocuous painting that
is negated in favor of the aesthetically preferable image of torture. The theatrical notion of mise-
en-scène, which was taken up by film theory thanks to its usefulness for understanding the
framing and production of images, becomes relevant here for the same reason. The spectacle is a
construct designed for visual consumption by a particular audience; it is a political event in that it
seeks to influence the public sphere. In considering the mise-en-scène of the Instantaneous
Theater, and on a larger scale that of the entire novel as it frames each of its images for narrative
consumption, we must take into account the framing of the images, whose arrangement is here
Taking the text’s gaps, lacunae, or eruptions of lack into consideration, we may approach
the framing of the mise-en-scène in terms of that which it excludes; this makes particular sense
for the current project given that the image has been shown to constitute the paradoxical
espacio Alberto Moreiras has identified another of Titian’s paintings, The Flaying of Marsyas, as
an ekphrasis that remains “secret, although legible” through the other images of the text (324).
Titian’s representation of the mythological scene in which Apollo skins alive the satyr Marsyas,
who dared to challenge the god to a musical contest and lost, evokes visually the structure of the
Leng Tch’é photograph: the victim, bound in the center with his blade-wielding executioner off
to one side, is surrounded by a throng of spectators who face the viewer. Elizondo’s cryptic
34
allusion to this painting solves what Moreiras calls the ekphrastic paradox: an ekphrastic
description of an image suspends or defers reference (as it offers us the image textually rather
than visually) while it nevertheless settles the classical problem of reference in that the visual
sign ceases to be a sign and is instead taken as a signified object (323). The identification of The
Flaying of Marsyas as the secret ekphrasis of the text, or as its extimate image (for it is present
only through its negation, its absence), resolves the ekphrastic paradox by introducing a third
level of meta-reflection into the text: the presence of King Midas, thought to be the painter’s
self-portrait, who sits in judgment over the contest and thus occupies the meta-level of critique.
The Renaissance interpretation of this myth, Moreiras notes, was the allegorization of the
triumph of superior arts over lower ones, as well as redemption, given that Apollo discovers
higher values within the body of the satyr (333). In this reading, the body awaits a redemptive act
of violence that will liberate the subject by penetrating the infernal flesh and release the higher
spiritual values encased within. Yet Elizondo moves beyond this Christo-Platonic dichotomy by
contemplating the entire structure of the agonic tension between body and spirit. Moreiras cites
critic David Richards, who argues in Masks of Difference that the figure of Midas/Titian
observing the scene “plays no part in the Apollonian triumph,” but rather records “the structure
which the triumph articulates” (Richards 19). This meta-structural element of Farabeuf results in
a new interpretation of the Leng Tch’é photograph, which Moreiras reads in the same meta-
reflexive way, through the Greek concept of the pharmakós: the “scapegoat and victim who
appeases social resentment” (337). As stated earlier, the dismemberment that the Leng Tch’é
victim would have unleashed upon the social body through regicide is reproduced upon his own
flesh. Moreiras notes that “only the ritual killing of the pharmakós converts him into pharmakós,
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which is to say, into a figure capable of giving meaning to the social space,” as it is this ritual
that establishes the fundamental political distinction between inside and outside (337-8).
Such a distinction, psychoanalysis has taught us, is located on the inside (within the
symbolic order); the feminine subject is made extimate through this spectacle, whose secret
mise-en-scène is the image of the satyr Marsyas as pharmakós, an image that emerges only
intertextually. Rather than the removal of an extimate Freudian object, the painting depicts the
removal of the skin, which is to say that it demonstrates the absolute negation of the barrier
dividing subject and world, inside and outside; the torture of Marsyas, as an annihilation of the
limit itself, paradoxically constitutes the de-constitution of the subject. The political order thus
establishes itself by negating that which it is not, through ritual sacrifice of the non-political, just
as the psychoanalytic subject founds herself through the negation of the non-self in the making-
extimate of objects. The identification of the pharmakós with the feminine is already present in
Farabeuf, as Moreiras notes that rather than the “Flayed Man,” in Titian’s painting we should
speak of the “Flayed Woman,” given Elizondo’s re-sexuation of the Leng Tch’é victim which is
retroactively applied to the ekphrastic image that it signifies (339). In turning to the final abyme
of the novel, whose mise-en-scène is the polyvalent space of the dark chamber, we follow
Moreiras’ assertion that “the narrator of Farabeuf seeks the repetition of the imperial gesture in
the body of his lover, a search which is oriented toward the ultimate production of meaning;
meaning which is thus understood as the opening of writing to the inscription of power” (337). In
Farabeuf it is clear that meaning is produced through the image; more specifically, writing opens
itself and power is inscribed ekphrastically through the production of a politicized image. This
process of politicization is demonstrated in the chain of signifying images of the Leng Tch’é, The
Flaying of Marsyas, the pharmakós, and finally the feminine subject in Dr. Farabeuf’s dark
36
chamber. We may read this last image as the culmination of the ekphrastic political
developments that precede it in the chain: that is to say, it is the subtraction of the feminine that
The final mise-en-abyme of the novel occurs in the dark chamber itself, a space in which
the novel’s three primary elements—sex, surgery, and torture—converge: the dark chamber
becomes simultaneously the bedroom, operating room, and torture chamber. This chamber
abyss formed between a set of mirrors and the female body itself: “Con un gesto de su mano
enguantada Farabeuf hará que todo vuelva a la penumbra. Proseguirá el espectáculo. Ahora serás
aparatos y marcillas que sirvan para mantenerte inmóvil y abierta hacia la contemplación de esa
imagen que tanto ansías contemplar” (182) [“With a gesture of his gloved hand, Farabeuf will
make the darkness return. The performance will continue. Now you will be the spectacle. This
game of skillfully placed mirrors will reflect your face, furrowed by equipment and braces to
hold you still and open to the contemplation of the image you are so anxious to see” (119)]. The
gesto that opens this passage evokes the “imperial gesture” that Moreiras claims the doctor will
repeat in this chamber, as the spectacle reaches its horrific apex and links the doctor’s two sole
interests: “la cirugía de campaña y la fotografía instantánea” (77) [“battlefield surgery and
The “dark chamber” (camera obscura, cámara oscura, or chambre noire), in addition to
being the space of psycho-sexual, existential horror in the novel, has a history as a photographic
apparatus, a device that led directly to the primitive type of camera that Dr. Farabeuf would have
used to capture the Leng Tch’é image in 1901 in Elizondo’s fictional reworking of history. Given
37
the doctor’s self-professed interests, this apparatus concerned with visual production may be
juxtaposed with another, one that occupies the aforementioned chain of signifiers of speciō,
speculum (espejo/mirror), and spectaculum (spectacle): the vaginal speculum, the modern
gynecological instrument used to hold a woman open for a doctor either to inspect (īnspiciō) or
to perform an intervention. The device is composed of blades, which are inserted, spread apart,
and arrested by a screw mechanism. Thus a metaphorical incision is made in order to gaze into
the feminine abyss, an act of both surgical and visual penetration analogous to that performed in
the dark chamber of Farabeuf. This uniquely feminine spectacle is produced through the
implementation of distinct penetrative apparatuses (the surgical speculum and the camera
obscura) that produce a feminine image; surgery and photography are thus parallel forms of
visual consumption. The experience of the feminine subject in this dark chamber constitutes an
ekphrastic repetition of the Leng Tch’é (and therefore of the imaginary transformation of the
satyr Marsyas into the Flayed Woman) in her role as extimate pharmakós; an ekphrastic
experience because the political division of the social order is inscribed into her flesh even as it
The final page of the novel explores this politicized image of the feminine, seeking in it a
particular kind of answer to its ineffable questions, as the doctor will find “en la imagen de tu
cuerpo abierto mil veces reflejado en el espejo, la clave de este signo que nos turba. Y él la
encontrará. Esto te lo aseguro. Bastará que en medio de esa pesadilla de tu cuerpo te mires
reflejada en el espejo” (183) [“in the image of your body reflected a thousand times in the mirror,
the key to this sign that disturbs us. And he will find it. I assure you of this. It will be enough
that, in the midst of your body’s nightmare, you see yourself reflected in the mirror” (120)].
While John Incledon has crafted a fine translation of Farabeuf, he mysteriously elides the
38
essential interiority of this passage, for the Spanish text actually reads “your open body;” the
mise-en-scène is here characterized by the opening of the body, its penetration by distinct
apparatuses that expose the interior and violently bring it into the realm of the (political) exterior.
This passage stages an inverted act of visual consumption, for in its particular mise-en-abyme it
is the abyss that consumes the subject rather than the subject who consumes the image. The
repetition of mirrors ad infinitum (or here even ad nauseam, given the graphic scene that they
reflect) not only inverts the image, but turns the order of visual consumption back upon itself.
The politicized image of these mirrors is unique in that it is one of negation, despite the
overwhelming proliferation of its presence. It is precisely this total, oppressive presence that
leads to the negation of the feminine subject through the image that presents her existence as
absence.
Elizondo concludes the novel with a series of images that effectively constitute its synopsis:
“Está aquí... En tu mente van surgiendo poco a poco las imágenes ansiadas. Un paseo a la orilla
del mar. El rostro de un hombre que mira hacia la altura. Un niño que construye un castillo de
arena. Tres monedas que caen. El roce de otra mano. Una estrella de mar... una estrella de mar...
una estrella de mar... ¿recuerdas?...” (183) [“He is here... In your mind, little by little, the desired
images begin to arise. A walk by the edge of the sea. The face of a man staring upward. A boy
building a sandcastle. Three coins falling. The graze of another hand. A starfish... a starfish... a
starfish... remember?...” (120)]. This is a fitting end to Farabeuf, a textual labyrinth of images,
yet these so-called “imágenes ansiadas” must be explored, for they are not merely “desired”
images. Like Freud’s unheimlich—a word that famously constitutes its own antonym—the verb
ansiar is entirely paradoxical: it denotes the act of yearning for something, yet this desire is
39
characterized not only by violent passion but even by fear, for the etymological root of the word
is Latin anxiō (“to make anxious or worry”), which heralds an affect related to a particular kind
of fear or anguish. Copjec defines anxiety from a Lacanian perspective as “that which nothing
precedes… a gap in the causal chain,” for it is a unique affect that works without signifiers and
thus signals “a lack of lack, a failure of the symbolic reality wherein all inalienable objects... are
constituted and circulate” (118-9). Las imágenes ansiadas operate simultaneously as signifiers
that designate desire as well as the very failure of signification; they are images of lack that
communicate their own impossibility. They arise in the instant before the female protagonist’s
presumed demise, the infamous instant of the novel’s subtitle, of which it claims the entire text is
a chronicle. This is the ecstatic instant captured in the Leng Tch’é photograph, itself perhaps
primary among these images, as it reduces the affects of desire and anguish to uncanny
indistinguishability.
Reading las imágenes ansiadas in terms of the politicized image of the feminine of which
they collectively become an ekphrastic representation, we realize that they also announce the
failure of the state to designate itself as sovereign. In this way the extimate feminine subject is
subversive, signaling a rupture in the smooth surface of hegemonic power which must then be
biopolitically regulated and institutionally excluded. The concentration camp, mental asylum, or
prison becomes a social appendix in which those subjects that announce the failures of the state’s
chain of signification are collected, out of sight, and made illegible. Farabeuf thus stages a
chiastic movement away from the subject by subtraction (through the interior negation of
objects) to the subtraction of the subject herself from the social order, while nevertheless being
negatively incorporated through what is essentially the elevation of extimacy to the level of
biopolitics.
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IV. DIFFERENTIAL INDIGESTION: LATIN AMERICAN ANTHROPOPHAGY
In thinking through the biopolitical incorporation of the feminine subject within the masculine
hegemonic order, the operative metaphor is one of consumption: the forcible conversion of the
Furthermore, as Elizondo bases his novel on the celebrated historical French surgeon Dr. Louis
Hubert Farabeuf, deforming him into the monster we encounter in the narrative, the text engages
deeper form of consumption lurking within its pages, as they evoke that perverse legacy of Latin
American difference: cannibalism. An analysis of this tradition will provide the background and
Elizondo’s novel. After exploring the notion of cultural anthropophagy as a means of critical
negation in an anti-colonial effort to combat eurocentrism and patriarchal oppression through the
production of difference, I argue that the matriarchal roots of anthropophagy are deformed along
with the feminine subject herself in postmodern Latin America. The feminine subject is
consumed, incorporated as an extimate remainder into the political realm through the violent
metamorphosis of anthropophagy into gynophagy. The metaphor for such a sexualized act of
devouring may be traced from the Brazilian theorists’ image of the cannibal to philosopher
Vilém Flusser’s eccentric critical taxonomy of the “vampire squid,” a deep sea mollusk in whom
description that very nearly fits Farabeuf). Object to image, abyme to scène, visual consumption
her birth into the political, which is also her death, if we are to learn anything from Elizondo.
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The movement to appropriate the notion of anthropophagy for Latin American cultural
theory was spearheaded by the Brazilian poet and intellectual Oswald de Andrade. Responding
to the colonial reality of Brazil that so appalled him, in 1924 Oswald published his Manifesto de
Poesia Pau-Brasil [Manifesto of Brazil-wood Poetry], a text that both playfully and polemically
sought out unique aspects of Brazilian culture that would provide the basis for original, non-
imitative cultural production. As critic Randal Johnson writes, the Manifesto “attempted to
reverse the historically imitative stance of Brazilian literature and the one-directional flow of
artistic influence by creating a poetry for export, just as Brazil-wood was the nation’s first export
product” (44). Thus Oswald championed primitivism, opposing it to elite, academic forms of
Reactions against all the indigestions of erudition” (187). Building on such notions, in 1928
Oswald published his famous Manifesto antropófago [Cannibalist Manifesto] in the first edition
of his Revista de Antropofagia [Cannibal Review], cementing the centrality of the notion of
cannibalism for Brazilian modernism, a movement officially begun in February 1922 during the
These two manifestoes constitute a militant effort in the search for an autonomous
Brazilian identity, against the dependency of the nation on neocolonial powers. As Neil Larsen
notes, dependency in this sense is far more than the mere misfortune of Latin American reality:
“it is, rather, the very logic of a historical subject that never catches up, that never ‘makes
History’ except in the image of an already-made” (78-9). He argues that Oswald’s modernism is
a “guerrilla strategy” of the dependent that pits the modern, colonizing power against itself by
“enclosing the antagonist within its own space and then simply withholding itself” (79). Hence
his focus on pau-brasil, the Brazil wood that was the territory’s fundamental export commodity,
42
of such importance that it gave the nation its very name: he creates a barbaric, primitive poetry
for exportation. “Language without archaisms, without erudition. Natural and neologic. The
millionaire-contribution of all the errors. The way we speak. The way we are,” writes Oswald,
amid the litany of the repetition through which the object itself emerges, “Pau-Brasil” (185). The
return to this commodity heralds the atavistic resurgence of a time before European reason
imposed itself economically, culturally, upon the region (“Our age announces the return to pure
meaning”); the poet reappropriates a national symbol in order to expropriate it on his own terms
(186). These inward and outward movements already prefigure the processes of devouring and
regurgitation that will characterize the concept of anthropophagy only four years later.
means of anticolonial production, one that operates through formative, critical negation in such a
way that the negation of colonial power and the production of subaltern difference become
synonymous. “Cannibalism alone unites us. Socially. Economically. Philosophically,” reads the
first of the 53 aphoristic fragments that comprise the text, indicating that what follows is not only
a critique of economic dependency and colonization, but a theory of social relations. Oswald
wastes no time in demonstrating just how his brand of cultural anthropophagy operates, declaring
at the outset “Tupi or not tupi, that is the question” (38). The Tupí ethnic group, the original
inhabitants of what is now Brazil, are an indigenous people comprising countless tribes with no
unified identity despite their common language, and are believed to have settled in the Amazon
rainforest nearly 3,000 years ago. According to the account of Hans Staden, a sixteenth-century
German soldier who survived captivity by the Tupí, they consumed the flesh of the strongest of
their rivals in rituals meant to increase their own power (an act referred to as exophagy), as well
as that of their dead relatives in order to honor them (endophagy). This historical reality
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bequeaths an undeniable legacy upon Latin American history: that of the cannibal, a word whose
etymological roots stem from Christopher Columbus’ acceptance of rumors that certain natives
of the Caribbean consumed human flesh and his subsequent conflation of the terms cariba and
caniba. Oswald’s reappropriation of Shakespeare simultaneously illustrates and enacts the kind
of cultural cannibalism that he set out to theorize, that of the consumption and regurgitation of
writing as subaltern difference. Furthermore, the phrase “tupí or not tupí” makes use of lexical
repetition in order to model the repetition of the cannibal, who consumes in order to produce
something new by means of a critical negation. The answer to the question is therefore both tupí
and not tupí; cannibalism revels in the paradox of difference through repetition (doubly so, in the
America, however, Oswald and subsequent Brazilian theorists of anthropophagy embrace them
as their unique historical legacy. As de Haroldo de Campos explains in his 1981 essay
“Anthropophagous Reason,” cannibalism speaks not from the perspective of the submissive,
noble savage, but instead adopts that of the bad savage, the “devourer of whites,” as it provides a
extimate: the cannibal identifies the extimate object already within himself (that which in him is
not him, the tendrils of colonial influence), and negates this very negation by regurgitating the
imposition of colonial absence in the production of new and unique subaltern reality. The
Brazilian legacy of anthropophagy is therefore useful for the present study in that it suggests a
possible strategy for transforming the sociopolitical reality of extimate negation into a positive
44
process through the production of difference. De Campos goes on to assert that “Any past which
is an ‘other’ for us deserves to be negated. We could even say, it deserves to be eaten, devoured,”
while stipulating the proviso of exophagy, the consumption of worthy opponents for the sake of
incorporating their strength (160). While any anthropophagic act seeks to liberate the subaltern
from dependency, it does so by evoking a past in which the subject was already autonomous,
prior to the expansion of European empires: “what underlies the phantasmagoric operations of
synthesis” (Larsen 81). It is through the metaphor of devouring that the image of autonomy
emerges, yet we are left to wonder—what of feminine subjectivity? For one cannot assume that
such autonomy would necessarily extend to the feminine, despite its focus on re-empowering the
oppressed.
Yet an analysis of Oswald’s “Cannibalist manifesto” reveals that the feminine does
indeed play a central role in the notion of anthropophagy, through his (at times oblique)
references to matriarchy. The poet identifies the oppressive colonizing forces as masculine, and
champions a matriarchal system that would oppose the phallocentric imperial order.
“Cannibalism. The permanent transformation of the Tabu into a totem,” he writes, referencing
Freud’s argument in Totem and Taboo that the cultural shift from totemic systems of social
organization to moralities of taboo constitutes the very process of civilization (in the verbal
sense) through the internalization of paternal authority as law (40). Oswald’s goal is to excise the
superego, the internalization of the father that results in the establishment of taboos as
inexplicable, sacred prohibitions (quoth the father, “Why? Because I said so!”). The regressive,
primitivist transformation of taboo into totem implies the rejection of the imposition of
patriarchal, colonial rule that generates paternal law. The poet thus calls for the making-extimate
45
of the father, internally negating him through his regurgitation as a totem animal, that creature
onto whom, according to Freud, the primal horde displaced their oedipal feelings toward the
father. This resulted in totemism’s two main prohibitions, “not to kill the totem [animal] and not
to have sexual relations with a woman of the same totem,” which significantly “coincide in their
content with the two crimes of Oedipus, who killed his father and married his mother, as well as
with the two primal wishes of children” (Freud, Totem and Taboo 495). As an oedipal system,
the totem is comprised of both paternal and maternal elements, yet it nevertheless remains free of
(or prior to) the patriarchal social and psychical constraints imposed surreptitiously through the
introduced through the violence of colonization. Oswald even evokes the matriarchal roots of
Brazilian material reality through references to the Tupí sun and moon goddesses, respectively:
“If God is the consciousness of the Uncreated Universe, Guaraci is the mother of the living. Jaci
is the mother of plants” (42). To these primitive, divine, “good” mothers he opposes the “bad”
mothers of Cornelia Africana (a paragon of patriarchal Roman virtue, the devoted mother of
tribunes Tiberius and Gaius Gracchi) and what is for Oswald her Portuguese parallel, María da
Fonte (a patriarchal woman who championed the Minho rebellion of 1846, supporting colonial
power) (38, 44). In the final fragment of the manifesto Oswald proclaims “Down with the
dressed and oppressive social reality registered by Freud—reality without complexes, without
madness, without prostitutions and without penitentiaries, in the matriarchy of Pindorama” (44).
The poet closes with a critique of enclosure itself: railing against the psychological and social
confinement of neuroses and prisons as well as the economic commodification and enslavement
of feminine subjectivity, Oswald eschews even the name of his nation, a name that celebrates the
46
origin of the colony’s dependence upon European powers in the exportation of Brazil-wood. In
what Randal Johnson identifies as Oswald’s call for “a utopian return to a pre-Cabralian Golden
Age of matriarchal society when man, rather than enslaving his enemies, ate them,” we witness
the resurgence of Pindorama, the Tupí name for the region (“land of the palms”). This amounts
to the atavistic return of a matriarchal order that reimagines (and re-produces) subaltern
difference through devouring acts of critical negation, an order that seeks to exorcise the
are left to wonder whether the anthropophagist revolution was simply a failure, or where lie its
lasting contributions. Larsen observes that literary anthropophagy remained limited to the
“Cannibalist Manifesto” and the short-lived Revista de Antropofagia that it engendered, and
claims that in general the movement lacked rigor, merely “proclaiming the new autonomy
without specifying the conditions that would take it beyond the level of clever sloganizing” (80).
At the very least it creatively opposes the Western position of exploitation to the Latin American
mode of critique. “I am only concerned with what is not mine. Law of man. Law of the
cannibal,” writes Oswald (38). Hence de Campos’ affirmation that “to write, today, in both
Europe and Latin America, will mean, more and more, to rewrite, to rechew” (177). Such a
discussion of Brazilian anthropophagic theory greatly informs a reading of Farabeuf, a novel that
bears no ostensible connection to Latin America whatsoever, given that its content is confined to
France and China in terms of both its spaces and characters, and its intertextuality limited to the
ekphrastic inclusion of Titian’s Italian Renaissance painting Sacred and Profane Love and the
horrific Leng Tch’é photograph. Elizondo’s novel is a work of Latin American cannibalism, yet
it is unique in that it isn’t a European literary text that he rewrites, but a person. The Mexican
47
author chews up the respected French surgeon Dr. Louis Hubert Farabeuf, honored with a statue
in the central court of the National School of Medicine in Paris, a man whose innovative medical
instruments are still utilized by doctors to this day, and regurgitates him as the sadistic surgeon
While it does not engage such issues directly through its content, Farabeuf nevertheless
has something to say about colonization, given its cannibalistic rereading (which is also
necessarily a rewriting) of European achievement. It is no accident that what passes for progress
and technological advancement in the West becomes an abomination when viewed from a Latin
American perspective. Even a brief survey of Latin American history abounds with
confirmations: western capitalism and neoliberal economic policies have a long tradition of
wreaking political havoc and implementing oppressive social structures throughout the
Americas. From the role of free-trade zones along the Mexican-U.S. border in the rise of
femicide; the United Fruit Company’s formation of the pseudo-democratic “banana republics” in
nations such as Honduras and Guatemala; to the violent imposition of the Chicago Boys’ free
market policies by the military junta during Pinochet’s reign in Chile, to name but a few bloody
examples. Yet this sort of critique stems only from the extradiegetic cannibalism effected by the
text: the fact that it rewrites and deforms a figure of European history (which is not to diminish
its importance). We must also address the endodiegetic anthropophagy of Farabeuf, however,
devoured by man in the novel. The text is cannibalistic, yes. Anthropophagic, not entirely: we’re
not in Pindorama anymore. It is this sexualized, gynophagic aspect of the novel that we will now
explore, for it is essential in tracing the development of the concept of the feminine political
subject in the thought of Elizondo. A new metaphor is necessary, one that more closely describes
48
the circumstances of feminine subjectivity in question. Enter Vilém Flusser’s “vampire squid,”
vampyroteuthis infernalis.
in 1939 during the Nazi occupation, and to Brazil the following year, when he lost his parents,
grandparents, and sister to the Holocaust. Throughout the 50s and 60s he taught philosophy and
worked as a journalist in São Paolo, before relocating to Europe in 1972 and focusing his
academic research on media theory. His unique study Vampyroteuthis infernalis, whose title
adopts the scientific name of the deep sea mollusk deemed “the vampire squid from hell,” was
published in 1987 in Germany, only four years prior to the critic’s untimely death in an
automobile accident in Prague. The text bears the mark of his decades among Brazilian
intelligentsia, as well as his decades of investigation into technology and media: while he tended
to compose his manuscripts in tandem between his two main languages, the Portuguese version
of Vampyroteuthis contains extended critiques that are absent in the German one. In this study
Flusser inextricably weaves philosophy with biology and social critique in what he deems an
madness”) in favor of an existential approach guided strictly by relevance to human matters (38).
This gem of a “paranaturalist” treatise thus explores what essential and urgent truths we must
learn about self-criticism from our surprising relation to this mysterious oceanic species that is in
every way our antithesis while also being the devouring Devil within us. Flusser states that
vampyroteuthis serves “as [a] pretext” for a critical view of mankind, a sentiment echoed in
Haroldo de Campos’ assertion that “Alterity is, above all, a necessary exercise in self-criticism”
(28, 177). Such a critique will directly inform the current discussion of the feminine political
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within the postmodern world of the image, the same world into which Farabeuf so poetically and
Flusser aligns human and vampyroteuthian existence with two distinct forms of
verticality: the elevation of our cranium “freed the gaze for theory and the hands for praxis,”
whereas the “unravelling of the molluscan spiral” pushed his cranium downward, “which freed
the foot for grasping and sucking in the world” (45). These opposing orientations correspond in
turn to two distinct epistemologies. Mankind “advances against the world,” one full of obstacles
impeding his path, which are perceived with the eyes and actively removed with the hands in a
gesture that Flusser defines as “culture”: the “deliberate modification of the world by a subject”
(72). Ours is a culture of removal projected against the objects that bar our way. The squid’s
relation to the world, however, is marked by a passive gesture that grasps the world in order to
suck it inward; for him, culture constitutes “the incorporation of impressions to digest them,”
which Flusser characterizes as a “critique of nature,” whereas man’s is a mere act of removal
(73). Like the Latin American cannibal, vampyroteuthis engages in a form of critical negation
through the act of devouring; yet his is an absolute and all-encompassing critique, one devoid of
This vampyroteuthian critique emanates from below, through an abyssal verticality that
ingests and digests the world itself. He is a ferocious creature whose existence is not only
supremely violent but also sexual, a sexuality that stems directly from vampyroteuthian violence.
consume their own tentacles) and cannibalism, devouring young offspring and mates even
amidst abundant food sources. Flusser explains this pervasive violence by asserting that “the
infrastructure of octopodal society is not economic, but sexual” (44). Endophagically sexual, to
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be specific. Whereas humans forget death by means of sexual repression, vampyroteuthis does so
through sexual excitement, paradoxically “through the repetition of suicidal and cannibalistic
tendencies” (92). Even his engagement with his environment (culture, in Flusser’s terms) is
sexual, for his tentacles are the bearers of his reproductive organs; thus “every concept is
sexually exciting... every stone touched on the ocean floor excites the genital apparatus” (83).
Sexuality and the drive to consume (we might even call it limos, adding “hunger” to the Freudian
drives of eros and thanatos) become the central facts of vampyroteuthian existence, which leads
Flusser to conclude that “culture leads him to orgasm” not only in a physiological sense, but “on
with a creature whose entire world is sexual in nature, and whose “cultural” interventions into
said world are characterized almost entirely by violent acts of consumption and orgiastic
name this tendency as we emerge from the depths of Flusser’s oceanic visions, a tendency that is
ever-present throughout Farabeuf in the novel’s violent take on the sexual relation, I introduce
the notion of the phagedaena. A polyvalent term, etymologically it stems from the Greek word
for an ulcer or canker, which incorporates the verb phageîn, to eat. While dictionaries offer now-
obsolete meanings of the word as referring to a canine appetite or to bulimia, in its current usage
“phagedaena” has been employed within the field of medical pathology to name a skin disorder
characterized by “deep, necrotic and gangrenous skin ulcers” in which “immediate excision of
dead tissue may be lifesaving” (Jackson & Bell 363). Thus we may read the phagedaena in the
following ways: the necrotic ulcer eating away at the patient’s flesh, an incarnation of death
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itself within the body, survivable only through the violence of surgical excision; also the
ravenous appetite of the bulimic, a desperate (almost always feminine) need to consume that is
punished by the violence of the abject purge. To these I will add a third meaning, in my own
appropriation of the term: the femicidal killer, the gynophage, a man with a pathological
(hegemonical) need to unmake women in the most violent of ways. The doctor Farabeuf, self-
ontologist extraordinaire.
We have now identified three metaphors for consumption in developing a framework for
the political gender/power relations that define feminine subjectivity in Latin America: the
cannibal, the vampire squid, and the phagedaena. It is no accident that what originated in the
Oswald’s matriarchal utopia of Pindorama has become a masculine force of sexual oppression in
the postmodern criticism of recent decades. For the very notion of consumption has evolved
along with the cultural configuration of the social fabric—we now speak of “the consumer”
strictly in terms of economic metaphor. In Posthegemony: Political Theory and Latin America
theorist Jon Beasley-Murray, quoting Frederic Jameson, highlights the relief felt by the
postmodern consumer: “an effect of our distance from production; it is a symptom of our
‘economic impotence.’ Now that all trace of production has been effaced from the commodity,
consumers can surrender to the narcotic delights of postmodern jouissance” (126). This is indeed
the same idea at the heart of Flusser’s mythological allegory of the vampire squid. He argues that
while the industrial revolution transferred value from the object to the machine used to produce
it, the emergence of cybernetic programs constituted a second industrial revolution that
introduced another level of removal: value is now displaced from machines onto the programs
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that produce them. This results in the cheap, banal (and now even digital) objects of mass culture
that are crafted merely to be consumed with disinterest. It is actually the information “imprinted”
on such objects that is consumed; Flusser thus envisions the future of human society as one
concerned less and less with the consumption of objects or goods, and instead one that favors
“ephemeral channels of mass communication.” Having forsaken the relation to objects that
characterizes the human culture of praxis, we will have become a truly intersubjective society:
that allows us to frame postmodernity not only in terms of cultural-economic consumption, but
as an age of a particular kind of sexualized violence as well. Beyond merely evoking each of
mythological vision of the vampire squid an apt description of the phagedaena, as both are
subjects who seek above all “to seduce the Other into coitus or into being devoured” (91). Yet
the phagedaena seems to incarnate something unimaginable in Flusser’s study: the synthesis of
human and vampyroteuthian existence; a creature that represses entirely the feminine without
repressing the sexual. Our task is therefore to excise this cancerous tissue from the body politic
before it spreads even further; this is indeed one aim among many of Latin American fiction,
The excavation of the phagic chain of signifiers undertaken here may be mapped out in
the following manner: each of the three writers in question proposes a distinct image with a
corresponding agent and practice of difference. Behind Oswald’s cannibal labors the Latin
American writer or artist, who seeks to produce anticolonial subaltern autonomy. Flusser’s
vampire squid serves as a metaphor for the postmodern consumer who sifts through a world of
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images, the world of mass culture that implies in a sense the annihilation of all difference:
(120). Finally Elizondo offers the enigmatic image of the starfish, preeminent among the novel’s
aforementioned imágenes ansiadas, as it closes the entire text: “Una estrella de mar... una
estrella de mar... una estrella de mar... ¿recuerdas?...” (183) [“A starfish... a starfish... a starfish...
corresponds to the agent of the surgeon, which I align with the phagedaena, and whose practice
ultimately constitutes her birth into political life, paradoxically achieved through the experience
uncontrollable metabolism of difference” with which Latin American writers cannibalize not
only European thought, but that of the Far East as well; he even cites Farabeuf and its “rites of
passage” as an example (173). While such rites manifestly refer to the political necessity of the
Leng Tch’é execution as the judiciary response to attempted regicide, Elizondo’s reappropriation
of this ritualized execution founds a new, eroticized rite of passage, this time acted out upon the
feminine body by the consumptive libido of the phagedaena. The result of this gynophagic act is
the feminine subject’s violent birth into political life: into a politics of deformation and
The analysis in this section has engaged the Brazilian search for identity through
anthropophagy as well as the production and practice of difference, yet the ever-critical
perspective of the French-born Chilean theorist Nelly Richard problematizes both of these
tendencies. She argues in “Cultural Peripheries: Latin America and Postmodernist De-Centering”
that while “the Latin American no longer fits with the search for ‘identity’ (essentialist nostalgia
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for the self as origin and being), neither does it fit submissively with the silhouette of difference,
the merely functional marking of the postmodern rhetorization of otherness” (160-1). In her
view, the identity/difference conflict regarding peripheral culture is arbitrated from the center,
from the First World. Her solution therefore consists of de-centering: “If it is a question of
cultural prestige of the authorized signature” (161). Farabeuf bears an interesting relation to
Richard’s critique of identity as essentialist nostalgia, given the novel’s search for the ineffable,
originary secret of being which it locates within the feminine body, a secret that gives rise to the
surgeon’s mutilation of the relation between inside and outside as he penetrates the interior of
her flesh. Likewise, the critique of difference as postmodern rhetoric may relate to the
fragmentary, psychological structure of Elizondo’s textual labyrinth that evokes the enigma of an
impossible relation to the other, a relation of physical and psychical violence. The “authorized
signature” of the novel would be that of the esteemed French surgeon, an elite agent possessing
the requisite knowledge and tools (existential as well as surgical) for guiding the charade of the
feminine other’s self-discovery in the instant of her death. Elizondo thus presents us with a text
that goes beyond mere cultural anthropophagy, entering the realm of gynophagy in its
subtraction of the feminine. He offers a framework of the problem of the feminine subject in
Latin America and leaves us fumbling for a solution. The productive, anticolonial act of critical
negation that Oswald theorized in anthropophagy has itself been corrupted, reimagined as the
negation of the feminine itself. Yet Nelly Richard’s notion of “differential multiplicity” as
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openness—opposed to the restrictive closure of hegemony, here in its specific incarnation as
This section will stage—and attempt to resolve—the debate between psychoanalytic and Latin
Americanist approaches to historicism. Such a task will contribute to the foundation of the
project as a whole in its effort to link these two fields, while also casting in a new light the issues
American political theory. As always, the image remains at the center of the debate, and it will
be expanded on here through a broader discussion of Flusser’s thought, which will take into
account once more the images of the vampire squid and the cannibal. The preceding analysis of
Farabeuf approached the novel in terms of the politicized image of the feminine that it seeks to
produce in the surgeon’s dark chamber, through the imaginary chain of signifying images of the
Leng Tch’é, The Flaying of Marsyas, the pharmakós, culminating in the image the feminine
stages the formation of the feminine subject along with her deformation; her birth and death
instant of the image itself. My engagement with historicism(s) here will lay the groundwork for
understanding the political significance of the feminine as image, for feminine subjectivity will
in the end be identified as the imaginary force that disrupts the illusions of hegemonic constraint.
While Flusser touches on the role of the image in Vampyroteuthis infernalis, specifically
movement away from the world of material objects, he develops a more general theory of it in
his earlier work Towards a Philosophy of Photography. In this text he argues that the birth of
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linear writing around the second millennium BC resulted from a crisis in which mankind’s
alienation from their images led them to “tear the elements of the image (pixels) from the surface
and arrange them into lines,” thus “transcod[ing] the circular time of magic into the linear time
of history” (10). Yet Flusser asserts that relatively recently in human history texts became as
incomprehensible as were the images which brought about their creation—they exist in order to
explain such images—and “human beings’ lives become a function of their texts” (12). In his
view, this crisis of “textolatry” reached its critical apex in the nineteenth century, at which point
“technical images” were invented in order to “make texts comprehensible again, to put them
under a magical spell.” Flusser declares emphatically that this return to the image, a turn away
from linear writing, marked the end of history, history defined as “a progressive transcoding of
images into concepts” (13). What is at stake here for Flusser is history itself, and the meaning of
human existence in relation to the complex systems of text and image that silently rule our lives.
the first order from the concrete world (as in a painting), and the “technical” image, an
abstraction of the third order, as it abstracts from a text which in turn abstracts from a traditional
image (14). The danger of the technical image, such as a photograph, is that it possesses the
illusion of objectivity: it appears not as an image, but as a window directly into the world. A
photograph seems to need no interpretation, for it functions as though it were on the same level
as the reality that it re-presents (when it is in fact a complex set of mediated abstractions of
further relations between texts and traditional images). The world of the photographic (technical)
image—now the digital image, ever more easily reproduced and purporting an even greater
objectivity than when Flusser developed this theory in the 80s—is post-historical precisely
because it is post-writing. Taking into account his subsequent theorization of mankind in relation
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to the vampire squid, we approach something bordering on the post-human. Regarding
Vampryoteuthis infernalis, Justin Read has argued that while Flusser’s study is not entirely
nevertheless preserves “a subjective locus of enunciation for human agents”) it may indeed be
the “first fully elaborated ‘explatonic’ work of human philosophy, one that recognizes
philosophical history (Plato above all) without replicating its mistakes, chief among them the
centering of ‘Man’ and ‘His’ prison-house of self-perception in the middle of an unknown and
hostile universe” (Read 14). If “post-human” seems to go too far (although critical theory
undoubtedly possesses the evolutionary capacity for reincarnating itself in some post-apocalyptic
form), we may at least agree that Flusser’s thought is explatonic. Yet given the centrality of Plato
within Western thought, we are left to wonder whether explatonic and post-human are in the
Such a theory of the image (which develops into a theory not only of history, but of the
human itself) is significant for this project, given our focus on the transformation of the feminine
into image, as well as with regard to the problematic relation between the discipline of
of Joan Copjec’s Read my Desire: Lacan against the Historicists), the field of Latin American
studies is inherently historicist, rooted as it is in the analysis and critique of colonial and post-
colonial power relations across a span of regional histories and their corresponding social,
political, and aesthetic movements. This is an especially important point to consider given the
project’s aim of laying the groundwork for linking psychoanalysis and biopolitics in Latin
America. In order to explore this conflict I will set Copjec’s perspective on historicism alongside
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that of Alberto Moreiras, as representatives of their respective fields whose thought, when
juxtaposed, will inform not only the matter of the historicism debate, but also the Latin American
Politics of Latin American Cultural Studies Moreiras distinguishes and sets against one another
two opposed incarnations of historicism: populist and absolute. Populist historicism, always
insufficient, mistakenly conflates the part and the whole, and should remain the “target of
subalternist critique.” In Moreiras’ words, this brand of historicism posits community values that
“embody a communal universality that would then be the ground for a seizing and suturing of the
social on the part of a given class or interclass formation whose strategy is to make itself stand
for the social whole.” The critic’s focus here is therefore to identify that which “values always
necessarily obscure,” a task that he identifies as the aim of absolute historicism, which is also
historicism, I will begin with his treatment of Ernesto Laclau’s notion of the “infinitude of the
social.” As Moreiras explains, Laclau uses this term to describe the “excess of meaning” that
surrounds structural systems, an excess unable to be mastered, which leads him to affirm that
“‘society’ as a unitary and intelligible object which grounds its own partial processes is an
impossibility.” The infinitude of the social in turn provides the conditions for the emergence of
“through which society tries to institute itself as such on the basis of closure, of the fixation of
meaning, of the non-recognition of the infinite play of differences” (Laclau, quoted in Moreiras
255). Ideology is the illusion of a political ground in the essential groundlessness of the social. In
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these terms the social itself, through the deployment of ideology, becomes the attempt to make
finite infinitude, to impose an order that seeks to hegemonize the social. Subalternity emerges
through such structural violence, as Moreiras asserts that “the understanding of social order as
the product of a more or less collective decision that sutures infinitude by way of a hegemonic
closure is also the understanding that such an order opens itself necessarily to a second-degree
order, an order of order, as it were, which is the relation of subalternity permanently implied by
any and all hegemonies.” Absolute historicism constitutes the critique of this hegemonic closure
and its effort to circumscribe the infinitude of the social, and is therefore synonymous with “a
radical opening of the subaltern position” as well as the effort of such a position to disrupt and
presentation of the matter in the introductory chapter of Read my Desire. Her nuanced argument
hinges on a critique of the “flattening effect” that she ascribes to Foucault’s understanding of
power relations and the production of knowledge. She takes issue with his reduction of society to
the sum of these relations, a perspective in which power ceased to be “an external force that
exerted itself on society, but as immanent within society, the ‘fine, differentiated, continuous’
network of uneven relations that constituted the very matter of the social” (5-6). Copjec’s
cause that is immanent within the field of its effects,” for she ultimately defines historicism as
“the reduction of society to its indwelling network of relations of power and knowledge” (6). She
therefore argues that “some notion of transcendence” is necessary in order to avoid such a
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The source of this flattening effect—the reduction of social configurations of power and
knowledge to a plane of immanence—is the linguistic model of critical analysis passed down
from structuralism, namely that “something cannot be claimed to exist unless it can first be
stated, articulated in language.” Material existence depends on language, which thus forms the
metalanguage... [for] no phenomenon appearing there may be taken to account for, to interpret,
all the others.” Copjec analyzes Foucault’s abandonment of this structuralist, language-based
model in the mid 1970s for one rooted in war and conflict in order to explain relations of power.
Yet she demonstrates that in practice, Foucault’s shift in thought was not nearly as drastic as it
purported to be: in his disavowal of the transcendence of a regime of power, he reiterates the
inherent immanence of the linguistic model and its disavowal of any metaprinciple. (Copjec 7-8)
Copjec’s quarrel with Foucault essentially boils down to where (and how) each locates
causality, where “appearance” refers to a set of observable, articulable facts, and “being” refers
to society’s “generative principle” (its cause) that cannot appear among is immanent relations:
Foucault’s historicist position “grounds being in appearance,” whereas psychoanalysis holds that
“appearance always routs or supplants being, that appearance and being never coincide” (Copjec
9, 14). This is to say that Foucault paradoxically locates the cause of the social within the field of
its effects (Copjec’s aforementioned definition of historicism), while Lacan incorporates the
excess of cause negatively as lack within the realm of immanent phenomena (as demonstrated in
our analysis of the role of extimacy in subject formation earlier in this chapter). While not named
explicitly, the kernel of extimacy is present here in Copjec’s introductory chapter when she
writes that “language is inscribed even in its own negation... that form of negation which, while
written in language, is nonetheless without content” (10). Psychoanalysis would therefore have
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us learn to read these gaps and lacunae in the surface of phenomena, those negative spaces in the
material plane of immanence through which being (as cause) erupts negatively in the form of
lack. Within the context of this project we may state that these gaps are appropriately feminine in
nature, given our establishment of feminine subjectivity as the extimate wound that founds the
social.
With respect to the historicism debate, the question that concerns us is therefore whether
the Latin American incarnations of historicism coincide with that of Foucault, in which case we
may find ourselves at an impasse regarding the viability of applying psychoanalytic thought to
Latin American social-political relations. Significantly, Copjec’s words regarding the flattening
of phenomena closely echo Laclau’s description of the infinitude of the social (the un-masterable
excess of meaning surrounding structural systems) when she states that “an acknowledgement of
metalanguage’s impossibility compels us to realize that the whole of society will never reveal
itself in an analytic moment; no diagram will ever be able to display it fully, once and for all”
(Copjec 8). Furthermore, earlier in the essay Copjec refers to being as “a surplus existence that
cannot be caught up in the positivity of the social” (4). In her critique, (Foucauldian) historicism
is guilty of blinding itself to the surplus that exceeds the social, a position that lines up
philosophically with Moreiras’ attack on populist historicism, as that which myopically fails to
take into account the impossible totality of the social. Populist historicism refers to the part
presenting itself as the whole, when the values of a particular community masquerade as the
entirety of the social, an illusion of communal universality that overrides all other class
structures and formations. Similarly, albeit at the other end of the spectrum, according to
Moreiras ideology itself refers to the limits collectively imposed on the infinitude of the social by
hegemony in another foundational act of refusal to incorporate that which exceeds the bounds of
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a system or regime. While the debates through which these critics arrive at their conclusions are
admittedly disparate, the results are nonetheless the same: both the psychoanalytic and Latin
Americanist positions condemn any configuration that fails to take into account the inarticulable
excess that necessarily forms an integral part of the social, be it as causal lack or indomitable
infinitude.
Copjec’s psychoanalytic critique. Recall that absolute historicism names the critique of the
fixation and closure effected by hegemony in its deployment of ideological limits, a structure of
constraint that Moreiras claims gives birth to the subaltern by establishing a secondary order (“an
order of order”) that exists and moves against it. Absolute historicism (and through it,
subalternity) calls for “the permanent destabilization of hegemonic ideology and the passage to a
thinking beyond hegemony” (Moreiras 263). Copjec issues a philosophically similar demand at
the end of her essay, namely that we “become literate in desire,” and thus “learn how to read
exhortation in like terms, as a demand to become literate in hegemony, to learn to read the
subaltern position as the excess that interrupts the neat, fixed limits of ideology. For both
positions seek to incorporate that which remains inarticulable (here Copjec’s implication that it
can be read, if not spoken, is indeed compelling), to take into account an infinitude that has been
overridden by the establishment of a system that founds itself on the political convenience
afforded by limits and exclusions. In the final analysis, therefore, Copjec’s attack on historicism
indeed literate in desire, for it consciously defines the subaltern as the excess negatively
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inscribed within hegemony. There is no impasse between psychoanalysis and Latin Americanism
regarding the historicist debate, for not only are their projects in alignment, but may mutually
inform one another regarding the cultural politics of inscription and exclusion that characterize
Through all of this we must not forget Flusser—for what would any historicism (absolute
or otherwise) look like in a post-historical context? What are we to make of the flattening effect
upon a phenomenal field when the materiality of that field has been transformed into two-
dimensional images, as in our vampyroteuthian crisis of the image? We know that Flusser’s own
treatment of history constitutes the history of the relation between text and image, and is
therefore rooted in language. Yet the end result plunges us into a cycle that enters and exits
history, depending on whether text or image rules in a given moment as the force that mediates
(and therefore determines) the relation of subjects to the world. Psychoanalysis would seem to
acquire a privileged position in the postmodern world of images, given its deeply articulated
discourse of the imaginary and of the subject’s subsequent inscription into the symbolic order of
language. Yet in a sense Flusser has gone beyond this system, not into the tertiary order of the
real, but by documenting a return to the imaginary that passes through the symbolic and finds on
the other side a new order of the imaginary. Such a passage occurs by means of incessant
mechanical reproduction and the feverish consumption of the technical image (significantly, a
phrase that offers an apt description of Elizondo’s Farabeuf). To frame the matter in terms of the
earlier discussion of anthropophagy, we might call this new field a vampyroteuthian imaginary in
The twin images of the cannibal and the vampire squid—synthesized in Farabeuf through
the image of the starfish—serve to illuminate the nature of the post-historical, post-symbolic,
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second-order imaginary. Moreiras referred to the opening of subaltern position itself as a
secondary configuration, an “order of order,” through which absolute historicism interrupts and
opens the constraints of hegemony. Perhaps this sheds a new light on the darkness of the
vampyroteuthian world as presented by Flusser, for in his study this mollusk becomes a
mythological monster for which the critic has no love: Vampyroteuthis infernalis reads as a sort
of cautionary parable amid the dangers of the digital/cybernetic era. Yet perhaps this devouring
creature, along with its Latin American parallel in the cannibal, may serve to theorize the
subaltern interruption of hegemony, which exerts its force from the center where abide the elite
whose is the purview of writing. Oswald would certainly agree with such a position, provided we
locate the pens of the elite in Europe rather than in the Brazilian poet’s own hand.
As made evident in the preceding analysis of Farabeuf, the entirety of this study is
concerned with the production of images; the interpretation of the figure of the vampire squid in
the post-writing age of the image must also therefore consider the images produced by the
creature. If the becoming-image of the feminine takes place as the result of the violence of an
external intervention upon her flesh (performed by the phagedaenic surgeon in Elizondo’s
novel), one that simultaneously brings about her constitution and dissolution as subject, we
encounter the opposite process in vampyroteuthis. For the squid’s relation to the production of
images is an internal one, located in its “chromatophores, the glands that secrete the ink which
colors his skin,” as well as the sepia cloud emitted by the mollusk in order to defend itself, a
discharge of ink that the animal “models... to copy its own outlines and shapes” (Flusser,
Vampyroteuthis 87-88). Both of these bodily functions constitute prevarications: in each, ink is a
communicative substance emerges in order to deceive, to ensure the survival of the creature so
that it may engage in the production of its primary image—that encoded in its genetic data.
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Whereas humans seek immortality in objects (the production of material texts and images, or the
conversion of the other into image), vampyroteuthis’ “historical engagement is the storage of
acquired data directly in the nervous systems of other members of the species,” data transmitted
through the violence of cannibalism and rape that characterizes the creature’s sexual
reproduction (84). Flusser observes that as humans we lack such a historical model that does not
depend entirely on “the mediation of objects,” and that such objects “are obstacles to
intersubjective communication” (85-86). This leads him to the radical conclusion not only that
mankind fails to engage in “true history,” but that “Vampyroteuthis is the only historical being
on Earth” (87). Reading Vampyroteuthis infernalis in relation to his study on photography, then,
it seems that for Flusser the end of history brought about by the rise of the technical image
results in a new form of historicity rather than its mere negation: a non-linear history of the
imaginary.
In an effort to name this unique historical tendency in the context of the debate outlined
above, we might call it vampyroteuthian historicism: in an age beyond writing, history, and the
symbolic order, we encounter a second-order imaginary in which images not only reign and
determine the world, but are formed through sexual violence. Dominance in such a world could
only be achieved by a force capable of both external and internal image production. The former
entails not only imposing its image upon the world externally, but reducing any material reality
indeed a non-linear, image-based text (and therefore post-historical in Flusser’s sense) centered
on the technical image of the Leng Tch’é photograph, a narrative that locates in this horrific
representation the capacity for subject formation through psycho-surgical violence. It also
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therefore becomes exemplary of the reinscription of “the circular time of magic” into texts that
Flusser identifies as the primary aim of the technical image (Flusser, Philosophy 10). Yet the
the invasive sexual and cannibalistic violence catalogued (or more accurately, imagined) by
Flusser in the exploits of the vampire squid in the creature’s effort to engage history on a genetic
level, by killing and feeding for the sake of sexual reproduction. Biopolitical analysis of state
formation must therefore ask in what way the state re/produces itself through both internal and
external imaginary functions, which will be our concern in subsequent chapters as we examine
internally through the stability of its own power structures as well as externally by exerting
control over the social body, its contribution to existing theories of hegemony in Latin America
lies in the role it grants to both the image and gender in these constellations of power. In
this age of the image, as he aligns mankind’s future with the behavior of the vampire squid that
devours and penetrates all that it can. Moreiras’ absolute historicism, a concept that names the
project of the subaltern against hegemony in Latin America, along with Copjec’s anti-historicist
conception of psychoanalysis, were demonstrated above to share the same goal of destabilizing
and interrupting any ideological order that limits the excess of the social. In placing these
identify them as feminine modes of resistance. The feminine, whose subject formation is
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grounded in her transformation into image (as seen in her extimate role in Farabeuf), may in turn
function as image in postmodernity in an effort to disrupt the hegemonic power structures of the
vampyroteuthian age. The final section of this chapter will begin to analyze the feminine as the
opening and interruption of hegemonic closure and constraint, a task that will continue through
In this final section I will argue that Elizondo’s novel ultimately sublimates the extimate cut onto
the public realm (rather than the psychic real) by means of biopolitical inscription—through the
conflation of torture and writing. In spite of its quest to open the body, Farabeuf is ultimately a
text about closure, given the control it exerts through the various transformations chronicled
throughout this study. Resistance to such a constellation of power may therefore be sought in a
theory of openness and interruption, such as that proposed by Nelly Richard in her notion of the
feminization of writing, a conception of feminism that will prove essential for the development
of this project. Yet in order to reach this point it will be necessary to reconsider the text’s final
penetrative intervention upon the female body at the hands of the phagedaena, a figure that
conclusion when we read that a phonograph repeatedly emits a single cry “cuyo significado
ponía en evidencia, aunque de una manera indirecta, la esencia trinitaria de algo que iba a
acontecer: el encuentro con Farabeuf” (76) [“whose meaning made evident, though indirectly,
the trinitary nature of something that was about to occur: the meeting with Farabeuf” (45)].
Although neither this mechanically reproduced cry nor the enigmatic reference to the esencia
trinitaria of the encounter with the surgeon are clear to the reader at this point, after piecing
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together various fragments of the chapter it becomes evident that the narrator is referring to a
trinity of sex, surgery, and torture. It is in the configuration of this trinity that the text frames and
orchestrates this violent enclosure of feminine subjectivity within the political realm, Elizondo’s
master mise-en-scène being the framing of the torture of the female body that is the novel itself.
For how can one chronicle an instant other than by orchestrating its occurrence?
An overview of the trinitary essence reveals a certain tension between the omission and
inclusion of particular elements that serves to theorize the failure of the symbolic order and
subsequent need of hegemony to inscribe power through sublimated acts of torture. At the
beginning of the novel’s third chapter we encounter a significant instantiation of the sexual
element of the trinity, when we read that an indefinite man and woman “han realizado o sugerido
la realización del acto llamado carnal o coito” [“have committed or have suggested committing
the so-called carnal act or coitus”] in the Odeon apartment, and that
uno de los dos, muy probablemente el hombre, había dejado olvidada, cuando
menos por lo que se refiere a su propia memoria y durante el tiempo que pudo
pero no por la mujer durante esa misma duración, canónicamente casi instantánea
magnicida mediante el suplicio llamado Leng Tch’é o los Cien Pedazos. (60-1)
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[One of them, probably the man, had forgotten—at least according to his own
recollection and during the time which the aforementioned act could have lasted
(canonically, one minute and nine seconds according to the precept ab intromissio
membri viri ad emissio seminis inter vaginam: one minute and eight seconds for
the anticipatory motion, one second for the emissio itself), but not according to
the woman’s recollection of this same time, almost instantaneous in canon law, of
one second according to the precept ‘…quo ad feminam emissio seminis inter
means of the torture known as Leng Tch’é or The Hundred Pieces. (35)]
The passage’s humorous use of presumably spurious canonical precepts serves to libidinize the
instant itself, providing one definition of coitus for man (from the insertion of the member until
the emission of the seed, lasting a total of one minute and nine seconds) and another for woman
(the instant of the emission alone). Yet such sexual declarations are presented amid an act of
forgetting: the significance of the passage lies in the cognitive omission of the Leng Tch’é
photograph that it describes, which we will see constitutes the sublimation of hegemonic power
In Imagine There’s No Woman Joan Copjec seeks to clarify the definition of sublimation,
moving away from the common yet mistaken understanding of it as the expression of an
inappropriate, carnal desire in more socially acceptable or refined terms. Aligning sublimation
with the notion of the drive, she maintains that Freud’s death drive hinges on two paradoxes:
while it serves to explain why life aims at death, its satisfaction nevertheless depends on it not
achieving this aim. This Freudian inhibition is not, however, due to an exterior obstacle (a notion
which gives rise to the misconceptions regarding the nature of sublimation) but is rather “part of
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the very activity of the drive itself” (30). Copjec goes on to explain the full paradox of the death
drive thus: “while the aim (Ziel) of the drive is death, the proper and positive activity of the drive
is to inhibit the attainment of its aim; the drive, as such, is zielgehemnt, that is, it is inhibited as
to its aim, or sublimated, ‘the satisfaction of the drive through the inhibition of its aim’ being the
Keeping in mind this understanding of sublimation as the inhibition inherent within the
drive, we may now identify the repression operative in the coitus passage as it seeks to
reconstruct a forgotten event (the sexual encounter between the indefinite man and woman after
walking on the beach at Honfleur, where they encounter a starfish), at the same time as it
describes the forgetting of the horrific photograph of the Leng Tch’é. This seems a strange point
for the narration to emphasize, begging the question of what the (apparently mutually exclusive)
relation is between the photograph and the carnal act. If the drive achieves its satisfaction by
means of the inhibition of its aim, reading the passage through the lens of sublimation means that
the Leng Tch’é, as that which is explicitly inhibited and forgotten in this moment of libidinal
ecstasy, is the proper aim of the coitus. Even this sexual instant which seems to repress the
violent impulses within the novel remains intimately linked to each element of the
aforementioned trinitary essence of the phagedaenic encounter. The text’s overt exclusion of the
torture constitutes its perverse inclusion, and we learn that the doctor’s desire for the woman will
This association of sexual element with surgery and torture becomes even more explicit
when the narration describes the doctor’s equipment as he prepares it for the horrific event which
will conclude the chronology of the story. It is here that language comes to the fore, as it
distinguishes torture from the other elements of the trinity through a kind of discursive blockage:
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Todas aquellas filosísimas navajas y aquellos artilugios, investidos de una
fastuosos como los joyeles de un príncipe oriental que se sirviera de ellos para
[All the sharp knives and instruments, invested with more than enough cruelty for
background of black velvet, sumptuous like the jewelry an oriental prince might
ineffable torture on the tense and anonymous flesh of a victim whose existence
forget the faded image of which, at once static and ecstatic, they would one day
This passage is characterized by a certain excess, the surgical equipment possessing more than
enough cruelty and being infused with the properties of the baroque aesthetic, which in turn is
horror vacui that afflicted the cultural psyche of the epoch. These same instruments become
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simultaneously royal jewelry employed in an erotic economy and the devices of an ineffable
torture applied to an anonymous flesh. It is significant that within a passage replete with
elaborate metaphors we find torture described as being ineffable: when an excess of language
meets an excess of cruelty, the result is a violation of the other that eludes any description, other
than pointing to the very hole that it opens in the process of signification. This failure of the
symbolic stems from a sublime encounter with trauma that seems to lie beyond the capacity of
human experience in some way, an encounter that is here reified into a photograph.
In an essay on the Marquis de Sade’s novel Justine in the collection Teoría del infierno,
Elizondo cites Baudelaire in order to introduce the notion of voluptuousness: “Por lo que
respecta a la tortura –dice–, ella nace de la parte infame del corazón del hombre sediento de
frío extremo” (64) [“For regarding torture—he says—it is born of the vile part of the heart of the
man who thirsts for voluptuousness. Cruelty and voluptuousness are identical sensations, like
extreme heat and extreme cold” (my translation)]. The voluptuous—that which is inclined
toward sensuous enjoyment, and a term nowadays almost exclusively located within the female
body in its relation to male desire—is here likened in its effects to pain. Let us not miss the
nearly religious tenor of Baudelaire’s phrasing: it reads as a ninth beatitude (or a tenth,
depending on one’s theological stance on the Sermon on the Mount), echoing Christ’s
proclamation that “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be
satisfied” (Matthew 5:6). We might reframe this as a sort of infernal beatitude, written from
below: blessed is he who thirsts for voluptuousness, for he shall be slaked through torture. In
Farabeuf voluptuousness plays a central role, as that which links torture and surgery to eroticism
in the trinitary essence. The “voluptuous response” of the concubine will coincide with that of
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the victim as well as the patient, as the three converge under the phagedaena’s blade in the mirror
image within the bedroom (and torture/surgical chamber). This image becomes a palimpsest of
feminine subjectivity, layering the Leng Tch’é photograph with the woman’s own reflection in
conflation of each element of the trinitary essence. The novel thus proposes a macabre politics
that reduces sex, surgery, and torture to indistinguishable penetrative actions (or more accurately,
interventions). This in turn evokes an even deeper relation of identity at the heart of Farabeuf,
mentioned in passing earlier with respect to the Leng Tch’é photograph, but a point that now
deserves further attention: “el suplicio es una forma de escritura. Asistes a la dramatización de un
ideograma; aquí se representa un signo y la muerte no es sino un conjunto de líneas que tú, en el
olvido, trazaste sobre un vidrio empañado” (135) [“‘torture is a form of writing.’ You are
witnessing the performance of an ideogram. A sign is represented here and death is but a set of
lines you drew obliviously on a moist windowpane” (87)]. The text reimagines the Leng Tch’é
execution itself as the reverse ekphrasis of the Chinese ideogram liú, composed of four strokes
that resemble the form of a man (particularly the victim in the photograph, at least prior to the
removal of his limbs), that was drawn on the window of the Odeon apartment where the doctor
stages his horrific intervention. The execution is an act of writing, on the flesh and with the
blood of the other, the pharmakós that establishes the political distinction between inside and
outside by paradoxically destroying the barrier between them (through the removal of the skin),
in Moreiras’ reading. Thus we encounter the following chain of signifiers, through the relation
between Farabeuf and anthropophagic theory: torture is a form of writing, writing is a form of
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consumption, and consumption is a form of simultaneous political incorporation and exclusion
The novel’s conclusory image of the starfish continues this chain, as the ekphrasis of both
the five-pointed liú ideogram as well as the Leng Tch’é victim, yet it also introduces an essential
kernel of subversion. The starfish constitutes the image of the feminine subject’s confrontation
with the possibility of her own autonomy: it is an oceanic devourer with the power to consume
(which, given Latin America’s cannibalistic legacy, is to take political action), yet one that has
been fossilized, reduced to an innocuous object (and subsequently to an image, as one of the
novel’s imágenes ansiadas). Having passed through the theories of anthropophagy initiated by
Oswald de Andrade, we may now ask of these images by whom are they desired. By the
phagedaenic hegemon, on the one hand, in his desire to incorporate the feminine through the
politicization of her image, yet also by the feminine subject herself as she seeks to resuscitate the
Having been consumed by the masculine political force, the feminine must seek a way to
interrupt the hegemonic order from her interior (in-corporated) position. One of the principal
characteristics of hegemony is that it admits no outside in the first place; the imaginary
gynophagic consumption outlined above was always already operative, the feminine has always
been inside. The novel’s assertion that “torture is a form of writing” describes the inscription of
the feminine within the masculine order, and its formulation of the process through the metaphor
of writing provides us with a significant clue as to how resistance to such a structure may be
effected. It therefore seems plausible to seek an answer in the notion of feminine writing, a force
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Ever the champion of the subaltern, Nelly Richard provides us with a window into Latin
American feminist thought. Richard remained active in Chile during the years of Pinochet’s
brutal dictatorship, seeking forms of resistance in subversive art such as that fostered by CADA,
the Colectivo de Acciones de Arte [Art Actions Collective], despite the threat of military
repression. Significantly, she aligns this subversive kernel with the feminine, as demonstrated in
three distinct problem areas that occupy the interstice between theory and practice. First, she
advocates the development of a plurality, the feminist critique being woven into all other
critiques, thus moving away from the us/them binary that ultimately precludes communication.
Next, rather than confronting masculine epistemologies head-on, feminism must seek to subvert
the masculine order by means of “oblique interferences that deprogram its enunciations from
within.” Finally, Richard asserts that feminism must become a deterritorializing force that alters
knowledge outside the “institutionalized preserve of Women’s Studies” (10-11). Thus the answer
does not lie in some manner of “feminine writing,” for such a task would end up being
counterproductive given that it fails to meet each of the three aforementioned tenets of plurality,
seeks to subvert and interrupt the smooth surface of masculine hegemony. Such a task must
acknowledge the nature of the sign as one that is impure, “striated with conflict,” in order to
avoid falling into the trap of seeking some utopian, foundational sign that has never existed.
Rather than emptying the sign of its masculine content, which is essential to its nature as a set of
forces in struggle, feminism must develop a hybrid perspective, a point of view that accepts the
masculine and feminine (14). Instead of seeking some otherness in the feminine, instead of
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rejecting that which is external to it, Richard holds that feminism must activate and multiply
difference, “so as to pluralize in these differences the ‘shared virtuality’ of the feminine” (16).
With the understanding that the masculine lies on the side of the universal and the
feminine on that of the particular, the feminization of writing would consist of any transgressive
use of signs that exceeds the universal: “any literature practiced as a dissidence of
‘feminine.’” In this respect, Richard cites Chilean author Diamela Eltit, who extends the
appellation of “feminine” to any and all groups who occupy the margins, whose relation to
hegemonic power is one of crisis, regardless of whether they are biologically male or female.
The feminine therefore consists of “a range of antihegemonic practices” that subvert and break
down “biological determinism... and symbolic roles” traditionally corresponding to being a man
or a woman, masculine or feminine (22). The masculine mode is thus one of fixed, closed
In our reading of Farabeuf, we might consider the novel a sort of inverted feminization of
writing: the novel constitutes a negative instantiation of the masculine, allowing it to run wild,
unchecked, in order to discover what horrific point it reaches when given free rein. Let us recall
Alberto Moreiras’ previously cited assertion in Tercer espacio that “the narrator of Farabeuf
seeks the repetition of the imperial gesture in the body of his lover, a search which is oriented
toward the ultimate production of meaning; meaning which is thus understood as the opening of
writing to the inscription of power” (337). This reading acquires new significance in light of
Richard’s take on feminism: the feminine political subject seeks to “open” the feminine in a
different way, against the kind of opening to the inscription of power chronicled in Elizondo’s
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novel—which is actually a form of closure, a containment characteristic of hegemonic power
structures.
Within the Elizondian realm of the novel, the notions of closure and confinement are
intimately linked to the image. As argued above, it is in the dark chamber (to which Elizondo
denies us access as readers, such is the imposition of limits) that the text effects the final
production of a politicized image of the feminine. As the distinct elements of the trinitary
essence approach their instant of maximum convergence—the instant chronicled in the novel’s
subtitle—the doctor will present the feminine subject not with her mirror image (which would
form a visual abyme) but with her interior, which he will frame in a sadistic mise-en-scène for
the sake of his own visual consumption. This instant of the consumption of the interior image, of
eikonophagy, demonstrates that there is not, and never was, any outside to begin with. As we
witness this foundational violence of subject formation within the hegemonic order through the
production of the deformed, politicized image of the feminine that we receive in Farabeuf, we
come to the conclusion that any form of resistance or disruption must be effected from within.
to reason that the more imaginary an action, the more political it is: for political relations in such
a world must also be imaginary, and imaginary actions may participate more fully in them. Thus
a focus not only on writing, but literature (the most imaginary writing of all), may lead to
drive to torture (which may be a logical interpretation of Farabeuf at first glance), we find the
opposite: torture displaces writing, stands in its stead as an act of desire. The state desires to
write the feminine on its own terms, and so inscribes its authority into her flesh, opening her a
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thousand times in a secret, closed space as it seeks to find some elusive self-affirmation within
her body—the lost extimate object (now an image). Yet we have moved beyond the realm of
Lacanian theory: rather than speaking of an extimate cut in the psychic real, in Latin America
torture constitutes the biopolitical inscription of the extimate cut in the public realm, upon the
The opening of writing to the inscription of power. Moreiras’ definition of the very
produce and maintain power through texts, in a parody of the Latin American writer who strives
for autonomy through textual regurgitation in the process of transvalorization. Yet in thinking
along with Nelly Richard, we may invert this conception of meaning, reimagining it as the
opening of power itself to the inscription of writing, which is the re-inscription of the feminine,
of the feminization of writing. Our task is therefore to enter willingly into the constraints of
hegemonic power in the concrete realities of Latin America in order to search not only for the
feminine political subject (for we already know that we will find her within the belly of the
beast), but for the oblique, indirect strategies of resistance to which she—and we, with her—may
recur in her quest to interrupt the masculine order from within. The following two chapters will
Alejandra Pizarnik, Luisa Valenzuela, and Diamela Eltit, authors in whom I locate fully
feminized writing that not only actively but violently engages in imaginary—and so entirely
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CHAPTER TWO
FANTASIES OF ERASURE:
PIZARNIK, VALENZUELA, AND THE GENDER OF VIOLENCE
The previous chapter described the politicization of the feminine subject through her forcible
transformation from mise-en-aybme into mise-en-scène. This is to say that the feminine,
relation to herself (as in the abyme of the Lacanian mirror stage) only to be thrust into a relation
to the world in which she is framed as a kind of performance. Rather, as mise-en-scène, a cut is
performed upon the feminine subject that founds the political order, an order that emerges from
the performance of her internal, extimate exclusion. From now on analysis of these theoretical
rampant. Thus I will explore Latin American difference—through the physical and structural
violence of dictatorships in Argentina and Chile during the 70s and 80s, as well as the more
recent crisis of femicide in Mexico—as it is likewise transposed from abyme to scène. The
development and fate of politics in Latin American is inextricably bound to that of feminine
subjectivity.
Argentine Revolution and the Dirty War—each of which I approach through the work of a
prominent Argentine woman writer. The first part of the chapter engages indirectly the Argentine
Revolution of the 1960s and 70s, outlining what I deem the “politics of the image” operative in
Alejandra Pizarnik’s La condesa sangrienta. While this dark meditation on Countess Erzsébet
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Báthory was written immediately prior to and published at various points during the regime, I
approach it much as I did the work of Elizondo—as a theoretical text that outlines the relation
between power, the image, and the feminine, rather than an explicit historical commentary. The
second part of this chapter, on the other hand, firmly grounds itself in the dictatorial reality of
Argentina’s Dirty War. I examine the notions of disappearance and confinement central to
Argentine state terror through Luisa Valenzuela’s “Cambio de armas,” written and published
from the United States toward the end of the reign of the juntas in Argentina. These texts will
advance my theory of the image in relation to feminine subjectivity that began to take form
through the consideration of Elizondo’s Farabeuf, while rooting the discussion in the
fetishization of subversion (Pizarnik) and the erasure proper to disappearance and confinement
(Valenzuela). In the end this analysis will consider the opening of a wound as a force of feminine
interruption, one that stands in place of a narrative of resistance—for these writers are anything
but utopian.
PART ONE
Moments of violence in a text demand the reader’s attention; we are implicated in them in some
Argentine poet Alejandra Pizarnik stages the erotic consumption of extreme acts of violence
against the female body through the nefarious exploits of its aristocratic protagonist and leaves
the reader to sift through their ethical and political significance in its wake. The text, consisting
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feminist reading of Latin American political formations within the context of its cultural
reception. Here I read Pizarnik’s work alongside Argentina’s violent history, tracing the
countess’ metonymic presence within the dictatorial period of “La Revolución Argentina” as the
force of absolute power that drives its oppressive machinations. In The Tears of Eros Bataille
speaks of Báthory’s “delirious sangfroid” that would have made de Sade “howl like a wild beast”
had he known of her, and immediately affirms that “human consciousness—in pride and
humility, with passion and in trembling—must be open to the zenith of horror” if it is to dare
approach the abyss of self-awareness (139-40). It is with such a perspective that one must engage
La condesa sangrienta in order to tease from its obscene images a new understanding of the
relation between the dictator (as the incarnation of state power) and the image of the tortured
female body. In the following analysis, two distinct forms of image production emerge. The first,
the countess’ obsession with her own reflection—the “specular” image—provides the conditions
for the staging of the second: the “spectacular” image in the spectacle of the torture of her
adolescent female victims. My reading of this text through the Argentine dictatorship will reveal
that in her treatment of the violence of visuality, Pizarnik theorizes the State’s fetishization of the
I undertake an analysis of La condesa sangrienta for three reasons. First, the text was
composed immediately prior to (and published at various points during) the significant historical
period of the Argentine Revolution, an era of military dictatorship under Generals Juan Carlos
Onganía, Marcelo Levingston, and Alejandro Lanusse from 1966 to 1973 that served as a
precursor to the horrors of the Dirty War (or “Process of National Reorganization,” as the regime
referred to it) that followed several years later. When Onganía assumed power in 1966 it was the
first time that an Argentine dictatorship dropped any pretense of being a state of exception;
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democracy was no longer the goal, and authoritarianism took over indefinitely. As a meditation
on the horror of absolute power and the bodies upon which it exerts itself, Pizarnik’s text on
Báthory yields a unique political reading of this moment in Latin American history amid the
state’s mounting obsession with subversion. Secondly, Pizarnik’s text serves as a transition
between those of Elizondo and Valenzuela not only chronologically, but thematically and
cannibalism with no explicit relation to Latin America: Pizarnik discusses a Hungarian countess
of Early Modernity, borrowing and building on material from a novel by the French surrealist
poet Valentine Penrose. Like Valenzuela’s narrative, Pizarnik’s dark prose stands in critical
relatively underrepresented text within the corpus of scholarship on Pizarnik, and—with the
notable exception of David William Foster’s essay “Of Power and Virgins”—much analysis of
this idiosyncratic text has neglected to make more than a passing reference, if any, to the
repressive political conditions in which it was published and upon which it obliquely comments.
As with Farabeuf, I intend to draw political conclusions from the mise-en-scène of femicidal
literary images—their production, framing, and consumption—yet now in relation to the historic
in morbidly beautiful prose. It deals with Erzsébet Báthory’s obsession with torturing and
murdering hundreds of adolescent girls in her castle at Csejte (now Čachtice, Slovakia) circa
1585-1610. She even said to have bathed in their blood in hopes of preserving her youth.1 While
1
Historical biographies of Báthory, which also catalogue her cultural legacy, are to be found in Raymond T.
McNally’s Dracula was a Woman: In Search of the Bloody Countess of Transylvania and Tony Thorne’s Countess
Dracula: The Life and Times of Elisabeth Báthory, the Blood Countess. The veracity of the blood baths is contested
in these works, but it remains a defining image of Báthory in contemporary culture, including in Pizarnik’s work.
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the official number of victims from legal documents is 80, one witness maintained (based on a
list kept by the countess herself) that Báthory had murdered up to 650 young women, an oft-cited
number. Indeed, in the very first line of her text Pizarnik introduces us to “un personaje real e
insólito: la condesa Báthory, asesina de más de 650 muchachas” (373).2 Over the course of two
and a half decades, the countess’ orgiastic cruelty escalated steadily, particularly after the death
of her husband Count Ferenc Nádasdy in 1604. She grew ever bolder, torturing servants and
peasant girls with impunity (which was not unheard of at the time), and eventually made the
mistake of daring to extend her crimes unto the bodies of young noblewomen, who were sent to
her “gynaeceum” to learn courtly etiquette. On December 29, 1610, her castle was raided by
Count György Thurzó, who allegedly found the body of a servant girl named Doricza Szalaiova
“ex flagris et torturis miserabiliter extinctam” [“wretchedly murdered by lashing and torture”]
(McNally 78, my translation). The countess was tried and convicted in absentia in January of
1611, and her various accomplices were beheaded and burned alive. Erzsébet Báthory’s house
arrest was made permanent later that year, when the windows and doors of her small room in
Csejte Castle were sealed forever by masons, leaving her with only a small hatch for food. After
several years of immurement, she was found dead in her cell on August 21, 1614, “without
crucifix and without light;” the so-called Tigress of Csejte was no more (McNally 88).
Báthory’s sexual excesses, madness, and confinement reflect in some ways the
thoroughly marginalized figure of the Argentine author in question: Alejandra Pizarnik, whose
work so often explores the themes of solitude, sexuality, and death. Born in Buenos Aires in
1936, Pizarnik was a surrealist poet who suffered from schizophrenia, also a lesbian and the
child of Jewish immigrants. She took her own life at the age of 36 on September 25, 1972 after
2
Pizarnik, Alejandra. “La condesa sangrienta.” Obras completas: poesía completa y prosa selecta. Ed. Cristina
Piña. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Corregidor, 1993. All citations of the text are taken from this edition.
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being granted a weekend of leave from the mental institution where she was a patient. Pizarnik’s
poetic oeuvre, beginning with La tierra más ajena in 1955, found its most important expression
in Árbol de Diana (1962), Los trabajos y las noches (1965), Extracción de la piedra de locura
(1968), and El infierno musical (1971). La condesa sangrienta is Pizarnik’s sole work of literary
prose, yet it is often considered an essay: she originally wrote it as a book review of Valentine
Argentine Revolution (1966-1973).3 A brief look at this period of military repression in which
Pizarnik’s text was received will cast a new light on the poet’s claim that “la libertad absoluta de
la criatura humana es horrible” (391) [“the absolute freedom of the human creature is horrible”
(87)].4 Patricia Venti highlights this connection between structural violence and literature,
emphasizing the immediacy of Pizarnik’s present tense narration and its implication of the
reader, as well as the fact that Báthory is used “as an excuse for making evil a subject for
thought, for self-recognition” (n.p., my translation). The following analysis considers this matter
various points during the Argentine Revolution suggests the text’s continual theorization of the
relation between images of violence and the social body in the context of a military regime that I
The 1960s were fraught with political turmoil in Argentina. Fearing a resurgence of
Peronism, the military overthrew Arturo Frondizi’s government in 1962, appointing José María
3
The text first appeared under the title “La libertad absoluta y el horror” in the Mexican journal Diálogos 1.5 in
1965. In 1966 it was published in the Buenos Aires journal Testigo 1.1 as “La condesa sangrienta.” It next appeared
as a book in 1971, La condesa sangrienta, published by Aquarius. Finally the text was included as an essay in the
1975 anthology El deseo de la palabra, published in Spain by Ocnos, with the title “Acerca de la condesa
sangrienta.” The text is the same in all editions, the variations in its title notwithstanding.
4
For a survey of this period of Argentine history, see Tulio Halperín Donghi’s The Contemporary History of Latin
America, as well as David Rock’s Argentina, 1516-1982.
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Guido as interim president (the only civilian ever to take power in an Argentine military coup).
Yet Perón nevertheless managed to align himself with Guido’s successor, Arturo Umberto Illia,
who held office for nearly three years until the threat of Peronism led the military to oust him,
this time installing General Juan Carlos Onganía as president in June 1966. While Argentina had
previously experienced military rule on several occasions, Onganía dropped any pretense of
masking the state of exception—the dictator would maintain power indefinitely. This heralded
the start of “a campaign of ideological purification” that would horrify the political parties and
interest groups who were so delighted when Onganía first took power (Halperín Donghi 317).
While the “Krieger Vasena” plan of the Onganía regime improved the economy of the nation
from 1967-1968, it supported labor leaders who were rivals of the unions that originally backed
Onganía’s coup. This led to a series of minor riots in 1969, culminating in an uprising referred to
as the Cordobazo, the assassination of labor leader Augusto Vandor, and ultimately the
insurgent group the Montoneros in 1970 marked the final blow to Onganía’s reign. At this point
the military called for yet another “Argentine revolution” (echoing the call of the 1966 coup),
and when Onganía refused to abdicate his position he was deposed by General Alejandro
Agustín Lanusse. Yet rather than assume control himself, Lanusse placed General Roberto
Levingston in power amid escalating violence in June 1970. The military government continued
to lose control, however, as four guerrilla groups (three of which were Peronist) arose, gaining
wealth through ransoms from their kidnapping industry. Another uprising in Córdoba in 1971
caused Levingston to resign from power, at which point Lanusse finally took control of the
government. Perón would be elected in 1972, and take office in October 1973 at the age of 78,
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with his wife Isabel as vice president. Upon her husband’s death in July 1974, Isabel Perón
assumed office and the war on the guerrillas intensified. As historian David Rock attests, state
forces “imposed repression by the use of unchecked, random, indiscriminate violence that struck
without warning or warrant. The definition of subversion was broadened and became
increasingly capricious, encompassing the mildest protest, whether made by the parties, the
Such is the context for La condesa sangrienta’s emergence onto the Argentine literary
scene in 1966, the year of Onganía’s coup. Its subsequent publication in 1971 marked the year in
which Lanusse, the mastermind behind half a decade of military repression, formally assumed
power. What began as a book review was transformed by historical happenstance into a text that
stands on its own as a meditation on the horizons of human power as they played themselves out
synonymous with the law. Pizarnik revealed in her diaries that she found her haunting work on
Báthory to be an exceptionally authentic piece, one in which she finds her true voice: “¿Cuál es
mi estilo? Creo que el del artículo de la condesa. Por momentos sentía que me abandonaba
style? I think it’s that of the article on the countess. At times I felt that I was surrendering
completely and even afterwards, while editing, I didn’t feel that I was severing myself [from the
text]”] (Diarios 464, my translation). Pizarnik’s declaration that even in editing—doing violence
to a text—she did not feel that she was censoring herself gains importance within the dictatorial
context of the work’s publication and reception. Her use of the verb cercenar, to sever or
amputate (either surgically or figuratively), is telling: here it obliquely evokes both the
censorship imposed by the Argentine military regime as well as the physical (surgical) violence
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of torture employed by the same in its quest to produce ideal citizens. Furthermore, the
significance of the emergence of authenticity (in Pizarnik’s consideration of what work best
reflects her style) through writing about extreme violence against women cannot be understated:
we may read in it the radical political assertion that the tortured female body provides the
These traces of jouissance mark both the cruel enjoyment of the sovereign, as well as the
dark apertures through which the poetic emerges. By definition, the dictator’s word is law (“The
sovereign is he who decides on the exception,” begins Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology): to
speak is to act (upon another), which is to enjoy (5). Yet as we shall see, Báthory scarcely speaks
in Pizarnik’s vignettes. The countess is a figure endowed with absolute power within the realm
of her castle, yet it is her body and gaze that become aligned with state power, which is
invariably inscribed into the flesh of her virginal subjects. Through her gynaeceum, the historical
countess was entrusted with the education of young noblewomen, that is, with their formation as
good and proper feminine subjects within society. Yet rather than formation, the structure she
imposed upon them was one of deformation and—perhaps even literally, as she was known to
bite their flesh—gynophagy. Political participation within this strictly feminine order meant
being sacrificed for the sake of the sovereign’s obsession, beauty, youth, and pleasure.
At the heart of Pizarnik’s reflections on the countess is a concern for the transformation of
material reality, a reality that is itself nevertheless rooted in the image. The reason for the
countess’ femicidal obsession, in addition to erotic pleasure, is her inability to accept the ravages
of time upon her aging body. Her occult belief that she can absorb the youth of virgins through
their blood leads her to construct numerous apparatuses that will halt the advance of age by
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lethal, vampiric means. In the vignette “La jaula mortal” [“The Lethal Cage”], this obsession is
framed in terms of a dual transformation brought about through a cage lined with knives:
jaula– se clava por sí misma los filosos aceros mientras su sangre mana sobre la
mujer pálida que la recibe impasible con los ojos puestos en ningún lado. Cuando
vestido blanco ahora es rojo y donde hubo una muchacha hay un cadáver. (377)
[The Lady of These Ruins appears, a sleepwalker in white. Slowly and silently
she sits upon a footstool placed underneath the contraption. A red-hot poker in her
hand, Dorko taunts the prisoner who, drawing back (and this is the ingenuity of
the cage) stabs herself against the sharp irons while her blood falls upon the pale
woman who dispassionately receives it, her eyes fixed on nothing, as in a daze.
When the lady recovers from her trance, she slowly leaves the room. There have
been two transformations: her white dress is now red, and where a girl once stood
The female body becomes a canvas upon which myriad horrors are visited for the sake of the
carnal transformation of the countess, and the device works in such a way that the victim is made
complicit in her own fate, a point parenthetically emphasized by the narrator. The first
metamorphosis described is visual in nature; rather than speaking of blood there is merely the
contrast between the colors red and white in reference to Báthory’s gown. The second
transformation, however, is one of essence or definition: the act of murder has produced a new
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and distinct material object, a cadaver. The countess, the sovereign that orchestrates this event, is
concerned with the visual order, and will transform material reality for the sake of producing a
particular kind of image, that of a pure feminine subjectivity, beyond politics, morality, and even
The countess is therefore a kind of alchemist of the flesh, seeking to transform her own
body (a body conceived of and consumed as the image in the mirror) by means of destroying the
flesh of another. In contrast to the cold, cinematographic quality of Pizarnik’s prose, the
vignette's epigraph, from the French poet Arthur Rimbaud’s “Being Beauteous,” evokes the
ecstatic sensuality of violence that assaults the viewer of the Leng Tch’é photograph: “…des
blessures écarlates et noires éclatent dans les chairs superbes” [“...scarlet and black wounds burst
upon the splendid flesh”] (377, my translation). Báthory’s alchemy is founded on the
appropriation of beauty that paradoxically entails the annihilation of feminine subjects in its
quest for the image of an ideal, pure feminine subjectivity, an image that will of course never
exist. Yet ironically, the carnal transformation of the countess is one in which no change actually
occurs: her eternal youth would theoretically be achieved through constant interventions that
would maintain the sovereign’s body forever the same. Such invariability is analogous to the
temporality of the dictatorship in Pizarnik’s Argentina during the period of the Revolution: the
regime perpetually maintains the state of exception (which is by definition transitory) through
the constant imposition of terror by acts of physical, psychological, and political violence. This
One notes in the afore-cited passage from “La jaula mortal” the extreme passivity of the
countess both as she moves (“lenta y silenciosa” [“slow and silent”]) and showers in the blood of
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her victim (“impasible con los ojos puestos en ningún lado” [“apathetic, with her eyes fixed on
nothing”]). This disturbing passivity stems from the fact that the countess is concerned primarily
with the contemplation of torture (although she does on occasion take part directly): Báthory is
referred to in the introduction as the “sola espectadora silenciosa” (374) [“single silent spectator”
(71)]. Before the iron maiden automaton that impales its victims, the countess, “sentada en su
trono, contempla” (375) [“sitting on her throne, watches” (72)], a vocabulary of visual
consumption that repeats throughout the text. In spite of the perverse intimacy of the relation
established through torture, the countess thrives on a certain degree of distance that allows for
her passive contemplation, a position that belies the extreme activity of her role as author,
architect, and alchemist in these crimes. This is the essence of the passive paradox, to name the
operative structure that determines the relation between the countess as contemplative feminine
subject and the nameless tortured feminine objects that comprise the dark menagerie of her
gynaeceum.
The passive paradox hinges on this distance of passive observation through which the
active framing and orchestration of torture takes place. It is through contemplative distance that
the mise-en-scène emerges and is visually enjoyed by the one who frames the event, which raises
an important distinction between the works of Elizondo and Pizarnik. As critic Melanie
Nicholson writes of La condesa sangrienta, “the sadistic act requires a separation of the object
(victim) from the subject (torturer/voyeur). The moment of ecstasy—or, as Bataille would say,
the temporary loss of the discontinuity represented by the ego—occurs at a physical distance
from the being who experiences death” (19). In the Leng Tch’é photograph with which Farabeuf
is concerned, the ecstatic subject is synonymous with the tortured object; in Pizarnik’s
meditation on Báthory’s erotic madness, however, ecstasy is located on the side of the perverse
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viewer of the image. Yet when Elizondo’s female protagonist is forcibly thrust into an encounter
with the ecstatic through the distance afforded by the specular structure of the surgeon’s chamber
in Farabeuf, she becomes both subject and object. It is the image, the making-image of the
feminine, that breaks down the distinction between subject and object to the point that there is
nothing left but a reflection, which is itself the palimpsest of a faded photograph.
Báthory’s enjoyment of the violent mise-en-scène that she stages allows for the only
moments in which she may emerge from her chronic state of melancholy: “la hermosa alucinada
riendo desde su maldito éxtasis provocado por el sufrimiento ajeno” (379) [“the beautiful
madwoman laughing in a wicked ecstasy provoked by the suffering of others” (75)]. Her orgasm,
we are told, depends on viewing sufrimiento ajeno, the literal deaths of others bringing about her
own petite morte. She becomes death itself so as not to suffer its effects: “Nunca nadie no quiso
de tal modo envejecer, esto es: morir. Por eso, tal vez, representaba y encarnaba a la Muerte.
Porque, ¿cómo ha de morir la Muerte?” (380) [“Never did anyone wish so hard not to grow old; I
mean, to die. That is why, perhaps, she acted and played the role of death. Because, how can
Death possibly die?” (76)]. Is orgasm the only death available to Death itself? It is only through
the death of the other (the young female other, so as to produce the requisite degree of
identification with the object of desire/emulation) that the countess may abandon her
melancholic catatonia and experience the loss of ecstasy, which in turn perversely mimics the
Due to the passive, contemplative element of her obsession, numerous critics have
identified Báthory’s perversion in La condesa sangrienta as voyeuristic: Foster states that the
“iron maiden” vignette, among others, “centers on voyeurism” (109); Nicholson identifies the
countess as “primarily a voyeur” (19); and critic Melissa Fitch emphatically declares that “The
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countess is portrayed as the ultimate voyeur” (23). While it is indeed tempting to think of
Báthory in such terms due to the pleasure she derives from observing sadistic acts, it is in the end
a position that fails to take into account the active implication of the passive paradox. Voyeurism
denotes satisfaction through covert observation: the voyeur remains hidden, the object of his
gaze unaware of his presence. He is entirely passive, unable to influence the scene that he
fervently contemplates, nor would he want to—essentially, the voyeur derives pleasure from
sexually engaging his candid object visually so as to remain powerless, his surreptitious
enjoyment stemming from the accidental, fortuitous eruption of jouissance amid a complete lack
of control. Yet in the same breath in which she deems Báthory “the ultimate voyeur” Fitch
acknowledges that the “final passage of the text is a meditation on the ramifications of the
possession of unlimited power,” which would seem to eliminate any possibility of voyeurism
(23). Foster (and, to a lesser extent, Fitch) go on to identify the reader’s position in the text as
voyeuristic, which may be a useful characterization for thinking through the ethics of (privately)
reading such overtly perverse material, yet this begs the question of whether a text knows it is
being read (and I would argue that it does). Film theorist Laura Mulvey’s observation regarding
cinema applies here: “narrative conventions give the spectator an illusion of looking in on a
private world,” which is to say that even diegetic voyeurism is ultimately a misapprehension (17,
emphasis added). In order to label the visual element of the countess’ twisted obsession, we must
Freud offers such a concept in the broader term Schaulust, “pleasure in looking,”
rendered in English (or more accurately, Greek) as scopophilia. In Three Essays on the Theory of
Sexuality Freud stipulates that scopophilia “becomes a perversion if... instead of being
preparatory to the normal sexual aim, it supplants it” (251). You can look, Freud suggests, but
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you must also touch. The countess’ perversion is therefore compounded by her passivity: while
she normally doesn’t participate directly in her own crimes, she nonetheless needs to witness
them overtly in order to gain enjoyment: “Bathory needed the visible, elementary, coarse death,
to succeed in dying that other phantom death we call orgasm” (76). The passive paradox
delineates the harsh activity beneath this quiescent surface of contemplation, the fact that it is
both for the countess and by the countess that each and every one of these events is staged. In her
cruel tableaux vivants Báthory meticulously transforms the female body into an image to be
consumed in a process culminating in death, and therefore effectively stages the performance of
a tableau mort; in this sense Pizarnik repeats the visual structure developed by Elizondo. Yet the
“trinitary essence” of sex, surgery, and torture in Farabeuf is here reduced to only two elements:
there is no longer any pretext of benefit for the victim, no medical institution, however spurious,
that would engage in surgery for the sake of the individual’s health. Pizarnik instead reveals the
profound enjoyment that lies at the heart of the sovereign’s proscription of torture, an act
ostensibly performed for the sake of the security of the state, yet one that is here stripped down
to the sexual framing and consumption of an image. The countess produces a violated,
fragmentary image of the feminine, and the absolute power of her scopophilia performs this
In her seminal essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” Laura Mulvey identifies “two
immensely useful for our reading of Pizarnik. Following Freud’s notion of Schaulust, Mulvey
aligns the scopophilic drive with fetishism in that it names “pleasure in using another person as
an object of sexual stimulation through sight.” Yet Mulvey also holds that there is an opposing,
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narcissistic form of pleasure in looking that she approaches through the Lacanian mirror stage:
the child’s pre-symbolic recognition of his mirror image provides the foundation for a notion of
self, and therefore of subjectivity, “but its misrecognition as superior projects this body outside
itself as an ideal ego, the alienated subject which, re-introjected as an ego ideal, prepares the way
for identification with others in the future.” This dichotomy between fetishistic scopophilia and
narcissistic identification may be conceived of as that “long love affair/despair between image
and self-image,” or the difference between screen and mirror. (Mulvey 18)
La condesa sangrienta produces a particular image of the feminine through the countess’
scopophilic drive—one that coincides with that produced in Farabeuf through these texts’
common blendings of torture and desire—yet this is in reality not the primary image that
emerges in Pizarnik’s work. We previously identified the ekphrastic signifying chain of images
that structures Elizondo’s novel, at the heart of which Alberto Moreiras locates the secret image
of The Flaying of Marsyas as the pharmakós that provides the political distinction between
inside and outside that grounds the State. La condesa sangrienta has a simpler structure in the
sense that the images it produces are merely twofold: the counterpart to the fetishized image of
the tortured female adolescent body is the countess’ own mirror image, a narcissistic
(mis)recognition. The seventh vignette, entitled “El espejo de la melancolía” [“The Melancholy
...vivía delante de su gran espejo sombrío, el famoso espejo cuyo modelo había
diseñado ella misma... Tan confortable era que presentaba unos salientes en
donde apoyar los brazos de manera de permanecer muchas horas frente a él sin
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[The Countess would spend her days in front of her large dark mirror; a famous
mirror she had designed herself. It was so comfortable that it even had supports
on which to lean one's arms, so as to be able to stand for many hours in front of it
without feeling tired. We can suppose that while believing she had designed a
mirror, Erzebet had in fact designed the plans for her lair. (79)]
The binary of the scopophilic drive established in Mulvey’s essay therefore emerges in
Pizarnik’s text through the tension established between the spectacle in which the violated
female body is visually consumed and the specular image-relation between self and mirror.
Báthory inhabits the image, what Vilém Flusser calls a “significant surface” (Photography 8), or
what Elizondo referred to in Farabeuf as a mirror “en cuya superficie nos estamos viendo morir”
(171) [“on whose surface we watch ourselves die” (112)]. The countess seeks a sort of stasis in
this image, whose significance would be synonymous with immutable youth and beauty, an
A return to the theory of the image, elaborated in the previous chapter, will be of
assistance here, given that the countess’ mirror image acts as a Flusserian screen. Flusser holds
that instead of representing the world (as a map), images “obscure it until human beings’ lives
finally become a function of the images they create;” when we cease to decode images and begin
to project them into the world, the world itself operates on the level of the image. The image
thereby functions as a screen, mediating (invisibly, precisely because it is all that we see) the
relation between subject and world. This is what Flusser calls “idolatry,” the crisis of the image
in which the image magically restructures our reality, and we are reduced to one of its functions
(Photography 10). Pizarnik’s characterization of the great mirror as the countess’ morada
indicates that the image dominates, determines the world, taking precedence over the corporeal
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flesh that it reflects.5 The countess inhabits a two-dimensional surface within Csejte; her
subjectivity is reduced to an image that in turn drives her to consume the fetishized images of
female adolescents as she vainly attempts to expropriate their defining qualities through a violent
The vector of one’s relation to the mirror image is in a sense reversed—it is the mirror
that looks at me, in an ego-oriented form of idolatry (in which the image itself is primary, the
seer secondary). For Mulvey, this form of pleasure in looking (and in being looked at)
“developed through narcissism and the constitution of the ego, comes from identification with
the image seen” (18). In his pivotal 1913 essay “On Narcissism: An Introduction,” Freud
proposes the existence of the ego ideal, a concept that would be elaborated a decade later in The
Ego and the Id. He writes that in an adult, the ideal ego “is now the target of the self-love which
was enjoyed in childhood by the actual ego. The subject’s narcissism makes its appearance
displaced on to this new ideal ego, which, like the infantile ego, finds itself possessed of every
perfection that is of value” (558). In his discussion of the formation of this ego ideal (through the
influence of parents, teachers, and companions, as well as public opinion), Freud makes an
especially interesting observation regarding the libidinal implications of this psychical construct:
“In this way large amounts of libido of an essentially homosexual kind are drawn into the
formation of the narcissistic ego ideal and find outlet and satisfaction in maintaining it” (559).
linking the narcissistic ego-libido with the fetishistic object-libido and their respective
Pizarnikian images: the mirror reflection and the tortured female body. The homosexual charge
5
morada: “home, dwelling, abode;” Manguel’s translation as “lair” imbues the term with a sense of evil
or animality not present in the original.
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of the ego ideal and the force with which it pushes the subject to maintain its displaced
Immediately following the previously cited description of the countess’ mirror, Pizarnik’s
text goes on to explain why torture chambers inundated with fresh blood were among the few
extreme things that could quicken the countess’ somber face with a semblance of life: “Porque
nadie tiene más sed de tierra, de sangre y de sexualidad feroz que estas criaturas que habitan los
fríos espejos” (384) [“Because no one has more thirst for earth, for blood, and for ferocious
sexuality than the creatures who inhabit cold mirrors” (79)]. The countess’ is ultimately an
obsession with a task that announces its own failure: the cold, melancholy mirror within which
Báthory performs her specular existence produces an image of the feminine as subject rather than
object, yet this ideal of subjectivity remains outside the purview of the countess’ power. The
mirror image is not an other, and is therefore not subject to the fetishization through which the
countess exerts her seemingly infinite control; a youthful reflection is both that which she tries so
bloodbaths—and ultimately the one thing within her realm over which she can exert no
influence. The countess’ own body, made image in the mirror, becomes the opening, the eruption
of lack within the hegemonic nightmare of Csejte. A political reading of the text must therefore
seek to locate this wound within hegemony and exploit it as the singular point of fragility in the
dominant order.
Let us recall the emphatic assertion of the previous chapter in its analysis of Elizondo’s
novel: it is the subtraction of the feminine that founds the political. In La condesa sangrienta
Pizarnik not only sustains this structure—the countess’ image, condemned to age, inscribes the
very lack that founds her autocratic femicidal regime—but repeats it in every mise-en-scène
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through which the Báthory tortures another female body. The conceptual chain of tierra, sangre,
y sexualidad feroz presents a sort of Pizarnikian trinitary essence that attests to the text’s
compulsion to ground itself in corporeal reality while at the same time paradoxically remaining
an image occupying the surface of a mirror. Indeed, these three elements constitute a
condensation of the entire narrative. The earth is the material ground upon which this structure
plays itself out, absorbing the blood that signifies in turn the ebb and flow of life itself. This
blood is then commodified as exchange in an economy of sadistic violence through the staging
of sexual spectacles. Finally, it is through such performances that the sovereign’s jouissance
imposes its demand upon both the ruling subject that sits in passive contemplation as well as the
fetishized bodies that suffer as objects-become-image for the scopophilic fantasy. One need only
picture the scene of “The Lethal Cage,” with its dual metamorphoses hinging on the blood that
rains down upon the ritually catatonic countess, with “her eyes fixed on nothing.”
We may find another avenue for a political reading of the text by returning to the
question of voyeurism, which in the end implies a particular subtraction of the masculine. David
William Foster observes that in La condesa sangrienta “a challenge is made to the gaze of the
reader, who (through the eyes of the narrator, who is the mediating voyeur) watches the countess
watch herself embracing her victim through the agency of the iron maiden” (110). For Foster, the
horror inspired by the text corresponds to our horror at the “actual oppression of abusive power
that permeates... everyday historical reality” (111). Although this argument does not address the
the reader’s position in relation to the countess leads us to an interesting conclusion regarding the
political implications of Báthory’s violent desires. To analyze the gaze of the reader—which is
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that of a viewer of the images produced in Pizarnik’s macabre, (cinemato)graphic vignettes—we
must consider the implicit violence of castration within the structure of the text.
We look on these scenes in horror (the only beauty being that of the haunting prose itself,
of the order of form rather than content), and it is with trepidation that we watch the countess
contemplate her cruel tableaux vivants. Mulvey’s emphasis on the psychoanalytic implications of
woman-as-image in film becomes relevant here: “she connotes something that the look
continually circles around but disavows: her lack of a penis, implying a threat of castration and
hence unpleasure.” The theorist then states that the male unconscious attempts to escape this
castration anxiety in one of two ways: either through demystifying woman (voyeurism), or by
fetishizing her (scopophilia) (Mulvey 22). Yet for a male reader of Pizarnik (at least one aligned
with the patriarchally structured dictatorship of the time) the countess herself comes to incarnate
castration anxiety, not through her beauty, but through her absolute power, which is ironically
only inscribed into female bodies. Perhaps the end of the text, then, affords such a reader some
degree of symbolic relief when Báthory is put on trial and immured within her own castle— the
paternal order of law intervenes and contains the threat. In this sense the regime’s fear of
“subversives” reflects a form of political castration anxiety. If the countess in Pizarnik’s work
comes to incarnate the force of this anxiety for the masculine reader, she would consequently
embody a subversive threat to sovereign (masculine) rule, despite her obvious alignment with
dictatorial power within the walls of her domain in Csejte. Even if Foster is correct in identifying
patriarchy,” in the end the countess paradoxically embodies a feminine force of resistance
against such a patriarchal order in her deployment of the threat of castration through hyperbolic
violence (103).
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IV. THE SUBVERSIVE FETISH
How, then, do the scopophilia and castration anxiety evident in Pizarnik’s work relate to the
political repression at the time of its publication? Any political critique would necessarily be
oblique and proleptic, since Pizarnik began writing this piece at the beginning of the 1960s.
General Onganía’s Argentine Revolution—whose span matches almost exactly the publication
reestablishment of democracy; the state of exception was made indefinite, and military
dictatorship was normalized. The state perpetuated itself through the enjoyment of dictatorial
rule while engaging in the production of the image of an ideal citizen, achieved by means of the
violence of state terror, forced disappearance, and torture. Of the kidnappings by clandestine
right-wing groups, David Rock sustains that by the beginning of 1971 (the year of La condesa
average each eighteen days” (355). As the demand for a return to civilian rule increased in the
country, so did the guerrilla operations of leftist groups, and the regime descended into a war on
subversive elements: “Each blow struck by the guerrillas was matched in kind by clandestine
groups on the right, and torture became a standard technique in the police interrogations of
Amid mounting civil unrest (the mendozazo, a series of uprisings in Mendoza in April
1972, echoed the cordobazo of 1969) and a worsening economic crisis (by March 1972, inflation
had risen to 58% in just one year), the regime could no longer support itself. General Lanusse
became desperate to calm the political tensions that were brewing into a storm, and surprisingly
decided to lift the ban on Peronism that had been in effect for eighteen years. Elections were
finally held after seven years of military rule, and in March 1973 the Peronists won, Perón
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himself being sworn in as president in October after brief terms by stand-ins Héctor Campora
and Raúl Lastiri. Nevertheless, the reign of Perón, and even more so, the subsequent reign of his
widow Isabel, only saw an increase in military repression in the war on subversion: “by early
1975 [right wing groups] dispensed with leftists at a rate of fifty a week,” at which pace the
Argentine military would surpass Báthory’s staggering body count in a matter of months (Rock
363). Pizarnik herself did not live to see this transition, however, as she took her own life in
September 1972.
In teasing out the political implications of La condesa sangrienta we have identified two
related yet opposed forms of image production in the text: the foundational mirror-gaze that
establishes narcissistic identification with the ego ideal; and the scopophilic gaze of the enjoying,
sovereign subject whose object-libido both produces and consumes fetishized images of the
female body. The mirror displays what the sovereign subject lacks: the break in the surface of
hegemonic rule, the point at which dictatorial control slips away and meets its own disruption in
the image. When the dictator turns her gaze upon herself, she therefore glimpses her own end,
the inevitable closure of the exception that establishes and sustains her rule. This totalitarian
crisis of the image then leads the hegemon to engage in the frantic production of object-images
on a mass scale in an attempt to cover up her own failure. Báthory’s obsessive contemplation of
her serial killings mirrors the structure of dictatorial rule in Pizarnik’s Argentina as the regime
(transitively) disappears and tortures the subversives that threaten to expose its true nature, for
they embody the exclusions upon which the dominant political order depends.
La condesa sangrienta therefore theorizes the dictatorial relation between image and
within human relations, as discussed earlier, is to be found in the mass production of technical
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images, in what Flusser deemed a second industrial revolution. Here (in either of Pizarnik’s
realms, Argentina or Csejte) this proliferation is displaced onto mass killings, as a regime
invested with absolute power constructs an entirely vampyroteuthian system in which human
discretion. As the scopophilic gaze of the regime passes over the social body, the subversives of
leftist guerrilla groups embody the erogenous zones that demand its most fervent attention.
Jean-Luc Nancy’s observation that the image not only “presents absence,” but
furthermore that it is concerned with the production of meaning itself (“making absense a
presense”), informs this reading of the Argentine regime’s night and fog tactics (“Distinct
Oscillation” 67-68). Like the image, forced disappearance is primarily concerned with the
production of meaning, which is here synonymous with the fate of the nation. Through the
deployment of clandestine paramilitary groups, the regime invisibly stages the spectacle of
disappearance and torture; state terror may operate as a negative public performance of the image
in that these acts oppress precisely in their absence.6 Much of the terror instilled through forced
disappearance hinges on the fact that one almost never sees it happen; the regime strives to
then, we can conclude the following regarding the politics of image relations: Báthory’s
fetishization of the adolescent female body—whose supremely violent unmaking will perpetuate
(the fantasy of) her own youth and beauty, as well as the existence of her macabre gynaeceum—
finds its analogue in the regime’s fetishization of the subversive body, the destruction of which
will restore (the fantasy of) the nation and extend indefinitely dictatorial rule.
6
Groups such as the Alianza Anticomunista Argentina, or Triple A, a right wing death squad founded in 1973 (with
the return of Perón), became a legacy of Argentine repression that would only grow over time, reaching its apex
during the Dirty War in the late 70s and early 80s.
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In her discussion of La condesa sangrienta, critic Nina Molinaro writes of Báthory’s
victims that in being reduced to “their sexual status as virgins, their bodies provide the space
upon which to produce an excessive control, a control that registers in screams and silence,
victimization with no history.” As they are tortured simply for the enjoyment of the countess
rather than being interrogated for political information, the girls “possess neither history nor
discourse.” For Molinaro, then, Pizarnik’s text is about “an elimination of voice, a systematic
display of female bodies, the conversion of art into a concrete effect of power, and the denial of
history” (49-50). Yet even in the case of Báthory’s femicidal reveries, history is denied one
subject (who is thereby forcibly transformed into an image, with the magical, non-linear, post-
historical existence that implies) for the sake of another (sovereign) subject’s inscription into
history. In Argentina the victims of dictatorial violence are in this sense victims in history, within
the historical narrative formulated by the regime regarding the identity of the nation: politically
historicized victims.
which we identified in the previous chapter as the operative force in Latin American dictatorial
itself both internally (through its inherent power structures) as well as externally (through the
control it exerts upon the social body). The subversive project, on the other hand—the aim of the
leftist guerrilla groups such as the Montoneros and the ERP (Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo)
during the Argentine Revolution—was aligned with Moreiras’ notion of absolute historicism,
which seeks to recuperate the infinitude of the social, a political excess beyond the material
excess inscribed into the regime’s victims through torture.7 Previously I demonstrated that
7
The Montoneros, or MPM (Movimiento Peronista Montonero), were radical leftist followers of Perón, typically
urban students, who sought to reveal the fascist reality of the government and destroy its oligarchical rule. However
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hegemonic structures of social organization seek to reduce the reality they govern to the
immanent field of material phenomena, thereby shrinking the world to fit their sphere of control
until there is no longer any outside position from which critique may be undertaken. Yet the
feminine seeks to interrupt such structures from within; this is precisely why guerrilla
movements in Argentina in the early 1970s (groups which, significantly for this discussion, “had
a high proportion of female combatants”), particularly the more radical ones such as the ERP,
“aspired less to refurbish the nation-state than to transcend it” (Rock 354-55).
through its unique mise-en-scène, that is, the way in which it stages the production and
consumption of two distinct types of images: the specular (in the melancholy mirror) and the
spectacular (in the performance of the fetishized body). The politics of the image emerges from
the gap between identification and fetishization in the realm of the visual. Pizarnik’s text
becomes doubly productive when one locates within it a possible recuperation of the countess for
feminism as an emblem of castration anxiety, thereby demonstrating the political potential of the
feminine monster. Yet the poet’s primary contribution is, in my view, the sexualization of the
dictatorial regime, identifying a perverse jouissance as the driving force behind its political
violence in a libidinous politics unleashed on the subversive as the erogenous point of the social
body. This reading of the Argentine Revolution through Pizarnik’s erotic prose ultimately
reveals the countess to be a metonym of that abstract force of absolute power that all too
the ERP (Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo), a guerrilla group based in the rural region of Tucumán, completely
mistrusted Peronism and sought a more radical revolution than the Montoneros, aligning themselves with Che
Guevara and the struggle against imperialism across the Americas.
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concretely exerts itself on the bodies of subjects who are deprived of history so as to be re-
The transition from analysis of the work of Pizarnik to that of Valenzuela is not only
temporal, as we move into the period of the Dirty War, but thematic, for it is concerned with
images of feminine space and confinement. The feminine space of Csejte Castle, particularly in
its political function as gynaeceum—the aim of which is the formation of ideal feminine political
subjects—becomes corrupted through the absolute freedom of the feminine subject of the
countess and the malformation of her narcissistic ego-ideal. Yet in Valenzuela we will encounter
the recuperation of feminine space as a site of resistance, through the absolute lack of freedom
ascribed to it. Erzsébet Báthory’s immurement, her imprisonment within a single room of her
home, reflects the very premise of “Cambio de armas,” a narrative in which a women is
seemingly confined within the walls of what appears to be her own apartment. Báthory’s moral
depravity aside (not that it can be excused), in some ways Pizarnik’s countess could be the
female protagonist of Valenzuela’s story. Each represents, in her own way, a threat to the
masculine hegemonic order: the countess embodies the threat of castration as a feminine
monster, while Laura is revealed to have formed part of a guerrilla group tasked with the
assassination of a colonel within the regime. “Cambio de armas” will be shown to constitute a
distinct meditation on the same concepts developed in part one of this chapter: passivity,
freedom and confinement, the gaze (both specular and spectacular), and sexual violence. In a
sense, Valenzuela picks up where Pizarnik leaves off in her feminist analysis of image
subjectivity.
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PART TWO
The Argentine governments of the 1970s utilized to great effect the Nazi strategy of “night and
fog,” illegally detaining thousands of alleged subversives through forced disappearance and
half of this chapter will explore these essential facets of Argentine state terror—disappearance
and confinement—through a work of experimental fiction that imagines the experience of one
desaparecida. Luisa Valenzuela’s “Cambio de armas” [“Other Weapons”] penetrates the dark
chamber so as to consider through literary fantasy the multiple ruptures that occur within. After
outlining the historical background of the regime I will approach Valenzuela’s text through the
fragmentation (her mediated relation to her own body in the mirror), the gaze (as the text’s
sexual encounters are situated within the visual field), and apuntamiento (the author’s linguistic
conflation of “aiming” with “writing”). This is a narrative about loss, yet one that begins with an
absolute lack of knowledge, given the amnesiac condition of its female protagonist. The text
story of confinement is ultimately about opening. “Cambio de armas” seeks to uncover a wound,
one that exists simultaneously within the feminine body and within Argentine history itself, a
wound that must be kept open to counter the erasure that lies at the heart of disappearance.
Peronism had strengthened itself during the Argentine Revolution, and Peron’s left-wing
candidate Héctor Cámpora consequently won the March 1973 elections (Perón himself could not
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run per decree of General Lanusse). Perón returned to Argentina on June 20, and was scheduled
to give a speech upon landing at the Ezeiza International Airport where some 500,000 spectators
had gathered. The Peronist left intended to demonstrate their power within the new
administration by standing around Perón on the podium as he gave his speech, but before he
arrived snipers aligned with right-wing Peronism began to fire into the crowd, targeting members
of the Montonero movement, including their radical political faction the Peronist Youth. At least
dozens were killed, though fatalities may have numbered in the hundreds. This event also
marked the end of Perón’s appeal to both ends of the political spectrum, as he denounced his
leftist followers and began to purge his Justicialista party of their presence. Cámpora stepped
down shortly after the Ezeiza massacre, as his government no longer enjoyed Perón’s support.
Raúl Lastiri took office in the interim before Perón won the September 1973 elections with wife
Perón’s third term as president was cut short when he died of heart failure in July 1974.
Isabel Perón assumed the presidency and launched “a virtual war of extermination” against leftist
elements (Halperín Donghi 357). David Rock observes that “the repression quite deliberately it
seemed, was arbitrary, uncoordinated, and indiscriminate, which intensified its powers of
intimidation” (367). The insurrectionists in turn became increasingly violent, moving from
kidnappings to assassinations with the aim of inciting a coup. Throughout 1975 mounting
violence and inflation undermined all support for Isabel Perón’s administration, until on March
24, 1976 the Army abducted her and a military junta led by General Jorge Rafael Videla took
control of the nation. Ever conscious of language, the regime abandoned the discourse of
“revolution” adopted by Onganía a decade prior, initiating instead the “Process of National
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In support of Isabel Perón’s politics of extermination, Videla had declared in 1975 that
“as many people as necessary must die in Argentina so that the country will again be secure,”
which set the tone for his own regime. The military generals calmly took power with the support
of the majority of Argentine citizens in what came to be called “The Gentleman’s Coup,” based
on an infamous statement by Jorge Luis Borges, which he later regretted (Feitlowitz 6).
Throughout the dictatorship each junta would be comprised of a commander from the army,
navy, and air force; the tensions between these branches ultimately resulted in greater violence
and terror. Halperín Donghi asserts that “In practice, factional fault lines within the regime led to
severe internal contradictions, prevented any effective check on the thousands of tortures and
disappearances, and encouraged an abdication of responsibility for abuses of all kinds, including
the satisfaction of personal greed” (358). The first two years of the regime were the most brutal,
as Videla zealously sought to purge the nation of subversion; by 1978 the guerrilla forces had
been quelled. Yet according to a 1978 report on forced disappearances, “fewer than 20 percent of
the victims were guerrillas and some 37 percent were factory workers”—the subversive fetish
was rampant, creating suspicion everywhere (Rock 367). In a shocking display of complicity,
Videla received a standing ovation from the crowd at the championship game of the 1978 World
Cup, controversially hosted in dictatorial Argentina. Testimonies would later reveal that political
prisoners in the infamous prison camp at the Naval Mechanics School could hear the roar of the
Videla’s chosen successor, General Roberto Viola, was deposed in December 1981 after
eight months in office in a coup led by Lieutenant General Leopoldo Galtieri. Galtieri had
fostered national fervor through his promise to retake the Falkland Islands, under British control
since 1833. Argentina received none of the international support the regime expected, and British
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forces decided to retake the islands. The conflict ended swiftly, by June 1982. The Argentine
forces had been defeated within a mere two months—despite their significant advantages—and
the military regime was disgraced. General Reynaldo Bignone was appointed as the final
president of the regime, in order to “preside over a ‘dignified’ end to the Process” as the nation
inevitably returned to democracy (Feitlowitz 8). In practical terms, this meant destroying all
documentation and evidence of forced disappearances, executions, and other human rights
violations. In April 1983 Bignone also declared amnesty for those who committed such
violations, absolving himself and all members of the military of responsibility, though this was
later overturned. Democratic elections were held as public recognition of state terror and human
rights abuses spread. Raúl Alfonsín won under his campaign of opposing all forces he considered
to have dominated the country for half a century: the military, the Peronists, and the labor
unions. He became president in December 1983 as the nation began its transition to democracy, a
process that would combine prosecution of those responsible for atrocities with amnesty and
It is estimated that the Dirty War claimed somewhere between 15,000 and 30,000
victims, though it is hard to tell due to the rampant use of forced disappearance. “As countless
families have testified,” writes Marguerite Feitlowitz of inquiries made during the dictatorship,
“the basic posture at Interior was that the missing were all ‘fat and happy in Nicaragua’” (31).
We speak of disappearance from the present, from the perspective of those who inhabit a social
space from which one may speak. The disappeared themselves occupy (insofar as one can
8
Alfonsín’s 1985 “Trial of the Juntas” was a landmark trial in Latin American history. General Videla and Admiral
Emiliano Massera (of the first and bloodiest junta) were sentenced to life imprisonment, while General Viola
received seventeen years. Though General Galtieri was acquitted in civilian court, he was later court-martialed and
sentenced to twelve years in prison. Nevertheless, in December 1990 Alfonsín’s successor Carlos Menem would
pardon all convicted ex-commanders in a controversial decision on what was decried by Alfonsín as “the saddest
day in Argentine history” (Christian, n.p.).
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ascribe to them any action) a somewhat imaginary, theoretical category—that of an absence that
forecloses on the very possibility of a predicate. Their purgatorial absence is simply a question
pending resolution, yet it is one with no answer. Or perhaps not: as asserted by retired naval
officer Adolfo Scilingo, who confessed in 1995 to having killed thirty people on two death
flights, “They were making us responsible for thousands of desaparecidos… when there was no
such thing. These people were dead, not missing” (Feitlowitz 200). Yet within Argentine culture,
therefore no accident that Valenzuela’s narrative operates through the simultaneous displacement
and deferral of Derridian différance, as the end of this chapter will demonstrate. We see through
the eyes of the absent in “Cambio de armas.” This is a feature the text shares on some level with
the genre of testimonio, which Feitlowitz characterizes as one that inhabits in the nation’s dual
worlds, “where the public and the secret Argentina intersect” (16). Valenzuela utilizes to great
effect the power of literature to represent that which takes place within the dark chamber, the
fragmented nature of her narrative reflecting the consciousness and experience of her
protagonist.
Luisa Valenzuela is a prolific author of novels and short stories, whose frequently
experimental work explores dictatorial and patriarchal power structures from a feminist
perspective, with a strong focus on sexuality and psychoanalytic thought. Born in Buenos Aires
in 1938, she grew up surrounded by authors such as Borges, Paz, Bioy Casares, Sábato and
Cortázar, who frequented gatherings hosted at their home by her mother, the writer and journalist
journalist, and lived in Mexico, Spain, France, and the United States while writing her first two
novels, Hay que sonreír (1966) and El gato eficaz (1972). She returned to Argentina in 1974 as
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Isabel Perón rose to power and brought increased political repression. As a result of the
censorship imposed upon her third novel Como en la guerra (1977) during the Process of
National Reorganization, Valenzuela expatriated herself to the United States in 1978 and
remained in New York City for a decade. She held positions as writer-in-residence at New York
University and Columbia, publishing Cambio de armas (1982) and Cola de lagartija (1983),
works that critique gendered power structures. Valenzuela returned to Buenos Aires in 1989 and
has since published works such as Novela negra con argentinos (1990) and La travesía (2001).
I will focus on the title story of Cambio de armas, the last of five pieces that, read
sequentially, “could form a qualitative progression of the political process” (Cordones-Cook 52,
translation mine). Juanamaría Cordones-Cook’s usage of the phrase proceso político directly
evokes the regime’s Process: Valenzuela’s collection indeed follows the evolution of a regime
from political and diplomatic tensions, through the rise of clandestine operations and forced
disappearance, and lastly to a level of repression so absolute that it erases all traces of that which
preceded it. “Cambio de armas” situates itself within this final moment, though this is not
initially apparent to the reader (or to the protagonist). The female protagonist has no memory,
and finds herself confined to an apartment that is frequented by a man—seemingly her husband,
according to a wedding photograph by the bed—for sexual visits that appear to devolve into
instances of rape. Toward the end we learn that Laura is one of the disappeared, a guerrilla
captured during a botched assassination mission. Her target—a Colonel within the regime—
killed her lover, tortured her, erased her memory through a constant drug-induced haze, and
ultimately rewrote her life as his spouse in a disturbing and elaborate scheme.
Never one for unequivocal writing, Valenzuela’s narrative is rife with ambiguity, and
therein lies its force as a feminist text. When asked about the possibility of “women’s language”
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in an interview with Sarah Lee and Ksenija Bilbija, Valenzuela responded, “I openly fight for it.
I think there is a different charge in the words—women come from the badlands of language.
Women know a lot about ambivalence and ambiguity—which is why, I think, good, subtle
political writing by women novelists is dismissed in Argentina. Women are expected to console,
not disturb, the readers” (n.p.). Valenzuela’s narrative practice is consistent with the project set
forth by Nelly Richard in that it deploys the feminine, in writing, as a force of political
interruption of the dominant order. Political (feminist) writing is inherently violent, seeking to
disturb the reader out of complacency, opening power itself to alternative epistemologies and
modes of social organization. Cordones-Cook carefully speaks of the titular change of guard or
weapons in “Cambio de armas” as “presumably liberating” (52). This raises the question of the
subversive social and political practices. Yet Valenzuela’s textual polyvalence resists the urge to
glorify resistance itself: while this half of the chapter will advance my argument regarding
feminine political subjectivity in relation to state power in Latin America, I will also explore
Valenzuela’s problematization of resistance, a matter that reaches its apex at the conclusion of
the narrative, which defers the fetishized instant of resistance to a time and space beyond the
My exegesis of Valenzuela’s work will begin with the author’s engagement with
language: the ways in which the regime uses it as a weapon and means of control, as well as how
the feminine subject engages in its counterpropriation. One of the primary fronts on which the
juntas established dominance in Argentina was linguistic; this is why Marguerite Feitlowitz
frames her study of the Dirty War as A Lexicon of Terror. Several terms in particular stand out
for the changes they underwent within the machinations of the regime. “For survivors of the
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clandestine camps, trasladar carries more terror, more grief, than any other single word,” writes
Feitlowitz (52). This verb meaning “to move, transfer” was imbued with the full force of state
terror, as it referred to the act of taking prisoners away to be murdered. They were stripped,
sedated, transported to airplanes, and then dropped alive into the sea. Prior to the implementation
of death flights, prisoners were often shot and then disposed of either in ovens or mass graves.
Forced disappearance and extermination, both heavily arbitrary, “came to define an age,” as the
words trasladar and desaparecido/a are terms whose change of meaning was so radical and
complete that their “pre-Dirty War meanings have fallen away almost entirely” (Feitlowitz 51).
The first two chapters of this study think through the underside of disappearance—the
anguished presence of the absent within the space of their confinement. This is the importance of
the “dark chamber” on both theoretical and political levels, as a space of image-production and
the production of state power in and through the bodies of the excluded. I cited in the previous
chapter Ernesto Sabato’s characterization as a “sad Argentine privilege” the fact that the term
desaparecido began to appear in Spanish in periodicals across the world (CONADEP 9). This
ironic appearance of disappearance (as text) is analogous to the way in which the photographic
image presents absence (as image); nowhere did this play itself out more forcefully than on the
signs paraded through the Plaza de Mayo through which families protested the regime’s
abductions and demanded information regarding those missing. The disappeared were confined
to clandestine detention centers that emerged throughout Argentina during the Dirty War
(CONADEP identified some 300 such centers), spaces whose requisite dark chamber easily
came to be called el quirófano, “the operating room.” According to the testimony of Oscar
González and Horacio Cid de la Paz, “This was a very sinister place, the walls were so covered
with blood and stains that you could barely make out that it had once been painted yellow. The
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smell of burned flesh, blood, sweat and excrement, especially since there was no ventilation,
made the air heavy, suffocating” (cited in Feitlowitz 58). While the image of the quirófano
directly evokes Dr. Farabeuf’s dark chamber, uniting the surgical and torturous elements of the
Elizondian trinity, the image presented in this testimony is more akin to Báthory’s dungeon. The
confinement within such a space is absolute: even the air itself is described as heavy and
oppressive, as though the current victim were breathing in the suffering of those who came
before. Beyond the spatial, the sense of confinement in the quirófano generates a shared
experience of biopolitical intervention across time; the image of the sanguine patterns that mark
gendered games of power in “Cambio de armas,” one so deeply immersed in disappearance that
absent from this narrative, and Laura’s incarceration is entirely domestic: we encounter
disappearance cloaked in a veil of normalcy, and the image of a scar across the protagonist’s
back will be the only trace of the dark chamber, a space that is itself confined to the woman’s
repressed past. Within the context of the current project, Valenzuela’s narrative on disappearance
theorizes an essential lacuna or opening in the formation of state power as repression (in both the
political and the psychical sense). Elizondo presents the dark chamber as a space of existential
transformation that founds the political order; Pizarnik engages it as the canvas upon which the
sovereign paints murderous tableaux for the sake of elevating her own power to the level of an
(impossibly) absolute event; and Valenzuela narrates the dark chamber’s erasure as the next step
psychoanalytic thinker, Valenzuela will stage the return of the repressed in “Cambio de
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armas”—a war waged within and through the symbolic order—as the protagonist uncovers the
If, as I argued in the previous chapter, the instant of which Farabeuf purports to be a chronicle is
the instant of the feminine itself, of the birth of the feminine subject in her deformation at the
hands of masculine forces, such an instant has already passed at the outset of “Cambio de
armas”—the narrative is rather set in the nebulous haze of its aftermath. The text is fully
focalized through the seemingly nameless female protagonist, whose is a position of absolute
unknowing; she is the product of an extreme yet mysterious case of manipulation and mediation,
one which we slowly unearth along with her as readers. The Colonel who unmade and
reconstructed her world engages in an operation of feminine subject (de)formation of the second
order. The narrative is significantly set at the twilight of the junta’s reign, coinciding with the
text’s publication in 1982: the state has already established itself through the disappearance and
Farabeuf, one that defines the very limits of state power as it inscribes itself into bodies. Rather
than the acquisition of power, Valenzuela is here concerned with its maintenance, specifically
the way in which it seeks to write itself into an endless, amnesiac loop, thereby reproducing itself
time and again through bodies that cannot recall a time before the Process. The Process erases its
own beginning, and the Colonel aims to produce a feminine subject who was never unmade in
the first place. Rather than physical torture, which now belongs to a time that never existed,
“Cambio de armas” presents the reproduction of the regime’s conditions both sexually—through
(reorganization) of language. It is Laura’s linguistic confinement that I will first explore, as the
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officer fragments her relation to the symbolic order in a twisted parody of domestic life in order
Draper examines the conversion of prisons in the Southern Cone into public institutions such as
shopping malls, museums, and memorials to the many tragedies that occurred at the hands of
military regimes. She cogently argues that governments’ “opening” of these spaces is in reality a
pseudo-opening that uses consumerism in order to manipulate the social body into acts of
selective forgetting. Draper begins with a useful analysis of Deleuze’s notion of a “control
society,” expressed through the image of a highway: “You do not confine people with a
highway. But by making highways, you multiply the means of control... people can travel
infinitely and ‘freely’ without being confined while being perfectly controlled. That is our
future” (Deleuze, in Draper 14). Her study of the afterlives of prisons in Argentina, Chile, and
Uruguay thinks through this idea of control as a “new imaginary of limited freedom in which the
technique of power that worked in the spatial figure of enclosure is progressively replaced by an
idea of control that works through the fantasy of an opening” (Draper 14, emphasis mine). Given
that the feminist element of this project, as developed thus far, entails the opening of power to
the inscription of writing, Draper’s conception of fantasy will assist with questioning the
disappearance, confinement, and control in the context of the Dirty War directly addresses the
production of fantasies. Part of our task will therefore be to consider where in her narrative we
encounter the “fantasy of an opening” and where the text opens lines of flight that are viable for
feminist politics.
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The fantasy of an opening indeed lies at the heart of the perverse game played in
“Cambio de armas,” for in it we behold a particular manner of confinement: the space of the
story is an apartment, not a prison cell; it is upper class, complete with a servant and refined
guests who visit the Colonel and his “wife.” The narrative presents a microcosm of control,
complete with the illusion of freedom—the man always leaves a key on the mantel when he
departs. Laura holds on to this illusion; she lets herself be taken into the game by not testing the
key, for she is only “free” as long as she never attempts to leave. The limits of hegemony strive
to remain invisible, an illusion that would dissipate should we dare approach them too nearly.
hands of masculine power that has broken both her body and her voice, re-forming them in
fragmented fashion within a political configuration based on the fantasy of an opening, that is,
While the female protagonist’s physical trauma is eventually revealed in the text, the
narration focuses from the outset on her disrupted relation to language. The opening fragment
(the first of sixteen, most named after objects), titled Las palabras [The Words], declares that the
protagonist is not concerned with her complete lack of a memory, the fact that she is living “en
cero absoluto” [“in an absolute void”], but rather with “esa capacidad suya para aplicarle el
nombre exacto a cada cosa y recibir una taza de té cuando dice quiero (y ese quiero también la
desconcierta, ese acto de voluntad)” (113) [“her capacity to find the right word for each thing
and receive a cup of tea when she says I want (and that ‘I want’ also disconcerts her, that act of
willing)” (105)]. Though we know not how, her voice has been deconstructed in such a way that
this woman is not comfortable acting as a speaking subject. She knows nothing of the world, she
cannot even rest on the arbitrary ground of being able to name the objects that surround her; nor
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does she know anything of herself or her past, as even her own name forms part of a reality
constructed by an impersonal “them”: “En cuanto a ella, le han dicho que se llama Laura pero
eso también forma parte de la nebulosa en la que transcurre su vida” (113) [“As for herself, she’s
been told she’s called Laura, but that’s also part of the haze in which her life drifts by” (105-6)].
She occupies a nebulosa, a nebulous haze, the result of the amnesiac drugs administered to her
daily by her husband/captor, which cuts her off from the symbolic order of language.
The character’s removal from the symbolic is most evident in the “so-called” motif that
repeats throughout the text. Her nebulosa acts as a fog that cuts her off from the process of
signification that normally structures the world for speaking subjects: “Ella, la llamada Laura, de
este lado de la llamada puerta, con sus llamados cerrojos y su llamada llave pidiéndole a gritos
que transgreda el límite” (114) [“She, so-called Laura, is on this side of the so-called door, with
its so-called locks and its so-called key begging her to cross the threshold” (106)]. This linguistic
rupture indicates the woman’s presence in a world of spurious objects: a “key” that she knows
would not fit a lock, a “door” that she knows she cannot cross. Laura’s confinement is made all
the more disturbing in light of its perverse domesticity, not only because the bedroom is really a
cell and the husband a torturer, but because the protagonist is right in doubting the name and
function of every object, for nothing is as it seems. In her lucid chapter on Cambio de armas in
Talking Back, Debra Castillo emphasizes the fact that the title story “projects the limit case of
marriage” (Castillo 104). As we learn later in the narrative, it is not only the actions of a guerrilla
that are neutralized here, but a woman’s relation to language itself (and therefore to the world)
that is censored, erased, and finally reformulated. For military officials understand that they too
are storytellers, that their new world will be constructed through narrative as much as through
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social and (bio)political reforms and strategic deployments of violence. Laura and her
captor/husband become the ideal Argentine couple during the Process of National
Reorganization, as she is a feminine subject that has been processed and reorganized from a
subversive into the image of a passive middle-class housewife. The domestic configuration of
their lives thus comes to represent the achievement of the regime’s goals, in a politics of
reformation through confinement and the reconstruction of subjectivity itself. In this sense the
story forms an allegory of biopolitics, for the state not only removes the subversive citizen from
social-political participation, but comes to control the minutiae of her life, as the political extends
control, an interesting inversion is staged in the fragment Los nombres [The Names]. “El de los
infinitos nombres, el sinnombre” [“He of countless names, the nameless man”], previously
referred to as Hugo, Sebastián, Ignacio, Alfredo, and Héctor, receives a new string of names
from his wife/captive. This time the so-called Laura, as she looks at and caresses the man’s body,
names each part of his flesh—Diego, Esteban, José María, Alejandro, Luis, Julio—“y él puede
dejarse deslizar en el sueño sintiendo que es todos para ella, que cumple todas las funciones”
(118) [“and he can let himself slip into sleep feeling he’s all of them to her, he fulfills all their
roles” (109)]. Yet Laura senses that the man’s peaceful smile is not entirely sincere: “Algo está
alerta detrás del dejarse estar, algo agazapado dispuesto a saltar ante el más mínimo temblor de
la voz de ella al pronunciar un nombre” (117) [“Something’s on the edge behind that peace,
something’s crouching, ready to pounce at the slightest tremble in her voice when she
pronounces a name” (109)]. We see that the two are playing a game, at least from his
perspective, as they dance around the traumatic kernel of truth: his true name and identity, her
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past, and the relation between the two. As he sleeps she admires the beauty of his form and
exercises her memory by repeating the names, though she is unable to recall “los viejos tiempos”
(118) [“the good old times” (110)] they must have had as a couple. A disquiet lurks beneath the
surface of the happy memories that she assumes exist but does not possess, while the repressed
As she wonders about her (their?) past, Laura is suddenly gripped by an odd sensation;
she feels “extraña, distinta” [“strange, foreign, different”], though she knows not from whom,
perhaps from other women, or from herself, she speculates. Driven by this vague feeling of the
uncanny, the so-called Laura immediately runs to the mirror in the bedroom to examine herself
and is surprised to discover a long, “inexplicable” scar running across her back, the sight of
Una cicatriz espesa, muy notable al tacto, como fresca aunque ya esté bien
cerrada y no le duela. ¿Cómo habrá llegado ese costurón a esa espalda que parece
haber sufrido tanto? Una espalda azotada. Y la palabra azotada, que tan lindo
[A thick scar, apparent to the touch, sort of tender even though it’s already healed
and doesn’t hurt. How did that long seam get to that back that seems to have
suffered so much? A beaten back. The word beaten, which sounds so pretty if you
don’t analyze it, gives her goose pimples. She stands there, thinking about the
This is the first confirmation for the reader that Laura has been tortured, yet the protagonist
herself resists the psychological weight of this revelation. The explanation of the inexplicable is
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too painful, and the woman falls into the post-traumatic defense of distancing herself from her
own body, evidenced through the use of demonstrative pronouns (“esa espalda” [“that back”]).
She looks upon her reflection as though it were that of another, divorces the signifier azotada
from its meaning—”beaten, whipped, flogged”—and instead reduces it to a series of sounds that
constitute an aesthetic object (and a pleasant one at that). The images of a reflection and a scar,
respectively representing a subject and a past trauma, are alienated in this passage, deprived of
their significance. The act of recognizing the relation within the gap between reflection/woman
and scar/suffering requires a third position, that of the implicit and implicated reader that remains
faithful to the process of signification and who thereby gradually reconstructs an alternate
narrative approaching “the truth,” a meta-narrative located beyond the expansive, censorial limits
of the regime.
privileging the form over the content of the term is the only way to sustain the fantasy of an
opening within this microcosm of dictatorial power. Maintaining the domestic illusion, and the
minimal freedom that it implies (as a housewife, rather than a political prisoner), means ignoring
the secret, maintaining the repression (political and psychical). For the word “azotada” is indeed
the “secret word” of the narrative, as Debra Castillo explains: “Slashed back and slashed word,
the word that is itself a slash, a wound in language, taking language back into, as language is
alienated from, the tortured body” (126). Yet this half-healed scar and the word that it screams
signify a revelation, a link between realities and narratives, for which Laura is not yet prepared.
She is aware of her exclusion, evidenced in her uncanny sensation of difference, but will sustain
the fantasy of the system of confinement around her until the past’s eruptions through the haze of
her nebulosa become even more violent. Laura’s specular encounter in Los nombres is of an
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entirely different order from that of Countess Báthory in Pizarnik’s prose poem, which we
identified as an instance of narcissistic identification with the mirror image. At this point in
encounter a complete lack of identification with the reflected image. The protagonist’s
confinement is not only domestic, but pre-symbolic: she is still being held within the limits of the
imaginary that her captor has so painstakingly constructed around her. To return to Draper, “The
prison that no longer functions as such is then turned into a mall or a hotel, in a kind of fantasy
(from which the prison itself was born) of progress and regeneration, recycling the Hegelian
notion of sublation as a simultaneous preservation and negation that frames the grammar of
progress” (15). The domestic prison in Valenzuela’s narrative constitutes a perversion of the
transition analyzed by Draper, as a space that occupies both sides of the spectrum of absolute
confinement and illusory freedom. My analysis of this story and the power structures that it
presents therefore shares Draper’s goal of uncovering that which has been excluded from the
national imaginary, “to articulate these remains, which evoke the always disturbing image of
This analysis of language and the rupture of the sign in “Cambio de armas” is a necessary
point of departure, for it not only outlines the protagonist’s forcible confinement within the
imaginary (her exclusion from the symbolic), but also sets up a series of inversions that
Valenzuela stages throughout the rest of the story. Laura will once more see herself in the
reflection of a mirror, and will be presented with the whip that presumably flayed her back. I will
examine the potential lines of flight that Laura traces as she re-enters the symbolic on her own
terms. She will counterpropriate her captor’s weapons (language, the gun) and engage in her own
wordplay and double meanings in order to establish the psycho-corporeal borders of a feminine
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space and unique avenues of political insurgency from within her confinement. For the moment,
however, Laura has not tested the so-called keys, though she knows enough of her condition to
doubt their name. She still subscribes on some level to the fantasy of an opening: the illusion of
freedom within a control society—or, here—the simple fantasy that a key could open a door.
Each of the texts studied thus far taps into the existential force of the specular encounter—the
introspective element inherent in looking at one’s mirror image. In Farabeuf Elizondo’s surgeon
produces his macabre image of the instant of feminine subject (de)formation in the reflection of
the victim’s open body. In La condesa sangrienta it is the narcissistic identification of Pizarnik’s
countess with her mirror image that imposes the demand of torture for the sake of preserving a
fantasy of youth. Valenzuela mediates between these two extremes of torture for oneself
(Pizarnik) and torture for the other (Elizondo). Rather than maintaining Báthory’s division
between spectacle and identification as two distinct categories of image production, the Colonel
in “Cambio de armas” will fuse them: he stages a spectacle of the feminine subject’s
identification as a process, of her becoming-subject as she learns to identify with one of the two
foreign bodies she encounters in the reflection on a mirror above her bed.
representation of the process of subject formation, yet she does so by emphasizing the sexual
relation between touch and vision, a relation into which the masculine lover/captor violently
interpolates himself. In Valenzuela’s take on the dark chamber, the man has installed several
mirrors in the bedroom, including one on the ceiling above the bed. The so-called Laura is thus
caught between two sets of relations—to the man, and to herself—for she looks at herself
“primero por obligación y después por gusto” (122) [“first out of obligation and then out of
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pleasure” (114)]. Her enjoyment throughout this passage contributes to its disturbing nature, as
Valenzuela highlights not only the possibility of pleasure within a violent encounter but the fact
The centrality of the visual in this mirror scene is supplanted by the physical and
affective force of touch, a medium in which is condensed the relation to the other, even as it
determines the subject’s relation to herself. The man forces her to watch as he licks her body, a
body from which she feels estranged, as she sees “unos pechos que la asombran por pesados, un
cuello largo y esa cara de ella que de golpe le recuerda a la planta” [“surprisingly heavy breasts,
a long neck and that face of hers which suddenly reminds her of the plant”]. She does not
recognize her own body, presented as a set of fragmented reflections, and she identifies it with an
object that, although living, seems “como artificial” [“somehow artificial”]. Her captor covers
the surface of her body with his tongue, mapping its geography as some perverse cartographer of
the flesh: “Y con la lengua empieza a trepársele por la pierna izquierda, la va dibujando y ella
allá arriba se va reconociendo, va sabiendo que esa pierna es suya porque la siente viva bajo la
lengua y de golpe esa rodilla que está observando en el espejo también es suya” (122-3) [“His
tongue starts creeping up her left leg, drawing it, and she starts to recognize herself up there, she
starts to know that leg is hers because she can feel it’s alive under his tongue and suddenly the
knee she sees in the mirror is also hers” (114-5)]. Thus begins a hurried litany that stresses touch
over vision as the narration works itself into a frenzy, rushing through the protagonist’s sensory
experience beneath mirror and tongue. Though it is painful to continue watching, Laura
witnesses the construction of a subject that is first felt and then graphed onto the mirror-image
above her. We must also note that the term “suddenly” is in Spanish de golpe, a temporal
expression that emphasizes not only touch but violence. The sudden, the instantaneous, that
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which happens de golpe, is in this sense doubly political: it evokes both the physical blows
(golpes) through which torturers “interrogate” their victims at the local level as well as the coup
d’état (golpe de estado) through which the regime establishes itself as a national power.
This disturbing passage is comprised of a single sentence spanning twenty-four lines and
four paragraphs, and culminates in a game of pleasure and power. The woman experiences “todo
un estremecimiento deleitoso, tan al borde del dolor justo cuando la lengua de él alcanza el
centro del placer, un estremecimiento que ella quisiera hacer durar apretando bien los párpados y
entonces él grita /¡Abrí los ojos, puta! / y es como si la destrozara, como si la mordiera por
dentro—y quizá la mordió” (123) [“a deep shudder of delight, right at the edge of pain when his
tongue reaches the center of pleasure, a shudder she would want to prolong shutting her eyes
right and then he shouts / ‘Open your eyes, you bitch!’ / and it feels as if he shattered her, as if he
bit her inside—and maybe he did” (115)]. In this passage the protagonist recognizes herself not
when she is confronted with her own image in the mirror (an experience that only seems to
alienate her further), but rather when she feels her body beneath the man’s tongue. While critic
Willy Muñoz aligns this scene with the Lacanian mirror stage, I see it as something of a
dictatorial parody of such a process, one through which the man forcibly produces the fantasy of
a subject. Muñoz astutely notes the role of the man as an invasive mediator in the formation of
this feminine subjectivity, writing that “the goal of the military husband is to impose upon his
wife a linguistic system of recognition, one which is destined to destroy both her public image
and the political power that she can have over herself, such that the entirety of her identity is
contained within her body” (61, translation mine). Her mirror image is one created so as to be
destroyed, the totality of a body patched together from so many fragments that only quicken
from their numbness beneath the tongue of a man who functions as an incarnation of the state.
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Lacan maintains that the function of the mirror stage is to “establish a relationship
between an organism and its reality—or, as they say, between the Innenwelt and the Umwelt”
(Écrits 78). Valenzuela’s parody of this process in “Cambio de armas” hinges on the fact that the
man orchestrating the mirror encounter prevents the feminine subject from entering any sort of
“inner world,” instead violently seeking to keep her grounded firmly in the material world of
objects, the Umwelt of which her fragmented body forms a part. He forces her to keep her eyes
open, maintaining a visual relation with an outer reality, and screams at her when she begins to
slip inside of herself, closing her eyes to focus on the pleasure. The narration suggests that he
shatters her interior, after which there remains what would appear to be the vapid semblance of a
subject. Yet this feminine subject is neither empty nor devoid of an interior—Valenzuela will
write of a pozo negro [dark well] within Laura, a concept through which she theorizes the inner
life of the desaparecida, and the space from which her protagonist could presumably mount a
As examined in the previous chapter, the nightmare of Dr. Farabeuf’s dark chamber
stages an encounter with the feminine interior by linking three distinct forms of penetration of
the flesh in sex, surgery, and torture. If Valenzuela’s horrific mirror scene remains focused on
the exterior in terms of political subject formation, part of its disturbing quality nevertheless
stems from the fact that the reader remains unsure as to whether this account of erotic
consumption constitutes torture (as a political act on the part of the state). Yet by the conclusion
of the Mirrors fragment Valenzuela removes all doubt. Beyond merely mimicking a violent
interrogation session, it evokes an actual event from the protagonist’s past through a subtle
change of discourse:
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Abrí los ojos, cantá, decime quién te manda, quién dio la orden, y ella grita un no
tan intenso, tan profundo que no resuena para nada en el ámbito donde se
techo, que multiplica y mutila y destroza la imagen de él, casi como un balazo
imperturbables, y ella al exhalar el aire retenido sople Roque, por primera vez el
verdadero nombre de él, pero tampoco eso oye él, ajeno como está de tanto
[Open your eyes, spit it out, tell me who sent you, who gave the order, and she
shouts such an intense, deep NO that her answer is silent in the space they’re in
and he doesn’t hear it, a no that seems to shatter the mirror on the ceiling, that
multiplies and maims and destroys his image, almost like a bullet shot although he
doesn’t perceive it and both his image and the mirror stay there, intact,
impervious, and she, exhaling the air she’d kept in, whispers Roque, his real
name, for the first time. But he doesn’t hear that either, as distant as he is from so
This colossal NO silently emerges at the deepest point of the feminine subject’s unmaking,
which “Cambio de armas” teaches us is the instant when counter-appropriation takes place.
Gwendolyn Díaz locates a polyvalence in this negative affirmation, stating that here “the
parallels between structures of domination in the realm of sexuality and those in the realm of
language and politics become intertwined” (753). These realms constitute a Valenzuelan trinity
that is condensed into a single utterance, syllable, and instant; for like Farabeuf, “Cambio de
armas” is also the chronicle of an instant. And like Zarathustra’s lion, which creates “freedom
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for itself and a sacred No even to duty” through an absolute rejection of imposed values, Laura’s
act of negation would seem to lay the foundation for a revolutionary resistance to follow
(Nietzsche 55). This is an instant born of revelation—for it heralds the return of the repressed,
when the trauma of her past erupts into the present—with which knowledge the protagonist
identity that has been forced upon her, an identity produced through an image on the surface of a
mirror, a mirror that is then symbolically shattered. Yet this NO itself only exists as a fantasy, an
imagined image, that of the bullet piercing the mirror and destroying his reflection, rather than
hers. We see that Laura, too, can manipulate images, and that her Innenwelt is indeed is
comprised of them. In spite of the fact that Roque and his image remain intact, a veil has been
lifted and Laura has acquired the psychical weapons for interrupting his dominion over her. This
is evidenced by the fact that this symbolic gunshot constitutes both an analepsis of the
assassination attempt during which she was captured and a prolepsis of the narrative’s
conclusion, when she will level a very real revolver at her captor. For now, the fantasy will
suffice. Laura has begun to face her trauma, has gained the ability to speak a true name, and the
VIII. ON THE GAZE: THE PHOTO-GRAPHIC SUBECT AND THE DARK WELL
My explorations of image production have thus far engaged textual configurations in which the
feminine is staged as image, mise-en-scènes in which the feminine becomes a consumable image
of fantasy. In “Cambio de armas” Valenzuela engages such forcible conversion of the feminine
into image while building on this structure in her imagining of avenues of counterpropriation
proper to a political literature of the feminine. I will now examine the central image through
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which Valenzuela’s protagonist stakes out an interior realm of subjectivity—the dark well.
Rather than a purely feminine space, this well constitutes a site of tensions with the masculine
even as it forms a psychical opening within her physical, political, and sexual confinement.
The fragment El pozo [The Well] begins with the question of what truly belongs to the so-
called Laura. The protagonist considers the moments of her sexual encounters as that which not
only belongs to her, but shapes her. Yet she wonders if there could be anything else, beyond the
limits that she constantly confronts in her domestic confinement. Laura then conceives of this
beyond in terms of a distinct experience of spatial confinement, “algo como estar en un pozo
oscuro sin saber de qué se trata” [“something like being in a dark well and not knowing what it’s
inalcanzable fondo de ella, el aquí-lugar, el sitio de una interioridad donde está encerrado todo lo
que ella sabe sin querer saberlo, sin en verdad saberlo” (129) [“That dark, unattainable bottom in
her, the here-place, the inner space enclosing all she knows and doesn’t want to know, without
really knowing it” (120-1)]. A series of images further characterize the well in relation to the
notions of trauma and repression, as it becomes a clawed, sleeping animal; an inside-out glove;
the humid darkness of a womb; or a well whose walls echo with a message that she experiences
as “un latigazo” [“a whiplash”]. This site of memory harbors that which cannot be erased, a
traumatic past inscribed within her very flesh. When Laura’s past calls out to her through the
well, she suddenly (de golpe) feels “como si le estuvieran quemando la planta de los pies” [“as
though the soles of her feet were being burned”], and she retreats into the superficially innocuous
comfort of the pink bedroom “que según dicen es la pieza de ella” (130) [“which they tell her is
hers” (121)]. In a significant inversion, Laura’s captivity becomes her refuge, as the feminine
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subject is fully confined within the regime’s hegemonic system of oppression in a microcosmic
At times the well widens into a horrifying, vertigo-inducing chasm that tempts her to leap
into its void; this when Roque is harsh with Laura. She nevertheless resists this fate: Laura
doesn’t leap because she knows that “la nada dentro de los pozos negros es peor que la nada
fuera de ellos” (130) [“the void inside dark wells is worse than the void outside them” (121)].
Yet when her lover-captor is kind, the abyss tightens into a small tunnel, an “agujerito-pozo”
[“hole-well”], that resembles the scope of a rifle: she sees him “detrás del agujerito, tras dos
finos hilos en cruz que lo centran” (130) [“behind the little hole, behind the juncture of cross-
hairs that focus on him” (121)]. These images of the chasm and the scope form a gendered
duality that emerges from the primary image of the pozo negro, the dark well which thus
becomes as slippery a concept as the unconscious that it represents. When the memory of
Laura’s trauma surfaces the woman finds herself faced with an inverted vector of repression: a
latent truth returns only to threaten her with a fall, the loss of the subject into the extimate abyss
within herself. Her past seeks to devour her from the inside, as though the regime had usurped
her interiority and arranged a parody of the feminist project, which we have outlined as an
of repression into a political one, whose politics are steeped in what Nelly Richard has referred
sign as a set of forces in tension (14). As though Valenzuela had anticipated Richard’s critique of
the sign, in “Cambio de armas” she deploys inversion and hybridity in her own theorization of
gender in relation to the regime and to the subversive forces that resist it. The rifle and scope—
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phallic images—are aligned with the feminine transformation of the dark well into the agujerito-
pozo, while the vaginal image of the chasm is reconceived as a masculine void that threatens to
consume the subject by tempting her to fall in. These gendered poles represent the two
possibilities of the subject’s reaction to the traumatic knowledge that will emerge from the
unconscious as a rupture: she may focus it into a beam of light that will disrupt hegemony, or
allow it to widen until there is no longer any ground that has not been appropriated by the
regime, even within body. While the battle within “Cambio de armas” plays itself out in the
realm of language, as previously demonstrated, it is also very much a visual conflict of gazes, of
The image of the rifle scope—or rather the image of Roque within its crosshairs—frames
the entirety of the narrative as both the premise of Laura’s confinement and the extra-diegetic
phallic scope through which the protagonist may counter-produce an image of the masculine to
be shattered by a bullet. The scope implies clarity of sight and critical distance, and is, along with
Laura’s counterpropriation of her captor’s language, the “change of weapons” referenced in the
story’s title. In Words of Light Eduardo Cadava identifies such distance as proper to the image,
noting that when an event is reproduced in an image it brings us closer to “something other than
the event. What we encounter is the distance without which an event could never appear: a
distance that comes in the form of an image or reproduction” (xxv). Yet beyond the appearance
of an event, Cadava asserts that the distance afforded through the image provides the very
foundation for subjectivity within the symbolic order: “there can be no psyche without
photography, without a process of writing and reproduction… If the psyche and photography are
machines for the production of images, however, what is produced is not simply any image, but
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an image of ourselves. And we are most ourselves when, not ourselves, we are an image or a
photograph” (100). If extimacy is an internal negation that founds the subject (as that which in
me is not me), the image is, for Cadava, an external affirmation that accomplishes the same by
highlights the fact that they both link subject formation to photography (147).
In Seminar XI Lacan explicitly conceives of the subject as image when he states that “in
the scopic field, the gaze is outside, I am looked at, that is to say, I am a picture” (106).
Subjectivity is in this sense a product of the gaze, yet Lacan emphasizes the role of writing in
this process: “It is through the gaze that I enter light and it is from the gaze that I receive its
effects. Hence it comes about that the gaze is the instrument through which light is embodied and
through which—if you will allow me to use a word, as I often do, in a fragmented form—I am
Cadava the photograph is a mechanical reproduction of the distance that marks an event, the
Lacanian photo-graph is the psycho-visual product of the gaze that grounds a subject as image-
object (for the other). This photo-graph has no material existence, yet it is nevertheless the
product of writing and stands in relation to the materiality of a body—it is indeed the image of a
body. Lacan goes on to consider “a fracture, a bi-partition, a splitting” of being that characterizes
human sexuality, as he links the mechanical reproduction of the photographic image to the
sexual reproduction of beings, a move that will prove essential for an understanding of
…the being gives of himself, or receives from the other, something that is like a
mask, a double, an envelope, a thrown-off skin, thrown off in order to cover the
frame of a shield. It is through this separated form of himself that the being comes
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into play in his effects of life and death, and it might be said that it is with the help
of this doubling of the other, or of oneself, that is realized the conjunction from
mediation of masks that the masculine and the feminine meet in the most acute,
Lacan asserts that being is split between the subject and a secondary image (a double, mask,
skin, physical organ of mediation between self and other). The subject is, in this sense, the
combination of body and image. Furthermore, this image is what allows for a sexual encounter
(between what are for Lacan two incommensurable sexes), and the fact of reproduction itself.
One only encounters the other through the image as screen (Flusser) or mask (Lacan). While
Lacan offers a litany of metaphors to describe the doubling medium through which an encounter
takes place, such as an envelope or skin, the mask stands out in the end as the primary image of
the sexual relation. This makes sense, as it is a medium through which one both sees and
presents oneself to the gaze of the other. It is no coincidence, then, that a unique mask emerges
when Valenzuela weaves a web of gazes in “Cambio de armas,” a text that engages in the
In the fragment titled La mirilla [The Peephole], Roque opens a peephole in the
apartment door so that the two guards who presumably stand watch outside may observe as he
has violent sex with the so-called Laura on the couch. In this acute sexual encounter the
woman’s captor “keeps on taking her with fury, without pleasure,” yet much of the trauma in this
passage results not from the protagonist’s violent non-relation with the Colonel, but from the
gaze itself, as it is integrated into the violence. Laura cannot bear her own visibility: not even the
fact of being seen but the mere possibility of it, the vulnerability of presentation within this
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panoptic structure in which she cannot know whether there really are guards outside watching.
Yet their gaze penetrates the space of her confinement all the same:
Ella a veces quiere sustraerse de este maremoto que la arrasa y se esfuerza por
descubrir el ojo del otro lado de la mirilla. En otros momentos ella se olvida del
ojo, de todos los ojos que probablemente estén allí afuera ansiosos por verla
retorcerse, pero él le grita una única palabra —perra— y ella entiende que es
alrededor de ese epíteto que él quiere tejer la densa telaraña de miradas. Entonces
un gemido largo se le escapa a pesar suyo y él duplica sus arremetidas para que el
[Sometimes she wants to escape from the earthquake that’s come over her and
tries to discover the eye on the other side of the peephole. At other times she
forgets the eye, all the eyes that are probably out there, eager to watch her squirm,
but he shouts a single word—bitch—and she understands that’s the epithet around
which he wants to weave the thick web of stares. Then she lets out a long groan,
unwittingly, and he doubles his thrusts to turn her groan into a howl. (126)]
This passage forms a chiasmus with respect to the bedroom mirror scene: while each grounds
itself in the violence of the signifier perra, the vector of the gaze emerges here not from the
woman but from the (implied) presence of a tertiary other that not-so-secretly observes the scene.
Recalling Elizondo’s trinitary essence of sex, surgery, and torture, we could align one element
with each of the texts analyzed thus far. This scene of “Cambio de armas” demonstrates
Valenzuela’s focus on the sexual, in which the Colonel produces an image of the feminine to be
consumed by anonymous male others through the medium of a penetrative gaze. Pizarnik’s
countess primarily utilized torture for the sake of producing an image of the feminine that she
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herself would consume. Finally the surgical intervention performed by Elizondo’s doctor
constructs a mirror-image to be consumed by the feminine subject herself in the instant of her
death. While each case employs trinitarian elements, Valenzuela’s peephole scene is a spectacle
in the truest sense, as it stages the sexual relation for a third party whose implied gaze is strongly
referencing an invisible crowd from which the protagonist must escape, as the author links the
observándola a ella— y por eso lo llama de vuelta a su lado, para que la cubra con
su cuerpo, no para que la satisfaga. Cubrirse con el cuerpo de él como una funda.
máscara para enfrentar a los otros. O no: una pantalla para poder esconderse de
los otros, desaparecer para siempre tras o bajo otro cuerpo. (136)
[She thinks of the crowd of people watching out there—watching her—and she
calls him back to her side, for him to cover her with his body, not for him to
satisfy her. Cover herself with his body like a glove. A body—not her own,
obviously not her own—she can use as a screen, as a mask to face others. Or
maybe not: a screen so she can hide from others, disappear forever behind or
Laura’s decision is shocking: in what appears to be an act of absolute physical submission, she
seems to prefer being violated to being seen. She cannot withstand being the object of a gaze that
would constitute her as a perverse subject that is the product of a forced sexual encounter with a
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man who bears a metonymic relation to the state. Valenzuela’s narrative thus destroys whatever
boundary one might suppose exists between sexuality and politics. The feminine transformation
effected in this passage is anamorphic; as such, we must now undertake an oblique reading of the
complex relation between gaze, body, mask, image, politics, and sex in this disturbing yet
provocative scene.
Valenzuela deconstructs the very notion of disappearance itself, which is revealed here to
be a form of negative reproduction. The regime subjects to forced disappearance those who do
not fit within the new narrative of the Argentine state, effectively negating their existence. It
produces and sustains itself by establishing and enforcing the boundary between subversive and
citizen, a primary exclusion that founds the state itself, as previously demonstrated through
Farabeuf. Yet the Process of National Reorganization carefully framed this culling of the
negative (re)production. The Argentine citizen is passively endowed with positive moral and
political value simply by not being disappeared. The regime criminalized and de-legitimized the
guerrilla forces, forbidding terms that identified them as forces at all. Feitlowitz outlines several
of General Viola’s official orders on the use of terminology, published in a secret manual in
“guerrilla bases” and “operations” became “criminal camps” and “actions.” Members of the
military were “kidnapped” rather than “taken prisoner,” while guerrilla prisoners were to be
referred to only as “captured delinquents” (50). The careful manipulation of discourse was
essential for the regime’s construction of a narrative of the Argentine state, while at the same
time literature became an effective weapon for subverting and combatting the dictatorship in the
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As an Argentine writing both during and about the Dirty War, Valenzuela does not use
the term desaparecer lightly when she writes of Laura’s desire to “disappear forever behind or
under another body.” Debra Castillo observes of this passage that “desaparecida is action and
absence, the body (lost) and the language that defines the screening of the body, the loss of the
speaking subject and the speaking of the loss” (116). Laura’s auto-disappearance is thus a
significant act of subversion on several levels, constituting a complex engagement with presence,
absence, loss, and desire. Discursively, the narrative deploys as a form of subversion a term that
is charged with the full force of the dictatorial regime’s systematic terror. This is a prime
example of the counterpropriation of language that lies at the heart of Valenzuela’s brand of
literary feminism. Yet counterpropriation in this passage goes beyond the lexical: Laura
appropriates her captor’s very body in order to evade the horror of the gaze that emerges from
the peephole. As with the femicidal tableaux arranged by Pizarnik’s countess, the configuration
of desire in this passage is that of fetishistic scopophilia. Acting as sovereign within this
domestic microcosm, the Colonel incorporates himself into the spectacle that he arranges, yet its
existence as spectacle depends on there being a public to observe it, to consume the image it
produces.
The peephole thus functions as the frame that delimits this mise-en-scène, while the
Valenzuelan mask serves to interrupt the spectacle from within the frame of the visual field.
Laura appropriates Roque’s hyper-masculine body and transforms it into a tool of feminine
disruption of the oppressive visuality that haunts her. This body-as-mask recalls the Lacanian
mask of sexual and photo-graphic reproduction, as Laura engages in her own forms of
transformation into feminine image. From within her very confinement she counterpropriates
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disappearance itself, anamorphically transforming it from a mode of abduction/negation into one
of escape. Beneath this “web of stares” the feminine subject produces her own line of flight;
disappearance is reconfigured as concealment through the use of the Valenzuelan mask that
If the apartment in which Laura resides stands as microcosm of a control society in which
the appearance of freedom belies a carefully orchestrated means of control, the final question we
constitute effective forms of resistance or mere projections of the fantasy of an opening. The
narrative presents a fragmented psychological journey into a woman’s repressed past, yet this
descent into trauma is at every step a political one. The text’s dark well—a sort of vaginal
(abismo), yet this feminine image of the rifle as resistance is later converted into a peephole
(mirilla) that torments the protagonist. The titular “change of weapons” is clear: masculine and
feminine parties alternate holding the gun, an emblem of power in its capacity to deal death.
Does the dark well become a feminist counterpropriation of the dark chamber, constructed from
within the confines of this oppressive space, even in its illusory domestic appearance? The
concluding analysis of Valenzuela’s engagement with openings, fantasies, sex, and power will
seek to answer these questions regarding the politics at stake in the author’s feminized writing.
subject: Laura’s task is to read the history of her own body, which has been overwritten by the
the nation will negotiate between the drive for justice (exemplified in Alfonsín’s 1985 “Trial of
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the Juntas”) and the drive for reconciliation through forgetting that overrides it (as in Menem’s
infamous 1990 pardoning of all ex-commanders). Laura exhibits both drives in “Cambio de
armas.” Toward the end of the text the Colonel presents Laura with a gift—un rebenque, a whip
or riding crop. Upon seeing the object, Laura “se pone a gritar desesperada, a aullar como si
fueran a destriparla o a violarla con ese mismo cabo del talero” (131) [“starts to scream
desperately, howling as if she were going to be ripped apart or raped with the grip of this
weapon” (122)]. The man seems to want to accelerate the return of the repressed: we will soon
learn that the regime has fallen and he must put a premature end to his game. Having been
confronted with the source of her trauma, Laura recalls her mission in flashes: the presence of
her lover, his death, her duty to complete the task, and her desire to die alongside him.
Nevertheless, she resists the coming revelation: “no vale la pena llegar al esclarecimiento
por vías del dolor y más vale quedarse así, como flotando, no dejar que la nube se disipe.
Mullida, protectora nube que debe tratar de mantener para no pegarse un porrazo cayendo de
golpe en la memoria” (132) [“it’s not worth getting to the explanation through pain; it’s better to
stay like this, sort of floating, not letting the cloud clear. It’s a soft, protective cloud she has to
try to keep there so as not to collapse and suddenly fall into memory” (123)]. The cloud is a sign
of erasure, whether it is the nebulous, drug-induced haze through which Roque maintains
Laura’s amnesia, or the psychological defense of the cloud of repression we encounter here.
an interval of erasure that is framed on either side by a phantasmal gunshot. This final section
will explore this negative interval both spatially and temporally through the Derridean notion of
différance, particularly as it pertains to Valenzuela’s final word play: the conflation of both
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In his 1968 lecture Derrida theorizes the relationship between the temporality and space
of difference through the neologism différance. Différence, the standard term for “difference” in
French, can only refer to “different things,” not temporal deferral or differences of opinion.
Derrida coins the homophone différance, whose neologistic a stands as a reference to two
distinct meanings of the verb différer, from Latin differre, which have split in English into
separate verbs: to defer and to differ. Derrida refers first to a temporal sense of deferral: “Différer
in this sense is to temporize, to take recourse, consciously or unconsciously, in the temporal and
‘will,’ and equally effects this suspension in a mode that annuls or tempers its own effect.” The
second meaning is that of a spatial difference, “to be not identical, to be other, discernible.”
Derrida argues that “whether it is a question of dissimilar otherness or of allergic and polemical
otherness, an interval, a distance, spacing, must be produced between the elements other, and be
produced with a certain perseverance in repetition.” These meanings are conflated in the a of
différance, which appears only in writing and signals “temporalization and spacing, the
becoming-time of space and the becoming-space of time” (8). The spatiotemporality of “Cambio
de armas” is rooted in political violence and ideological struggle, as the text plays out a game of
disappearance, confinement, and the deferral of truth. To a large extent the significance of this
game may be expanded to reflect the relation between the dictatorial state and the social body, as
the demand that the regime places on society thrusts all of its members into either subversion or
to the traumatic ground of the text as both political and gendered difference.
In the penultimate fragment of the text, La revelación [The Revelation], the Colonel
forces the truth of Laura’s past upon her for the last time. She resists this revelation to such an
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extent that her attention is diverted entirely to a droplet of dried paint on the wall at her back.
Roque claims that he undertook his scheme in order to save her from the routine rape and torture
that would await her as a desaparecida. Yet such salvation entailed the systematic deprivation of
subjectivity within a regimen of the Colonel’s own implementation of rape and torture under the
guise of marriage, transforming her hatred into love and dependence: “ya te iba a obligar yo a
quererme, a depender de mí como una recién nacida, yo también tengo mis armas” (144-5) [“I’d
force you to love me, to depend on me like a newborn baby, I’ve got my weapons, too” (134-5)].
He insists that she became his when she tried to kill him with the very gun with which he
presented her in the secreto fragment, revealing that “te agarraron cuando me estabas apuntando,
buscabas el mejor ángulo” (144) [“they caught you when you were aiming at me, you were
waiting for the best angle” (134)]. In this passage we are offered an analeptic glimpse at the
traumatic instant that provides the foundation for the entire narrative: Laura’s foiled
assassination mission, in which her lover was killed and she was captured by her target. It is the
instant of an intended death that never occurred, by means of a gunshot that never took place.
Time effectively halts for Laura, as she falls into the hands of the man who would erase her
identity in order to construct a parody of wifely citizenship within the new Argentina. The
shall learn, is not characterized by abandonment into a history that never took place, but by
that recalls the phantom gunshot of its premise. In El desenlace [The ending], Laura resists her
new knowledge that the regime has fallen and attempts to prolong the domestic fantasy of her
confinement. She intends once more to cover herself with his body in order to escape an external
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gaze, yet now the gaze is that of history itself. When Roque turns to walk out for the last time,
Laura finally feels “como si por dentro se le disipara un poco la niebla. Empieza a entender
algunas cosas, entiende sobre todo la función de este instrumento negro que él llama revólver.
Entonces lo levanta y apunta” (145-6) [“like the fog is beginning to clear. She starts to
understand a few things—what that black instrument is for, that thing he calls a gun. She lifts it
and aims” (135)]. These are the final words of the narrative, which halts immediately prior to its
own denouement. The story concludes just as history itself recommences: Laura is again a
guerrilla in the Dirty War, and is now faced with her target, gun in hand. History picks up right
where it left off, after the spatial and temporal displacement of Laura’s confinement. The
with a word that means both “to aim” as well as “to write down.” Ksenija Bilbija observes of the
text’s concluding “apunta” that: “It could also correspond to the act of writing (escribir), of
writing down (apuntar) all that had happened, of forgetting neither history nor tradition” (15, my
translation). I will explore this term as the opening of power through Derridean deferral into a
perpetual future, yet we must also recognize with Bilbija that the Laura’s final apuntamiento
constitutes an opening into the past. If reconciliation entails forgetting, Valenzuela’s work
clearly lands on the side of justice as it seeks to uncover and record the unspeakable secrets of a
past that threatens to collapse under the weight of the regime’s palimpsestual counternarrative.
Laura’s final act of leveling the revolver calls for a dual analysis: of the gunshots that
frame the narrative, as well as of the discursive ambiguity of apuntamiento as both writing and
gunshots, neither of which take place, and Laura’s story (as it is presented to the reader)
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constitutes the passage from one to the other. We may name T1 the moment of Laura’s capture,
when she first pointed the revolver at the Colonel during a guerilla mission (“cuando me estabas
apuntando” [“when you were aiming at me”], emphasis added). This gunshot, failing to take
place, is deferred to T2, when Laura levels the same gun at the same man in the final line of the
text. Whereas the gunshot of T1 is deferred by plot, that of T2 is deferred in terms of diegesis, as
it lies beyond the limits of the text. While Laura’s liminal story of confinement picks up where it
left off (as T2 mirrors and overlaps T1 in the deferred instant of the Colonel’s killing), Valenzuela
The overlapping of these instants would entail the possibility of resuming one’s previous
life; we encounter once more the disappearance of disappearance itself. The spatial difference
between the contexts of the two imaginary gunshots, as well as the difference inherent within the
violent encounter between bodies and ideologies that frames this instant of death, correspond to
what Derrida deems the “allergic” (allos meaning “other”) and “polemical” aspects of différance.
He notes that différents (different things) and différends (differences of opinion) both stem from
the spatial meaning of the verb différer (8). His neologism différance situates these differential
tensions in relation to time, theorizing the spatiotemporality of difference itself. Derrida argues
that the sign constitutes “deferred presence” in that it stands in for something absent, occupying
an interval of deferral until the moment of our encounter with the thing itself. He thus
lecture are lines that could just as well have been written by Valenzuela herself: “the sign, which
defers presence, is conceivable only on the basis of the presence that it defers and moving toward
the deferred presence that it aims to reappropriate” (9). This is the structure that emerges in
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reappropriate her own relation to the present, to reinsert herself into the history from which her
The limits of Laura’s removal from history are delineated by the interval between the
phantom gunshots, T1 and T2, which both frame the narrative and stand as signs that defer the
difference between dictatorial and feminine subjectivities, while their temporal suspension
signals the temporality of disappearance itself. Yet if we consider the conditions for each
interruption, we will see that those of T1 are political—the intervention of the regime itself, as it
defers its own limit, ending, death, or the horizon of its power—while those of T2 are textual.
Laura’s concluding act of apuntamiento suggests that writing itself is the force that establishes
the final limit, in a so-called “ending” that will remain forever open.
The pre-diegetic gunshot of T1 is a traumatic kernel: the death of a lover, the historico-
political conditions of the subject’s disappearance, and the subsequent inscription of state
violence unto the female body. Given that the post-diegetic gunshot of T2, equally and eternally
deferred, lies beyond the limits of the narrative, these phantom instants of violence are united in
the polyvalent negativity of Derridean différance and therefore in their negative repetition. A gun
is not fired, again. Valenzuela’s innovation here is that rather than the discharge of a firearm, we
are left with the action of aiming. No dispara, sino apunta—she does not fire, but aims/writes.
Apuntar is both to locate visually one’s target in order to line up the shot, as well as to record on
paper—the textual inscription of information. “Other Weapons,” the revolver and the pen. The
content and form of the narrative meet in différance, a deferred killing within (or rather, beyond)
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feminine subjectivity itself to differential multiplicities. Valenzuela plays out actions of
If the regime writes itself into the subversive body—that of the feminine subject—in
“Cambio de armas” it is the feminine subject who will inscribe her power into the body of the
deferred, and is therefore a final instant of fantasy, the deferral of a desire at once political and
personal. The text establishes a temporal link between the moment of Laura’s capture and the
narrative’s denouement, as though time simply stopped for the duration of her disappearance, a
timeless interval of Laura’s amnesiac disappearance, history itself erupts; the regime collapses.
Cambio de armas was published in 1982, the year of the Falklands War catastrophe that led to
the downfall of the dictatorship (though it would still be another year until the restoration of
democracy in 1983). Like Countess Báthory, the Argentine juntas could not sustain themselves
indefinitely. Valenzuela takes aim at the dictatorial regime and opens up the possibility of its
collapse in her literary fantasy. “Cambio de armas” is a story of physical and psychic damage,
and its feminist focus on opening—the opening of power, of the unconscious, of history—entails
Debra Castillo describes Valenzuela’s tactic in such terms: it “does not involve a vision
of liberation;” rather, “against the euphemistic subterfuges she counterposes an image of the
unforgettable wound” (136). The wound is transformed from the inscription of state power into
the social body to a point of relation and of memory. The past must be maintained as an open
wound—more specifically, the image of a wound—for its closure would lead to its
disappearance. This is ultimately not a narrative of resistance, but one that opens itself unto an
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ending that witnesses the fall of a regime: Valenzuela stages the transition from counter-
narrative is a political struggle, “Cambio de armas” is the story of a personal struggle for
subjectivity. Its succession of images—the fragmented domestic signifiers of keys, windows, and
doors that give way to the gendered images of the dark well, chasm, scope, and rifle—situates
itself in relation to the politics of the image operative in Pizarnik’s vignettes on Báthory. I argued
that the politics of the image emerges in the gap between identification (within the mirror image)
and fetishization (in the spectacle of the other’s body). Such are the hidden politics behind the
sexual encounters between Laura and her captor, as they play themselves out in the realm of the
visual: within the mirror (and the gaze of the feminine subject), or the voyeuristic gaze of the
guards. Valenzuela’s chain of images likewise resembles Elizondo’s imágenes ansiadas, the
“desired images” whose anxiety denotes the failure of signification. From Elizondo we have
learned that such images subtly announce the failure of the state to designate itself through
hegemonic and biopolitical mechanisms, a fact that is all the more evident within the dictatorial
context of Laura’s personal narrative in “Cambio de armas,” as the text traces the remains of that
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CHAPTER THREE
The wound that lies at the heart of Valenzuela’s text becomes especially significant as we
transition from Argentina to Chile, where the dictatorial drives of confinement and erasure
analyzed in the previous chapter will survive the transition to civilian rule. The Chilean post-
dictatorship will be seen to be a pseudo post-, as authoritarian power merely alters its appearance
and self-narrative under the auspices of Latin American democracy. In the second half of this
chapter I turn to Mexico, following an economic trail northward in a transition from official to
illicit networks of power: the dictatorial regime and the so-called narco-state. Mexico never
suffered a military coup, yet Mexican society and politics were nevertheless overthrown by
organization in moving from Pinochet’s Chile to the Mexican-U.S. border since the 1990s, the
politics of neoliberalism establishes a link between these spaces and their systematic deformation
of the feminine. The economic experiment undertaken in 1970s Chile by Milton Friedman and
his Chicago Boys—a financial model which emerged from textbooks rather than any historical
precedent—became an economic model for change across the world in both developing and
developed nations. In Latin America, “Chile anticipated by over ten years the stabilization,
adjustment, and liberalization processes that are now a generalized feature of the continent”
(Valdés 3). Pinochet’s Chile therefore stands as neoliberalism’s primal scene, whose shadow
extends across space and time to engulf the maquiladoras that perforate the Mexican-U.S. border,
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This chapter seeks to bridge the gap between these sites, from the margins of Chile under
Diamela Eltit’s cutting gaze to the border of northern Mexico where Roberto Bolaño catalogues
the abject cadavers of murdered women and girls in a fictional version of Ciudad Juárez. The
peripheral feminine subject will be our concern here, as she occupies the zones of exclusion at
both margin and border. If in “Cambio de armas” Valenzuela seeks to maintain the aperture of an
unforgettable wound as she struggles with the physical and psychic trauma inflicted by
authoritarianism, in the work of Diamela Eltit we will see a similar feminist impulse taken to the
extreme. Yet while Eltit counters the Chilean regime’s strategies of penetration by taking up the
knife against her own flesh in Lumpérica, Bolaño confronts an excess of femicidal violence so
radical that it consumes his vast novel, twisting 2666 into an interminable series of failed
accounts, of unsolved murders whose cases are always closed with the same shrug of apathy.
corpses”—in both the surrealist and psychoanalytic senses of the term—on a border that links
not only nations (in complicity as well as in conflict) but also forms of power and capital: sexual
violence and neoliberal accumulation. Authoritarian rule manipulates law and transforms it into a
weapon to be used against the body politic. On the Mexican border, however, an underground
network of power has dispensed with law entirely. With the globalized border there has emerged
a new kind of regime, one whose relation to law is at once transgressive and transcendent, an
anti-sovereignty that nevertheless still founds itself on the negation of the feminine through rites
of initiation that directly evoke the Leng Tch’é image (down to the removal of the breast) and the
trinitary horror of Dr. Farabeuf’s chamber. We have come full circle, back to a reality in Mexico
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PART ONE
Eltit’s experimental novel Lumpérica (1983) is founded on both bodily and textual cuts, which
are themselves rooted in the deep cut in Chilean historical memory that occurred ten years prior
to the work’s publication: the coup d’état of September 11, 1973. This event overthrew the
socialist democracy of Salvador Allende and ushered in a period of brutal dictatorship at the
hands of Augusto Pinochet. Eltit lived in Chile throughout this time, writing during the regime
and working at the forefront of leftist artistic performance that stood against the oppressive
authoritarian state. Eltit’s work focuses on the zones of exclusion that we have seen frame such
regimes, both as extimate acts of formative negation that establish the boundary that defines the
state, and as sites of interruption that elude hegemony’s grasp and therefore announce its failure
to acquire and exert absolute control. In an inversion of the dark chamber which has surfaced in
each of the texts studied thus far, the feminine subject of Lumpérica, a ragged vagabond, finds
comfort in the darkness and evades the light that penetrates her plaza. I will refer to this as Eltit’s
luminetics, an innovative poetics of light and darkness within which lies the political aspect of
her work. Her disavowal of transcendence will oppose an alternative erotics of rubbing to the
penetration employed by the state (be it through sex, surgery, or torture), while a theory of the
image will emerge that appropriates for femininity the cut as an act of self-opening. Eltit
proposes and performs a voluntary, self-sacrificial wound that exposes the violence of the
neoliberal state while staging a feminine critique of power from its margins.
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After Salvador Allende assumed the presidency in late 1970, Chile experienced economic
prosperity. The Marxist president implemented agrarian reforms and nationalized mines;
production increased and inflation declined; the economic boom was such that Allende’s Popular
Unity party easily won the municipal elections of 1971. Yet Allende’s socialist policies fatefully
incurred the “implacable hostility of the United States,” as Halperín Donghi puts it (345). The
Chilean economy suffered greatly from the blockades imposed on it from North America, and
the nation’s Soviet allies would not provide aid indefinitely. The economy shifted as scarcities of
food and goods became more common, and Allende’s party began losing support. The economic
tensions of the early 70s fed directly into the political polarization of Chile, and the Christian
Democratic party of the middle class began to lean more toward the conservative right-wing
National party. By late 1972, Allende’s government only enjoyed the support of the poor and
working-class Chileans. The country had descended into radical class conflict, and Allende
struggled to find peaceful resolutions. He appointed military officers into his cabinet and tried to
compromise with the Christian Democrats, yet he met with conservative opposition at every turn
and his opponents even “began to make open use of terrorist violence, the favorite tactic of the
In August 1973 General Carlos Prats was forced to resign from his position as
Commander in Chief of the Army. He was Allende’s strongest military supporter, and had been
appointed Vice President of Chile the previous year. Prats opposed efforts to stage a military
coup, believing strongly in the political neutrality of the armed forces. Allende appointed
General Augusto Pinochet as the new Commander in Chief; the president’s mistaken belief in
Pinochet’s loyalty ultimately paved the way for his own demise, as well as that of democracy in
Chile. On Tuesday, September 11, 1973 Pinochet led the armed forces in an attack that
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devastated the nation, and shocked the world at large. After the bombing of the presidential
palace and the death of Allende, Pinochet immediately revealed his ruthless ambition to lead the
country indefinitely, and initiated a period of brutality against the working class as his first step
in the consolidation of power. Chile’s soccer stadiums were “transformed into huge open-air
prisons, [and] became the scenes of numerous executions, while in rural areas more killings
erased all trace of recent mobilizations in support of Popular Unity” (Halperín Donghi 347).
Naomi Klein writes that in the days after the coup, “roughly 13,500 civilians were arrested,
loaded onto trucks and imprisoned, according to a declassified CIA report.” Pinochet intended to
keep the Chilean people as terrified as possible, thus “death replaced football as the public
spectacle” in the stadiums-made-camps. Pinochet fully embraced the power he acquired in his
new role, going so far as to stage an internal coup that ousted the other three military
commanders who formed the initial junta, naming himself “Supreme Chief of the Nation as well
as president” (Klein 93-5). Chile’s middle and upper classes accepted Pinochet as the ruler who
had saved them from communism, and, when they could no longer deny his human rights
violations, many accepted those too as the necessary evils of a war on subversion.
The fear generated throughout the Pinochet regime’s seventeen years would remain
operative even in the post-dictatorial transition to democracy. Pinochet legalized political parties
in 1987 under international pressure and held a vote to determine whether or not he would reign
for another decade. With 56% of the votes against him, Pinochet conceded power and Patricio
Aylwin assumed the presidency on March 11, 1990, after winning the December 1989 elections.
Neverthless, as Gareth Williams argues in The Other Side of the Popular, at this crucial time
“democracy’s surpassing of the dictatorial culture of fear was promoted by sustaining the
dictatorial culture of fear as the necessary precondition for the possibility of a peaceful transition
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to democracy” (282). This is in reference to the fact that although Pinochet stepped down from
power as president, he remained Commander in Chief of the Army until March 1998, at which
time he became senator-for-life in accordance with Chile’s 1980 constitution, a post which
conferred on him immunity from prosecution.9 Williams observes that in the transition to
democracy, the Chilean elite managed to transform Pinochet’s image from that of a murderous
dictator into that of “the national republican figurehead and patriarch,” while also disseminating
the belief that the regime remained willfully latent, and could therefore resurface instantaneously
“to put an end to the process of transition itself” (281). Williams reads this latency in terms of a
sort of expediency of trauma that explains the paradox of an authoritarian leader holding
guardian of, and as the ground from which to articulate, national democratic
forms would prove to be less traumatic than the violence that would be exacted on
processes of the military regime that had put democracy on the table in the first
In this sense, the Chilean elite (and through them, Pinochet himself) achieved a social
configuration akin to the horrific, amnesiac arrangement that we encountered in the domestic
terror of Valenzuela’s “Cambio de armas.” Chilean society would forget the suffering of their
past and accept the continuous presence of the military official that had violently restructured
their reality, while living under the threat of the reemergence of that traumatic force. It remains
9
Pinochet was nevertheless arrested in London in October 1998 for human rights violations, after being indicted by
Spanish magistrate Baltasar Garzón in a landmark use of universal jurisdiction, which allows states to claim
jurisdiction over an alleged criminal regardless of the nationality of the accused or where the crime took place.
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to examine the concept that lies at the heart of this restructuring of Chile, one that has since come
In The Shock Doctrine Naomi Klein argues that neoliberalism takes advantage of
“shocks,” beginning with the Chilean coup of 1973, in order to implement free-market principles
that depend on such acts of violence and loss of life. This idea stems from American economist
Milton Friedman’s own assertion in Capitalism and Freedom that “only a crisis—actual or
Pinochet, and was able to implement in Chile “a rapid-fire transformation of the economy—tax
cuts, free trade, privatized services, cuts to social spending and deregulation” (Klein 8).
Pinochet’s absolute freedom as dictator permitted him to eliminate any who opposed the
economic and political reformation of Chile, which became the foremost country in the world to
pursue Friedman’s call to “‘shrink the state’ in order to ‘enlarge the nation,’ that is, the private
amounted to a unique period of U.S. intervention in Latin America that was waged on the
academic front. In the 1950s the U.S. government implemented a program to subvert Latin
America’s growing Marxist tendencies: between 1957 and 1970 approximately one hundred
students from the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile received fully funded advanced degrees
in economics at the University of Chicago under the tutelage of Milton Friedman. They returned
to Chile and essentially established their own satellite Chicago School of Economics at the
Pontifical Catholic University: Klein notes that by 1963, “twelve of the department’s thirteen
full-time faculty members were graduates of the University of Chicago program,” including the
department chair (75). This environment of academic incest and imperialism fed on itself, as the
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“Chicago Boys” could now educate future generations of Chilean economists locally. Yet the so-
called Chile Project failed, as the 1960s only led to Salvador Allende making history as the first
democratically elected Marxist in Latin America. Pinochet would change that, as his coup would
provide the requisite shock to allow for the wholesale restructuring of society imagined by
Friedman and his disciples. As Klein writes, “Democracy had been inhospitable to the Chicago
Thus Chilean society went from being “one of the most egalitarian in Latin America”
under Allende to having a “huge gap driven between rich and poor” with the implementation of
neoliberal policies under Pinochet, which led to the rise of unemployment and drops in wages,
social services, and education (Valdés 4). Political scientist and Chilean foreign minister Juan
Gabriel Valdés asserts that the Chicago Boys were characterized by “their limitless faith in
economic science as the legitimizing basis for their draconian decisions, and in the market’s
ability to resolve the bulk of the problems faced by society” (2). Neoliberalism appears as both
justification and messiah, and Pinochet implemented it ruthlessly, having been convinced by
Friedman of its virtues. Beyond a mere economic theory, neoliberalism took on the form of a
totalizing ideology, both in the eyes of Friedman as well as in Chilean reality, thanks to the
dictatorship. Pinochet was free to use the military to suppress any force that would interfere with
the economic restructuration of Chile; neoliberalism and authoritarianism thus converged in their
the possibility of democracy. In Chile the Chicago Boys converted “economic objectives into the
sole determinant of all that was socially desirable,” and reduced the state to a mere two
functions, that of repression and of handling the extreme poverty it generated (Valdés 6). It
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seemed that only an authoritarian regime could keep its hands off of the market, as though the
state had to intervene in something—if not the market, social policy, and relations between
opposing political parties, then it would do so in the bodies of its citizens. The radical
neoliberalism that Friedman envisioned could only be implemented by the absolute power of a
regime that would put the freedom of the market above that of the people it ruled. This politico-
economic reconfiguration of society further polarized class conflict in Chile, and the regime’s
pursuit of subversion was grafted onto its economic aims. It is no accident, then, that the
protagonist of the novel through which Eltit descends into Chile’s margins is a destitute woman
who cannot participate in the neoliberal Chilean state other than by forming a part of the
impoverished collective that sustains its elite as the human sacrifice demanded by neoliberalism
itself.
Born in Santiago de Chile in 1949, Eltit is the author of over ten novels, the first four of
which—Lumpérica (1983), Por la patria (1986), El cuarto mundo (1988), and El padre mío
(1989)—were written under Pinochet’s dictatorship. With the re-democratization of Chile, Eltit
served as cultural attaché in the Chilean Embassy in Mexico from 1991-1994, and published
Vaca sagrada (1991) and Los vigilantes (1994). Her more recent works include Jamás el fuego
nunca (2007) and Impuesto a la carne (2010). She was at the forefront of the Chilean avant-
garde in the 70s and 80s as a founding member of CADA, Colectivo de Acciones de Arte [Art
Actions Collective], which staged daring leftist performances within Chile’s urban spaces. Eltit
has held teaching positions in the Universidad Tecnológica Metropolitana in Santiago, as well as
in various universities throughout the United States, and currently teaches Creative Writing in
Spanish at New York University. Eltit’s critical and literary work focuses on marginality and
zones of exclusion, which are exemplified in her first novel. In her discussion of the “spasms of
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identity” unleashed by the Chilean avant-garde, Nelly Richard notes that works like Eltit’s
invade “the shores of the irrational and the nonsensical… in order to deploy the trembling
under dictatorship, Eltit’s literary subversion is to be located beyond the political; her
deformation of the symbolic reveals the instability of all social relations, and her forays into
cultural margins seek an oblique revaluation of that which has been discarded by the neoliberal
machine that dominates Pinochet’s Chile. In this sense her work exemplifies “the refractoriness,
128).
Eltit often undermines language, convention, and genre, such as in El infarto del alma
[The Heart Attack of the Soul] (1994), a collaborative work with photographer Paz Errázuriz that
looks at romantic relationships formed within the Dr. Philippe Pinel Psychiatric Hospital in
Putaendo, outside of Santiago de Chile.10 A brief look at this unique text will lay important
groundwork for the analysis of the image in Lumpérica that follows. Gareth Williams bases his
cogent exploration of El infarto del alma on Baudrillard’s notion of “late capitalism’s unceasing
‘operational whitewash’ of all negative histories and undesirable socioeconomic and cultural
traits through the communicative manipulation of both language and image” (Williams 278). As
though conceived of by Dr. Louis Hubert Farabeuf himself, this process entails the surgical
Forms, which I will argue are deconstructed by Eltit in Lumpérica. The patients/inmates of the
asylum in El infarto del alma are negatively inscribed within a Chilean state that simultaneously
expels and incorporates them: the hospital is a politically extimate zone, as it internally houses
10
At the insistence of Eltit, this text has been translated into English with the curious title Soul’s Infarct.
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(non-)subjects that do not form a part of the state. The visual-textual portrayal by Eltit and
Errázuriz of impossible love that can articulate itself neither verbally nor through sexual
reproduction has a profound outcome: Williams insists that “Putaendo’s community of mad
lovers can only promise the radical unworking of all redemptive/constructivist intellectual
languages, aesthetics, and consensual/hegemonic projects” (297). Our exposure in El infarto del
alma to this negative community on the underside (the other side) of hegemony thus “demands a
notion of the social that is grounded no longer in constituted intimacy, in closure, in communion,
or in the promise of a completed collective identity of all in one,” favoring instead “scattered
interruptions, fissures, fragments, and residues” (Williams 301). It is precisely this notion of a
decade before El infarto del alma. The closure/confinement experienced within the psychiatric
hospital—which appears as a decrepit prison in Errázuriz’s final three photographs, the only ones
that depict empty space rather than the portraits of couples—stands in contrast to the open plaza
of Eltit’s first novel. Yet this public space is nevertheless restricted by the state: the light of a
neon sign will frame the movements of its nocturnal inhabitants, much as Errázuriz’s camera
El infarto del alma opens with the (textual) image of an angel “que se niega a llevarme
sobre sus espaldas y me desprecia y me abandona en las peores encrucijadas que presentan los
caminos. No hay sombra más devastadora, más poderosa que la que proyecta el vuelo de un
ángel” (n.p.) [“that refuses to bear me on its back and scorns me and abandons me in the worst
crossroads that paths present. There’s no shadow more devastating, more powerful than that cast
by the flight of an angel” (my translation)]. The motif of such a powerful, transcendent force
dominates Lumpérica, where this horrific angelic shadow is inverted: the oppression in Eltit’s
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novel stems from the mundane projection of the neon sign into the town square. In the hospital at
Putaendo, as in Lumpérica’s plaza, we are thrust into a field of immanence that approaches the
visual and corporeal fragments of “la noche y sus crueles imágenes” (n.p.) [“the night and its
cruel images”], as Eltit writes in the final pages of El infarto del alma. Throughout Eltit’s oeuvre
runs what Nelly Richard calls the “bad image,” in reference to videos of the artist’s performance
pieces that modeled “failure as a minority aesthetic.” Richard argues that this was the only sort
failings of narrations seemingly transparent and too sure of themselves.” Yet she further
characterizes the “bad image” as “the feminine errata, an error worked on as such, against the
asserting that “it was the tremor of the inexact that made the pseudocertainty of the master image
vacillate” (Masculine/Feminine 37). For Eltit, the failure designated by the feminine image is
that of the masculine to assert itself successfully as a transcendent, hegemonic force, much like
This engagement with El infarto del alma introduces the concept of the image in Eltit’s
work as one that is at once gendered and politically charged. I will show how her writing of the
image in Lumpérica is both ekphrastically constricted and based on a violent cut that opens
writing to marginal configurations of feminine sexuality that subvert the centrality of dictatorial
politics from its own sites of exclusion. Amidst the closure imposed on society by the Pinochet
regime (particularly for leftist writers and artists), Eltit wrote obsessively as a mode of freedom:
“when my freedom [libertad]—not in a literal sense, but in all of its symbolic amplitude—was
threatened, I took the liberty [libertad] of writing freely [con libertad].” She refers to her writing
under dictatorial oppression as a “secret political resistance;” an interesting fact given that her
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novels were openly published under the regime (Emergencias 171). This suggests that the
“secret” was encoded into Eltit’s experimental discourse; we will see in Lumpérica she writes
against, and from beneath the regime, yet in such a linguistically and culturally oblique,
decentered fashion that there is nothing to censor. This decentering is fundamental for Eltit’s
work, and within it lies the core of the feminization of her writing. Eltit aligns the masculine with
“the management of central powers” to which the feminine stands as peripheral, and therefore
identifies as feminine those writers who, regardless of their sex, “decenter the center,” offering
Joyce as an example (Emergencias 174-5). She seeks to produce “a literature that problematizes
its own zones of production and that broadens meanings within the symbolic order”
(Emergencias 185). We will see how this broadening of the symbolic often takes the form of
violent linguistic cuts and ruptures that would seem to require an elusive hermeneutics so as to
re-inscribe them within the realm of intelligibility. Yet rather than such a central interpretive
model, reading Eltit demands immersion: both within an unsafe language that lies far beyond the
scope of the symbolic as a coherent system of communication, and within marginal (feminine)
zones of exclusion that lie beyond the reach of hegemony even as they are negatively inscribed
within its boundaries. Thus, as Gisela Norat notes, Eltit’s novels demonstrate “a preoccupation
attaining, exercising, maintaining, or losing power is what distinguishes the oppressor from the
oppressed” (49).
The following analysis of Lumpérica, published in 1983 at the height of Pinochet’s reign,
will explore the body (both as collective and as feminine) in relation to light, cut, and image.
Eltit blends prose, poetry, dialogue, and even photography into surreal descriptions within a text
that is almost entirely devoid of plot: “In a true parody of the asepsis of medical discourse, the
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script relates with surgical precision how the protagonist performs a series of cuts upon her skin”
(Avelar 176). The female protagonist is a homeless, ragged bag-lady who walks into a town
square at night, falls, and performs her cuts amid the collective of vagrants around her as they
seek to avoid the light of a neon sign that unwelcomely illuminates the darkness. The book’s
enigmatic title itself constitutes a neologism that reveals a number of the text’s primary elements.
Lumpen recalls the lumpenproleteriat of Marxist theory, this being the lowest layer of the
working class, that of the beggars and criminals, whom Marx calls an “indefinite, disintegrated
mass” incapable of achieving class consciousness and therefore of no use either to society or to
any revolutionary struggle (n.p.). The etymology of lumpen per se describes the novel’s
protagonist, given that in German Lump, refers to a “vagabond, scoundrel, or louse,” while
Lumpen is the term for “rags.” Furthermore, in Spanish slang perica may refer to a prostitute, a
synthesis of marginality, economic exchange, and nocturnal urban life. The title also evokes
America, which we may read as the phantom presence of an oppressive hegemonic force who
played a central role in the installation of the Pinochet regime. Finally, the term lumen emerges:
the Latin word for “light,” significantly referring to artificial light sources (such as the neon signs
that illuminate the novel’s plaza) as opposed to lux, the Latin term for daylight, which has no
place in this entirely nocturnal text. The protagonist herself is named only L. Iluminada, a
feminine subject who is passively illuminated by the electric lumen of “el luminoso,” the neon
sign. It is this violent, unwanted illumination with which we will begin, in a novel that depicts
trauma rather than trama, plot. I will demonstrate how Eltit seeks to evade the penetrative force
between marginal bodies, before exploring the self-cutting of both author and protagonist as the
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II. LUMINETICS: PENETRATION VS. RUBBING
The figures in Eltit’s nocturnal vision of urban Chile under the watchful eye of the dictatorship
are excluded from the social in an entirely different way from the structure of disappearance and
confinement analyzed in Valenzuela’s “Cambio de armas.” Whereas Laura was a citizen of the
Argentine state who chose to occupy a subversive line of flight as a guerrilla, L. Iluminada
simply lives her a-political life on the margins. Exclusion in Valenzuela’s work is politically
motivated, while in Eltit’s it is economic: the term “lumpen” names the destitute flows of the
ideological position, that confers on them their marginal status. This is a significant fact, as
Eltit’s literary performance and critique take place at the height of an oppressive regime that—
with the outside help of both Milton Friedman and the CIA—violently reimagined Chile as a
bastion of neoliberal devotion to the free market. The lumpen’s subversion, if it exists, resides in
their failure to operate within such a market. They will be surveilled; the neon sign whose light
intrudes on the plaza often constitutes the only presence of an otherwise absent dictatorship. I
luminetics, for the writer posits the metaphor of light itself as the operative means of oppression
in the text. The flow of figures in the darkness will be explored in terms of their deployment of
affect as a relational principle (primarily through the act of rubbing) against the various modes of
thought that favors affect over hegemony, a principle that is here synonymous with the light that
penetrates and claims for the regime every corner of the polis by means of a violent illumination.
I locate the root of this metaphor, and the dualities associated with it, in Plato, specifically in the
Theory of Forms and its didactic presentation in the Allegory of the Cave. According to Plato,
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the Forms are transcendent to both space and time, perfect and unchanging. They occupy the
highest level of that which is real, and are indeed what allow us to identify objects or concepts
around us as what they are: imperfect, particular representations of a given Form. There are
many dogs in the world, for example, but the Form of dogness is the essence shared by each of
them. Plato insists that only the Forms themselves are real; the objects or phenomena we
encounter in the world are merely shadows imperfectly reflecting the perfection of the Forms.
The Allegory of the Cave famously plays on the tensions between light and darkness,
between the unknowable world of Forms and the sensible—yet false—world of our perceptions.
In Republic VII Socrates describes to Glaucon a scenario in which a group of prisoners are
chained within a cave, unable to turn their heads, passing the entirety of their existence watching
the shadows of objects cast upon a wall by a fire behind them, such that they believe “that the
truth is nothing other than the shadows of those artifacts” (515c). He posits that when one of the
prisoners is unchained, the fire behind him would burn his eyes and the artifacts themselves
would seem entirely unreal: “he’d be at a loss… and believe that the things he saw earlier were
truer than the ones he was now being shown” (515d). The light of the sun outside of the cave
would all the more so overwhelm him, and he would be “unable to see a single one of the things
now said to be true” (516a). Yet the liberated prisoner would eventually grow accustomed to this
new knowledge, and, scorning his previous existence as a shadow-gazer, “he would rather suffer
anything than live like that” (516e). Thus the Allegory of the Cave metaphorically aligns light
with perfection, knowledge, reality, and power, while darkness corresponds to a world of
ignorance, illusion, and confinement. Indeed, Socrates explains to Glaucon that the “visible
realm should be likened to the prison dwelling,” and that “the form of the good… is the cause of
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all that is correct and beautiful in anything, [and] produces both light and its source in the visible
realm” (517b-c).
This notion of transcendence has dominated all of Western thought, and man himself was
even conceived of in the Middle Ages as speculum mundi, the “mirror of the world” that
imperfectly reflected the perfect world of Forms into an inferior, if accessible, world. Mankind
was the bridge between heaven and earth, the upper and lower worlds; man (or at least the
greatest man, the philosopher) would contemplate the Forms, and through them, the Good, in an
effort to rise beyond his circumstances. This recalls the lovely observation often attributed to St.
Augustine, “inter faeces et urinam nascimur” [“we are born amid shit and piss”]. Our goal is to
leave the filth of the cave and learn to bask in the light of day in what is for Plato “upward
journey of the soul to the intelligible realm,” or in postmodern terms, to escape the Matrix and
see the code for what it is: a cleverly crafted illusion meant to bind us in the fetters of ignorance
(517b).
A descent into Eltit’s novel will bring us to question this upward movement into light.
The sixth chapter of Lumpérica opens with a desolate litany that beseeches the reader to imagine
Imaginarla encerrada. Imaginar a la mujer con la cabeza baja para eludir una
constituido por una luz de gran potencia. Imaginar todo desharrapado bajo esa luz.
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Imaginar su propio tirerío bajo esa luz… Imaginar la iluminación de toda luz
eléctrica. (137-8)
[Imagine that this woman is a ragged bag lady in the square, gone numb with
cold... Imagine a powerful light on the woman’s bowed head... Imagine her shut
in. Imagine the woman with her head lowered to avoid a light... Imagine the
light. Imagine everything in tatters under that light. Imagine her own rags exposed
In this passage the light becomes oppressive, we feel it intruding, penetrating the square. The
artificial light will afford the destitute woman no warmth or safety; on the contrary, it violates
her intimacy, exposing the wretched details of her existence, offering them to visibility. This
light confines her, piercingly infiltrates her closed eyes—it forces upon her an overwhelming
awareness of its presence, makes visible to the woman her own exposure. We encountered a
similar visual structure in “Cambio de armas,” when Laura sought to evade the “web of stares”
woven by the Coronel as he opened the peephole. Yet there is no one watching in Lumpérica; the
novel’s figures are simply exposed. It is light itself that sees, as the neon sign—el luminoso—
that illuminates the square becomes a metonym of the military state, the force by which it effects
its penetration of this peripheral space. In spite of their marginality, the ragged “pale people” of
the square are registered under the panoptic eye of the regime simply by the fact of their
traumatic exposure.
light in this plaza is lumen, as an artificial light source, rather than the lux of daylight aligned
with the Good in Plato’s allegory. This panoptic eye is a manufactured device, one that
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simultaneously associates the state with a transcendent Good and reveals it to be mere artifice.
Here it is not mankind who ascends into the light of the sun, but an electric light that descends
into the realm of human squalor; furthermore we see that mankind is no longer a mediating
mirror reflecting the perfection of the Forms, but rather a mass in the darkness. The notion of the
construct is essential for this project: each chapter explores a forcible framing of the feminine
within a particular mise-en-scène. In the work of Eltit the artificiality of this mediation reaches
its zenith; the author accepts the state’s desire to frame as a fact of dictatorial existence, and
situates her own feminist project in the performance that takes place within this inescapable
grasp what kind of body it is that performs, as well as the relation that this body bears to the
plaza’s marginal collective of pale people. The body in the passage cited above is both trapped
and exposed by the neon light that penetrates the square. While the concept of penetration is
nothing new in this study—it unites each aspect of the trinitary essence of sex, surgery, and
torture, and thus defines in some way each of the works explored thus far—Eltit’s treatment of it
is entirely distinct. Here it is space that is penetrated, an urban space within the new Chilean
state; this is a luminous penetration that violently envelopes a body that does not belong to the
state that inscribes it. The protagonist is defined by extimacy, as an internal exclusion within
Pinochet’s Chile, and one whose extimate confinement is paradoxically limited to public space.
The figure of L. Iluminada enjoys no private existence—she and the rest of pale people form a
marginal humanity presented in Lumpérica. To put it in Deleuzian terms, we can posit affective
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encounters of deterritorialized intensity as an alternative to the transcendental politics of capture
implemented by the authoritarian regime. For Spinoza, affect describes states of mind and body
related to emotion, such as pleasure, pain, and desire, each of which contributes to an
individual’s power of activity. In contemporary thought this notion has been recuperated by
philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze in what has been deemed an “affective turn.” Jon Beasley-
Murray in particular has further developed the notion of affect in Posthegemony. The critic
describes affect not as “what happens to a body, but part of a process by which a body becomes
other to itself” (132). It is characterized by a will to escape, in contrast to the state, which he
writes that:
Affect marks the passage whereby one body becomes another body, either
joyfully or sorrowfully; affect always takes place between bodies, at the mobile
or subjectivity. (128)
Subjectivity and transcendence, which are revealed to be human constructions, are established
later, when these immanent affective encounters between bodies are contained; only then may
The image of the rhizome comes into play here: from the Greek term for a mass of roots,
it refers to the subterranean stem of a plant that extends itself ever outward through networks of
shoots and nodes. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari describe their own theories as
rhizomatic in order to present them as non-hierarchical networks of ideas with no center that
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allow for infinite entry and exit points. Similarly, affect may refer to the expansive, de-centered
ebbs and flows of intensities across encounters between and within (pre-subjective) bodies.
Through the interventions of the state, however, the rhizomatic affective mass acquires (or is
forcibly divided into) quantifiable categories: the state may take a census and label its citizens as
such. Yet according to Beasley-Murray, affect cannot survive this constrictive transformation,
and emerges on the other side as emotion. He asserts that “this orchestration of affect, its
transformation into emotion, is also immediately political [in that] contemporary regimes exploit
‘affect as capturable life potential.’” Forsaking consent, the leader of a regime may appear to
bodies as emotion, appearing a hero that controls all, being able to bend the emotions of the
masses (128-9). In this way hegemonic power thrives on the conversion of affect into emotion,
and multitude into people (meaning subjects of sovereign power), Beasley-Murray argues. Thus
the state’s claim to transcendence is actually what constitutes a “quasi cause,” that is, an effect
mistaken for a cause, and one that endows the state with the sovereignty which it deploys in
In Lumpérica, the lumpen of the plaza are an affective mass par excellence: far from
being a group of civic-minded individuals, they embody the nameless flow of the city’s marginal
spaces. Here they lurk in the shadows, yet they often go unnoticed or ignored even in daylight.
Nelly Richard favors the metaphor of flow over mass to describe this sort of collective, whom
she also describes in Deleuzian language: “The found forms (rubbish dumps) of speech
characteristic of those subjects roaming along the outskirts of the city’s cartography experienced
sophisticated cuts and montages that could account for the ‘collective,’ not as a mass, but rather
as a flow to partition and reassemble in new connections and intensities” (Insubordination 16-7).
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Lumpérica’s collectivity of pale people shuns both the daylight and the artificial neon lights that
violate the darkness of the square where they reside: lux and lumen as (solar, Platonic)
transcendence and (neon, dictatorial) pseudo-transcendence, respectively. The space the lumpen
occupy is central to the Chilean city—as a public square—and it is paradoxically this very
If the lumpen are rhizomatic, even more so is Eltit’s language itself. Deleuze and Guattari
write that “A rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organizations
of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles.” They highlight
the multiplicities inherent within such chains and maintain that “there is no language in itself, nor
are there any linguistic universals, only a throng of dialects, patois, slangs, and specialized
languages… There is no mother tongue, only a power takeover by a dominant language within a
political multiplicity” (7). This indeed describes the aim of authoritarian power to unify and
homogenize the nation, eradicating multiplicity and difference through the deployment of a
dominant ideology. The dictatorial state is mathematical and reductive, founded on the
ideological position, but rather to formulate an affective alternative to ideology itself. Opposing
the rhizome to the hierarchical, genealogical structure of the tree, Deleuze and Guattari assert
that a “method of the rhizome type, on the contrary, can analyze language only by centering it
onto other dimensions and other registers. A language is never closed upon itself, except as a
function of impotence” (8, emphasis mine). As we shall see, Eltit maintains this aperture through
the cut—at once linguistic, visual, and physical. This stands against the homogenous and
homogenizing discourse of the regime, which Deleuze and Guattari astutely reveal as impotent,
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founded on a lack. The roots of the authoritarian tree do not run so deep, and they can neither
encompass nor eradicate the rhizome of marginal difference in its non-ideological, affective
multiplicity.
It remains to analyze the affective relations between bodies of the pale people in
the relation between sovereign power and the social body. This is a fact that plays itself out in
the reformulation of the subversive as an erogenous point of the body politic, given the
jouissance of authoritarian regimes in their relentless pursuit of the subversive fetish. Through
her surrealist forays into the affective existence of the dispossessed, Eltit crafts a novel infused
with sexuality that opposes what we may call an alternative erotics of rubbing to the luminetics
of penetration established by the state. The fifth chapter of the novel, “Quo Vadis,” begins with
L. Iluminada laying in the rain in the plaza, experiencing “deleite de su propia imagen” (115)
[“delight in her own image” (98)]. The images presented in this section of the text are indeed
shall see, this rubbing—through Eltit’s neologism refrote, perhaps as an intensive or repetitive
form of frotar, “to rub”—is the action that unites the marginal figures of the square as an
affective collectivity. This erotic refrote ultimately leads to a new form of feminine writing
imagined by Eltit, one that stands evasively against the totalizing ideology of the regime
Given Eltit’s concern with alternative epistemologies, it is no accident that the novel
establishes relations through rubbing, an act fundamental to queer sexualities. L. Iluminada is,
etymologically speaking, a tribade: not in terms of sexual orientation but rather in terms of
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action; not as a lesbian but literally as “one who rubs.” Lumpérica universalizes this mode of
sexuality among the lumpen, regardless of their sex—as a collective, the affective mass (or
network of flows and intensities) engages in tribadism, from the Greek tribein, “to rub,” a term
often associated with lesbian forms of sexual intercourse. The sexuality of the lumpen in the
square is both queer and collective: “Su vello púbico en las nalgas esa posterioridad frenética el
maremágnum: no logró el displacer” (119) [“Her pubic hair on their buttocks that frenetic
posteriority the rubbing. The pale people exiting and entering day in and day out salivish, falling
out of the hubbub: she did not achieve displeasure” (102)]. Even pleasure itself is presented
alternatively, here as “not displeasure,” as though it were not a realm to which she is granted
The rubbing, this collective frottage, indeed constitutes an alternative epistemology. The
protagonist grinds her hips while “thinking the rubbing”: “Su vello púbico en el vello púbico más
sus dos piernas cruzadas al ritmo de las caderas, pensando el refrote” (120) [“Her pubic fleece on
the fleecy pubis plus her two legs crossed to the rhythm of the hips, imagining the rubbing”
(103)]. Through linguistic repetition, rubbing becomes a refrain devoid of syntax as the text links
bodies and body parts into a pre-subjective set of intensive corporeal relations: “Percátate nada
más de su vello púbico en la cara el refrote… Su vello púbico en el torso el refrote… Su vello
púbico ascendente, la boca el refrote” [“Take notice of her pubic fleece in the face the rubbing…
Her pubic fleece on the torso the rubbing… Her pubic fleece ascendant, the mouth the rubbing”
(103)]. Here we witness not the ascent of the soul toward the perfect intellectual world of
Platonic Forms, but that of a ragged woman’s pubic fleece toward a mouth. The protagonist of
Lumpérica does not emerge from the darkness so as to learn to distinguish between her world
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and that which transcends it, but evades the light so as to rub against all that she can in the night,
policies, Eltit imagines an alternative engagement with sexuality rooted in the marginality of her
subject. Laura Garcia-Moreno touches on this point, noting that in Lumpérica the body is “a
porous surface onto which conflictive meanings are constantly adhering, thus modifying its
borders. A new erotics would take this porosity into account just as a new Latin American
politics would entail generating friction (‘refrote’) among three usually ignored conceptual
bodies: ‘mujer/lumpen/América’” (128). For Eltit, the production of meaning itself is both erotic
and political. The tribadism of the lumpen establishes decentralized relations between bodies
(points of difference, exclusion, multiplicity) based on affective lines of flight. The lumpen act
boundaries between individual bodies and so deconstruct all normative relations, be they sexual,
social, or political. Rather than the penetration of a delimited orifice, they simply rub themselves
affective relations of frottage so as to link the feminine and the marginal within the context of
Latin American political history. For Eltit, the erogenous itself becomes post-hegemonic, and
therefore feminine.
The state disrupts this scene through a simple yet violent act of illumination: we read that
the pale people will continue their rubbing “hasta la prendida de las luces que muestran los
árboles en la reinscripción del terror” (121) [“until the streetlights’ coming on shows the trees in
the reinscription of terror” (104)]. The rubbing that extends the jouissance of affective contact
across any available surface rather than confining it to a predetermined point depends on the
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cover of darkness, the anonymity of the collective. In Eltit’s luminetics—the game she plays with
light and darkness so as to deconstruct hegemonic power while seeking alternative modes of
being, writing, enjoying, etc.—light itself is synonymous with terror, as the state illuminates so
as to stamp out subversion, to keep track of the excluded figures upon whom its existence as a
political power depends. We must also note that, for Deleuze and Guattari at least, the trees
illuminated under these artificial lights (lumen) stand in direct opposition to the subterranean,
decentralized organization the rhizome. Eltit counters the state’s “reinscription of terror” with
her own alternative inscription, that of bodies in pub(l)ic space: “Se acomodan como líneas
ordenadas sobre la página y toda plaza los imprime y toda lluvia los entinta. Se imprimen y se
tensan en su propio movimiento y por refrote son publicados: familiares en su orden, tipificados”
(122) [“They arrange themselves like lines ordered on the page and every inch of the square
imprints them and every drop of the rain inks them. They are printed and stretched taut in their
very movement and by rubbing they are published: familiar in their order, typecast” (105)]. This
passage describes an alternate form of writing effected through the body and the act of rubbing in
decentralized encounters between bodies. This is, in other words, affective writing. Eltit
feminizes the notions of both affect and writing by simultaneously linking them with rubbing,
thereby deploying a tribadistic sexuality against the focused, localized precision of masculine
penetration. Frottage is aligned with feminine jouissance, as well as with the marginality of the
destitute, for whom friction also generates warmth to ward off the cold of the frigid night in
Eltit deconstructs the illusory heights of transcendence from which the authoritarian
regime stakes its claim to power: there is no sun, merely the artificiality of the neon sign, el
luminoso. Her nighttime descent into the immanence of the plaza is not limited to the rubbing of
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the pale people, however. The protagonist—along with Eltit herself, as we shall see—stages a
significant performance: that of the cut as a feminist opening. The complex relation between cut
and image performed in Lumpérica is, like Elizondo’s Farabeuf, based on an ekphrastic relation
between literary text and photographic image. And like Valenzuela’s “Cambio de armas,” the
text seeks to maintain the aperture of a wound for the sake of a post-hegemonic feminist project.
Yet Eltit takes this further by staging the repeated performance of the wound, both literarily and
physically, a wound that is itself distinct from those that have preceded it in this study of cut,
image, and feminine subjectivity. Beyond the wound(s) inflicted by the regime, Eltit imagines
The eighth chapter of Lumpérica, titled “Ensayo general” [“Dress Rehearsal”], takes a page from
Elizondo’s book and opens with a shocking photograph. We are confronted with a full page,
black and white image of a woman sitting with her arms resting on her knees, yet our eyes are
immediately drawn to the numerous lacerations that mark her forearms, each of which also
appears heavily bruised. The English and Spanish versions of the text differ slightly in their
translation the image is smaller, only occupying about three fourths of the page, and is framed by
negative white space, with the novel’s title in the header and the page number in the footer.
While the woman pictured sits in shadows, the image itself is relatively clear, with sharp
contrast, and is zoomed out to reveal the darkness on either side of its subject. In the Spanish
version, however, the photograph reaches every edge of the page. It is slightly zoomed in, with
gritty quality, low contrast, and its black and white hues are washed into gray. The effect is that
the wounds on the woman’s arms are even more shocking—rather than being covered in bruises
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and cuts that have scarred, both forearms appear to be entirely shredded. The woman sits calmly
while presenting us with her open wounds, on a part of the body that suggests that they may be
self-inflicted.
This is indeed the case, as the subject of the photograph is Eltit herself. In her 1980
performance piece “Maipú” Zona de dolor I [Zone of Pain I], she “washed the sidewalk in front
of a brothel, inflicted a series of wounds to herself, and read parts of Lumpérica to a group of
prostitutes” (Avelar 176). The photograph that opens “Ensayo General” highlights the centrality
of the cut itself to the text, “as both the condition of the performing subject under dictatorship
and at the same time as a perplexing strategy to intervene within an already wounded urban,
national sphere” (Garcia-Moreno 125). Beyond merely evoking the trauma repeatedly inflicted
upon the social body by Pinochet’s brutal regime (the cut as penetration), the cut exists as an
wounding is a willful act of opening the body in a sort of Valenzuelan counterpropriation of the
regime’s tactics. Nelly Richard observes of the “Maipú” performance that the brothel was “the
trysting place where techniques and genres came together to vie for the favor of a transitory
word,” as Eltit juxtaposed the “baroque verbosity” of her written work with the poverty of
prostitution so as to “break down the economy of sexual commerce and debunk the assumption
of masculine profit through the exchange of money, words, and women” (Masculine/Feminine
37). Rather than covering up a horror vacui, Eltit’s baroque engagement with the symbolic
confronts dictatorial horror from the margins of its urban spaces, from the zones of exclusion
inhabited by beggars and prostitutes, each of whom bear an economic relation to the social body
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Given that L. Iluminada and her fellow pale people are—in spite of their absolutely
public existence—entirely excluded from political participation, we must consider in what way
the novel might still aim at political subversion. One possible answer lies in the notion of the cut,
and its relation Eltit’s “baroque verbosity.” Garcia-Moreno rightly argues that the self-inflicted
cuts on the part of Eltit and her protagonist only constitute subversive interruptions of the
dominant order “insofar as they are interpreted and re-represented by the performers; the
simultaneously destructive and productive act of laceration acquires political potential when it
passes again through language to produce a turn in meaning, in order to modify the realm of the
symbolic” (121). Language itself is one of the principal realms in which dominance is exerted,
and Eltit’s linguistic ruptures fully subvert the symbolic field: numerous critical perspectives on
Lumpérica have referred to the novel in terms of its illegibility. Idelber Avelar responds to
accusations against Eltit of obscurantism by arguing that Lumpérica is “indeed illegible… but
rather in the Barthesian sense of that which cannot be read, only written” (173). Devoid of plot,
the text engages in poetic ramblings and conceptual or imagistic frottage, cutting up language
only to reconnect tribadistically its syntactic, lexical, orthographic, and phonic elements in
We are already familiar with the notion of the cut as writing, having looked at how an
authoritarian regime founds and sustains itself through the inscription of its power into the flesh
of those it must exclude to establish its limits. Yet the lacerations in Lumpérica are self-inflicted;
this is a new form of corporeal writing in which the feminine subject stages her own mise-en-
scène, whose images depend on the cut. For Eltit, there is no image prior to the cut. The cut itself
is primary, and in “Dress Rehearsal” Eltit defines it as both rupture and limit: “rompe con una
superficie dada. Sobre esa misma superficie el corte parcela un fragmento que marca un límite
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distinto. El corte debiera verse como límite. El corte es límite” (177) [“it breaks with a given
surface. On this same surface the cut sections off a fragment that marks a different limit. The cut
should be seen as a limit. The cut is the limit” (156)]. The image emerges within the space of this
rupture, here a cut on the female body. The photograph we encounter in Lumpérica is therefore
an image at once of and within the feminine. The cut forms the limit that frames the image,
which in turn represents the cut as it is inscribed in the flesh and thus invested with social and
political meaning.
The cut thus oscillates between the image—which emerges in its opening—and
representation—in which it is closed off and restricted. In The Untimely Present Avelar touches
on this tension when he identifies what he deems “two different dimensions of the written.” In
the first, “escritura (writing) and escribir (to write) appear as scenes, moments of illumination
where the body is always actively involved,” while in the second dimension “literature appears
as a sphere of institutions, names, records, and poses, that is, the realm of representation in all
senses. The opposition between the two is thus between a collective experience of inscription
and its belated, inadequate depiction” (178). These are affective scenes, images of the body as
glimpsed in the interval between light and darkness that are framed within a literary mise-en-
scène. The body (and through it writing itself) is inscribed as image, and the image is represented
ekphrastically within literature, which necessarily fails to represent its subject, according to
Avelar. To cut is to open, to allow for the possibility of emergence even while establishing a
limit, whereas writing (even illegibly, as Eltit does) entails a certain degree of closure or failure
with respect to the image. The “Dress Rehearsal” photograph thus acquires a special function
within Lumpérica, as the point at which the novel may escape the constraints inherent within the
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symbolic, even when this symbolic register is itself deconstructed and pushed to its very limits
through cutting.
Eltit’s linguistic rupture is extreme, and entails visual elements even at the level of the
written. The “Dress Rehearsal” chapter narrates the performance of Eltit’s theory of the relation
between cut and image as she enacted it upon her own body in “Maipú.” The second section of
the chapter consists entirely of the following fragment, whose linguistic violence extends to the
es/garra” (172) [“She anal-izes the plot = thickens the skin: the hand catches = fire and the
laceration takes place—desgarra; Eltit burns and cuts her arms. The word “d es/garra”
(desgarrar: “to rip apart, tear up”) is itself fragmented through multiplicity of both textual space
and the slash, the use of which is “indicative of the coupling of the incision made on the
fragmented textual body with the clawing and tearing corte and linkage at which a textual
‘event’ takes place” (Weintraub n.p.). Eltit reminds us through ambiguity that her own physical,
photographic, and linguistic cuts are not the only ones to tear apart the marginal body in Chile: la
fobia desgarra, “fear rips apart;” la fobia es garra, “fear is a claw/talon.” The reconstruction of
Eltit’s ruptured signs opens the text to myriad images and meanings. Even as it describes Eltit’s
“Maipú” performance, this fragment conversely evokes a torture session in which flesh is burnt
and torn, as well as the image of a raptor—a bird of prey—whose talons (garras) instill fear
across the land that it panoptically surveys from above. Pinochet ruled Chile through fear: his
conversion of two football stadiums into makeshift concentration camps immediately following
the coup was due to the fact that he knew his “hold on power depended on Chileans being truly
terrified,” a fact which he further ensured through General Sergio Arellano Stark’s infamous
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“Caravan of Death” (Klein 93). The use of helicopters to cover the entirety of the nation with the
Caravan’s executions is likewise inscribed within the image of the raptor and its dissemination of
fear.
Lumpérica’s polyvalence is encoded into diverse chains of meaning such as those that
emerge through the phrase “la fobia d es/garra.” It is the cut itself—in its capacity as limit—that
unifies each of the elements in these chains. For in conceiving of the cut as limit, and therefore of
the limit as cut, Eltit reformulates the limit itself as an opening, a wound. Garcia-Moreno notes
the ubiquity of the cut as a theoretical concept for Eltit, asserting that her novel “traces the
movement from theory to body to photography to writing, all of which are linked by references
to laceration and cutting (film cuts, bodily cuts, linguistic cuts)” (122). While writing constitutes
a form of closure in its failure to circumscribe the visual image through ekphrastic
itself may become a system of closure participating in a “sphere of institutions,” as noted above
by Avelar, particularly when situated within a cultural canon or the censorial constraints of an
authoritarian regime. Eltit’s aim in Lumpérica is thus to cut open the realm of the social at the
level of the inclusion and exclusion of bodies and subjectivities as well as at the level of cultural
production. The artist’s performance of cutting, writing, and reading in both “Maipú” and
Lumpérica “symbolically redefine the controlled space of the plaza/literature as a site where the
lumpen, those traditionally excluded from the scene of writing and citizenship, could… open up
a closed literary and performance space” (Garcia-Moreno 124). Performance is the foundation of
Eltit’s project, as she seeks to control the mise-en-scène by evading the masculine light that has
until then forcibly framed the feminine subject within her own political horizons.
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Though Eltit demonstrates the illusory nature of transcendence and attacks the metaphor
of light in its alignment with truth and power through her erotic critique of the regime’s
luminetics, she does not engage directly in political insurgency, unlike Valenzuela. Eltit rather
depicts affective encounters between bodies in the act of rubbing, favoring a rhizomatic network
of non-subjectivity whose peripheral nature traces the outline of the state itself by means of
extimate inclusion or intimate exclusion. While her focus on the lumpen evokes the notion of a
Marxist class struggle, there is no struggle per se in the text. In lieu of a plot, we encounter only
“a scenic pattern, reemerging in different forms” (Avelar 169). Eltit proposes non-revolutionary
alternatives; she seeks not to overthrow the regime, but rather to look beneath that which it
bodies rub against one another. Garcia-Moreno concludes that “above all, Eltit’s writing
demands unmasking the promise and pursuit of pleasure… beyond the purifying technologist
discourse embraced by the military state.” Eltit writes from beneath and from the darkness so as
to “elude the totalizing gaze of el luminoso, defy its naming practices and constitutive power,
and allow for a new form of circulation, a new disposition of letters on the page and of bodies in
the plaza” (Garcia-Moreno 132). She performs the actions of cutting and writing simultaneously
Given that the cut is a limit whose eruption defines and delineates the image, photographs
such as those depicting the Leng Tch’é execution and Eltit’s wounded self-portrait constitute
meta-incisions. They simultaneously depict the cut as both a line inscribed into the flesh of the
socially and politically excluded, as well as the line that interrupts the gaze and so frames the
image itself. The textual, visual, and physical slashes respectively interrupt writing, the gaze, and
the body so as to construct an image that paradoxically makes present a figure of absolute
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exclusion. This may be the pharmakós whose banishment or execution is necessary for the
state’s definition of its own limits, or the vagabond/writer who is marginalized for the same
reason. In each case, the photographic image depicts an act of cutting through which is drawn the
foundational limit between hegemonic state and its imaginary beyond, unrepresentable except as
an open, bleeding, feminine body. The prosopopoeia effected in Lumpérica is such that Diamela
Eltit and L. Iluminada bleed into each other to the point of indistinguishability in the visual
representation of the feminine subject within the frame of the novel’s haunting photograph. If the
act of rubbing defines the affective relations between the marginal bodies of the plaza in Eltit’s
novel, we must ask what the relation is between the state’s will to penetrate and the woman’s
willful laceration of her own flesh in “Dress Rehearsal.” It would seem that she is engaging in
the state’s work of surgical biopolitics, and therefore in a form of hegemonic violence aligned
with the masculine. But there is more than one type of cut.
In its engagement with the Leng Tch’é photograph Farabeuf depicts execution by
dismemberment, while its secret ekphrasis of The Flaying of Marsyas, as outlined by Alberto
Moreiras, invisibly incorporates skinning within the novel’s intertextual network of images.
Penetration is the unifying principle of Elizondo’s trinitary essence of sex, surgery, and torture;
acts through which feminine subjectivity is violently subtracted in the formation of the state.
Within this hegemonic configuration the female body becomes the politically necessary site of
exclusion. Skinning is the act of removing the limit that defines a body in relation to another
body—the skin is an affective border and point of immanent contact necessary for the existence
of the collective. To skin the sacrificial subject of the pharmakós is to make impossible his
relation to others: this most horrific form of execution entails, on a philosophical level, the
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absolute isolation of the subject, confinement by removing the border that defines a body as
Yet the self-inflicted wounds that we encounter in Lumpérica are neither penetrative
surgical incisions—which Elizondo has shown to imply the quest for some secret,
transcendental, inner truth—nor the removal of the skin as the surface necessary for the existence
of a subject. Eltit’s cuts are rather lines drawn across the surface of the skin forming their own
decentralized rhizomatic network: Deleuze and Guattari write that “There are no points or
positions in a rhizome, such as those found in a structure, tree, or root. There are only lines” (8).
Most importantly, these cuts are openings, and thus align themselves with a feminist project of
interruption against hegemonic closure. And let us not forget who holds the knife: perhaps the
ability to cut is what defines a subject, feminine or otherwise? In opening lacerations upon her
own flesh, Eltit stages the occupation of a “zone of pain,” as her series of performances is titled.
This zone is the space from which the feminine subject disrupts both language and body (the
realms upon which the state must exercise control in order to define and sustain itself), as well as
the very means of control: cutting. The image of the feminine produced in Lumpérica is thus an
autonomous self-portrait of the marginal body as feminized through the staging of disruptive
PART TWO
Eltit’s post-hegemonic disruption of authoritarian power in her reconfiguration of the cut will
itself be subverted by the mysterious forces that deform feminine subjectivity on the Mexican-
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U.S. border, the site of criminal/corporate exception that will command our attention for the
remainder of this study. The neoliberal project undertaken by Pinochet will be advanced in the
transnational spaces of industrialized border cities like Ciudad Juárez and Tijuana, as they
become emblematic of the will-to-globalize of the elite and, entirely without coincidence,
notoriously permissive of extreme violence against women. This is the world of Roberto
Bolaño’s posthumous epic 2666, a disturbing work that records the production of a perverse
feminine collective by an illicit and invisible network of power. Prior to performing an exegesis
of Bolaño’s novel I will outline from a critical perspective the serial female homicides that have
come to plague Ciudad Juárez and consider the stakes of their terminology (femicide vs.
feminicide) for feminism. Kristeva’s notion of the abject will frame an analysis of the logic of
expulsion that defines both the border as well as Bolaño’s representation of it through the female
cadaver as a byproduct of the exploitation of feminine labor in the region. The image of the
exquisite corpse will provide the foundation for this analysis: it names a surrealist mode of
arbitrary textual production (the emergence of meaning in the senseless gaps between non-
relational elements of excess) as well as the psychoanalytic content of the tomb of repression (an
erotic excess that is the result of a failure to mourn a lost object). The exquisite corpse thus
illuminates not only Bolaño’s focus on the female cadaver in his own excessive literary
production, but the possibility of a Mexican relation to the victims of femicide. I will
demonstrate how the text’s serial excesses ultimately effect a perverse transformation of the
feminist notion of seriality itself, twisting it into the technical automaticity that is the product of
its limitless feminine workforce and discards their bodies as so much waste.
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While September 11, 1973 stands as neoliberalism’s primal scene for Latin America,
January 1, 1994 became a watershed neoliberal moment with the establishment of the North
American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and its borderland free trade zones. This study of
feminine subjectivity in relation to state power is trans-historical, yet it is also circular: the
maquiladora, the manufacturing-assembly plant that lines the borders of Ciudad Juárez, has its
roots in the Border Industrialization Program that began in 1965—the year in which Elizondo
published Farabeuf. This program was undertaken after the end of the Bracero Program (1942-
1964), which had provided the U.S. with temporary manual labor from Mexico since the Second
World War.11 The emergence of the maquiladora on the border in the 1960s would pave the way
for the city’s own emergence as a site emblematic of globalization in the 1990s, particularly with
the beginning of NAFTA. The maquiladora lies at the center of the border’s history, as well as
that of its current crisis. It was through the propagation of the manufacturing industry that
“Ciudad Juárez became a city-machine whose tensions entwined Mexico, the United States, the
global economy, and the underworld of organized crime.” The combination of these elements
resulted in a second transformation, right around when NAFTA took effect: when activists began
to denounce the brutal, sexualized killing of women in 1993, this “city-machine” became, as
journalist Sergio González Rodríguez has called it, the “femicide machine” (8-9). Thus it was
that the elimination of tariffs bore an enigmatic correlation to the elimination of women.
In The Femicide Machine, González Rodríguez presents the contradictions that define
Ciudad Juárez in terms of three distinct yet interconnected “translineal” spaces produced by a
“transborder”: one that is penetrated from both sides through conflicts, fusions, and exchanges of
11
The Bracero Program provides the basis for director Alex Rivera’s postmodern “Cybracero” program in the
science-fiction film Traficantes de sueños [Sleep Dealer], in which workers plug their bodies into a digital network
from “info-maquilas” on the Mexican border that allow them to control labor-oriented robots throughout the world.
While this is an interesting connection, it lies beyond the scope of this project.
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information and is therefore entirely fluid and unstable. These three translineal spaces are the
bridge, the wall, and the garbage dump. The first “works as a valve” that controls the flows of
labor as well as illegal drugs and firearms. The wall is the “failed container of the transborder,”
while the garbage dump names the role of such cities in developing nations in relation to the
superpower on the other side of the border (57-8). This transborder is an exceptional space—as
the site at which national, corporate, and illicit powers collide, converge, and cooperate—yet it is
also a site of exception in the political sense. Drug trafficking has been reformulated as “narco-
terrorism, whose threat justifies a ‘state of exception’ that suspends the rights of citizens and
Latin American history abounds with states of exception, which define the authoritarian
regimes such as those in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile during the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. Yet the
exception of the border is unique, as it results from the framing of Mexican drug cartels in terms
of the United States’ “war on terror,” which situates the crisis in Ciudad Juárez in relation to a
geopolitical problem. There exists a paradox, however, in that if drug trafficking “seems to be
everywhere, it is because societies everywhere recognize that their expansive centers lie
precisely in their deceitful institutions,” González Rodríguez argues (69). Even as it is ravaged
by cartel violence, the border has continued to grow in terms of manufacturing; its licit and illicit
relations to the global economy are inextricably bound to one another, and seem to jointly
inscribe themselves on the bodies of women. According to Amnesty International, between 1993
and 2005 “more than 370 young women and girls have been murdered in the cities of Ciudad
Juárez and Chihuahua—at least a third suffering sexual violence—without the authorities taking
proper measures to investigate and solve the problem” (n.p.). González Rodríguez reports that in
2009 there were 164 women murdered in Ciudad Juárez, and 2010 the number rose to 306 (75).
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Such statistics are inevitably inscribed within a gaping hole, as they only reflect the deaths of
women whose bodies have been found; many more are still missing. As with the desaparecidos
of the Southern Cone regimes, the border is the site of a dual haunting: the presence of the dead
scholars in relation to the femicide crisis. Mbembe’s landmark essay opens with the Foucauldian
contention that “the ultimate expression of sovereignty resides, to a large degree, in the power
and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die” (11). He holds that the notion of
biopower is insufficient for explaining “contemporary forms of the subjugation of life to the
power of death,” and presents necropower as a manner of accounting for the “maximum
destruction of persons and the creation of death-worlds” that are mapped out in “topographies of
cruelty,” as refers to the spatial extension of sovereign power (39-40). The confluence of
globalization and death in Ciudad Juárez—the nefarious relation between its export-processing
zones, drug trafficking, femicides—clearly lends itself to necropolitical anaylsis. The impunity
with which the crimes have taken place since 1993 points to the formation of such a death-world,
one that is explicitly gendered. Melissa Wright conceives of the crisis in Ciudad Juárez in terms
of “gendered necropolitics,” by which she means that “the politics of death and the politics of
gender go hand in hand” (“Necropolitics” 710). Wright describes a war of interpretation waged
between feminist activists and the Mexican government, at the heart of which is “the ongoing
further below, the discursive campaign mounted by the authorities sought to blame the crimes on
women’s sexuality, gendering the public sphere in such a way that displays of femininity invite
(and, given the impunity that characterizes the region, authorize) extreme violence by otherwise
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rational male forces. Wright claims that such gendered violence is used “as a tool for securing
the state;” but we must address exactly what kind of state it is that is thereby established (708).
Elizondo’s Farabeuf functions as a theoretical text that outlines how the surgical
penetration of a feminized body constitutes the act of violent subtraction that founds the Latin
American state. This project’s return to Mexico in its final chapter is due to the tragic application
of such a theory to a new type of state: an invisible network of terror that extends along the
border, one that is both larger and smaller than the governmental state beyond whose reach it
operates. Within this unique framework the familiar notion of consumption reaches its zenith: in
her astute Marxist analysis of femicide, Julia Estela Monárrez Fragoso sustains that “women are
converted into items of consumption, into useful commodities whose bodies are frequently
valued for their (re)productive potential and for, among other things, being zones of desire with a
consumable difference” (65). She ultimately argues that the fetishization of the feminine
normalizes masculine dominance, such that the killing of women “symbolizes the exploitation of
the female other in the sphere of exotic difference, in a discourse of racial superiority and
economic development that legitimizes the consumption of things and people as a civilizing
force” (67-8). The new state perpetuates itself through economic consumption within a
globalized neoliberal market that finds its freest expression on the border: the transborder as a
liminal site of exception, or as an economic erogenous zone where one national body meets
another.
Borrowing terminology from Agamben, Rita Laura Segato has cogently argued that the
femicides in Ciudad Juárez are not ordinary gender crimes, but rather “corporate crimes and,
more specifically, crimes of the second state, of a parallel state,” one that “cannot be classified
for lack of efficient legal categories and procedures” (86). Sergio González Rodríguez
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nevertheless criticizes this view, claiming that such arguments “pluralize the concept” out of a
desperate need for understanding. He regards Segato’s reference to corporate crimes or those of a
second state as a “displacement of the criminal with the political” (80). I agree with this notion of
displacement, yet I think that is precisely where Segato locates the existence of a second state in
the first place. It seems that in Ciudad Juárez criminality and politics have displaced one another,
such that, for reasons only explainable as a pervasive political agreement—tacit or otherwise—
the crimes of femicide are not sincerely investigated or prosecuted by state authorities.
According to Segato, these mysterious murders “indicate that decentralization, in a context of de-
conjunction of postmodernity and feudalism, where the female body is once again icon and
annex of territorial domain” (84). This is particularly disturbing in light of the preceding analysis
of Diamela Eltit’s decentralized literary production and bodily performance. It seems that the
second state operating beneath Ciudad Juárez has appropriated an essential facet of the post-
America. In this sense its configuration bears a perversely mimetic relation to feminist resistance
efforts. The narco-driven parallel state is—like Pinochet’s regime—entirely neoliberal, and yet—
like Eltit’s aesthetics of marginalization—it operates on the periphery, evading the capturing
this—referred to as the vertical axis of rape—is fairly obvious: the downward discourse of power
between aggressor and victim. Segato asserts that the rapist “takes on a moralizing profile as a
safeguard of social morality” as he punishes his victim. Yet in her admirable investigations into
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the state of mind of the perpetrators of sexual violence (Segato spent years interviewing
convicted rapists in Brasilia), she discovered a horizontal axis of dialogue that extends between
the rapist and his peers, real or imagined. Segato explains that the aggressor will initially rape in
order to petition acceptance into this society, and subsequently in order to compete with his
fellow members. The raped woman therefore becomes “the immolated sacrificial victim of a
ritual of initiation” as well as the gendered other from whom tribute is demanded; the feminine
subject constitutes “the provider of the repertoire of gestures that nourish virility” and thus
“produces [her] own exclusion” (Segato 76). Through her application of this model of rape to the
situation in Ciudad Juárez, Segato arrives at the following atypical conclusion, which will prove
essential for any attempt to understand the femicides: while the crimes are clearly misogynist in
nature, hatred of women is not their primary motivation but rather a “precondition for their
occurrence.” Segato sees the femicide victims as the discardable waste product of the extreme
rites of initiation that govern acceptance into the illicit “patriarchal regime of a mafia order” (77).
Rape is therefore an action that takes place within a community, even if its interlocutors
are present only “in the enunciating subject’s mental landscape” (75). Given that this is always a
communicative crime, there can be no solitary act of rape. Crimes of sexual violence bear an
inherent relation to one another, particularly within a cultural landscape in which they have
become normalized to a large extent and even point to the existence of an organized crime ring
whose influence reaches official authorities. As will be explored further on through the notion of
seriality in Bolaño’s novel, these crimes form a unique signifying chain in their deformation of
critics, activists, and journalists are faced with the disturbing task of reading the violence
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inscribed into women’s bodies so as to trace the message back to its source, to find the elusive
This project has examined several hegemonic states, yet the border between Ciudad
Juárez and El Paso presents a unique anti-hegemonic configuration in relation to the epidemic of
femicide. These crimes, along with their continued impunity after over two decades, take place
on a border that has been transformed into a space entirely separate from the nations that it
divides. Such is the nature of all borders to a certain extent, yet the existence of the “femicide
machine” and the murderous fraternity behind it points to a network that takes advantage of this
peripheral status of the border in order to constitute itself as a secondary state whose mechanisms
operate in the opposite manner of hegemony. Whereas a hegemonic regime admits no outside
position and extends itself visibly across all available space, the dominant power structure in
Ciudad Juárez lies beyond the ostensible government, or more accurately, beneath it. What
Segato calls the “second state” may therefore more accurately be considered an infra-regime that
combines ghostly elusiveness with the oppressive threat of extreme and arbitrary violence while
also structuring the social and political order in the manner of a state. As Patrick Dove observes,
the growth of maquiladora industry “coincides with the dismantling and retreat of the state’s
historical role as mediator between the local and the capitalist world system” (142). In such a
retreat of the official state another emerges, one that shares hegemony’s dependence on closure,
yet a closure that covers the infra-regime itself. This ubiquitous power paradoxically closes itself
off from the world, standing against it and its governments, even as it operates through extreme
neoliberalism that taps directly into the global economy and acts as an invisible mediator that
shows itself only through the violated bodies and the flows of capital that it cyclically produces.
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V. FEMI(NI)CIDE: GENDER VS. SEX
While naming the enigmatic power behind the murders in Ciudad Juárez is difficult, feminist
approaches to naming the crimes themselves have varied, to the point of causing internal (and
international) divisions. Appropriating a term coined by writer Carol Orlock in the 1970s, Diana
Russell was among the first to develop the notion of femicide, which she has defined as “the
killing of females by males because they are females” (Russell 2001, 13). The concept was
firmly established within English speaking academia in 1992 when Russell published with Jill
Radford the anthology Femicide: The Politics of Women Killing. Introducing the term to
Lagarde y de los Ríos chose to translate this term as feminicidio rather than femicidio in order “to
name the ensemble of violations of women’s human rights, which contain the crimes against and
the disappearances of women,” which she argues are crimes against humanity (xv). Feminicidio
has since been translated back into English as “feminicide,” resulting in the existence of two
parallel terms in English, with feminicide having come to bear the mark of the crimes in Ciudad
Juárez. In their important 2010 anthology Terrorizing Women: Feminicide in the Américas,
Rosa-Linda Fregoso and Cynthia Bejarano acknowledge that feminicide and femicide are “used
volume (3). Nevertheless, they argue in favor of the use of feminicide so as to base
considerations of the crimes on gender norms (femin-) rather than the biological sex (fem-). The
critics’ primary motivation, however, is to refuse the simple appropriation in Latin America of a
term developed within Western academia: “we are using feminicide to mark our discursive and
material contributions and perspectives as transborder feminist thinkers from the global South
(the Américas) in its redefinition—one that exceeds the merely derivative” (4).
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While I agree that critical approaches to the killing of women (or any other matter) must
clearly be explored within the particular socio-political configurations that determine the
phenomenon in a given space, I question the attempt to infuse a single term (feminicide) with the
weight of said phenomenon as it occurs throughout the entirety of the global South. Such a
the-North and therefore establishes a spurious commonality across the global South itself. Within
Fregoso and Bejarano’s own volume, for example, there is little connection between the
numerous essays on the crimes in Ciudad Juárez (understood in relation to cartel violence,
Mexican gender norms and politics, NAFTA and neoliberalism, etc.) and the killing of women in
Costa Rica (mostly the result of intrafamilial or intimate partner violence, as analyzed by
Monserrat Sagot and Carcedo Cabañas, who use the term femicide). To a large extent, even
within Terrorizing Women, the terms are not interchangeable, but rather in flux. Like patriarchy
itself, femicide seems to describe a universal phenomenon, the misogynistic killing of women,
which must be framed within a given cultural landscape; feminicide, on the other hand, has been
(problematically) defined in relation to the specific structures of power that operate within
Ciudad Juárez.
paradoxical twist that took place in 2006 when Marcela Lagarde y de los Ríos wrote the
introduction for a translated volume titled Feminicidio: una perspectiva global. The original text
was Femicide in Global Perspective, edited by Diana Russell and Roberta Harmes in 2001, a
collection in which seven of the fifteen essays are by Russell herself. In her introduction to the
Spanish edition, Lagarde argues that femicidio (femicide) could only be understood as “the
feminine term for homicide… a concept that specifies the sex of the victims.” Her translation of
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the term as feminicidio (feminicide), she declares, demonstrates that “it is not only about
describing the crimes that murderers commit against girls and women, but rather the social
construction of these hate crimes, the culmination of gender violence against women, as well as
the impunity that structures them,” and goes on to assert that feminicidio is therefore “a crime of
the State” (12, my translation). Therein lies the irony of the translation of Russell and Harmes’
configuration of gender and power in the global South, translating Russell’s own scholarship as
Latin American feminists take issue. This translated volume universalizes the supposedly-
specific feminicidio, as its essays engage the phenomenon in the United States, Canada, South
Lagarde has worked tirelessly to combat this crisis of gender violence in Mexico, and I
question none of her work beyond the scope of her terminology. But there is a problem with the
specificity of her (re)definition of femicide (and therefore with the translation of the term as
problem in relation to impunity she describes a general principle that characterizes the juridical
response to many cases of female homicide in nations such as Mexico and Guatemala, yet this
does not describe the crimes themselves. Diana Russell has argued as much, expressing concerns
over Lagarde’s definition in a speech she gave to the U.N. Symposium on Femicide in 2012,
contending that “a sound definition must avoid making the definition of the phenomenon [be]
defined conditional on the response to it” (n.p.). Furthermore, defining these murders in terms of
impunity or as crimes of the state implies that if a case were solved or did not involve
governmental complicity, it would cease to have ever been a feminicide in the first place.
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According to Lagarde’s formulation of the term, a case of intimate partner violence in which a
man murders his wife, is arrested, convicted, and serves a sentence, would not fall under the
category of feminicide since it would not meet the criteria of impunity or state complicity.
It is imperative to analyze the social and political structures (official and otherwise) that
inscribe violence against women within a particular context, which is the impulse behind the
specificity of Lagarde’s notion of feminicidio. And while I agree with the anti-essentialism of
Fregoso and Bejarano’s position, I would argue, conversely, that the focus on sex rather than
gender is helpful in the case of the misogynistic murders that have taken place over the past two
decades in Ciudad Juárez. To say that a female was killed because of being female (Russell’s
view of femicide) in no way precludes one from analyzing the crime as an act of sexual violence
within a gendered power structure. Rita Laura Segato’s contention that the crimes are in fact not
motivated primarily by hatred of women is of the utmost importance, for it demonstrates that a
critical focus on the gendered nature of the crimes may ultimately sidetrack or obfuscate the
central feminist task of reading into the power beneath the murders. We might also question
critics’ focus on the gender of victims as opposed to their race or social class, each of which
plays an essential role in their configuration within the structure of violence that dominates
Ciudad Juárez. In Disposable Women and Other Myths of Global Capitalism, Melissa Wright in
fact refers to the women of her case studies as “‘maquiladora mestizas’ as a way to illustrate
their local roots as well as their significance for considering the political and global implications
The femicides in Ciudad Juárez ultimately have more to do with biological sex than
gender performance. They are crimes perpetrated against females, but highlighting the femininity
of the victims (as feminicide does) could ultimately play into the (government) narrative of the
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victims’ implication in their own deaths. Wright draws attention to the cultural association
between the obrera (“worker”) and ramera (“whore”), as each works within the public realm: the
of prostitution as emblematic of women who are contaminated by their activities in the public
sphere and who, in turn, contaminate their families, communities, and nations” (“Necropolitics”
713). Such an association results in a reversal of the vector of guilt, and a social configuration
that blames girls’ deaths on their provocative clothing or decisions to go out dancing makes them
“public women who actually caused the violence that ended their lives” (714). In this sense, the
misogyny of such a cultural narrative already understands the crimes in relation to gender
performance—and this is precisely the problem. The public display of femininity places a
woman into a social category akin to Agamben’s homo sacer, against whom “no act
While the killings in Ciudad Juárez are grounded in sex rather than gender, as far as
gender is concerned they reflect masculine relations if they are indeed the product of a ritual of
masculine bond through the sacrifice of a female body. In Murder and Masculinity Rebecca
Biron highlights the paradoxical relation between gender, violence, and the law thus: “When
successful manliness is associated with power over women, and successful male citizenship is
associated with obeying laws designed in collective male interest, then the criminal male who
kills women simultaneously celebrates and undermines hegemonic masculinity” (8). Femicide is
the masculine ritual through which the infra-state in Ciudad Juárez continually constitutes itself,
and the subversive crime through whose ruptures a subterranean hegemonic network displays
itself when it deems necessary. Yet we have seen throughout this study that hegemony inevitably
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inscribes its own failure: Countess Báthory’s narcissistic mirror image will reflect wrinkles as
she ages, the deferral of the Coronel’s assassination in “Cambio de armas” heralds the text’s
conclusion when Laura will once more level the revolver at her target. In like manner, when
Biron presents the killing of women as a form of gendered exorcism she highlights the fantasy
that hides within such violence: female homicide purges “femininity’s lack both from within the
masculine subject (to make him less threatened in his masculine consistency) and from its
embodiment in women who act as other subjects upon him. Such an exorcism can never succeed,
though, because even attempting it exposes the imaginary nature of the masculine subject’s
independence and autonomy” (15). The femicidal rituals that plague Ciudad Juárez thus point
toward a fantasy of masculine subjectivity that seeks to constitute itself as a neoliberal collective
endowed with freedom—from law, from morality, from tariffs, from women. This is the
structure that I locate in the term femicide, as the appropriation of feminine subjectivity through
the absolute negation of the female body. Nevertheless, as Pascha Bueno-Hansen points out in
reference to the terminology debate within feminism, “if the long-term goal is to create the
conditions for justice for women, the name is not as important as the content and analysis” (308).
The confluence of the killing of women with neoliberalism and global capitalism as they play
themselves out both legally (NAFTA and the rise of the maquiladora as forces determining urban
growth) and illegally (drug, arms, organ trafficking) has resulted in a logic of expulsion that
defines the Mexican-U.S. border. In transitioning to a literary analysis of the femicide crisis
through Roberto Bolaño’s 2666—a text in which the cadaver occupies a central position, or at
least functions as the unifying principle in a text that has no center—we will turn to Julia
Kristeva’s notion of the abject as it theorizes subject (de)formation in relation to death and a
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phenomenology of the discard. In Powers of Horror Kristeva famously conceives of the
breakdown between subject and object as abject, describing the encounter with one’s own bodily
fluids, for example. Vomiting is an act of simultaneous production and expulsion that breaks
down the barrier between myself and the world: as the abject emerges from my body it disrupts
the very notion of my body, whose insides are now visible on the floor before me. Kristeva
locates in the universal aversion to the unclean an encounter with death, epitomized in the
abjection of the cadaver. Any encounter with the abject thus entails a haunting truth: “‘I’ am in
The horror of this encounter with the liminal abject is ultimately located not in the notion
of the threat of illness that it presents as filth, but rather in its disruption of order. This is the true
threat of the abject as it emerges at the limit, the border: its inherent transgression suggests that
there may no longer be any border at all. Kristeva approaches this idea via the image of waste:
If dung signifies the other side of the border, the place where I am not and which
permits me to be, the corpse, the most sickening of wastes, is a border that has
border has become an object. How can I be without border? ...It is thus not lack of
cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system,
The abject thus emerges at the limit while dismantling the limit as such; it names an encounter
with “a terror that dissembles” (4). Rebecca Biron’s aforementioned analysis of the masculine in
relation to transgression reveals a similar structure, one through which the killing of women (the
production of an abject cadaver) undercuts the hegemony of a legal code while establishing, in
my view, a new set of power relations within an infra-state. Reading the above passage within
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the socio-political landscape of the Mexican border, the “I” that speaks of its own abject
expulsion is the feminine subject herself. Kristeva’s thought is useful in this regard, as the
philosopher presents a dismantled subjectivity that is capable of articulating its own disruption,
decay, and expulsion even when it no longer has a coherent body distinct from the waste that
defines the abject. Or perhaps it is the very cadaver who speaks as the expulsed abject I, in an
impossible enunciation that we must read in the borderless body that emerges in the garbage
dumps of the border itself. The grammar of the abject thus defines the configuration of the Latin
American feminine subject in the neoliberal infra-state ruled by local narcos and foreign CEOs.
Sergio González Rodríguez takes up Kristeva’s concept when he refers to the “abject
architecture” of the maquiladoras, stating that the “opaque factory would be, at its extreme, the
mapping of the abject onto the space of the manufacturing-assembly facility reveals the
possibility of abjection as a critique of neoliberal economic policies on the border, in terms of the
expulsion such labor policies effect of both mass-produced goods destined for international
consumption as well as the bodies of the women who perform such work. Toward the end of his
study González Rodríguez extends the discourse of the abject to Mexican institutions and
Mexico’s ruling classes and its spokespeople, who now occupy the space that
once belonged to the rule of law. The result is a bifurcated reality: Institutions
float in a self-referential vacuum, while society follows the inertia of its own
erosion. (87)
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He immediately goes on to cite statistics demonstrating a 400 percent increase in the
disappearances of women in Ciudad Juárez between 2008 and 2012, the time of publication. The
writer’s presentation of Mexican class conflict in terms of abjection is telling; within a few lines
he deploys the terms putrefaction, corruption, degradation, defecation, and erosion to present an
image of a new anti-hegemonic hegemony in which wealth has displaced law. This “bifurcated
reality” aligns the cartels with the economic elite and implicates the latter—along with the
media—in the propagation of the infra-state. Within the neoliberal structure of Mexico the
defecation of the ruling classes, that is, their abject displacement of politics and law, becomes a
force of economic production that transforms the social order. In this logic of expulsion, the
conflation of waste with capital has overridden the old limits established by previous political
regimes. The femicide machine thus stands as the preeminent image (and it is more than just a
feminine subjectivity and, quite literally, the bodies of women and girls.
Kristeva’s formulation of the abject as the breakdown of the limit presents a provocative
connection to Eltit’s theory. In Lumpérica the cut is conceived of as limit, the aperture in which
the image come to be. Yet Kristeva’s view is entirely distinct: if the cut is the limit, the blood
that issues forth from it annihilates that limit through the terror of the abject. For the expulsion of
the interior destroys the very distinction between inside and outside. The state depends on such a
distinction, which is why it sacrifices the feminine subject as pharmakós in the first place (as in
Elizondo’s feminization of the Leng Tch’é photograph). Yet in Ciudad Juárez we see that the
infra-state that sustains itself through the expulsion of the feminine thrives on the destruction of
the limit between inside and outside. The Mexican-U.S. border is therefore the site of an
apocalyptic violence that announces the end of the border itself in its capacity as limit. The
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invisible infra-state presents itself, asserts its limitless power, through its repetitive production of
(the image of) the female cadaver that functions as the signifier of a local and global network—
one whose existence we may trace in the absolute transgression of the law that it repeatedly and
regularly stages through femicide. Kristeva herself explicitly associates such legal transgression
with the abject: “Any crime, because it draws attention to the fragility of the law, is abject, but
premeditated crime, cunning murder, hypocritical revenge are even more so because they
heighten the display of such fragility” (4). The notion of display in relation to law is essential for
understanding femicide in Ciudad Juárez, as this violence against the female body is undertaken
precisely for the sake of performing the infra-state’s status as infra-, that is, as a subterranean,
decentralized, rhizomatic power that freely operates far below the spectrum of legality.
literature, the following reading of Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 will consider the abject female body
as the product of both material and textual production.12 Born in Chile in 1953, Bolaño lived
much of his life in Mexico and Spain, publishing acclaimed novels such as La literatura Nazi en
América (1996), Estrella distante (1996), and Los detectives salvajes (1998), which have earned
him a prominent place within the Latin American literary canon. Yet as Sergio Villalobos-
world—literature, the author’s concern is “not tradition but invention” (193). Much of his work
critiques the literary and academic establishments, in addition to oppressive power structures
such as that of the Pinochet regime. Several works were published posthumously after Bolaño
12
Several critics have deployed the notion of the abject as a way of thinking through the complex monstrosity of the
cadaver in Bolaño’s 2666. Gabriela Muniz references the abject cadaver as the breakdown of the body’s coherence,
while Laura Barberán Reinares uses the abject to analyze the anonymity of the femicide victims in the novel (Muniz
47, Barberán Reinares 56). Diana Aldrete stages a deep engagement with Kristeva’s theory in her dissertation
exploring literature on femicide in Ciudad Juárez, particularly with respect to the role of the abject in subject
formation (88-118).
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died of liver failure in 2003 at the age of 50, including his (essentially unfinished) epic 2666
The disparate narrative threads of the novel’s five books converge in Santa Teresa, a
fictional border city that shares with Ciudad Juárez the presence of manufacturing-assembly
violence. Bolaño recounts the obsessive search of a group of European academics for enigmatic
German author Benno von Archimboldi; the philosophical musings of Chilean professor Oscar
journalist into the story of the murders when sent to Santa Teresa to cover a boxing match; the
investigations of Mexican detective Juan de Dios Martínez into the crimes themselves from 1993
to 1997; and finally the story of Archimboldi (the pen name of soldier Hans Reiter), from his
experience in the Second World War to the alleged role of his nephew in the Mexican femicides.
My engagement with the novel, specifically “La parte de los crímenes” [“The Part about the
Crimes”] is concerned with the protagonism of the female cadaver as a perverse series, along
with the various textual series that are produced in relation to it.
“discloses not only the globalization of violence but the anomic setting of the plot, that is to say,
the de-territorialization of the Nomos, and the powerless condition of literature.” The text
therefore also points to “the undecided situation of a general interregnum within contemporary
imperial reason” (202). The suspension of law in Ciudad Juárez, or more accurately of a juridical
response to its transgression, has resulted in the suspension of time itself. For this interregnum in
the realms of the moral and the corporeal, while withholding any sight of its own end. Bolaño
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offers us a vision of hell from which we cannot escape. Kristeva herself identifies such a
breakdown of limits and borders as the apocalyptic core of the literary, in what could stand as a
description of 2666:
seems to me rooted, no matter what its sociohistorical conditions might be, on the
fragile border (borderline cases) where identities (subject/object, etc.) do not exist
As a literary analog of Ciudad Juárez, Santa Teresa represents this fragile border of unstable or
abject identity, a border whose feminine subjects are made doubly abject through the violence
done to their discarded bodies. The logic of expulsion that determines (gender, power, human)
hero in this apocalyptic landscape through the inscription of his own death within the
posthumously published novel: when asked by Mónica Maristain in the last interview he ever did
how he felt about posthumous works, the writer responded that the term sounded like the name
of an unconquered Roman gladiator; “at least that’s what Posthumous would like to believe”
(122). Through the literary apocalypse that he conceived in Santa Teresa (alongside its non-
fictional analog in Ciudad Juárez), Bolaño engages in a battle the stakes of which we may
identify as, without exaggerating, the future of humanity. The constellations of power in Ciudad
Juárez have led to a crisis of impunity against which neither governmental authority nor
international condemnation seems capable of gaining ground. In this sense, 2666 isn’t just “about
the crimes” (though it is that, too): Bolaño deploys the cynicism of his nihilistic vision and
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sardonic wit against a new configuration of an increasingly global world that threatens to devour
Oswaldo Zavala has recently argued that the genre of the “narconarrative” that began with the
publication of Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s La reina del sur in 2002 has been plagued by a problem of
ethical representation. When cartels are portrayed as expansive kingdoms that terrorize the state
and its citizens (an “us/them” binary), the state is problematically absolved of its responsibility in
the drug trade and the narcos are mythologized into convenient enemies that justify
governmental violence of the drug war (articulated through the discourse of terrorism). For
Zavala, 2666 is one of few texts that successfully critique the culture of narcotráfico; the critic
phenomenon whose reality cannot be penetrated but only transcribed in imaginary constructions
involving certain effects of violence seen from an insurmountable distance” (351). This distance
is ethically and politically essential, and it structures the entirety of Bolaño’s treatment of the
femicide crisis, which is narrated in “La parte de los crímenes” through forensic, after the fact
police reports. While most other narconarratives, particularly those produced in Mexico, make
the mistake of “objectifying drug trafficking as a problem external to official power in Mexico
and the U.S.,” texts such as Bolaño’s “instead propose a careful historical revision of its place
inside that power: drug trafficking as power itself.” In this way 2666 becomes an exceptional
work whose representation of the topography of a criminal landscape refuses to “reify the
simulacrum of truth constructed by official propaganda” (357). Bolaño’s focus on the instant of
discovery rather than occurrence with respect to femicidal violence, along with his implication of
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the authorities and the elite ruling class in the crimes, points to an enemy that is insidious and
From the very first words of “La parte de los crímenes” in 2666 we are faced with the
paradox of feminine subjectivity on the border through this instant of discovery: “La muerta
apareció en un pequeño descampado en la colonia Las Flores” [“The girl’s body turned up in a
vacant lot in Colonia Las Flores”]. The appearance of a missing girl encapsulates the
contradiction inherent in the image, as a visual remainder that presents absence. The use of the
definite article imbues this body with a horrible status: we know nothing about this girl, yet she
is la muerta, the feminine subject transformed into cadaver. This is the first body, discovered in
January 1993: another primal scene. While the process that produced this body will remain
obscure throughout the text, we will encounter its effects over and over—ad infinitum, ad
old Esperanza Gómez Saldaña, who died of strangulation after (or while) being repeatedly raped
and beaten. Of the discovery of her body in January 1993 we read that “A partir de esta muerta
comenzaron a contarse los asesinatos de mujeres” [“From then on, the killings of women began
to be counted”]. Yet “from then on” is “a partir de esta muerta”: from this dead girl on. On the
border at Santa Teresa, time is measured in the discarded bodies of women, rather than in dates.
Nevertheless, the narration tells us that she probably wasn’t the first. The primal scene of
femicide slips away into a succession that has no beginning, for there were surely others “que
quedaron fuera de la lista o que jamás nadie las encontró, enterradas en fosas comunes en el
desierto o esparcidas sus cenizas en medio de la noche, cuando ni el que siembra sabe en dónde,
en qué lugar se encuentra” (443-4) [“who didn’t make it onto the list or were never found, who
were buried in unmarked graves in the desert or whose ashes were scattered in the middle of the
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night, when not even the person scattering them knew where he was, what place he had come to”
(353-4)].
When the police arrive at the scene, two women are crying over Esperanza’s unidentified
body, two women who do not know her. From the very beginning Bolaño presents us with
feminine empathy for the other and cold masculine indifference: one police officer doesn’t even
bother getting out of the car, where he instead remains smoking. The women tell the police,
“Esta criatura no es de aquí” [“She isn’t from around here, poor thing”]. We are immersed in a
global network, one that consistently discards the human bodies that it produces in vacant lots
such as this one, or in city garbage dumps, or in the surrounding desert. The feminist motif of
openness as a theoretical means of interruption is twisted within the emptiness of the border
region, whose urban spaces likewise become a wasteland. The lot where Esperanza’s body was
found “se perdía en una acequia tras la cual se levantaban los muros de una lechería abandonada
y ya en ruinas” (443) [“ended in a ditch behind which rose the walls of an abandoned dairy in
ruins” (353)]. We begin with an apocalyptic vision of the border in which civilization has given
way to a secret form of savagery whose existence can only be traced in that which it discards: las
muertas.
If this nefarious power structure generates a culture of fear, its femicidal terror
nevertheless belies another kind of fear. Elvira Campos, the psychologist who runs a mental
asylum in the novel, speaks of “la ginefobia, que es el miedo a la mujer y que lo padecen,
naturalmente, sólo los hombres. Extendidísimo en México, aunque disfrazado con los ropajes
más diversos… casi todos los mexicanos tienen miedo de las mujeres” (478) [“gynophobia,
which is fear of women, and naturally afflicts only men. Very widespread in Mexico, although it
manifests itself in different ways… almost all Mexican men are afraid of women” (382)]. When
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her lover, detective Juan de Dios Martínez, challenges the ubiquity of gynophobia in Mexico,
Campos retorts with optophobia, fear of opening one’s eyes, which, she argues, figuratively
“contesta lo que me acaba de decir sobre la ginefobia” (479) [“[is] an answer to what you just
consideration of the killing of women as gendered exorcism through which the masculine purges
itself of that which threatens its own consistency (Biron 15). As we analyze Bolaño’s treatment
of femicide in the novel, we will look at the product of this system, that of a neoliberal infra-state
that transforms its gynophobia into an appearance of power by means of gynophagy, the
consumption of the feminine that we explored through Farabeuf. This process takes the form of
a rhythmic, ritual sacrifice of feminine subjectivity within the limitless space of a global
(trans)border, in which the flows and exchanges of labor and capital leave in their wake a steady
stream of discarded bodies like that of Esperanza Gómez Saldaña. Yet the extreme sexual
violence inflicted on these women results in yet another perverse transformation: the jouissance
inscribed into the abject cadavers through which one may measure time on the border makes
The provocative image of the exquisite corpse through which I will read 2666 has
emerged in two places—surrealism and psychoanalysis—both of which deploy it for the sake of
naming a particular kind of text. The “exquisite corpse” first emerged in 1925 when André
Breton and fellow surrealists began playing a parlor a game in which they would collectively
compose a text (or drawing of a body) by passing around a sheet of paper and folding it so that
no one could see any of the previous contributions. The name itself was coined through the first
sentence the game ever generated: “La cadavre / exquis / boira / le vin / nouveau” [“The
exquisite / corpse / will drink / the young / wine” (McShane 87)]. This surrealist endeavor is
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therefore concerned with the aesthetic production of a textual body whose disparate elements are
linked only through the arbitrary machinations of the collective that sets them alongside one
another. Yet it is precisely in the juxtaposition of its random elements that the aesthetic value of
the exquisite corpse lies: its meaning emerges from the gaps between the words. Through the
unforeseen relations that it establishes, the exquisite corpse is, for the surrealists, characterized
by “an escape from ennui, in the sense that ennui was perceived as death by not dying”
(McShane 95). This point bears an interesting relation to Bolaño’s epigraph for 2666, a line from
Baudelaire: “Un oasis de horror en medio de un desierto de aburrimiento” [“An oasis of horror in
a desert of boredom”]. In Bolaño’s novel, perhaps particularly in “La parte de los crímenes,” the
reader is confronted with boredom as a narrative device: its numerous plots and anecdotes
continually run into dead ends with no guarantee of arrival at some ultimate meaning. The
repetitive narration of femicides using the same forensic language inevitably makes banal the
horror of the fatal sexual violence that they exhibit. One of Bolaño’s most disturbing
achievements is in fact having made horror and boredom coincide. Yet the ennui of 2666 is not
“death by not dying” but rather a limitless death, made infinite through the automaticity of a
As this body becomes other to itself, like a machine it purges, emits, expels the waste that is the
byproduct of its operation. In the case of the border—the epicenter of drug trafficking and other
nefarious markets—the femicide machine acts as a collective body whose generated waste
consists of the individual bodies of women who are linked to one another through the consistent
violence of their becoming-abject. Reading the border through surrealism, we may see it as a
body composed of fragmented bodies that are produced through mechanization: a technological
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exquisite corpse. The killings are, as Brett Levinson argues, “the responsibility of men, but not of
geometrical formations, Levinson states that the professor’s attempt to uncover his own hidden
thoughts through the “reconstruction of the history of thought… recalls the surrealist practice of
‘automatic writing’: scripture without deliberation as a means to unveil repressed ideas” (183).
The automation that characterizes the aesthetic production of the exquisite corpse in Breton’s
that fill the border’s free trade zones. As in the surrealist game that produces an “exquisite
corpse” to be read, our own reading of the bodies of the femicide victims uncovers a disturbing
logic regarding the roles of the rape and killing of women in the constitution of the Mexican
infra-state (and therefore, through the extension implicit in the crimes’ impunity, the official
state). Yet such a logic also bears a connection to the unintelligibility of surrealism—for the logic
of femicide is opaque at best, and as Segato says of the killings in Ciudad Juárez, “it is precisely
in their unintelligibility that the murderers take refuge” (71). We may attempt to render them
approachable by looking at the hollow gaps (cuts) in which their relations are established, as with
Maria Torok appropriates this concept for psychoanalysis in her 1968 essay “The Illness
of Mourning and the Fantasy of the Exquisite Corpse.” Her clinical study of mourning
demonstrates the cryptic significance of the erotically-charged cadaver for the bereaved, as the
analyst notes a pattern of patients who ashamedly find themselves with an increased libido upon
the death of a loved one, particularly a parent. Torok asserts that rather than gradually
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introjecting the drives into the unconscious (a healthy process which allows for growth even
after the loss of a love object), some instantaneously incorporate the lost love object directly into
the ego “to compensate for the lost pleasure and the failed introjection” (113). In the latter case, a
close object identification results in loss of self with the loss of the love object. The subject then
experiences a libidinal surge, which is in reality an outpouring of love in the psyche’s last-ditch
attempt at healthy introjection upon the loss of the object and entrance into mourning. Dreams
follow, filled with disturbingly erotic visions of the dead, and the subject may even experience
spontaneous orgasm, all of which inspires great confusion, shame, and guilt in the bereaved.
Repression thus serves not only to separate, but “to preserve carefully, although in the
unconscious, the wish the ego can only represent as an ‘exquisite corpse’ lying somewhere inside
it; the ego looks for this exquisite corpse continually in the hope of one day reviving it” (118).
The space of this preservation is a tomb constructed within the psyche. According to
Torok, introjection forms a “good” internal object in the subject, while the hurried process of
incorporation forms an imago that is “born of a failed introjective relation to an external object”
and whose “effect is always to prohibit sexual desire” (121). Within the tomb lies buried the
repressed imago, the image of the subject’s simultaneous failure (to introject), desire (for the lost
object), and shame (over its orgasmic libidinal surges). The exquisite corpse thus synthesizes
these elements within a single image, an image that will inform our analysis of the femicide
crisis through a psychoanalytic reading of the culture around it. This imago emerges repeatedly
with each discovery of a new body: “Paradoxically, the object who is dead because of real death
momentarily revives the ‘exquisite corpse’ that together the dead and the survivors had both long
before consigned to the grim tomb of repression” (124). In a sense, we are asking whether the
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community that suffers these losses reacts through mourning or melancholia, which is a question
The very fact of the crisis’ impunity points toward the production of an intrapsychic
tomb, an “allegorical crypt, that is to say, the remainder that names phantasmic presence of
unresolved mourning work” through which Idelber Avelar reads postdictatorial Latin American
fiction in The Untimely Present (8). Whereas successful introjection of the lost object leads to the
healthy process of mourning, the incorporation of the object into an inner tomb of repression
results in melancholia, a state in which the subject shamefully clings to the exquisite corpse that
it hides within itself. Avelar performs a psychoanalytic reading of Latin American culture in
which he argues that the struggle to move from melancholia to mourning in the wake of
authoritarian regimes is impeded when “a transnational political and economic order repeatedly
reaffirms its interest in blocking the advance of postdictatorial mourning work—as the digging
of the past may stand in the way of the accumulation of capital in the present” (9). The
neoliberalism that has defined Latin America’s economy since September 11, 1973, and that
firmly entrenched itself within the global economy on January 1, 1994, operates through the
preservation of the exquisite corpse within the tomb of the Latin American psyche in a drama
that has come to stage itself through a perverse performance of actual corpses in Ciudad Juárez.
The criminal investigator therefore shares the work of the analyst. Torok writes that the
“analyst-judge also acts as a morphologist: they have to reconstruct the event from a few
scattered body fragments” as they help patients undergoing the illness of mourning and are
“called upon to unmask the ‘crime’ of repression and to identify the victim: the orgasmic
moment experienced upon the object’s death” (122). Such a description could apply to Bolaño’s
detective in 2666, Juan de Dios Martínez, as he investigates the crimes in Santa Teresa and
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works to reconstruct the past in the confrontation with an epidemic of femicidal violence. The
cadaver is thus infused with multiple meanings: it plays a forensic, medical-judicial role as
evidence of crime; and a societal role as a symptom of the violence of gendered power
structures. It also has an economic role as the discarded byproduct of the manufacturing-
assembly technologies of the borderlands, as well as a communicative role as the corporeal text
upon which a brutal aestheticization of rape is performed in order to maintain the consistency of
the infra-state. Finally, it plays a psychic role as the forced incarnation of the repressed exquisite
corpse, the encounter with which is doubly traumatic due to both the unbearable suffering of the
victim and the impossibility of her introjection into the cultural psyche. That is to say, the
victims of femicide are impossible to mourn. The neoliberal apparatus (which encompasses both
the official and the infra-state) maintains the feminine subject’s status as exquisite corpse: each
femicide reinforces her reduction to an imago to which the bereaved can bear only a melancholic
relation.
significantly titled “Instructions for Taking Textual Photographs.” Sergio González Rodríguez
presents a “Photographic mise-en-scène” that reconstructs the final days of Lilia Alejandra
García Andrade from the perspective of her mother, Norma Andrade, who would later found an
important anti-femicide activist group. Alejandra was kidnapped from the maquiladora where
she worked on February 14, 2001 and found dead in a vacant lot one week later. González
Rodríguez presents twenty ekphrastic “textual photographs” that describe images of Alejandra
and her family, as well as spaces, documents, and moments related to her murder in an effort to
“reconstruct the family environment of one victim” (127). The reader encounters non-visual
photographs of a family both with and without Alejandra, with the final three ekhprases being of
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satellite images (complete with global positioning coordinates) of the property where her body
was found before, after, and again before the tragic discovery. The presumably identical images
of an empty lot form a patterned series in which the eventual discovery of yet another body
remains pending, deferred. González Rodríguez’s decision to present the textual images of a
specific case after outlining the history and workings of a “femicide machine” simultaneously
personalizes and generalizes the violence. His treatment of this crisis thus benefits from the
affective force of a testimonial narrative, while the strictly textual presentation of its visual
images strips the testimonio of its specificity and thus allows Alejandra to incarnate the
Nuestras Hijas de Regreso a Casa [Bring Our Daughters Home] was founded by
Alejandra’s mother, Norma Andrade, and her teacher, Marisela Ortiz in order to combat the
femicide crisis and the inaction of the authorities. I mention this family’s story within the context
of my discussion of the exquisite corpse not only because of González Rodríguez’s fascinating
ekphrastic epilogue but because of the name of Norma Andrade’s organization. It translates more
literally to “Our Daughters Back at Home” and is therefore itself a textual image rather than an
exhortation or a hope, as it is often translated (“bring them home” / “may they come home”),
though these are implicit within its meaning. Yet the image of the missing daughters having
already returned, in which we see the daughter Lilia Alejandra García Andrade, is the very
imago of the exquisite corpse. The name inscribes an impossible desire—the return of the
dead—that is impeded by an unpunished crime that has unforgivably consigned this corpse to the
psychic tomb of repression, even after the recovery and burial of her remains.
The libidinal excess that characterizes the exquisite corpse overflows into the narration of
2666, a text within which Bolaño uses free indirect discourse—and its disregard for or
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destruction of limits—to great effect. In her article “More! From Melodrama to Magnitude,” on
the excess inherent in melodramatic cinema, Joan Copjec presents the psychoanalytic aspects of
free indirect discourse in relation to the concept of seriality. On the one hand, the world offered
objective world of historical fact that excludes “life or being,” and to which we add a narrator as
inconsistent, ambiguous, and characterized by “an absolute undecidability.” While the former
would often be represented by means of direct quotation or clearly reported speech, free indirect
discourse consists of the bleeding together of narration with the characters’ speech or thoughts,
such that they frequently become indistinguishable. Copjec affirms the difference between
omniscient and free indirect narration as “the difference between a limited and an unlimited
symbolic.” Free indirect discourse is therefore constructed by its own serial nature, rather than
“through the imposition of a limit” (257). This is clear within the genre of melodrama: telenovela
plots could go on indefinitely. Copjec argues that the “seriality of melodrama, its inability to
come to an end, to form a consistent whole, is not accidental but a fundamental feature of it,” and
that the genre’s excess is “the cause of the diegesis’ inability to close itself off.” (258).
which we explain the truth of our object of study in some particular corner of the world. Yet in
the case of the femicides there is essentially nothing we can add that will give sense to the chaos
that has ravaged the border for decades. Bolaño’s epic, read through Copjec’s analysis of
melodrama, thus suggests that no omniscient narration of the femicide crisis can be given, for the
crimes do not form a part of the intelligible world of history. The serial femicides in 2666
constitute an incomprehensible excess that disrupts its own representation. Given that the cases
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themselves cannot be solved—countless variations of se cerró el caso, “the case was closed,”
form one of the novel’s bleak litanies—they are closed only to remain forever open. In similar
fashion, their narration cannot truly be closed off; femicide cannot be written, only raged at.
These serial murders resist any and all attempts to explain them, as they cannot be inscribed
within the symbolic. As Santa Teresa and Ciudad Juárez bleed into one another, the only
representable feature of the border becomes the excess that disrupts the boundaries between
While not a work of melodrama, 2666 is based on the same principles of excess and
seriality, and likewise shares the discursive format of free indirect narration, through which
Bolaño blends prose narration and dialogue such that they often become indistinguishable. With
free indirect discourse, the most vulgar examples tend to be the clearest: “Hábleme de su
genealogía, decían los cabrones. Enuméreme su árbol genealógico, decían los valedores. Bueyes
madre” (693) [“Talk to me about your family history, said the bastards. Explain your family tree,
the assholes said. Self-sucking pieces of shit. Lalo Cura didn’t get angry. Faggot sons of bitches”
(554)]. Here the narration conveys the anger that Lalo Cura purportedly does not feel or cannot
express, revealing his true affective state through free indirect discourse that transgresses the
boundaries of the character’s psyche and of social propriety. Although the novel is entirely
devoid of quotation marks (or carrots, as in the convention of the Spanish language) as indicators
of dialogue, Bolaño frequently uses dashes to denote direct speech—except in “La parte de los
crímenes.” While “La parte de Amalfitano,” the novel’s second book and by far its shortest, sets
off only one direct quote with a dash, the book on the femicides (the novel’s longest, at 350
pages) makes no such use of orthographic limits. As the horrific excess that characterizes
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femicide takes over the narration, the form of the text comes to reflect the content and the
absence of imposed limits reveals the porous nature of what was thought to be consistent: law,
border, body, speech. We read of discovery after discovery of female bodies in a paradoxical
becomes rote, and femicide ceases to be exceptional. As a social phenomenon, the murdering of
women thus behaves in the same manner as the free indirect discourse through which Bolaño
narrates it: femicide is constructed through a seriality that is unable to limit its own excess within
an unintelligible world.
Feminism has in the past thought through the notion of seriality; such considerations will be
useful for a reading of 2666, given that the text founds itself on the serial unmaking of the
feminine. Political philosopher Iris Marion Young theorizes gender through the concept of
seriality, building on the distinction made by Sartre in his Critique of Dialectical Reason
between a “group” and a “series.” While members of a group recognize themselves as such and
share a common aim, people may also fall into a series, which describes an unorganized
collectivity that is not consciously aware of its own existence. A series is defined as “a social
collective whose members are unified passively by the objects around which their actions are
oriented or by the objectified results of the material effects of the actions of others;” Young cites
Sartre’s example of people waiting for a bus as they spontaneously follow the social norms
In her 1994 article “Gender as Seriality,” Young deploys these concepts in order to
resolve a dilemma that had emerged within feminism regarding the conception of women as a
collective. The quest to locate some commonality shared by all women led to two equally
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problematic possibilities: the reduction of women to a biological category would empty such a
grouping of all social meaning, while describing “essential social attributes… founders on the
variability and diversity of women’s actual lives.” Each of these results in what Young refers to
as a “false essentialism,” either excluding some women or distorting their lives to fit its
paradigm. The philosopher’s solution of conceiving of gender in terms of seriality avoids this
There is a unity to the series of women, but it is a passive unity, one that does not
arise from the individuals called women but rather positions them through the
(733)
The series emerges spontaneously and unconsciously from what Young refers to as the milieu,
the background of any action as a set of collective habits already in place, which is experienced,
as we will have come to expect in a patriarchal system, “as constraints on the mode and limits of
action” (725, 728). The milieu within which manufacturing-assembly workers operate within the
border’s free trade zones is clearly a neoliberal system that determines and limits their actions.
Such limiting stands in stark contrast to the excess that we have said characterizes the cultural
configuration that produces the femicide crisis. This is because the operative force of the infra-
state remains beneath the hegemonic network of constraint and closure; indeed it uses the
neoliberal milieu to its advantage. A great deal of the power of such a network stems from its
ability to infiltrate and vanish, to slip in and out of positions of power. The infra-state may
display its power through theatrical violence, issue threats, and move massive amounts of
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contraband only to disappear when necessary and evade all attempts to pinpoint it. It is both
Such masculinist infiltration even creeps into Young’s presentation of her argument. In a
disturbing moment, when Young discusses the interchangeability of members in a series (which
would seem a morally neutral point), she shockingly jumps to an example of sexual violence:
In the newspaper I read about a woman who was raped, and I empathize with her
While the notion of seriality saves feminism from the dilemma of having to ascribe essential
characteristics to all women in the construction of a group, it also creates a problem. Young
claims to deploy this example of what is essentially women’s serial rapeability simply to
illustrate that seriality is a “background to rather than constitutive of personal or group identity,”
yet something else entirely slips through (731). In my serialized existence I am rapeable: while
seriality may spontaneously join diverse individuals as they emerge in unison from a particular
milieu (like a bus stop), it also allows for the reduction of a group to a depersonalized series that
thereby allows for appropriation by a dominant group. Seriality is a useful concept for feminism,
yet it may be twisted and turned against women as a dehumanizing force. As is to be expected
given Young’s example, such are the series that we encounter in 2666.
In “La parte de los crímenes” Bolaño weaves together distinct series, a series of series,
each of which is tied to the killing of women in Santa Teresa and presented through a narrative
excess. The principal series is indeed the femicides themselves, which are all narrated after the
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fact through police reports that employ the cold, forensic language of medical discourse: most
cases display signs of rape and torture, and usually cite as the cause of death stabbing or
strangulation. The novel begins one of its many series of femicide reports with the description of
a body found in February 1996: “Tenía dos heridas de arma blanca de pronóstico mortal.
También mostraba heridas profundas en los antebrazos” [“She had been stabbed twice fatally,
and her forearms were marked with deep cuts”]. Another series interrupts the list of killings
when the medical examiner ponders the victim’s race, which might be Yaqui, Pima, Mayo, Seri,
Pápago, each of which is rejected in turn as unlikely. Days later, “tras muchas cavilaciones y
mediciones” (626-7) [“after much deliberation and measuring” (500-1)], the examiner, whose
students had taken to calling him “the Dr. Mengele of Sonora,” determines that she was
undoubtedly Tarahumara.13 Set alongside Young’s theory this series becomes ironic in that it
aims to produce a group through the establishment of essential (physical) attributes for racial
belonging. This example of scientific racism encodes on the local level the structural violence of
race and class conflicts as they play themselves out on the labor markets of the border. The
doctor’s classification of groups by distinct phenotypes and his identification with the most
notorious of Nazi officers points to extreme racist tendencies that underlie the femicides
themselves as the crimes’ cultural milieu, pervasive perspectives (including among official and
scientific authorities) that indirectly support the criminal power of the infra-state. The reference
to Mengele, who was known as der Todesengel [the Angel of Death], casts a disturbing
biopolitical shadow over the femicides, one that Bolaño will reinforce directly through his
Holocaust narrative in the fifth book, on the life of soldier Hans Reiter, who would become the
13
Josef Mengele was a physician and captain of the SS who gained infamy in Auschwitz for sending prisoners to the
gas chambers and for engaging in human experimentation, particularly on twins. After the war he fled to South
America and lived the rest of his life hiding out in Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil.
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reclusive writer Benno von Archimboldi and whose nephew Klaus Haas becomes the prime
This series resumes with the six bodies found in March 1996. The first, that of a ten-year-
old girl who was stabbed eight times, brings one of the policemen to tears. A thirteen-year-old is
found strangled to death, and her report leads to a series of musings on all of the possible ways
that her killers could have dumped the body in the valley (Juan de Dios Martínez is one of the
few officers who truly investigate the crimes). A girl of sixteen is found next, stabbed only once,
but the wound was “profunda, que literalmente le había atravesado el cuerpo” [“so deep that the
blade had literally pierced her through”]. The cause of death, however, is determined to be
“estrangulamiento y rotura del hueso hioides” (627-30) [“strangulation and a fracture of the
hyoid bone” (501-3)], a phrase that becomes another dark litany throughout “La parte de los
crímenes.” This particular forensic point encodes extreme sexual violence, as it occurs when the
killers strangle the victim to death during rape to heighten their own enjoyment, a disturbing fact
of the femicides that Jean Franco refers to as “Lustmord, or death pleasure” (219). Another
sixteen-year-old is discovered stabbed and mutilated, though the latter may have been “obra de
los perros del lugar” [“the work of dogs in the area”]; her resemblance to the previous victim
leads the press to wonder whether the two were twins. The last two victims of March, one
sixteen and the other between eighteen and twenty, had been stabbed to death after repeated
rapes. The narration of the March femicides ends on a curiously sexual note, telling us that the
inspector assigned to the final case found the girl “muy atractiva. Tenía piernas largas y el
cuerpo delgado aunque no flaco, el pecho abundante, la cabellera por debajo de los hombros.
Tanto la vagina como el ano mostraban señales de abrasiones. Después de ser violada la
acuchillaron hasta matarla” (630-1) [“very attractive. She was thin but not skinny, and she had
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long legs, full breasts, and hair past her shoulders. There was both vaginal and anal abrasion.
After she was raped she had been stabbed to death” (503-4)].
As the penetrative jouissance (via knife or phallus) of the series of crimes takes its toll,
the authorities working the cases move from tearful empathy with the victim (in the first case) to
sexual fantasy regarding the cadaver (in the last). No case is solved, only one girl is identified,
and each body displays wounds that bear the mark of enjoyment that characterizes it as a
perversion of the exquisite corpse. Each cadaver is infused with libidinal value precisely in the
moment of death through the act of rape. The victims are thus forced through a chain of
category of the exquisite corpse. Such a transformation takes place either materially as a body
tomb of repression, whose mourning will be forever deferred. These cadavers also form a
surrealist exquisite corpse, for Bolaño inscribes the girls’ deaths (or rather the forensic
reconstruction of their deaths) within a narrative series whose connections are thus revealed to be
tenuous. They may be linked temporally (March 1996), spatially (being found in the same
vicinity), or by some imaginary relation, as with “las hermanas malditas” [“the cursed sisters”]
who soon became “las gemelas infaustas” (630) [“the ill-fated twins” (504)] in the press in yet
another textual transformation of the corpse. The presence of an exquisite corpse, which is
always also a traumatic absence, is unbearable because its only meaning emerges through the
The narration of the March 1996 femicides reads like a horrific surrealist amalgam of
vignettes, forming an arbitrarily constructed collective body (a series) whose connections exist
only tautologically, that is to say, by means of their own juxtaposition. With respect to the final
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case, it is through the ambiguity of free indirect discourse that Bolaño destroys the limit between
the inspector’s own personal (sexual) assessment of the girl’s attractiveness and the official
police report documenting the sexual violence done to her body, such that we cannot tell where
one ends and the other begins. Like the textual exquisite corpse, free indirect style may produce
meaning in the gap between two disparate elements through the elimination of the boundary that
divides them. Brett Levinson maintains that no individual atrocity in the novel “serves as the
example or ground of atrocity as such. Rather, each functions as one more atrocity in a
disconnected but repeated series” (182). He argues that the “stop,” the closing of the case, is the
necessary unifying point between the crimes, “the rhythm of murder that binds one assassination
to another, or, to all others” (190). The closure of an unsolved case is paradoxical, as the crime
itself remains open in the absence of justice. The legal system therefore engages in its own
construction of an exquisite corpse in the linking of each femicide to the one that precedes it. The
paperwork and case files thus become a postmodern version of Breton’s surrealist game, forming
a (dis)unity of dismemberment through the inevitable repetition of the phrase se cerró el caso,
The forensic presentation of femicides in 2666 forms a gendered series (in Young’s
sense) that emerges from the milieu of manufacturing-assembly plants, narcotráfico, sexism, and
impunity that characterizes the border. Seriality indeed constitutes a fundamental narrative
device in the structure of the novel, as Bolaño weaves numerous series in and out of the primary
series of the murders. In this way the femicides form the very milieu from which minor series
spontaneously emerge, and back into which they soon disperse. The novel’s seriality self-
multiplies, as the crimes not only reproduce themselves indefinitely but normalize misogyny in a
process that Bolaño encodes in a grammar of repetition and serial narration. We encounter one
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such moment when several groups of police officers finishing their night shifts gather for
breakfast at a diner and begin to tell jokes about women. The second joke presents an anomaly,
when an officer named González asks why women don’t know how to ski. The punchline—that
it doesn’t snow in the kitchen—is met with little laughter, as most of the officers, having never
skied, do not understand it. The ambiguous free indirect narration asks critically, “¿En dónde
esquiar en medio del desierto?” (690) [“Where do you ski in the middle of the desert?” (552)].
The geographic failure of this joke highlights the fact that it is imported, and therefore points to
An unnamed inspector who thoroughly enjoyed the jokes outlasts González, who grew
weary after working himself into a frenzy telling over twenty of them, each of which is narrated
in the text. The inspector wonders about the truth behind such jokes, and then tells a few of his
own, but not before scratching his crotch and dropping his large (phallic) Smith & Wesson
revolver on the table with a resounding thud. When the violence of femicide is explicitly
inscribed within the seriality of the jokes, it arrives as an excess that surpasses the limits of the
series’ own exhaustion. Yet the inspector’s lines significantly take the form of refranes,
proverbs—that is, condensations of cultural wisdom: “Las mujeres de la cocina a la cama, y por
el camino a madrazos. O bien decía: las mujeres son como las leyes, fueron hechas para ser
violadas” (691) [“A woman’s path lies from the kitchen to the bedroom, with a beating along the
way. Or he said: women are like laws, they were made to be broken” (553)]. These statements
beating and rape that encodes the very grammar of femicide. “Broken” in the second saying is
something of a mistranslation, however: while it reflects the transgression of the law expressed
in the statement’s use of the term violada, it fails to reproduce the sexual nature of its application
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to women, as violar is the standard term for rape. This aphorism therefore draws attention to the
jouissance inherent in the transgression of the law, while aligning the crime of rape with an
alternative legality—the anomic nature of the infra-regime—that not only constitutes itself
through just such a transgressive, masculine performance, but infiltrates the discourse of the very
authorities charged with upholding the official law of the Mexican state: the police.
Thankfully, not everyone plays into these disturbing jokes. In its description of the
general laughter that erupts at the second proverb, the narration distinguishes several officers
who ignore the inspector’s comment, speaking among themselves or eating in silence. We read
that they eat their breakfasts “acodados en la angustia y en la duda. Acodados en lo esencial que
no lleva a ninguna parte. Ateridos de sueño: es decir de espaldas a las risas que propugnaban otro
sueño” (692) [“hunched over in anguish and doubt. Hunched over in contemplation of essential
questions, which doesn’t get you anywhere. Numb with sleep: in other words with their backs
turned to the laughter that invited a different kind of sleep” (553)]. Here the narration presents
two types of sueño, “sleep/dream.” The sexist discourse (which ranges from sexist clichés to
extreme sexual violence and murder) constitutes one kind of sueño: like the nebulous haze that
confined the so-called Laura within a particular zone of the symbolic order in “Cambio de
armas,” a heavy cloud of violence hangs over Santa Teresa and deforms the cultural discourse
about women. This is the aforementioned “war of interpretation” in Ciudad Juárez that Melissa
Wright recounts between anti-femicide activists and the government, as women are forced to
prove that the crimes visited upon their bodies are not their own fault. The other sueño, that
experienced by the officers who ignore the jokes, is not a hopeful one, however. Theirs is the
sleep of exhaustion—from the series of jokes and the physical violence that they translate into
discourse. The officers’ anguish and doubt stems from their impotence in the face of the
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impunity of sexual violence; this diner scene therefore suggests that the best we can hope for is
for the police to ignore the crimes, because at least then they are not contributing to them.
Bolaño reproduces the exquisite corpse in another highly disturbing series, the one that
plays most directly into the series of bodies generated through femicide. This takes place once
again within the hyper-masculine discourse among Santa Teresa’s police officers. The narration
of a series of seven bodies found in August of 1995 (in a single paragraph spanning five pages)
derails itself when it arrives at the fourth case: that of twenty-year-old Mónica Posadas. The
medical examiner reports that, in addition to having been anally and vaginally raped, she was
found with traces of semen in her throat. This fact “contribuyó a que se hablara en los círculos
policiales de una violación «por los tres conductos»” [“led to talk in police circles of a ‘three-
way’ rape”]. One officer argues, however, that “una violación completa era la que se hacía por
los cinco conductos” [“a full rape meant a rape of all five orifices”], including the ears. Another
adds the eyes for a total of seven. As the sickening excess of 2666 outdoes its own seriality yet
un tipo del DF que violaba por los ocho conductos, que eran los siete ya
mencionados, digamos los siete clásicos, más el ombligo, al que el tipo del DF
practicaba una incisión no muy grande con su cuchillo y luego metía allí su verga,
aunque, claro, para hacer eso había que estar muy taras bulba. Lo cierto es que la
[a man from Mexico City who did it eight ways, which meant the seven orifices
previously mentioned, call it the seven classics, plus the navel, where the man
from Mexico City would make a small incision with his knife, then stick in his
224
dick, although to do that, of course, you had to be out of your tree. Anyway, the
story of the “three-way” rape spread and became a favorite among the Santa
Beyond the mere normalization of rape, the phrase “the seven classics” imbues an absurd,
violently perverse masculine fantasy with positive value based on a tradition that does not even
exist. In the anecdote of the D.F. predator Bolaño’s farcical parody of the Mexican authorities
reaches a Sadean level of rape that requires surgical intervention to take place; this story thus
inscribes an excess that pushes the Elizondian trinity of sex/surgery/torture beyond the limits of
what is even possible for sexually penetrative violence. The free indirect narration once more
obscures the source of its content, as we cannot tell who draws the line at surgical navel rape.14
The comment that of course, you’d have to be crazy passes judgment in what amounts to a mere
parody of a moral boundary: a false limit in a limitless sea of exponential excess, a limit that
exists for the sole purpose of being transgressed and thereby adding to the text’s violent seriality.
The report of the Posadas case resumes with the circumstances of her rape becoming a
through the juxtaposition of the images of an angel and a dog. Let us recall the image of the
angel at the outset of Diamela Eltit’s El infarto del alma, the figure that scorns the narrator,
refusing to carry her, instead abandoning her “en las peores encrucijadas que presentan los
caminos. No hay sombra más devastadora, más poderosa que la que proyecta el vuelo de un
ángel” (n.p.) [“in the worst crossroads that paths present. There’s no shadow more devastating,
14
The Russian literary reference in the original text to Taras Bulba, an 1835 story by Nikolai Gogol, would only add
to the absurdity of the passage if it came from a Santa Teresa police officer rather than an extradiegetic narrator,
though this fact does nothing to clear up the ambiguity of 2666’s free indirect narration.
225
more powerful than that cast by the flight of an angel” (my translation)]. While this spiteful force
framework, in 2666 it takes the form of a horrible angelic witness. The body of Mónica Posadas
was found naked below the waist, her legs covered with “Tanta sangre que vista de lejos, o vista
desde una cierta altura, un desconocido (o un ángel, puesto que allí no había ningún edificio
desde el cual contemplarla) hubiera dicho que llevaba medias rojas” [“So much blood that if seen
from a distance, or from a certain height, a stranger (or an angel, since there was no nearby
building from which to look down) might have said the girl was wearing red tights”]. The
damage to her body took the form of “mordidas y desgarraduras, como si un perro callejero la
hubiera intentado comer” (577) [“bites and tears, as if a street dog had gnawed at her” (461)]. It
is as though she were seen by an angel, devoured by a dog; ironically, the human element of her
destruction is omitted. Jean Franco asserts that 2666 indeed recounts “the end of the human as
such and the ferocity of misogyny that underwrites it” (241). The angel and dog in this passage
represent the two forms of consumption that have appeared throughout this study of feminine
subjectivity: the material and the visual. The imago of the exquisite corpse synthesizes these
elements, as the melancholic preservation of the dead as psychic image, yet 2666 twists this
through the jouissance that drives its sexual violence. In Bolaño’s novel the exquisite corpse is
The subtle reference to Emilia Pardo Bazán’s story “Las medias rojas” [“The Red
Stockings”], about the beating and disfigurement of a beautiful young girl by her possessive
father, suggests more than just the destruction of the body as image. While we do not know what
happened to Mónica Posadas, her macabre “red tights” remind us that the violence of the
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performative practices of the infra-state reproduces itself beyond the porous limits of whatever
nefarious group orchestrates the crimes. Instances of domestic violence easily insert themselves
into the seriality of the femicides in order to enjoy (in all senses) the impunity of the region. For
the series of femicides is essentially non-linear: it is a series of cuts and negations, of repetitive
disruptions of time itself. Months and years pass as we move through the narration, but nothing
changes; Bolaño unifies boredom and violence. Brett Levinson argues that while time “binds the
multiple series of events” in 2666, time is “not a concept” but rather “a form of being that
withdraws from conceptualization.” Time itself is cut up along with the bodies, as the seriality of
the crimes overrides the chronology of human experience: “Serial killing comments upon a
certain automaticity or technicity, a kind of beat operating within and over human history, human
action, and the human body.” The series of distinct crimes against individual bodies nevertheless
permutation of rearrangements” (Levinson 190). Thus we are faced with an overwhelming pile
of crimes that disfigures history itself, reducing it to the minimal difference of repetition of the
same events that produces ruin after ruin. And in the case of Mónica Posadas, there is a
metaphoric angel that bears witness to this destruction, to the ruins of history and the ruining of
2666 through the motif of the angel as the witness to devastation. Benjamin’s famous “angel of
history” offers what is perhaps the most coherent position regarding the intolerable
Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps
piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would
227
like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a
storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence
that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into
the future to which his back is turned while the pile of debris before him grows
The seriality of these crimes may be reconceived as a singularity, and not only in the sense of
being part of the same disturbingly unified (technical, automatic) human catastrophe. A
technological singularity names the theoretical point at which artificial intelligence would be
able to produce infinitely improved versions of itself, and thus no longer remain under human
control. And within the realm of astrophysics, singularity describes the point of infinite density
that is presumed to lie at the center of a black hole. The notion of the singular interweaves these
twin images of infinite technological reproduction (through expansion) and infinite devouring
destruction (through condensation). Yet far from a nightmare of science fiction or distant
astronomical void, such singularity seems to be the operative principle of the femicides as a
series. They occur on the border within the context of a neoliberal “paradise” of manufacturing-
assembly facilities designed to engage in their own forms of infinite reproduction of goods to
labor and that therefore generates a limitless amount of waste. Consumption and expulsion (of
the feminine) are the activities proper to the technological body of the border, an industrial,
automated body emblematic of the material progress that blasts the Benjaminian angel of history
backward (and therefore forward) into a future that has exceeded the limits of history itself.
Historical chronology has become the singularity of catastrophe, as the violence of accumulation
228
It comes as no surprise, then, that “La parte de los crímenes” ends with the image of a
black hole. One final cadaver (whose finality extends itself towards an infinite horizon of
violence) is found around Christmas in 1997. The body remains unidentified, though the high
heels in the girl’s possession lead the authorities to infer that she could be a prostitute. Holiday
festivities take place as usual, with laughter filling the streets. “Algunas de estas calles eran
totalmente oscuras, similares a agujeros negros, y las risas que salían de no se sabe dónde eran la
única señal, la única información que tenían los vecinos y los extraños para no perderse” (791)
[“Some of these streets were completely dark, like black holes, and the laughter that came from
who knows where was the only sign, the only beacon that kept residents and strangers from
getting lost” (633)]. Just as the fictional Santa Teresa devours its reader, Ciudad Juárez becomes
a black hole that threatens to swallow Mexico, the United States, or the world from its globalized
Through its exploration of the critiques of neoliberalism staged by Eltit and Bolaño this chapter
has outlined two radically different transformations of the cut in relation to feminine subjectivity.
In a dictatorial context, the cut is implemented as the imposition of a limit—one that marks and
contains subversion—even when deployed as the subtraction of the limit that divides subject and
world: the flaying depicted in the Leng Tch’é that amounts to an extreme form of ontological
performance reconfigures it as lines drawn on the surface of the body in a decentralized network
of interruptions and openings against hegemonic closure. Her “zone of pain” establishes a
simultaneous disruption of language and the body such that they cannot be appropriated by the
regime. Eltit’s post-hegemonic feminine subjectivity is that of a bleeding body whose wounds
229
are lines of flight that always already place it beyond the limits of authoritarian power. She
writes (cuts) from the margins that lie outside the regime even as they are found within its
borders, and her marginal subjects are excluded (cut off) from the national body as the residues
and remainders (social, economic, erotic) of a power that cannot assimilate them.
the very failure to cut that generates the excess that defines the horrific violence of femicide. The
enigmatic network of power that rules the border from below establishes and sustains its
dominance not through cuts (though all we really know of it is that it rapes, stabs, and strangles)
but through the production of relations. The textually-produced exquisite corpse (of sexually-
produced exquisite corpses) that we encounter in 2666 is a series of arbitrarily linked bodies that
should not be connected to one another. The violence each victim suffers reduces her to yet
another empty signifier in the seemingly endless chain manufactured by the femicide machine.
Ni una más, “not one more,” cry the brave activists in Ciudad Juárez, women who know that
their demand will not be met. What leverage can one have against a power that cannot be
named? This cry inscribes the intolerable nature of the violence on the border, and highlights the
individuality of the victims (named on the pink crosses that mark their deaths) in an effort to
interrupt the continuation of a spontaneous series that seeks to reduce its feminine elements to a
The free indirect narration of “La parte de los crímenes,” its propensity for litanies (of
jokes, phobias, etc.), and its minimally distinct forensic reports all point to the novel’s failure
(refusal) to cut itself off, over and over. This perverse seriality frames a violence characterized
by the transgression of limits, yet not through a cut that simultaneously breaks down one limit
(the body) so as to establish another (the state), as in Elizondo’s chronicle of an instant. 2666
230
instead represents a violence that acts as though there were no limits in the first place. It
similar to that of Eltit’s marginal figures—a darkness that covers acts of rape rather than rubbing.
Bolaño’s vision in 2666 is therefore apocalyptic in the etymological sense: apo-kaluptein, “to un-
cover, reveal.” The apocalyptic revelation of the novel is the darkness of the femicidal infra-
regime that lies at the heart of the (also femicidal) globalized network into which we are all
integrated. There is no deferral, no instant; only a terrible disruption of history through the
establishment of a cyclical chronology that cuts up time itself in the production of a catastrophe
of repetition. In this world in which the political has become both the criminal and the corporate,
in which the cut can no longer subvert, feminine subjectivity itself becomes the unbearable
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CONCLUSION:
THE OPEN BODY
At all times, even at its most theoretical, this project has been grounded in the materiality of the
body—the open body, the opening of the body through the cut—and its becoming-image, as well
as the spectacle of its politicization, consumption, and negation. The forcible production of the
feminine subject has been a process of multiplication, one that ultimately leads to an intolerable
seriality. What began as an image multiplied a thousand times in the mirrors of Dr. Farabeuf’s
dark chamber was transformed into the serial acts of rape, torture, and murder repeated
thousands of times on the border, as reality eclipsed the macabre fantasy of politico-literary
imagination. This deformation of the feminine has passed through what we may deem three
distinct stages: the public, the clandestine, and (to put a name to that which eludes all
We began with the feminization of the pharmakós in the Leng Tch’é execution as a public
performance, onto which Elizondo grafts masculine jouissance in his psycho-surgical novel. This
work functions as a theoretical text outlining the exclusionary processes through which the state
founds itself on the simultaneous formation and deformation of feminine subjectivity that gives
meaning to its own limits. Turning to Latin American dictatorial powers, we examined the
clandestine maneuvers of Southern Cone regimes in their fetishization and confinement of the
subversive body within the dark chamber in processes diversely critiqued through the
experimental forays of Pizarnik, Valenzuela, and Eltit into the undersides of official power.
Finally an analysis of femicide on the Mexican-U.S. border confronted the spectrality of the
infra-state, as violence against the female body has been deployed in the establishment of an
232
Bolaño’s novel, this power must be traced through its effects, represented as serial excess. My
trans-historical approach to the iterations and political vicissitudes of the open body in Latin
America may be condensed into the following images of feminine political subjectivity from
each of the texts analyzed, as they encode distinct relations between power and the body.
feminize the sacrificial body. There is no feminine subject a priori—she is rather the negative
construct that establishes the limits of the social upon which the hegemonic state depends.
interstice formed between the countess’ contemplation of her mirror image and her spectacles of
fetishized torture. The scopophilic fantasies of Pizarnik’s dark vignettes reveal the desires of
hegemony itself through the obsessions of the sovereign that stands as its incarnation. Yet they
also demonstrate how such desires ultimately inscribe their own failure and impossibility:
Báthory’s immurement within her castle suggests that absolute power can never see beyond the
hegemony to post-hegemony; that is, from guerrilla resistance to the feminist opening of the
wound through the appropriation of the master’s weapons. These two tendencies correspond to
the two gunshots that frame the narrative of Laura’s confinement: the (past) failure of resistance
and the (future) turn to writing in apuntamiento. The psychoanalytic work of uncovering the
wounds of the past leads to the political work of maintaining such wounds for the sake
interrupting the hegemonic narrative that seeks to overwrite its own violence. Valenzuela’s
233
feminism thus understands the body as a palimpsest, and her narratives aim to sound its depths in
Apertura. Eltit takes up the knife herself—both literally and literarily—so as to stage a
radical reformulation of both cut and image in relation to feminine subjectivity, reconceived as a
marginal collective. Her self-inflicted wounds, narrated through her prosopopoeic relation to the
ragged homeless woman of her novel, become decentralized openings that frustrate hegemonic
closure from a marginal beyond that the dominant order can neither successfully incorporate nor
disavow.
Expulsión. Bolaño deploys his cynical nihilism in a representation of the femicide crisis
that suggests that whatever progress had been made in the critique (feminist, political, literary) of
the powers that orchestrated the oppressive feminine mise-en-scène in dictatorial Latin America
seems to be negated through the logic of expulsion that dominates the contemporary Mexican-
U.S. border. The oft-cited assertion in 2666 that within the crimes “se esconde el secreto el
mundo” (439) [“the secret of the world is hidden” (348)] enigmatically endows the violence of
femicide with a semblance of meaning amid a chaotic landscape. This is a secret whose very
withdrawal exposes the violence of the exquisite corpse that lies at the heart of the neoliberal
fantasy, a violence so thoroughly incorporated that it has continued unabated and with impunity
for over two decades. The serial repetition and reproduction of the exquisite corpse is an effect of
globalization’s dirty secret, as the narco-political power that has emerged in the transnational
space of the border comes to repeat and transform the foundational exclusion (expulsion) of the
This project may branch into further study of both texts and areas that it could not engage
due to reasons of time and space. The genre of the dictator novel would provide useful
234
considerations of power, particularly in relation to masculinity and language, such as in Augusto
Roa Bastos’ Yo el supremo [I the Supreme] (1974). Set alongside Pizarnik’s treatment of
the dictator would complement the analysis of the feminized subversive body that I have
undertaken here. Another avenue of research is to be found through Manuel Puig’s El beso de la
mujer araña [The Kiss of the Spider Woman] (1976). Puig’s exploration of queer subjectivity
(and the queering of subjectivity) within dictatorial confines problematizes the notion of género
through the multiplicity and fluidity of sexual genders and textual genres. Due to the social and
political urgency of the femicide crisis, this project may also link to pressing investigations into
narco culture generally, novels about the killings such as Alicia Gaspar del Alba’s Desert Blood:
The Juárez Murders (2005), and films such as Lourdes Portillo’s Señorita extraviada (2001) and
Carlos Carrera’s Backyard: El traspatio (2009), and more recently the FX network television
Ridley Scott’s bleak film The Counselor (2013), written by Cormac McCarthy, is
particularly relevant for this study of feminine subjectivity. In addition to positioning the drug
lord (Rubén Blades) as a Platonic “philosopher king” within the new world order—the film’s
climax builds toward his metaphysical discourse on the meaning of life (and death)—the film
presents a synthesis of Countess Báthory and the narco in the figure of Malkina (Cameron Diaz).
She is a calculating woman who finds great success in the drug trade through cunning, killing,
and careful use of her feral femininity. In an infamous scene she removes her underwear, climbs
onto the windshield of her boyfriend’s Ferrari convertible, and grinds herself to orgasm on the
glass as he watches from beneath in shock. Reiner (Javier Bardem), Malkina’s boyfriend and
partner in crime, is traumatized by this experience, later confessing to a friend that what he saw
235
was “like one of those catfish things. One of those bottom feeders you see going up the side of
the aquarium. Sucking its way up the glass,” and that it “was too gynecological to be sexy”
(McCarthy 92-3). In my analysis of Farabeuf I identified Vilém Flusser’s vampire squid as the
metaphorical devourer in the postmodern world of images, a vector of power aligned with the
masculine as it consumes the feminine in her becoming-image. Yet here we encounter the gaping
maw of the catfish (or perhaps an ironically phallic lamprey) as a feminine image that speaks to
the gynophobia mentioned by Elvira Campos in 2666, a condition that she elevated to the level
relation on its head, transforming the most masculine of status objects—a Ferrari—into a vaginal
speculum as the feminine abyss threatens to devour (from above) he who is forcibly placed on its
precipice. This is not to propose a feminist redemption of Malkina—like Báthory, she is a source
of something that approaches pure evil in the film, or an absolute realpolitik—yet the feminine
(narco)hegemony. Reiner’s gynecological terror runs far deeper than the acute fear of staring
down the barrel of a gun. It is a form of psycho-sexual vertigo, a synthesis of falling into and
being devoured by an open female body that operates with the perverse freedom of the border, in
defiance of both law and gender normativity. The film’s innovation is precisely this organization
around “the fear of a monstrous feminine sexuality as a metonym for the unfathomable and all-
consuming new economy” (Nguyen n.p.). Feminine subjectivity is split into two possibilities in
relation to this violent neoliberal landscape: The Counselor juxtaposes Malkina to Laura
(Penélope Cruz), who ends up becoming another victim of a murderous cartel due to the
decisions of her fiancé, the titular counselor, in his attempt to get involved in the drug trade. The
236
feminine seems to exist only as an open body in relation to the globalized violence of the border:
either as an abject product in its series of exquisite corpses or as a monster who perversely
and capital, of body and image. The fact that the most cynical of representations of the border
seems to understand it best speaks to the urgency of critical inquiry into the elusive structures of
power whose epicenter is now located in a transnational space of globalized crisis. This project
has outlined the participation of the feminine in such networks through relations of negation and
(Valenzuela), exclusion and critique (Eltit), and finally labor and expulsion (Bolaño). We began
with the foundation of the political order through the negation of the open body as a sacrificial
act of subject (de)formation that established the limits of the state. The passage through the
gendered relations of dictatorial power into the violence of femicide on the Mexican border has
transformed this singular negation of the feminine into a process of serial production of open
bodies in a contemporary Latin American synthesis of economic and sexual violence (what I
referred to earlier as phagedaenic hegemony). The act of opening itself, like the cut, becomes the
of images and forms of control, consumption, and critique reveal the urgency of attention to the
relation between cut, image, and the feminine with respect to Latin America’s current political
crises of violence—which transform and repeat the deformation of the feminine that founded the
237
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