Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies

Travesia

ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjla20

Thinking In The Present: Virus, Feminism, Politicity

Diamela Eltit, Rita Segato & Javier Guerrero

To cite this article: Diamela Eltit, Rita Segato & Javier Guerrero (2021) Thinking In The Present:
Virus, Feminism, Politicity, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 30:3, 475-489, DOI:
10.1080/13569325.2021.2003761

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13569325.2021.2003761

Published online: 03 Jan 2022.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 134

View related articles

View Crossmark data

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=cjla20
Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 2021
Vol. 30, No. 3, 475–489, https://doi.org/10.1080/13569325.2021.2003761

Diamela Eltit, Rita Segato, and

Javier Guerrero

THINKING IN THE PRESENT: VIRUS,

FEMINISM, POLITICITY

The following conversation took place on 20 September 2020, during a virtual

encounter jointly organised by Princeton University’s Latin American Studies
Programme, and the journal Cuadernos de Literatura, from the Pontificia
Universidad Javeriana, Bogota. “Thinking in the Present” offered a critical opportunity
to confront the interpretative volatility and paralysis of criticism of the current
moment, the failure of liberal democracy, the deepening of inequality based on
intersectionality, and the geopolitics of the COVID-19 pandemic. The virus has
disorganised and exposed the intrinsic failure of the algorithms set in the past few
decades to predict our movements, to anticipate, and therefore to control, life on the
planet, our behavioural patterns and wishes: from how we shop to how we vote. The
interpretative failure vis-
a-vis the virus’s global behaviour – its universalisation in
other words, that attempts an interpretation that could apply from New Zealand to
Colombia, from Honduras to Singapore – summons forth two thinkers who have worked
around the notion of uncertainty, thinkers who could be defined with a key word:
suspicion. The photograph featured on the event poster (Figure 1) is by Lotty
Rosenfeld, who had recently passed away in Santiago de Chile. The encounter also took
place in memoriam of this unforgettable artist, who taught us how to cross the sign.
Her crosses bear witness to an indelible act: Lotty Rosenfeld (1943–2020).

Keywords: Insurgency; Chile’s 2019 social unrest; decolonial thinking;

feminism; COVID-19; Diamela Eltit; Rita Segato

Underlying the poetics and politics of Rita Segato and Diamela Eltit is a question that
leads to an archaeology, through which misunderstandings are corrected, concepts are
remapped, from where it is possible to establish the base for rethinking the rules of the
game, in order to imagine its ultimate possible connection. Both were invited in order
to discuss their work and the gestation of the operability of their discourse. These are
two disciplines and two undisciplined women. Their lack of discipline consists of their
thinking outside of their respective fields and theoretical frameworks; on the other
hand, their discipline resides in the search and localisation of the place where methodo-
logical errors are forged, the place where the threads of discourse interweave. Both,
from unequal spaces, even if within the same tradition: one, an Argentine who has
spent most of her time abroad, in Brazil, and who has recently returned to her native
# 2022 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
476 J O U R N A L O F L AT I N A M E R I C A N C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

Figure 1. Lotty Rosenfeld, 1981. The artist in one of the planes that flew over Santiago
rica.
during CADA’s Ay Sudame

country; the other one a Chilean who remained in Chile during the dictatorship, then
lived for some short periods in Mexico and Argentina, before spending fifteen years
dividing her time between New York and Santiago. In a certain way, both deal with
the same issues: the historical role of the State in the construction of inequalities, identi-
ties, and alterity through history; neoliberalism, globalisation, the body, the politicity
and coloniality of power. The core of their work resides in a deep debate over the
vocabulary, lexicon, and syntaxes of their disciplines, the naming and moulds of political
interpretation.
The photograph featured on the event poster is by Lotty Rosenfeld, who had
recently passed away in Santiago de Chile. The encounter also took place in
memoriam of this unforgettable artist, who taught us how to cross the sign. Her
crosses bear witness to an indelible act: Lotty Rosenfeld (1943–2020) (Figure 1).
Javier Guerrero: I would like to begin with a double question for Rita, one
that has to do with our life during the pandemic, something that also relates to
the uncertainty and suspension of the interpretive frameworks of this moment,
something that you delineate in your wonderful article “Coronavirus: Todos somos
mortales. Del significante vacıo a la naturaleza abierta de la historia”. I think that
with the pandemic there is a critical opening that could be interesting, but that no
doubt is hard to theorise and interrogate. I would like to consider together the
uncertainty and also the meaning that the pandemic takes on in different countries,
with their different political and social uses.
Rita Segato: The pandemic is a big scanner, a big machine that scans reality
and brings to the surface the tension points in the cracks of the present, the alter-
natives to the present, because it reveals what is invisible, or what we had consid-
ered normal. The pandemic reveals the abnormality of the normal and its
antagonistic forces. I think it is impossible to know what will happen after the pan-
demic, but what we are definitely seeing is this antagonism. Thinking about this
medium, Zoom, the medium we are using to communicate, this is now a public
 E LT I T, S E G A T O & G U E R R E R O 477

space, in the public life of work, of productivity colonising our domestic space; or
maybe the opposite: our private life, our own space, enters and transforms the
ways in which we used to act in public space.
Guerrero: We are witnessing a contradiction between the colonisation of private
space and the emancipation of public space, other readings that have to do with
Zoom, with all these systems of communication. Nevertheless, it is interesting that
even considering all their failures, all their glitches, it is now possible to have this
virtual space for debate. Concerning this, Diamela, I wonder what you think about
the 2019 protests in Chile – the October insurrection that preceded the pandemic
by a few months.
Diamela Eltit: I would like to start by emphasising that Rita Segato’s thought
production is very interesting. There is already a Latin American production that
is very specific, because it is precisely focused on the here and the now of local
bodies and their experiences. This to me is very interesting vis-
a-vis this illness: an
illness that medievalises us, reminds us of the Middle Ages, admittedly with differ-
ent technologies. This is where the system is suspended, and now we are in an
astonishing moment, a becoming-medieval in a way. As Rita has brilliantly said,
what is at stake here is public versus private, revealing versus hiding. There is a
series of political and cultural mechanisms involved in all that we are witnessing.
This pandemic has revealed what the neoliberal system conceals; this is a system
that inhabits us in a globalised way, with a capitalist accumulation – I repeat, glo-
balised – of an unprecedented magnitude; this, of course, has weakened the
Nation-State. Nation-States have been affected by this accumulation of capital that
exceeds them, and they are in an inescapable relationship with these forces of cap-
ital, they bow down to them. On the other hand, I consider it important to point
to a political hollowing out, a major crisis of the political parties, which is affecting
all democracies. We see this more visibly in France, Chile, Venezuela.
I would also like to underline the politicity of the virus. The virus has politics,
but the administration of the virus also has politics. This is why we see how the
virus circulates through social space, how it entwines, where it entwines, and how
the system can’t function very well when debt and the exchange of goods are sus-
pended. This generates a crisis that translates into unemployment and precarity. At
least in Chile this is noticeable and I think it is the same in the USA; and I imagine
this replicates everywhere else. We are globalised but we are local, in how differ-
ent systems manage the crisis. Even if everything intersects generically with neo-
liberalism. I think that Segato’s view opens up a space for discussion, where we
could bring other contributions, mainly European and from the United States.
Segato paints a picture that I find fascinating. Also, in her case, it will generate a
connection with other problems regarding how to de-eliticise the Academy and pol-
itics – the great process of de-eliticising. This is where we are in Chile, this misun-
derstanding between the elites and everyday life, because there is an outlandish
separation between political parties, the Congress, civic life, etc. Segato has man-
aged to transfer her knowledge – which comes from the essay form and theory,
for example – to the feminist collective LasTesis;1 and they, LasTesis, also crossed
borders. There’s a displacement here that I find intriguing. We have to think about
our decolonisation. Decolonisation in the most realistic sense of the term: not
478 J O U R N A L O F L AT I N A M E R I C A N C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

because we might be decolonised but because we are decolonising. And it is where

the emancipation of thought resides. And, if you follow Ranci
ere (2009), it is pos-
sible to establish productive dialogues between writing and the body. I think the
big task is decolonisation.
Segato: In order to think through decolonisation I find inspiration in Anıbal
Quijano, who I consider my great master. We can’t rewind. Decolonising: I think
we need to think better the idea of a possible decolonisation. Rewinding history is
impossible. Decolonisation sometimes brings to mind the idea of a point zero, a
place of origin. This point zero isn’t recoverable. Those peoples who were in that
initial situation, during the first days of the Conquista, and then of colonisation,
continued their journeys, they continued their own thread of history, although
ripped, torn, hindered, intercepted; and their thread of history, even if ripped,
torn, hindered, intercepted went on through other channels. This is why Quijano
(2014) preferred to tear the cloth. Then we can talk about the order of discourse,
ripping the order of discourse, opening fissures in this order of discourse, in order
to erode it. This is interesting, because decolonial thinking is impressively similar
to poststructuralism – forms that speak of this ripping, of the gaps in the order of
discourse, of a destabilisation of the order of discourse, with a neocolonial con-
science. This is why this neologism, the decolonial is coined, this is an alternative
to the idea of decolonisation as a return to some original purity; which isn’t pos-
sible, because we are dealing with a world that continued on its journey. There
are phantasmagoric forms below the surface. I see David Lynch’s Twin Peaks in
these forms – ghosts that you can spot through the fine epithelium of the nations,
those of decolonial landscapes, like all our nations from north to south.
Guerrero: In the works of you both there are tools to consider the relationship
between the nation and globalisation. In Rita’s, State intervention in the face of the
fetish of the globalised, and certain figures that prohibit the foray of the State into pol-
itics. I think it is important to go over this because Diamela has also touched upon
this very clearly, in her essays and novels. This tension between global and local,
between paradigms of the State, the Nation-State, and globalisation. I remember El
cuarto mundo as a great survey of how alterity activates global fluxes in the national
sphere. Maybe we could trace here a parallel between State intervention and, once
again, the shape of State faced with what could be an omnipresent globalisation?
Eltit: In fact, to begin with what Rita was saying, when I think of decolonisation
I am thinking on a symbolic level. Obviously, from a materialist point of view it
isn’t possible, let’s say, to take a step back in history, in order to return to an
ideal, transcendental, and essentialist space. I am more interested in revealing how
the threads that control our imaginaries work, imaginaries that are obstructed by
certain colonisations; and especially, the ones that have to do with gender: how
the masculine gender produces what is feminine. This production is inscribed
within certain imaginaries. In this sense, I have thought permanently, as a question,
why if women make up half the world’s population there is an inequality that has
no possible egalitarian horizon, differently to the hopes and expectations of other
bodies, other practices. I think this happens because these imaginaries favour what
is masculine. I am interested in this tension; and above all, I link it to my practice,
literature, and with my big question: how to de-biologise literature, in order to
 E LT I T, S E G A T O & G U E R R E R O 479

reach a democratic horizon, where the focal point is literature, instead of the
author’s biology. Literature without an escape route holds the power; women’s lit-
erature is very popular, much frequented – this speaks of an expansion of the
“ghetto”. I understand colonisation as something symbolic.
Guerrero: I would also like to talk about Chile, the referendum in the midst of
the pandemic, the new Constitution: there is a long list of talking points regarding
Chile. At the beginning there was much discussion about the pandemic and its
paralysing effect on all the upheaval and quest for social progress in Chile. And I
would like to bring in here a question that pertains to the USA, the murder of
George Floyd, as an important event that takes place during the pandemic, and
that has generated a major discussion concerning systemic racism. Nevertheless, I
think that there are specific elements that work in a different way in Chile.
Eltit: I think that Chile has been read by specialists as the most intense labora-
tory of neoliberalism. And of a certain school of thought with an origin in the
University of Chicago, that, via the privatisation of what is public, has established
a divisive and mischievous way of understanding public and private. This has
affected the whole notion of community, because it has unleashed a cycle of the
“I”, of how each person has to battle the other in order to achieve social status. In
this sense, it is the idea of community that has been very distinctly hollowed out.
The “other” comes to be seen as a competitor. The explosions of 2019 have prece-
dents: firstly, the demonstrations of secondary-school students, then those of stu-
dents in 2011, and then the rebellion of young university feminists. These were in
the main young bodies pondering their conditions of existence. Everything explo-
des in 2019, and I think it is interesting to read this explosion through the image
of an old mole. In other words, it was from the Metro, the underground, this
underground and blind circuit of the city, that the explosion found its way out. I
used the idea of a mole leaving its burrow in my novel Sumar. I think that when
things explode, everything explodes at the same time, with different groups,
forces, subjectivities. Many subjectivities appeared during those protests. They all
appeared together and this was very interesting. The First Lady made some com-
ments that were leaked: “we will have to renounce some of our privileges”; and
then she added that the demonstrators seemed like “extraterrestrials” to her. She
read the explosion well, because she saw privilege as a cause; on the other hand,
she said that she didn’t know what was going on. She didn’t recognize those
bodies, because those bodies inhabited a different planet. I found this revealing. I
think that what happened in 2019 is that those without a part entered the scene –
as Ranci
ere would say: those that the system didn’t take into account, those who
had no words, who for the elites had no subjectivity. The pandemic, at the begin-
ning, continued to reveal these bodies. A public health administrator told me that
he had no idea that so many people could live together. What hadn’t been seen
before exploded because of its absence. People in this country are like extraterres-
trials, disconnected, abandoned by the political elites. The pandemic didn’t destroy
this mobilisation – it revealed its causes.
In the USA, indisputably there is racism. The system contends with and humili-
ates both Afro-American and Latino citizens. The fact that George Floyd said “I
can’t breathe”, against the backdrop of a respiratory disease that has killed so many
480 J O U R N A L O F L AT I N A M E R I C A N C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

people, especially Afro-Americans and Latinos, is revealing: I can’t breathe in this

country, in this disease, because they are killing me. This is different from the
Chilean case, but also we need to look at Colombia and Bolivia. It is democracy
that is in crisis and the cause is the elitisation of all the systems.
Guerrero: I was thinking about some of those who protested during the dicta-
torship in Chile. Sebastian Acevedo and Rodrigo Rojas,2 for example, brought the
protests against the dictatorship to an international context. These acts have been
examined by Lotty Rosenfeld and Las Yeguas del Apocalıpsis, among others. I
wonder if there are parallels between the dictatorship and what Chile is going
through now. I have always found it remarkable that Chile, during the transition,
didn’t cancel the Constitution of 1980. I would like to know what you think about
the referendum and the possibility of writing a new Constitution.
Eltit: In effect, this theme is crucial, because the new Constitution will be a
framework – no one would think that it will resolve all problems, whether struc-
tural or individual. For me its importance is symbolic: putting an end to that pre-
vious text, delivering another framework, another juridical text with which to
operate. You have mentioned some of the gestures of resistance during the dicta-
torship, like Sebastian Acevedo’s, whose way of responding to the terror, in order
to free his children, was to self-immolate, which is a type of martyrdom but also
an act of purification. On the other hand, we also need to consider how the dicta-
torship generated a new concept: the disappeared detainee. This wasn’t in our
lexicon, not at all. This is something that took place over seventeen years, took
place, took place again. It generated more than a dose of distress and we learned
to live with this dose of distress. And then we learned to live without this dose of
distress, from the nineties onwards, because even if this was an imperfect system,
Pinochet left with a political agreement. In voting to change it, compromise was
necessary. At least human rights violations were partially stopped. So, in this
sense, it was very violent when, during the recent explosions, human rights were
violated and affected. It is not a small detail: we do not only have deaths, we also
have a cruel police force. There are acts of cruelty against demonstrators. There
are two iconic victims: one is Fabiola Campillai, who was waiting for transport to
get to work and ended up blind. And of course, Gustavo Gatica, the young uni-
versity student who also lost his eyes. And there are thousand other victims. The
pandemic left in suspense any investigation of this serious abuse of human rights –
this is still pending. Also, the pandemic has exposed the healthcare policy of this
country, in which the most vulnerable sectors are in the periphery: those zones
that the hegemonic elite doesn’t want to see. I think that we are in a wait-and-see
moment, but we know that the referendum will win, there will be a constitutional
assembly, and we have to figure out how to write ourselves and how to act this
writing once it is consolidated. It is an other writing that we need to activate,
together with then demands from the base. Along with the debate a certain idea of
community was reinstated; people came out to express their wishes, and today we
have the very significant problem of hunger, denounced by artists who work with
light,3 who created an image that wasn’t tolerated and that was intercepted by the
authorities, because they didn’t want to see this hunger restaged in Chile. We are
full of food banks. It is a return to the eighties.
 E LT I T, S E G A T O & G U E R R E R O 481

Segato: I have followed the situation in Chile since the “penguins”4 appeared in
Baquedano station, years ago. I was watching from the Law Faculty of the
Universidad de Chile across the road, together with judge Cecilia Medina, who
oversaw the case of Ciudad Juarez in the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.
I was visiting the faculty and a judge’s seminar. I was in her office when we heard
many voices, a big racket outside, and we looked out and saw the first penguin
demo in Baquedano station just opposite. And we both started crying. We had
never met before, it was the first time, and we cried together. From then on, I
think that the winds of change have been blowing in Chile.
And I have a question for Diamela. I see it in some political spaces and of crit-
ical discourse; and I hear some people question the Chilean process, because it
wouldn’t fall within the parameters of conventional insurgency. Chilean insurgency
is very similar to feminist insurgency, to the insurgency of the people, to popular
insurgency; it isn’t a centralised insurgency, with central guidelines. An insurgency
of the streets, that expresses itself by occupying public space, is something new.
We aren’t dealing with political parties or unions demonstrating, it is the people;
it is not the social movements but the movement of society. Some condemn this. I
don’t; I find in this the possibility of change. We must rethink the old slogans, the
old politics, and understand this social unrest, an unrest similar to feminist unrest.
Diamela, what do you think about this movement of society, with a multiplicity of
vanguards, without the density of monopolistic vanguards, this new form of
street insurgency?
Eltit: Dear Rita, I really think that in a certain way it was this which revealed
the rift between the population, the people, and their representatives. In effect,
this movement, unlike other moments in history, isn’t led by political parties, or
actors seeking to belong to the representational elites. It wasn’t consumable or
consumed by parties or leaders. The demonstrators appeared from different
spheres, from the citizenship to the sub-proletariat, in Rosa Luxemburg’s words –
there were different subjectivities with a common desire. For example, in 2011,
the university students’ movement was very valuable, with wonderful leaders, but
it had an organicity. Nevertheless there were other groups that would intervene,
anarchists apparently, who would clash head-on with the police. And this would
unsettle the students. Then, in 2019, those same groups would clash one on one
with the police, but this time they were seen as heroes. The opinions regarding
the emergence of different bodies change. This wouldn’t have been possible with-
out the massive feminist movement of 2018, which changed the logic of protest –
even the president of the Republic said he was a feminist. All of this disarticulated
the fear of the word “feminist”. These female students changed the map when they
made of their bodies not a space of predatory objectification but a political space.
They were demanding not to be seen as mere sexual objects, by their colleagues
or teachers. This made sense. In 2019, we had the biggest, unfathomable, feminist
demonstration. It was an inter-generational demo: grandmothers, mothers, grand-
daughters. There is something here to reflect on, faced with the failure of the
model. These other numerous and dissimilar forces, from different places, are
here, and we have to understand and accept this. This apparition of those without
a part is important. Without these movements there wouldn’t have been 2019.
482 J O U R N A L O F L AT I N A M E R I C A N C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

Segato: We could say that in Chile there has been a new experiment, a new
way of doing politics; and we could, indeed, say that it was the feminist move-
ment that set the tone for how to take to the streets in a radically plural form.
This is an extraordinary laboratory. Now, what to do with this? There are critics,
with whom I don’t agree, that expect to condense in a pair of vanguards this plu-
ral social force, this dissatisfaction. This street movement isn’t just the expression
of a lack, of shortcomings; it is the opposite, it is an expression of strength, of
what there is to give, of another kind of pleasure that is taking over public space.
People felt capable of inserting their transformative strength in the streets. And
like you say, Diamela, the inspiration was the feminist movement that preceded all
of this. Now, I ask myself, what do we do?
I think we can only offer words. Words have an important part to play when it
comes to shaping history. When an experience is named, a mirror is born.
Vocabulary is central in order to write this unprecedented history. In the past, in
the sixties, in the seventies, the insurgency had a script to follow. There were
those in charge of moving forward with this script. There is no script now. There
is no elite in charge of writing the script. The people own the script. At most we
can gift words about what we see is happening in the streets, but we can’t script
this movement. How to think about it without killing it, without capturing it,
without vertical ideas? How to feed it, describe it, be there without trying to
domesticate this force, this great plurality of desire, of bodies? How to allow them
to be?
Guerrero: We have several good questions from the audience here with us.
There is one that I feel is very relevant for this encounter. It is from Pedro Meira
Monteiro: I would like to hear more about the difference between social move-
ments and movements of society; I think this is a fascinating topic. Would perhaps
a non-partisan approach be able to connect to the sub-proletariat? Then, there are
questions about how to resist. From Alicia Montes: Aren’t these decentralised
mobilisations also appropriated by the Right, as is happening in Argentina? From
Silvia Ruiz: we know that the pandemic affects all bodies, but especially those
prone to suffer abuse and that are targeted by abusers. How can these bodies
resist? And one from Rubı Carre~no: thinking of LasTesis, who have reached mil-
lions of women around the world, it would seem that this virality anticipates the
virus. What role does technology have in these social movements?
Segato: These movements and the pandemic share an uncertainty born of non-
scripted politics. We need to learn these lessons, about the pandemic and about
social movements. We have been exposed to the cycles of production of life and
extinction of life, of the niche we inhabit. We are part of a niche that is moved
by cycles we thought had been controlled. The pandemic is unique in history – it
isn’t the same as leprosy or the Plague. The COVID-19 pandemic takes place after
we had assumed that history was under control, that time was encapsulated, that
we were living in a capsule of certainties, under a capitalist and republican admin-
istration of the liberal State, and that in this way history had reached its most
rational point, and time had stopped. The control of life as a thing, the commodi-
fication of life, made us believe that time was under our control. So along comes
this pandemic, which won’t be the last one, because what gave rise to it keeps
 E LT I T, S E G A T O & G U E R R E R O 483

increasing all the time – its source is in constant expansion. The pandemic shows
that human beings are exposed to the cycles of nature, extinction being one of
them. This uncertainty is central. And there is also a political uncertainty.
Quino passed away today;5 one of his drawings says: “Fortunately, public opin-
ion hasn’t realised that it only thinks what private opinion wants it to”. The groups
that have taken to the streets, expressing the interests of the chief owners of
Argentina, without any awareness of being directed by those same interests, have
actually assumed the behaviours of the old Left. They have adopted tactics in the
street that reproduce the slogans of yesteryear, like left insurgency would do in
the past. There are tactics that used to be on the side of the critic, that belonged
to the Left of the past, and that have now been adopted by the Right. For me
that’s patently clear in Argentina. It is up to us to find other modes. The slogans
of yesteryear haven’t been expropriated. We need new modes of politicity.
Eltit: I think that in one way or the other, what we have seen in Chile is the
naturalisation of the rift between represented and representatives. This is an extra-
ordinary abyss. As we have already discussed, 18 October exposed this absence of
a leadership. There is a title that those representatives that no longer represent us
willingly adopt: political class. I have always found this strange. They call them-
selves the political class. They self-define as political class and the media follow
suit. None of this is innocent. This political class only talks to itself. Regarding the
lack of direction, this is not coincidental – there just isn’t a direction, because the
heterogeneity of the social sphere is self-represented in the streets. During what
was the biggest women’s demonstration, 18 March 2019, a multitude took to the
streets, with a quite remarkable intergenerational pact. Also, we have the problem
of how the State institutionalises children via third parties. Boys and girls are per-
manently put into situations of vulnerability and risk, to historic levels. Now we
have the case of a girl who ended up living a life of crime, but during her life she
had always suffered abuse. There are still zones of cruelty and there is still a sym-
metry, especially in the way women are represented. I don’t think there is a need
to manage social explosions and unrest. Unrest is in the bodies and the (self)-rep-
resentations are in the street. And this is going somewhere, to a place that the
bodies build and textualise. On the other hand, it is important to consider the
reconstruction of the community in Chile. If the State doesn’t feed people, if pri-
vate space doesn’t feed people, the neighbours feed each other. I think this is
invaluable, because it means thinking from a place that the political class as class
can’t occupy, simply because they closed ranks as a class, because they only man-
age a model that guarantees their hold on power. An atomic bomb was dropped
over the space of politics. Destruction was unleashed when politicians decided to
self-label as political class. They assumed this name; therefore they form part of a
class incapable of leading anyone but themselves.
Guerrero: More questions from the audience: there are several regarding Black
Lives Matter. From Cecilia Fajardo-Hill: would the Chilean insurgency compare
to Black Lives Matter? In the USA, BLM doesn’t respond to a leadership either
– this is an intersectional movement of massive and spontaneous participation.
And to Diamela: what do you think about the new Chilean Constitution? How
could it include excluded communities? From Mario Camara: I would like to ask
484 J O U R N A L O F L AT I N A M E R I C A N C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

about forms of protest and insurgency in times of Zoom and the pandemic,
taking into account that the latter is forcing many of us to remain enclosed or
distanced. One more, from Natalia Saavedra: what is Diamela’s opinion on the
15 November agreement?
Segato: I think that the Chilean constituent or re-constituent process is abso-
lutely central. But we can’t place all our bets on leading the State. Our States are
unreliable by design, from their inception. I consider that the problem of the div-
ide between manager and managed forms part of the very core of our history.
This has to do with how Latin American independence developed: those who car-
ried the weight of independence were then evicted from the nation-building pro-
ject. And from this moment on, the State was built by a criollo elite, which, in the
Chilean case especially, is a caste. In our countries everyone speaks with the same
vocabulary; we all speak of capital, provinces, el interior, white, aboriginal, black.
We have a common vocabulary. But the syntax, the way in which social languages
and alterity are built, is different in every one of our nations. Between Chile and
Argentina there are things in common. But Chile is to me more of a nation of
castes than Argentina. The ultraconservatism is palpable in Chile. Chile is much
more sensitive to social distancing than a two-bit country like Argentina.
Nevertheless, in every case, State administration has been forever drifting away.
The criollo class that created our States received the colonial inheritance, to carry
out a transference of colonial goods from the overseas metropolises to the hands
of a criollo elite; and those who have access to the State join the elite. It is almost
unavoidable: they drift away from what they manage. This happens from the USA
to Patagonia. In the past, the corporate class had its representatives among the pol-
itical professionals and now it is they who command it: the corporate class oper-
ates the State. From Trump, to Pi~nera, to Macri. There has been a fusion between
the roles that in the past, at least fictionally, were two different roles. The man-
ager would represent the business class and the businessman would remain hidden.
Now power is exercised over vulnerable bodies, a vulnerability that has been made
worse by the pandemic. For this reason the pandemic is for me a big scanner, a
big X-ray machine that traverses the planet and reveals what is wrong, what is dys-
functional in life; and one of the things the pandemic has exacerbated is vulnerabil-
ity, it has revealed vulnerable bodies, women and children among them. We must
mirror it, use words like a mirror, to expose what the pandemic has revealed with
greater precision: there are spaces of vulnerability occupied by those who die first,
those who are first affected. And we have to work on masculinity. I realised too
late that in the women’s movement we had worked a lot with women, about the
central theme of women, but it is by dismantling the mandate of masculinity that
the world changes and history is reoriented.
Eltit: The explosion of 18 October was almost a revolution because there were
spaces in the city that were liberated, that weren’t controllable by the police. It
wasn’t the referendum that motivated the social explosions. This happened later,
rather, as a form of compromise but also to abort the movement, the massive insur-
rection. This is why the referendum was offered. Once the political class intervened,
it quickly agreed on a referendum, because this was seen as a way to repair what
they call “order”. Nevertheless, the pandemic completely changed the scene. And this
 E LT I T, S E G A T O & G U E R R E R O 485

referendum was later reconsidered by the forces of officialism, but it was too late. In
this sense, I want to say to my dear Rita, that Chile is also a two-bit country. In
Chile there is a criollo class that is rather kitschy, with rituals, with overwhelming
issues. Yes, we are two-bit. And I will call up one of the most important postcolonial
novels, Martın Rivas, in which a provincial man arrives in Santiago, but this provincial
man possesses knowledge because he studies Law. After several misadventures he mar-
ries a businessman’s daughter. He is middle-class but has education; he is from an
educated middle class. So, the businessman once he has guaranteed wealth via this
educated middle class decides to venture into politics and run as a parliamentarian.
This shows that from the immediate post-colony there is this transfer between public
and private space, how wealth flows towards the State. Wealth appropriates the State
because it also needs and exploits it. This hasn’t stopped. Martın Rivas, a foundational
novel, depicts this. This commercial association hasn’t changed since the nineteenth
century. And woman is objectified in this profitable society. This cultured bourgeois
expands his wealth and heads to the State. This is why we have these multimillionaires
who are presidents, because there is already a precedent around this. This precedent
betrays this two-bit nature, because in other contexts the rich class would prefer to
remain hidden. Chile doesn’t have major problems hiding the link between wealth
and the State.
Guerrero: Linia Barrero asks whether it is possible to rethink community
dynamics in the margins of self-isolation. I also wanted to ask about the
Venezuelan case, a historical regional exodus that affects the rest of the contin-
ent. Another point I wanted to discuss is the circulation of Rita Segato’s and
Diamela Eltit’s work, which is a different kind of circulation. Rita has published
mainly in Portuguese and Spanish, and I think the publication and circulation of
non-dominant languages is important. And in Diamela’s case, even if many of
her books have been translated, it is interesting to see her journeying on the
margins of the market; she doesn’t work with literary agents, she forsakes the
marketing of literature.
Segato: Regarding community and confinement: of course, some forms of com-
munality that were absent in the city are coming back. There is mutual assistance
between neighbours who under normal circumstances wouldn’t talk to one
another, would have no communication in the middle of the metropolis; but now
they do. There is mutual assistance and reciprocity in the neighbourhood, in a
building, in a block, between people who watch and are attentive to what others
might need. Community rises from the ashes. In our Latin America or Amefrican
(Gonzalez 1988) world there are shreds of community that traverse the kitchens,
meetings, cafes. People sometimes sacrifice profit and gain in order to feed back
and remain within the habits of their community, in the midst of the city. This is
now very important for life. Neighbours that offer to help with the shopping.
People who communicate, talk to each other, support one another. The pandemic
has strengthened the community in the places where it barely existed.
The pandemic has also clearly revealed the difference between creativity and
productivity, terms which are very frequently muddled in academia. The academic
world confuses quantification and productivity with the creativity of the academic
subject. I think these are competing and antagonistic things. I have never made any
486 J O U R N A L O F L AT I N A M E R I C A N C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

effort to translate my texts, I haven’t knocked on any doors, it hasn’t been my ini-
tiative, even when I can write in English. The other day I was invited to the
Pompidou Centre, to talk during a meeting of museologists. The question they
asked was how does Eurocentrism affect Europe and European museums. I think
there is a generalised feeling, and in the USA there is also a very decadent hollow-
ing out of intellectual imagination. Then there is a need to fuel the desire for
imagination and creativity. This is how I can explain the way my texts have circu-
lated without being pushed. And precisely because of this, one of the things I find
most striking about LasTesis is that their performances, which in appearance are
simple but actually aren’t, have cut across the world without any media help. No
button was pushed to send LasTesis all across the planet. Maybe, because we are
less productive we are more creative.
Regarding Venezuela, I will attempt a joke: its situation has benefited the world,
because now we can find arepas, hallaquitas, cachacas, everywhere. Well: it is a dis-
aster. It saddens me to say it; and it is difficult because some will want to kill me,
as usual. If some cancel you others love you more. The problem with Venezuela is
that it followed an already defeated model, a model that had expired – the Cuban
model. It is the model that filled my generation with hope and enthusiasm; but I
am convinced, and it is hard to say it, that this wasn’t the way. I don’t understand
how a country enters history much later, in the wrong way. I am very sorry. I
await for the next pile-on. I lived in Venezuela during a moment of abundance,
the moment of the mono economy of petrol, when everything we bought
was imported.
Eltit: I will start with Venezuela. I have visited a couple of times. I don’t
have the knowledge to answer. I am aware there was an exodus in Venezuela
that wasn’t a minor thing. But I don’t have a direct experience. But what con-
cerns me about Venezuela, without inhabiting that space, is that there is talk
about a Venezuelan dictatorship. This doesn’t convince me. As I lived through
the Chilean dictatorship I can’t understand how there can be a dictatorship with
two presidents. This is impossible to imagine in Chile. A president [Juan
Guaido] who was even recognised by the American president. Yes, I think there
is a giant crisis in Venezuela. Democracy above everything has suffered. These
two presidents working? The conundrum for me has to do with the opposition:
why a country with such a history – one of our conceptual leaders in Chile was
from Venezuela: Andres Bello – hasn’t been able to produce an opposition that
may deliver change in this difficult situation? Many exiled Venezuelans have
made it to Chile. They come with a lot of knowledge; this is a highly educated
migration. And of course, they are already part of Chilean life. This diaspora
fills me with pity. This is the same diaspora I saw in Colombia on the streets,
begging for money: the same Venezuelan bodies. This is a gigantic crisis.
Something has happened. There is talk about the army intervening to sustain all
of this. Maduro’s discourse doesn’t convince me; nor Guaido’s. There is a crisis
of meaning. You ask me what failed: sense. This is where I see the crisis. Now,
unfortunately, the UN reports mention at least 2,000 dead, and this is some-
thing that we feel in our hearts. This is painful. For me the question is what
happens to people.
 E LT I T, S E G A T O & G U E R R E R O 487

Guerrero: I just want to point out the regional difficulty of managing the
Venezuelan crisis. The history of opposition in Venezuela is very long. What pre-
vails since the second half of the twentieth century in Venezuela is the centre-left.
We didn’t have dictatorships. This implies a different democratic tradition. I have
always been concerned with the regional attention this theme receives. It is many
years of a diaspora of a country whose people didn’t use to migrate. This is inter-
esting with respect to the relationship with Colombia: a very porous border. It is
relevant then, that right now Venezuelans who had never migrated are doing it;
and Colombia, whose people historically did use to migrate, now receives
migrants. This is a complex scene.
Eltit: Regarding LasTesis: they cross borders. The thing with LasTesis is that
they are a collective, they aren’t working under their names, they are called
LasTesis. There is something communitarian about them. They have never
attempted to become celebrities. In other words, they don’t go to TV shows.
They have remained significantly serious. I remember once watching a show in
which someone claimed to be a manager for LasTesis, someone about forty; but it
wasn’t true. LasTesis have been very lucid about the ways in which the system
could weaken them by turning them into celebrities.
Another theme that Rita highlights, and I think it is fundamental, is the penetra-
tion in Chilean production of assumptions that originate in US academia. For
example the notion that you have to make sacrifices, or that there are some wor-
thy publications and others that aren’t; and this is something that they have imple-
mented intelligently, because you get paid more if you publish in indexed journals.
This policy of sticking a price tag to the essay has been catastrophic. There are
books that only make sense within the reproductive framework of this association
between market and academia. This has proven fatal, because it has affected the
literary essay form – a form in which fiction is also present, as a way of establish-
ing a possible horizon.
In the same way, something I find striking about the pandemic is inefficiency. If
it is true that there is a very strong biopolitics, the body with organs has been a
mystery. It has been slow to come. There are very old matters that haven’t been
resolved. There is no improvement for cancer. Only the pharmaceutical industry
has operated. We are waiting patiently for a vaccine, which in these times of artifi-
cial intelligence, of increasingly powerful weapons, you would expect would be
delivered swiftly. Nevertheless, this is the third pandemic in two decades. There
will be other pandemics, because livestock farming is at critical levels. I find all of
this striking.
With respect to literature, I prefer more alternative ways. I need them, they are
necessary for me. I am not interested in the professionalisation of literature. I have
taught courses where I have done systematic work. But the professionalisation of
literature is a step too far; to surrender the novel to an agent who demands things
of you, because agents live off the way in which these materials circulate. I don’t
have an agent. I want to preserve this space for myself. If they don’t translate me
into German, so be it; if they do, great, but that’s not why I write. In fact, I have
been translated but I remain outside of the neoliberal circuit of authorial circula-
tion. Writing a book is hard enough – not to mention having to peddle it door to
488 J O U R N A L O F L AT I N A M E R I C A N C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

door. With the democratisation of publishing there are places to publish your
books. If someone has an agent, all the better for them; if someone wants to travel
with their books, fair enough. But I prefer an alternative way. I enjoy writing the
novels I write. I have preserved my writing space; and I have stored desire, pleas-
ure, work in it. I want to protect this.

20 September 2020. PLAS. Princeton University.

Transcribed by Alejandro Martınez
Translated by Fernando Sdrigotti

Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Gabriela Nouzeilles, director of the programme in Latin American Studies at Princeton
University, Gina Saraceni and Jeffrey Cede~no, from the Departmento de Literatura at the Pontificia
Universidad Javeriana de Bogota, Rubı Carre~no Bolivar and Macarena Areco, of the Facultad de Letras at
the Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile, and Alejandro Martınez, Damaris Zaas and Jeremiah
LaMontaigne, for making possible, live-streaming, and promoting this encounter.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes
1. Translator’s note: Eltit refers here to Segato’s influence on LasTesis, particularly on the
protest song “Un violador en tu camino” (A Rapist in Your Path). See Hinsliff (2020).
2. Translator’s note: Sebastian Acevedo, a Chilean construction worker who self-immolated
in 1983, in order to protest against the detention of his children; see Agosın and Ben-Ur
(1988). Rodrigo Rojas was a young photographer who was burned to death after being
captured during protests in Santiago, in 1986; see The Guardian (2019).
3. Translator’s note: A reference to the art collective Delight Lab, who for months projected
words on Plaza Francia, Santiago, coinciding with the 2019 protests. Their projection of
the word HAMBRE (hunger) went viral, outraging many politicians. See Girardi (2020),
for more.
4. Nickname given to Chilean secondary-school students, due to their school uniforms. The
2006 students uprising was also known as the Revolucion Ping€uina.
5. Translator’s note: Argentine cartoonist, famous among other things for his Mafalda comics.

References

Agosın, Marjorie, and Miriam Ben-Ur. 1988. “Notes on the Poetics of the Acevedo Movement against
Torture.” Human Rights Quarterly 10 (3): 338–343.
Girardi, Antonia. 2020. “Un tabu, la imagen del hambre.” El mostrador. Accessed 14 September 2021.
https://www.elmostrador.cl/cultura/2020/05/23/un-tabu-la-imagen-del-hambre/
 E LT I T, S E G A T O & G U E R R E R O 489

Gonzalez, Lelia 1988. “A categoria polıtico-cultural de amefricanidade.” Tempo Brasileiro (Rio De Janeiro),
no 92/93: 69–82.
Hinsliff, Gaby. 2020. “‘The Rapist Is You!’: Why a Chilean Protest Chant Is Being Sung Around the
World.” The Guardian. Accessed 9 September 2021. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/feb/
03/the-rapist-is-you-chilean-protest-song-chanted-around-the-world-un-iolador-en-tu-camino
Quijano, Anıbal. 2014. “Colonialidad del poder, eurocentrismo y America Latina.” In Cuestiones y
horizontes: De la dependencia historico-estructural a la colonialidad/descolonialidad del poder, edited by Danilo
Assis Clımaco, 777–832. Buenos Aires: CLACSO.
Ranci
ere, Jacques. 2009. El reparto de lo sensible. Estetica y polıtica. Translated by Cristobal Duran, et al.
Santiago de Chile: LOM.
The Guardian. 2019. “Chile: Retired Soldiers Sentenced over 1986 Attack on Activists Burned Alive.” The
Guardian. Accessed 22 September 2021. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/21/chile-
soldiers-activists-attack-rodrigo-rojas-carmen-quintana

Diamela Eltit is one of Latin America’s most daring writers and is highly regarded for
her avant-garde initiatives in the world of letters. Eltit began her engagement with
literature in her native Chile during the years of the Pinochet dictatorship when she
participated in the collective CADA, staging art actions against the dictatorship, and
published her first novels, Lumperica (1983) and Por la patria (1986), to universal
acclaim. Since then she has published, among others, El cuarto mundo (1988), El padre
mıo (1989), Vaca sagrada (1991), Los vigilantes (1994), Los trabajadores de la muerte
(1998), Mano de obra (2002), Jamas el fuego nunca (2007), Impuesto a la carne (2010),
Fuerzas especiales (2013) and Sumar (2018). In 2021, She received the FIL Literary Award
in Romance Languages.

Rita Segato is Professor Emerita at the University of Brasilia and an anthropologist and
feminist who has written extensively on gender, violence, the gender system in the
Yoruba tradition, race, and coloniality. She is a major figure in Latin American
decolonial feminism, and currently holds the Rita Segato Chair of Uneasy Thinking at
the National University of San Martın in the Province of Buenos Aires and the Anıbal
Quijano Chair at the Reina Sofıa Museum in Madrid. She is the author of many essays
and books including Las estructuras elementales de la violencia. Ensayos sobre genero
entre la antropologıa, el psicoanalisis y los Derechos Humano (2003), La crıtica de la
colonalidad en ocho ensayos (2016), La guerra contra las mujeres (2017), and
Contrapedagogıas de la crueldad (2018).

Javier Guerrero is Associate Professor of Latin American Studies in the Department of

Spanish and Portuguese at Princeton University and the author of Tecnologıas del
cuerpo. Exhibicionismo y visualidad en America Latina (Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 2014).
He is the editor of Relatos enfermos (Conaculta/Literal Publishing, 2015) and Biopolıticas
de la visualidad en la necro polis contempora
nea (Cuadernos de Literatura, 2019) as well
as a coeditor of Excesos de cuerpo: relatos de contagio y enfermedad en Ame rica
Latina (Eterna Cadencia 2009, reprinted 2012), Diamela Eltit’s A ma quina Pinochet e
outros ensaios (Peixe-eletrico, 2016), and the two-volume dossier Cuerpos enfermos/
Contagios culturales (Estudios 2010, 2011).