(DE)FORMING WOMAN:

IMAGES OF FEMININE POLITICAL SUBJECTIVITY IN LATIN AMERICAN

LITERATURE, FROM DISAPPEARANCE TO FEMICIDE

by

Michael Martínez-Raguso
July 20, 2015

A dissertation submitted to the

Faculty of the Graduate School of
the University at Buffalo, State University of New York
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

Department of Romance Languages and Literatures

 ProQuest Number: 3725958

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 Copyright by

Michael Martínez-Raguso

2015

ii
For my mother, who speaks in silence.
Y para mi hijo, que todavía no lee.

iii
 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

literature department.” Thank you.

This project was made possible through the generous support of an Advanced PhD

Fellowship from the University at Buffalo Humanities Institute, as well as a Presidential

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

Fellows for their criticism and support.

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

stimulating and enjoyable.

Finally, I thank my family. I am deeply indebted to my sister-in-law Diana, without

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

dedicate this work to her memory, and to Noah.

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 TABLE OF CONTENTS

DEDICATION ............................................................................................................................ iii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ........................................................................................................ iv

ABSTRACT ….…...................................................................................................................... viii

INTRODUCTION: THE FEMININE MISE-EN-SCÈNE .................................................... 1

CHAPTER ONE. IMAGES, OBJECTS, TRAUMATIC CUTS:

THE VICISSITUDES OF THE FEMININE IN ELIZONDO’S FARABEUF

Introduction: Farabeuf, the Diegetic Labyrinth of the Image .......................................... 10

I. The Subject by Subtraction: Extimacy and Formative Negation .................................. 16

II. Ekphrastic Reflections: The Elizondian Shift from Object to Image .......................... 22

III. Mise-en-abyme, Mise-en-scène: The Politicization of the Image ............................... 32

IV. Differential Indigestion: Latin American Anthropophagy ......................................... 41

V. The Photographic Turn and the End of History ........................................................... 56

VI. Torture and/as Writing: The Trinitary Essence .......................................................... 68

CHAPTER TWO. FANTASIES OF ERASURE:

PIZARNIK, VALENZUELA, AND THE GENDER OF VIOLENCE

Introduction: Latin American Dictatorial Difference …………………........................... 80

PART ONE. FETISHIZING THE FEMININE:

PIZARNIK’S LA CONDESA SANGRIENTA AND THE POLITICS OF THE IMAGE

I. Rewriting the Countess: Csejte 1585-1610 / Argentina 1966-1973 .............................. 81

II. The Scopophilic Gaze: The Passive Paradox of the Spectacle .................................... 88

III. The Specular Gaze: Narcissism and the Melancholy Mirror ...................................... 94

IV. The Subversive Fetish .............................................................................................. 101

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 PART TWO. THE UNDERSIDE OF DISAPPEARANCE:
CONFINEMENT IN VALENZUELA’S “CAMBIO DE ARMAS”

V. Institutionalizing Absence: Argentina 1976-1983 ..................................................... 107

VI. On Language: The Fantasy of an Opening ............................................................... 116

VII. On Fragmentation: Specular Cartographies of the Subject ..................................... 124

VIII. On the Gaze: The Photo-graphic Subject and the Dark Well ................................ 129

IX. Apuntamiento: Writing with a Revolver .................................................................. 139

CHAPTER THREE. NEOLIBERALISM AND THE FEMININE:

ECONOMIES OF VIOLENCE, FROM ELTIT’S MARGINS TO BOLAÑO’S BORDER

Introduction: Zones of Exclusion, Sites of Exception .................................................... 148

PART ONE. CUTTING AND RUBBING AT THE MARGINS:

AFFECT AND IMAGE IN ELTIT’S LUMPÉRICA

I. Dictatorial Economics and Literary Production: Chile 1973-1990 ............................. 150

II. Luminetics: Penetration vs. Rubbing ......................................................................... 162

III. Performing the Cut, Framing the Image ................................................................... 174

PART TWO. THE LOGIC OF EXPULSION:

FEMICIDE AND SERIAL EXCESS IN BOLAÑO’S 2666

IV. The Infra-regime: The Mexican Border in the Wake of NAFTA ............................ 182

V. Femi(ni)cide: Gender vs. Sex .................................................................................... 191

VI. Abject Expulsion ...................................................................................................... 196

VII. Exquisite Corpses .................................................................................................... 203

VIII. On Seriality: The Narrative Perversion of a Concept ............................................ 215

Coda: Cut, Line, Relation ............................................................................................... 229

CONCLUSION: THE OPEN BODY .................................................................................... 232

WORKS CITED ........................................................................................................................ 238

vii
 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,

respectively. Pizarnik’s meditation on Elizabeth Bathory’s crimes highlights both the

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

regime’s use of forced disappearance by staging a perverse sexual relation within an

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

instantaneity for which it becomes a disturbing emblem.

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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

representation of socio-political trauma—as well as political imagination in the efforts of a

military regime to produce a pure authoritarian state free of subversion.

This interdisciplinary study engages experimental literature through and alongside the

lenses of feminism, psychoanalysis, and Latin American political theory so as to establish a

critical, trans-historical view of feminine subjectivity in relation to Latin American state

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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

neoliberalism with Pinochet’s coup on September 11, 1973.

As will be demonstrated through my reading of Latin American history in relation to its

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

of women. It is through paradoxical acts of negative incorporation and exclusionary inclusion

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

metanarrative. In tracing the images of feminine subjectivity produced under such

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

these socio-political landscapes.

In the first chapter a close reading of Salvador Elizondo’s novel Farabeuf: o la crónica

de un instante [Farabeuf: or the Chronicle of an Instant] (1965) maps a theoretical framework of

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

3
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

the feminine in relation to absolute power.

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

4
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

fetishization. It is through identification with an image of his or her own always-illusory

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.

Pizarnik published La condesa sangrienta (1965) immediately prior to the beginning of

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

formulate a feminist critique of power—dictatorial and otherwise—through fragmentary

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

5
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

crafting a utopian narrative of resistance, Valenzuela presents a psychological narrative of

counterpropriation—of the regime’s language as well as its weapons—yet she is careful to

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

that generates wealth through exploitative practices of marginalization. The politics of

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

6
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

power into a feminized body.

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

proliferation of maquiladoras (manufacturing-assembly plants) in the region since 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

7
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

circles of surplus violence, consumption, and economic exchange.

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

8
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.

9
 CHAPTER ONE

IMAGES, OBJECTS, TRAUMATIC CUTS:

THE VICISSITUDES OF THE FEMININE IN SALVADOR ELIZONDO’S FARABEUF

INTRODUCTION: FARABEUF, THE DIEGETIC LABYRINTH OF THE IMAGE

In his intimate meditation on photography, Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes establishes a

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

in some way, “a catastrophe which has already occurred” (96).

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:

10
the punctum being a stigmatum, a lacerating emphasis, a catastrophe. The notion of the cut

(surgical, conceptual, temporal, visual) pervades the discussion of the image.

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

Salvador Elizondo’s Farabeuf, o la crónica de un instante [Farabeuf, or the Chronicle of an

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.

In Farabeuf, Elizondo crafted a novel that is as difficult to describe and analyze as it is to

read. It is not so much that the novel is nonlinear as that it refuses to engage in the recounting of

11
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

instruments, and enters a room where a woman awaits.

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

12
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

notion of representation (142).

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

Elizondo forms two hypercharacters—male and female—each of whom assumes “a multiplicity

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-

to-presence in and through images; psychoanalysis is therefore indispensable for the

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

13
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

Bataille). Raúl Carrillo-Arciniega provides an excellent overview of the novel’s complicated

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

14
requires that one read creatively into its gaps and lacunae, which Alberto Moreiras has achieved

in his chapter on Farabeuf in Tercer Espacio precisely by locating in it a silent intertextual

reference to a painting that never appears, as will be discussed in detail below.

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

subtraction—founds a political order. In an analysis of Latin American difference, the chapter

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

violence of political incorporation, thereby providing a framework for concrete sociopolitical

analysis of feminine disruptions in (post)dictatorial literature in the following chapters.

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

through the extimate negation of the feminine.

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

negation... Pain is a pure physical experience of negation, an immediate sensory rendering of

‘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).

Copjec identifies two distinct manners of encountering the extimate object a. At a

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

Reorganization Process: what is such a “Process” if not hegemonic nation building by

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

Elimination”) in which he effects a metacritique of the notion of cultural imitation. Schwarz

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

in concentration camps, secret detention centers, or mental institutions. In her surreptitious

exclusion, she is biopolitically included; disappearance, as an internal exclusion, is therefore the

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.

On the level of social-political organization, then, feminine subjectivity becomes the

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

theory of subject-object relations, overproximity becomes problematic in that it impinges upon

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

moment when anxiety reaches its intolerable apex.

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

the long knives.

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

of a political other (an insurgent, Communist, terrorist, etc.) constitutes a means of

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

social body—becomes the crudest form.

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

says of the imago that

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

place of displacement, a metaphor. (68)

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

suficientemente prominentes como para ser considerados como miembros, extremidades o

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 female protagonist’s surgical unmaking of which it is an ekphrastic representation) depicts

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

Farabeuf is primarily concerned with feminine subjectivity, as it effects a double transformation:

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

its uniqueness, a psycho-surgical text.

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

feminine subject is submitted.

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

fact with dire political implications.

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)

[“produces a fundamental error in the way we relate the events” (39)].

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

situation, or an empirical experience, which suggests “una identidad definitivamente inquietante”

[“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

acciones totalmente distintas: una de orden pasivo: contemplar el reflejo de sí misma en un

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

are essentially inversions mediated by the image: sacred/profane, left/right, contact/distance,

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

emergence of the uncanny double.

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.

III. MISE-EN-ABYME, MISE-EN-SCÈNE: THE POLITICIZATION OF THE IMAGE

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

Greek pharmakós as a political scapegoat—will lead us to posit the production of a politicized

image as the novel’s aim, as the feminine subject herself becomes an extimate image of internal

exclusion whose negation founds the social order.

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

técnica en la que se invocaban los procedimientos quirúrgicos aplicados al arte de la tortura”

(131) [“once again we saw, as if from another point of view, the image of that chilling scene, its

details accentuated by a technical explanation referring to the surgical procedures employed in

the art of torture” (82-3)]. The spectacle concludes as the Nurse begins to sell to the audience a

pamphlet titled Aspects Médicaux de la Torture, par le Dr. H. L. Farabeuf, Chevalier de la

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

speaks of a certain “fascinación de aquella carne maldita e inmensamente bella” (130)

[“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

Farabeuf’s spectacle, compounded infinitely in the theater’s mirrors, significantly incorporates

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

characterized by the vertigo-inducing repetition of the mise-en-abyme.

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

presence of an absence. In seeking to uncover a symptomatic absence in the text, in Tercer

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

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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,

35
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

founds the political.

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

constitutes an anamorphosis of the Instantaneous Theater, as the spectacle is reconstructed in the

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

tú el espectáculo. Ese juego de espejos hábilmente dispuestos reflejará tu rostro surcado de

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

instantaneous photography” (my translation)].

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

produces the feminine image and offers it up for masculine consumption.

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.

In this moment of the production of a politicized image of feminine subjectivity,

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

mise-en-abyme into a mise-en-scène by means of visual consumption, as analyzed above.

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

directly a certain tradition of consumption in Latin America, an engagement that indicates a

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

framework for the present exposition of feminine political subjectivity as developed in

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

he detects a violently erotic infrastructure of consumption in a world of images (significantly, a

description that very nearly fits Farabeuf). Object to image, abyme to scène, visual consumption

to oral devouring; all are imaginary transformations—with concrete sociopolitical

consequences—effected in the same process of becoming to which the feminine is subjected in

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

knowledge: “The counter weight of native originality to neutralize academic conformity. /

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

“Week of Modern Art” in São Paulo.

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.

In the “Cannibalist Manifesto” of 1928 Oswald ultimately proposes an autonomous

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

Spanish sense of repetir as the involuntary regurgitation of food after consumption).

Rather than distancing themselves from these mythological monsters of pre-Columbian

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

grammar of “transvalorization: a critical view of history as a negative function (in Nietzsche’s

sense), capable of appropriation and of expropriation, of dehierarchization, of deconstruction”

(160). As a process of production through negation, transvalorization is in a sense doubly

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

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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

antropofagia is a formal identification of autonomy with consumption itself as the moment 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

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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

formation of the superego.

Such advocacy of a totemic order implies an absolute rejection of patriarchy, a system

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

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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

internalized colonial superego through a reversion to the magic of totemism (51).

Yet in spite of Oswald’s poetic exhortations, Latin America is no matriarchal utopia. We

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

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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

possessed of a schadenfreude for the ages that we encounter in the novel.

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,

which is significantly a metaphorical act of gynophagy, for it is a woman who is symbolically

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

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the circumstances of feminine subjectivity in question. Enter Vilém Flusser’s “vampire squid,”

vampyroteuthis infernalis.

Born in Prague in 1920 to a family of Jewish intellectuals, Flusser emigrated to London

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

“intersubjective” approach to science, one that abandons scientific objectivity (“pernicious

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

subject, as it ultimately updates the Latin American metaphor of cannibalism by situating it

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within the postmodern world of the image, the same world into which Farabeuf so poetically and

violently thrusts its reader.

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

any feminist/matriarchal element.

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.

His life is characterized by suicide (significantly by autophagy—octopods have a tendency to

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

every existential level, above all at the level of thought” (92).

Flusser’s paranaturalist contribution to Brazilian anthropophagic theory thus presents us

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

incorporation. Everything vampyroteuthis does is a sexualized act of devouring; he therefore

comes to incarnate the image of what is essentially an eroto-phagic tendency. In an effort to

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-

professed aficionado of instantaneous photography and battlefield amputation; psycho-surgical

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

1920s as a theory of active, anticolonial resistance and counter-consumption in the evocation of

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:

one of images, “a society of Vampyroteuthes” (114).

In a sense, then, the phagedaena is the quintessential postmodern subject: it is a concept

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

these distinct elements, it serves to theorize their interdependency. We find in Flusser’s

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,

particularly that of the post/dictatorial eras.

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:

“When Vampyroteuthis emerges, he explodes,” with Nazism standing as Flusser’s example

(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...

remember?...” (120)]. This oceanic devourer, the Mexican counterpart to vampyroteuthis,

corresponds to the agent of the surgeon, which I align with the phagedaena, and whose practice

of difference is characterized by the deformation of the feminine subject. Such deformation

ultimately constitutes her birth into political life, paradoxically achieved through the experience

of death. In “Anthropophagous Reason” Haroldo de Campos describes the “impulsive and

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

exclusion, a return to a gendered colonial ethics of exploitation.

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

heterogeneity, of fragmentation and plurality, it will be necessary to de-symbolize difference,

opening it to a differential multiplicity of practices not included in the arena of theoretical-

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

phantasmagoric parody of political/gender relations as it recounts in obsessive detail the

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

phagedaena—provides us with a starting point for developing a strategy of disruption.

V. THE PHOTOGRAPHIC TURN AND THE END OF HISTORY

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

developed in the previous section on anthropophagy, specifically in their relation to Latin

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

subject’s horrific unmaking. Elizondo simultaneously (or more accurately, instantaneously)

stages the formation of the feminine subject along with her deformation; her birth and death

become indistinguishable. Her existence is reduced to an instant, and an imaginary one—the

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

in his characterization of postmodernity as a vampyroteuthian world of images in mankind’s

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.

Flusser distinguishes between what he deems the “traditional” image, an abstraction of

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

“exanthropic” (in that it its intersubjective approach to the human-cephalopod relation

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

end—or after it—one and the same.

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

psychoanalysis and Latin Americanism. Whereas psychoanalysis—with its claim to being

universal discourse of modernity—is militantly anti-historicist (evidenced as early as the subtitle

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

relation between psychoanalysis and biopolitics.

Through his characteristically subtle argumentation, in The Exhaustion of Difference: The

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

necessarily the aim of subaltern studies. (Moreiras, Exhaustion 250)

In an effort to summarize Moreiras’ complex argument regarding the nature of absolute

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

ideology, defined as the “non-recognition” of this excess, developed by means of discourses

“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

move beyond hegemony (Moreiras 263).

In order to address the psychoanalytic position against historicism, I turn to Copjec’s

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

condemnation of historicism refers precisely to “this notion of immanence, this conception of a

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

myopic reduction of the social to an immanent field of relations (7).

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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

field of phenomena; yet such a configuration necessarily precludes “the possibility of a

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.

It remains to be seen, then, how Moreiras’ notion of absolute historicism relates to

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

what is inarticulable in cultural statements” (14). We could reformulate Moreiras’ conclusory

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

constitutes a defense of the absolute historicism championed by Moreiras. In tracing this

multiplicity of historicisms we have established that in Latin America, absolute historicism is

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

the reality of the subaltern.

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 age of cannibalistic consumption.

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

or subjectivity it encounters to two dimensions in a sort of existential flattening effect, as

witnessed in the psycho-surgical relations obsessively narrated in Farabeuf. Elizondo’s novel is

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

second aspect of vampyroteuthian historicism—that of internal image production—consists of

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

dictatorial literature of the Southern Cone.

If vampyroteuthian historicism denotes the effort of hegemony to perpetuate itself both

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

Towards a Philosophy of Photography Flusser establishes the primacy of the image in

postmodernity, an epoch he identifies as post-writing and therefore post-historical. Yet in his

blending of mythology and science in Vampyroteuthis infernalis he forms a masculinist vision of

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

militant concepts against the masculine violence of vampyroteuthian historicism, we therefore

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

each of the social-political configurations addressed in subsequent chapters.

VI. TORTURE AND/AS WRITING: THE TRINITARY ESSENCE

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

synthesizes Elizondo’s homogenization of the masculine roles of lover/surgeon/torturer. In the

third chapter of Farabeuf we encounter a significant foreshadowing of the novel’s horrific

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

haber durado el acto anteriormente nombrado –canónicamente un minuto nueve

segundos de acuerdo con el precepto ab intromissio membri viri ad emissio

seminis ínter vaginam, un minuto ocho segundos para los movimientos

propiciatorios y preparatorios; un segundo para la emissio propiamente dicha–,

pero no por la mujer durante esa misma duración, canónicamente casi instantánea

de un segundo según el precepto ‘...quo ad feminam, emissio seminis inter

vaginam coitum est’, una fotografía que representa la ejecución capital de un

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

vaginam coitum est’—a photograph representing the execution of an assassin by

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 relation to the body of the feminine subject.

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

very definition of sublimation” (30).

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

be just as surgical as it is sexual.

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

crueldad necesaria a la función a la que estaban destinados, adquirían una belleza

dorada, como orfebrerías barrocas brillando en un ámbito de terciopelo negro,

fastuosos como los joyeles de un príncipe oriental que se sirviera de ellos para

provocar sensaciones voluptuosas en los cuerpos de sus concubinas, o para

provocar torturas inefables en la carne anónima y tensa de un supliciado cuya

existencia estaría determinada por el olvido tenaz, a lo largo de un milenio, de

quienes un día habrían de contemplar, súbitamente, en un momento único, su

imagen desvaída, estática y extática, congelada para siempre en una apariencia

borrosa, en una fotografía manchada por el tiempo. (82)

[All the sharp knives and instruments, invested with more than enough cruelty for

their intended purpose, acquired a resplendent beauty like baroque goldwork on a

background of black velvet, sumptuous like the jewelry an oriental prince might

use to provoke a voluptuous response from the bodies of his concubines or

ineffable torture on the tense and anonymous flesh of a victim whose existence

would be determined over the course of a thousand years by a relentless will to

forget the faded image of which, at once static and ecstatic, they would one day

suddenly see at a unique moment, frozen forever, a blurred image in a photograph

faded by time. (49)]

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

emblematic of an excessive and ostentatious decoration in order to overcompensate for the

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

voluptuosidad. Crueldad y voluptuosidad son sensaciones idénticas como el calor extremo y el

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

each aspect of the trinitary essence.

The conflation of voluptuousness and cruelty outlined by Elizondo corresponds to the

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

that retroactively founds (and sustains) the hegemonic order itself.

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

matriarchy of Pindorama, to recuperate a body capable of consuming, in turn, through subversive

feminine apertures within her political confinement.

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

that would oppose and interrupt the masculine order of hegemony.

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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

Masculine/Feminine: Practices of Difference(s), where Richard argues that feminism is based on

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,

obliquity, and deterritorialization. Instead, Richard advocates the feminization of writing, as it

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

sign’s inherent “axes of plurisignification,” its nature as simultaneously—contradictorily—

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

identity...would deploy the minority and subversive (counterhegemonic) coefficient of the

‘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

representation, whereas the feminine is characterized by an openness that challenges the

dominant order in its oppressive stability (24).

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.

Furthermore, if, following Flusser, we characterize postmodernity as a world of images, it stands

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

particularly effective avenues of resistance.

Torture is a form of writing. Instead of (sadistic) writing constituting the sublimation of a

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

social body itself.

The opening of writing to the inscription of power. Moreiras’ definition of the very

notion of “meaning” in Farabeuf describes a cannibalistic tendency of the state as it seeks to

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

seek Nelly Richard’s “differential multiplicities” in the fragmentary, psychological narratives of

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

political—anti-hegemonic acts of interruption.

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 CHAPTER TWO

FANTASIES OF ERASURE:
PIZARNIK, VALENZUELA, AND THE GENDER OF VIOLENCE

INTRODUCTION: LATIN AMERICAN DICTATORIAL DIFFERENCE

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,

conceived of as image or as a set of image-relations in Elizondo's novel, is brought out of her

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

movements regarding the development of feminine political subjectivity will be grounded in

literature produced in relation to extreme social-political realities in which repression runs

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.

This second chapter is concerned with two dictatorial periods in Argentina—the

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

FETISHIZING THE FEMININE: ALEJANDRA PIZARNIK’S

LA CONDESA SANGRIENTA AND THE POLITICS OF THE IMAGE

I. REWRITING THE COUNTESS: CSJETE 1585-1610 / ARGENTINA 1966-1973

Moments of violence in a text demand the reader’s attention; we are implicated in them in some

way, ethically, voyeuristically, or emotionally. In the case of La condesa sangrienta (1965),

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

of vignettes about Countess Erzsébet Báthory’s sadistic seventeenth-century exploits, offers a

81
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

subversive body and thereby produces a politics of the image.

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

structurally. Like Farabeuf, La condesa sangrienta is a work of intertextual and historic

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

relation to the machinations of a particular Argentine regime. Lastly, La condesa sangrienta is a

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

specificity of the Argentine Revolution.

La condesa sangrienta is comprised of an introduction and eleven titled vignettes written

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.

83
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.

84
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

Penrose’ historical novel on Erzsébet Báthory, La comtesse sanglante (1962).

The publication history of La condesa sangrienta (1965-1975) coincides roughly with

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

of self-recognition through the historic reception of La condesa sangrienta: its publication at

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

will demonstrate to be analogous to the countess’ dominion.

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.

85
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

deterioration of General Onganía’s authority.

The assassination of anti-Peronist General Pedro Eugenio Aramburu by the Peronist

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

press, the universities, the legal profession, or the unions” (363).

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

in Argentina, as well as a theorization of the jouissance of the dictator whose word is

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

totalmente e incluso después, al corregir, no sentía que cercenaba mi persona” [“What’s my

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

foundation for absolute power.

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.

II. THE SCOPOPHILIC GAZE: THE PASSIVE PARADOX OF THE SPECTACLE

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:

Aparece "la dama de estas ruinas", la sonámbula vestida de blanco. Lenta y

silenciosa se sienta en un escabel situado debajo de la jaula. Rojo atizador en

mano, Dorkó azuza a la prisionera quien, al retroceder– y he aquí la gracia de la

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

se repone de su trance se aleja lentamente. Han habido dos metamorfosis: su

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

a corpse now lies. (73)]

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 temporal grasp of history itself.

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

results in an indefinite series of transformations—of people into cadavers—through which the

state of exception justifies its own extension.

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

loss of life that catalyzes it.

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

seek a different concept than voyeurism.

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

image through a sadistic, gynophagic mise-en-scène.

III. THE SPECULAR GAZE: NARCISSISM AND THE MELANCHOLY MIRROR

In her seminal essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” Laura Mulvey identifies “two

contradictory aspects of the pleasurable structures of looking,” a dichotomy which will be

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

Mirror”], begins with the following description:

...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

fatigarse. Podemos conjeturar que habiendo creído diseñar un espejo, Erzébet

trazó los planos de su morada. (384, emphasis in original)

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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

obsession that overwrites the morbid truth of Elizondo’s mirror.

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

corporeo-visual exchange in the spectacle of torture.

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).

Here we encounter an excellent description of Countess Báthory’s psycho-sexual motivations,

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

perfection explains the countess’ satisfaction in the torture of young women.

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

desperately to maintain—through witchcraft, alchemy, murderous orgies, torture, or

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

historical specificities of the publication or reception of Pizarnik’s text, Foster’s consideration of

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

Báthory’s femicidal madness as “a confirmation of the terrible masculinist violence of the

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

history of La condesa sangrienta—constituted the first time that an Argentine military

government abandoned the pretense of being an interregnum period leading to the

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

sangrienta’s publication as a book by Aquarius Libros), “one such ‘disappearance’ occurred on

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

suspects” (Rock 356).

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

body through a politics of visuality. The postmodern emergence of vampyroteuthis infernalis

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

subjects are processed as images to be displayed, consumed, or destroyed at the sovereign’s

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

maintain an appearance of normalcy. In reading the regime alongside La condesa sangrienta,

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.

Such victims are subjected to the violent machinations of vampyroteuthian historicism,

which we identified in the previous chapter as the operative force in Latin American dictatorial

configurations. Vampyroteuthian historicism names the hegemonic state’s effort to reproduce

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).

The Argentine reproduction of a French novelization of early modern Hungarian history

effected in La condesa sangrienta formulates a critique of oppressive constellations of power

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-

inscribed within the historical narrative of the nation.

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

production in relation to dictatorial power structures and the vicissitudes of feminine

subjectivity.

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 PART TWO

THE UNDERSIDE OF DISAPPEARANCE:

CONFINEMENT IN VALENZUELA’S “CAMBIO DE ARMAS”

V. INSTITUTIONALIZING ABSENCE: ARGENTINA 1976-1983

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

unconstitutionally imprisoning them in hundreds of clandestine detention centers. The second

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

following concepts: language (the protagonist’s confinement within a pre-symbolic imaginary),

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

directly advances my development of counterhegemonic feminine subjectivity, as Valenzuela’s

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

Isabel as his running mate.

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

Reorganization,” otherwise known as the Dirty War.

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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

stadium just a mile away.

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

willful acts of forgetting.8

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,

the matter of disappearance is characterized by an interminable, unbearable deferral—it is

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

Luisa Mercedes Levinson. Valenzuela travelled throughout Latin America working as a

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

viability of resistance as a political concept, either through literature, feminist criticism, or

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

limits of the text.

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

its walls link each victim to the others in an interminable series.

Yet Valenzuela constructs a unique situation of confinement in which to play out

gendered games of power in “Cambio de armas,” one so deeply immersed in disappearance that

disappearance itself vanishes, as in a relation of overproximity. The Argentine quirófano is

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

in the sovereign’s consolidation of power in relation to feminine subjectivity. Ever the

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

politics of her traumatic past in what appears to be a narrative of resistance.

VI. ON LANGUAGE: THE FANTASY OF AN OPENING

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

torture of subversives, in the process outlined in my analysis of the politicized image in

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

rape under the guise of marriage—and symbolically, in its absolute reconfiguration

(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

to construct a unique psycho-physical space of confinement.

In Afterlives of Confinement, a spatial study of postdictatorial Latin America, Susana

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

horizons of feminism as a counterhegemonic tool. Valenzuela’s psychoanalytic engagement with

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.

Valenzuela’s story illustrates the post-traumatic (re)construction of feminine subjectivity at the

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,

under the twisted illusion of a calm, quotidian domestic life.

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

social censorship of women through the unexpected metaphor of a traditional middle-class

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

itself into the intimacy of the domestic.

Given the importance of naming as a primary act in the establishment of hegemonic

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

prepares for its inevitable return.

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

which induces a remarkable rupture within the symbolic order:

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

suena si no se le analiza, le da piel de gallina. Queda así pensando en el secreto

poder de las palabras.... (119)

[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

secret power of words... (110-11)]

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.

In this passage la espalda azotada necessarily becomes la palabra azotada, for

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

“Cambio de armas” there is essentially no “subject” to be narcissistic in the first place, as we

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

what is missing from the fantasy of progress” (17).

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.

VII. ON FRAGMENTATION: SPECULAR CARTOGRAPHIES OF THE SUBJECT

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.

Like those of Elizondo and Pizarnik, Valenzuela’s specular mise-en-scène frames a

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

that it may be used as a weapon against she who feels it.

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

resistance, a problematic notion that I will discuss further on.

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

encuentran y él no alcanza a oírlo, un no que parece hacer estallar el espejo del

techo, que multiplica y mutila y destroza la imagen de él, casi como un balazo

aunque él no lo perciba y tanto su imagen como el espejo sigan allí, intactos,

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

desgarramiento interno. (123-4)

[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

much trauma. (115)]

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

destroys the reflection on the ceiling above her.

Laura transforms her violent self-recognition through a Nietzschean rejection of the

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

fantasy of a subject has become the fantasy of a death.

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

about”], as Valenzuela presents a provocative image of the unconscious: “Un oscuro,

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

representation of dictatorial domesticity.

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

interruption of the hegemonic order from within.

Valenzuela’s nuanced psychological narrative thus transforms the psychoanalytic concept

of repression into a political one, whose politics are steeped in what Nelly Richard has referred

to in Masculine/Feminine as the “axes of plurisignification” inherent within the hybridity of the

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 psychic and specular production of images.

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

resolution of the conflict. This subversive image is characterized by counterpropriation of the

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

means of a productive distance. This relation to Lacan is no accident, as Cadava himself

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

photo-graphed” (106). I am inscribed as subject through light—written as image. Whereas for

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

Valenzuela’s approach to the image in “Cambio de armas.” Lacan writes that:

…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

which proceeds the renewal of beings in reproduction… It is no doubt through the

mediation of masks that the masculine and the feminine meet in the most acute,

most intense way. (107, emphasis mine)

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

(sexual) reproduction of images.

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

gemido de ella se transforme en aullido. (135-6)

[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

analogous to that of the reader.

Valenzuela subtly implicates us as we observe Laura’s disturbing animalization, even

referencing an invisible crowd from which the protagonist must escape, as the author links the

disappeared, the state, and her readers:

Ella piensa en la muchedumbre de afuera que los estará observando—

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.

Un cuerpo —y no el proprio, claro que no el propio— que le sirva de pantalla, de

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

under another body. (127)]

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

subversive political remainder in positive discourse; disappearance thus became a form of

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

December 1976: “guerrillas” were to be referred to as “armed bands of subversive criminals,”

“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

realm of language, which is thus a fully political domain.

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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

disappearance in order to participate subversively in her own photo-graphic subjectivity, her

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

disrupts the state’s system of (re)production.

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

must consider is whether the protagonist’s subversive disruptions and counterpropriations

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

unconscious—is ironically feminized as a rifle scope (mira) and masculinized as a chasm

(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.

IX. APUNTAMIENTO: WRITING WITH A REVOLVER

Valenzuela ultimately presents us with something resembling a political palimpsest of the

subject: Laura’s task is to read the history of her own body, which has been overwritten by the

Colonel. Such a configuration prefigures the politics of memory in post-dictatorial Argentina, as

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.

Valenzuela’s text—and the politics of disappearance and confinement that it critiques—occupies

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

“aiming” and “writing” in apuntamiento.

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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

temporizing mediation of a detour that suspends the accomplishment or fulfillment of ‘desire’ or

‘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

complicity. It remains to consider the operation of deferral in Valenzuela’s narrative, as it relates

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

narrative of “Cambio de armas” is founded on this phantasmal instant, whose temporality, we

shall learn, is not characterized by abandonment into a history that never took place, but by

deferral into a history that comes.

Though the text remains open-ended, it concludes cinematographically with an image

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

protagonist levels the revolver at her captor—apunta—as Valenzuela significantly concludes

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

aiming. To approach it in narratological terms of the Bakhtinian chronotope, “Cambio de armas”

is characterized by an entirely liminal spatiotemporality. The text is framed on either side by

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

is careful to resist representing this moment, leaving it in fact forever postponed.

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

characterizes “signification as the différance of temporization.” What follows in Derrida’s

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

“Cambio de armas,” a narrative of erasure whose protagonist seeks (even if unconsciously) to

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reappropriate her own relation to the present, to reinsert herself into the history from which her

disappearance constitutes a rupture that is at once existential and political.

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

making-present of counterhegemonic violence. The gunshots signal ideological (polemical)

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)

an open-ended text. This tale of confinement—within a cloud, a prison, an apartment, a

relationship, a dictatorial regime—is ultimately about the opening of power, of writing, of

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feminine subjectivity itself to differential multiplicities. Valenzuela plays out actions of

counterpropriation while abstaining from indulging in a narrative of facile resistance.

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

regime. Yet this second inscription, a counter-inscription, is presented on a horizon, forever

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

non-durative duration—this text is indeed an Elizondian “chronicle of an instant.” Yet in the

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

maintaining the aperture of a wound.

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-

hegemony to feminist post-hegemony, from an against to a beyond. While Laura’s framing

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

which has been erased, disappeared, or overwritten, but not forgotten.

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 CHAPTER THREE

NEOLIBERALISM AND THE FEMININE:

ECONOMIES OF VIOLENCE, FROM ELTIT’S MARGINS TO BOLAÑO’S BORDER

INTRODUCTION: ZONES OF EXCLUSION, SITES OF EXCEPTION

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

nongovernmental powers. While we will witness a radical transformation of hegemony’s self-

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,

especially since the North American Free Trade Agreement of 1994.

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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.

This project thus culminates in an examination of the endless production of “exquisite

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

that is darker than the darkest of fictions.

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 PART ONE

CUTTING AND RUBBING AT THE MARGINS:

AFFECT AND IMAGE IN ELTIT’S LUMPÉRICA

I. DICTATORIAL ECONOMICS AND LITERARY PRODUCTION: CHILE 1973-1990

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

extreme right” (Halperín Donghi 347).

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

democratic elections. For in Chile,

sustaining Pinochet (and, of course, the dictatorship’s 1980 constitution) as the

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

the country and its population if it considered questioning the institutional

processes of the military regime that had put democracy on the table in the first

place. (Williams 282)

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

to structure social and political constellations of power on a global level: neoliberalism.

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

perceived—produces real change” (Friedman xiv). Friedman acted as economic adviser to

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

sector” (Halperín Donghi 349).

The decades leading up to Chile becoming an economic model for neoliberalism

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

Boys in Chile; dictatorship would prove an easier fit” (77).

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

mutual demand for “a radical transformation of the state” (Valdés 5).

Such a symbiotic relationship between politics and neoliberal economics forecloses on

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

symptom of precariousness in all of its metaphorical extension” (Insubordination 17). Writing

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,

opacity, and allusive metaphoricity of the avant-garde aesthetic” (Beasley-Murray, “Reflections”

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

production of an image in an attempt to approach a transcendental ideal akin to the Platonic

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

ruptured, fragmentary collective that we encounter in Lumpérica’s anonymous vagabonds 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

captures images of the disjunctive relations within the asylum.

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

of gaze “capable of reaestheticizing imperfections and blunders in symbolic homage to the

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

model of perfection victoriously raised by a masculine gaze thought to be ‘beyond suspicion,’”

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

Pizarnik’s treatment of Báthory’s narcissistic image in its pseudo-perfection.

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

with power—be it sexual, literary, or political—within an economy of marginality where

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

of lumen through the deployment of rubbing as a decentralized form of affective relation

between marginal bodies, before exploring the self-cutting of both author and protagonist as the

foundation of Eltit’s performance of feminine image production.

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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

city’s impoverished denizens. It is their lack of capital, rather than a counter-hegemonic

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

refer to Eltit’s critical approach to marginality, economics, and language in Lumpérica as a

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

penetration utilized by the authoritarian state.

Eltit’s emphasis on darkness, marginality, and anonymity is indicative of a line 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

a simple scene of a neon light illuminating a homeless woman in a plaza. Eltit

cinematographically presents a phantasmagoric succession of images:

Imaginar que esa mujer es una desharrapada en la plaza, entumida de frío…

Imaginar una luz de gran potencia sobre la cabeza inclinada de la mujer…

Imaginarla encerrada. Imaginar a la mujer con la cabeza baja para eludir una

luz… Imaginar la iluminación de sus ojos cerrados… Imaginar el escenario

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

illumination of her closed eyes... Imagine the scene constituted by a powerful

light. Imagine everything in tatters under that light. Imagine her own rags exposed

to a powerful light... Imagine the illumination of every electric light. (119-20)]

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.

It is important to note that el luminoso is a construct, even on an etymological level. The

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

structure of image production.

In order to understand the unique performance staged by Eltit in Lumpérica we must

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

public, non-civic mass united in their exclusion.

An understanding of affect is essential for approaching the particular conception of

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

refers to as an “apparatus of capture,” following Deleuze and Guattari (138). Beasley-Murray

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

threshold between affective states as bodies either coalesce or disintegrate, as they

become other to themselves. Hence... affect constitutes an immanent and

unbounded ‘field of emergence’ or ‘pure capacity’ prior to the imposition of order

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

they be pinned down and fixed into individuated identities.

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

achieve transcendence as sovereign by manipulating the affective power of the multitude of

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

order to deny its citizen-bodies affective power (138).

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

centrality that inscribes their marginality.

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

subtraction of subversive/marginal elements until it arrives at the One. Eltit’s approach is in a

sense non-ideological, or anti-ideological. She subverts not so as to propose an alternative

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

Lumpérica, relations significantly based on the act of rubbing. In looking at La condesa

sangrienta we previously identified as one of Pizarnik’s major contributions her sexualization of

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

characterized by delight, that of the jouissance generated by the self-pleasure of rubbing. As we

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

precisely due to its non-ideological nature.

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

refrote. Los pálidos saliendo y entrando cotidianamente salivosos, cayendo desde 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

access in the nocturnal underside of Chile that she occupies.

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,

“evitando generosamente el displacer” (120) [“generously avoiding displeasure” (103)].

Against the neoliberal eroticism of consumption that characterizes Pinochet’s economic

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

through avoidance—of displeasure, of light, of penetration, of limits—as they disassemble

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

on anything or anyone. Garcia-Moreno’s triad “woman/lumpen/America” broadens such

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

which Eltit situates her novel.

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

(and images) another, one that is self-inflicted.

III. PERFORMING THE CUT, FRAMING THE IMAGE

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

representation of this disturbing photograph, and in interesting ways. In Ronald Christ’s

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

opening—the core of feminist post-hegemonic strategy. L. Iluminada’s (and Eltit’s) self-

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

at large, in spite of their peripheral status.

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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

innovative ways as they rub against one another.

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

level of the orthographic: “Anal’iza la trama=dura de la piel; la mano prende y la fobia d

es/garra” (172) [“She anal-izes the plot = thickens the skin: the hand catches = fire and the

phobia d is/members” (151)]. La mano prende [fuego]—the hand catches [fire]—and a

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

representation, it nevertheless succeeds as a means of opening when deployed as a cut. Literature

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

paradoxically conceals through illumination—a field of immanence in which destitute marginal

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

in her production of feminine images of the marginal.

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

such. In other words, the cut as the subtraction of a limit.

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

actions of writing, fragmentation, and opening.

PART TWO

THE LOGIC OF EXPULSION:

FEMICIDE AND SERIAL EXCESS IN BOLAÑO’S 2666

IV. THE INFRA-REGIME: THE MEXICAN BORDER IN THE WAKE OF NAFTA

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

an unchecked neoliberal drive of accumulation that—both necessarily and joyfully—consumes

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

civil liberties” (62).

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

and the absence of those to whom no predicate can be ascribed.

Philosopher Achille Mbembe’s notion of necropolitics has been deployed by numerous

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

gendering of public space as a principle mechanism of necropolitics” (719). As will be analyzed

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-

statization and neoliberalism, cannot but install a provincial totalitarianism, in a regressive

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-

hegemonic deterritorialization deployed by feminism against authoritarian regimes in Latin

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

mechanisms of official authority through decentralized, nomadic lines of flight.

Segato’s identification of a second state in Mexico is based on another of her important

contributions to understanding femicide: that of rape as a form of communication. One aspect of

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

the feminine. As a perverse form of communication, the femicides must be read—feminist

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

subject (or collectivity) who speaks through the murders.

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

Spanish-speaking academics and activists, Mexican anthropologist and congresswoman Marcela

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

interchangeably in the literature on gender-based violence” as well as by the contributors to their

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

practice would be self-defeating, as it merely defines feminicide as not-the-kind-theorized-in-

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.

The geographic specificity of feminicide can be seen in an interesting and somewhat

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’

volume as Feminicidio: una perspectiva global: if feminicide reflects a unique socio-political

configuration of gender and power in the global South, translating Russell’s own scholarship as

feminicidio contradicts the notion of redefining a term—femicide—with whose universality

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

Africa, China, Israel, and Australia.

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

feminicidio, insofar as it adheres to Lagarde’s formulation of it). In explicitly defining the

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

of their actions” (93-4).

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

“characterization of obreras as typifying a kind of public woman relies on negative interpretation

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

committed… could appear any longer as a crime” (97).

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

initiation into an illicit brotherhood. Such a femicide is a performance that establishes a

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).

VI. ABJECT EXPULSION

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 process of becoming an other at the expense of my own death” (3).

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

encroached upon everything. It is no longer I who expel, ‘I’ is expelled. The

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,

order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. (3-4)

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

femicide machine’s antechamber, an exceptional ‘camp,’ as described by Agamben” (31). This

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

society, which he non-rhetorically claims have rotted:

To putrefy is to corrupt, to effect a radical alteration of matter. This transition to

another condition—in this case, degradation—demonstrates the defecation of

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

metaphor) of a neoliberal order founded on the exploitation, consumption, and expulsion of

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.

Approaching the apocalyptic landscape of the neoliberal Mexican border through

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-

Ruminott observes of Bolaño’s ironic canonization as a master within Latin American—and

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

(2004), which has acquired the status of a masterpiece.

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

facilities with a predominantly female workforce, and a mysterious epidemic of femicidal

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

Amalfitano, expatriated to Mexico after Pinochet’s coup; the descent of an African-American

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.

Villalobos-Ruminott argues that Bolaño’s representation of the Mexican border in 2666

“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

which anything is possible has extended globalization’s inherent transgression of boundaries to

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:

On close inspection, all literature is probably a version of the apocalypse that

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

or only barely so—double, fuzzy, heterogeneous, animal, metamorphosed,

altered, abject. (207)

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)

relations on the border leads to an apocalypse that is ironically—or worse, perhaps

nonironically—based on a neoliberal fantasy of economic progress. Bolaño himself emerges as a

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

us economy-first through our own inability to see or understand it.

VII. EXQUISITE CORPSES

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

characterizes Bolaño’s engagement with drug trafficking as oblique because it represents “a

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

invisible, but not at all illusory.

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

nauseam, ad absurdum—as a patterned femicidal series. The victim is identified as thirteen-year-

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

said about gynophobia” (382)]. Gynophobia corresponds to Rebecca Biron’s aforementioned

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

them exquisite corpses.

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

machine; an intolerable representation of death that approaches the mathematical sublime.

In considering the border as a site of abject expulsion, we are conceiving of it as a body.

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

subjects, supplanted by the persistence of a meter” (190). The automaticity of border

technologies—the manufacturing-assembly plants, maquiladoras—has been implicated in the

region’s sexual automatization of death itself. Regarding Amalfitano’s obsession with

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

game bears a disturbing relation to the manufacturing-assembly technologies of the maquiladoras

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

the surrealist exquisite corpse.

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

of Mexico’s relation to the imago of the exquisite corpse.

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.

We encounter such an imago in the epilogue to The Femicide Machine, which is

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

collective of femicide victims.

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

to us through omniscient narration is “consistent because it lacks something;” this is the

objective world of historical fact that excludes “life or being,” and to which we add a narrator as

a “principle of intelligibility.” Free indirect narration, however, represents a world that is

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).

As cultural critics we tend to position ourselves within a plane of omniscience from

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

reality/fiction, narration/enunciation, history/apocalypse, and woman/corpse.

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

mamones de su propia verga. Lalo Cura no se encorajinaba. Volteados hijos de su chingada

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

chain of continuous ruptures as we descend into the normalization of atrocity—the horror

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.

VIII. ON SERIALITY: THE NARRATIVE PERVERSION OF A CONCEPT

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

governing public transportation (Young 724).

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

trap, as a serial collective makes no claim to essential attributes:

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

material organization of social relations as enabled and constrained by the

structural relations of enforced heterosexuality and the sexual division of labor.

(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

excess and control; the excess of absolute control.

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

because I recognize that in my serialized existence I am rapeable, the potential

object of male appropriation. But this awareness depersonalizes me, constructs me

as Other to her and Other to myself in a serial interchangeability rather than

defining my sense of identity. (731)

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

suspect in the femicides that plague Santa Teresa.

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

transformations—from subject to object to imago—as they enter the ambiguous psycho-cultural

category of the exquisite corpse. Such a transformation takes place either materially as a body

enjoyed by the killers or melancholically as an un-introjectable cadavre exquis locked within a

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

non-relation of its parts.

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 case was closed.”

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

the existence of a globalized network of misogyny.

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

have no punchline; they are instead presented as complementary truths in a combination of

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

again, still another officer states that he heard of:

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

violación «por los tres conductos» se extendió, se popularizó en la policía en

Santa Teresa, adquirió un prestigio semioficial… (576-7)

[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

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 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

Teresa police, acquiring semiofficial status… (460-1)]

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

semiofficial phrase through the positive discourse of popularity and prestige.

Bolaño significantly presents the death of Mónica Posadas in terms of consumption,

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.

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more powerful than that cast by the flight of an angel” (my translation)]. While this spiteful force

of transcendence was replaced by an intrusive neon sign within Lumpérica’s chiaroscuro

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

psychoanalytic concept by repeatedly enacting the making-exquisite of the material corpse

through the jouissance that drives its sexual violence. In Bolaño’s novel the exquisite corpse is

not the result of trauma; it is trauma itself.

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

forms “one stack” of murders, or of reports of murders, that is “potentially... an infinite

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

history itself: the angel of history.

Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History become an indirect reference 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

unintelligibility of the femicides:

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

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 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

skyward. This storm is what we call progress. (257-8)

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

answer an endless demand of consumption, a system that necessitates an unlimited supply of

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

reproduces itself in automated cycles and cyclical killings.

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 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

epicenter at the border.

CODA: CUT, LINE, RELATION

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

confinement. Eltit’s self-sacrificial subversion of this cut through her corporeo-textual

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

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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.

In Bolaño’s representation of the transborder as a site of perverse seriality, however, it is

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

collective of anonymous corpses.

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

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instead represents a violence that acts as though there were no limits in the first place. It

constitutes a masculinist perversion of post-hegemony, as its illicit powers occupy a beyond

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

relation of one discarded body to another, and another, and another.

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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

circumscription) the spectral.

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

unofficial network of criminal/corporate power. Present only as an overwhelming absence in

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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.

Desollamiento. Elizondo outlines the foundational exclusion of the pharmakós through

acts of skinning and dismemberment, forms of biopolitical intervention that retroactively

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.

Contemplación. Pizarnik considers the visual consumption of the feminine in the

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

horizon of its inevitable collapse.

Apropriación. Valenzuela stages the representation of the transition from counter-

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

their appropriation of power and discourse.

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

feminine for the sake of its own ritualized constitution.

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

Countess Báthory as a feminine embodiment of absolute power, an exploration of the image 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

series The Bridge (2013).

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

of the national in Mexico.

Malkina’s “gynecological” performance turns the implied doctor/patient (surgeon/victim)

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

mise-en-scène that she constructs is nevertheless simultaneously within and beyond

(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

capitalizes on her own position within a gynophobic, femicidal order.

A politics of consumption governs postmodernity after NAFTA—consumption of labor

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

penetration (Elizondo), contemplation and enjoyment (Pizarnik), erasure and confinement

(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

image of both an oppressive masculine hegemony and a post-hegemonic feminism. Permutations

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

dictatorial state decades ago along with the birth of neoliberalism.

237
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