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American Comparative Literature Association meeting, 2009

Sergio Villalobos-Ruminott
Dept of Foreign Languages
University of Arkansas, Fayetteville
svillal@uark.edu



The Place of Literature: War and Onto-theology in Extremoccidente


Even if the question for the place of literature is too general and indirect, I will
elaborate some comments on recent Latin American narratives about war and violence that
require a meditation on the place of literature in our current society. Generally referred to
as post-boomers, contemporary writers share not only their aversion to former generations,
but also a particular taste for short novels, ubiquitous plots and pan-topic trips.
Representations of political violence, war and social fractures are also among the preferred
topics for these writers, despite the fact that this isnt new if the major works of the
twentieth century are considered. What seems to be new, however, is the place in which
such literature is located.
Standard criticism has come to terms with Latin American contemporary writers by
means of grouping their works in categories such as post-dictatorship, post-civil war, and
post-revolutionary narratives. At the same time, from the nineties, the Crack and McOndo
generations and the so-called forty-under-forty are used as levels that promise, but just
promise, something more than a classification. In what follows, I will elaborate on some
particular transformations in Latin American society and its literature that imply what I will
call, tentatively, a new literary place. In short, what matters to me is the possible link
between a series of novels whose main topic is war and political violence, as a phenomenon
that goes beyond the national State and the conventional criticism related to it. How to
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think the revision of the recent past and the representations of violence in works such as
Los Pichiciegos (Malvinas Requiem) by Rodolfo Enrique Fogwill (1982); El fin de la
locura by Jorge Volpi (2001); El testigo by Juan Villoro (2004); Managua salsa city by
Franz Galich (2001); El arma en el hombre by Horacio Castellanos Moya (2001); 2666 by
Roberto Bolao (2004), among many others? Is classical criticism, oriented by the
analytical teleology of the nation formation process, suitable for these novels?
The main hypothesis I am following in this paper is that literature, and specifically
contemporary Latin American narrative, has suffered a process of disarticulation from the
State and from cultural institutions related to the State (University, national print houses,
etc.) Therefore, it seems that we lack an universal standard to organize the current
production of Latin American narrative, let alone poetry and other literary expressions, and
it is clear that the old teleology of the nation formation is exhausted and insufficient to deal
with these novels. In my research, I focus on this exhaustion, which should not be
misunderstood as an end of literature, or as a call for other cultural expressions. The
exhaustion that concerns me is the very condition for a literary thinking that is not
subordinated to the classical social contract that founded the civic value of literature.
Therefore, what matters is the ineffectiveness of contemporary literature, a condition due to
many transformations of our modern cosmopolitical world. I would say that that
ineffectiveness is the very condition for our thoughts, since what is at stake here is the
powerless condition of literature, its powerlessness, if we can say it in this way.
Before we get to our point, another precision seems necessary. I am not primarily
concerned with the sociological dimensions of this exhaustion, as Jean Franco is in her
rigorous book The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City (2002). In it, Franco elaborates the
empirical transformations of Latin American culture and literature from the inception of the
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avant-gardes to the current imperial times. But, if I might, I would refer to the challenging
example of Peter Sloterdijk to complement our understanding of the disarticulation and
exhaustion I was talking about. Sloterdijk has questioned what he conceives as the
humanistic programming of literature, in general, and of narrative in particular, for quite a
long time. Already in his lecture of 1999, Rules for the Human Park, that was a response
to Heideggers famous Letter about Humanism (1945), he established that Heidegger still
dwells in the humanistic universe of the written word insofar as his Letter has the form of a
letter, that is to say, a message directed to a reader and oriented to produce a particular
effect. It is this economy of codification and deciphering, proper to the epistolary exchange
and to the universe of the written word, what discloses Heideggers co-belonging to
humanism. Rules then, is a cynic criticism of Heideggers text that pays attention to what
Sloterdijk conceives as a change in the code of programming proper to our contemporary
world. This argument, that caused many denunciations from the German cultural left,
regarded biological programming, genetic engineering and biopolitical organization of the
human park (society), as more relevant and effective than the old humanist project of
literary programming of humankind (the romantic aesthetical education).
In Latin American narrative, however, this disarticulation and change of the
programming code had its inception in a rather concrete historical event (or series of
events), related to the latest dictatorships and civil wars. These processes were constitutive
of a sort of big bang of neoliberal globalization in the region that transformed culture,
universities and the role of the State in the last thirty years or so. As I said, I am not
concerned here with sociological aspects of these transformations, but it should be
sufficient to explain that we dont need to claim that globalization is a recent phenomenon
in our history, or that it is as old as the very discovery of America, to understand how
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political violence and the destruction, strategically implemented by the State, produced also
a general transformation of the hegemonic articulation of Latin American society. In short,
one of the consequences of this political violence and permanent war in the region is the
configuration of a post-hegemonic place for literature, both, in the sense that literature is
not a crucial narrative anymore in the hegemonic articulation of society and, in the sense
that today power seems to articulate itself not only through classical hegemony but as
imperial reason, as William Spanos consistently contends (Americas Shadow, 2000,
American Exceptionalism in the Age of Globalization, 2008.)

* * * * *

In that case, what might be the link between literature and onto-theology? If we
think of onto-theology as the articulation between ancient (Roman) ontology (onto),
medieval theology (theo) and modern scientific rationality (logos), then literature as a
particular thinking is placed in a rather ambiguous position. Does it belong to the onto-
theological articulation of history or rather its place is one of reservation and exteriority to
this historical articulation? Patricio Marchants works, we might state, are organized as a
question mainly oriented to discern the place of literature (place and not role, neither
function), within the context of Latin American history. He developed his ideas in his major
book about Chilean poetry and Latin American literature (with emphasis on Gabriela
Mistral and Jorge Luis Borges), Sobre rboles y madres, (1984). But, in 2000 an anthology
of articles and lectures given by Marchant and unpublished at that time appeared: Escritura
y temblor. This second work complemented the scope of his first monographic approach
and expanded his meditations on the relationship between philosophy, literature and
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thinking. As in the Heideggerian tradition, Marchant does not identify thinking with
philosophy but rather with languages historical conditions. His formulation is twofold, on
one hand, he interrogates Spanish as an historical language able to think critically, and, at
the same time, he conceives Spanish as a language that belongs, by all means and rights, to
the European history of imperial reason. As an imperial language it shares the same status
as any other philosophical language.
In this sense, as a philosophical language, Spanish is conformed by many dramatic
experiences that make possible an historical thinking different to any historicist way of
knowledge. Marchant identifies historicism with academic philosophy insofar as this
philosophy was, in Chilean universities and in Spanish language, dedicated to translations
and to problems of the history of philosophy. Therefore, if history of philosophy and
philosophy are not the same, and if philosophy and thinking differs, what concerns
Marchant is a thinking on historical thinking that relates to the very articulation of being
and time. This is why we should look for other places in order to conceive this linguistic
articulation of thinking. But what would be that other place? This is, indeed, literature.
Once again, Marchant is not concerned with the institution of literature or with the
sociological dimensions of this social practice. For him, it is a matter of dwelling in some
specific works gifted with the ability to express or disclose the historical condition of Latin
American society (and, up to a certain point, of Spain, insofar as he regards Spanish history
as a wild process of hybridization which permeates languages thoroughly). At the same
time, this disclosing requires from the thinker-readers to go beyond any logic of
representation proper to traditional criticism. His readings are not oriented by a deciphering
process or an interpretative device, focused in the metaphorical elements of a literary work
or in its allegorical economy. What Marchant does is a polemic confrontation
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(Auseinandersetzung) with the literary works that interrupts the economy of interpretation
of traditional criticism from a kind of reading that is generally called destructive. What
he does is to destruct the emphases of history of philosophy and of literary criticism in
order to re-read the work with a regained innocence and mindfulness.
Since Marchant regards the literary space as an endeavor of thinking, we might
suspect that his conception of literature falls within what we might call the hypothesis of
the power of poetry (die Dichtung), to say, the ability of literature, and poetry in
particular, to save humans in dark times. This hypothesis, schematically exposed is related
to the so-called Heideggerian turn of the 1940s (die Kehre), and to the deconstructive
reading of Paul de Man (Allegories of readings, 1979), and states that deep in some literary
works dwells an immanent critic to metaphysics as a problematic questioning of being in its
relations to humans. As if in some literary authors such as Hlderling, Celan, and Trakl or,
for Marchant, Neruda, Vallejo and Mistral, we were able to recover the vocation of an
ancient way of thinking all-forgotten by the onto-theological articulation of western history.
On the other hand, this nave presentation of the power of poetry of the very
coincidence between thinking and poetry (Denken und Dichtung), is not to be taken as a
transcendental relationship. On the contrary, since language is permeated by historical
experiences, so the conditions of our recent history are crucial to determine the potentiality
of literary articulations. For Marchant there are not master-works or a Western canon that
might be conceived as the moral reserve of our values, rather everything for him is
historical thinking and literary works are too. This is why the cup dtat of 1973 plays an
important role in his thought: Marchant understood the coup not only as the spectacular
representation of the attack executed by the army against the government of Salvador
Allende, but also as a coup to the language in which Chilean society imagined itself. A
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dramatic break of the symbolic universe of the national community, this inscription of the
Real meant also the exhaustion of the trust in the power of language to disclose the
historical condition of thinking. It was, certainly, the end of the Chilean road to socialism
and also the end of the so-called narrative boom, a literary movement characterized by its
linguistic power of expression and imagination. Consequently, the dramatic military
intervention was for him a mute sign of the end of the literary power to disclose thinking,
and an inexorable end of the singularity of a historical process conceived as exception.
Latin American magical realism and the Chilean road to socialism were over; there were no
more exceptions because dictatorship was precisely the rule of exception. Marchant himself
referred this violent event as our little Auschwitz and, in Adornos terms, what is at
stake here is the very possibility of poetry after the catastrophe.
This is how Marchant comes back to his first reading of the literary place and,
without naivety he set the problem of how literature and sovereignty overlaps and co-
belongs to the same historical occasion. This is why the coup dtat might perfectly be
considered as the end of the hypothesis of the Dichtung, and then what remains after this
end is the articulation of another historical process, somehow dormant in the regional
history, and now apparent everywhere. This disclosure showed that political violence and
war, dirty and civil war certainly, were non-exceptions to Latin American history but
constitutive elements of it. Then, the power of literature to disclose the historical
conditions of thinking was subsumed to the disclosing mechanism of the new sovereign
dictatorships, a disclosing that makes apparent how Latin America republicanism was
marked by the violent articulation of onto-theology. This is the hypothesis of the co-
belonging between the former sovereignty of the literary boom, its trust in language and
imagination, and the sovereignty of dictatorship. Latin American dictatorships and,
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particularly, Pinochets regime, were not conservative or commissarial intervention
(oriented to re-establish order in a critical time), but rather sovereign redesigns of society,
by the foundation of a new social contract, a new constitution, and the disarticulation of the
traditional welfare State. The coup and the subsequent dictatorship in Chile was a radical
exercise of sovereignty against sovereignty: it was the foundational character of the
sovereign State of exception played against the backdrop of its institutional tradition. And it
should cause no surprise that the thinker of the Chilean Constitution (1980), Jaime
Guzmn, was a careful reader of Carl Schmitt, Fredrick von Hayek and Juan Donoso Corts
(as Renato Cristi has powerfully argued, El pensamiento poltico de Jaime Guzmn, 2000.)

* * * * *

In a short essay entitled Land and Sea (Land und Meer, 1942), Schmitt proposes a
reading of modern imperial power as an imposition of what he calls foreign law, Nomos
and katecon, to the subordinated nations. Even if Nomos does not correspond perfectly to
the notion of law, what is at stake here is how Schmitt understood the international policy
and the geopolitical articulation of the world as a problem of power and territoriality. The
Nomos of classical British imperialism was indeed based on its control of the ocean, but as
soon as we talk about the imperial reason of the contemporary world, Schmitt point to the
new Nomos of the Earth (1950) related to the American hegemony after the Second World
War. For him, the American mission in global history was the articulation of a global order
based on the Nomos of a planetary territoriality subsumed to its control, to its katecon;
otherwise, we will confront an anomic situation due to the lack of public rights. Carlo Galli,
the Italian commentator of Schmitt has stated in a recent work (La Guerra Globale, 2002)
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that what happened after the other September 11 (2001), was precisely a symptom not of
the American imperial presence in the world, rather a symptom of its lack of presence and
control of what has become a permanent global war. This symptom meant the configuration
of a theological horizon that is not properly embodied in the political order (not properly a
theological-political setting), and because of that improper embodiment, it produced an
anomic reconfiguration of the order (an eschaton). In this sense, the global war is not
anymore a nomic conflict between sovereign States, but the ubiquitous conflict that is
reflected in the transition from the partisan to the terrorist.
It is this ubiquitous condition of war what makes it permanent and global, and
distinguishes it from conventional and civil wars. In this sense, for Galli, the other 9 / 11
precipitates a transformation of war into a global issue. These attacks carried with them the
abandon of the classical idea of security, based on the dialectic between identity and
difference, interiority and exteriority, in favor of its reformulation in terms of a general
pollution and insecurity. The war now is not oriented to defend the national borders, rather
is oriented to expurgate the risks that inhabit the heart of the self. This war directed against
oneself (that Roberto Esposito has called immunitarian), produces a dismantling of the
modern categorical architecture of thinking that Schmitt has conceived as the exhaustion
of the Nomos of the earth. This is also what William Spanos has conceived as interregnum
and what Carlo Galli called architectonic nihilism.

* * * * *

Coming back to the place of literature, the question that remains is up to what
point this new geopolitical situation enables new readings and new ways to deal with Latin
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American narrative? As in Marchant, we are not dealing here with the nave presumption of
the thoughtful nature or the liberating power of literature; rather we are concerned with the
co-belonging of literature to what we have called the planetary articulation of onto-
theology. No exceptions. What makes literary articulations worth thinking about is how this
co-belonging discloses the very conditions that repress and demand thinking.
I would like to make some final comments on two novels that seem to address these
issues. Written in the immediate aftermath of the Malvinas war, in 1982, and without
access to reliable information, Los Pichiciegos (Malvinas Requiem), by Rodolfo Enrique
Fogwill, tells the story of a group of deserters from the Argentinean Army placed in the
Falkland Island in the short period of confrontation between Argentina and England, in
1982. These runaways, under the command of El turco, are called pichis in allusion to
a blind mammal that inhabit the pampas of Argentina. They live in a precarious
subterranean refuge between the Argentinean and the British fronts. As characters, they
have not substance and not political education that transforms them in agents of a particular
allegory. Empty as they are, these pichis are the literary figuration of a naked life exposed
to power and war strategies that they do not control. In the plot, written as a fictional short
reportage, the pichis spend their time hiding from the Argentinean Army and from the
bombing of the British Air Force, stealing sugar from storages, smoking and talking. This
rough representation emphasizes the distance between the traditional characters of Latin
American narratives, always invested with imagination and consciousness, and the
precarious life of the pichis that lacks consciousness and discursive rationality. They are
untranslatable objects destined to die, not exactly subjects that can be articulated within the
hegemonic discourse of national sovereignty. Sort of negative sovereignty, the pichiciegos
are a disclosure of the post-conventional condition of war. So, the subterranean crypt in
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which they live and die is the inversion of the symbolic function of the trench, a function
very much related to the strategy of the position war that characterized through the
twenty century the political battles for hegemony and the State.
Something similar might be said about Roberto Bolaos last work, 2666. Divided
into five chapters, the novel or set of novels takes place, mainly, in Western and Eastern
Europe, and in Mexico. The landscapes of the Second World War on both fronts, and the
desert of the north of Mexico, along with many European universities where scholars
dedicated to the work of Benno von Archimboldi meet, are the principal scenarios for a plot
that is marked by war and, ultimately, by violence as a token of the twenty century. Benno
von Archimboldi, the invincible German soldier that became an enigmatic cult writer in the
European postwar, is a literary figure that embodies the paradoxes of violence and
destruction in contemporary history, as Amalfitano, the Chilean leftist exile who is living in
the north of Mexico, expresses the shipwreck of a whole generation in Latin American
history; Bolaos generation. It shouldnt be a surprise then that the novel ends up around
the femicides of Ciudad Juarez, which represent one of the five parts of the novel. In this
part, Bolao narrates in a direct way, mimicking police reports and technical forensic
writing. Therefore, from the destruction of the Second World War to the femicides in the
north of Mexico, from the spleen and boredom of literary scholars to the hallucinations of
an ex partisan and currently exiled Chilean professor, the novel focuses on the shared
horizon of both European and Latin American history as if the old trick of the difference
were exhausted. What makes Latin American political history part of the European saga is
war and violence, which are not accidental to the plot but the main topic of Bolaos work.
This co-belonging to the planetary articulation of war is, therefore, rightly presented at the
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end of the novel in the desert, since the desert implies an anomic crisis of the nation State
as opposed to the city.
As in Los Pichiciegos, where the subterranean refuge (la pichicera), is both a shield
and a crypt for the renegades of the Argentinean army who died at the end of the novel; the
Mexican desert and Santa Barbara, the phantasmagorical representation of Ciudad Juarez,
full of corruption and impunity, 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
powerlessness condition of literature. The tragic destine of the pichis and the superfluous
condition of life in 2666, are not only representations of a bare or precarious life of
subalterns in general, for this narratives do not attempt to be testimonial. In the co-
belonging of literature and onto-theology, these novels as many other in the recent Latin
American literature, disclose the anomic condition of global war and point to the undecided
situation of a general interregnum within the contemporary imperial reason. All of this, I
think, is enough to wonder about the place of literature.


Fayetteville, March 2009.