A Kind of Hell: Roberto Bolaño and The Return of World Literature
2009; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 18; Issue: 2-3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/13569320903361887
ISSN1469-9575
Autores Tópico(s)Memory, Trauma, and Testimony
ResumoClick to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgement I would like to express my gratitude to Greg Buchanan for his help in the editing of this article. Notes 1 ‘Sevilla me mata’, in Palabra de America (2004), p. 21. Translations are mine if not otherwise indicated. I will also give the original date of publication along with the English version when it is possible. 2 Negri and Hardt Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio. 2004. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of the Empire, New York: The New Penguin Press. [Google Scholar] developed this idea in their sequel to Empire; Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (2005). However, in a more nuanced understanding of the co-belonging, even beyond the reformulation of the modern emancipatory principle that feeds their approach, I would like to refer to Carlo Galli's Schmittian perspective in: Spazi Politici: l'etàt moderna e l'etàt globale (2001 Galli, Carlo. 2001. Spazi Politici. L'etàt moderna e l'età globale, Bologna: Il Mulino. [Google Scholar]); and Lo Sguardo di Giano (2008 Galli, Carlo. 2008. Lo sguardo di Giano. Saggi su Carl Schmitt, Bologna: Il Mulino. [Google Scholar]). 3 Peter Sloterdijk Sloterdijk, Peter. 2003. Temblores de Aire. En las Fuentes del terror, Valencia: Pre-Textos. [Google Scholar] in his book Terror from the Air (forthcoming, 2009) developed the idea of a ‘structural continuity’ between the surrealist avant-garde and the invention of the atmoterrorism, which represents the frank exposition of terrorism as part of the ‘political reason’ of the Western tradition. Atmospheric terrorism refers to the realization of a war strategy focused not only on the extermination of the enemy, but on the control of his conditions of existence, in order to make this enemy a protagonist of his own devastation. The link between avant-gardism and atmoterrorism is not circumstantial but embodied in the co-belonging of their attempts to control the settings of human existence, in a revolutionary way. The Chilean neo-avant-garde group CADA (Art Acts Collective) emerged in the late 1970s with a performance that consisted in crossing the skies of Santiago with a plane rented from the National Air Force from which they threw thousands of pamphlets against the dictatorship. Once again, this co-belonging is not a moral issue, but the co-existence of avant-gardism and military technology in late capitalism. 4 In The Human Race ([1957] 1992), Robert Antelme's Antelme, Robert. 1992. The Human Race, Translated by Jeffrey Haight and Annie Mahler Evanston: Marlboro Press/Northwestern. [Google Scholar] diary from his experience as a prisoner in the Nazi concentration camps in the 1940s, there is a significant episode related to the possession of a little piece of glass that was used as a mirror for the prisoners. Antelme tells how this tiny glass had an ambivalent function among everybody, since all the prisoners wanted to see their faces reflected for a minute. They wanted to see themselves in a different perspective from that of the Lagerscghutz (camp police) but soon they had to give away the mirror: ‘And it was better that way. For this new, isolated, framed object didn't belong here. It could only provoke a radical despair, since in an intolerable way it made one measure a distance whose very nature was intolerably uncertain’ (53). Keeping the proportions, something like this happens with the narrative of Bolaño's, as if his novels were our contemporary mirrors. 5 It is important to refer to Spanos's work, particularly, America's Shadow. An Anatomy of Empire (2000 Spanos, William V. 2000. America's Shadow. An Anatomy of Empire, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. [Google Scholar]), and American Exceptionalism in the Age of Globalization (2008 Spanos, William V. 2008. American Exceptionalism in the Age of Globalization, Albany: State University of New York Press. [Google Scholar]), since he represents an alternative problematization of American imperialism to that of Negri and Hard, and to the Schmittian approach of Galli. Spanos conceives the current global articulation of power as a co-belonging between the old project of Western metaphysics and the recent manifestation of the old imperial reason in what he called the Pax Americana. This Imperial Pax is, indeed, in his Heideggerian view, the expression of the onto-theology that is proper to the evolving process of devastation that includes the Second World War, the Vietnam War, and the events related to the aftermath of September 11, 2001. It also implies a reformulation of the old theory of European imperialism, but not a naïve appeal to the power of a vanishing multitude. Instead of resorting to this multitude, Spanos refers to the juridical-political notion of interregnum as a key concept to think about an event that could break this Pax Imperial and could allow worldly criticism. 6 Schmitt, in his Land and Sea, plays around the understanding of territoriality and the city as metaphors for political stability, crucial for the Western philosophical tradition; and the ocean, which embodies the instability and chaos of pirates and mercenaries. It would be important to think, for instance, of the (Deleuzian) figure of de-territorialization as a desertification of political philosophy and politics as such. If the Nietzschean warning regarding the growing of the desert was related to the expansion of nihilism, we still need to think of this nihilism in relation to the exhaustion of traditional criticism, let alone modern political philosophy. On the other hand, from this consideration, the telluric nature of Latin American narrative (and, indeed, poetry) would acquire an entire new dimension beyond the picturesque and realistic traditional interpretations, as if they were allegories of the modern configuration of the nomos of the earth and not just of the nation-State.
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