To Dress Up in the Other’s Skin
2019; Routledge; Volume: 24; Issue: 7 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/13528165.2019.1717864
ISSN1469-9990
Autores Tópico(s)Political Theology and Sovereignty
ResumoThis article analyses several performances carried out in dictatorial contexts, particularly Francoist Spain and in the military dictatorships of Chile and Argentina, regimes within which disappearing civilians was a common terror practice, to consider the presence of the body in performance, and how it may soothe the pain for the loss of missing people (‘desaparecidos’).These performances do not represent the victims of the forced disappearances, but rather make them present in a gesture of overlaying identities that entails putting oneself in the skin of the other, a complex form of subjectivation based on a layering of memories, affects and identities. That is, a subjectivity that challenges the modern model of the whole and present subject, and that is shaped by partial absence, by what is missing. Besides the show of solidarity that arises as I align my body with other bodies, we are dealing with forms of subjectivation, of quotation and superimposition, which are duly reconfigured in the encounter with the other and the overlaying of bodies. When my body makes others present, when the other’s body appears via mine, something of me necessarily disappears. if embodying the disappeared leads to the partial loss of oneself in an act of love that fills the absence of the other’s body, what kind of political subject is formed in this embodiment?
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