Politics, Aesthetics, and Subjectivity in the Postdictatorial Southern Cone

• In Event: Critical Theory and Latin(o) America: precariedades, exclusões, and emergent practices

Abstract

This paper explores the relationship between notions of politics, aesthetics, and subjectivity articulated through postdictatorial culture in the Latin American Southern Cone. I examine how political subjects are produced, co-opted, or subverted through dominant discourses related to memory and human rights, which determine who or what are visible within these categories in both the past and the present. I suggest that by de-emphasizing the ethical task of art and literature to bear witness to the victims, traumas, and effects of past State violence, we can trace ways that aesthetic production can disrupt and rearticulate exclusionary perceptions of political subjectivity in postdictatorship. In my discussion, I dialogue with Jacques Rancière’s notions of political and aesthetic dissensus, interventions that disrupt the very terms of any given social framework and problematize which subjects have the capacity to participate in this structure. For Rancière, both political and aesthetic interventions into the visible and the sayable constitute political subjectivity, which is always an open category that disputes who or what is included in any given concept—such as victims or justice. Thinking through this understanding of dissensus in the analysis of postdictatorial culture, in dialogue with contributions in the Latin American context by such cultural theorists as Alberto Moreiras, Nelly Richard, and Bruno Bosteels, I problematize how the concepts of memory, human rights, and political subjectivity are interpreted, employed, and distributed in both aesthetic and academic work in/on the Southern Cone.

Author

• Andrew C Rajca, University of South Carolina