Undesired Proximities: The Aesthetics of Disgust and the Subaltern Nadien in El Apando

• In Event: Apandos: Narrating Imprisonments and Unveiling the Crises of Coexistence in the Americas

Abstract

As a life-long political agitator, Mexican author and activist philosopher José Revueltas (1914-1976) acquired numerous prison anecdotes. The reappearance of the penitentiary in his works, however, is not driven by mere autobiographical reflection, but instead by an attempt to unveil what, following Marxian and Hegelian thought, he understood as the material and cognitive aspects of humanity’s modern imprisonment. Revueltas held that prisons not only reproduce exterior conflicts and crises, but are also enclosures where society’s political and affective stalemates are amplified. It is fitting then that El apando (1969), a narrative that literary critic Edith Negrín describes as the “climax” of Revueltas’ treatment of prison themes, explores these passions through aesthetics of disgust that highlight the undesired proximity of the subaltern. This paper focuses on El apando’s depiction of subjectivities that are not only represented as marginal but as disgusting and undesirable, specifically the abject figures of “El Carajo” (the worthless one) and his mother. The mother’s womb is presented as a site of imprisonment for the protagonist and serves as the allegorical non-space where subject-object and other presumably fixed boundaries are blurred. Through an analysis of the term “nadien,” as a class marker whose colonial history, linguistic ambiguity, and singular plurality problematizes the borders of the subaltern, I propose that Revueltas’ “disgust aesthetics” not only help to crystallize his theoretical writings, but may even surpass them in addressing the political crisis of coexistence in 20th century Mexico.

Author

• Noe E Bautista, New York University