Eating, Animality, and Biopolitics in Osvaldo Lamborghini’s Tadeys

• In Event: Animals in Latin American Literature and Visual Arts

Abstract

This paper will investigate the biopolitics of Osvaldo Lamborghini’s unfinished novel Tadeys, written in exile towards the end of the Argentine dictatorship but not published until 1994. Set in the fictional La Comarca, the novel presents the reader a Sadean universe where anal rape is part of daily life and regularly employed for subjugating delinquents. The human-like animals which give the novel its title at once found and problematize the fictional state’s hierarchical ordering of lives. Their uncontrollable sexual activity resists the state’s attempts at appropriation. Though bred for consumption like cattle and used as canon fodder in wars, the tadeys are at the center of political debates; different factions compete for the support of these lives at the indistinguishable limit between man and animal. This presentation will explore Lamborghini’s novel through the biopolitical framework opened up by Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, and Roberto Esposito. It will particularly focus on the relation between eating and animality in the novel, analysing how the human-like animals function in the novel’s libidinal economy.

Author

• Ali Kulez, University of Southern California