On imagination, fiction and justice: Sergio Chejfec’s Los Incompletos

• In Event: On Latin America, imagination, and the exhaustion of the onto-theological tradition.

Abstract

This paper discusses the relation between imagination, fiction, and justice through a discussion of Sergio Chejfec’s Los incompletos (2004). In Los incompletos, literature desists of a redemptive tradition and its promise of absolute justice. For the narrator, fiction offers no justice, no regulative (moral) model to achieve, but just a “commentary,” a “note” on the “so called real world.” Accordingly, fiction “frames” the world giving it a margin and producing an image of the globe. This fictional frame does not regulate the globe’s image, but shows its inconsistency, showing the world in its contingency. The work of imagination in this text can be understood as an “imagination without image,” using Villalobos Ruminott’s notion. For him, there is a “necessity” of “interrupt[ing] the aesthetic imagination of the ideal community, …to make possible an imagination without image of the community to come, that is, the community that never coincides with the Community” (Soberanías en suspenso, 2013). This statement entails that to imagine the community to come is impossible, since the imagination cannot fixed the community to-come into an actual image of a desired just community, and yet at the same time, it cannot not try to imagine this radical futurity and the possibility of justice. Los Incompletos deals with this aporia and is able to generate this “imagination without image” not by looking to the future, but by looking to an imagined world in a past that was not, offering an artificial “image,” that proposes no model, being “infinitely more just” in its artificiality.

Author

• Sol I Peláez, Mississippi State University