Kynicism and Consciousness in Horacio Castellanos Moya

• In Event: Inclusion, Justice, History

Abstract

The ancient cynics (kynics) were provocative in their enlightened resignation. The kynic successfully combines consciousness with apathy, deciding to withdraw from idealism despite knowing better. In his Critique of Cynical Reason, Peter Sloterdijk notes that “questions of self-preservation must be approached in the same language as those of self-destruction,” for both operate under a repudiation of refined ethics, an enlightened false consciousness, he so asserts. I maintain that Horacio Castellanos Moya’s oeuvre offers a similar reconceptualization of cynicism as a political category grounded in radical historical awareness. Through a reading Baile con serpientes (1996), El arma en el hombre (2001), and Moronga (2018), my presentation revises the evolution of the author’s postwar aesthetics through the lens of his often-used underemployed protagonist. His subject’s class resignation is neither depoliticized nor nihilistic, as Beatriz Cortez (2001) and others contend (Arias 2007; Sanchez Prado 2010); his retreat is instead firmly engaged in a dialectical struggle that sees precarity and uncertainty as extensions of past crises. By presenting the material dimensions of political motivation as asymmetrically related to the protagonist’s subjectivity as compared to idealist motivations, the author suggests that postwar cynicism is a structural problem, not a moral one. Moreover, cynical reason here is a not a closed category—it is in motion and unsettled inasmuch as it both demonstrates and desires consciousness. If knowledge is indeed power, or at least its roots, the works in question interrogate the extent to which politics are truly in retreat in the post-testimonio genre.

Author

• Veronica Brownstone, University of Pennsylvania