O anjo da história tem corpo de mulher: estética e política em Jamais o fogo nunca, de Diamela Eltit

Abstract

From the reading of the novel Jamais o fogo nunca (2007), by Diamela Eltit, the present thesis proposes to investigate the possibility of literature, when questioning the hegemonic places of knowledge, to stand as a dissenting instance of thought. Guided by the intelligibility of a body- memory, which in recovering the past from the unsaid reveals its latency in the present, in this novel, aesthetics, politics and History intersect at all times. It is a narrative in which an unnamed woman recalls past episodes while examining the banality of the present she shares with her mate, the degraded image of an authoritarian militant leadership. By appropriating the paradoxical condition to which Pinochet has relegated thousands of missing people – this suspended space between life and death –, Eltit builds a body-ruin that inquires about the disappearance of a political project while bringing its internal contradictions to light: brushing History against the grain, the narrator removes the hierarchy of gender from silencing by questioning the phallocentric rationality that structured both state moralism and militant organizations. In order to examine the political potential of these aesthetical strategies, we first recall Jacques Rancière’s reflections on the distribution of the sensible. Then, in order to investigate how this rereading – which is submitted only to the oblique legislation of memory – highlights other ways of visibility and intelligibility, we recall the concept of History elaborated by Walter Benjamin. The interlocution between these two authors allowed us, finally, to develop the hypothesis that, in Jamais o fogo nunca, it is through the body that the intersection among aesthetics, politics and History is completed.