Review The space of disappearance: A narrative commons in the ruins of Argentine state terror. Karen Elizabeth Bishop

MAURO

Contemporary Political Theory

Palgrave

Año: 2021

1470-8914

In the The Space of Disappearance. A Narrative Commons in the Ruins of Argentina State Terror (Suny Press, State University of New York, 2020), Karen Elizabeth Bishop picks up and analyses four separate novels of three contemporary Argentinean writers: Rodolfo Walsh?s Variaciones en rojo (Variations in Red), Julio Cortázar?s Fantomas contra los vampiros multinacionales (Fantomas against the Multinational Vampires), and Tomás Eloy Martinez?s La novela de Perón and Santa Evita. Her reading of four oeuvres written both before and after the last Argentine dictatorship (1976-1983) conducts her to posit what may be the core hypothesis of the book: disappearance, the privileged technique through which the Juntas? Generals disappeared the political opposition to the neoliberal model they were implementing, is also a literary device by which the before mentioned authors proposed ?divided, refracted and embedded ontologies? (11). Drawing upon the contributions that post-World War II deconstruccionists ?Derrida, Blanchot, etc.? elaborated on the voids and absences as a ?active hermeneutic agent at work in literature? (15), Bishop deconstructs Walsh?s, Cortazar?s and Martinez?s works not only as denouncing neoliberalism and engaging in politics, or as national dramas refracting the agitated recent Argentine history, but rather as ?anticipatory fictions? (p. 154) that foresee the dissimulations, doublings, displacements and suspensions that will take place afterwards during the dictatorship.