UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE Otherwise Than Our Knowledge: Solidarity, Love, Failure and the Left in Argentina and Chile A Dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Spanish by Conor Craig Harris June 2019 Dissertation Committee: Dr. Alessandro Fornazzari, Chairperson Dr. Marta Hernández Salván Dr. Jacques Lezra Dr. Freya Schiwy Copyright by Conor Craig Harris 2019 The Dissertation of Conor Craig Harris is approved: Committee Chairperson University of California, Riverside ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First and foremost, I must acknowledge my constant companion during this process- Faustus. …Durchaus studiert, mit heißem Bemühn. / Da steh ich nun, ich armer Tor! / Und bin so klug als wie zuvor…. And then, my committee. Alessandro, an adviser beyond any other, for being calm and grounding, with a keen eye for which path I ought to be on, whether or not I thought I was going anywhere. Freya, for while at first it was with fear that I approached you, a wiser and warmer presence I could not have asked for throughout, and hopefully to come. Marta, a keen eye and a keener mind, your advice, encouragement, and faith in me has often been what kept me going, come what may. And Jacques, often seemingly bemused, your genuine openness, intelligence and guidance have so often allowed me feel right here when I have doubted. Thank you all so much. My family knows I love them all dearly and could not have managed without their support- and the free food and drink, of course. A special thanks is due my mother, who beyond everything she does, found it in her to periodically visit California, despite her distaste for the state. My California friends have been ever my sunshine companions, and I’ll here restrict myself only to those who have directly impacted this dissertation: Allison, for venting and inventing; Bret, Alma and Charlie, a new family; Brittany and Sean, for endless engaging conversation; Daisy, for evening wisdom about life and our work; Daniel, ever encouraging, ever open; Emily, David, Luna and all of their smiles; Eric, a better guitar player than he’ll admit; Jorge, for all you’d never know it from his face; Mark, although he’d rather be in France; Óscar Alain, steadfast and strong; Óscar, iv warm and wittiest of all; Roxana, a sharp eye and a warm welcome, in two countries; Seher, an infinite kindness; and entirely too many others who have had the good fortune to not have to hear overmuch about my work. Out of California, there are too many to name, but I’d like to leave a special thanks for a gaggle of Virginia friends who have been a guiding light: Alex, Athena, Alex, Conor (now somewhere else, of course), Cookie, Dan (VA émigré as he is), Joe, John, Jordan (also much further south, now), Josh, Kyle, Parker, Phillip, Samantha, Sean, Sole, Thom and everyone they gather to themselves. I miss you terribly. And finally, dearest Annie- for years of friendship, and more of love and light [slow heavy metal music playing]. v ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Otherwise Than Our Knowledge: Solidarity, Love, Failure and the Left in Argentina and Chile by Conor Craig Harris Doctor of Philosophy, Graduate Program in Spanish University of California, Riverside, June 2019 Dr. Alessandro Fornazzari, Chairperson This dissertation proposes to critique and reformulate the terminology used to discuss non-statist subjectivities, particularly regarding neoliberal Argentina and Chile. By putting into dialogue the ethical thought of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida and the autonomist Marxism of Paolo Virno and Antonio Negri, I articulate an anarchistic thinking of ethico-political subjectivity in the commons and propose a new mode of situated reading/writing opposed to the capitalist State’s ordering of language. I argue that a situated thought of solidarity without epistemic capture and friendship as a form of love allows us to think the persistence of radical subjectivities and avoid attributing failure to emergent movements. Further, it allows us to comprehend our own theoretical limitations concerning subjectivities emerging or already extant in modes otherwise than statist politics. I articulate a theory of the neoliberal State’s function and continued vi relevance through an engagement with Nicos Poulantzas’s later works. I then think solidarity and friendship through readings of Nicanor Parra and Juan Gelman’s poetry, respectively. Afterwards, I explore radical persistence through a reading of post-saqueo independent video in Argentina and the current im-possibility of conceptualizing, within academic language, the relationship between the Mapuche and the Chilean state, through a reading of Elicura Chihuailaf Nahuelpán’s poetry and prose. I conclude that by learning to teach from and be taught by these texts, through what I term a paradoxical auto- didact’s pedagogy, we may better situate ourselves and our work vis a vis the necessity of a radical, anti-capitalist relationality, beyond the State. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction By Way of a Beginning…………………………………………………….1 The State During Ouroboros Capital……………………………………………...3 Chile……………………………………………………………………….8 Argentina…………………………………………………………………12 A Return to the Greek……………………………………………………16 The Machinic State………………………………………………………22 Otherwise Than the State………………………………………………………...24 Learning to Learn, Together……………………………………………………..29 Chapter 1 Many Parras: Techniques of a (re)Socialized Poetics……………………….36 Where(in) we find ourselves……………………………………………………..37 Double-negation and the Literary………………………………………………..47 Humor and the Third Person……………………………………………………..61 Politics, Somewhere Outside…………………………………………………….75 Chapter 2 Endless Act(s) of Love: Juan Gelman and Sweetly Writing (for) What’s to Come……………………………………………………………………..83 So, then, where?.....................................................................................................85 Movement, before melancholy…………………………………………………..94 A Vision, an Act…………………………………………………………………97 There is a time… ……………………………………………………………….108 …and a place… ………………………………………………………………...114 …to teach and be taught………………………………………………………..118 viii Chapter 3 The Violence of Failure, or the Failure of Violence: Documentary, Video and Radical Political Subjectivity in Neoliberal Argentina…………………127 Dinosaur Cinema……………………………………………………………….132 The Violence of Failure………………………………………………………...147 A Cacophonous Chorus………………………………………………………...157 Or the Failure of Violence……………………………………………………...170 To see what is to come………………………………………………………….179 Chapter 4 In the folds of a blue dream: Elicura Chihuailaf and his Impossible Place...193 Selecting for the same…………………………………………………………..199 Colonial encounters…………………………………………………….202 Accumulating independence……………………………………………204 Twentieth century ghosts………………………………………………..205 The unthinkable now……………………………………………………206 Success, on the face of it………………………………………………………..211 A mirror that reflects nothing…………………………………………………..223 Our bounds and theirs…………………………………………………………..236 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………...246 ix By Way of Beginning “I am an anarchist, a social anarchist. I am not a communist, because social anarchism is beyond communism.” -Louis Althusser “It is from the love of humanity that we are revolutionaries: it is not our fault if history has forced on us this distressing necessity” -Errico Malatesta As I was initially planning this introduction, I intended to open with an apocryphal quote from Emma Goldman, one which I have always liked. The quote in question is always some variation on: “if I can’t dance, it’s not my revolution”. Turning, action, joy and persistence are all bundled up in the little quip, a retort to a young comrade who presumed chide her for dancing, as though her role as agitator forbade such expression. But more than vaguely apocryphal, it cannot be attributed to Goldman at all- it sprung from missed encounters and propagandizing in the seventies, if certain accounts from the 1990s can be believed.1 The actual sentiment, however, is perhaps a better beginning. As she says of the incident in her autobiography, “I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from conventions and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy” (Goldman 56, emphasis mine). While this dissertation will not address explicitly anarchist movements- at least, not in the concrete historical sense of that within which Goldman agitated- I felt it appropriate to begin there, in the 1930s but really with the clarification made in the 1990s of a misattribution from the 1970s. In a felicitous way, it lays out the time frame and problematics that guide my work- a work asking after the persistence of certain, 1 perhaps anarchist but certainly at least horizontal, tendencies in left organizations and works in Argentina and Chile throughout the 20th century and into the 21st, while also thinking the conceptual modulations and approaches we need to do our own work without denying life and joy, nor eliding persistence, failure, love and the imposition(s) of history. That said, my aim in this dissertation is to explore concepts and approaches for an explicitly anarchist mode of reading, that the dissertation in turn enacts in exploration. A mode of reading that is also, thus, one of learning, writing and teaching, situated in and by the body of whomsoever enacts it- one not imposed nor universal, but emergent from the situations in which it is enacted and, thus, always conformed by them. Hence, given