The Theme of the Traitor: Disinheritance in Ricardo Piglia’s Artificial Respiration

So I’m referring to that kind of question: a discourse that should not be understood as external to the state. It is the state itself that speaks, and writers and novelists dialogue and argue with this kind of fictional politics.

—Ricardo Piglia, Crítica y ficción

The Argentine novelist Ricardo Piglia once remarked that a strange aspect of the Dirty War in Argentina—in which thousands of people were secretly “disappeared” from 1976 to 1983—is that the intentions of the military dictatorship were clear to anyone who knew how to read the generals’ public statements. As Piglia notes in an interview from 1984: “Above all the military constructed a version of reality, and the military appeared in this myth as the medical safeguard of society. They began to circulate the theory of the foreign body that had penetrated the social fabric and had to be surgically removed. This anticipated publicly what in secret was happening to the bodies of the victims. Everything was said, without saying anything” (Piglia 2001a, 36).¹ This story of the cancerous growth that had to be removed to save the body politic also appears in the military’s rhetoric concerning the “traitor,” the internal enemy that machinates against the state. As José Pablo Feinmann explains, the politics of the Dirty War entailed the complete annihilation of this internal enemy: “The enemy is within, it’s subversion. It’s everything that goes against the Argentine ‘way of life,’ against ‘Western and Christian’ civilization” (Feinmann 1988, 92). The point, for the military, is not to incorporate the enemies of the state, but rather to annihilate them completely. From this politics arose the policy of “disappearing” suspected traitors, as well as the systematic destruction of evidence that would testify to these crimes. The Dirty War is therefore the attempt to locate and destroy the enemy within, the traitor that threatens the Argentine “way of life.” It is for this reason that Ricardo Piglia places the figure of the traitor at the center of his 1980 novel, Respiración artificial. Written during the dictatorship years, Artificial Respiration reinscribes the traitor as a kind of hidden figure that silently but efficaciously intervenes in the rhetoric of the military dictatorship. As we will see, Piglia theorizes the “traitor” as a hidden relationship that disrupts any kind of heritage or inheritance (herencia) based on the death or disappearance of the other.

Piglia’s interest in the figure of the (internal) enemy can be traced back to his writings on politics from the 1970s, when he was still involved with the journal Los libros and the politics associated with that group (including such writers as Beatriz Sarlo and Carlos Altamirano). An early version of his notion of the enemy can be seen in his essay on the Cultural Revolution in China, “La lucha ideological en la construcción socialista,” in which he focuses on Mao Tse-Tung’s theory of contradiction. According to Mao, Piglia notes, there are three contradictions, each with its own sphere: the economic, the political, and the cultural. For Mao the political sphere is defined by the class struggle: the contradiction between the people and their enemies. However, Piglia notes that, because the notion of “the people” is not an essence but must rather be negotiated within each country, in the end the three contradictions are resolved in the political sphere. Piglia therefore notes: “Pueblo/enemigos define siempre el aspecto principal de la contradicción” [The people/the enemies always define the principal aspect of contradiction] (Piglia 1974, 7). The task of defining the enemy—and fighting against the enemy—is ultimately what constitutes the political struggle of the revolution. This theory of struggle as constitutive of the Marxist class conflict is of course not surprising; what is noteworthy is only Piglia’s emphasis on the way the figure of the enemy defines the essence of politics for Mao. In a footnote, Piglia states:

In relation to this, it is not an accident that the first sentence of the Works of Mao Tse-Tung, which opens...