Kidnapped Language: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Politics in Sergio Chejfec's Los planetas

This essay takes as its point of departure the idea that one of the central preoccupations of post-dictatorship literature is the question of representation. If, following the disaster of dictatorship and disappearance, literature seeks to find a new language commensurate not only with the political, but with the impossible yet necessary task of saying the unsayable, Sergio Chejfec's subtle language in his 1999 novel Los planetas acknowledges the void of the disaster without seeking to repair, reconstitute, or fill it.² My essay focuses on how Chejfec signals the limits of literary discourse by teasing out the relationship between identity and difference. As a novel that seeks to represent the kidnapped other through figurative language, Los planetas is concerned with the problem of exteriority, and its connection to the interiority of the subject, as well as of the text that narrates this subject. Chejfec draws upon the image of the void—an absent center around which all meaning is structured—together with the idea of "Jewishness" as an empty signifier to address the problem of the other and the same, or the other within the same. In dialogue with Alain Badiou's notion of absence (vide) in Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil and Slavoj Žižek's discussion of plenitude and lack in The Sublime Object of Ideology, I aim to unpack the motif of el vacío, or lack, in Chejfec. I argue that the void that stands at the heart of Los planetas serves as the condition of possibility— and impossibility—for the articulation through the literary of the role of the literary in the wake of disaster.

Chejfec's sixth novel approximates the dire political reality of the second half of the twentieth century without expressing an explicit ideological position, choosing instead to occupy the complicated terrain of figurative representation. Los planetas is set several decades after tens of thousands of Argentines were disappeared, and is narrated primarily from the perspective of "S," a forty-year-old writer living in Buenos Aires, who recalls his childhood friend "M," kidnapped and likely murdered during the early years of the Dirty War. Organized around a series of anecdotes and fragmented recollections of M, the novel addresses questions of violence and history, memory and mourning. The narrative's central tension concerns the identification of S with M—an identification that, in its extreme form, risks the complete appropriation of M's identity by S, as we shall see below.

Los planetas is structured around a central relationship: the poignant childhood friendship between the narrator and M. The two are alternately referred to as "Miguel" and "Sergio," "M" and "S," "M" and "the other," and "M" and "I" (in the last example, the narrator speaks in the first person.) The narrator recounts the history of the boyhood pair both as a way to signal the radical singularity of the other and to subvert the division between same and other. The rapport between identity and alterity becomes a crucial theme in this novel because, as we will see, it structures the conditions of possibility and impossibility of representation. By approximating the other—the narrator contends that M was the "real" writer—S acquires the authority necessary to relate the story of his friend's disappearance. Yet the extreme form of this identification—publishing a novel under M's name, an option proposed to him by a bureaucrat when S tries to legally change his name to his disappeared companion's— would eliminate the possibility of memory, because there would no longer be an S to remember M (nor would there be an external M to be remembered.)

The author's unapologetic autobiographical references—S is occasionally called Sergio, he is from Buenos Aires, is a writer, nearing forty, Jewish, etcetera— seem gratuitous, as if Chejfec were giving the reader a freebie, while at the same time depriving her of the ability to interpret the text. Reading a novel, particularly one rooted in the historical and political specificity of the state-sponsored terror of 1970s and '80s Argentina...