Abstract

This essay centers upon Edmundo Paz Soldán's novel, El delirio de Turing, which is analyzed as a recent example of a "critical utopia," a genre that both critiques former, homogenizing utopian projects and seeks to advance new, alternative discourses of social change and justice. The fictional universe of El delirio de Turing is inscribed in the post-1989 aesthetic and political difficulties of utopian writing and, on the other hand, in the context of the ascending "new left" in Latin America at the beginning of the twenty-first century, a phenomenon often condescendingly referred to as "marea rosa." Representationally closer to Phillip K. Dick's science fiction than to contemporaneous Latin American models, Edmundo Paz Soldán's utopia explores the paradigmatic hacker figure of Kandinsky and the virtual space of the (inter)net as a privileged zone of local and global political and economic intervention and resistance in a post-national stage. One of the most important merits of El delirio de Turing is its attempt to outline an alternative utopian community and a more inclusive form of citizenship through the catalytic sphere of the web, an experiment that not only alludes to Hardt and Negri's problematic concept of "multitude," but also prefigures the actual political cooperation among the new, heterogeneous social movements that contributed to the recent downfall of various Latin American neoliberal governments.

pdf

Share