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  • Violence Without Guilt: Ethical Narratives From the Global South
  • Sara Castro-Klaren
Hermann Herlinghauss. Violence Without Guilt: Ethical Narratives From the Global South. New York: Palgrave, 2009. ix + 258 pages.

This book by Hermann Herlinghauss is one of the richest and most thought provoking critical considerations of our present human condition as defined not by the death of God but rather stipulated by the structures of power and feeling produced by the new order of capitalism as religion (19–28). It is hard for the reviewer to decide what to highlight in the contents of this finely crafted book that sends its whole quiver of arrows into the heart of the aesthetics and theo-politics of Latin America’s narco literature and film and its meditation on the subjection of consumption imposed by the Global North on the Global South. Violence Without Guilt requires more than one slow reading as the theoretical sophistication brought to bear on all discussions does not simply, for example, deploy Benjamin’s concept of bare life on the landscape of the La Virgen de los sicarios (1994), but rather analyzes and theorizes Benjamin’s concept beyond its own philosophical and geographical limits to make it do new work in the context of our postmodern global order.

The relentless theorization that underscores the readings of the texts Herlinghauss has chosen to privilege in the book leads him to propose a number of new categories of analyzes that enables him to make the necessary break beyond established theories of genre and affective disposition: melodrama, drama, irony, satire and tragedy. A good example of Herlinghauss critical creativity can be found in the third chapter of the book, “Parataxis Unbound” where he engages in a lengthy and profitable discussion of his concept of paratactical drama and its concomitant effacement of tragedy (74–80). The reading of the narco-corridos by “Los Tigres del Norte” in which the suspension of melodrama is linked to Herlinghauss’ main thesis on the question of violence without guilt as the iconic experience of our pharma world is based on a detailed analysis of the language of the corrido driven by a creative deployment of Heidegger’s concept of the ontological sublime of the presence of death. How the “popular” and marginal language and affective structure of the lowly corrido manages to capture and communicate the hard won and high minded philosophical findings at the academic discursive center of power is one of Herlinghauss’ major contributions to our study of Latin American low brow or marginal aesthetic realm.

Violence Without Guilt has four parts. The first part is dedicated to a theorization of Benjamin’s concept of bare life so as to enable discussion of narco-narrative in the context of a “modern war on affect.” The second part focuses on the narco-corrido and the problem of affective figuration in the presence of death. The third part takes on a theo-political discussion of Colombian affective marginalities. The fourth part provides an analysis of recent Latin American film within an econo-cultural matrix that points to spaces beyond bare life.

In the first part of the book, “From Walter Benjamin’s Early Writings to the Perils of Global Modernity,” Herlinghauss lays down the parameters of the [End Page 414] theoretical inquiry that he conducts into the overarching question of affective marginalities (9). For Herlinghauss, affective marginalities represent “a concept-figure that inquires into a theater of social emotions and the regulation of their aesthetic coordinates” (9). This concept enables him to tackle the problem of violence without guilt as observed in, but not confined to, narco- narratives and the narco-corrido. The problematic of affective marginalities is rather made extensive to the world order in general. Intertwining the concerns of Giorgio Agambem’s Homo Sacer (1998) with his own reading of Benjamin’s concept of bare life, Herlinghauss seeks to show how “Ingraining violence into the core of modernity and violence as a feature of everyday experience cannot be addressed without forcing reflections anew, pushing it toward what have remained underestimated spheres of analysis: the contradictory dynamics of secularization and the resultant affective undergrounds and paradoxes that exist within heterogeneous modernity” (3...

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