Estética, política y el posible territorio de la ficción en 2666 de Roberto Bolaño

This article analyzes the novel 2666 (2004) by Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño. The aim of this study is to rethink the intertwining of fiction, politics, and violence in Bolaño’s literature: this means to reflect on the potentiality of Bolaño’s writing, and from this perspective to reconsider the specificity of Bolaño’s political engagement. This article identifies and describes the ways in which violence is used in the construction of the fiction. By reading 2666 together with Jacques Rancière’s ideas on the relationship between politics and aesthetics, this study highlights 2666’s aesthetic ‘disagreement’, which consists in the repetition of the heterogeneous. In the novel, this repetition produces a specific form of violence. By means of repetition, the narrator of 2666 draws a possible connection between two different forms of violence experienced during the 20th Century: the Jewish genocide and the Mexican feminicide of Ciudad Juárez. Bolaño develops within his writing a ‘methodology of evil’, which allows him to make seeable and sayable specific manifestations of violence, specific crimes. This is how politics relates to aesthetics in Bolaño’s fiction. This study briefly comments on other works by Bolaño, Amuleto (Amulet) and Estrella distante (Distant Star).