Messianism, Teleology, and Futural Justice in Raúl Zurita’s Anteparaíso

Anteparadise was conceived as a total structure, a trajectory beginning with the experience of everything precarious and painful in our lives and concluding with a glimmer of happiness. I’ll never write a Paradise, even if such a thing could be written today; but if it could, it would be a collective enterprise in which the life of everyone who walks the face of the earth would become the only work of art, the only epic, the only Pietà worthy of our admiration. I won’t write it, but that is the outcome I desire.

—Anteparadise, Raúl Zurita (1984)¹

This epigraph, taken from Zurita’s introductory note to the English translation of his second book of poetry (Anteparaíso in the Spanish original), emphasizes and at the same time calls into question the forward-looking and teleological thread that runs through the course of his poetic project. The Chilean poet was a founding member of the neo-avant-garde group CADA (the Colectivo de Acciones de Arte) that intervened in the South American scene of writing in the mid-1970s and early 1980s by way of a series of public and poetic installations, which provocatively questioned the relationship between art and the praxis of life during General Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship (1973–89). Zurita’s own early poetry engaged a series of allegorical and biographical self-mutilatory gestures—he did in fact burn his own cheek with acid in 1975—and thereby explored the violence done to language and/ as body writing under military rule. The trajectory of Zurita’s poetic career spans four decades and culminated in 2000 when he was awarded the Chilean Premio Nacional de Literatura.

To return to the epigraph quoted above, Zurita’s introductory comments are particularly suggestive given the way in which his poetry has been predominantly read. It has most often been considered via its allegorical relationship with violence under Pinochet’s authoritarian regime, and has been framed by questions of religion, sacrifice, testimony, and corporality.² The ray of hope emanating from Zurita’s poetic messianism and visionary ecstasy—which tends to align the sacrificial violence done to the poetic body with discourses of institutional violence under dictatorship—has shaped the dominant critical reaction to his writing.

The epigraph, however, appears to dispel the egocentric, self-messianistic visions that otherwise seem to characterize Zurita’s work. Or at least, we could say, the epigraph disassociates the poet himself from the promise of a futural textual paradise, thereby responding in a productive way to criticism of the way in which poetic authors project themselves onto the lyrical voice. The critic Jorge Fondebrider, for example, sweepingly accuses the Chilean poetic tradition as a whole of fundamentally “confusing the figure of the poet with poetry itself ” (Masiello 2001, 301). On one hand, the epigraph’s conception of futurity effectively distances Zurita, on a larger thematic level, from the more strict conceptualization of religious transcendence suggested by his evocation of Dante’s Divine Comedy cycle and the temporal realization of Paradise. But at the same time, the epigraph’s focus on the collective “writing” of the work that would entail Paradise marks a series of interesting movements in Anteparadise’s particular textual economy. Anteparadise’s resistance to the possibility of an empirically futural Paradise ends up reconfiguring the temporality of Paradise as a construct more ethically “worthy of its name”—more ethical, that is, than any project for the actual achievement of the collective “perpetual peace” to which Zurita ostensibly refers.

My essay thus takes a different path in following the reinscription of hope for the redemption of Chile’s wounded body in Anteparadise—which is where the predominant critical reading of Zurita’s poetry locates its point of departure. In its suggestion of the interrupted teleology of justice, Zurita’s Anteparadise engages a very Kantian system in such a way as to hold itself back from the “end” that it “thinks” it is proposing. By interrogating Anteparadise’s specific teleological workings vis à vis a reading of Immanuel Kant’s political writings and the...