Ungrounding the Nation: A Reading of Juan José Saer’s Nobody Nothing Ever (Nadie nada nunca)

“In the Beginning There is Nothing. Nothing,” Declares the Narrator of Nobody Nothing Never (Saer 1993a, 7; 1994a, 11).¹ Against the solidity of the national Being claimed by the Argentine Dictatorship (1976–82) and populist ideals, Juan José Saer’s writing tactfully touches the nothingness from which the world springs. Through a dialogue with the Marquis de Sade’s writing on the possibility of touching, enjoyment, and community, Nobody explores the violence of the nation, of sexuality, and of writing. According to Saer, Sade’s libertines acted based on the utopian hope (desire) of finally touching the other, and moreover, of being touched (changed, marked) by the other. This hope is equivalent to the Dictatorship’s desire to finally “touch,” through surgical methods, the Argentine Being, and to ground “once and for all” a united, solid, national Being. To question this undertaking, the text eroticizes the political through the exploration of desire and of perception. Through the question of touch, Nobody examines the “being-with” implied in a community, marking the distance between singular bodies and the body politic. The novel, therefore, avoids constructing a positive populist allegory of the “People” to oppose the military. Instead it displays the bodies of the killed horses and a fragmenting enjoyment in which—to extrapolate Jean Luc Nancy’s concept—Gato and Elisa, the main characters, as “lovers expose, above all the unworking of community” (1991, 40). By touching upon the nothingness of language, Nobody spaces the bodies, the social, and undoes the soil, the patria (fatherland), the nation, the people, and the patriarchal family. Throughout the text, the fantasy of a sovereign subject—military, revolutionary or populist—dissolves.

Nobody is set in the period before the Argentine military coup d’état. It tells the story of a Mesopotamian Argentine town, Rincón, and its surrounding area, where “someone has begun, some time ago, to kill horses” (Saer 1993a, 55–56; 1994a, 60). During one weekend, Gato Garay is visited by his lover, Elisa; they share their time, they talk, eat, and make love. In the meantime, Gato reads and reflects on the unnamed book Philosophy in the Bedroom by the Marquis de Sade and keeps an eye on a horse, a potential victim of the gruesome and mysterious horse-slayer. The police chief Caballo (Horse) Leyva, a specialist in political torture, leads the search for the killer of the horses. One night, he is executed by a guerrilla while, in Gato’s house, an unaware Elisa defecates.

During the 1970s the political struggle in Argentina became radicalized through the insurgent activities of many different social groups: from Left to Right wing, from activists and union members to guerrilla groups, from intellectuals, students, and artists to political parties, from church to military, from middle-class to big economic groups. The broad range of populist and Left wing mobilization claimed for “la patria socialista … more social justice, wealth redistribution and more political participation” (Calveiro 2001, 16).² Endorsed by the exiled ex-president Juan D. Perón, the guerrilla received popular support during 1970–74. But, once president again, Perón withdrew his support and the Argentine Anti-communist Alliance (triple A), a semiofficial Right wing group, started to menace, plant bombs, and kill many Left wing militants and intellectuals. In a sense, the guerrillas were defeated politically before they were overpowered militarily (19).

The death of Perón, the weakness of democracy, the strikes, the rise of political violence, and the unhappiness of the Church, the middle class, and the dominant class, among other groups, prepared the scenario for a re-entry of the military, given the indifference of the main political parties (López Laval 1995). The military coup of March 24, 1976 aimed to cure—at last—the Argentine social body and eradicate the cancer of subversion, targeting a range of people, from committed activists to militarized guerrilla members. The combination of “militarized and medicalized language” arguing for the “cleansing of the national body” discursively grounded (in its letter and practice) the military repression...