Soberanías en suspenso. Imaginación y violencia en América Latina by Sergio Villalobos-Ruminott (review)

With Soberanías en suspenso, Sergio Villalobos-Ruminott has set a new standard for reflection in the unending light of dictatorship, what he calls “la verdadera temporalidad del golpe, aquella en la que todavía estamos domiciliados” (14). While that formulation may appear a bit peculiar or unexpected to some readers, it seems to me that one of the challenges his book takes up—a rather brave wager if one considers certain ideological entrenchments in guild Latin Americanism—is that it is long past time to cease speaking of the vaunted epoch of “post-dictatorship.” Even as the epochal post-ness of the signifier was always placed into question by its most significant thinkers, the term itself engraved an image for thought that veiled reflection from its deepest necessities. It was an enabling artifice, but—for that reason—it obscured the ultimate consequences of the reflection that the word itself initially convoked.

As a counter-measure, the author assumes, and perhaps even carries out, what he later calls “un arruinamiento general de la historia como narrativa excepcional” (286); that engagement is the book’s central project. Villalobos-Ruminott’s study engages the multiform repercussions of what we perhaps too reductively have called dictatorship, understood as “un agotamiento categorial del pensamiento crítico tradicional y de sus agendas reformistas y desarrollistas” (66). Written through a capacious knowledge of intellectual history, political thought, political economy, sociological research, and philosophical inquiry, the author develops a reading of the “crisis categorial” that has characterized much of the reflection from and on Latin America in recent decades, toward the possibility of a certain ruination of its field of inquiry. Informative and innovative in equal measure, the author elaborates his theoretical speculations through a rigorous engagement with Chilean political and intellectual history: “pasar desde la concepción burguesa de la catástrofe a su versión barroca” (163).

The book’s first chapter links the study’s concerns to Latin American history more generally and takes as its point of departure the bicentenary of Latin American independence, understood critically not as “una ruptura inaugural” but rather “como una metamorfosis de la soberanía imperial y como configuración de una relación soberana vinculada al nomos territorial del Estado moderno” (23). Two hundred years later, Villalobos-Ruminott characterizes the contemporary scene, with its democratizing, transitional, and reconciliatory tendencies as the symbolic return of the promise of independence, which is to say the promise of sovereignty. Even as the sovereignty of the state experiences its exhaustion, that decline is accompanied by its contemporary “transmutación transnacional y corporativa” (27). The second chapter then turns to a history of the debates surrounding the Southern Cone dictatorships and their aftermaths on the one hand, and the exceptionalist regard for Latin American modernity on the other. The following chapter adeptly traces this line of thought in the context of a relation between the 1973 coup and the artistic neo-avant-garde, taking up the debate surrounding the escena de avanzada in the work of Richard, Oyarzún, and Thayer. Co-belonging (copertenencia) becomes the sign for understanding the coup in its contradictory non-aftermath: “la yuxtaposición entre lo político y lo artístico, mostraría la comparecencia del carácter fundacional de la dictadura y de la ‘voluntad de acontecimiento’ de la neovanguardia en un mismo plano onto-teológico, inaugurado genealógicamente con el golpe militar de 1973” (154). We are faced, thus, with “la radical indiferenciación entre crítica y facticidad” (154) that, as such, demands a thought (after what was once called critique) adequate to its conditions.

The fourth chapter (in my opinion, the strongest), focuses on Patricio Marchant and through Marchant, on the poetry of Mistral, taking up Marchant’s reading of the coup as a “golpe a la lengua.” Here poetic language and poetic thought are not, after the common misreading of Adorno would hold, barbaric in...