Radical Justice: Spain and the Southern Cone beyond Market and State by Luis Martín-Cabrera (review)

Luis Martín-Cabrera’s : Spain and the Southern Cone beyonIn this complex, multifaceted and dynamic book, Martín-Cabrera contributes significantly to a diverse body of academic debates that include biopolitics, psychoanalysis and historical traumas, transatlantic studies, and filmic and literary studies. Still, in a more specific vein, his main contribution is to shed new light into the ongoing reflection on politics of memory in those regions. While complementing the work of such scholars as Moreiras-Menor, Avelar, Gundermann, Richard, Vezzetti, Moulian or Calveiro, Radical Justice offers an innovative approach by focusing on detective novels and political documentaries as an alternative framework to gain a counterhegemonic understanding of the past, and developing path-breaking theoretical and political insights.

The book is divided into four main chapters, each of which examines one or various literary or filmic artifacts. The first one engages the dilemmas posited by the figure of the desaparecido through an analysis of Manuel Vázquez Montalbán’s detective novel Galíndez with two important theoretical elaborations: the concept of the non-place and a transatlantic theory of state violence. The non-place indexes the radical dislocation and incommensurable memory of the desaparecido and offers an alternative trajectory to achieve justice beyond the law and the market. Secondly, Martín-Cabrera questions the new dominant transatlantic theories as celebratory understandings of the Atlantic as a fluid space of cultural exchange. He, instead, suggests one that addresses the common dictatorial heritage and the implicit neocolonial policies between Spain and Latin America.

In the second chapter, Martín-Cabrera analyzes three detective novels—Manuel Vázquez Montalbán’s Los mares del sur, Ramón Díaz Eterovic’s Nadie sabe más que los muertos, and Osvaldo Soriano’s Una sombra pronto serás—that expose impunity as the perpetuation of the state of exception and the biopolitical matrix of the dictatorial past in our societies. Agamben’s “state of exception” and Freud’s “melancholy” are productively deployed and reformulated here. Contrary to a widespread perception of the melancholic affect as political paralysis, Martín-Cabrera endows it a potential of resisting the “closing” of the past. In the three novels, the detective as a melancholic character is the vehicle through which he suggests a different undertaking of justice and a struggle against impunity.

The third chapter shifts the attention toward three political documentaries: El astuto mono Pinochet contra La Moneda by Betina Perut and Iván Osnovikoff, Santa Cruz… por ejemplo by Gunter Schwaiger and Hermann Peseckas, and H.I.J.O.S., el alma en dos by Garmen Guarini and Marcelo Céspedes. Drawing from a psychoanalytical framework, Martín-Cabrera offers an original approach to the intergenerational transmission of trauma by connecting the experience of the Lacanian Real (death) with his own concept of the non-place. He again proposes a new concept of political militancy and justice beyond the constraints of the politics of the state and the logic of the market.

In the fourth chapter, Martín-Cabrera turns toward a critique of the discourses of international law and victimhood through Patricio Guzman’s documentary El caso Pinochet. While Guzman reproduces the hegemonic global human-rights agenda in his view of Pinochet’s detention, Martín-Cabrera takes on female testimonies—the other story thread of the film—to suggest a non-ontological mode of relating to the other—one that transcends Badiou’s ethics of truth. This last section also shows an inspiring account of the shared history between Chile and Spain and Spanish Judge Garzón’s investigations of both Pinochet and Franco’s crimes.

Martín-Cabrera’s writing combines complex and rigorous criticism with a passionate, lucid and accessible style that provides a highly enjoyable and engaging reading. His original materials, thought-provoking formulations, insightful debates and critical perspectives all cohere to form a truly stimulating book that ultimately transcends the academic sphere...