Ethics and Politics in Hector Aguilar Camin's Morir en el Golfo and La guerra de Galio

Héctor Aguilar Camín's Morir en el golfo (Dying in the gulf) and La guerra de Galio (Gallio's War) are two superb political novels whose basic strategy borders on what Roberto Esposito would call the "unpolitic." In these two texts literature is at the service of the political in the sense of claiming a radical privilege to exist "democratically," which means, to be able to think the possibility of a decision beyond every pragmatic or "political" reason. One could even talk of an infrapolitical or non-militant decision, upon which Aguilar Camín makes the very possibility of a radically anti-utopian writing depend. One should talk about these novels as examples of a literature against civilizing elites, infrequent in a cultural context that still oscillates between the two sides of Sarmientism, and that can only endlessly redefine the dualism between civilization and barbarism without ever displacing it.