My plane leaves Monday evening. so this is the last weekend in Vancouver before the trip. Arrangements continue… Just this afternoon, for instance, one of the museums we’ll be visiting (the Museo Larco) wrote to tell me that their charges are going up, but that we can still visit for the old price that we were quoted when I asked for a guided tour a few weeks ago, so long as we now pay in advance.
But paying in advance is not simple. This goes also for hotels and everything else. Peruvian businesses much prefer to be paid via bank transfer, which is a long and laborious process to arrange via the university. So I try to pay by credit card (I now have a university credit card precisely for this purpose), but this has its own complications, sometimes at this end, sometimes at the other.
At times the issue is the Peruvian enthusiasm for bureaucracy. Perhaps as a legacy even of colonial administration, as elsewhere in Latin America businesses like things written down and sealed with some kind of identification: National Identification Card (or DNI) for citizens, passport number for foreigners. The lettered city lives on.
But at times the issue is the various ways in which Peruvians try to get around these same strictures of documentation… in ways that make my university’s financial administration’s metaphorical eyebrows raise a centimetre or two. The real city endures, even as the formalities of the paperwork are theoretically respected. “Obedezco pero no cumplo” (I obey but I do not comply), as the old phrase has it.
In my experience, however, everything has a way of working itself out.
Meanwhile, I’ve been meeting up with the students on a fairly regular basis. Our final get-together is this afternoon. These have been optional exercises in getting to know each other, and there have been varying numbers each time, but I think they’ve been pleased to meet each other, and maybe relieved to discover they have some of the same interests and enthusiasms. To me, they seem like a very good group, and it’s also been good to have a better sense of them before we go.
In many ways they are typical of students I have in other Faculty of Arts classes. They have a variety of different experiences and perspectives. The majority, but not all, are Canadians (mostly but not entirely from British Columbia), and yet even among the Canadians many are first- or second-generation immigrants. A couple have some kind of Latin American heritage. There are (by quite a margin) more women than men. Some have officially graduated, others have still to declare a major. Of those who have, they are studying a variety of different subjects–Latin American Studies, but also Anthropology, English, Sociology, even the Sciences. They seem to be fairly well-travelled, but few have been to South America, and only one to Peru before. Some speak at least some Spanish, but most do not. They all seem almost as excited as I am.
I will be there a day or two in advance, and meeting most of them in at the airport in Lima early in the morning on Thursday.
Then after settling in at the hotel, our first activity will be a tour of San Isidro, the neighbourhood where we are staying, including the Huaca Huallamarca, a (mostly) reconstructed Indigenous pyramid, and El Olivar, a park featuring olive trees that are descendants of saplings brought over from Spain in 1560.
In The Lettered City, Angel Rama stresses the utopian dimensions (literally) built in to the colonial cities of Latin America. For here, the plan came first, often with scant regard for the material (or human) environment. The classic grid system, with a plaza mayor or main square on each side of which were arrayed the various centres of power whether spiritual (the cathedral) or temporal (the town hall or municipality), reflecting an ideal conception of order and hierarchy. These were cities of “signs” that, in Rama’s words, could “be made to represent things as yet only imagined–the ardently desired objects of an age that displayed a special fondness for utopian dreams” (8). In the New World, the Spanish imagined a <em>tabula rasa</em> on which to construct a vision of civilization untrammeled by the messy history they had left behind in Europe. They were of course not the only ones to think this way–colonial settlers in North America, for instance, had similarly utopian dreams–but what was distinctive about the Spanish imperial enterprise was the focus on urban design and cities as nodes of power and influence from which order would flow from the centre outwards.
Rama explains the longevity of this urban dream, and the resilience and adaptability of those who came to construct, supervise, and implement it: the letrados, that class of professions (lawyers and accountants, civil servants and bureaucrats, priests and architects) who wielded power with a pen to work with the signs that were always to dominate material reality. The letrados outlasted even the imperial project of which they were such a key component, “weather[ing] the revolutionary storm” of the struggles for independence from Spain and “reconstitut[ing] their power in the independent republics” (45) that followed.
By this point, however, the initial utopianism of the letrado project had long since faded–there was no longer any serious intent to bridge the gap between sign and reality–and the letrados had become a conservative force, dedicated merely to their own reproduction. Indeed, though Rama observes how reformers such as Bolívar’s mentor, Simón Rodríguez, drew on the <em>letrado</em> tradition as inspiration for change, he also shows how they were defeated by this same tradition, which ensured that “The new nations of Latin America [. . .] failed to construct democratic, egalitarian societies, and their educational institutions, instead of producing an informed citizenry, turned out custodians of the traditional, hierarchical social order” (47). The belief in the dominance of the sign built into the urban social fabric had by this time traced an affective inversion, from the utopia of infinite possibility (because the sign could be changed almost at will, so could the world), to the dystopia of entrenched cynicism (all that ever changed was the sign).
Perhaps all this helps to explain the wild swings so characteristic of Latin American political history: between resigned fatalism on the one hand, and periodic outbursts of exuberant hope, on the other.
Behind the scenes, however, another logic is at work: not the lettered city, but the much more anarchic real city, which draws on and constitutes the context that letrado utopianism disavowed, including for instance “indigenous social networks–their agricultural zones, their market centers, and above all, their labor power” (12), but also the everyday reality that the ideal grid could never capture. For the intellectual class, the resilience of the real brought only dismay, as it resisted their vision of utopian transformation. But surely it is here we should look if we seek hope for the future.
It has just struck me that it is now less than a fortnight before I will be in Peru, to take a group of twenty UBC undergraduates (accompanied, fortunately, by a very reliable Teaching Assistant) for six weeks of study and exploration in Lima, Cusco, Pisac, Ollantaytambo, and Machu Picchu.
I am asking the students to write a regular travel blog, on which they will reflect on their experiences and observations while they are there (alongside a reading blog, in which they comment on a respond to the texts we will be reading and discussing). And so I thought, pour encourager les autres, that I would do the same.
At present I am still caught up in logistics–just yesterday I heard from our hotel in Cusco, for instance, that there has apparently been a misunderstanding about how many rooms we need; I am very much hoping this gets resolved today! But the sudden realization of how close the trip is may perhaps, paradoxically, help me stand back and think again about what I hope we achieve.
The theme of the course (because it is also a regular, six-credit university course) is “Making and Unmaking Indigeneity in the Andes.” Its basic premise, I suppose, is that we cannot (and should not) take Indigeneity for granted. Indigeneity is a product of history–and of course, specifically colonial and postcolonial history–if only for the fact that, prior to colonization, there was no such category as “Indigeneity.”
There were of course Inkas (and Chankas and Ashánika, and so on; elsewhere, Maya and Mexica etc.), but there were no Indigenous people. Indigeneity is a result or construction of colonialism. Indeed, the term “Indigenous” (in English) is first attested to by the OED in 1632, and it is in 1646 that we have the first occurrence of what we would consider its modern meaning, in a reference (by Thomas Browne) to “indigenous or proper natives of America.”
So we will read and think about how Indigeneity has been made–and at various points, also un-made–in the Andes from the seventeenth century (with Guaman Poma) to a present that we will, partially at least, see around us in Peru itself.
Inevitably, we will be tourists–and I hope that the students have a good time, and do not get sick or break legs and the like–but we will also be studying tourism, thinking about a history of outsiders’ gazes or Occidentalism, reflecting on our own participation, and even complicity, in making and unmaking Indigeneity. There is a lot to learn, and not only for the students. I am very much looking forward to the trip, although I am also a little nervous. . . if mostly in a good way. As I have told the students: we need to expect the unexpected and prepare for our plans to be derailed. That will be part of the learning.
In more than one way Jesse Andrews’ Succession (2018-2023) is a show all about the limits and possibilities of successions. That is, not only is the show worried about the way a series of similar events happen after each other, but also the show is worried on the contingency of this series. Precisely, the drama of the Roy family, a corporate juggernaut owner of a giant broadcast company (ATN), along with thematic amusement parks and cruise lines in the US, resembling closely America’s Murdoch conglomerate, is not only about the demise of the patriarch, Logan Roy, and the future successor, but about the idea of succession in a broader sense. What is beyond, or after, the riches, the power, the corporate and familial relations that a global enterprise, owner of all forms of entertainment, have proven to fall short in a world where friendship is impossible, and any relationship is murky and fragile? Or to put it differently, and, perhaps, clearer, what comes next after the normal way of capitalist accumulation of power, wealth, influence, and enjoyment has collapsed? For the crisis of the Logan family is not only theirs. Today power, wealth, influence, and enjoyment are no longer achieved by the bond of friendship, or other bonds proper to the development of bourgeois society (family values, codes of sociability, and so on). With Logan Roy’s foretold death, as early in the series is announced by the stroke, he suffers that only deteriorates his health throughout the show, Succession wonders what happens once the master of these bonds is gone.
In chapter one of the first season, way before Logan Roy has his first stroke that sends him to a coma, there is a meaningful scene. This is the opening scene. With a camera angle that can hardly focus, a confused Logan Roy walks into a corner of a dark room. He then proceeds to pee on the carpet and the camera focuses on the stain the flow of pee makes onto the surface. Once he’s done, Logan regains awareness of what has happened. Then, a service woman assists him. Finally, Marcia, his by then wife, enters the room and comforts him. This scene is not only foretelling the fate of Logan, as his health deteriorates, but it is also participating of a particular visual tradition. It is, for instance, a very similar scene to the opening one of the first episode of the show Billions (2016-2023), created by Brian Koppelman, David Levien, and Andre Ross Sorkin). In Billions, a show about the dispute between billionaires and ruthless district attorney in New York, the opening scene is not about a foretold sickness, but about pure enjoyment: a man is golden showered by his mistress.
Both opening scenes, from Succession and Billions, are revisiting the famous scene of Sergei Eisenstein Ivan the Terrible (1944), when the tsar is showered on coins at the moment of his coronation. That is, the flows of money that showered the figure of the sovereign, validated as well by the people and the orthodox church, in Eisenstein crudely manifested (revisited) in contemporary visual culture. From this perspective, both Succession and Billions are telling us about the place on which the flows money, and capital land. If for the modernity, from Eisenstein view, it is the sovereign who receives all flows, realizing money into capital and so on, in Billions, for instance, the golden shower Chuck Rhoades, the NY city attorney, receives is but a flow deterritorialized of capital. He is getting full jouissance, and, hence, invigorating his will against billionaires. The lesson from Billions is that the money of billionaires masochistically moves the libido of the police since it is Chuck Rhoades, the ruthless lawyer that “hunts” billionaires, who is receiving this flow. In Succession’s first scene the flow is coming from a billionaire (Logan Roy’s pee), and the place where it lands is but a corner of a room in his apartment. Here the tragedy becomes visible: from a world in which the figure of the sovereign (Ivan the Terrible) was the recipient of the flows, transforming them into capital, now we have a world in which the police perversion is moved by the flows they received (Billions), and more radically, where the ones expelling the flows don’t know where to throw them (Succession). Logan Roy’s confused peeing contrasts precisely with his well-intentioned “demarcation of territory” when peeing in the office of his son Kendall Roy, when the latter attempts to become the successor of his father’s firm in the first season. By peeing confusedly in a corner of his house, Logan Roy’s actions tell us of capitalism integral and general crisis: where to pee next? Where to mark new territory? Or even more, now capitalism does not know how to realize the flow into capital, now it is just pee into a corner, a sign of an acute sickness.
Flows are everywhere in Succession. From Kendall Roy, Logan’s eldest son, a recovering addict, to the quantities of liquor all character’s drink, including a pregnant Siobhan Roy, the only daughter of the patriarch, in the fourth season, or the semen Roman Roy, the youngest son, ejaculates on the crystal window of his office in the first season, the show is constantly reiterating how flows failed to be transformed into capital, or even into something else rather than the crudest real they represent. In the case of Roman Roy, for instance, his ejaculation on his office’s window glass already manifests how he is unable to engage in any type of affection with women. He cannot have sex. By the fact that during this scene his semen is throwed into a clear surface that both suggests thrownness and narcissism, the show is addressing the incapability of capitalism to escape its own ego. Roman Roy’s semen won’t ever be part of the (re)production of life, it will just be a projectile crashing on a clear surface: an illusion of death trapped in narcissism. In contrasts with Logan Roy’s pee, Roman’s ejaculation does not worry about territorializing, and neither is the effect of a deterritorialization (he knows what he is doing, he covers the inside windows of his office before masturbating). Roman is rather affirming cynically his impossibility of being the successor, or of having any sort of succession from within the family.
Even formally, at all times, we are reminded that flows are cut and that successions are very contingent, if not impossible, in the show. Characters like Craig, a distant cousin of the Roys, or Tom Wambsgans, Siobhan’s husband, constantly are interrupted when speaking. And all characters, in general, constantly stutter when approaching Logan Roy. When Kendal, for example, confronts his father in person, he is unable to utter a series of words without stuttering. Or to bring another example, when audited by the US Senate, Tom cannot respond to the questions and his speech and answers are but broken sentences and stutters. Even more, the opening theme of the entire show is built both visually and musically on works that play with the possibilities and impossibilities of succession. The music play that accompanies the opening images of the show mixes different genres, from a scale on piano to beats of hip hop with a syncopal rhythm. The images of the opening credits are a succession interrupted by images that overlap out of context. The main sequence, a family video tape of a family portrait of the Roys, is interrupted by images from the ATN TV network, and other familial moments. These series of interruptions, overlaps, and breaks that cut the flows, but do not entirely stop them, and that make contingent any series and succession, could be understood as a cumulation: an entropic pile up of things profusely affecting us.
If normally, capitalism guarantees as process of series and succession based on the way flows are transformed into accumulations of use, labour, and value that is yet to be realized into capital, in Succession what gathers the flows by recovering their cuts, stops and overlaps is far from a traditional accumulation. Regular capitalist accumulation is based on the principle that a sovereign can arbitrate and transform an amassing of things into capital, but with the demise of Logan Roy the flows are deterritorialized, and by extension it all becomes alien to the power of the sovereign validation. What piles up in the show, money, lobby meetings, weddings, drugs, cars, or to sum up, excess and residue of all kinds is still gathered, as the flows are still continuing, but the succession, as a series, cannot be continued. Almost playing with numerology, the show stops on its fourth season. Four, for Tarot, is the number of dominance, or of the aporia of domination, thigs have accumulated and are perfectly stable, or precisely suggesting all the opposite a complete disarray that only tricks the lonely emperor who sits on top of a too small world (as the Camoin and Jodorowsky Tarot de Marseille illustrates the card).
At the end of the show, when a succession has been achieved, not directly inside of the family, and the company has been sold to foreign investors, flows ratify their continuity, but this next succession is but transitional, a façade: the new investors, a Sweden billionaire (who also is obsessed with flows, he sent to his assistant bags of his blood as a romantic/ harassing gesture) is going to radically transform the company. From this, there no longer a possibility for transferring, succeeding, the regular order of things.
La estrategia del caracol no es sólo una historia sobre el despojo. O más bien, es una historia sobre la intervención y la transformación del despojo en otra forma de desplazamiento o mudanza. La película comienza cuando un grupo de periodistas llegan a una calle atiborrada de cosas. El reportero del grupo pregunta a un hombre viejo qué es lo que pasa, y éste, a punto de responder de forma agresiva, es interrumpido por otro personaje. Éste se presenta como miembro de la ya desalojada casa de “la Pajarera.” Y en palabras de este nuevo personaje, “el paisa,” lo que el reportero está presenciando es la “injusticia de la justicia.” En este sentido, la historia que vemos ya iniciada es la ya sabida historia de la acumulación originaria, aquella del robo y el despojo, aquella escrita en letras de sangre en los anales de la historia. De ahí, el paisa comienza a narrar la historia de un despojo previo, de “la Pajarera” y de una casa vecina, al reportero y su equipo. Esta primera escena ya resume un mecanismo que se repite en la película. Este mecanismo consiste en un desplazamiento del afecto por una narración o creación artificial (la reacción del hombre viejo por la narración del paisa), y también la de la intervención de un tiempo diferido. Es decir, la historia nos enseña sobre el diferir de los afectos y su transformación en una narración, un plan o una estrategia.
Precisamente, la película confronta dos tipos de procedimientos, al menos. Por una parte está la fe ciega que “el perro,” un leguleyo residente de una de las casas a ser desalojadas, tiene hacia la ley y sus mecanismos. Por otra parte está la estrategia que Jacinto inventa: la creación de un sistema de tramoyas y poleas para mover toda la casa en que viven él, el perro, y los demás inquilinos a ser desalojados. Esta estrategia busca sacar cada cosa de la casa y moverla hacia la “Pajarera,” una casa que se resiste al despojo por medio de la acción armada, para de ahí transportar todo a la cima de un cerro a las afueras de la ciudad. En este sentido, la trama de la película, que es también la historia que cuenta “el paisa,” depende de cómo estas dos estrategias trabajan para diferir el inevitable despojo. Si bien, estas son de las principales estrategias, o planes, que se presentan en la película, también están otras. Está, por ejemplo, la reacción armada y violenta, a la que recurren un grupo de inquilinos de la casa vecina a donde son transportadas las cosas y los muros de la casa de Jacinto y el perro. A su vez, todas estas estrategias trabajan en contra de los caprichos del acaudalado dueño legal de las fincas, un hombre fascinado por las máquinas y demás dispositivos asociados a la captura fílmica y acústica. Con este personaje se tiende un eje de oposición que ubica a los desposeídos, como aquellos que poseen una estrategia y además construyen sus propias máquinas, en contra del que desposee, que está meramente fascinado con las cámaras de video, las televisiones y las grabadoras. Los desposeídos son creativos, los que desposeen son reactivos, parece decirnos el filme de Cabrera.
Quizá las lecciones más radicales del filme son las siguientes. Primero, el filme, en una suerte de apotropaia conservadora, es decir, en el hecho de dar por sentado que el despojo algún día llegará y que nada se puede hacer para evitarlo, nos enseña que todos, algún día, habremos de mudarnos, o de morirnos. Lázaro, el inquilino más viejo de la vecindad, es asesinado por su esposa ante la inminente urgencia de acelerar el proceso de mudanza. Por el hecho de que Lázaro esté durante casi toda la película en estado moribundo, se puede decir que la estrategia de Jacinto, en combinación con la estrategia legal del perro, son como el aplazamiento del asesinato del Lázaro. Como la fachada de la casa es tronada con dinamita al final de la película, así también la esposa de Lázaro decide acabar con la pantalla de vida que tenía su esposo. La segunda lección radical es que en lo más real se esconde un simulacro, o un artificio. En la escena que representaría el estado máximo de violencia, la explosión de dinamita que derrumba la fachada de la casa, nadie muere ni resulta herido, sino que sólo la fachada de la casa de desmorona casi como escenografía de teatro. Al fondo del lote baldío donde estuviera el inquilinato se ve una casa pintada y en el centro del espacio arde la tramoya que transportara las cosas de los inquilinos. Como si el filme se suicidara, destruyendo el espacio más creativo de toda la película, se deja ver en las ruinas aquello que fascina al acaudalado dueño pero que no puede él mismo crear ni completamente poseer: un simulacro violento, un artificio agresivo, una imagen y su violenta emergencia en lo real.
The main purpose of The Interpretation of Dreams is to prove that dreams are part of the waking state, that they are “a senseful psychological structure which might be introduced into an assignable place in the psychic activity of the waking state” (13). Dreams are, thanks to the technique Freud is about to present, a part which has no “official” belonging into the structures that form the waking state, conscious. In a way, the task of interpreting dreams, then, is a task of giving place, a task of ordering, or to assign order a missing part of its very own structure. Throughout the first chapter, Freud revisits many of the different approaches that have studied dreams. In the summary presented in this chapter, we learn that nothing is set on stone when it comes to discussing and interpreting dreams. For some authors, Freud says, “the discovery of the origin of some of the dream elements depends on accident” (22), or that what appears in the dream is what has been “pushed aside from the elaboration of the working thought” (35). Dreams escapes us, their mechanisms are not clear. Indeed, Freud affirms that “the entire memory of the dream is open to an objection calculated to depreciate its value very markedly in critical eyes. One may doubt whether our memory, which omits so much from the drea, does not falsify what is retained” (52). And yet, once we remember a dream, it is not so much a story that we remember, but “pictures… which resemble more the perception than the memory presentations” (55).
To interpret dreams, then, one should learn how to read pictures. These are the residual, but also excessive, symbolic activity of fantasy. Whereas in dreams the “clearness of language is rendered especially difficult by the fact that [they] show a dislike for expressing an object by its own picture,” in a dream what we have is a “strange picture,” one that “can only express that moment of the object which it wishes to describe” (86). The pictures we see in dreams are not like the acoustic images that years later Sausurre’s Cours de linguistique général, that is, the images of a dream are not attached to one single object but are only “that moment of the object which [the dream] wishes to describe” (86). The dream gives away, or reveals itself as a “somatic process… which makes itself known to the psychic apparatus by means of signs” (99). This serves as point of departure of Chapter 2, in which Freud presents a sample dream, the famous Irma’s injection dream. And subsequently, Chapter 3 and 4 introduce the notion of understanding the dream as a fulfillment both affirmative and negative (distorted).
In these four chapters we read some of the key contributions of what later would be psychoanalysis. Here for, instance, after Freud formulates that every dream is the manifestation of the desire to “fulfill a dream,” we read about the 2 forces, or systems, or streams (all these synonyms mentioned by Freud) that cause the dream formation. One of these “constitutes the wish expressed by the dream” (145), and the other one “acts as a censor upon this dream wish” (145). By the simile of the “censor,” we then realize that dream depends on a flow that wishes, desires, something, and that this affirmation is only available to consciousness by a process of censorship, a process of self-repression or even self-regulation. Freud puts the relationship between these two in the following terms: “Nothing can reach consciousness from the first system which has not first passed the second instance, and the second instance lets nothing pass nothing pass without exercising its rights and forcing such alterations upon the candidate for admission to consciousness as are pleasant to itself” (146). Conscience, for Freud, “appears to us as an organ of sense” (146). And the sense of consciousness is what is “pleasant to itself” (146). Hence, the act of censorship collaborates with the wish fulfilment. It is, then, not surprising that Freud closes the fourth chapter by describing the mechanisms of certain dreams that seem to distort, or withdraw from, the fulfillment of desire. Withdrawal, or repression, is by extension a form of affirmation, a machoistic one, a neurotic one, a hysteric one. Freud has summarized what later will inspire further works on the way jouissance is at the chore of the mechanisms of desire flow control.
While surely this book is mainly about the interpretation of t dreams. What would it take to read the text with its own proposed technique? Indeed, this book has an affective clear purpose. Freud seeks revenge: “if there were such a thing in science as right to revenge” (95), the interpretation of dreams will be part of that violent revenge. Freud, perhaps, is telling us that to think what escapes sense (dreams), one should be closer the Iliad’s first verses. One should open this thought, like Homer, with rage. And even more, what sort of rage will one find in Freud’s text if one were to consider that most of his examples involve leisure (the trips with his family in chapter 3), intoxication (cocaine in the injection that kills a friend of his in the dream example of chapter 2), the law (the judge at the end of chapter 4)? Would this be merely a rage directed to a reduced group? Or would this rage have the chance for thinking an heterogeneous but open field for thinking?
It is perhaps because ultimately Macondo is so full of the ghosts of the motley cast of characters that have wandered through the book’s pages, that García Márquez can only put an end to it all by shouting “enough!” and bringing on a cataclysmic hurricane that tears the whole place down.
Desde el inicio de Los muertos y el periodista (2021), de Óscar Martínez, se advierte sobre el tema principal del libro, pero también sobre la diferencia radical que tiene este libro en comparación con otros escritos por Martínez. Este es también un libro en el que “hay pandilleros, pero no es sobre pandillas; hay narcos” pero “no va de narcos; hay El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, México, Estados Unidos, pero no va sobre esos países; también hay policías y jueves y presidentes y políticos corruptos, pero no pretende profundizar en ese mal endémico de la región; hay migrantes y no es sobre migración; hay reflexiones de periodismo y frases de periodistas célebres, pero no va sobre eso” (12-13). Eso que hay en, pero no “de lo que va” el libro es la diferencia radical a la que apunta Martínez. Si sus trabajos anteriores fueron ejercicios periodísticos de largo trabajo y dedicación, este libro, como se dice desde las primeras páginas, fue escrito “como vomitar” (11). Así pues, este es un libro sobre la distinción, o la diferencia absoluta, entre aquello que hay y aquello que es, entre lo que es trabajo (escribir) y lo que es orgánico (vomitar), y entre los muertos y el periodista.
Aquello que separa al periodista de los muertos es también lo que los une. La principal historia que el libro cuenta, construida a partir de digresiones, reflexiones y comentarios sobre el trabajo anterior de Martínez y otros de sus compañeros periodistas, es la de una muerte anunciada, como la de casi cualquier fuente que pueda tener un periodista como Martínez: Rudi, un dieciochero que presenció una masacre realizada por policías en El Salvador, esquiva su muerte hasta que años después policías irrumpen en su casa y secuestran a él y a dos de sus hermanos. Jéssica, la hermana mayor de Rudi, y Martínez, se encargan de identificar los cuerpos de los dos hermanos de Rudi, cuando estos aparecen. Pero de Rudi, no quedó sino un cráneo quemado, una calavera imposible de identificar. El desenlace es una ya sabida desazón, un no saber, y una absoluta impotencia. Al final, el periodista vive, una buena historia se escribe y se vende, y los muertos se apilan en un cúmulo interminable. Y aún así, es por la vida de Rudi, su confesión y su historia, que muertos y periodista guardan una relación casi irrompible.
La diferencia entre muertos y periodista está en la completa obviedad que conllevan ambas palabras. Los muertos son muchos, el periodista es uno solo. Los muertos preceden al periodista, el segundo es un mero agregado (aquello que sigue de la “y”). Aún así, es por el agregado, el periodista, que aquello que precede puede hallar un espacio en la escritura. El asunto, claro está, es que escribir no es, para nada, un oficio feliz. Ante la famosa frase de Gabriel García Márquez, sobre eso de que el mejor oficio del mundo es el periodismo, Martínez afirma, “‘No jodás’ le respondería con muchísima admiración” (36). Para Martínez, el oficio del periodista “da un privilegio inmenso y una enorme responsabilidad: atestiguar el mundo en primera fila. Aunque a veces, casi siempre, el espectáculo sea nefasto” (36). El periodista, entonces, es aquel que ve aquello que es siniestro, lo que duele, pero que también expande la imaginación y provoca la escritura. El periodista registra un infinito incalculable donde se mezcla el dolor, el asombro y la curiosidad en el nudo machacado de las palabras.
Desde esta perspectiva, entonces, se podría pensar que la escritura es en sí una práctica que guarda las distancias insalvables, una práctica de la diferencia absoluta entre aquellos que viven y mueren, y el “individuo” que registra todo en una multitud: los muertos. Es decir, el periodista es aquel que escribe siempre sobre los muertos, es aquel que encara siempre a esa siniestra multitud. Los muertos y el periodista es un libro sobre ese espacio crepuscular donde se diferencia lo que hay y lo que es: un espacio infrapolítico, similar a aquello que Alberto Moreiras define como eso de lo que ningún experto puede hablar. Desde ese espacio siniestro, esa infinita distancia, pero también infinita cercanía, es que se invita a pensar la relación misma entre muertos y periodista, entre lo existente y su registro, lo que duele y sus marcas. Sólo desde aquí es que uno pudiera ver en Los muertos y el periodista no sólo un libro de distancias insalvables, sino un umbral hacia otra parte y diferentes comienzos.
