Imagining the Inoperative Community: Documentary Aesthetic in Roberto Bolaño and Alfredo Jaar

Roberto BolañO;Alfredo Jaar;Documentary aesthetic;Inoperative community;Jean-Luc Nancy;Jacques RancièRe;General and Comparative Literature;Romance Languages and Literature;Humanities;Comparative Literature

Ferrari, SebastianColas, Santiago ;

University of Michigan

关键词: Roberto BolañO;    Alfredo Jaar;    Documentary aesthetic;    Inoperative community;    Jean-Luc Nancy;    Jacques RancièRe;    General and Comparative Literature;    Romance Languages and Literature;    Humanities;    Comparative Literature;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/93868/ferraris_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

The literary and artistic works under review in this dissertation emerge from a background in which the circulation of documentation is immense and important: mass crimes committed by the state in the Southern Cone in the 70’s and 80’s must be documented and communicated by post-dictatorship governments. At the same time, the means through which such documentation is formulated and transmitted have become delegitimized or problematized in significant ways: traditional documentary work has undergone severe questioning in the last three decades; the value of a photograph has changed with the emergence of digital media; and the structures of the state which previously underwrote the cultural value and weight of documents have been corrupted by ties to previous orders (some of which committed the crimes in question) or weakened by the ascending power of the neoliberal market. And perhaps most importantly, there is the dilemma posed by having to document erasure and disappearance. Confronted with this problem, documentary work, I suggest, turns toward more literary or figurative forms of gesturing at what remains beyond and before the typical frame of documentary work.Using selected novels by the Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño and artworks by the Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar, I argue that their appropriation of documentary forms (such as testimonial discourse, encyclopedia, catalogues and lists, documentary film and photographs) develops into a documentary aesthetic, in which the process of documentation becomes blocked, seen as insufficient or otherwise rendered inoperative; this sense of inadequacy not only calls into question the stereotypical documentation of victims seen in ;;official reports” of state crimes, but also forms the ground of a different way of imagining community in the post-national, neoliberal era. This experience of incapacity and insufficiency, I contend, opens us up to an imagining of what Jean-Luc Nancy calls the inoperative community, which is at its heart the common sharing of finitude. Such finitude is however, itself the product of sharing. I argue that the documentary aesthetic produces a limit-experience that ;;exposes us to our finitude;” we confront our own exteriority to ourselves through the ;;unframing” of the other in the documentary aesthetic.