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This essay uses elements of Roberto Esposito's immunitary paradigm to shed light on Edgar Allan Poe's "Masque of the Red Death" and, in parallel, to think through social and spatial stratification in contemporary Brazil. I argue that racial anxiety is at the heart of both Poe's story and the particular spatial tendency in Brazil's cities of elites to live in "fortified enclaves" (Caldeira), comparable in many ways to the "castellated abbey" of Poe's story. In examining the effects of the "Red Death", or Covid-19 in Brazil under Jair Bolsonaro's government, I observe that Bolsonaro's status as a democratically elected official (unlike Prince Prospero) has forced him to give certain concessions to the population, in the form of aid payments, that maintain his power. However, I demonstrate that this is not incompatible with an active thanatopolitical strategy, which encourages the most marginalized in society to expose themselves to the virus (and thus to death). Finally, I turn to Jean-Luc Nancy's short essay "Communavirus", which outlines the ethical potential of community-in-isolation but which does not take into account places such as the favelas of Brazil, where isolation is often not practically or materially possible.
In the 1994 film El elefante y la bicicleta (directed by Juan Carlos Tabío) two women in the marketplace of an allegorical version of Cuba (an island called La Fe) are discussing the film they saw the night before, screened by a mobile cinema that had recently arrived to the island. 1 The debate turns to an abstract discussion of the function of film, and Serafina posits that, "Las películas tienen que ser bonitas, que terminen alegres, que la muchacha se case con el muchacho." Broadly in the style of Kant's Critique of Judgement, Serafina displays a nonsocial aestheticist view: that film is designed to provoke aesthetic pleasure and nothing else. 2 Suddenly, there is a Brechtian drum roll and the other woman, Eloísa, puts on some black-framed glasses and says: "¡Pero Serafina! El cine, como toda manifestación artística, debe constituir un elemento de penetración de la realidad." 3 Related to this question of the function of art, is that of its general relationship to the reality external to the work, with philosophical discussions often taking 'mimesis' as their starting point. Audiovisual media have always been seen to have a privileged relationship to reality, compared to other mimetic arts, due to the "impression of reality" caused by the "perspectival analogy of the photographic image, persistence of vision, and the phi-effect or 'phenomenon of apparent movement.'" 4 However, the so-called objectivity of the reality presented is called into question by a number factors, including: changes in technology that allow for the manipulation of the image; the realization that film, like other representational arts, is not unmediated but has a certain perspective or ideological vision; and poststructuralist/postmodern skepticism about whether there is a stable or authentic reality to be represented in the first place (Jean Baudrillard suggests that simulation no longer refers to a referential field). 5 The debates regarding what is at stake in terms of mimetic representation in general can be loosely related to the previous three notions: is it deceptive? (Plato), does it reinforce ideological stagnation? (Barthes and others), or does it enable the recreation of reality in a way that contributes to our understanding of it? (Aristotle and Ricoeur). 6 A comprehensive definition of mimesis is elusive since even at a very basic level the terms "imitation," "reflection," and "representation" are all widely used but imply quite different notions of the relationship between art and reality.This article will address two instances of self-conscious filmic comment on the perceived effects of mimesis, in the particular context of Cuba in its extended moment of crisis (or successive crises) following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The effects of this dissolution included the loss of seventy per cent of Cuba's import capacity over three years, as well as the knock-on impact on agriculture and industry of the halting of fuel imports. 7 The government response was to declare a "Special Period," which saw the imposition of st...
Jacques Derrida, in one of his last projects, took "touch" as an analytical point of departure for the study of a selection of texts by Jean-Luc Nancy. He interprets the meaning of "to touch" in Nancy's work as a "setting-in-motion," a trope which can be observed in the novel Los informantes (2004) by Juan Gabriel Vásquez. This article observes an intertextual relationship between Los informantes and a chapter from Nancy's The Sense of the World entitled "Politics II: Subject, Citizen, Sovereignty, Community, (K)not. Tying. Seizure of Speech". The narrator and his father are read as allegorical representations of Nancy's definitions of "sovereignty" and "democracy," respectively. When mapped onto the historic and contemporary Colombian political landscape, the flaws associated with these concepts suggest the need for a new form of community based on "interdependence" and "being-in-common," critically explored in the novel through the character of Angelina, a physiotherapist. Set against a trend in Colombian and Latin American writing of incorporating the themes of Nazism and the Second World War, the article-contrary to previous studies-finds that therapy through language (talking or writing) is not the key to healing the divides of the past. The meaningful encounters demonstrated by Angelina and others involve physical contact and affection: these are the encounters that promote reconciliation.
Diário da Queda (2011) by Michel Laub has been described as autoficção (autofiction), the Brazilian translation of the concept coined by Serge Doubrovsky to describe the narrative working‐through of trauma through fictional autobiography. This article re‐examines the definition of ‘autofiction’ and argues that Laub's narrative process more closely resembles Jean‐Luc Nancy's notion of a singular voice ‘compearing’ experiences in a process of ‘sharing’ that, when combined with touch and affection can – according to the novel – more successfully help to overcome trauma. At stake are questions regarding the inheritance of Holocaust memory, as well as its politicised deployment in contemporary conflicts.
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