25 febrero 2003
| 25 febrero 2003 |
The Street Signs of Downtown Lima: Memory and Identity in Peru - II |
William W. Stein |
Yolanda Westphalen (2001) rephrases the question in her brilliant exegesis of Mario Vargas Llosa’s (1969) Conversación en La Catedral. The title of Westphalen’s article is “La mirada de Zavalita hoy: ¿En qué momento se jodió el Perú?,” a paraphrase of a passage in the book which “es la historia del desclasamiento de Zavalita, compleja figura discursiva que se va construyendo a través del recorrido semántico del proceso de transformación de un joven de oligarca en un empleado mediocre. Pero Zavalita es como el Perú, es la encarnación del proceso de transformación de una República Aristocratica en una mesocrática.” We might even say: in the novel Zavalita is Perú (is Vargas Llosa), all of them “jodidos”—a “dense word” if ever there was one. We confront the metaphor for rape, but raped people are not cinders. Paul de Man (1986:91) tells “of an example [he] heard given by the French philosopher Michel Serres—that you find out about fragments by doing the dishes: if you break a dish it breaks into fragments, but you can’t break the fragments any more.” That is, when you break fragments you just have fragments. Or cinders. Being “jodido” alive is nothing like that because you can be “jodido” over and over again and you just end up “jodido”. There is no end to being “jodido,” to being excluded from pleasure. But are we dealing with one person, Zavalita, or with a whole population? There are differences—and differances, a concept Derrida (1973:129) applies in cases where the meaning between the two possibilities, nonidentity and delay, is undecidable. Is Vargas Llosa’s text is to be read “Zavalita is jodido,” or “Zavalita, Perú, and Vargas Llosa are jodidos”?; and, when does the “joder” start: during Odría’s ochenio?, or could we place it earlier, during Leguía’s oncenio, the War of the Pacific, the guano age, the colony, the conquest? Or is the real, the absolute, the final “joder” still in the future? If so, how long can one be “jodido” in advance, before it actually happens?
So far we’ve concealed one part of a binary, the favored part. Because you can’t have jodidos without los que joden, los jodedores, the ones on top, the ones who have the orgasms while the jodidos experience only pain. And it’s possible to reverse things without disturbing the structure in the least. Martín Oyata (2001:352-353) brilliantly deconstructs the binary in his assessment of a famous story by José María Arguedas:
Durante 1965, José María Arguedas escribió un relato que le había sido confiado en una localidad del Cusco. Muchos lo conocemos; se trata de “El sueño del pongo”. Como se recuerda, al final de ese relato, donde se sueña la vida en el cielo, “nuestro gran-Padre San Francisco” ordena al patrón que lama al siervo cubierto de excrementos. En ese momento, doblemente soñado, la realidad se invierte. Solo que, tras intercambiarse los papeles, persiste la humillación. Admito que el ejemplo es extremo, pero ¿acaso no es la reproducción consciente de una misma estructura, como sucede con la reforma culturalista del canon, un peligro que late en diversas formas de discriminación positiva—esas leves desigualdades calculadas para recobrar una promesa de genuina igualdad? (Emphasis mine.)
Arguedas’s dilemma should give us pause to rethink the metaphor of “revolution”, an exceptionally “dense” word which is easy to say but hard (phallic) to perform. It is a trickster, duplicitous because it hides “the law of the law,” that is, the violence which lies beneath the law, as Derrida (1999:115-116) points out:
How is one to hear [the silence between ethics and politics, ethics and law]? [...] As always, the decision remains heterogeneous to the calculations, knowledge, science, and consciousness that nonetheless condition it. The silence of which we are speaking, the one toward which we are above all attentive, is the elementary and decisive between-time, the meantime, the instantaneous meantime of decision, which unsettles time and puts it off its hinges (“out of joint”) in anachrony and in contretemps: that is, when thelaw of the law exposes itself, of itself, in the non-law, by becoming at once host and hostage, the host and hostage of the other, when the law of the unique must give itself over to substitution and to the law of generality–without which one would obey an ethics without law–when the “Thou shalt not kill,” wherein both the Torah and the law of messianic peace are gathered, still allows any State (the one of Caesar or the one of David, for example) to feel justified in raising an army, in making war or keeping law and order, in controlling its borders–in killing. Let’s not insist too much here on the obvious, but let’s not forget it too quickly, either. (See also Derrida 2002a on law and violence.)
The disguise of “the law of the law” is apparent in the efficient machine known as the “guillotine” which was invented at the time of the French Revolution, as Regina Janes (1993:259-260) describes it:
Of capital instruments in repose, only the guillotine so thoroughly reveals its threat while refraining from any actual display of violence. A gas chamber is only a room with ducts; an electric chair is only a chair with wires. The gallows noose, when it produces its full effect, always bears the burden of a body. To have any effect at all, the pike must sport a head. But the geometry of the guillotine is energetic. The blade is always there, potentially active, and requires only release from tension to execute its fell purpose. The guillotine is also discrete. It evokes violence, but it does not show it. More, it makes its point by itself, without any need for human actors to intervene or even to appear. The machine thus politely, if misleadingly, erases the humanity of violence.
The guillotine’s persistence, then, derives from the same source as its existence, that “improvement of manners” on which the eighteenth century so prided itself. The ancient pleasures of violence recede from view as the machine erases the human hand. The carnival of the pikes falls to the order of the machine that controls and subordinates the vehemence of popular violence. The bloodless stillness of a waiting guillotine invites rhetoric—passionate, ironic, or frenzied—to twine around it or to break against it. Inhumanly passive, the machine challenges language, and language will always rise to the occasion. But the improvement of manners, while real, is also deceptive; it is only an improvement of manners.
From the eighteenth century French terror to Stalin’s show trials or Mao’s cultural revolution, or now the terrorist bombers of 9-11 who gracefully and impersonally slice jets loaded with fuel into skyscrapers, manners have certainly improved but violence has never been far away.
Arguedas (1950, no page indicated, as cited in Vargas Llosa 1996:30) himself wrote:
Las clases sociales [...] tienen también un fundamento cultural especialmente grave en el Perú andino; cuando ellas luchan, y lo hacen bárbaramente, la lucha no es sólo impulsada por interés económico; otras fuerzas espirituales profundas y violentas enardecen a los bandos; los agitan con implacable fuerza, con incesante e ineludible exigencia.
Violence erupted and overcame him in 1969 when he shot himself. Revolutionary law, and its “law of the law” prevailed.
I think I know something of Arguedas’s despair, because in my lifetime I’ve had the experiences of sailing around the world, moving thousands of miles on land, taking new jobs, leading graduate seminars on Marx, and radically changing my life conditions from enlisting in the military to getting married to increasing the length of my hair—and found myself confronting the same internal structures of otherness. The-others-in-me always came with me; I could never escape them. Instead of shooting them into oblivion I chose to welcome otherness and, thereby, found the freedom to make a future. For Arguedas the war was unceasing, and although he and I come from different cultures and grew up in radically different ways, he without a mother (with a mostly absent father and a really evil stepmother and stepbrother)and I without a father (with a mother who placed me at times in an orphanage and various foster homes, spent long months in bed as an invalid, and experienced bouts with mania), he with early sexual trauma, some of which he remembered, and I with unremembered sexual trauma and a more or less anesthetized childhood, he speaking Quechua and I denied Yiddish, and so on, I feel related to him—as though the difference between him and me were slight. But I made only one fumbling and obviously unsuccessful suicide attempt when I was seventeen.
In his discussion of huachafería, Salazar Bondy (1977:98-99) reminds me of my own early fumbling efforts to look “respectable,” and my later failure to “make revolution,” as well as the very thin line (if there is one at all) between “arribismo” and insurrectionary violence: “Si el pobre se queda en pobre, acepta la pobreza y la reconoce como prueba providencial, impertérrito fatalismo o naturaleza irrecusable, no habrá peligro de que amenace de ningún modo el estado de cosas que la determina. Ahora bien, si el pobre pretende salir de esa situación y niega su pobreza como destino, se le abren dos caminos: la subversión contra los opresores o la infiltración entre ellos. La primera equivale una guerra y se la libra negando la legitimidad de los poderes y sus estamentos. La segunda es una maniobra y se ejecuta mediante ardides.” (And I am most grateful to Peter Elmore [1998:306-307] for calling my attention to this most significant passage.) Salazar Bondy goes on to explain how huachafería doesn’t work because, as we say these days, it is only a simulacrum. The first edition of his book appeared nearly forty years ago, so he cannot deal with “subversion” and “war” as we can today. “Subversion,” now, deconstructed, is a sub-version, only one version among many possible versions, including supra-versions, re-versions, contra-versions and pro-versions, in-versions and out-versions, per-versions, para-versions, and surely meta-versions. “War”, as a viable alternative to “infiltración”, is demonstrably inadequate because one war always leads to another, one violence to another violence.
Following Levinas, Derrida (1978:130) writes:
Discourse [...] if it is originally violent, can only do itself violence, can only negate itself in order to affirm itself, make war upon the war which institutes it without ever being able to reappropriate this negativity, to the extent that it is discourse. Necessarily without reappropriating it, for if it did so, the horizon of peace would disappear into the night (worst violence as previolence). This secondary war, as the avowal of violence, is the least possible violence, the only way to repress the worst violence, the violence of primitive and prelogical silence, of an unimaginable night which would not even be the opposite of day, an absolute violence which would not even be the opposite of nonviolence: nothingness or pure non-sense.
Not everyone is a simple jodedor or jodido. There are, of course, unwilling jodedores who do not take advantage of their privilege because, for them, hurting others is painful, as well as willing jodidos/jodidas for whom being injured is pleasurable, so the binary really is unreal. The jodedores are not necessarily brutal brutes but often behave with “caballerosidad”. According to Norma Fuller (1998:38-39):
La caballerosidad en el trato, que es la regla de deferencia debida a la madre, y a la esposa convive con la violencia doméstica debida a la incapacidad innata del hombre de contener sus impulsos. De este modo es posible que coexista la más exquisita deferencia al lado de la agresión física y psicológica. La misma admiración que lleva al respeto contiene el inverso de rebeldía frente al poder femenino. Si la caballerosidad es la regla de lo debido, la violencia es la constante transgresión, consecuencia de la impulsividad del varón.
So there are degrees of “caballerosidad.” Fuller notes: “De hecho existe una crítica abierta y constante al machismo de parte de hombres y mujeres. Se le considera una visión arcaica y abusiva de las relaciones entre los géneros. Sin embargo, ésto parece limitarse al discurso, sin que incida en ciertas actitudes básicas, como la doble moral sexual y la autoridad masculina.” In a sobering footnote to a passage pointing to the fact that the existence of servants means that “la division sexual del trabajo en la familia no sea revisada”, she points out: “Un elemento a relevar es la persistencia de relaciones semiserviles y profundamente jerárquicas en la familia. Es curioso notar que las mismas mujeres que aplican para sí mismas criterios democráticos, cuando se trata de su ‘muchacha”, se deslizan hacia patrones jerárquicos. Según expresan, la empleada doméstica ‘no tiene las mismas necesidades’ o no siente el mismo deseo de ser libre o reconocida como igual (41-42).” Thus there is the possibility that jodidas/jodidos may exercise the power of jodedoras/jodedores over others who are weaker. Indeed, it is easier to conceive of a “pecking order” of domination-submission than a simple binary. We can also think it as a “chain of suffering, based on Portocarrero’s (1990:234) image of “la persona que reclama sumisión y obediencia por el hecho de haber sufrido o seguir sufriendo. Desde una suerte de trono del dolor, el sufriente se queja y ordena. Si es preguntado por la razón de su privilegio puede responder que ha padeecido bastante, más que el resto, y que ahora le toca a él (ella) el turno de recibir. [...] En la presunción de que el suframiento crea derechos encontramos la secularización de la idea básica del mártir: el sufrimiento como inversión. Pero ahora la expectative no es tanto la salvación, la recompensa en el más allá, sino la posesión o el poder el el más acá, en el plano intramundano.”
What Fuller (1997:20) says, regarding “heterosexualidad obligatoria”, applies to all cases of the binary: “[L]a identificación con el fantasma normativo [...] no es una operación concluida y dejada atrás en un pasado ya olvidado, sino una identificación que debe ser reafirmada y enterrada una y otra vez a través del repudio compulsivo por el cual el sujeto sostiene sus fronteras, creando así bordes precisos a su identidad.” If machismo is a “repudio compulsivo”, we should try to find the source of the compulsion; that is, we should look beyond the symptom to the disorder.
Now, read what Derrida (1980:203-204) has to say about “The law of genre” (read law of gender, law of race, law of decencia, or even laws of day and night and good and evil):
As soon as the word “genre” is sounded, as soon as it is heard, as soon as one attempts to conceive it, a limit is drawn. And when a limit is established, norms and interdictions are not far behind. [...] But the whole enigma of genre springs perhaps most closely from within this limit between the two genres of genre which, neither separable nor inseparable, form an odd couple of one without the other in which each evenly serves the other a citation to appear in the figure of the other, simultaneously and indiscernibly saying “I” and “we,” me the genre, we genres, without it being possible to think that the “I” is a species of the genre “we.” For who would have us believe that we, we two for example, would form a genre or belong to one? Thus, as soon as genre announces itself, one must respect a norm, one must not cross a line of demarcation, one must not risk impurity, anomaly or monstrosity. [...] If a genre is what it is, or if it is supposed to be what it is destined to be by virtue of its telos, then “genres are not to be mixed”; one should not mix genres, one owes it to oneself not to get mixed up in mixing genres. Or, more rigorously, genres should not intermix. And if it should happen that they do intermix, by accident or through transgression, by mistake or through a lapse, then this should confirm, since, after all, we are speaking of “mixing,” the essential purity of their identity.
Yet, Derrida adds (206) by citing “the law of the law of genre”: “It is precisely a principle of contamination, a law of impurity, a parasitical economy. In the code of set theories, if I may use it at least figuratively, I would speak of a sort of participation without belonging—a taking part in without being part of, without having membership in a set. The trait that marks membership inevitably divides, the boundary of the set comes to form, by invagination, an internal pocket larger than the whole; and the outcome of this division and of this abounding remains as singular as it is limitless.” That is, a boundary, margin, limit, or frontier—and boundaries are, as I’ve stated, porous, the unstable sites of hybridization, bilingualism, syncretism, reinterpretation—is not what it appears (“it” is a chameleon: it appears in different guises and disguises in different contexts) to be. I very much like the way in which Gloria Anzaldúa (1987:vii) lives there:
Living on borders and in margins, keeping intact one’s shifting and multiple identity and integrity, is like trying to swim in a new element, an “alien” element. There is an exhilaration in being a participant in the further evolution of humankind, in being “worked” on. I have the sense that certain “faculties”—not just in me but in every border resident, colored or non-colored—and dormant areas of consciousness are being activated, awakened. Strange, huh? And yes, the “alien” element has become familiar—never comfortable, not with society’s clamor to uphold the old, to rejoin the flock, to go with the herd. No, not comfortable but home.
A boundary is libidinal: from a psychoanalytic point of view Kathya Araujo (1997:461) associates what Freud identified as “zonas erógenas” with “bordes”. (How wonderful to be “marginal”!) So sad, then, as people (especially in North America) are ready to tear each other to bits, that there is little pleasure to be seen. The jodedores appear to be jodidos internally, while the jodidos seem to be jodidos externally. Yet there is something of the jodedores inscribed in the jodidos, as well as something of the jodidos inscribed in the jodedores. Otherwise, why do so many jodidos take advantage of weakness in their spouses and children in order to abuse them? Just what are the jodedores so worried about, if not their possible reduction into jodidos? And those who worry about purity and defilement always have plenty to worry about.
Ramón León (1998:32) makes a bold observation loaded with implications: “Y todos sabemos, por ultimo, que el primer mandamiento del decálogo de todo peruano “normal” es rechazar y “poner en su lugar” a esa amenazante y creciente turba de “igualados”, “creídos”, “confianzudos” y “mandados”, que sin mayores reparos desafían las leyes no escritas que rigen la sociedad peruana.” Which means that the jodidos are kept on the bottom, “puestos en su lugar.” But more important than that, it can be no accident that León chose a Biblical metaphor, and one from the Old Testament in which a Supreme Jodedor is on top of multitudes of jodidos on the bottom, the Jodedor immortal and the jodidos sentenced to die.
Then what we find beneath all this social acting out of fear by equating jodidos and social death is a religious cult devoted to the task of making certain that the dead stay that way, “puestos en su lugar.” Here I apply the term “religion” in Derrida’s (2002b:66-67) sense:
Does not “the question of religio” [...] quite simply merge, one could say, with the question of Latin? By which should be understood, beyond a “question of language and culture,” the strange phenomenon of Latinity and of its globalization. [...] Religion circulates in the world, one might say, like an English word <comme un mot anglais> that has been to Rome and taken a detour to the United States. Well beyond its strictly capitalist or politico-military figures, a hyper-imperialist appropriation has been underway now for centuries. It imposes itself in a particularly palpable manner within the conceptual apparatus of international law and of global political rhetoric. Wherever this apparatus dominates, it articulates itself through a discourse on religion. From here on, the word “religion” is calmly (and violently) applied to things which have always been and remain foreign to what this word names and attests in its history. The same remark could apply to many other words, for the entire “religious vocabulary” beginning with “cult,” “faith,” “belief”, “sacred,”, “holy,” “saved,” “unscathed” (heilig). But by ineluctable contagion, no semantic cell can remain alien, I dare not say “safe and sound,” “unscathed,” in this apparently borderless process. Globalatinization (essentially Christian, to be sure), this word names a unique event to which a meta-language seems incapable of acceding, although such a language remains, all the same, of the greatest necessity here. For at the same time that we no longer perceive its limits, we know that such globalization is finite and only projected.
Many Christians—people who call themselves such but are not, in fact—do not carry Christ’s message of humility, peace, and unconditional love—if I properly understand this message from outside, as a Jew (and “Jew,” in case you’ve never thought about it before, is a rather “dense” concept), though a kind of “double consciousness” may assist me.2 One meets up with a Bartolomé de las Casas or a Martin Luther King infrequently. Instead nominal Christians take the role of Christ’s torturers. They carry arrogance, domination, mass murder, thievery on a grand scale, exploitation, oppression, and wreckage of what others have constructed. They appear to want to get close to God only so that they can be the jodedores and not the jodidos. This is quite absurd to someone like me who rejects all those compulsions and is happy to know that there are many ways to make love, and that they are all pleasant. This makes me a sexual mestizo (“Queer” is another “dense word”), but again with a “double consciousness,” because I grew up absorbing obligatory heterosexism. Liberation from patriarchal “family values” means social death in that universe. I count my blessings because I exist elsewhere, and here I am on the other side enjoying life. Jonathan Dallimore (1998:xvii) speaks of “the ambivalent attitudes in Western culture towards both desire and movement: desire as undesirable movement.”—
Illicit desire is especially prone to being conceptualized as aberrant movement. For example, the idea of deviation—itself the conceptual heart of the idea of perversion—is about a movement which is dangerous or subversive: to deviate = to go astray. Conversely, the good, the safe and the true are about not deviating (sticking to the straight and narrow), while related virtues like order, stability and harmony presuppose restricted, limited or controlled movement, often echoing the ultimate metaphysical ideal of fixity, predetermination or stasis: the fixed origin, fixed destiny, fixed identity, and so on. And yet [...] no culture has a more significant history of obsessive, expansive, restless movement.
Socially dead people, jodidos, subalterns, slaves, are not supposed to rebel, and when they do they are considered to be perverse; they are demonized: the dead who do not remain “en su lugar”. In his study of Slavery and Social Death, Orlando Patterson (1982:44) distinguishes between “intrusive” and “extrusive” modes of social death: the first a conception of the slave “as someone who did not belong because he [sic] was an outsider”; the second as a condition in which “the slave became an outsider because he did not [belong] [...] or no longer [...] belonged.” He continues: “In the former the slave was an external exile, an intruder; in the latter he was an internal exile, one who had been deprived of all claims of community. The one fell because he was the enemy, the other became the enemy because he had fallen.” And: “Institutionalized marginality, the liminal state of social death, was the ultimate cultural outcome of the loss of natality as well as honor and power. It was in this too that the master’s authority rested. For it was he who in a godlike manner mediated between the socially dead and the socially alive” (46). And some of the socially dead don’t even want to be alive, but those who do inspire great fear. In Peru, for example, popular insurrection has been conceived by criollos as “race war,” and the latter as an abominable and perverse movement to alter a natural order (see Stein 1988). Historical research tells us otherwise, as Alberto Flores Galindo (1987:278) informs us:
Vista de cerca la imagen de una “Guerra de castas” parece esfumarse. No es una lucha, en sentido estricto, de mistis contra indios. Se enfrentan los mistis contra los sublevados, pero en ambos bandos hay indios. A veces pelean una comunidad contra otra; en ocasiones son colonos contra comuneros, sin que faltan los conflictos en el interior mismo de las comunidades.
The “order of things,” the “way things are,” “reality”: all are constructed by language, but “tautology” turns things inside-out. Barthes’s (1972:152-153) comments are eloquent:
In tautology, there is a double murder: one kills rationality because it resists one; one kills language because it betrays one. Tautology is a faint at the right moment, a saving aphasia, it is a death, or perhaps a comedy, the indignant ‘representation’ of the rights of reality over and above language. Since it is magical, it can of course only take refuge behind the argument of authority: thus do parents at the end of their tether reply to the child who keeps on asking for explanations: ‘because that’s how it is’, or even better: ‘just because, that’s all’—a magical act ashamed of itself, which verbally makes the gesture of rationality, but immediately abandons the latter, and believes itself to be even with causality because it has uttered the word which introduces it.
So let’s reestablish the rights of language over reality! “Social death” is a metaphor. Even as “death” itself is metaphoric. It’s just a word in the English language (it rhymes with “breath”), as “la muerte” is in Spanish (it rhymes with “fuerte,” and “la suerte”), and I learned it from others as a child. Nobody is born knowing it; everybody who speaks English has learned it from others. It’s the same with “muerte” in Spanish. It’s always already a “monolingualism of the other” (Derrida 1998). So it’s in us, that’s for sure, but it’s an otherness constructed in us that makes split subjects of us. We cannot emphasize too strongly here that we are confronting language. Thus, there is an interminable blossoming of meaning in Jean Baudrillard’s (2002:5) words in his essay on “The spirit of terrorism,” a philosophical reflection on the events of 9-11: “The fact that we have dreamed of this event, that everyone without exception has dreamt of it—because no one can avoid dreaming of the destruction of a power that has become hegemonic to this degree—is unacceptable to the Western moral conscience. [...] At a pinch, we can say that they did it, but we wished for it.”
In a most amazing assemblage of Saussure, Benveniste, Jakobson, Hegel, and Heidegger, Giorgio Agamben (1991:86-87) observes that langue, as contrasted with parole,— that is, language vs. speech—has no sound. Ontology, too, can be defined as silent “Voice.” He continues:
The essential relationship between language and death takes place—for metaphysics—in Voice. Death and Voice have the same negative structure and they are metaphysically inseparable. To experience death as death signifies, in fact, to experience the removal of the voice and the appearance, in its place, of another Voice [...] , which constitutes the ordinary negative foundation of the human word. To experience Voice signifies, on the other hand, to become capable of another death—no longer simply a deceasing, but a person’s ownmost and insuperable possibility, the possibility of his [sic] freedom.
Here logic shows—within the horizon of metaphysics—its originary and decisive connection with ethics. In fact, in its essence, Voice is will or pure meaning (voler dire). The meaning at stake in Voice should not, however, be understood in a psychological sense: it is not something like an impulse, nor does it indicate the volition of a subject regarding a determinate object. The Voice, as we know, says nothing; it does not mean or want to say any significant proposition. Rather, it indicates and means the pure taking place of language, and it is, as such, a purely logical dimension. But what is at stake in this will, such that it is able to disclose to man [sic] the marvel of being and the terror of nothingness? The Voice does not will any proposition or event; it wills that language exist, it wills the originary event that contains the possibility of every event. The Voice is the originary ethical dimension in which man pronounces his “yes” to language and consents that it may take place. To consent to (or refuse) language does not here signify to speak (or be silent). To consent to language signifies to act in such a way that, in the abysmal experience of the taking place of language, in the removal of the voice, another Voice is disclosed to man, and along with this are also disclosed the dimension of being and the mortal risk ofnothingness. To consent to the taking place of language, to listen to the Voice, signifies, thus, to consent also to death . [...]
For this reason, the Voice, the originary logical element, is also, for metaphysics, the originary ethical element: freedom, the other voice, and the other death—the Voice of death, we might say to express the unity of their articulation—that makes language our language and the world our world and constitutes, for man, the negative foundation of his free and speaking being.
Death becomes for many of us, uncannily, an oppressor with which we identify. Dollimore (1998:96) says: “An internalized, dreaded mutability, experienced as desire, leads to abject identification with an omnipotent, vengeful God. To regard this sexualizing of the religious experience as commonplace or conventional is only to say that it probably requires closer attention than that usually given it by those who would describe it thus.” Thus, we need to rethink Oedipus’s conflicts—at least in the way Freud described them.
“Death” is a very “dense” signifier, for it not only signifies the transition from one state of existence to another, but it also signifies nothing. How to think “nothing”? How to think “not”? It’s not easy, as Mark Taylor (1993:1-2) shows us at the beginning of his book on Nots:
To think not is to linger with a negative, which, though it can never be negated, is not merely negative. The not is something like a non-negative negative that nonetheless is not positive. So understood, the not does not exist; nor does the not exist. Neither something nor nothing, the not falls between being and nonbeing. Though thought cannot think without thinking not, the Western ontotheological tradition has, in effect, been in an extended effort not to think not. While the strategies that have been devised for negating the not have been multiple, they consistently involve the effort to turn the not into something positive that can be managed and controlled. Within such schemes, the name of the not varies: God, Satan, the good, evil, being, nonbeing, absolute knowledge, nonknowledge, the unconscious. [...] But such naming is always inadequate, for to think not is to think the unthinkable, which is unnameable or is nameable only as unnameable. Declining all nominations and eluding or resisting every oppositional structure constructed to repress it, the not entails an altarity more radical than any binary difference or dialectical other. (Elipsis in the original.)
Fidias Cesio (1996:176), an Argentine psychoanalyst, writes:
Para el “más allá de la muerte, hay diversas hypótesis. Estan las de las religiones que hablan de otra vida después de la terrena o de la muerte. Para los ateos, para los “no” creyentes en general, después de la vida es la “nada”, más, tal como lo descubrimos con el psicoanálisis, la negación es una manifestación en lo preconsciente-consciente que representa la represión, significa la existencia en lo inconsciente de algo oculto, rechazado por la consciencia. “Nada”, tal como lo señala la etimología de la palabra, es lo “no nato”, lo no nacido, el feto o el aborto—el muerto--, que también es metáfora que alude a lo que no alcanza una existencia consciente, lo que no ve la luz, lo que habla de lo sepultado y de la sepultura. [...]
La palabra “muerte” remite a un concepto abstracto. En los diccionarios aparece explicada como “cesación de la vida”, una definición por la negativa que nos habla de lo que queda cuando ya “no “ hay vida, cuando hay “nada”. La represión y su expresión consciente, la negación, el “no”, al rechazar un contenido lo califica como algo “malo” para el yo. Cesa la vida y queda tácita, presente, la “ausencia”, es decir, un contenido inconsciente, sepultado, tabú, negado por ominoso, que recibe el nombre de “muerte”.
“Death” signifies, as well, “the end of a story,” detumescence (poetically it is a metaphor for orgasm), the consequence of sin, castration, fear of specters, corruption, pollution, danger, vampires (or pishtacos in Peru, and for the definitive work in English on Andean pishtacos see Mary Weismantel’s [2001] recent work), as well as punishment and the punishment of punishment, a infinite hall of painful mirrors.
Let’s look for the origin of the themes of decencia and social death in colonial times: in the way in which biological death was treated in the different social sectors. We have a most vivid description by Teresa Gisbert (1996:105-107) of anonymous painting in a chapel in Caquiaviri, La Paz, Bolivia:
El cuadro de la muerte está concebido como un espejo, cuanto ocurre en el lado derecho donde se coloca el bien, corresponde exactamente al lado izquierdo donde está el mal. Hay un eje central en cuya parte alta está Dios Padre y al pie la confesión de un indio. Al centro se ve un cadáver en putrefacción y delante de él la muerte pisando los despojos de reyes, papas y caballeros. Esta muerte es doble, la que “mata” con azucenas a los justos y la que “mata” con fuego a los pecadores, ambas apuntan a dos moribundos identificados por sus obras. Una ventana central, también doble, muestra la penitencia en contraposición a los placeres. Al pie de la cama del justo están mundo, demonio y carne; el pecador tiene los mismos tres personajes que bailan delante de él. Mundo y carne están concebidos como mujeres vestidas según la moda del siglo XVI, la primera con la esfera del mundo en su cabeza y una copa de vino en la mano; la carne con flores y un espejo; cerca hay una vihuela que representa la sensualidad. Según el “Ars Moriendi” también se peca deleitándose al escuchar música. El demonio a su vez, baila con una tercera mujer. Junto al justo están las siete virtudes, las cuatro cardinales: Prudencia, Justicia, Templanza y Fortaleza, y las tres teologales: Fe, Esperanza y Caridad (estas últimas colocadas en la almohada del moribundo). El pecador, en contraposición, tiene los siete pecados capitales en la almohada: soberbia, avaricia y lujuria; y los otros cuatro: pereza, envidia, ira y gula, con sus respectivos animales; el asno para la pereza, un jaguar para la ira, un cerdo para la gula y un perro para la envidia. La simitría es tal que los seres infernales hacen par con Cristo, La Virgen, San José y San Antonio Abad—que es patrono de Caquaviri. Uno de los demonios lleva un cartel que dice; “Arda para siempre quien no hizo (caridad) al pobre”.
Gisbert (109-110) notes: “¿Cómo insertar al indígena en el teatro barroco de la muerte? Es algo que se dio en muy escasa medida. En el mundo andino, el culto a los antepasados suponía la conservación del cuerpo momificado que era tratado como un objeto sagrado, se hacían sacrificios a los muertos y periódicamente se repetían los ritos funerales. Nada más opuesto a esta costumbre que el enterramiento cristiano que suponía la descomposición del cuerpo. Por ello en el Collao, los cadáveres eran robados de los cementerios de las iglesias y llevados a los chullpares, práctica que Toledo prohibió expresamente. Pensar que las riquezas se abandonan con la muerte era paradójico en un mundo donde los muertos llevaban consigo su ajuar. Por todo ello, no extraña que los indígenas estén escasamente representados en las ‘postrimerías’ que, copiadas de grabados las más de las veces, nos dan la visión europea de la muerte.”
It will come as no surprise, then, that contemporary Peruvian cemeteries replicate social divisions. José Tamayo Herrera (1992:39) says: “[L]a estratificación de la muerte, causada por la posesión o desposesión de recursos económicos, se muestra siempre como un constante, pues aun en los Cementerios Laicos o en el Cementerio Presbítero Maestro, o el del Angel, hay lugares de enterramiento de primera, segunda o tercera, desde los lujosos mausoleos del Presbítero Maestro, hasta los diversos precios de los nichos, según la fila o la altura de su ubicación, o el hecho de que el entierro, se realice en nichos o en tierra virgen, sin nicho alguno, o en nicho perpetuo, o en nicho temporal, durando el primero teóricamente, en forma indefinida, y el segundo sólo por un periódo de dos o cinco años, al cabo de los cuales los restos del cadáver, son echados en el Campo Santo, es decir en tierra virgen cualquiera.” Tamayo Herrera (61-62) counted “más de 31 cementerios clandestinas, tanto en los Conos Norte y Sur de [Lima], como en el sector de Cantogrande hacia el Noreste.”—
Todos estos cementerios clandestinos, algunos de los cuales hemos podido visitar son simples campo santos, sin delimitación precisa, ni cerco alguno, simples extensiones de desierto en el perímetro de las barriadeas, donde en forma desordenada y caótica, entre pedrones, arena y basura, se han depositado los cadáveres de origen popular en pequeños túmulos, excavados en el propio arenal, o entre las rocas circundantes, y cubiertos apenas de un montón de tierra y arena coronados con una cruz de madera, con la inscripción del nombre del cadáver. Algunos, mejor construidos lo han sido de una frágil estructura de ladrillo con cemento, pero la mayoría son simples túmulos levantados en forma desordenada, en superficies variables de media a 3 o 4 hectáreas que cubre el cementerio clandestino.
2 Jews who grow up in Christian societies tend to have, to one degree or another, a “double consciousness.” Thus, in his autobiographical account of doing ethnography in the Andes, Benjamin Orlove (1997:19) describes how he felt “simultaneously an American and a specific other.” He and I borrow the term from W. E. B. Du Bois (1986:364-365) who writes: “[T]he Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second sight in this American world,--a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness,--an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; to warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”
© 2003, William W. Stein
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