Nature Fantasies: Decolonization and Biopolitics in Latin America 9781684485024

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Nature Fantasies

Bucknell Studies in Latin American Literature and Theory Series editor: Aníbal González, Yale University Dealing with far-­reaching questions of history and modernity, language and selfhood, and power and ethics, Latin American literature sheds light on the many-­ faceted nature of Latin American life, as well as on the human condition as a whole. This highly successful series has published some of the best recent criticism on Latin American literature. Acknowledging the historical links and cultural affinities between Latin American and Iberian literatures, the series productively combines scholarship with theory and welcomes consideration of Spanish and Portuguese texts and topics, while also providing a space of convergence for scholars working in Romance studies, comparative literature, cultural studies, and literary theory.

Recent titles in the series: Nature Fantasies: Decolonization and Biopolitics in Latin America Gabriel Horowitz The Aesthetic Border: Colombian Literature in the Face of Globalization Brantley Nicholson White Light: The Poetry of Alberto Blanco Ronald J. Friis Latin American Literature at the Millennium: Local Lives, Global Spaces Cecily Raynor Exemplary Violence: Rewriting History in Colonial Colombia Alberto Villate-­Isaza Transpoetic Exchange: Haroldo de Campos, Octavio Paz, and Other Multiversal Dialogues Marília Librandi, Jamille Pinheiro Dias, and Tom Winterbottom, eds. Early Puerto Rican Cinema and Nation Building: National Sentiments, Transnational Realities, 1897–­1940 Naida García-­Crespo Machado de Assis and Narrative Theory: Language, Imitation, Art, and Verisimilitude in the Last Six Novels Earl E. Fitz Beyond Human: Vital Materialisms in the Andean Avant-­Gardes Tara Daly For more information about the series, please visit bucknelluniversitypress​.org.

Nature Fantasies Decolonization and Biopolitics in Latin America

Gabriel Horowitz

Lewisburg, Pennsylvania

Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Horowitz, Gabriel, author. Title: Nature fantasies : decolonization and biopolitics in Latin America / Gabriel Horowitz. Description: Lewisburg, Pennsylvania : Bucknell University Press, [2023] | Series: Bucknell studies in Latin American literature and theory | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023008703 | ISBN 9781684484997 (paperback) | ISBN 9781684485000 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781684485017 (epub) | ISBN 9781684485024 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Spanish American literature—­19th century—­History and criticism. | Spanish American literature—­20th century—­History and criticism. | Nature in literature. | Decolonization in literature. | Biopolitics in literature. | National characteristics, Latin American, in literature. Classification: LCC PQ7081 .H598 2023 | DDC 860.9/36098—­dc23/eng/20230601 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023008703 A British Cataloging-­in-­Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. Copyright © 2024 by Gabriel Horowitz All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Bucknell University Press, Hildreth-­Mirza Hall, Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA 17837-­2005. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. References to internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Bucknell University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared. ♾ The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—­Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-­1992. bucknelluniversitypress​.org Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press

For Juanita

C O N T E N T S

Introduction  1

Part I: Decolonization and Nature

1 The Natural History of Latin American Independence   17



2 Renewing Niagara Falls and Burning the Archive in the Cuban Poetic Tradition   31

Part II: Toward the Biopolitical State

3 The Fantasy of the Creole as White Indian   47



4 The End of History and the Return to Nature   77



5 The Garden, the Camp, and the Biopolitical State   92 Conclusion  117 Acknowledgments  123 Notes  125 Bibliography  147 Index  157

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Introduction

Nature ideology and the fantasies it engenders determine a continuity between processes of decolonization and the emergence of the biopolitical state. The histories and national discourses of Latin American states that envisioned themselves as locations of nature—­as sites of timelessness and truth—­to make the decolonial proclamation of national independence from Spain during the nineteenth century show this continuity particularly well. In these national discourses, a desire to return to the nation’s foundational nature has contributed toward a secondary, unconscious movement away from the state as such, toward a “biopolitical state,” in which the nature, bare life, or lawlessness that was traditionally seen as the constitutive outside of the political becomes its center. If Giorgio Agamben describes the biopolitical state in juridical terms, as being ordered by the concentration camp and defined by the “impossibility of distinguishing between outside and inside, nature and exception, physis and nomos,” this study modifies and develops his view by studying the historical emergence of the biopolitical state in relation to the development of a fantasy of the state as an enclosure of “nature.”1 This investigation of the insertion of nature into the center of the political not only sheds light on a specifically Latin American biopolitics but shows generally how it is possible and what it means to desire the biopolitical state. Today a desire for the nature that was supposed to act as the ground of a new, utopian society in the nineteenth century—­the Latin American nation-­state—­ has become as strong as or stronger than the desire for that society. As much as the formation of these nation-­states reflected a wish for genuine social or political engagement, the literature that promoted and consolidated their national identities reified a fantasy of return to the theoretical precondition of the state, nature imagined as a physical environment. Insofar as I describe how national literary cultures unwittingly reinforce a desire not for national community but rather for its opposite, the state of nature that is supposed to have preceded it, it 1

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describes a dialectical movement in which the nature that assisted the invention of the state becomes an engine of its negation. The historical arc that this book traces reflects an ideological effect of nature in general, the way in which nature thinking tends to be unproductive and self-­ defeating. Rather than serving as the tabula rasa that would allow for the creation of a more perfect society, as many have hoped, nature has more often facilitated mechanisms of rationalization and denial that have led away from the goals it was supposed to help achieve. More than allowing for emancipation from a colonial condition, Latin American nature thinking has perpetuated the structures of the colony by concealing them in discourse, often through the erasure of both Indigenous history and the history of nature itself.2 Thus, the biopolitical state must be seen as an extension of the colony, a site of forced labor meant to maximize the efficiency of extraction and accumulation of wealth, and as such represents a failure to decolonize. At the same time, today’s biopolitical horizon represents something new. A passage through the nation-­state form has helped bring about a revaluation of nature that has made lawlessness and war—­ which the state was originally meant to suppress—­not just into a de facto state of affairs in some places but into objects of desire. It is this desire for nature instead of community—­which results in a redefinition of the state as nonstate—­that is perhaps the most significant mark of the historical shift this book observes. In this work I seek to provide a glimpse into the hidden operations of nature ideology itself and the ways in which a concept of nature undermines the ends toward which it has been mobilized, making the realization of the desire it articulates impossible. This interest in uncovering nature’s ideological function is oriented by an understanding that nature is the unseen god of modernity—­a myth that is hardly recognized as a myth at all but rather naturalized within language and taken at face value as something that exists not just abstractly but as a physical presence in the world. This book offers a Latin American fragment of the world-­historical process by which nature has gained the power of a god in the present.3 The mythical power of nature is established by a complex set of factors. The factor that is perhaps most clearly relevant to the development of biopolitics and the emergence of the biopolitical state is nature’s centrality within modern scientific thought—­a point addressed by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, among others. This work considers the scientific function of nature but is also concerned with its parallel function as the secularized theological concept (into which a repressed political theology of empire is sublimated) that defines the theoretical contours of the modern state and the national cultures it engenders. Finally, the apotheosis of nature can only be understood in its relation to a process of nature’s spatialization, or territorialization, intensified by both Columbus’s arrival in America and a backlash against industrialization and social upheavals of the eighteenth century expressed in literary and philosophical Romanticism.

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The territorialization of nature is a historical process that unfolds in unison with its growing ideological force, a hypostatization that, with the passing of time, transforms an abstract, philosophical concept into something concrete and real and thus seemingly attainable. As an important basis for the ensuing investigation, I will briefly discuss it here.4 The earliest elaborations of nature were not spatial but rather temporal. Of particular importance to the Western tradition is the ancient Greek notion that the world has inherent, underlying processes that unfold in a way that is indifferent or prior to human intervention. The nature of a thing was an inborn quality that guides a predetermined course of its growth and decline. Subsequently, a philosophical definition of the political has been instrumental in spatializing nature. Through a definition of a separation between the political and the prepolitical marked by the city wall, a difference between where positive law is enforced and where it is not, philosophy assigned a specific space to nature. “Law” within prepolitical nature (i.e., natural law) was understood as the right of the strongest that defines the behavior of animals, which are neither guided nor protected by principle and bound only by force. Through this view—­along with a related anthropocentric, Eurocentric view of history that considers spaces beyond the city wall as being not only apolitical but also ahistorical—­nature is hypostasized as an ahistorical space actually existing in the present. According to Agamben this spatialized view of nature goes back to ancient Rome; he cites Cicero’s understanding of exile from the city as a punishment that makes man into a wolf, one who can be killed because he is outside the law—­that is, the city walls.5 Perhaps the most significant subsequent development of a spatialized view of nature in political thought occurred in response to Columbus’s voyage of 1492 and the sudden, unexpected appearance of a vast terra incognita in the imaginations of European thinkers. Enlightenment thought began to formulate a secular, universal view of history primarily through the thought experiment of imagining the past as a state of nature. It is not a coincidence that this philosophical turn occurred shortly after Columbus’s arrival in America. While Enlightenment thinkers understood nature principally as a theoretical construct—a hypothetical past that facilitated a reimagination of history against the traditional Christian scriptural narrative—an awareness of America must be seen as an impetus for this thought, as well as providing a canvas for an idea of nature as an actual place. Hobbes, for example, found inspiration in America for his concept of nature, although he formulated it as a geometrical, hypothetical realm. Carl Schmitt describes, “His state of nature is a no man’s land, but this does not mean it exists nowhere. It can be located, and Hobbes locates it, among other places, in the New World.”6 Significantly, this view of America as nature would be reified in the development of European international law, which established the idea of a unified Old World (the Jus Publicum Europaeum) in contradistinction to a New World defined as a massive state of nature.

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Schmitt describes how national powers set out amity lines that effectively designated the New World as a juridical void, “that treaties, peace, and friendship applied only to Europe, to the Old World, to the area on this side of the line.”7 “At this ‘line,’ Europe ended and the ‘New World’ began. . . . Beyond the line was an ‘overseas’ zone in which, for want to any legal limits to war, only the law of the stronger applied” and whose land was free for appropriation by any power.8 Schmitt understands this designation of free spaces in relation to Hobbes’s theory of the state of nature: “For Hobbes, the state of nature is a domain of werewolves, in which man is nothing but a wolf among other men, just as ‘beyond the line’ man confronts other men as a wild animal.”9 Thus, through the development of international law, America was defined during the early period of its colonization as a Hobbesian state of nature, whose status as such depended on and reinforced a decision not to recognize the full humanity of the peoples who lived there or the systems of law and culture that they maintained.10 This ascription of nature to specific territories would continue under a different guise and set of values in Romantic thought. In a backlash against secularization and industrialization, philosophers and poets went to the countryside in search of the divinity that had departed from everyday life. The divine origin sought by Romantics was conceptualized in terms of landscape; in contradistinction to industrialized spaces, it was only to be found in the countryside and the wilderness, which had not been adulterated by the ravages of capitalism and secular revolution. Significantly, Romantic thought revalued nature as something good and desirable; against its previous status as a de facto state of war, nature-­as-­land represented the innocence and unity that existed prior to man’s fall. Theoretical thought cannot do without a concept of nature whose imagination was the basis of a historical Enlightenment. A critique of nature butts up against the extent to which notions of positive law, history, and “the human” are dialectically constituted through the imagination of a prehuman past. While it is productive to test the limits of these fundamental concepts by way of such critique, the basic idea that nature represents—­the processes that constitute a nonhuman fabric of existence—­remains indispensable. Consequently, even as this work understands nature to be a form of ideology, it is as ideology that cannot be simply dispelled. Critiquing nature means grappling with the conditions that make critique itself possible. A critique of nature must draw a line between territorialized and nonterritorialized notions of nature. While it is not possible to dispel basic notions of the inhuman or the vestiges of a prehuman origin that remain with us today, a critique of nature can maintain that its territorial conceptualization does not in fact exist. This book rejects the idea of nature set forth by the thinkers of Romanticism in particular, which took actual landscapes as guises of divinity and unchanging truth in an increasingly secularized modernity, thus making

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them into objects of desire. The critique that this book carries out is driven by the rejection of Romantic nature. It is not altogether unreasonable to see wilderness as a space in which one can get away from other people, but as William Cronon argues, such feelings quickly give way to false consciousness. A feeling that one can escape modernity or civilization in the wilderness is dubious. And although an affective experience of wilderness might provide a feeling of objective truth in a world turned upside down, the belief that one actually finds a remnant of something that has never changed more readily in wilderness landscapes than in settled spaces is similarly doubtful. Patently false is the notion that such landscapes are unchanging in their entirety. As such, a belief that one communes with an eternal truth in the wilderness—­that one is experiencing in a personally novel way something that has always existed—­in fact performs precisely the opposite of a communion with truth. It is a fantasy of revelation that is actually a form of blindness and a denial of history—­both human and natural. It is also important to note that a Romantic fantasy of communion with nature in the wilderness retains a colonial value, and it is no coincidence that this fantasy arose at a time of European imperial expansion. Its expression in certain outdoor activities—­mountain climbing, for example—­demonstrates the relational dynamic between a desire for nature and the colonial impulse. The physical intrusion of the climber on the mountain summit (a metaphorical colonization practiced in actual colonial territories, India and Nepal in particular) is akin to the imposition of the thinker’s ego on a space when he imagines it to be without history. Wilderness becomes the tabula rasa for the desires of men, the place where, through the resources of truth and power it offers, he believes he can turn himself into a king or demigod.11 A desire for nature in its territorialized form cannot be separated from a desire to conquer land, to impose oneself on regions beyond the boundary of one’s own legal order for one’s own glorification. Romanticism reflects a positive view of conquest and colonialism—­the sublime act of overcoming nature—­as Bildung. If a desire for territorialized nature arose in part through the reaction of Romantic thinkers against the industrialization of European cities, the continued expansion of urban and suburban spaces since the early nineteenth century has reinforced and fed it. If it arose in response to the secularism and nihilism of modernity, ongoing alienation continues to feed it. Today a desire for nature appears in all forms of culture, not only in television series, advertising for consumer products, films, and novels, but also in ostensibly self-­conscious forms of “elevated” culture, such as academic environmentalism and ecocriticism. Even as ecocriticism frames its own necessity through the cataclysm that will be brought on by man’s destruction of the environment (stakes that are historical and human), a desire for the preservation of wilderness manifest in the work of many of its practitioners seems equally informed by a neo-­Romantic idealization

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of territorial “nature.” In light of a historical deification of nature and a widespread failure to recognize it as such, this book presents a critique of nature that is demanded by thought far beyond the context of Latin America. The two branches of the literary genealogy that this work presents—­one centered on the Cuban origins of contemporary decolonial thought and the other on Argentine and Paraguayan projections of the biopolitical state—­are inflected by national spaces. Nonetheless, their ends are transnational. Each genealogy culminates in phenomena understood in academic thought as unbound by any specific national tradition: the decolonial movement articulates itself as being continental in scope, taking the opposition between pre-­Columbian America and the European colonizer as its primary conceptual-­historical framework; the theorization of biopolitics and the contemporary political space understands these phenomena to be global, inherently linked to the problematics of international law as defined by Carl Schmitt via Agamben. At their origins, both genealogies are rooted in Romantic and scientific thought that is also international in scope: many of the foundational Latin American thinkers of the nineteenth century—­ including those I discuss in this book, such as José María Heredia, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, José Martí, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, and Esteban Echeverría—­traveled to Europe and the United States and read the works of their literary and scientific thinkers, some of whom had themselves based their work on experiences of America (Alexander von Humboldt and Charles Darwin being the most important examples). Even if an awareness of the biopolitical state, as I define it, emerges within Argentine and Paraguayan thought because of the specific contingencies of their national cultures, the reality of the desire for that state is not limited to those places. Thus, while many of the works considered here are cornerstones of Argentine, Paraguayan, and Cuban national canons, they all contain a transnational kernel and an orientation beyond a simple articulation of that which is proper and unique to their cultures. On the one hand this can be seen as a testament to the fact that any important work must bear on universal interests and concerns. But in this simple fact there is also something suggestive of the book’s central concern, the paradox presented by nationalist canonizations of the transnational horizons of José Martí and José Hernández: that Martí would be a national hero even as his nuestra-­americanismo sought a broader alliance between Spanish-­speaking nation-­states or that Martín Fierro would become the canonical national poem of Argentina even as its protagonist decides to abandon his country at the end of the first volume. This paradox, which is so central to the chapters that follow, can be understood as a reflection of the artificiality of nations themselves and the extent to which all nations seek to naturalize their contrived origins. As Adorno suggests, “Precisely because the nation is not nature, it has ceaselessly to proclaim its closeness to nature, its immediacy and the intrinsic value of the national

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community.”12 As such, the two relatively narrow, historically defined lines of literary thought that I investigate represent something beyond the specificity of their artificial national discourses. The symbolic labor carried out by literature that thinks about nature hypostasized as the national territory applies to the modern nation in general, not just to Cuba, Argentina, and Paraguay: a “delusion  .  .  . that a form of association that is essentially dynamic, economic and historical misunderstands itself as a natural formation, or misconstrues itself as ideologically natural,” a delusion that “culminates in a belief in races” and a desire for the biopolitical state.13 The process that invents the nation through a fantasy of a return to nature and that “culminates in a belief in races” simultaneously seeks to erase an Indigenous presence on the land and in discourse. Insofar as this book seeks to illuminate this process, its main objects of study are the same canonical, national literary works—­mostly written by Creole men—­that helped effectuate the erasure. It is by studying such texts, as well as those that respond to them, that this ideological process can be best understood. Thus, while one of the important stakes of my argument is the legacy of Indigenous history and culture and the injustices done to Indigenous people in America, it does not take the Indigenous cultural objects and practices that were excluded by nationalistic nature discourses as its main objects of study. It is worth noting that where literary culture (European and Romantic at its origin) has created space for Indigenous voices, those voices are often still produced by Creole writers, as we find in the works of Peruvian writers José María Arguedas and Mario Vargas Llosa, Guatemala’s Miguel Ángel Asturias, and Ecuador’s Jorge Icaza and members of the Guayaquil Group, among others. Although works by these authors clearly attempt to recuperate and include Indigenous voices within their vision of the national community, the extent to which they have been consciously or unconsciously affected by European thought, including nature ideology, is not always clear. Even in works claiming to present “authentically” Indigenous voices, as in the Maya poetry that I address in chapter 1, it remains unclear whether a European view of nature has been adopted. While I do not address this question of a transcultural relation between a Romantic conceptualization of nature and literary-­Indigenous thought at length, it might serve as fertile ground for future works that consider the natural history of Latin American thought. In any case, I believe that the exclusions effectuated by nature ideology can best be addressed through the study of Indigenous histories and cultures for their own sake and on their own terms. As I illustrate in chapter 1, I do not believe it will be especially productive to try to reconcile European nature discourses with “authentically” Indigenous thought. Nature ideology will not be remedied, redeemed, or overcome by seeking to study alternative or excluded conceptualizations of “nature,” in part because understanding such excluded views through

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the lens of “nature” would again subsume them to nature ideology and thus fail to see them in and of themselves. The critique of nature that this work carries out arises from the arc of the historical fragment it traces and the work of historicizing nature in discourse in general. Indeed, to historicize nature is to deny the claim to ahistoricity at the heart of its ideological function. In the first chapter of this work, I present this methodology under the moniker of “natural history.” Michel Foucault’s neo-­Kantian view of ideology rooted in language is an important inspiration for this approach. In Foucault’s work, rather than the mental “categories” that Kant describes, it is language that, comprising the basic condition of thought’s possibility, can determine our thinking a priori, especially when we take for granted as natural and true the concepts to which it gives form. Foucault works against this naturalization of language by demonstrating the historicity of concepts we might otherwise assume to have always existed—­concepts such as madness and sexuality—­and showing the play of power exerted through their deployment.14 In tracing the history of a concept, Foucault tells the story of its naturalization, the growing extent to which its strategically defined reality is taken for granted. In The Order of Things Foucault goes a step further in his critique of ideology by historicizing the epistemological modes by which nature itself has been understood, as the principal object of scientific study and field whose revelation has become synonymous with the creation of scientific truth. Foucault thus critiques scientific truth by historicizing the discourse by which its object, nature, was conceptualized and defined. Foucault described his method first as the “archaeology of knowledge” and later as “conceptual genealogy” but never as “natural history,” which for him was simply one of the epistemological modes or phases in the history of scientific thought that he describes in The Order of Things. Nevertheless, his approach to critique accords with the concept of “natural history” as it was set forth by Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin: a notion—­passed from Kant to Hegel to Marx—­of the extent to which nature and history are not in fact oppositional concepts but rather intertwined and inseparable from each other.15 For Adorno and Benjamin, “natural history” was a basic condition of existence whose recognition was necessary for an accurate view of reality. In more recent years, the writer and academic W. G. Sebald and his critic Eric Santner have taken up the concept—­especially through its discussion by Benjamin—­as a mode of criticism that engages with the intellectual heritage of the literary Romantic tradition of nineteenth-­century Germany.16 This book takes up the term along similar lines, in relation to the intellectual heritage of literary Romanticism and its important theorization of landscape and nature as it extended into the thought of Latin American intellectuals. But it also maintains the more general scientific sense of the term, acknowledging the

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continued importance of scientific discourse in the definition and ideological function of nature and recognizing its relation to literary discourse, from which it had not yet been fully differentiated during the nineteenth century. Furthermore, this book understands natural history as a central thread and point of contention in a tradition of continental philosophy that has culminated in the contemplation of biopower. Through Adorno it is possible to see “natural history” as the ontological condition underlying and determining the more epochally defined Foucaultian “biopolitics.” A scientific or technological administration of populations that increasingly reduces man to bare life reflects directly how “human history, the history of the progressing mastery of nature, continues the unconscious history of nature, of devouring and being devoured.”17 The work of this book draws out and explores the relation between biopolitics and natural history, between epochal regime and the more fundamental, unchanging condition it fulfills. Although Adorno and Foucault diverge in their view of the epochality of this integration of nature and history, the Nazi state is a critical touchstone in both their work and their shared perception of an administrative deployment of scientific technique that, rather than elevating man and improving his condition, debases him. The Nazi state is definitive also for the thinking of another branch of biopolitical thought set out by Hannah Arendt and elaborated by Giorgio Agamben, and it casts a shadow on my argument as well in its conceptualization of “natural history.” In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt argues that a central aim of the Nazi regime was to “return” the world to a state of nature by creating conditions in which nature and history would cease to be differentiated from each other. Arendt explains that the concentration camp was the site in which this was to occur, where a specifically scientific view of nature—­a Darwinian war of all against all—­was instated, not merely as a means toward bringing about a conclusive extermination of genetic undesirables, but rather as an engine and catalyst of human evolution. As such, Arendt describes the camp as a model of the state in which nature and history become one, and it is on this understanding of “natural history” that Agamben bases his own view of biopolitics, as a historical horizon secretly determined by an ongoing impulse to make the state into an artificial enclosure of nature, a regime in which survival becomes the highest good. The jarring tension between a view of natural history as a basic ontological condition, on the one hand—­be it for Marx, Darwin, or Adorno—­and its function as a fantasy that ordered the Nazi state, on the other, encapsulates the central concern of this work: the slippage between truth and fantasy engendered by nature that is also a slippage between good and evil. The third meaning of “natural history” as a methodology of critique is the attempt to navigate and expose this slippage. A sense that the biopolitical reduction of human life to bare life goes hand in hand with a worldview that reduces all things to their basic productive

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functions—­their status as “standing reserve for labor/resource extraction and surplus value”—­defines biopower and the contemporary global political space as a regime of force empowered by scientific and technical knowledge.18 Foucault’s focus on the history of scientific discourse and the deployment of techniques of domination, combined with a sense that the power of scientific knowledge itself lies in its adherence to and alliance with objective truth, creates the impression that the biopolitical regime is predominantly defined by stark facticity and mathematical ratio, raw calculation divorced from delusion and myth. While it is undeniable that biopolitics, in its Foucaultian definition, has a technical character, this book is concerned with another quality, just as definitive, of both biopolitics and its transformations: the fantasy and desire that underlie it. The decentralized, disembodied power, or invisible hand that is at the center of Foucault’s interest and that has led to the present political and social scenario, is neither entirely inhuman nor rational; it is also an expression of the hidden mechanisms of often-­irrational human desire. This desire, too, conscious and unconscious, moves history along its path, and the literary genealogies contained here are meant to trace its evolution and operation, guided always by the fundamental question raised by Auschwitz: Why, in trying to make the best possible society, has man tended to instead create a hell on earth? If the biopolitical state—­a vision of the state as the enclosure of nature exemplified by the camp—­ represents one such hell, it is the interest of my work to understand not just the technical mechanisms by which it is realized but the conditions of possibility for desiring it. It is important to note here that biopolitical “realism”—­the imagination of the biopolitical as a regime of fact and unvarnished force, and the aesthetic sensibility it entails—­can itself be seen as a nature fantasy. Even taken in its most negative sense, there is a risk of experiencing jouissance when contemplating naked force, which derives in part from a feeling of the thinker that, touched by the object he contemplates, he becomes truer or realer. This aesthetic sensibility simply reflects the persistence of a desire for the Real in a secularized world, in which God has been replaced by nature.19 A truly clear-­eyed view of the present global scenario understands that delusion, fantasy, and fiction contribute to the current state of affairs as much as (if not more than) cold, rational calculation does. This book contributes to such an understanding. One notable effect of nature’s ideological function—­its erasure of history in particular—­ is a production of repetitions, returns, and doublings. An early observer of this phenomenon was Leopoldo Zea, who discussed how the fantasy of America as nature reinforced the Latin American Creole’s denial of his Spanish past and caused him to repeat the same history he disavowed. Zea understood a Latin American failure to confront and assimilate the past catalyzed by nature ideology, as well as its effects—­underdevelopment and dependence—­through a progressive, Hegelian view of history.20 Nature Fantasies takes this view of historical

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repetition as stagnation into account and effectively expands and illustrates Zea’s understanding that nature’s main ideological function is the erasure of history. Nevertheless, it seeks alternatives to a strictly progressive historical framework in light of subsequent critique, maintaining an understanding that Latin American states and cultures are not in fact languishing in an earlier stage of universal history and that the ghosts by which they are haunted are not unlike those of any other nation or people. Far from an image of the past, this study understands the Latin American biostate in the opposite sense, as a possible image of the global future. There is no single answer to a question about how to understand the repetitions and returns in Latin American discourse that signified stagnation for Zea. Surely, Zea is correct that at least some of these repetitions are produced by nature’s erasure of history, reflecting the dictum that those who fail to learn from history are destined to repeat it. However, the repetitions and returns also reflect something more. As Frantz Fanon and Albert Memmi have observed, the colonial condition produces schisms in the subjectivity of both colonizer and colonized, giving way to doubled selves.21 What’s more, the structure of history itself, described by Freud through the myth of Oedipus and reiterated notably by Jorge Luis Borges in “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” can be seen as a proliferation of doubles driven by a need to return, repeat, and displace the figures of the past. Each chapter takes as its object an instance of doubling, repetition, or return as a way of better understanding the ideological structures by which it was engendered. Chapter 1 critiques a contemporary academic decolonial movement and its proposal of making a return to nature in order to liberate Latin American thought from European colonial influence. It reads the resonances between calls for a total rupture with the past by influential decolonial thinkers such as Walter Mignolo and Marisol de la Cadena, who have helped define the current state of Latin Americanism as a field, and the meditations carried out in the poem “En el teocalli de Cholula” by José María Heredia in 1825. Through this comparison it shows how the more recent calls for decolonization echo and repeat an original claim of Latin American independence, which itself was in many cases conceptualized as a decolonial return to nature during its initial break from Spain in the nineteenth century. Thus, the chapter argues that the idea of nature, in its reification of a desire for historical erasure, helps produce this futile repetition within Latin American political discourse. Through its reading of Heredia, the chapter proposes an alternative approach to “decolonization,” a project of historicizing nature in Latin American discourse to perceive and understand its ideological effects and thus move beyond the eternal iteration of a call for a break with the past. Chapter 2 continues the work of the previous chapter by examining one example of ideological repetition in Cuba’s literary and political discourse and its concretization into a worldview by José Martí: a series of works about Niagara Falls,

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including “Niágara” (1832) by José María Heredia, “A vista de Niágara” (1864) by Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, “Poema del Niágara” (1880) by Juan A. Pérez Bonalde, and Martí’s prologue to the latter poem written in 1882. In tracing the formation of Martí’s thinking, the chapter engages with the decolonial thinking that would become universally influential within Latin American discourse and act as a key point of reference for today’s decolonial movement. It focuses on a desire in Martí’s work for a rupture with the past that is paradoxically constituted as a return to it. Martí’s effusive praise of Bonalde’s work and reluctance to even name the poets who preceded him in writing about the Falls suggest how a belief in nature becomes an engine for a view of history that favors a displacing supersession of the past by the present: a destructive renewal of history that I conceptualize as “original repetition.” For Martí, it is the nature poem itself that performs this act of supersession. Taking César Aira’s novel La liebre as a point of departure, chapter 3 examines the development of ideological conditions that foment a desire for a return to animal life in the biopolitical state discussed in the following chapters. It focuses on how the Creole gaucho was imagined as a white Indian for the purpose of proclaiming Argentine cultural autonomy—­as one who was white but at the same time natural or autochthonous to the American land. It first details the conditions of possibility for belief in the white Indian in colonial thought and then traces its instantiations in the figure of the gaucho through Sarmiento and Hernández. It continues by considering Leopoldo Lugones’s revision of this fantasy through a post-­Darwinian view of natural history once the impossibility of being simultaneously white and an Indian was fully understood. Chapter 4 reads Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “El Sur” as a key work in an Argentine literary genealogy of the biopolitical state. It engages with a debate carried out by Carlo Galli, Giacomo Marramao, Patrick Dove, and Gareth Williams, among others, about the definition of the contemporary political space commonly understood through the lens of globalization and at times as a movement toward the end of history. Through the figure of Juan Dahlmann’s desire to repeat his grandfather’s death, Borges helps illustrate the interconnection among desires for national identity, a return to nature, and the end of history. The chapter reads “El Sur” to show how this set of desires, installed into the imaginary of the nation-­state by the political Romanticism of the nineteenth century, form both the historical and ideological conditions leading to the weakening of the same nation-­state sovereignty in the present day. Furthermore, it considers the theological-­mythical value taken on by nature after it displaces the concept of God in Enlightenment thinking. The chapter understands the apparent weakening of nation-­state sovereignty not only as a return to nature but as a messianic return of nature: a return of the divinity repressed by a secularization that was part and parcel of the political philosophies defining the modern nation-­state.

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In his major novels Hijo de hombre, Yo el Supremo, El fiscal, and Contravida, Augusto Roa Bastos develops a view of Paraguay as a prison-­garden. Chapter 5 presents Roa Bastos’s view as a model of the contemporary biopolitical state. It situates Roa Bastos’s work in relation to other visions of the state as a garden-­ camp, a politics based on nature defined by scientific discourse that can be traced back to Enlightenment utopianism. The chapter shows how the evolution of scientifically defined nature alters the corresponding view of the state upon which it is based, focusing on a contrast between an early view of the garden-­ state based on Linnean nature and one that is based on Darwinian nature. In dialogue with Hannah Arendt and Daniel Nemser, the chapter shows how the evolution of this model leads to the conceptualization of a world system based on a vision of the state as a site of forced labor and accumulation. Roa Bastos, in attempting to think through the challenge of transcending an all-­encompassing biopolitical world order, began to consider a rebellion against the “life-­nature” that acts as its organizing principle. The chapter reads his proposal of counterlife (contravida)—­a concept that bears strong intertextuality with the thinking of Borges discussed in the previous chapter—­as an imagination of a dialectical negation of biopolitics and a prediction of one possible future for the Latin American state and the world in general. It concludes with a discussion of Roa Bastos’s negative understanding of “utopia” as the beginning and end of the state defined as “no-­place, no-­time.”

PA R T I

Decolonization and Nature

Chapter 1

The Natural History of Latin American Independence

The concept of nature is a potent ideological mechanism that has been instrumental in defining the course of Latin American history. The very idea of the independent Latin American nation-­state and the politics of liberation conditioning its invention depend on nature and the possibility of total historical rupture that it represents. Nature in its modern guise—­an interpretation of wilderness as the lasting trace of a prehistoric or nonhuman origin in the present—­ has been the secret motor behind the repetition of a self-­defeating claim of independence and difference within Latin American discourse.1 In light of the growing influence of ecocriticism in the field and forays by its purveyors into a perpetual debate surrounding the problem of incomplete decolonization, it has never been more important to critique nature. In order to recognize nature’s ideological effect, it is necessary to remember nature’s role in incomplete decolonization, tracing its history in Latin American discourse back to the original rupture with Spain during the early nineteenth century. Here, I revisit José María Heredia’s poem “En el teocalli de Cholula” (1825), which shows that Latin American independence thinking conceives itself as “natural history” or as an interrogation into the nature it sees as its own discursive ground and condition of possibility.2 In spite of claims to the contrary, the contemporary debate about decolonization is a continuation of a conversation that was initiated by independence thinkers in the nineteenth century, when they called for Latin America’s cultural autonomy from Europe and elaborated a vision of America as a site of nature in order to consolidate a radical break with both its Spanish and Indigenous pasts.3 A contemporary decolonial movement manifested in the edited collection Coloniality at Large calls attention to ways in which original attempts to decolonize 17

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America failed or remain incomplete and elaborates itself against Creole Eurocentric tendencies by seeking to recuperate Indigenous and subaltern histories. Despite these good intentions, however, it continues to be informed by a sense not only that it is possible to make a total rupture with Western modernity but that such rupture would be desirable.4 Furthermore, like earlier instances of decolonial thought, it continues to look to nature as a potentially redemptive political and cultural resource, a means of making this total break with the West. In these ways, decolonial thought buys into an impossible fantasy of independence whose true function is to conceal ongoing ties to Western modernity, and thus it falls into the very trap that it seeks to avoid, writing another chapter in the futile pattern of disavowal that Octavio Paz calls Latin America’s “tradición de la ruptura” [tradition of rupture].5 A Latin American desire for decolonization—­past and present—­falls short not in its wish for political, social, or economic emancipation but rather in the belief that this could occur as an emancipation from history itself, as a reversal or erasure of a colonization that cannot in fact be undone. This chapter does not make a claim about whether decolonization should continue to be an object of intellectual efforts or what such efforts should look like. It only claims that any understanding of decolonization as a radical break with or total erasure of historical fact—­be it Amerindian or European—­is a self-­defeating fantasy that will not attain the plenitude of the emancipation it desires. Indeed, as I detail in the second half of this book, previous efforts to decolonize produced conditions that have given rise to novel modalities of exploitation and enslavement in the biopolitical state. In The Latin American Mind (1949) Leopoldo Zea critiques a Creole imagination of America as “a virgin land, a new country” and describes the closely linked belief that the “man who inhabited it lived in a complete state of nature, that is, without history.”6 There is little question that this fantasy is linked to the political claim of independence from Spain, the Creole’s dream that political autonomy would initiate a new historical line completely divorced from his cultural and genealogical past, which he saw as decadent and corrupt.7 José Martí’s thinking toward Cuban independence (achieved in 1898) and José Enrique Rodó’s Ariel (1900) are perhaps the most influential and recognizable exemplars of this form of thought. The political writing of Martí in particular, which inextricably binds Latin independence to nature, continues to act as the foundation of a Latin Americanism oriented by resistance.8 His influence can be felt in the many ideas of Latin American difference that have been elaborated ever since; Leopoldo Lugones’s gauchesque nationalism, Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s “hombre nuevo,” and Alejo Carpentier’s utopian dream in Los pasos perdidos—­perhaps even, perversely, Euclides da Cunha’s Backlands—­seem to echo the Cuban’s vision of a resistant Latin American identity rooted in nature. But Martí’s writing in support of independence didn’t originate this mode of thought but rather

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synthesized and responded to the thinking of Creole intellectuals before him—­ Simón Bolivar most explicitly, but also Andrés Bello, José Victorino Lastarria, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Esteban Echeverría, and José María Heredia—­ who began to consider the question of cultural autonomy in dialogue with European Romanticism around the time that the first wave of independence was consolidated in 1824.9 Early Latin American independence thinking was unsystematic and heterogeneous, and so one must be wary of broadly generalizing its principles. Nevertheless, despite differences among its works, nature consistently acts in a similar way, as a tabula rasa or a space of historical oblivion that supports a view of Creole culture-­civilization as something that is entirely original and thus divorced from the tyranny of the past. This can be observed simply by comparing the natures described by two of its most important figures, Bello and Sarmiento. In “La agricultura de la zona tórrida” (1826) Bello portrays the land as a space of virtue and renewal against cities that perpetuate the corruption and tyranny of the colony. Facundo (1845) describes just the opposite; for Sarmiento, the desert of the pampas is a barbaric void that will be tamed by the civilization maintained in cities such as Buenos Aires.10 While the wilderness is, on the one hand, a space of virtue and, on the other, one of barbarism, in both cases it acts as a means by which to initiate a new civilization and provides the autonomy required to do so. Seeing America as a state of nature confirmed the Creoles’ hope that after independence they were starting over—­that even prior to any struggle for political autonomy, living out in the wilderness, a break with the past had already been attained. But rather than making this break with the past, a willful erasure of both Indigenous and European histories in the push for cultural autonomy created a form of ignorance that actually helped perpetuate the colonial structures the Creoles sought to leave behind. Even as they took inspiration from the French Revolution, imagining themselves as enlightened revolutionaries, their political Romanticism retained the imperial reason that had defined the Hispanic colonial project up to that point.11 It was largely the belief in nature as a tabula rasa that blinded Creoles to their ongoing cultural and economic dependencies and to the fact that rather than emerging from the tyranny of empire, they had really “sought only to take the place left by the conquistador.”12 As a catalyst of a Creole fantasy of independence, the concept of nature was an essential condition of incomplete decolonization. The question of decolonization to which Latin American discourse has returned continues to reflect the ideology defining the original, paradoxical call for Latin America’s cultural independence from Spain. For scholars following the decolonial project presented in the influential collection of essays Coloniality at Large (2008), the enterprise of fulfilling a still-­incomplete decolonization continues to represent the most important horizon for intellectual labor in the field. In his contribution to the collection, Aníbal Quijano proclaims, “It is time

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to learn to free ourselves from the Eurocentric mirror where our image is always, necessarily, distorted. It is time, finally to cease being what we are not.”13 Walter Mignolo elaborates, arguing that due to the Eurocentrism of philosophical epistemology, “it is no longer possible, or at least it is not unproblematic, to ‘think’ from the canon of Western philosophy, even when part of the canon is critical of modernity.”14 This statement sums up a position that understands the influence of Western thought in studies of Latin American literature and culture as a manifestation of colonialism, the influence of a foreign academic practice whose use of certain texts (the canon of Western philosophy) is hegemonic and should therefore be resisted. The disavowal of colonial power and European genealogy initiated over two hundred years ago continues to define Latin America’s academic and cultural fields, and yet, in spite of this protracted effort, decolonization remains incomplete. Since the mid–­twentieth century, thinkers such as Leopoldo Zea, Jorge Luis Borges, Octavio Paz, and Augusto Roa Bastos have shown the various ways in which the claim of making a break with a colonial past itself actually contributes to the failure of decolonization. Scholars such as Santiago Castro-­Gómez, Carlos Alonso, Alberto Moreiras, and Abraham Acosta have reiterated and reaffirmed these observations, illustrating how the claim of historical rupture in modernity only hides historical continuity and thereby helps perpetuate it.15 As Borges illustrates so succinctly in “La muralla y los libros” (1950), the emperor who burns the archive so that history will begin with him does not realize how unoriginal it makes him; he cannot know how many others have done the same before him precisely because, rather than reading the books that might teach him that history, he destroys them.16 Especially in recent years, insofar as the call for decolonization has articulated itself as a call for a rupture with the past and a disavowal of the Western archive, it has failed to acknowledge these observations and accordingly repeats the very gestures that failed to decolonize thought in the past. Insofar as the decolonial movement today attempts to exit Western modernity, “the past is being continued as the destruction of the past.”17 This perpetuation of independence discourse in the present is no coincidence but rather a precise expression of the anti-­historical ideology of nature by which it was originally constituted. Furthermore, beyond abstractly informing a belief in the possibility of rupture, today, the concept of nature continues actively to represent the potential of Latin America’s decolonial redemption. One need look no further than Marisol de la Cadena’s treatment of a recent breakthrough in Ecuadorian politics, in which the national constitution was rewritten so as to include “Pachamama-­Nature” as one of its central organizing concepts. In “Indigenous Cosmopolitics in the Andes” (2010) she describes this event as a moment of rupture that exemplifies the increasing importance of nonhuman or natural actors (specifically, mountain divinities) in Andean politics. She argues that it represents a breakdown in the

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“traditional” opposition between nature and culture and thus a novel and productive development of the political in the region. She sums up her sense that something new is happening in Andean politics by writing, “Nature . . . is not an ‘apolitical’ entity as we have learned to think.”18 While the growing agency of Indigenous people in Andean nation-­state politics is certainly a novel development since the colonization of America, nature’s function as an ostensible basis of a redemptive political rupture and cultural renewal is not. It is deeply symptomatic that nature—­perhaps the most important concept developed for the legitimization of the original transition to independence in Latin America, and one that has been discussed constantly over the last two hundred years—­would be characterized today as an exciting new conceptual basis for political liberation in the region. It is symptomatic precisely because what nature, as a form of ideology, reinforces is the idea that it has no history and that as an embodiment of real ahistoricity in the present, it can constitute a new beginning. Without knowledge of the discursive history of nature in America, it will not be possible to be critical of the inclusion of “nature” in the formulation Pachamama-­Nature or recognize its complexities and paradoxes—­for example, the ways in which it continues to reproduce the language of nineteenth-­century political Romanticism formulated precisely in order to repress Indigenous history, delegitimize Indigenous culture, and question the human status of Indigenous peoples. While Cadena’s article engages and presents a topic of the utmost interest, its critical force is greatly hindered by its claim of the redemptive potential of nonhuman nature or, at the very least, its decision not to historicize this claim. Far from supporting a radical politics, one of its ostensible aims, the article presents ideas that are deeply entrenched in traditional Latin Americanism. What’s more, it does not seem to be aware that this is the case. By presenting these ideas as new, Cadena undermines her own intention, helping perpetuate at least one status quo in Latin American politics. A similar issue arises in Amy Olen’s “Decolonial Translation in Daniel Caño’s Stxaj no’ anima / Oración salvaje” (2015), which argues that the Guatemalan poet’s bilingual poemario counters the “colonization of the imaginary of dominated peoples.”19 Olen reads Caño’s work as the expression of a special Maya connection to nature and explains that this connection represents a spiritual difference from the West, which as such forms the basis of a Maya resistance to imperial, Catholic epistemology.20 While much of the essay is dedicated to a discussion of translation, Olen notably does not discuss Caño’s decision to use the word naturaleza in the Spanish versions of his poems when referencing the concept that ostensibly organizes a Maya critique of Catholicism. Consequently, the reader is left with a number of questions. What is the specific word in the Maya-­Q’anjob’al being translated as “nature” here? What is the specific meaning of this word? How is it different from the Western concept? Without addressing

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these issues, we are left in the dark about the conceptual basis of Maya resistance and, by extension, the poems’ real decolonial force. More problematic still, failing to account for a difference between concepts (one that is at least implied in the formulation Pachamama-­Nature, for example) raises doubts about whether Caño even recognizes a difference and, consequently, whether his poems manage to resist Western colonization at all. For many readers, who will only understand the Spanish versions of the poems, Caño’s work will effectively displace a Maya word with an engrained, Western ideology of nature: the same ideology that was developed and used repeatedly to reinforce the belief that Indigenous people have neither history nor culture. If Caño bases his understanding of the Maya concept on a colloquial Western definition of nature, without a sense of its discursive history, the poems actually do the opposite of what Olen claims, contributing to a conceptual westernization of the Maya language and its cultural imaginary. His poetry, despite its aim of appropriating and ironically subverting a colonial discourse—­made clear by the title’s reference to a Western claim of “civilization” against Indigenous “savagery” or “barbarism” (Oración salvaje)—­would in the end differ little from those nineteenth-­century texts that relegated Indigenous people to anonymous ahistoricity. Rather than being represented as a people with a specific, historically inflected worldview that is reflected in its language, the Maya become a people who listen to waterfalls and experience spirituality by “traversing the mountains.”21 Despite good intentions, Caño’s book would, at best, present an idealized and Romantic oversimplification of Maya culture that effectively reinscribes the erasure it was supposed to undo. Iterations of the redemptive promise of nature are emblematic not only of scholarship that resists Western thought in Latin American thinking but also of “an emerging philosophical movement committed to a unique form of realism and nonanthropocentric thinking” known as “object-­oriented ontology.”22 While this line of scholarship is greatly indebted to Bruno Latour, who sought to redefine the relation between science and political philosophy by critiquing nature in The Politics of Nature (2004), articles by Cadena and Olen show how an interest in the political utility of reconsidering the “inhuman” can lead to the abandonment of such critiques. Like the decolonial movement that seeks to make a rupture with Western Eurocentrism, work that seeks to break with Western anthropocentrism risks betraying its own political intentions by fetishizing the realm of the inhuman as a space of innocence and truth. Articles by Cadena and Olen also reflect an emerging ecocritical discourse in its intersection with decolonial and anti-­humanist discourses. At the confluence of ecocritical and decolonial discourses, as reflected by these articles, one finds a hope that Indigenous culture might reveal means of living in greater harmony with the environment today. While this hope itself appears to be affected by a Romantic view of Indigenous people, a historicized study of Indigenous culture might still speak to it. However, such work must actively understand its historical

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relation to the Romanticism that constitutes prior attempts to achieve similar goals, as well as the extent to which this same Romanticism produced problematic views of indigeneity. Such work—­see, for example, Tony Andersson’s reconsideration of slash-­and-­burn agriculture in Guatemala or the literature of Sherman Alexie, which represents the vicissitudes of life on the reservation—­will probably render “unsatisfying” conclusions that do not accord with a Romantic view of Indigenous people living in harmony within an inhuman and pure nature.23 It will instead show struggles with the environment—­attempts to engineer it and bend it to their own purposes—­or the hopelessness, brutality, and stagnation of life on “protected” land.24 Regarding the decolonial position in particular, a return to nature is especially ironic because this very gesture is one of the clearest points of continuity between European and Latin American traditions. The ancient Greek thinker Heraclitus, in observing that “nature loves to hide,” set forth a line of inquiry that would develop as an important question to which the occidental philosophical tradition would return over and over again during its long history of debate; nature, with its strong connection to a concept of being, is the self-­concealing enigma that philosophy has repeatedly sought to illuminate. The Romanticism that so strongly influenced early Latin American thinking and its fascination with nature developed directly out of this line of thought. Historically, Latin Americanism at its very foundation is inextricably bound up with the philosophical project that Walter Mignolo has declared to be irrelevant today. But more than an incidental contingency or stodgy origin myth, this historical connection has proven its relevance: over the years, Latin Americanism has affirmed and renewed its connection to philosophy again and again precisely through its consideration of nature (and a question of ontological difference). Against the understandable desire for rupture—­a wish to awaken from the nightmare of history—­the decolonial project today affirms this connection to the colonial, European past in exactly the same way. Rather than disavowing this tradition, we might instead critically reexamine it, reevaluating the history of Latin Americanism with this understanding that its obsession with nature causes it to be both a branch of the philosophical tradition and an engine of ideology.25 This means recognizing both the good and the bad that have come out of the debate about nature and the claim of historical rupture that it supports. Looking back at the earliest considerations of the problem of Latin American cultural autonomy is essential for scholars today who wish to formulate models of political and scholarly intervention in an informed way. By seeing that the call for a total rupture with the West and a belief in the redemptive potential of Latin American nature are the most venerable gestures of a failed decolonization, it becomes possible to begin thinking productively about how that program went awry and how to avoid making the same mistakes again. Furthermore, historicizing nature—­the very concept of what is not

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historical—­creates the possibility of glimpsing the mechanisms of ideological self-­concealment that continue surreptitiously to affect our thinking. The work of José María Heredia is an appropriate place to begin a recollection of nature’s foundational role in Latin Americanism. Before independence had even been consolidated, his work set a precedent in Latin Americanist theory by articulating a hope for a cultural rupture with Spanish and Indigenous histories through a concept of nature, acting as the prototype for the revolutionary nature thinking that would later be elaborated by Martí.26

Independence, Nature, and the Decolonial Thinking of José María Heredia José María Heredia—­a Cuban exile widely credited as the first postindependence literary thinker and father of Latin American Romanticism—­archives two major ideological tensions defining the outset of independence that would continue to preoccupy Latin American thinking for years to come. Explicitly, in his poem “En el teocalli de Cholula” (1825), he thinks through the tension between two historiographic paradigms for defining Latin America and its culture after independence: Indigenous history/culture and nature. Incidentally, in so doing, Heredia begins to think through certain inconsistencies within Romantic discourse regarding the definition of nature itself, archiving a dissonance between proto-­positivistic scientific thinking and literary thinking that would continue to evolve in the coming years. This dissonance between contrasting literary and scientific views of nature in his work reflects the extent to which Heredia found himself pushing the limits of what nature itself meant at the time and can be taken as a micronarrative of the discursive process by which nature would increasingly refer not to a hypothetical utopia but rather to specific territorial regions. Even before the first wave of Latin American independence, Creole intellectuals had already begun to theorize their cultural autonomy from Spain. In Spanish Imperialism and the Political Imagination (1990) Anthony Pagden describes a process of recognizing a new Creole culture distinct from peninsular culture during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Mexico and Peru. Through his discussion of Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, Francisco Javier Clavijero, and Juan Pablo Viscardo, Pagden shows how cultural autonomy began to be elaborated through the appropriation of the culture and history of conquered Aztec and Inca civilizations. But if in the large Indigenous metropolitan centers that Pagden discusses Creole patriotism “was founded on an ambition to appropriate the past of the ancient Indian empires,” after independence, in just as many Latin American nation-­states, it was articulated through an active blindness to Indigenous presence on the land and an erasure of the Indigenous past.27 Such formulations of Creole autonomy linked new Latin American cultures to a definition of the American land as a space of timeless nature.

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The Creole quasi-­indigenismo that Pagden describes was certainly never an attempt to reinstate Indigenous sovereignty in America, and he portrays it ultimately acting as a kind of cultural vampirism by which Creole culture would adopt, displace, and supersede Indigenous culture. Indeed, Pagden emphasizes that because Creoles “wished to avoid any suggestion of a racial contact with the Indian and half-­caste (mestizo) masses, the project was poised forever on the edge of absurdity.”28 Still, even acknowledging their disingenuousness, these quasi-­indigenista projects of Creole patriotism were of a different ilk than the notion of Creole autonomy developed in Río de la Plata, Colombia, Venezuela, and Cuba that sought to legitimate a historical break with both Spanish and Indigenous cultures by casting the land as an empty, unpeopled space of ahistorical nature. With the poem “En el teocalli de Cholula,” Heredia contemplates the intersections and tensions between quasi-­indigenista and naturalist currents in a debate about Creole cultural autonomy. He began work on the poem in 1820, at the cusp of Mexican and South American independences (which were, respectively, consolidated in 1821 and 1824), in Mexico, shortly before his political exile from Cuba. A fervent republican, Heredia was consumed with a desire that his own Cuban patria should soon follow a similar path toward independence. At this historiographic crossroads, during a brief period of indeterminacy between Hispanic Empire and Latin American national republic, his poem speculates about how the culture of America would be defined in the coming years of an independence not yet attained. From atop an Aztec pyramid (as the title of the poem announces), enfolded in the solitude and beauty of the land, he poetically reads an opposition between the eponymous artifact of Indigenous civilization and a nearby volcano in their competition to dominate the scenery, as the tension between cultural paradigms vying to define the land—­Indigenous history (pyramid) and natural history (volcano). In this poem, Heredia begins to define the American land itself as a state of nature. In so doing he begins to grapple with tensions and inconsistencies inherent to the concept of nature itself, in particular those resulting from an ascription of nature to the land. At a certain point Heredia finds himself faced with the disconcerting incompatibility between a poetic vision of the land as an ahistorical realm and a scientific view that sees it as being subject to a natural history. As such, “En el teocalli de Cholula” archives a schism within Romantic ideology: a tension between a literary view of nature as a divine eternity residing in the land and a materialist, proto-­positivistic, or scientific concept of nature as something that subjects the land to history and is thereby separate from it. In accordance with scholarship maintaining the influence of the scientific travel narrative on Latin American letters, in Imperial Eyes (1992) Mary Louise Pratt discusses the ways in which Heredia adopts and reflects Alexander von Humboldt’s scientific view of nature in the poem.29 One can see, however,

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that more than simply reiterating Humboldt’s view, Heredia contrasts his geological natural history with a view of the valley as a site of innocence, stasis, and eternity corresponding to a desire to recover the integrity banished by secular modernity—­“nature” according to thinkers such as Friedrich Schiller and William Wordsworth. With modernity’s division of intellectual labor, this heterogeneity within Romantic thinking (Humboldt maintained close ties with the Jena Romantics) would transform into the rift between positivism and Romanticism during the second half of the nineteenth century, becoming a debate between developmentalist and culturalist (or Arielist) currents within Latin American thought. Thus, “En el teocalli de Cholula” is a remarkable urtext, a glimpse of the future of Latin Americanism from the past in a few condensed images. Still more importantly, the extent to which the nature of America is artificial—­a discursive effect of the poem itself—­becomes visible in the heterogeneity of the concept of nature that the poet attempts to utilize. This betrayal of its own ideological function is, in my opinion, the poem’s main heuristic value.

Between the Pyramid and the Volcano The first line of “En el teocalli de Cholula” invokes the beauty of “la tierra que habitaban / Los aztecas valientes” [the land they inhabited / the valiant Aztecs], immediately introducing the relation between land/nature and Indigenous culture that the poem explores at length.30 After thus relegating the Nahuatl people to the past (“habitaban” [inhabited]), Heredia goes on to describe the land not merely as a wilderness or bucolic paradise but as nature: seeing the afternoon light play on the peaks of the volcanoes Iztaccíhuatl and Popocatépetl, he claims that the Aztec “vio a Naturaleza conmovida / Con su dulce calor hervir en vida” [saw Nature impassioned / with its gentle heat boil alive].31 While today nonurban or undeveloped land and nature colloquially refer to the same thing, at the time in which Heredia wrote, this identity was still in the process of being established. Thus, this direct reference to the land as nature is noteworthy, representing an important moment in the discursive process by which nature was sutured to the land. Heredia articulates the most basic ideological-­political function of casting the American territory as a timeless state of nature in the second stanza of the poem, in which he characterizes the land as a force of oblivion that directly opposes the recollection of human history, past and present. He calls the reader’s attention to a disparity between a vision of the peaceful countryside and the violent historical events that had taken place there, writing, ¡Qué silencio! ¡Qué paz! ¡Oh! ¿quién diría que en estos bellos campos reina alzada

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la bárbara opresión, y que esta tierra brota mieses tan ricas, abonada con sangre de hombres, en que fue inundada por la superstición y por la guerra? [What silence! What peace! Oh, who would say that in these beautiful fields there reigns aloft a barbarous oppression and that this land sprouts such rich grain fortified by the blood of men, with which it was inundated through superstition and war?]32

The land is the nature named in the first stanza insofar as it maintains silence. The fields of grain reflect no visible trace of the violent events that transpired upon their extension. The countryside represents a radical ahistoricity, “nature” defined as the opposite of culture. In this stanza Heredia implies that the histories belied and occluded by the silence of the land are the Aztec rituals of human sacrifice (“superstición” [superstition]), the massacre carried out at Cholula by the Spanish conquistadors (“guerra” [war]), and the ongoing Spanish rule over the land (reigning “bárbara opresión” [barbarous oppression]). It is significant that specifically Indigenous and Spanish histories seem to spontaneously vanish from the face of the earth. Heredia’s poem shows that the originary function of the territorialization of nature for Creoles in America is to naturalize a claim of rupture with the past, to make the Spanish and Indigenous cultures disappear from view. Turning America into nature—­making it seem that deep down, it is an ahistorical space—­ seems to invalidate both Spanish and Indigenous claims to the land. As nature, America becomes a tabula rasa upon which the Creole can build an entirely new civilization. What’s more, it informs the radical Creole claim that he ceases to be culturally Spanish after independence; the land suffuses him with a culture of nature and erases his past, alchemically transforming him into an independent national subject. In perceiving a timeless eternity in the land—­emphasized in a repeated observation of the eternal snows of the Anáhuac volcanoes (“nieve eternal,” “yelo eterno,” etc.)—­and singing its praises in a poem, Heredia reflects the view of nature along lines similar to those being developed by European literary thinkers at the time.33 Nature at this point in the poem is timeless and innocent: it stands above human violence and struggle. It is fertile, abundant, and welcoming and suggests the possibility of rebirth and renewal as a means by which to escape the decadence of the present. When night falls on the temple, a sense of nature’s dominion over the land intensifies but then also changes and begins to move away from the literary Romantic vision of a prehistoric or divine origin. The moon sets, and the shadow

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of the volcano extends across the valley like the hand of a rudimentary clock, recalling an older kind of time and invoking disquiet in the poet and reader alike. While earlier the land had been serene and welcoming, at night the shadow of the volcano swells, and the silence, peace, and eternity of Anáhuac are recast as a slow and inscrutable natural violence. Heredia describes its ravages: Pueblos y reyes viste hervir a tus pies, que combatían cual hora combatimos y llamaban eternas sus ciudades, y creían fatigar a la tierra con su gloria. Fueron: de ellos no resta ni memoria. [Peoples and kings you saw boil at your feet, who battled just as we now battle and called eternal their cities and believed that they exhausted the earth with their glory. Gone: of them there remains not even a memory.]34

From the Aztec temple—­itself a fossilized memory of the Indigenous past—­ Heredia imagines all the proud civilizations that were wiped off the face of the earth, peoples of which there remains no memory. The derelict pyramid acts as the fleeting recollection of one civilization, but Heredia asks how many others preceded it. Doubtless, in “En el teocalli de Cholula” Heredia proclaims the dominion of the timeless over the historical. But while at the beginning of the poem nature and culture are differentiated strictly along these lines, the land representing the inscrutable face of nature and the pyramid representing the transience of man’s power on earth, in the dark this distinction becomes unclear. Addressing the volcano, he writes, ¿Y tú, eterno serás? Tal vez un día de tus profundas bases desquiciado caerás; abrumará tu gran ruina al yermo Anáhuac; alzaránse en ella nuevas generaciones, y orgullosas que fuiste negarán. [And you, will you be eternal? Perhaps one day unhinged at your very roots you will fall; your great ruin will weigh on deserted Anáhuac, on which will arise

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new generations, and arrogantly they will deny you ever existed.]35

Here, even the volcano becomes subject to the annihilating march of time and thus is not so different from the pyramid to which it had previously been contrasted. In the dark, the pyramid and volcano reflect and resemble each other within the grander scheme of a natural history under whose influence even the landscape might one day fall into ruin. In his imagination of the shifting face of the earth, Heredia reflects a scientific view of “natural history,” the extent to which the visible land isn’t eternal after all but rather is mutable and fluid. This older view goes against the literary Romantic sense that the land is nature and unsettles the wistful feelings of melancholy and nostalgia for a sturdier past by which it is informed. If Heredia had ended his poem at this point, one would be able to read it as a purposeful critique of the poetic transformation of nature into land representing a fixed and ancient presence in the world, by which the land itself came to act as a kind of stand-­in for God. But rather than paying heed to the disquieting inconsistencies he observes, Heredia soon suspends his digression into the wilderness of natural violence and returns to the beaten path of describing Indigenous “barbarism.” By the final lines of the poem, one senses that the purpose of the nighttime section is to imagine “nature” as a benevolent destroyer: the force that grinds down mountains and the monuments of Indigenous culture alike is that which also predetermines the downfall of Spanish rule in America. The poet reads an affirmation of his revolutionary hopes both in the beauty of the land and in the ruinous state of the pyramid, and he concludes that the latter should serve future generations as a sobering message about the folly of human arrogance and tyranny. Thus, at the end of the poem, nature is upheld as the primary force of Creole political redemption in America, as an assurance of the impending disappearance of Indigenous and Spanish cultures from the land. Rather than reflecting on a possible critique of nature, Heredia purposely ascribes it to the American space and to the land as the basis for a new culture after independence that is free of both Indigenous and Spanish history. Tacitly, insofar as Heredia writes his poem at the outset of an independent Creole national society, he offers it as an example of the new American culture of nature that will serve as its foundation. The exalting descriptions of a uniquely American landscape constitute a large part of the originality and interest of the work. It is the nature poem that will help contribute to a sense of the Creole’s cultural independence. And as such, in the spirit of the political Romanticism of his day, it is the poet who helps invent the new Latin American state, who lays the ground for its construction. And yet, even as it condemns Indigenous barbarism, Heredia’s poem is still like the pyramid it describes insofar as that older cultural artifact also references

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the volcanic forms of the surrounding landscape. In light of this correlation, it is as if the poet fashions himself (and the Creoles with him) as the new Indigenous man of America, not by appropriating the Nahuatl culture of the region, but rather by drafting his own culture of nature—­the Romantic landscape poem—­and constructing it on top of the pyramid. Heredia’s poem is a temple built on the ruin of that which preceded it, a paradigmatic act of supersession. This logic of displacement and supersession is consistent with the tension described by Pagden when discussing previous attempts to define Creole patriotism, the need to justify a right to rule over competing Spanish and Indigenous claims. The method used here—­a poem, a medium favored by European Romantics of the day—­reflects the subtle double standard at the heart of the Creole pretension to political and cultural sovereignty. They would assert the superiority of their European education and refinement as a basis to rule over the uneducated masses and Indigenous peoples while at the same time proclaiming a total rupture with their Spanish/European genealogy. Insofar as a Romantic concept of territorial nature helped support this claim, it acted as the ideological justification for a false decolonization by which Creoles, rather than creating inclusive egalitarian republics, simply took the place of the Spanish as rulers of the land. To its credit, even as Heredia’s poem clearly seeks to articulate the Creole national claim of difference and pioneers the primary means of doing so, it also ingenuously betrays doubts about the effectiveness of its own technique. While the landscape serves as the basis for the autonomy and originality of his work, helping it manifest its difference from poems describing European landscapes, when the poet imagines the volcano itself falling into ruin, he finds that the timelessness—­that is, nature—­supposed to be a property of the land does not truly belong to it. Even as the poem invokes American nature to support a Creole claim of rupture with the past, it implies that the land itself cannot serve as the basis for it. At the same time as Heredia lays the cultural foundation of the Creole American nation-­state, he seems also to admit that the ground on which he sets it is not as solid as it looks.

Chapter 2

Renewing Niagara Falls and Burning the Archive in the Cuban Poetic Tradition

Through the outsized influence of his anti-­imperial and prototypical decolonial thought, José Martí ensured that a belief in the redemptive function of nature would remain an integral element of the Latin Americanism (or nuestra-­ americanismo) he helped invent and that nature would remain an important conceptual tool for renewal and resistance in Latin American thought through the present day.1 A critical document for understanding Martí’s nature thinking—­ which informed his more influential works such as “Nuestra América” and Versos Sencillos—­is his prologue to the Venezuelan poet Juan A. Pérez Bonalde’s “Poema del Niágara” (1882). This work is intriguing not only in its illumination of Martí’s legacy and influence but also in its demonstration of the continuity of his thought with that which preceded him, in particular that of José María Heredia. Martí’s prologue to “Poema del Niágara” establishes a complex relationship to Heredia’s nature thinking as he articulated it in his poem “Niágara” (1832) and exemplifies a trope of repetition and return to nature that would become a Latin American tradition. Specifically, it shows how nature’s promise as a site of renewal, in its transcendence and erasure of history, develops into a kind of ethics defined by a paradoxical desire to return to the past and at the same time to destroy it. This logic of supersession, or “original repetition,” becomes visible through the relationship Martí establishes with Heredia via Bonalde and, more covertly, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, another Cuban poet who wrote about Niagara Falls. The dialogue and intertextuality among four works about Niagara Falls by Caribbean poets, as well as the poetic repetition of the 31

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Falls itself, offer a rare glimpse into the operation of nature ideology, which can be taken as a guiding image of modernity. At the beginning of Divergent Modernities (2001) Julio Ramos introduces José Martí’s prologue to Juan A. Pérez Bonalde’s “Poema del Niágara” as a crucial work that “constitutes one of the first Latin American reflections on the problematic relation between literature and power” after the first wave of national independences in the nineteenth century.2 Furthermore, Ramos calls attention to the fact that the “crisis” Martí addresses—­an “exhaustion of traditional modes of literary representation”—­is “concomitant with what Max Weber termed the disenchantment of the world in the process of rationalization and secularization.”3 For Ramos, the prologue is not only an expression of a crisis within Latin America but also symptomatic of a larger crisis of modernity resulting from processes of secularization and technological advancement, as described by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment.4 Ramos uses the expression “exile from the polis” to describe Martí’s characterization of modernity, making a symbol out of the Cuban writer’s very real experience of exile in the United States. What Ramos goes on to describe casts this exile from the polis—­a trope defined by the relation between the center and the periphery, city and wilderness—­as an unsettled positioning between the past and the present. He shows how on the one hand, Martí feels the need to break with the burden of a tradition that can be understood also as a kind of law, the “paternal institution.”5 But on the other, Martí seeks to reaffirm this law and reclaim its legitimacy: “Against the ‘surgeon’s scalpel,’ an emblem for the official positivism of the epoch, Martí hearkens to the Romantic impulses of a previous age, proposing the Romantic priority of ‘a knowledge bequeathed to me by the gaze of children.’”6 By highlighting the difficulty of navigating a desire to break with the law of the father and a desire to reinscribe it, Ramos shows that Martí’s “exile from the polis” is also an exile from progressive history, a feeling of being “out of joint” in time.7 Following lines that have been set out by Jaime Rodríguez Matos, who considers the problem of time in his book Writing of the Formless: José Lezama Lima and the End of Time (2017), I sense that a “clash between the rhetoric of the Eternal Return and that of the tabula rasa of the New” is not only “a central matrix from which to make sense of the cultural politics of the Revolution,” as Rodríguez Matos argues, but also the tension that defines Martí’s diagnosis of his era.8 The problematic of time and history as a tension between eternal return and the radical break that is proclaimed by the New is intimately bound up with a feeling of exile from the city that brings him to refer to himself as “nature’s son.”9 Martí’s work helps clarify how the problem of history in modernity is part and parcel with the ascendency of a concept of nature introduced by the Romanticism of the late eighteenth century. Furthermore, he brings into clear view the structural heart of nature ideology as it defines

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modernity as a desire to make an original repetition of the past that supersedes and erases it. A question of history and its relation to nature becomes visible in the prologue to “Poema del Niágara” if one takes a step back to pay closer attention to the remarkable genealogy of Bonalde’s poem, which has been largely overlooked by scholars (including Martí, who only alludes to it indirectly in his prologue). “Poema del Niágara,” first published in 1880, is actually the third in a series of poems about Niagara Falls written by Caribbean authors. In 1832, during his exile in the United States, José María Heredia wrote the poem “Niágara,” describing the famous waterfall as an expression of America’s natural prowess and revolutionary potential and as the fount of its political independence. Then, in 1864, the Cuban poet Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda wrote “A vista de Niágara,” responding to Heredia’s poem by describing not only the Falls but also a newly constructed bridge nearby—­finding more inspiration in “industrial progress” than nature and thus archiving a shift in value attending the epochal passage from Romanticism to positivism. The poem by the Venezuelan writer strikes a strange relation to the two poems that precede it, repeating Avellaneda’s difference with Heredia but mentioning only the latter, more foundational writer. Investigating the “natural history” of the prologue—­the complex relationship among the works that act as its condition of possibility and the understanding of nature that each expresses—­shows Martí’s position to be somewhat more troubling than Ramos’s treatment does. More than merely harkening to the Romantic genre of the nature poem, Martí intricately expresses the nature ideology that it reinforces and by which it was historically constituted. While stylistically one can see Martí’s break with independence thinkers in the way Ramos describes, we also see in his work a recasting or reiteration of the vision of America as a state of nature set forth by the first wave of independence thinkers, which served as the main conceptual predicate of Latin American political and cultural autonomy.10 Martí’s endorsement of Bonalde’s poem mirrors the discursive and ideological function of nature insofar as it celebrates the Venezuelan author as someone who simultaneously fuses with the past and destroys it. More than accurately portraying and introducing Bonalde’s actual position, Martí’s prologue must be read as an expression of his own paradoxical experience of being “out of joint” in time. He expresses this most clearly in an apparent contradiction between his act of calling for a renewal of the nature poem (which his endorsement performs), and his call for the destruction of old poetry in a bonfire toward the end of the prologue. It is precisely this kind of relation to history that the concept of nature reinforces when it is taken as an imagination of a primordial space that stands outside the normal flow of time and yet is accessible within the present: a destruction of the past as a means of renewal (in the case of Latin America, its reinvention as a collection of nation-­states). As such, the concept of nature holds

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the key to understanding the experience of time being out of joint—­confusion about the relation among past, present, and future—­in Martí’s work that Ramos considers. Through its lens, the prologue allows the reader to perceive the relation between an experience of being an exile from progressive history and the nature ideology that was developed during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The beginning of Martí’s prologue flatly denies any notion that Bonalde’s decision to write another Latin American poem about Niagara Falls is unoriginal. Its opening line acknowledges this potential criticism to the reader who knows about the other Niagara Falls poems but without fully illustrating or explaining it to a less knowledgeable one. Martí writes, “¡Éste que traigo de la mano no es zurcidor de rimas, ni repetidor de viejos maestros—­que lo son porque a nadie repitieron  .  .  .  : es Juan Antonio Pérez Bonalde, que ha escrito el ‘Poema del Niágara.’” [This one I bring by the hand is no mender of old rhymes or repeater of old masters—­who are masters because they never repeated anyone . . . : it is Juan Antonio Pérez Bonalde, who has written “Poema del Niágara.”]11 Though he does not mention him by name, the old master to which he refers here is Heredia, Cuban author of the first Niagara poem of 1832. A little further on he continues to consider Bonalde’s relation to the unnamed master—­whom he now refers to as a “giant”—­and presses the question of originality, writing, Y si me preguntas más de él, curioso pasajero, te diré que se midió con un gigante y no salió herido, sino con la lira bien puesta sobre el hombro. . . . Y no preguntes más, que ya es prueba sobrada de grandeza atreverse a medirse con gigantes; pues el mérito no está en el éxito del acometimiento, aunque éste volvió bien de la lid, sino en el valor de acometer. [If you ask me more about him, curious passenger, I will tell you that he measured himself with a giant and came out not harmed but rather with his lyre firmly set upon his shoulder. . . . So don’t question further: it is already exceeding sufficient proof of greatness to dare measure oneself against giants; and after all, the merit is not in the success of the challenge—­although this one returned safely from the battle—­but rather the valor of the challenging itself.]12

Whatever the true quality of Bonalde’s poem may be, here Martí makes the claim that it is important to demonstrate bravery by challenging or attacking the heroes of the past and then adds that the challenge itself is more important than actually succeeding in overcoming them. The first claim alone goes against a valuation of originality and newness that had characterized Latin American political Romanticism up to this point, which, more than advocating measurement against the masters, often preferred to ignore them. The second claim radicalizes the first and helps make it into an ethics.

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In The Latin American Mind (1949) Leopoldo Zea elaborates the way in which the idea that the masters are great because they never “repeated” anyone—­which Martí proclaims but then also seems to contradict in his advocacy of Bonalde—­gained importance in early debates about how to define Latin American cultural autonomy. Regarding the newly independent Latin American culture, in 1842 José Victorino Lastarria writes, “Fuerza es que seamos originales” [To be strong we must be original], echoing sentiments expressed by Esteban Echeverría a few years earlier when discussing the meter of La cautiva (1837): “Si el que imita a otro no es poeta, menos lo será el que, antes de darlo a luz, mutila su concepto para poderlo embutir en un patrón dado.” [If he who imitates another is not a poet, even less so will be one who, before bringing it to light, mutilates his concept to make it conform to a given pattern.]13 Octavio Paz calls the development of this tendency in the twentieth century Latin America’s “tradición de ruptura” [tradition of rupture].14 Martí’s approval of Bonalde’s decision to write another poem about Niagara Falls is strange. For the contemporary reader who has probably only heard of Bonalde because of Martí’s prologue, the claim that it is original seems to protest too much and feels a little like an elaborate apology for the writing of another poem about the Falls. From today’s perspective, one can also sense how a proliferation of poems about the Falls might run parallel to its being made into a cliché, infinitely reproduced on postcards sold by the same tourism industry that built the city around it, which turned the Falls into a parody of what nature is “supposed” to be and which is anything but wild. Furthermore, Martí’s celebration of the poem seems like a contradiction of his own claim that one must never repeat the past. Even if Bonalde’s poem does in fact challenge Heredia (and I will argue that it does further on), after Martí proclaims its originality, his ensuing treatment of it makes it seem like mere repetition. He does not call attention to any difference between the poems or to how exactly Bonalde attacks Heredia. He repeats the tropes one would expect—­the exalted power of the Falls, the lyricism they inspire—­and even uses the adjective “herediano” [Heredian] to describe Bonalde’s prose (in the only explicit reference to the Cuban master), effectively negating his claim that the Venezuelan poet doesn’t repeat.15 Then, to conclude his promotion of Bonalde’s poem, Martí insists on its taking part in a modern claim of rupture that calls for a radical break with the past: Pon de lado las huecas rimas de uso, ensartadas de perlas y matizadas con flores de artificio, que suelen ser más juego de la mano y divertimiento de ocioso ingenio que llamarada del alma y hazaña digna de los magnates de la mente. Junta en haz alto, y echa al fuego, pesares de contagio, tibiedades latinas, rimas reflejas, dudas ajenas, males de libros, fe prescrita, caliéntate a la llama saludable del frío de estos tiempos dolorosos.

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[Put aside the hollow, used-­up rhymes, encrusted with pearls and colored with flowers of artifice, which tend to be more sleight of hand and diversion of idle invention than the flaring of the soul or achievement worthy of the magnates of the mind. Gather into a tall heap and put to flame contagious sorrows, lukewarm latinities, reflected rhymes, foreign doubts, ills of books, prescribed faith—­warm yourself on the healthy flame against the cold of these painful times.]16

Against any repetition of the past or recollection of the masters, Martí calls for their destruction in a bonfire. In light of this call to burn the “used-­up rhymes” of yesteryear, what is one to make of his praise for Bonalde’s work, which clearly goes back to a poem that had been used at least twice already—­once by Heredia and once by Avellaneda—­if only to measure himself against it? How does one reconcile Martí’s call to burn poetry past in a bonfire with his celebration of Bonalde’s Heredian prose? We are very clearly faced with the confusion Ramos describes, a tension between a harkening to the past and a call to break with it. One interpretation would maintain that the work of Heredia simply does not fall into the group of things Martí would see burned in a bonfire. While latinities, used-­up rhymes, and the ills of books must be discarded, Heredia is a revolutionary poet who should be remembered and emulated. But this explanation does not address the extent to which the issue of imitation and originality was just as concerning for Martí as it was for his predecessors. Other works by the Cuban thinker lead one to believe that even though he admired Heredia, he would never encourage another poet to copy him. The motif regarding originality and imitation in Martí’s work—­visible in an opposition between the imported book and nature in “Nuestra America”—­is characterized by Rodríguez Matos as the opposition between the “copista,” who can only imitate, and the poet, who creates spontaneously. The copista is “a cultural functionary who operates via imitation, reproducing cultural models that already exist and have a generally accepted value ascribed to them. Against this kind of copyist, he [Martí] proposes another: ‘When ideas are ripe for expression, they come of their own accord . . . when he who would be their vehicle does not expect it.’”17 This “other,” the poet, is a conduit of nature, whose work arises spontaneously, as the fruit of a tree ripens, without artifice and without resorting to imitation. Clearly, Martí heavily favors the latter figure. After all, it is precisely because he does not imitate that the nature poet will free America from its dependency on European culture and allow it to be culturally and politically autonomous. In light of this motif in his work, Martí’s celebration of Bonalde’s reinscription of the Niagara Falls poem cannot simply be explained by his respect for Heredia’s greatness. I propose that Jorge Luis Borges’s thinking about imitation and originality can shed light on the paradox of Martí’s celebration of “Poema del Niágara” and his

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sense that it is not unoriginal. In a certain way, Martí resembles the fictional narrator of Borges’s story “Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote” (1939), who celebrates the eponymous intellectual’s claim of having written several sections of Don Quijote again.18 Just as, according to the narrator, Menard’s Quijote is not less original than Cervantes’s and is in fact superior—­“El texto de Cervantes y el de Menard son verbalmente idénticos, pero el segundo es casi infinitamente más rico” [Cervantes’s text and Menard’s are verbally identical, but the second is almost infinitely richer]—­Bonalde does not repeat, per se, by writing another Latin American exile poem about Niagara Falls and in fact deserves praise.19 Understanding what Menard hopes to accomplish by writing the Quijote again can provide an answer to why Martí celebrates Bonalde’s “repetition” of poems by Heredia and Avellaneda as something other than repetition. Borges’s narrator explains that Menard chooses to write Cervantes’s magnum opus because “el Quijote es un libro contingente, el Quijote es innecesario” [the Quijote is a contingent book; the Quijote is unnecessary].20 The significance of its contingency is illuminated toward the end of the fiction, when Menard is quoted as saying, “Todo hombre debe ser capaz de todas las ideas y entiendo que en el porvenir lo será.” [Every man should be capable of all ideas and I understand that in the future this will be the case.]21 These two statements lead the reader to assume that Menard ascribes to the positivist belief in the possibility of developing a hard social science of history (or in this case, literature) that would allow for a precise prediction of future events and that will ultimately result in the equality of all men. He is a caricature of the utopian positivist (and perhaps, more specifically, a Hegelian Marxist), taking his belief in the power of science to the logical extreme. By replicating the creation of the most contingent book, Menard would prove that even the most aleatory event can be reduced to a kind of scientific determinism. The repetition of the novel can be read as being akin to the repetition of an experiment in a lab, one that would make literature—­and by extension, all human history—­no longer subject to contingency. Read in this way, Menard is a kind of scientific prophet who seeks to prove the imminence of (and to help bring about) the end of history. By spontaneously reproducing Cervantes’s most important work, Menard displaces and supersedes the mythical Spanish writer, rendering his genius obsolete by demonstrating in the most radical way possible that all men are capable of all ideas. He rewrites the Quijote in order to prove that it is no longer necessary. He repeats history in order to do away with it. Through “Pierre Menard” we can understand Martí’s celebration of “Poema del Niágara” not as a repetition that remembers Heredia but rather as an original repetition that forgets him: a repetition that supersedes the original. I sense that Martí wishes to imagine Bonalde as a new Heredia in the present, taking his place and rendering him obsolete and dispensable. “Poema del Niágara” would take the place previously held by “Niágara” as the rebirth or renewal of

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the older poem for the next generation under the guise of spontaneous originality. As with Menard, Bonalde’s rewriting would challenge and displace the past by reconstituting it. In this Menardian reading, it is crucial that Bonalde evokes Heredia in particular. Taken as a “founding father” of independent national Latin American literary expression and a forerunner of Cuban independence, Heredia’s importance in Cuba is not unlike that of Cervantes in Spain. This not only lends credence to a reading of Bonalde as a living Menard but calls attention to the Oedipal overtones of the displacement he ostensibly performs. His secret motivation is to take the place of the father—­in this case, the father of independent Latin American culture. With this understanding one begins to suspect that in Martí’s celebration of the author of “Poema del Niágara,” Bonalde is a stand-­in for himself and that the displacement he ascribes to Bonalde is really the one he wishes to perform personally—­an expression of his own Oedipal desire. It is not hard to see the personal and intellectual affinities between Martí and Heredia: how the former took up the cause of the latter, brought it to fruition, and became the new nature poet of Cuban independence.22 Historically, if anyone repeats and displaces Heredia, it is not Bonalde but rather Martí. In this light, his prologue can be read as an expression of the desire underlying the repetition and displacement of Heredia that he would eventually carry out, which is at the same time a fulfillment of Heredia’s own poetic and political vision. Years earlier, Heredia had expressed his political aspirations for Cuban independence from Spain as being bound up with a view of America as a site of nature, which he represented as a place standing outside and against history. In an early poem, “En el teocalli de Cholula” (1825), Heredia stands on a ruined pyramid in Mexico, a relic of an older Indigenous empire, and thinks about those other Indigenous civilizations whose presence on the land had been erased completely by the destructive forces of nature. He imagines the Spanish Empire one day becoming like these lost civilizations, vanishing and making way for a new order, which is none other than the autonomous national republic for which he was fighting. “Niágara” maintains a similar view of nature as a resource that might be mobilized as a means of political renewal. For Heredia, the particularity of the manifestation of nature in Niagara Falls—­its bracing sublimity and power—­seems to inspire the greatness of the North American people, who, in contrast to Cuba, had already ceased to be a colony and attained independence at the time of the poem’s writing. Searching for but not finding the palm trees of his homeland around the Falls, he implies a kind of geographical determinism in U.S. independence and Cuban lack thereof: Nada ¡oh Niágara! falta a tu destino ni otra corona que el agreste pino A tu terrible majestad conviene.

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La palma, y mirto, y delicada rosa Muelle placer inspiren y ocio blando En frívolo jardín: a ti la suerte Guardó más digno objeto, más sublime. [Nothing, oh Niagara, is lacking in your destiny, nor does any crown besides the rugged pine better befit your terrible majesty. May palm, myrtle, and delicate rose inspire easy pleasure and soft idleness in the frivolous garden: for you fate held a more worthy, more sublime object.]23

As in “En el teocalli de Cholula,” there is an almost paradoxical view of natural history at work here. In reading the political difference between Cuba and the United States in their contrasting landscapes, Heredia implies a relation between human history and nature. At the same time he cultivates a sense of the immortal timelessness of the Falls (“Duren mis versos como tu Gloria inmortal” [May my verse endure like your immortal Glory]) as well as the destructive power he previously ascribed to nature in “En el teocalli de Cholula.”24 Nature’s transcendence of history appears also to be a clearing of history, and it is this clearing that would comprise its main political (historical) value. Just as it is significant that the book Menard writes is the Quijote insofar as he comes to resemble its crazed protagonist, it is significant that the poem Bonalde renews is Heredia’s “extraordinary and resplendent song of the inexhaustible poem of nature” insofar as it articulates and develops the sense of nature’s function as the erasure of history.25 If Martí is really suggesting that Bonalde could displace Heredia, the philosophy of destructive renewal he expresses would have to be understood as a development of the same Romantic nature thinking that Heredia himself presented. As such, Bonalde’s rewriting of Heredia’s poem is not any return to nature but rather a return to the Romantic nature of Latin American independence that would facilitate the new republic’s rupture with its colonial past. Radicalizing Heredia’s position, Martí casts this return to the return to nature as an escape not just from the past but from all history, as an alternative to past, present, and future: Lo pasado, ¡todo es castillo solitario y armadura vacía!; lo presente, ¡todo es pregunta, negación, cólera, blasfemia de derrota, alarido de triunfo!, lo venidero, ¡todo está oscurecido en el polvo y vapor de la batalla! Y fatigado de buscar en vano hazañas en los hombres, fue el poeta a saludar la hazaña de la naturaleza. [The past, with lonely castles and empty armor; the present, with questions, negations, anger, blasphemy of defeat, cries of victory; the future, obscured

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in the dust and fog of battle! Tired of vain searching amid the triumphs of men, the poet (i.e., Bonalde) went to greet the triumph of nature.]26

It is with this return to a nature previously mobilized as an alternative to history—­a return to the same nature (i.e., Niagara Falls) by the same means, the nature poem—­that Bonalde would ostensibly escape the law of Latin American cultural history as Heredia defined it while at the same time being ironically bound to it in repetition. Few critics who write about Martí’s prologue fail to mention that Bonalde’s posterity does not live up to the praise he receives. And yet it is not readily recognized that Martí’s reading overpowers the young writer’s poem and that perhaps his effusive praise is not carried out in good faith. Far from seeking to erase history or burn the past in a bonfire, Bonalde frames “Poema del Niágara” as a pilgrimage to Heredia’s Niagara. Against Martí’s claim that Bonalde does not repeat old masters, the poem is explicitly concerned with the repetition that occurs when the poet goes to pay homage to the Cuban master, whom he names in the first stanza.27 The master who is most clearly erased, invalidated, or “Menarded” by Bonalde’s poem—­and Martí’s reading of it—­is Avellaneda. Without ever mentioning her, Bonalde’s Niagara Falls poem repeats the sentiment expressed by her earlier poem “A vista de Niágara”: both its performance of pilgrimage and its qualification of Heredia’s Romantic understanding of nature. Avellaneda conspicuously differs with Heredia’s superlative treatment of the Falls as a visage of God. Heredia, on the one hand, suggests the divinity of the Falls in the Romantic fashion.28 He calls out to “Omnipotente Dios” [God Omnipotent] in the middle of an apostrophe otherwise exclusively addressed to the Falls, creating a brief ambiguity about the extent to which he differentiates between the two.29 And in closing with a comparison of his own frailty and mortality to its power and everlastingness, Heredia reiterates divine attributes of the Falls. Avellaneda, on the other hand, is disappointed by the Falls and finds herself uninspired by them. But when she turns to a recently constructed bridge at the end of her poem, she cries, “¡Salve, o aéreo, indescribible puente, / Obra del hombre, que emular procuras / La obra de Dios, junto á la cuál te ostentas! / ¡Salve, signo valiente / Del progreso industrial!” [Hail, oh aerial and indescribable bridge, / work of man that succeeds in emulating / the work of God, alongside which you exhibit yourself! / Hail, brave sign / of industrial progress!]30 Here it is not the Falls that are like a god but rather man, whose dominion over nature, facilitated by the union of science and technology, was growing dramatically during this period of the nineteenth century. Although Bonalde makes no mention of Avellaneda, he also searches for Heredia’s god in the Falls (“Do te ocultas deidad tronadora?” [Where are you hiding, thundering god?]), shouting to it as Heredia did, but receives no response

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besides the echo of his own voice.31 Here, like Avellaneda, Bonalde invokes the disenchantment of the modern world—­if not proclaiming man’s supremacy over the god of nature as Avellaneda seems to do, at least observing that man has been left to fend for himself, that his own voice is the only one available for providing answers to the question of his spiritual torment. Regarding the Falls he reflects, “Tú no eres más que yo, ni más que el hombre! / Tú eres la imagen viva / De la proscrita humanidad altiva; / Tú eres el hombre mismo  .  .  . / Nada supiste responderme, nada; / Que lo que el hombre ignora / Lo ignoras tú también.” [You are not greater than me, nor than man! / You are the living image / of haughty, banished humanity; / you are man himself . . . / You knew not what to answer me; / what man knows not / you know not as well.]32 The Falls echo the poet and are “proscribed” like a man in political exile: their outward appearance of confidence and power conceal hidden hollows of doubt and ignorance. If the Falls are a god or conceal one under their torrent, it is a god without power. Martí’s prologue does not acknowledge that the doubt racking Bonalde’s poem is in fact a doubt about nature itself: doubt about the divinity of the Falls and their ability to provide the kind of solution to the political imperatives of the day that Heredia had hoped they would. To question the divinity of the Falls is to question the divinity of the nature they stand for and the function it was supposed to serve in post-­Enlightenment thought. Even as Bonalde attempts to move beyond a Romantic understanding of nature, Martí’s prologue “corrects” his poem, restoring the older, Heredian meaning of the Falls. He prefers to see the young poet’s return to Niagara as a return to purity, truth, and spirituality—­a return to nature in its sense as a modern god, as “el único asunto legítimo de la poesía moderna” [the only legitimate theme of modern poetry].33 Martí canonizes an inverted interpretation of the poem, adulterating Bonalde’s memory within Latin American letters, perhaps irrevocably. Although he will mainly be remembered as the forgotten poet of Martí’s prologue, Bonalde achieves something significant in challenging the ideology of nature that the Falls represent. And yet he nevertheless reinscribes the same ideology that he attempts to critique, failing to acknowledge the literary history subsequent to the Heredian “origin” of independent Latin American literature and ignoring his repetition of Avellaneda’s own secularizing return. His desire for the origin still causes him to repeat history, though not that which he imagines he does. This kind of ongoing amnesiac repetition and misreading that seeks to simultaneously restore an original truth and obliterate it is deeply symptomatic of the system of belief that the idea of nature itself reinforces. The echoing relation among Heredia, Avellaneda, Bonalde, and Martí shows the history of Latin American literature becoming the history of a repetition of the same return to nature: the search for a break with tradition that merely affirms that tradition with greater force every time it is carried out.

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There can be little question that a fantasy of nature—­a fantasy of a place that stands outside the flow of history but that reinforces its repetition through the erasure of history—­is ideology as Foucault understood it: the belief that conditions language and, by extension, thought without making its presence known and that causes the thinker to betray his own intentions. This sense of ideology as blindness—­in the words of Paul de Man, a “pattern of self-­mystification that accompanies the experience of crisis”—­is what is at stake when, in reference to the Cuban revolutionary impulse, Rodríguez Matos describes his desire to comprehend the “underlying structure that sends us in an endless circle, in which the solution reproduces the problems it was supposed to correct.”34 It is the structure that Borges describes in “Pierre Menard.” Beyond the patent impossibility of Menard’s project and the fact that its realization could never be proved, with his attempt to write the Quijote again, he comes to resemble its protagonist: a madman who tries to remake a fantastical past within the present. Indeed, Menard is doubly foolish, not only trying to carry out an impossible task, but also failing to appreciate a basic lesson of the book he wants to overcome. Martí’s prologue, on the other hand, shows something more than the blindness and unwitting error that the ideology of nature often reinforces. While he misreads Bonalde’s poem, it is hard to believe that this misreading is entirely unintentional. The misreading does not undermine Martí’s cause but rather furthers it, helping create a space for him within the intellectual patriarchy of Latin America. His use of nature demonstrates an accurate and frank understanding that its function is to erase the past, and it appears that he embraces it for precisely this reason. The nature to which Martí returns signifies the destruction of the archive—­the bonfire in which the law is burned—­and as such a means for effectuating a displacing, supersessionary maneuver for the realization of his own will to power. The prologue expresses his own fantasy of being the new Heredia and helps make it into a reality. It is impossible to know the extent of Martí’s agency in this expression of an Oedipal desire to displace Heredia and his mobilization of nature to assist in the operation—­whether he fully grasps what he is doing—­but its precision cannot be denied. Martí defines his moment as one in which a Foucaultian understanding of the decentralized and agentless operation of ideology/power meets the centralized, personal will to power. Whether Martí is indeed a prophet of modernity or if he is simply one of many who tried to think through the tumultuous changes occurring at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, his articulation of a desire for original return is symptomatic of a secularization in which nature increasingly assumes the position that God had held in the past. His work reveals the possibility that an experience of modernity as “exile from the polis” is marked not just by a sense of time being out of joint but also by a presentiment of the suspension of progressive history in the state of nature, that “exile from the polis” would increasingly signify life in a space imagined not as a site of politics and

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culture—­the traditional definition of polis and civilization—­but rather as a site of war and survival in the biopolitical state.

_________ An obvious direction to now take in developing a history of nature in Latin American discourse would be to trace the influence of nature ideology in subsequent Cuban revolutionary discourses that embraced Martí and Heredia as its heroic precursors. Nonetheless, I have chosen to move in a different direction, examining the desire to make an original repetition that is central to the decolonial thought paradigmatically expressed by José Martí, as I have elaborated in the first two chapters of this work, in its relation to a desire for the end of history in the biopolitical state within the context of Argentine and Paraguayan national cultures. This decision is informed in part by a sense of urgency presented by the current state of world affairs summed up in the epochal importance Giacomo Marramao has assigned to the fall of the Berlin Wall in the unfettering of global capitalism. Following Jacques Derrida’s observations in Specters of Marx, Marramao describes how the lifting of this border, which had preserved the previous world order, marks a new stage of globalization in which the free market can challenge nation-­state sovereignty without the constraint presented by the opposing movement toward global socialism. Today’s world-­ordering paradigm is not a model reflected most clearly by the communist revolutionary redoubt of Cuba—­which is exceptional within the array of Latin American states—­but rather a capitalist biopolitical state that acts similarly, as a prison camp whose aim is a maximization of resource and labor extraction, a vision of the state as an enclosure of nature that has been most clearly expressed in Paraguayan and Argentine national literary cultures. The reason that decolonial nature ideology became important in the Argentine and Paraguayan national imaginaries is a matter of historical contingency. Countries such as Mexico and Peru, for example, had little choice but to confront and assimilate the legacy of their Indigenous peoples into their fledgling national cultures during the nineteenth century. In part this was because monuments built by the Aztec and Inca people stood as a testament to and reminder of not only their existence but also their greatness. Whatever hopes Heredia might have held for nature’s benevolent destruction of Indigenous monuments (discussed in chapter 1 of this work) would not be realized in countries like Mexico and Peru. Beyond the persistence of their monuments, the ongoing presence of Nahuatl and Quechua speakers in these countries, as well as massive mestizo and Indigenous populations, created a situation in which the Indigenous character of the people and their culture, as well as the historicity of these peoples, could not be ignored. In Argentina, on the other hand, Indigenous cultures were nomadic, less populous, and more starkly segregated from Creole society. As a result, the

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exclusion and destruction of these groups, as well as the erasure of their history, was more viable. For this reason Argentina was more readily imagined and portrayed in its national literary culture as a state of nature, and an erasure of Indigenous groups that would eventually occur in reality began in its discourse with Domingo Faustino Sarmiento’s description of the Argentine countryside as a desert, a barbarous state of nature. Paraguay—­which was originally joined with Argentina in the colonial viceroyalty of Río de la Plata—­came to be understood as an enclosure of nature both by its founding father Gaspar de Francia in his declaration of independence from both Spain and Buenos Aires and in Argentina, where it was seen as an inaccessible, provincial, jungle redoubt. In the following chapter I consider how Sarmiento’s imagination of the Argentine national subject as a product of the land and a conceptualization of the bad gaucho as “white Indian” would evolve in subsequent discursive imaginations of the Argentine subject as a figure who is more original than the original inhabitants of the land and therefore justified in displacing them—­an independent expression of Martí’s “original repetition.” The subsequent chapters will consider this development and how nature thinking in Argentine and Paraguayan decolonization produced a view of these states as enclosures of nature, not only as wilderness, but as war, lawlessness, and survival, in what can be seen as an independent emergence of a biopolitical model of the state.

PA R T I I

Toward the Biopolitical State

Chapter 3

The Fantasy of the Creole as White Indian

César Aira’s novel La liebre (1991) resolves with a typical fairy-­tale ending, in which a protagonist of uncertain origins discovers that he is a prince. Clarke, a British naturalist, discovers through his scientific fieldwork in Argentina that he is actually the son of Calfucurá, sovereign of the Mapuche Empire in the Southern Cone of South America. This conclusion can also be read as an iteration of a literary trope in which a white person, in one way or another, comes to live in the manner of Indigenous people. It is an added twist within the trope that the protagonist, who thought he was white and was brought up in a typically Western way, turns out to be a full-­blooded Indigenous person.1 Not only does he find cultural acceptance with an Indigenous group; he also finds an ethnic belonging: Clarke was already a Native American, and his experience of acculturation in the wild Argentine pampa is in fact a return to his familial and geographical birth origin. This imagination of the possibility of being a “white Indian” (“salvaje de color blanco,” as per Domingo Faustino Sarmiento) represented in Clarke is a nature fantasy.2 An acculturation to Indigenous society that has itself been understood in the Romantic literary tradition as a return to nature is here taken to a logical extreme, becoming total physical transformation—­a return to nature occurring at the level of biology or race. Although seemingly far fetched and absurd, this subterranean myth or nature fantasy of the “white Indian” continues to operate within certain national vocabularies of Latin America—­especially in a criollismo embodied by the figure of the Argentine gaucho—­and thus exerts an influence on the definition of its political subjectivity today. In the convergence of two common, even cliché cultural motifs at the end of Aira’s novel, the reader finds a desire for a simple resolution to the complex issues of legitimacy, identity, and race in the Argentine national tradition. Clarke’s 47

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discovery that he is an Indian encodes a wish to learn that one is not in fact a usurper and a colonialist but rather an original, rightful ruler of the land that has since become Argentina. And insofar as Clarke retains the ability to look and act like both an English scientist and a Mapuche general, it is a desire to be European and Indigenous at the same time, to continue being what one was—­a traveler from Europe who has come to impose a law on the land—­but also be a member of the group upon which the law is to be imposed and thus be exculpated of one’s white guilt.3 The desire here is not for mestizaje or hybridity but rather for full belonging to both groups—­to be a white Indian in the most radical and impossible sense of the term.4 While on the one hand functioning as a vicarious wish fulfillment of the Argentine reader’s unconscious desire for exculpation and legitimacy, the ending, in the ludicrous inverosimilitude of an Englishman discovering—­to everyone’s surprise—­that he is in fact an Indigenous prince, can also be taken as a critique of the same desire. In any case, insofar as it conveys the possibility of being both colonizer and colonized at the same time, it contains a grain of truth about Argentine subjectivity as it relates to the ambivalent position of the Latin American Creole at the beginning of the nineteenth century, when the new national identities of the continent were being invented. The figure of the white Indian appeals to a sense of the Creole’s divided position in which, even as he sought to liberate himself from his own colonial subjugation by Spain, he imposed his will to power over the Indigenous people of the land. As such, it has remained an important, albeit repressed, figure of Argentine national identity. Although La liebre presents a desire for simplification—­the miraculous resolution of the tensions that underpin a question of Argentine cultural autonomy, which has been under debate since independence from Spain in the early nineteenth century—­the novel nonetheless provides an opportunity for a reconsideration of the complexities of identity and cultural autonomy in Latin America. The present chapter will take up the work of tracing a discursive history of the fantasy of the white Indian from its earliest iterations in colonial Latin America into nineteenth-­and twentieth-­century Argentine discourse and then culminating in Leopoldo Lugones’s canonization of José Hernández’s Martín Fierro. It is a history that has been largely erased due to the fact that scientific discourse not only invalidated its object—­the white Indian—­but made it into something difficult to even conceptualize. Insofar as this history shows how a belief in the white Indian was once not just figurative or metaphorical but rather a matter of a scientifically defined biological reality, it casts new light on an independence-­era belief in the power of nature to effectuate historical rupture. Taken as a theoretical precondition of nature ideology today, this history shows a kind of inverted “political theology,” in which the mistaken scientific concept of degeneration has continued to exert a dialectical influence on the conceptualization of race today in the aufhebung of its supersession. This leads to another interest of this chapter,

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which is, as a preface to subsequent chapters that deal directly with the issue, to illustrate the ideological conditions that give rise to the biopolitical state. Specifically, the conceptual history traced here casts light on the genesis of a biological concept of race—­central to Foucault’s concept of the biopolitical—­and how it emerges in response to a shift in the scientific definition of nature, as a means of rescuing and validating nature as a basis for the claim of national difference and as the ideological foundation of the nation-­state and its corresponding identities. The key point of inflection in the history of the white Indian and its role in the definition of Argentine political subjectivity is Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, elaborated in The Origin of Species (1859), which marks the transformation of a Romantic return to nature as a return to the land into a return to nature as the rediscovery of biological heritage that La liebre presents. Indeed, the novel draws attention to Darwin’s importance in this history in its reference to numerous details from the scientist’s life, which effectively become the scaffolding of the narrative. The novel’s protagonist, Clarke, is Darwin’s brother-­in-­law (no blood relation), and his journey roughly retraces Darwin’s expedition in Argentina as described in his diaries, published under the title The Voyage of the Beagle (1839). Certain episodes of Darwin’s journey are repeated or recast in the novel, including the events with which the novel begins and ends: a meeting with General Rosas and an ascent of the mountain Sierra de la Ventana. Insofar as Darwin himself never appears in person but is constantly evoked, the novel casts him as a ghost, a specter that haunts the Argentine national imaginary and the text that lies at its center, Martín Fierro, whose first volume was published in 1872, thirteen years after The Origin of Species. La liebre invites us to consider Darwin’s impact on an Argentine national identity centered on the Creole gaucho taken as a white Indian, as well as its impact on more widely held notions of Creole legitimacy in Latin America. In holding that hereditary or genetic transmission is the key factor in determining the physiological traits of organisms (and that survival in the environment determines which of these traits will be retransmitted and preserved through reproduction), Darwin made clear for the first time something that today seems obvious: that one could not be “white” and be an Indian at the same time. In his invalidation of the notion of the white Indian, Darwin challenged the scientific basis of Creole legitimacy as it had been understood up to that point. La liebre’s reiteration of the fantasy of the white Indian and suggestions of its persistence help us see the extent to which Martín Fierro is defined by its engagement with Darwin’s challenge, seeking a new basis for the meaning of an Argentine Creole identity and to transform the concept of white Indian so as to salvage its legitimacy. The transformation of the white Indian after the publication of The Origin of Species reflects a shift away from an allegorical view of history and scientific belief in “degeneration”—­the power of the land to physiologically alter organisms—­to a view of history based on hereditary and descent.5 Thus, more broadly, it reflects

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the challenge Darwin posed to the notion of Latin American national identity rooted in an ostensibly ahistorical nature seen as land. The idea of nature that had been adopted to define certain Latin American states at the time of independence had been the untamed landscape of the Romantic poem. But as notions of truth and subjectivity were increasingly defined by scientific discourse, this nature came to be conceptualized also as a Darwinian struggle for survival. Even as the imperative of proclaiming its difference from Spain faded, the national imaginary defined by its foundational works would continue to perpetuate a fantasy of nature that evoked an animal life preceding the state. La liebre thus considers the moment in which two different cultural views of nature, the sublime Romantic landscape and Darwinian materialism, face each other and begin to coexist and suggests that a schism arising within the Western worldview as a result of Darwin’s theories is analogous to the situations produced by the colonial imperialism of the same period.

The Ideological Conditions of Possibility for Belief in the White Indian Before Darwin, it was much easier to believe that a person could be white and Native American at the same time, and it appears that the figure of the white Indian held serious intellectual stock as an important basis for the Creole nationalism of the seventeenth century. In order to understand an independence claim of total historical rupture from Spain, it is necessary to understand its relation to a belief in the white Indian and to revisit the ideological conditions that gave rise to both views, which consist in a belief in “degeneration” (the notion that geological forces in America would alter the biological makeup of an organism within a few generations) and a Christian-­allegorical understanding of history. Shedding a post-­Darwinian bias when approaching pre-­Darwinian independence thought causes its central claims to appear more radical—­that a national rupture with the past is not metaphorical but rather biologically and spiritually real. Even so, it also seems more reasonable when understood in relation to the system of belief that informed it. Additionally, examining the beliefs of this period contributes to an understanding of how nature’s ideological function of erasing history came to be and allows for further consideration—­discussed in the following sections of this chapter—­of how it was preserved in political thought even after a scientific theory of degeneration was proven wrong. Contemporary understandings of heredity and genealogy hold that the cultural or historical truth of being a Native American is also a biological truth, a phenotype, reflecting a specific, limited history of sexual relations within a specific environment: a history of reproduction and selection. But at the time of Latin American independence, the scientific understanding of heredity informing contemporary views of biological race was only beginning to emerge.6 Race

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in the early nineteenth century was still defined through a combination of factors that included religion and social class.7 The more materialist understanding of historical necessity that we take for granted today—­whose notion of cause and effect is in fact oriented by laws of heredity—­was still in the process of formation.8 Genealogical frames for understanding history did exist—­bloodline being particularly important in the definition of both European and Indigenous nobility—­ but other views of history such as spiritual Christian allegory and certain notions of natural history (specifically, that which informed a belief in degeneration) competed with them. As a result, starting in the seventeenth century, a period in which Creole subjectivity was beginning to crystallize, a white Indian would not necessarily have seemed like a contradiction in terms in the same way as it does today. Later, during the first wave of Latin American independence, the white Indian would have still appeared to be a real possibility according to existing views of history and human biology. In the retooling of imperial Creole nationalism into autonomous national identities after independence from Spain, the figure of the white Indian would also be retooled, utilized as a figure of cultural difference. At this time its meaning became more closely linked to a Romantic nature ideology of the nineteenth century that sought an escape from history in the wilderness. The Creole patriotism of seventeenth-­century Nueva España that Anna More describes in Baroque Sovereignty elaborates an early iteration of the fantasy of the white Indian, and in her investigation of it, she takes notice of the conceptualizations of history that make an ingenuous theorization of the white Indian possible at all. Although More’s work is centered on preindependence Mexico and not Argentina, the ideological conditions of possibility she considers—­an allegorical understanding of history in the Spanish Empire and a scientific theory of degeneration—­would have prevailed in Río de la Plata as well. Historical and geographical contingency would cause Mexican and Argentine articulations of the white Indian to be different, but the possibility of taking this figure seriously in the first place would have been very similar, if not identical. More’s work sheds light on the desire mobilized by the Argentine gaucho as white Indian, as a desire for something real, not imaginary. More writes that in response to the challenges of colonial governance (caused, in part, by the decline of the Hapsburg monarchy) and their unique position within the Spanish Empire, seventeenth-­ century Creoles in Nueva España defined themselves as inheritors of a “mantel of Indigenous nobility,” and they saw the legitimacy of their political authority being based in their privileged access to local, specifically Indigenous knowledge.9 While continuing to emphasize their European descent (“purity of blood” being an important marker of status in the empire), the Creole elite saw themselves as standing in for Indigenous nobility in decline: “Creoles expressed [a] contradictory subjectivity in racial and ethnic terms by insisting on their Spanish descent even while they claimed to be

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‘patrimonial sons of the land’ (hijos patrimoniales de la tierra).”10 More continues, “It is important to note that Creoles did not understand themselves to be direct genealogical descendants of pre-­Colombian peoples, even when this was actually the case.”11 In elaborating her view of Creole patriotism and the invention of tradition as a basis for Creole right to rule within the Spanish Empire in America, More emphasizes the importance of allegory, specifically the allegorical function of the archive: “Rather than placing hope in the eschatological end that underwrote initial Spanish imperialism, seventeenth-­century Creoles substituted allegorical descriptions of landscape, history, and local objects for the mystical substrate of the Spanish monarchy.”12 Creoles built “collections of disperse fragments from a century and a half of Spanish colonialism, that authorized local forms of patrimonial right.”13 The collection and possession of Indigenous artifacts provided an aura of Indigenous authority that was transferred to their possessors. It is worth considering that the importance of allegory within the worldview of the Spanish Empire may have been even greater than More suggests. More’s understanding of allegory is primarily informed by the work of Walter Benjamin, placing emphasis on the fragmentary authority of the aura maintained in the artifact or ruin in contradistinction to the legitimization of power through the grand, epic narrative. But a notion of allegory rooted in the Christian practice of reading (notably described by Nietzsche) can help clarify even further the connection between the appropriation of Indigenous artifacts and a view of Creole sovereignty deriving from their inheritance of Indigenous patrimony. Nietzsche criticized the way in which Christianity and the understanding of history it produces are predicated on the supersessionary practice of reading Jewish scripture allegorically, against its more literal interpretations, to find prophetic signs of Jesus’s life and teachings in it.14 Christianity reads and preserves the Jewish archive—­qualified as “the Old Testament”—­in order to appropriate its authority while at the same time overturning the law it had been used to uphold.15 This allegorical structure of supersession, in which Christians reinterpret the Jewish archive in order to displace the Jews as the true people of God, is strikingly similar to the Creole’s supersessionary appropriation and interpretation of the Indigenous archive as More describes it. The allegorical supersession of Jews by Christians appears to be the model upon which Creoles based their view of themselves as custodians of the Indigenous archive. A colonial Christian worldview, in which a spiritual/allegorical view of history was considered to be truer than a genealogical one, would have created the possibility for Creoles to view themselves not as analogous to Indians but as true Indians and the true inheritors of their culture—­just as Christians saw themselves as the true Hebrews and true inheritors of the Hebrew scripture.16 In addition to allegory, More mentions in passing the other important ideological condition of possibility for a sincere belief in the white Indian not only in

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the seventeenth century but then also moving into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: a scientific theory of degeneration. Such theories—­perhaps the most important of which was advanced by the eighteenth-­century naturalist Georges-­ Louis Leclerc, the Comte de Buffon—­were an intermediate step between theological creationism and Darwin’s theory of evolution. At a time in which race had not yet been strictly defined through descent, the theory of degeneration understood differences in phenotype among the diverse peoples of the globe (which posed a problem for a religious view of man created in God’s image) as an effect of geography and climate. Unlike Darwin’s theory, in which the effect of the environment on a species is exerted over millennia, the theory of degeneration held that such changes occurred quickly, within a few generations. According to Buffon, who maintained the inferiority of equatorial races, the Creole, after several generations of living in America, would undergo detrimental alterations to his physiology. The Creole would become more like the long-­standing inhabitants of the region—­Indigenous people—­not because of interbreeding but rather because of transformations brought about by the land itself. Such a view opens the possibility of a scientifically grounded conceptualization of a “white Indian” as an intermediate phase of Creole degeneration. More notes that the term criollo “originally carried the connotation of degeneration among American-­born subjects,” the word reflecting an “accusation that climate had a detrimental effect on those born in America,” which was used to bolster the position of those born on the Iberian Peninsula within the caste system of the empire.17 Although Creoles strove against the claim that they would degenerate in the tropics, their positive reappropriation of the pejorative word Creole itself suggests the possibility that degeneration, too, might be imagined in a positive light.18 Indeed, the notion of being “patrimonial sons of the land” (“hijos patrimoniales de la tierra”)—­a variation of the official title of ownership in the encomienda system, beneméritos de la tierra [those worthy of the land]—­seems to carry with it a more neutral or positive notion of degeneration: that the land could take possession of those who dwell upon it and become their mother or father.19 The evocative expression “natural lords” (señores naturales) that Creoles used to portray themselves, which More highlights, appears to be another ideological point of inflection, uniting and accommodating a smooth shuttling between seemingly opposing valences of a Creole claim to sovereignty: bloodline and land, indigeneity and nature.20 It is important to note here that the meaning of the word natural in its original usage in this context was closer to the English native than natural in today’s sense and that the expression “natural lord” (señor natural) was originally used exclusively to refer to pre-­Colombian Indigenous nobility or those claiming genealogical relation to them. Once the scope of the word nature grew, increasingly denoting land and landscape in the literary Romanticism of the nineteenth century, the expression señores naturales could

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be understood not only as Indigenous lords but as any whose right to rule was established by nature-­understood-­as-­land. A theory of degeneration appears to have helped this conceptual transition in the meaning of the word nature itself, along with a gradual transition from a view of a lordship defined by blood (familial nobility) to a lordship defined by land. The idea that Creoles are natural lords captures the extent to which they imagined themselves as inheritors of an Indigenous rule predating the conquest and at the same time remained free from history defined in strict genealogical terms. By the time the concept reached the nineteenth century, when Creole patriotism transformed into a Creole nationalism, the descriptor señores naturales expressed what Leopoldo Zea understands in The Latin American Mind (1949) as a Creole renunciation of the Spanish, colonial past within a state of nature. Zea asserts that nature was the Creole utopia, an imaginary construct allowing for a vision of a new society: America was “a virgin land, a new country,” and the “man who inhabited it lived in a complete state of nature, that is, without history.”21 A Creole self-­image as a señor natural, as it would be understood through nineteenth-­century Romanticism, would become a tool for the proclamation of cultural independence. A belief in degeneration and the historical truth of Christian allegory would have allowed Creoles to credibly believe that a break with Spain could be absolute—­not merely political or cultural but biological and spiritual, touching the most intimate and essential part of their being. The Creole imagined he had ceased to be Spanish and had become natural, absorbed by the American land and indigenous to it.

The Gaucho as White Indian and Figure of Cultural Originality The Creole gaucho, as represented in literature and discussed in Argentine political discourse, is a transformation of the myth of the white Indian, which is to say, a fantasy of national originality and natural sovereignty hinging on a return to nature. Unlike a proto-­Mexican vision of the Creole as white Indian, the Argentine gaucho was not used to make a claim to any uniquely Indigenous knowledge or legitimizing cultural heritage. If his knowledge—­his use of bolos, for example—­was like that of the Mapuche or Tehuelche, its sense as transmitted knowledge was not always recorded or emphasized.22 Just as often, the gaucho was held up as a manifestation of a natural man whose knowledge was not historically inflected but rather imparted by the land. A view of the Creole as white Indian emerges in the work of Argentine independence thinkers such as Domingo Faustino Sarmiento and Esteban Echeverría, both of whom emphasize the power of the land to transform and define an individual, thus appearing to adopt certain aspects of Buffon’s theory of degeneration, if not wholly ascribing to his view. In Sarmiento’s Facundo (1845) and

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Echeverría’s La cautiva (1837) the Creole, by returning to nature, makes a break with his Spanish past and sets out on his own path within universal history. Their view of the Creole who returns to nature as “salvaje de color blanco” is reiterated and developed further in José Hernández’s long poem depicting gaucho life—­published in two parts as El gaucho Martín Fierro (1872) and La vuelta de Martín Fierro (1879)—­whose subsequent canonization by nationalists Leopoldo Lugones and Ricardo Rojas brought the white Indian to the center of Argentine cultural imaginary.23 A central claim of Sarmiento’s biography of Juan Facundo Quiroga is that the problem of perpetual civil war in Latin America could only be understood and remedied by appreciating the determinative power of the land. Sarmiento saw men like General Rosas—­the present leader of the Federalist Party—­and his precursor Facundo Quiroga as “hombres naturales” [natural men], whose tyrannical bent reflected the savage and barbaric environment that formed them: “En Facundo Quiroga no veo un caudillo simplemente, sino una manifestación de la vida argentina tal como la han hecho la colonización y las particularidades de la tierra.” [In Facundo Quiroga I see not simply a caudillo but rather a manifestation of Argentine life such as it has been produced by colonization and the particularities of the land.]24 Sarmiento continues, “Facundo no ha muerto; está vivo en las tradiciones populares, en la política y revoluciones argentinas; en Rosas, su heredero, su complemento.” [Facundo isn’t dead; he lives in popular traditions, in Argentine politics and revolutions, in Rosas, his heir, his compliment.]25 In effect, Argentine politics—­which is to say, its civil war—­like Facundo himself, is merely an extension of the particularities of the land: “La naturaleza campestre, colonial y bárbara, cambióse en esta metamorfosis en arte, en sistema y en política regular.” [Rural nature, colonial and barbarous, transmuted itself in this metamorphosis into art, system, and regular politics.]26 Sarmiento’s belief in the transformational, determining power of the land and its transmission of barbarism to its inhabitants seems to accord with the views of Buffon and supports a sense of the indigeneity of the “salvaje de color blanco” [white Indian].27 However, he makes certain departures from Buffon’s view in order to maintain the possibility of the Creole’s redemption. While criticizing the negative effects of the barbaric “desert”—­or uncolonized space—­on Argentine culture, calling for civilization through the construction of cities, Sarmiento takes time to register some of its positive effects. In the section called “Originalidad y caracteres argentinos” [“Originality and Argentine Characters”] he notes how the land has imbued the Argentine subject with a certain originality and talent. A focus on the vulgar science (“ciencia vulgar”) of the Argentine countryman, developed through his intimate relationship with the land, emphasizes his potential for being made into a productive national subject.28 Indeed, Josefina Ludmer describes Sarmiento’s interest in the liminal position of the gaucho at the border between nature and the state and the possibility of civilizing him by

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means of law and war, the foundational impulse of the gaucho genre itself.29 The baqueano’s deep familiarity with the land makes him a potential geographer or general; the rastreador’s ability to read marks on the land makes him a potential police detective or scientific investigator; the cantor, who sings the legends of the pampa, is an incipient historian (“historiador futuro”).30 Equally important to the land’s yield of science is its yield of art—­poetry in particular: “Existe, pues, un fondo de poesía que nace de los accidentes naturales del país y de las costumbres excepcionales que engendra.” [There exists an endowment of poetry that springs from the natural accidents of the country and from the exceptional customs it begets.]31 The solitude and vast distances of the pampa, or the terrifying power of a sudden lightning storm, produce an experience and contemplation of the sublime: “De aquí resulta que el pueblo argentino es poeta por carácter, por naturaleza.” [Consequently, the Argentine people is poetic by character, by nature.]32 Thus, while nature instills barbarism on the one hand, it also provides experiences that cause the savage, stateless, degenerated Creole to begin his journey back to civilization. By becoming a poet the gaucho might advance the national cause of transcending barbarism, not only by developing philosophical and aesthetic sensitivity or transforming himself into the important cultural signifier of civilization represented by poets in general, but also by attaining the ability to articulate the cultural specificity that unites all Argentine people in his verse. As Ludmer writes, the gaucho genre that Sarmiento inadvertently founds “constructs the ennobled voice of the patriot gaucho in order to produce patriotism.”33 The gaucho’s potential to give voice to an Argentine identity—­if he could only be civilized—­appears to be a source of hope for Sarmiento, a possible means of bringing an end to Argentina’s civil war. The imperative of articulating Argentina’s cultural unity in literature stemmed from the foundational disunity of Latin American independence, which began as civil war between those who wanted to remain Spanish subjects and those who did not.34 A conflict about whether or not to be politically Spanish mapped onto a debate about whether to be culturally Spanish, and those in favor of political independence sought to organize the newly independent state around a new non-­Spanish cultural identity. If political dependence correlated to cultural dependence, political independence seemed to require cultural independence. Furthermore, the cultural and historical unity sought by independence thinkers—­which is none other than a Romantic concept of nationhood itself, the status of being a people—­was understood to be a precondition for the proper functioning of a representative state and synonymous with the end of civil war. While cultural independence was supposed to be natural, something that was already the case, political exigency demanded that the unity of the new people and its rupture with the past—­otherwise understood as its originality—­be made visible or emphasized.35 Poetry could fulfill this political necessity of making

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national originality visible, if not simply inventing it through an act of willful creation by the Romantic poet-­demiurge. For the thinkers of independence and the new nation-­state in Latin America, it was of the utmost importance to be original insofar as the existence and unity of the nation—­that is, its existence as a people—­itself hinged on the reality of its unique culture. While Sarmiento advocated for European immigration and did not oppose adopting ideas developed in the United States and elsewhere for the improvement of Argentine civilization, “Originalidad y caracteres argentinos” nonetheless conveys his agreement about the importance of finding exemplars of original culture in Argentina. And in Facundo it is the gaucho who represents this originality. Despite his barbarism, here was a Creole who had been cleansed of his Spanish past, who truly belonged to his new land, and who, with his poetry, was equipped to create a new civilization entirely his own. The long poem El gaucho Martín Fierro by José Hernández appears to respond directly to the view of the gaucho expressed in Facundo, affirming and developing premonitions about Argentine originality deriving from nature and turning them into a banner of identity. Written from the perspective and in the dialect of a Creole gaucho, the poem is presented as an example of the poetry of the pampa, a faithful copy of an ahistorical gaucho culture that emerged from the land. Hernández describes this purpose in the introduction to the poem: Me he esforzado, sin presumir haberlo conseguido, en presentar un tipo que personificara el carácter de nuestros gauchos.  .  .  . Cuantos conozcan con propiedad el original podrán juzgar si hay o no semejanza en la copia.  .  .  . Y he deseado todo esto, empeñándome . . . en copiar sus reflexiones con el sello de la originalidad que las distingue y el tinte sombrío de que jamás carecen, revelándose en ellas esa especie de filosofía propia que, sin estudiar, aprende en la misma naturaleza. [I have endeavored, without presuming to have been successful in my goal, to present a type that would personify the character of our gauchos. . . . Those who personally know the original will be able to judge if there is or is not resemblance in the copy. . . . And I have desired all this, seeking . . . to copy their reflections with the seal of originality that distinguishes them and the hint of melancholy they never lack, revealing in them a kind of distinct philosophy that, without schooling, they learn from nature itself.]36

His emphasis on the “originality” of the gaucho and his decision to personify his “character” not only respond to the concerns of Sarmiento’s work but employ the exact terminology it sets out (“Originalidad y caracteres argentinos”). The gaucho’s status as a student of nature sets Martín Fierro well within a tradition of viewing Latin American cultural autonomy as being rooted in nature. The poem he writes is intended as a form of costumbrismo, an archive of gaucho language

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and thought that would manifest the existence of Argentina’s unique and autonomous nature-­culture. It is significant also that the author notes in the same introduction an affinity between the gaucho and the Indian. He casts the affinity—­which is expressed in Fierro’s decision to live with the natives beyond the frontier at the end of the first volume—­in terms of appearance: “Cuando ven al hombre de nuestros campos, al modesto agricultor, envuelto en su manta de lana o con su poncho en la espalda, les parece que ven un indio de nuestras Pampas.” [When they see the man of our countryside, a modest cultivator wrapped in his wool blanket or with his poncho on his back, they think they are seeing an Indian of the Pampas.]37 He goes on to decry the abuse of the gaucho at the hands of the government due to the facility with which he is confused with the Native American. The gaucho and the Native American are visibly identical but must not be conflated, because the one pertains to a national “we” of Argentina, while the other does not. Upon reading the poem it becomes clear that the difference between the gaucho and the Indian is not merely political but also racial: as I will show, though Fierro is barely an Argentine subject, he is definitively Creole. As such, Hernández frames the question of Argentina’s cultural originality through the political subjectivity of the white Indian as a question of racial identity.

The Question of Race in Martín Fierro In the introduction to El gaucho Martín Fierro, the passage about the physical resemblance between the gaucho and the Indian raises a question about the extent to which Hernández understood the difference between them in terms of biological race. We see that he makes a distinction between two visibly interchangeable figures—­one should be treated with mercy, while the other should not—­but whether the difference extends beyond political/national affiliation is at first unclear. Hernández writes at a time in which a biological understanding of race—­ catalyzed by Darwin’s work—­would start to be applied in political thought. In its preoccupation with the relations among the various groups that composed the gaucho milieu—­tensions among Creoles, Blacks, Indians, “napolitanos” and “gringos” (European immigrants), and “el Gobierno” [the Government]—­ Martín Fierro can be read as a post-­Darwinian inquiry into the relation between race and political affiliation.38 While it is never stated explicitly, a question about degeneration looms: Creole difference, which had once been understood (at least in part) as a physiological alteration brought about by the land, must now be understood in another way. This shift in the definition of biological and cultural identities unsettled the definition of political affiliation ordered by such categories. In the poem it is precisely this lack of definition that defines the stakes of the gaucho’s political future, which comes in the form of a question of whether

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the gaucho will be integrated into the Argentine state or if he will join the Indians on the other side of the frontier. Underlying this question are others: Could the Creole gaucho actually become an Indian? Does his whiteness (or biological race in general) define his political affiliation or preclude his affiliation with the Indian? While Martín Fierro does not definitively answer the question of whether the gaucho will become a productive member of the state, it does affirm and celebrate a Creole national identity in terms of both its racial and cultural difference from other groups. As such, Hernández elaborates an early view of biological race as a cornerstone of political affiliation. A revision of a Creole political identity based on a transforming view of race in El gaucho Martín Fierro can be best approached through sections V and XII, which contrast the Creole to other whites. Section V defines Creole difference from other whites in terms of culture more than as a mysterious spiritual-­ biological schism brought about by the land, while section XII highlights the difference as one of moral quality. While these sections show that not all whites are Creoles, it is elsewhere made clear that all Creoles are white. Indeed, the moral kinship expressed in section XII appears to be underwritten by a modern view of biological race, which must thus be seen as a key factor in Hernández’s definition of Creole political identity. In section V, Fierro wonders why the government sends “gringos”—­that is, European immigrants—­to defend the frontier from Indian invasion: “Yo no sé por qué el Gobierno / nos manda aquí a la frontera / gringada que ni siquiera / se sabe atracar a un pingo.” [I don’t know why the Government / sends us here at the frontier / gringos who don’t even / know how to rustle a horse.]39 Fierro enumerates the skills that the gringo lacks, which also include riding long distances, saddling, slaughtering, and spying things in the distance. The gringo’s inability to identify objects on the horizon is especially indicative of his belonging to a different land: “No hay una sola que aprienda / al ver un bulto que cruza, / a saber si es avestruza / o si es ginete o hacienda.” [Not one would even learn / on seeing a passing form / to know if it’s an ostrich / horseman or hacienda.]40 The objects that compose the landscape—­the Argentine ostrich or ñandú, for example—­ are unfamiliar to him for the simple reason that they do not exist in his native country. Here, the difference between the Creole and the gringo is defined by a knowledge or science that has been imparted to him by exigencies of the land; animal husbandry, for example, like identifying distant objects, is something you inevitably learn when living in the pampa.41 What differentiates the Creole from the gringo is not degenerated biology or access to a certain legitimating archive as it had been in colonial Nueva España but knowledge and culture. Section XII continues to contrast the “criollo” to other whites but takes the extra step of proposing a more limited definition of the word. As Cruz, Fierro’s friend and ally, reflects on his decision to give up being an officer of the law and to accept the life of an outlaw (matrero), he acknowledges the challenges

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posed by the unsheltered life he is about to embrace, saying, “Tiene el gaucho que aguantar / hasta que lo trague el oyo / o hasta que venga algún criollo / en esta tierra a mandar.” [The gaucho has to suffer / until he is swallowed by the grave / or until there comes some Creole / to take charge in this land.]42 Knowing that Cruz himself is a police officer and that surely the other authorities of the countryside are also Creoles in a traditional sense—­people of European descent born in America—­the reader wonders what he means. As he goes on to describe the corrupt plotting of the judge in charge of the region, the reader understands that his greed and indifference to justice instate a de facto void of governance there. Thus, Cruz’s insinuation that the judge is not a Creole, despite the fact that he most certainly would have been a white person born in America, effectively redefines the word, imbuing it with a positive value that updates its function as a political identity. “Criollo” for Cruz means not just any person of European descent born in America but a person whose knowledge and morality are grounded in a specific lived experience of the pampa. It remains unclear whether his definition as friend—­a distinction understood by Carl Schmitt as defining political affiliation—­is the effect of his perceived goodness or is its cause. Cruz views Fierro and the Creole in general favorably, with the suspension of judgment that friendship begets. Although Fierro transgresses, periodically killing innocent people in knife fights (one of whom, significantly, is Black), he is seen as brave and earnest, good.43 In contrast, because the judge is part of an oppressive and corrupt government—­because he is not a friend—­he is not criollo. Even as its function as a political identity is redefined culturally so as to exclude certain individuals who previously would have fallen into the category, the racial-­biological implications of the word criollo remain: you still have to be white to be criollo. Martín Fierro’s definition of the Creole as a friend, combined with the fact that there are no characters who fit this definition in the text who are not white, reinforces a sense of the reality and political importance of whiteness for Hernández: a sense reinforced by the conflict that defines Fierro’s relationship to both Indigenous and Black people of the frontier. Perhaps one could have reasonably imagined that it is not race but rather status as an Argentine citizen that makes the gaucho Creole different from the Indian, but Cruz’s redefinition of “Creole” so as to exclude the judge—­an avatar of the state—­goes against this reading. Fierro exists at the margins of citizenship, declaiming the state’s interference in his life and seeking exile at the end of the first volume. More than an Argentine nation-­state identity, it is a redefined, racialized Creole identity that is celebrated in the text and that differentiates Fierro from the Indian whom he so closely resembles. The protagonists’ decision to leave Argentina, crossing the frontier to live among the Indians at the end of the first volume of Martín Fierro, can be viewed in a number of ways, but considering the poem’s declared purpose of decrying the

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gaucho’s plight, it can be taken to mean the following: the gaucho, if mistreated like the Indian and forced to live as an outlaw, will want to leave the Argentine national community, taking his natural talents and heroism with him.44 If Cruz, at the end of La ida, in stating that perhaps he will find a woman to live with in Indian territory (“Tal vez no falte una china / que se apiade de nosotros” [Maybe there will be a woman / who will have mercy on us]) suggests he is open to friendship and allegiance with the Indians, this openness appears naive in La vuelta when he and Fierro are taken captive and forced to fight for their lives.45 Their inability to join with the Indians reinforces a sense that the biological element of racial identity is an important ground of the body politic and that the nation from which the state will arise is defined in terms of not only culture but also race. Indeed, if La ida does not definitively answer the question of whether biological race will define the political community, La vuelta does. Far from making an ideological shift from the position taken in La ida, La vuelta simply takes it upon itself to clarify that the gaucho’s attempt to live among the Indians is doomed to fail.46 In asserting that political affiliation between the Creole and the Indian cannot be realized, Hernández affirms the political importance of race, which is ultimately the main difference between them. Hernández’s understanding of race thus comes back to the conflation between the gaucho and the Indian in the introduction. If the gaucho’s whiteness is the primary difference between them, insofar as it is not visible, it must exist as something inhering inside the body, beneath the skin, at a cellular level; it is an inherited, scientific fact whose reality transcends appearance. Thus, in its celebration of Creole identity, Martín Fierro clarifies an incipient view of race as biological heritage and in this way can be seen as challenging Sarmiento’s view of the bad gaucho (“gaucho malo”) as white Indian, or “salvaje de color blanco.”47 For Hernández it is imperative that the gaucho be not viewed as an Indian but rather welcomed into the political belonging of a racial Creole identity. The conclusion that political affiliation boils down to racial belonging, which becomes clear through the failure of the promise of a perceived affinity between Fierro and the Indians, must be applied to the interpretation of Fierro’s relations with other members of different races as well. This insight is particularly important for interpreting sections representing Afro-­Argentine pampas dwellers. Similarly to the way in which La vuelta answers questions raised in La ida about political affiliation with the Indian, Fierro’s poetic duel with the payador moreno (Black parador) in La vuelta—­whose brother he had killed in the previous volume—­can be read to imply that political union between the Creoles and Blacks will also not occur. Although other scholars have observed that the Black gaucho is represented as a worthy adversary by Hernández and like the Indian bears certain affinities with the Creole gaucho, it would appear that these affinities are again not enough to allow for a political bond.48 The protraction of conflict between the Creole and el Moreno as well as Fierro’s victories

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in physical and verbal combat suggest that Hernández believes Creole racial identity will be the only political affiliation that can form the basis of a successful Argentine state (or at least one to which he could belong).

A Transformation of the White Indian: The Gaucho as a Bronze Greek in Lugones By the early twentieth century a more rigidly biological definition of race had come into common use, reflecting in part the rise of a racist view of progressive history based in a misinterpretation of Darwinian evolution.49 Around the same time, the influential intellectual Leopoldo Lugones began to apply these new views about race and history toward a fascist theorization of the Argentine nation-­state.50 Lugones sought to rectify views that had previously defined Argentine cultural autonomy but that had now become untenable with the onset of a post-­Darwinian conceptualization of natural history. In accordance with a more strictly hereditary notion of race and in the interest of preserving Argentina’s claim to whiteness as well as the nature fantasy that underwrites its claim of national originality, Lugones transforms the scientifically unviable white Indian into an ancient Greek—­a figure of European “indigeneity.” In El payador (1916) Lugones recasts the question of Latin American cultural autonomy to reflect a new understanding of political subjectivity rooted in race. This work sets out to canonize Martín Fierro as Argentina’s foundational document, an authentic example of gaucho poetry, and a true literary expression of Argentine identity, thus falling into the Latin American tradition of proving cultural autonomy through literature. For Lugones, however, who had taken up a scientific racism that had been developed during the latter half of the nineteenth century, the poem reflects not only culture but, more importantly, race. Through El payador, one can observe the historical-­cultural identity of the nation becoming a biological identity, as nationhood is more strongly equated to biological race. Lugones saw Martín Fierro as a document that manifested the link between the Argentine people as a biological race and their cultural autonomy, or originality. In regard to the eponymous wandering troubadour of El payador, he writes, “Fue su agente primordial la poesía, que al inventar un nuevo lenguaje para la expresión de la nueva entidad espiritual constituida por el alma de la raza en formación, echó el fundamento diferencial de la patria.” [Poetry was his primordial agent: with the invention of a new language for the expression of the new spiritual entity constituted by the incipient soul of the race, he established the differential foundation of the fatherland.]51 Lugones’s notion that poetry is the means used by a new race to express its national difference implies a causal chain in which culture is above all a reflection of race, as opposed to its older definition as a set of practices associated with the cultivation of the

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land. This represents a very clear shift from previous modes of understanding national difference—­that which makes one’s national culture unique, independent, and different from others—­that had focused on the determinative power of the land. With Lugones, the land fades into the background as a notion of biological race becomes central. El payador is quixotic because it sets out to establish the truth of a fictional text, to show the extent to which the world that Martín Fierro describes, the language it uses, and the people it represents are authentic. Perhaps the most powerful example of this quixotic bent is the chapter entitled “El linaje de Hércules” [“The Lineage of Hercules”], in which Lugones embarks on an earnest attempt to trace Fierro’s genealogy back to Hercules, the demigod of classical myth, thus making the Argentine people the direct inheritors and torchbearers of Greco-­ Roman civilization.52 It is also in this section that he demonstrates most clearly an understanding of race as something strictly hereditary and genealogical, in accordance with a post-­Darwinian materialism. The first paragraph of “El linaje de Hércules” is complex, an extended metaphor about the bronze flesh of the gaucho, with strong implications for Lugones’s view of the Argentine race, but whose poetic nature causes it to remain irremediably ambiguous. It is necessary to address this introductory section because its insinuation of the gaucho’s racial mestizaje appears to contradict all of what follows. Through a quote from the Roman poet Horace, Lugones considers the imperative of erecting Fierro’s “bronze”—­that is, of immortalizing him in bronze statuary—­and proclaims that Fierro’s bronze already exists in the form of his heroic flesh (“carne heróica”).53 A sense in which flesh could be an eternal testament to heroism can be seen coinciding with a racist celebration of skin color, which in this case would be bronze. The ensuing reference to the fact that bronze is an alloy, made from a mixture of red and white metals (copper and tin), can be read as an acknowledgment that the color and “composition” of the gaucho’s flesh is an outcome of the mixing of Indigenous (“red”) and European (“white”) blood. Thus, it appears at first that Lugones celebrates the gaucho’s bronze skin as the marker of his mestizaje, a new “race” created by the procreation of Indigenous and white ancestors. But Lugones immediately moves on from any relation between bronze-­as-­ alloy and mestizaje, stating that the gaucho is made of land and sun, work and pain, and that these groupings coincide with the red and white metals that mix to form his flesh: “De tierra pampeana y de sol nuestro, de trabajo y de dolor que nos pertenecen, estaba construido aquel antecesor. Como en la aleación donde se combinan la rojura y la palidez de los sendos metales, el furor de la llama original ennoblecía su raza.” [Of soil in the pampa and of our sun, of our work and pain, that ancestor was constructed. As in the alloy in which the redness and pallor of those metals are combined, the furor of the original flame ennobled his race.]54

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The notion that his flesh is bronze now becomes more suggestive of the role of the environment in determining race: he is brown not because of Indigenous or African ancestors—­both of whom certainly constitute part of his biological heritage—­ but rather because of a toasting in the flame of originality: “Y de arder así, habíase puesto moreno.” [And from burning in this way, he had turned brown.]55 As the passage continues—­and Fierro is suddenly not a bronze statue but rather a bronze bell, a metaphor for the timbre of his voice—­poetic overdetermination causes the section to lose its coherence. Any glimmer of the Creole gaucho’s mestizaje disappears completely in the following pages, which detail an ostensibly rigorous and factual cultural history of troubadours in Europe, meant to back up a claim that the Creole gaucho is Greek and ultimately descended from Hercules. Indeed, the main argument of the chapter is that the gaucho is the most recent member of a long line of Hellenic troubadours, who traveled from ancient Greece to Provence, then to Spain, and from there to America: Arruinada en Provenza durante el siglo XIII, aquella civilización de los trovadores y de los paladines, estos últimos siguieron subsistiendo en España, donde eran necesarios mientras durase la guerra con el moro; de suerte que al concluir ella tuvieron en el sincrónico descubrimiento de América, la inmediata y postrera razón de su actividad. Así vinieron, trayendo en su carácter de tales, los conceptos y las tendencias de la civilización que les fue peculiar y que rediviva en el gaucho, mantuvo siempre vivaz el linaje hercúleo. [Said civilization of troubadours and paladins having been ruined in Provence during the eighth century, the latter group continued subsisting in Spain, where they were necessary as long as the war against the Moors persisted; it was by chance that its conclusion coincided with the discovery of America, which would immediately present a subsequent object for their activity. Thus they came, bringing in their character as such the concepts and tendencies particular to their civilization, which now lives in the gaucho, the herculean lineage maintaining a perennial robustness.]56

In light of Hercules’s importance in Spanish folklore, as well as the characteristics of bravery and musicality that he shares with the gaucho poet, Lugones is convinced that the gaucho is not merely Hellenic but Herculean: Hércules, además de ser el antecesor de los paladines, fue uno de los grandes liróforos del panteón.  .  .  . Más directamente que cualesquiera otros, los héroes y los trovadores de España fueron de su cepa; pues sabido es que las leyendas medioevales, con significativa simbólica alusión al carácter de la raza, considerábanlo creador del estrecho de Gibraltar y fundador de Avila. [Hercules, in addition to being the forebear of the paladins, was one of the great lyricists of the pantheon. . . . More directly than any other, the heroes

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and troubadours of Spain sprang from his trunk; indeed, it is known that in medieval legends, with important symbolic allusion to the character of his race, he was considered to be the creator of the Strait of Gibraltar and founder of Avila.]57

However outlandish it might seem, the only possible reading of “El linaje de Hércules” is the most straightforward one: not merely that the gaucho is analogous to the paladins of old or even the inheritor of a Hellenic tradition but rather that his culture actually reflects the extent to which he is the inheritor of a biological race that can be traced back to classical prehistory. Evidence for this reading—­already present in the somewhat serious attempt to trace the genealogy of the troubadour and repeated use of the word race—­arrives indisputably at the end of the chapter, in a passage that equates the heroic ancestry of the gaucho to the “we” of the Argentine people in general: Nuestra vida actual, la vida de cada uno de nosotros, demuestra la existencia continua de un ser que se ha transmitido a través de una no interrumpida cadena de vidas semejantes. . . . Así es como Martín Fierro procede verdaderamente de los paladines; como es un miembro de la casta hercúlea. Esta continuidad de la existencia que es la definición de la raza, resulta, así, un hecho real. [Our contemporary life, the life of each and every one of us, demonstrates the continual existence of a being that has transmitted itself by way of an uninterrupted chain of similar lives.  .  .  . It is in this way that Martín Fierro truly descends from the paladins, that he is a member of the herculean caste. This continuity of existence that is the definition of the race turns out to be, in this way, an actual fact.]58

On the one hand, this description of the transmission of shared being (race) along an unbroken chain of lives reflects a post-­Darwinian notion of natural history as the history of heredity and descent. On the other hand, it fails to grasp the reality of genealogy, the dilution of meaning in heredity as the family tree is traced into the past, and the impossibility of ascribing predominance to a single distant ancestor, who is but one of many thousands.59 In Lugones we see the process by which a Darwinian history of heredity is contaminated by mythical thinking and becomes fantasy. For Lugones, Hercules is a kind of Abraham, the patriarch of a nation that, despite never defining itself as such, has somehow secretly maintained its coherence over thousands of years of diaspora and exile. On the way to addressing the central claims of “El linaje de Hércules,” I am interested in the contradiction between the opening paragraph and the rest of the text—­between Lugones’s apparent acceptance of the gaucho’s racial mestizaje and his sense that the gaucho’s race is determined almost exclusively by a line of Hellenic paladin-­troubadours descended from Hercules. One way to address the contradiction is to simply deny that Lugones refers to mestizaje in

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the first paragraph, holding with one of the many other metaphors he makes. But if Lugones does acknowledge mestizaje, he appears to take a position similar to that of Juan Dahlmann in Borges’s “El Sur,” choosing one patriarch over another in an attempt to find meaning in his own divided and ill-­defined identity. Frankly, there is no real need to choose one forebear over the other, as Dahlmann does—­no need to seek the comfort of meaning in pure contingency or to simplify the complexity of whatever meaning one’s ancestry might actually contain. But Lugones, perhaps a model for Dahlmann, chooses. His choice of the white forebear over the Indigenous one—­to find his identity in the one line and not the other—­reflects not his reality but rather his desire: both what he wants the gaucho to be and what he wants to be himself. Even as he acknowledges that the gaucho does not look white—­perhaps due to mestizaje or perhaps because of time spent laboring under the sun—­his insistence on the predominance of a white bloodline makes the chapter a fantasy of Argentine whiteness and a justification of colonialism.60 One reason for choosing the white ancestor for the gaucho is the fact that he is being set forth as a symbol of Argentina, which originated as the colonial enterprise of a European country. The Creole of Río de la Plata would have had hereditary links to Europe and thus a certain claim to “whiteness” (although Spain’s ethnic diversity makes even this claim uncertain). Still, Lugones might have denied this past by embracing Indigenous culture. He might have imagined the gaucho as the descendant of a similarly mythical Indigenous person, perhaps naming the chapter “El linaje de Calfucurá.”61 Or he might have celebrated mestizaje itself as a sign of superiority, as José Vasconselos does in La raza cósmica (1925). Argentina’s status as a Spanish colony is not enough to fully explain his focus on the white ancestor. One must view his choice as reflecting the racism of his pseudo-­Darwinist and “vitalist” beliefs, which categorized human groups according to an evolutionary framework, understanding some to be more evolved—­and thus more distant from their primate cousins—­ than others. In several science fiction stories that appear in Las fuerzas extrañas (1906), Lugones reveals his preoccupation with Darwin’s theory that humans had evolved from primates. One such story is “Un fenómeno inexplicable” [“An Inexplicable Phenomenon”], which recounts a dinner shared by two amateur practitioners of homeopathic medicine. In the course of their conversation the retired English military officer reveals to the Argentine narrator that he has a double: a kind of spiritual projection in the form of a black, humanoid monkey, who follows him everywhere he goes.62 The officer explains that the doppelgänger appeared after he began to practice the spiritual exercises of the yogis, to which he had been exposed when living in colonial India. He had taken up these practices in order to submit them to his rational scrutiny, but his attempt to impose the rigor of Western scientific observation on the mysteries of Hindu mysticism had

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backfired; his act of scientific colonialism exposes him to an otherness that in turn colonizes him, causing him to be haunted perpetually by a phenomenon he cannot explain. This “inexplicable phenomenon” represents not only a failure of “modern” scientific epistemology to understand all natural phenomena but the triumph of a primitive epistemology—­the magical thinking of the savage mind—­which all boils down to a persistence of the ape within. In this way, “Un fenómeno inexplicable” symbolically expresses ideas that run parallel to the discredited pseudoscientific claims of Caesar Lombroso, who developed a theory that many criminals suffer from evolutionary atavism, committing crime because they are biologically closer to apes than other humans, having inherited a larger proportion of primate traits than their noncriminal compatriots.63 Through this story about the discovery of the ape within, Lugones expresses a sense of horror at the possibility that man could share his heritage with the primate, that even the civilized Englishman on some level carries its shadow with him as his double. The discovery, which is akin to being colonized by the barbaric past, is colored by the colonial context of the officer’s story; it is through transculturation in the colonial space, through contact with an ostensibly inferior or less evolved race, that the ape rubs off on him, or is (homeopathically?) elicited from within him. If “Un fenómeno inexplicable” expresses an anxiety about the place of man within a spectrum of evolution as universal history that moves inexorably toward perfection, El payador responds to the same anxiety by insisting on the overriding force of the gaucho’s white inheritance. Lugones effectively denies the doubled nature of his own heritage that was so troubling to him. A question remains as to why Lugones insists that his whiteness can be traced back to Hercules—­a claim that could never be corroborated scientifically, Hercules being a mythical figure and not a historical one. One imagines that, having decided to participate in a Latin American tradition of inventing one’s own identity, he simply selects a mythical hero (with tenuous Spanish associations) as his adoptive primogenitor and treats him as the founder of a nation. Still, this does not appear to be enough for Lugones’s purposes; a racial connection to the Greco-­Roman past does not answer the fundamental question about Argentine originality and difference. A connection to the Greco-­Roman tradition legitimizes Argentine culture as “civilized” and “heroic” and makes Argentines into the bearers of what Lugones sees as an innate, hereditary superiority, but it doesn’t explain why gaucho culture didn’t arise in Chile, or Mexico, or even Spain itself, where individuals of the same stock most certainly also resided. Not only does Lugones not explain the source of the gaucho’s difference; it seems that national originality itself is at odds with the desire to cast Argentine greatness as an expression of Greco-­Roman lineage. Does not an emphasis on the conclusive historical link between the troubadour and the gaucho make the gaucho less than original, a mere expression of something that came earlier, a repetition?

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When it comes to a question of originality it can at least be understood why Lugones chooses a Greek antecedent. Insofar as he, among others, saw the classical Greeks as the originators of Western civilization, there is a sense in which it would never be possible to be more original than they were—­that originality itself is embodied in their example and can never be overcome.64 For one holding such a belief, the only way to be as original as the Greeks is to actually be one, and so this is probably why Lugones imagines the gaucho as a crypto-­Hellene. One detects in Lugones’s fantasy of the Greek gaucho something akin to the paradoxical desire to perform an original repetition, which I ascribed to José Martí in his relation to José María Heredia and understood through Borges’s “Pierre Menard” as a central tenet of nature ideology in the previous chapter. Lugones hopes that Argentina, while continuing to be Argentina, can also be Greece (again). Although Lugones appears to distance his view of the gaucho from a Creole fantasy of being a white Indian by making the gaucho Greek, I would argue that insofar as the ancient Greek already represents a notion of white indigeneity, his modification to the fantasy is minimal. By making the gaucho Greek, Lugones maintains the function of originality previously fulfilled by the Indian while at the same time accounting for the fact that the political entity to which he belongs—­the “nosotros” to which he refers—­is colonial and did largely come from Europe. Darwin no longer allows him to imagine himself as Amerindian and white at the same time, and so he substitutes American originality/indigeneity with European originality/indigeneity. Indeed, both Indian and Greek take on a signification of irreducible originality. In the case of the Indian, the significance of this originality can be seen both positively, through an ethnocentric Indigenous worldview, and negatively, through a colonial-­Romantic lens, as a human subject who makes the transition from a prehistorical state of nature into history upon exposure to the colonizer and prior to whom it is falsely imagined that there is no historical record. Once it becomes clear that a quality of irreducible originality unites the Indian and the Greek in the occidental imaginary championed by Lugones, it becomes possible to anachronistically detect in his work a rustling of Aira. The solution to the problem of Argentine identity in El payador is the fairy-­tale discovery that the seemingly marginal figure is in fact a prince, endowed with royal lineage: a descendant of Hercules. One notes that Lugones, in imagining the gaucho as the bearer of Herculean blood, still appears to differ with independence thinkers who sought to proclaim the Creole’s rupture with European history. But his view is not as radical a departure from the independence tradition as it might seem. Although he traces the movement of the progenitors of a gaucho-­Argentine race through Spain, the gaucho ultimately represents Hellenic and not Spanish culture, the latter being overly influenced by an “Asiatic” (i.e., Jewish) Catholicism.65 And while Lugones’s treatment of the troubadour is quite clearly historical, and thus appears to cast

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the gaucho himself as historical, I would argue that the gaucho (and the Creole in general) nevertheless remains a child of nature in Lugones’s view, in accordance with his predecessors. The race that Fierro incarnates is not historically inflected by the years intervening between himself and Hercules, which is to say, between the present and a mythical prehistory. It is as if the gaucho had remained subterranean and only now emerges into history, as the Greeks themselves did thousands of years before. Thus, it is in a desire to maintain the gaucho as a figure straddling the threshold of history and prehistory—­history and nature—­that Lugones opts to trace the gaucho lineage to a prehistorical myth as opposed to some historically verifiable figure. The prehistorical state of nature from which he emerges is also a state of myth.66 Thus, the gaucho is the inheritor not only of a race—­and by extension, a culture—­but of a foundational originality attending the emergence from nature into history. The gaucho repeats the historical emergence that made Greece into the (ostensible) origin of Western civilization; and he repeats the Greek emergence and origination in an original way, arising out of the anonymity of nature into the historical-­political space of the Argentine nation-­state.67 Martín Fierro is an epic poem akin to The Iliad, according to Lugones, a foundational work that testifies to the gaucho’s original repetition. It is this atavistic emergence that constitutes his inheritance; the gaucho’s originality is a scientific fact of descent and biological race; his transitional historicity is immutable, fossilized. In this way Lugones responds to a shift in the major scientific paradigms of the day, a shift in an understanding of objective truth, while preserving the original premises of Latin America’s claim of cultural autonomy. Even as land ceases to determine man through degeneration, Argentina is still a state of nature, whose historical oblivion allows its people to imagine themselves as entirely autonomous and undetermined by the immediate past. Lugones is certainly not an orthodox Darwinist, this being most apparent in the paradigm of historical decadence that persists in his neoclassical fantasies, the idealization of origin by which classical civilization was held up as a model in the first place. Related to this, his racism also strays from true Darwinism (as all racism does) insofar as a hierarchy of man is presented in terms of a positive progress that Darwin disavowed. Nevertheless, and perhaps unwittingly, there is still something truly Darwinian in Lugones’s vision of Argentine identity: the gaucho’s place at the threshold of history, in a continual state of emergence, comes close to Darwin’s nihilistic view of natural history and evolution. The fact that it is Martín Fierro himself who becomes the paradigm of Argentine culture, as opposed to some other figure, also reflects a certain Darwinian fantasy because Fierro lives an unsheltered life of survival, at the threshold between man and beast. The state of nature in which he moves is not a halcyon pre-­Columbian utopia but an unrelenting exposure to violence more akin to animal life than to human life as it is traditionally viewed.

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If an imagination of the Creole as a white Indian was already an ideological structure meant to legitimize colonialism, his displacement by the Creole Greek in Lugones’s work moves its erasure of history one step further. The discursive, ideological gesture seeks to determine a new reality. The gaucho, as an ancient Greek, is equal in originality to the Indian; living wild on the pampa, he too emerges into history from the unknown recesses of time. He is, in a sense, the Indian’s double, and because (according to Lugones and Hernández) he is better, he will eventually displace the Indian as the true autochthonous inhabitant of the land. The fact that he comes from another territory is now inconsequential because the authority to rule derives no longer from a localized or specific land but rather from a universal nature.

The White Indian and the Double The figure of the double, or doppelgänger, is a prominent motif in Aira’s La liebre, which should not come as a surprise considering the extent to which the fantasy of the white Indian touches on issues of originality, repetition, and a specular relation between colonizer and colonized, as we have seen in Hernández and Lugones. Perhaps its most significant manifestation in the novel occurs after Clarke, having become the commander of the Huilliche-­Tehuelche confederation and taking on their customs, starts to look like an Indian: “Con su piel mate, sus cabellos negros que habían crecido desmesuradamente durante la expedición, su contextura sólida, una vez engrasado y en cueros sobre el caballo parecía un indio más.” [With his olive skin, his black locks that had grown excessively during the expedition, and his solid build, once greased and naked on a horse, he looked like any other Indian.]68 It is in this moment that people begin to report having seen his double: someone who they thought was him in a place and time when he was elsewhere. Eventually Clarke himself, still dressed as an Indian, has an encounter with his double, who is dressed as Clarke used to dress, in the clothing of a British scientist: “Allí estaba y había alzado la cabeza para mirarlo . . . él mismo, un sosías perfecto, más parecido a él que él mismo pues llevaba sus ropas y fumaba su pipa.” [He was there and had raised his head to look at him . . . he himself, a perfect look-­alike, resembling him more than he himself did; indeed, he was wearing his clothes and smoking his pipe.]69 The reader wonders if the mysterious appearance of Clarke’s double represents a split within his personality due to the effects of colonialism, as Fanon describes; or if perhaps it is simply a metaphorical representation of Clarke’s experience of transculturation, his visible transformation into a white Indian; or if, along these lines, it is a comment on Hernández’s description of the easy confusion of the gaucho and the Indian.70 As it turns out, it is none of these. Just as other mysteries of La liebre’s plot are resolved through the deus ex machina of Clarke’s secret indigeneity, the materialism of heredity and genetics, so is the mystery of Clarke’s

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double. It turns out that this second Clarke is actually Namancurá, his identical twin brother, wearing the clothing Clarke had stowed away after assuming the role of commander, because there was nothing else around for him to put on. Thus, a genetic explanation of identity in La liebre interrupts and precludes the necessity of thinking through the figure of the double that recurs continually throughout the novel. This strange act of self-­sabotage by the novel appears even stranger when one considers the fact that the motif of the double is an important mainstay within the Argentine literary canon in general—­not only in Hernández and Lugones, as we have already seen, but in subsequent writers such as Jorge Luis Borges, Manuel Puig, and Ricardo Piglia, as well as in Roa Bastos (who was Paraguayan but took up the tradition when living in Argentina), and in Roberto Bolaño’s “El gaucho insufrible.” One imagines that Aira, in evoking the figure of the double, seeks to comment on this historical literary trope. But this commentary fails to occur before the question itself is invalidated by the novel’s materialist-­genealogical conclusion that Clarke’s double is really just his long-­lost identical twin. One can therefore surmise that Aira’s message about Darwinian materialism relates precisely to its function of interrupting and obfuscating the thinking that a consideration of the double would facilitate. In response to a dissatisfaction with Aira’s conclusion, the reader may nevertheless insist on an answer to the question of the double’s meaning and wonder about the line of thought that simple kinship interrupts in the novel. Of course, La liebre is in fact thinking through the figure of the double, even if it stages the absurd dismissal of this thinking. Considering that the white Indian is himself a figuration of the double (an equation that Clarke embodies), one line of thinking that hereditary materialism interrupts in the novel is the very thinking that the present chapter has undertaken up to this point: the theories of history that preceded Darwin that made the figure of the white Indian possible to take seriously and then also the recurrence and transformation of the white Indian in Latin American discourse. On a more abstract level, the ending interrupts a consideration of the double as a figure of a colonial relation, in which two worlds—­two legal, cultural, or biological orders—­came into contact for the first time. Jorge Luis Borges, whose work carries out a sustained contemplation of the double, can help illuminate the issue to which Aira alludes. On a basic level, “Pierre Menard” conveys a sense in which the double for Borges is a spatialized representation of historical-­temporal repetition—­a reification of history in the artifact. In “El escritor argentino y la tradición” (1957), he shows how this doubling repetition plays out in the history of gaucho literature. This essay, which directly criticizes Argentine nationalists Lugones and Rojas in their call for the identification of Argentine culture with gaucho culture, presents a view of the gaucho at the limit between that which is original and real and that which is a copy, imitation, or simulacrum. The main arguments of the essay hinge on

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his observation of the difference between poetry actually composed by gauchos, which tends to use a simple, straightforward Spanish, and gauchesque poetry written by non-­gauchos such as Martín Fierro, which abounds in gaucho language and actively seeks to distill the essence of the gaucho spirit. Noting that an absence of camels in the Koran doesn’t make it any less paradigmatically Middle Eastern, Borges argues that the attempt to highlight one’s own originality or differential identity only makes that identity more contrived and inauthentic. Gauchesque literature, even as it displaces real gaucho poetry in its nationalistic canonization—­and even when it is admirable, as in the case of Martín Fierro—­fails to achieve the authenticity it desires: “La poesía gauchesca, que ha producido—­me apresuro a repetirlo—­obras admirables, es un género literario tan artificial como cualquier otro.” [Gauchesque poetry, which has produced—­ I hasten to reiterate—­admirable works, is a literary genre that is just as artificial as any other.]71 Gauchesque poetry is already the artificial double of gaucho poetry, which, ironically, comes into being as an attempt to distill the authentic truth of gaucho language. Thus, the epic poem that Lugones holds up as the highest truth of Argentina’s racial spirit is in fact a simulation or caricature of the real thing. Along lines similar to “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”—­which describes how an invented world is integrated into the public domain in such a way that it eventually gains the force of truth and begins to contaminate reality—­the history of gauchesque literature arises as a series of imitations that gradually displace the original truth. Borges shows the desire for originality and the Real giving way to confusion about what the original actually is, its eventual distortion and loss. Through Borges we can see that the confusion between the gaucho and the Indian that Hernández describes encodes the relation between gauchesque and popular gaucho poetry, which is the relation between what Hernández writes and that which he aspires for it to be and, on a certain level, a relation between himself and the fictional Fierro. Although he frames it as a problem, I would argue that this confusion is actually his secret desire: he wishes that the gaucho were as “original” and autochthonous to the land as the Indian, that the gauchesque poem’s language were as authentic as the gaucho’s—­or that they were even more authentic, realer. Seemingly in response to Hernández, La liebre orchestrates the fulfillment of this desire and thus archives the extent to which it remains today a part of Argentine national subjectivity, even after the questions underlying it are theoretically resolved by the science of heredity, which marks an absolute “biological” difference between Creole and Indian, gauchesque poetry and gaucho song. Clarke’s discovery that he is an Indian affirms a desire for the triumph of the double, for the colonizer to discover that he is actually more legitimate, authentic, autochthonous, and original than the colonized. Prior to Borges, Lugones suggests the ways in which the double represents the coloniality of history itself, as he understood it through a pseudo-­Darwinian lens. Underneath his claim that the gaucho inherits Greek superiority is an

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unresolved anxiety about the implications of Darwin’s work, a narcissism of small differences that defines man’s relation to other races and the ancestors from which he descended: Lugones’s fear is that even if Argentines are original, they will still never entirely escape the ape within, free themselves from barbarism, or be able to entirely dismiss the possibility of their mestizaje—­a fear that they are not wholly white. Or perhaps his fear is that they are simply not original, not made “different” by a glorious ancestry, but defined instead by blind, meaningless contingency and, as such, less real than those truly original subjects of his imagination, haunted by the copy’s lack of unique immanence and integrity, without aura, modern. Aira’s response to Hernández is thus similar to that of Lugones, expressing the same desire that guides Lugones’s attempt to turn Darwin’s profound challenge to his political and biological subjectivity into something good, to make Darwin say that we are original, that we are princes.

The Desire to Be a White Indian as Biopolitical Aperture Although one aim of Martín Fierro, as stated in its introduction, is the integration of the gaucho into the national life of Argentina, the poem also reinforces affection for the gaucho as he is, a stateless, lawless individual. The canonization of this text as a national epic creates a paradox insofar as both volumes conclude with Fierro’s exclusion from national life—­in La ida with Fierro’s decision to live with the Indians and in La vuelta with the irresolution of his status as an outlaw. Fierro and the gaucho in general become national symbols that represent and thus reify a desire to escape the nation-­state, or at least—­if we integrate the conclusions of the second volume—­live within it as if it provided no shelter at all. Both the aestheticizing of gaucho life in the poem and the poem’s canonization as a national text perpetuate a desire to be a white Indian in a country that is conceptualized as a state of nature. The image of gaucho life that Martín Fierro paints, and the vision of the Argentine state it informs and that Lugones promotes, is biopolitical: it defines the national subject as bare or “creaturely life,” as opposed to specifically human life inflected by law, history, and culture.72 Mariana Amato describes the development of a biopolitical current in Lugones’s thinking, linking the contemplation of force in the sci-­fi collection Las fuerzas extrañas to his later political writings.73 According to Amato a key moment in the development of Lugones’s biopolitical worldview is a shift in his thinking that occurs after the First World War, which is most visible in his work La organización de la paz (1925). Prior to this moment, Lugones had been concerned with maintaining a strict differentiation between animal and human life, which correlated to the difference between barbarism and civilization, brute force and the law.74 He had opposed “Germany’s militarized intervention” in the war because it “entailed a barbaric violation of the law through the imposition of

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its military force over international” treaties that he saw as a threat to freedom and human civilization writ large.75 Later, it was the war itself that demonstrated to him the necessity of making recourse to force and caused him to “appreciate the fallacy of the ideology of democracy and pacifism.”76 Amato quotes/translates Lugones: “The principle of subordination of force to the law expired with the war.”77 The transformation Amato observes can be understood as a conversion from his earlier pseudo-­Darwinism to a truly Darwinian materialism—­ a move away from a moral, teleological system to a paradigm of nonteleological life guided only by the principle of survival.78 Although the biopolitical views Lugones expresses in 1925 go directly against his ideas from 1912, Amato maintains that his turnaround is prefigured in his early works of science fiction. The present chapter will conclude by demonstrating that Lugones’s biopolitical vision of Argentina, rooted in a belief that humanity is not a political entity but rather a zoological species, is also prefigured in El payador, whose canonization of Martín Fierro elevates a work that consistently describes the gaucho’s life as that of a wild animal.79 A defining characteristic of the Creole language that Hernández sets out to archive in Martín Fierro is its reflection of the gaucho’s everyday contact with animals. The poetry of the gaucho arises in part through a spontaneous, metonymical application of ranching terminology to nonranching situations. The shoulders of a human being might be referred to as las paletas (the front quarters of a horse), as in the description of Fierro’s fight with the Indian cacique: “Ay no más me tiré al suelo / y lo pisé en las paletas.” [Then and there I dove to the ground / and I pinned him with my foot on his front quarters.]80 When boasting about his lyrical and musical prowess, he describes himself as a bull in the roundup—­“Yo soy toro en mi rodeo”—­which is to say, formidable.81 Poetic comparisons between humans and animals abound and can be either positive or negative. While they establish a continuum between human and animal life, on their own they do not imply a biopolitical dehumanization per se. However, as the poem progresses, it becomes clear that a comparison between men and animals is not just a matter of poetic language but a deeper expression of man’s condition in a land where the only law is the right of the strongest. For example, when Cruz tells about the time he was exiled from his home after his wife eloped with an officer, he describes his life as that of an animal: “Después de aquella desgracia / me refugié en los pajales / andube entre los cardales / como vicho sin guarida; / pero amigo es esa vida / como vida de animales.” [After that disgrace / I took refuge in the grasses /and traveled amid the thistles / like a critter without a den; / this life, my friend, / is like the life of animals.]82 In this case, his comparison with an animal clearly evokes dehumanization as abasement. When Fierro and Cruz decide to embrace the life of the outlaw (matrero), a sense of man becoming animal is reiterated:

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Andaremos de matreros si es preciso pa salvar. Nunca nos ha de faltar ni un guen pingo pa juir, ni un pajal ande dormir, ni un matambre que ensartar. Y cuando sin trapo alguno nos haiga el tiempo dejao, yo le pediré emprestao el cuero a cualquiera lobo, y hago un poncho, si lo sobo, mejor que poncho engomao. [We will be outlaws if that’s what’s required of us. We will lack for nothing not a steed to ride, nor grasses to sleep in, nor a steak to skewer. And when without even a rag we should find ourselves abandoned to the elements, I will take on loan the skin of any wolf I find and make a poncho, which greased is better than a poncho made of rubber.]83

Man’s transformation into a beast is conveyed here by the image of a half-­naked individual killing a wolf and putting on its skin to protect himself from the elements. But this animal skin, which will now serve as Cruz’s shelter, is not merely compensatory: it is better than the rubber poncho, the civilized, urban, modern solution for the rain. While little in the style of life has changed from the previous section in which Cruz describes living like a critter in a negative light, the optimistic tone of this section reflects a revaluation of his dehumanization, a decision to embrace an animal existence as it has been presented to him. This can also be seen in a prideful reappropriation of the title matrero, mirroring revaluations of the words criollo and gaucho, which similarly were once pejorative terms. Through the metaphor of the wolf skin Cruz describes the return to animal life as something akin to de-­alienation. He will never suffer lack in part because he has the strength and know-­how to live off the land. He has merely to accept a shift in values to live as a wolf does and to enjoy it, taking what he needs by force.84 The return to nature, a situation in which human life is no longer differentiated from animal life, is attended by the acceptance of a new system of values that

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includes a rejection of positive law. The gaucho dons the wolf ’s skin and in this moment becomes the wolf, a predatory animal without need of shelter or society and unbound by its laws. The image poetically encodes the Latin proverb that describes the prepolitical condition as one in which man is wolf to man—­homo homini lupus est—­confirming that the gaucho revaluation of animal life is also a revaluation of the political. Significantly, this revaluation of human life as animal life reflects the trajectory not only of the protagonists’ thinking but of the reader’s as well. Insofar as Martín Fierro is held up by Lugones as the cultural object that defines the unity of the nation, he advocates imbuing the national reader with this revaluation of human life as “zoological fact,” leading one to a consideration of the joys of bare life. Even more than Lugones’s political writings, his work toward a canonization of Martín Fierro helps institutionalize a program of reading that produces a desire for a biopolitical state that, rather than aspiring to civilization, prefers survival—­a topic I will describe in greater depth in the final chapter of this work. La liebre registers these biopolitical implications of the desire to be a white Indian contained in any impulse an Argentine might feel to imagine him or herself as the gaucho Martín Fierro and hints at its tragic irony. During a campfire conversation about the convolutions of Mapuche kinship, a cacique named Miltín tells Clarke, “Los indios, frente a ustedes los blancos, representamos la supervivencia del género humano, contra el exterminio.” [We Indians, before you white people, represent the survival of the human race, against extermination.]85 If the life of Indigenous peoples is already viewed by the ethnocentric Westerner as a life of survival—­closer to the struggles of an animal than to a civilized dwelling in the city—­Miltín recasts it through the Indigenous experience of colonialism and foretells a contemporary meaning of Indigenous life as a testament of having survived genocide. By becoming an Indian, Clarke, the English colonizer, also adopts the position of the survivor, a potential victim of colonial extermination. But of course Clarke’s becoming the Indian, insofar as it more generally represents the historical displacement of the Indian by the white on the land, is the genocide. La liebre casts a biopolitical ethos of survival as the colonialist’s claim of victimhood, a white person absolving himself of guilt by imagining himself to be the person whom he has killed.

Chapter 4

The End of History and the Return to Nature

Understanding a conceptualization of the Latin American nation-­state as a return to nature can illuminate questions surrounding a contemporary transition in global order commonly known as globalization. The short story “El Sur” (1953) by Jorge Luis Borges is an especially illustrative reflection on the trope of return that can cast light on a rethinking of globalization within the academy today. “El Sur” archives the relationship among a desire for national identity, for a return to nature, and for the end of history. Through Borges, one can see how these desires, installed into the Argentine national imaginary through the processes of its political and cultural inception, form both the historical and ideological conditions for a perceived weakening of nation-­state sovereignty and rise of anomie during the present day. In recent years scholars have announced a change in the global order in which the nation-­state and its system of law no longer maintain a monopoly on violence as they previously did: it is seen as a situation in which the sovereign decision, deterritorialized and hence universalized, has become “infinitely more arbitrary, violent, spontaneous, and widespread” than it had previously been.1 Latin America in general and Mexico in particular have been described as the vanguards of this new age of insecurity, fear, and unfettered capital. A consideration of diverse cultural phenomena, from the grotesque spectacle of narco-­violence to the ominous silences of the Juarez femicides, has found that “the conceptual vocabularies of political and aesthetic modernity are no longer capable of explaining and regulating the contradictions generated by capitalist modernization today.”2 This sense that the categories we currently use to understand the ordering of the world need to be reexamined and rethought—­here expressed by Patrick Dove—­is the guiding sentiment of a larger project within the field of political philosophy. 77

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In Political Spaces and Global War (originally published as Spazi politici in 2001 and Guerra globale in 2002) Carlo Galli sets out the contours of an academic project that seeks a new language to understand the deeper complexities of the phenomenon heretofore described as “globalization.” Galli introduces the term global war to describe an intensification of what had previously been named globalization, which in his view, after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, began to unravel the traditional spatial order of a nation-­state system that had clearly defined the difference between friend and enemy. In The Passage West (2003) Giacomo Marramao continues this project of describing the present in terms of an epochal shift we do not yet understand. The language that Marramao proposes reframes a process that had previously been understood as principally economic to show it also as a matter of international law; “passage west”—­his conceptual supplement to “globalization”—­is an ongoing process of transition from continental to oceanic nomos, a moving away from the international legal order imposed by imperial Rome to that which was created by England and the United States. In his understanding of this epochal shift, Marramao places special importance on the fall of the Berlin Wall, which he describes in the terminology of Carl Schmitt as the last global katechon—­that is, the last border preserving the political world order and restraining a decline into lawlessness, or anomie. Wendy Brown weighs in on the contemporary state of the Schmittian nomos in Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (2010), arguing that a new proliferation of border walls is an attempt by the nation-­state to slow the waning of its sovereignty. In “Decontainment: The Collapse of the Katechon and the End of Hegemony” (2015) Gareth Williams responds to the call for a “rethinking of the political” with his own concept of “post-­Westphalian decontainment,” describing its impact on an understanding of hegemony within the sphere of state politics.3 For Williams, decontainment and an attendant “exhaustion of the legal norms of land appropriation, division, and distribution; and the socialization of that exhaustion via the multiplication and corporatization of sovereign force” are characterized by an intensification of violence and terror on a global scale.4 In Literature and “Interregnum” (2016) Patrick Dove develops a Gramscian concept of interregnum—­the period of chaos separating regimes or reigns—­in order to describe the “contradictions generated by capitalist modernization today.”5 By seeking a new vocabulary to “reveal to us the concrete possibilities of the new political space we . . . already occupy,” these interventions imply not only an epochal or historical shift in the political ordering of the world but also a shift in the definition of the political itself and the inherited categories of political thought.6 As such, their relation to previous definitions of the political is necessarily uneasy, defined by the problematic of maintaining a foot in the past while at the same time heralding its obsolescence. Whether or not an epochal shift has actually occurred, it is certainly worthwhile to interrogate the possibility of elaborating a political form that is no longer based on the relation between inside and outside, or friend and enemy, and that might be effectuated through the

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deconstruction of concepts such as sovereign, subject, and katechon. Nevertheless, it remains crucial to recognize the ongoing relevance of certain inherited political categories as they continue to evolve and take on new meanings within a changing historical context. Specifically the concept of nature, which lies at the center of Giorgio Agamben’s understanding of the political, remains indispensable. Whatever new vocabulary might be developed, nature remains the most significant concept—­if not the “guiding image” that Galli seeks—­for the actual common consideration of political space today.7 The phenomenon that has been termed postnational passage, passage west, global war, decontainment, and interregnum is still conceived, consciously and unconsciously, as a return to nature. In Homo Sacer (1995) Giorgio Agamben identifies the exclusion of nature as the basic axiom of Western political thought, showing how a territorialized dialectical relation between nomos (law/order) and physis (nature) defined the legal order of the Roman Empire and how this model subsequently served as the foundation of the continental European system of international law that was established with the Peace of Westphalia. The Servian Wall of Rome that separated the realm of the city (the purview of positive law) from the realm of wilderness (that which is outside the law) is the defining limit of the spatialized legal order (nomos) of Europe, on which modern sovereignty is based.8 Aristotle understood nature even more primordially as the unordered, “bare life” (zoe) whose exclusion marks not only the origin of the political but the beginning of human being and human history. Agamben observes, “In Western politics, bare life has the peculiar privilege of being that whose exclusion founds the city of men. It is not by chance, then, that a passage of Aristotle’s Politics situates the proper place of the polis in the transition from voice to language,” which defines the transformation of animal into man.9 Thus, Agamben shows that nature conceptualizes a concurrent spatialization and temporalization, or historicizing, of politics: it is a spatial realm outside the city and the purview of its law, the sovereign violence and exceptionality at the center of the state, and at the same time, the bare life that is transformed into human being/culture by law, a process that constitutes the foundation of history. The “new political space we . . . already occupy” has been defined repeatedly by today’s scholars as the undoing of three valences of order that nature (and the process of its negation) inflects: space, history, and law.10 Marramao’s focus on the fall of the last restraining katechon at the end of the Cold War—­his sense of the epochal importance of the fall of the Berlin Wall—­casts the crisis of defining a new political space as a crisis of walls (or the absence thereof). A dissolution of spatial order is a dissolution of legal order that represents a movement toward the end of history. This image of the destruction of the last wall, which expresses the three-­faceted transition into anomie, is nothing less than the image of a return to the state of nature that (hypothetically) preceded the positive state, upon whose exclusion it was founded.11

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While the call for new vocabulary to describe our current epoch suggests that it makes a break with past forms, the return to nature is a well-­worn trope. As such, the approach I propose suggests the current period can be understood more clearly through its continuity with the past than with any rupture it makes. A knowledge of the history of the discourse surrounding nature—­that is, the conceptual history of nature—­reveals that this “new” epoch, taken as a world return to nature, actually represents the logical outcome of a long process of secularization. On the one hand secularization can be seen as a “closure of Western metaphysics”: passage away from the nation-­state, insofar as its organizing principle is based in messianic Catholic eschatology, would represent the final decline of religion and the power of the church.12 At the same time, however, the decline of Westphalian order as a global katechon can also be seen as the outcome of the logic Western metaphysics sets forth and the realization of the messianic prophecies that define the Judeo-­Christian understanding of history: the return of the God repressed by Enlightenment thinking and the return of myth to the world. Indeed, the principal form that a repression of Christianity has taken in Western thought, and a key gesture of modern secularization, is a sublimation of God into nature. Since Spinoza formulated the equivalence between God and Nature in Ethics (1677), the concept of nature has served as a tool for elaborating rationalist theories of history (and by extension, science, philosophy, and politics) alternative to the Judeo-­Christian system of thought based in the history described in the Bible. Subsequently, nature displaced the Judeo-­Christian God in discourse as an alternative theory of history and an alternative hypothetical past. In Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer describe this secularization—­the displacement of one myth by another that they understand as the main process by which modernity is constituted—­specifically in terms of nature. If, as they describe, the “categories by which Western philosophy defined its timeless order of nature marked out positions that had once been occupied by Ocnus and Persephone, Ariadne and Nereus,” the various Greek gods of a polytheistic worldview, they also “marked out” and vied for the position of universal sovereign held by the Abrahamic monotheistic God.13 As secularization proceeded, nature was increasingly understood as the present-­day remnant of an ancient, divine origin whose truth, studied and observed by science, stood in for the truth of God. Significantly, while in Renaissance thought nature had been largely decoupled from land, it was reterritorialized by Defoe, Rousseau, and English and German Romantics. In response to revolutions in political, scientific, and economic thought, Romantic thinkers began to conflate a secular substitution of God by nature with nature’s apotheosis, its rise to the status of God. Consequently, nature began to simultaneously evoke a secularized, scientific-­ mathematical view of a world set apart from biblical history—­an ahistorical field that reduces the world to a play of force—­and a mystical view of God’s stamp within the present that was increasingly tied to the wilderness landscape.

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Over the years, nature has grown into a widely held structure of belief that is not fully recognized as such, an operative myth that hides in plain view. In The Inoperative Community (1991) Jean-­Luc Nancy observes that an operative myth is one that is not recognized as a myth. The word myth itself casts doubt on the validity of that to which it refers; to designate a myth is to make it visible as myth and impute its falsity and obsolescence. An operative myth (or God) is one that is so readily accepted that it is not even recognized as such and about which there is no doubt as to its existence. This view, elaborated by Marcel Gauchet in The Disenchantment of the World (1985), suggests that Judeo-­ Christian religion is already secularized insofar as it raises the question of faith at all in its doxa. The test of obedience involved in the binding of Isaac casts Judaism as a departure from Gauchet’s imagination of true “religion” (though it would not even bear that name) as the totemic spirituality that existed during a time in which man was “completely powerless in the face of overwhelming natural forces,” which cannot be fully recognized by its adherents due to its absolute proximity.14 While the Abrahamic God calls attention to himself as a god, the Romantic formulation of nature that displaces God erases the self-­conscious awareness to which the question of faith calls attention. The logical conclusion of a repression of metaphysics in modernity and the total displacement of myth by natural truth could amount to the covert apotheosis of this specific idea of truth into a god. We find ourselves in the situation that Nancy describes, where we increasingly adhere to an “absence of myth as ‘a kind of myth’ in itself.”15 If (following Weber) Gauchet finds that “Christianity proves to have been a religion for departing from religion,” nature, then, is a secularism for departing from secularism.16 It is not arbitrary that the apotheosis of nature in modernity occurs to it and not to some other concept. Nature represents all that had to be negated by the logic that produced modernity and the current global order. Its return would therefore constitute a return of the repressed (or what is imagined to have been repressed), the persistence or spectral haunting of the past retained in any dialectical aufhebung. The return of the divine in the guise of nature is also the return by nature to the godlike value Gauchet shows it to have previously held, or at least that he imagines that it held. This last point is important. If Gauchet’s imagination of nature is another symptom of the ideological effects of Romanticism, his view only confirms the idea that the fantasy of nature represents the desire repressed in modernity. While it is difficult to truly know, I do not believe that this repression was historical/epochal, something that actually occurred at a specific time in the past. It is instead a historicized expression of ongoing repression, an idealized past that almost certainly never existed but that, as the horizon of our collective desire, could someday become a reality. In taking on its function as a stand-­in for the Judeo-­Christian God, nature absorbs and encodes the specifically Judeo-­Christian expectation of messianic

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return and a subsequent apocalypse, or end of history. If this is a mere coincidence, it is an extremely felicitous one. A vision of the world’s return to nature easily maps onto the messianic return of God to the earth. If the world undergoes a political transition that is envisioned as this return to nature, such a return would stand in for the fruition and fulfillment of Judeo-­Christian prophecy, albeit under an unexpected guise.17 Just as the Christian apocalypse was awaited during the Middle Ages with both excitement and dread, nature brings similar conflicting feelings into close proximity and articulates into a single image the various projections of its meaning: the end of history as utopia and as the terror of global catastrophe.18 On the one hand it is envisioned as a space of truth, beauty, and goodness. The return to this nature represents a return to freedom, to a time prior to the imposition of a seemingly arbitrary positive law, as the possibility of beginning a new historical epoch divorced from the past, or a rupture that facilitates an escape from the nightmare of history. On the other hand it is a terrifying vision of the end of the world, the coming collapse of civilization, followed by universal civil war, violence, and a new history of survival. The revaluation of survival is a particularly noteworthy trend in popular cultural production and one of the most significant expressions of a nature fantasy adapted to contemporary conditions of unfettered capital: in film (World War Z, The Road, Snowpiercer, Tremors, The Day after Tomorrow) and television (Survivor, Man vs. Wild), the hunting/gun catalogs that also sell zombie apocalypse weapons, bumper stickers (“Country Boy Can Survive”), the paleo diet, and so on. In “Survival of the Richest” Evan Osnos shows that a fantasy generally attributed to rural “survivalists” has been increasingly adopted by the global elite, leaders of the tech industry in particular. Osnos describes the “preoccupation with the apocalypse” that has come to “flourish in Silicon Valley,” which has CEOs storing supplies in nuclear bomb–­proof bunkers and buying up land in New Zealand, investing in a future return to nature once end-­times arrive.19 The choice of New Zealand itself, whose beautiful landscapes feature prominently in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings films (another apocalypse fantasy), points to the identity of pristine nature, apocalypse, and mythical return in the popular imaginary: the new beginning will occur in the primordial space of a mythical past, Middle Earth. Like that of any survivalist, or religious believer, their preparation only intensifies a secret wish that their worst fears be confirmed and that upon the arrival of the end of the world, they will be proven right, redeemed by their preparation, rewarded for their circumspection, and given a good return on their investment. They will survive because they deserve to, while the rest will perish. Bruno Latour argues along similar lines that the global elite is accelerating an apocalyptic historical trajectory: “The elites were so thoroughly enlightened that they realized there would be no future for the world and that they needed to

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get rid of all the burdens of solidarity as fast as possible (hence, deregulation); to construct a kind of golden fortress for the tiny percent of people who would manage to get on in life (leading us to soaring inequality); and to hide the crass selfishness of this flight from the common world, to completely deny the existence of the threat (i.e., deny climate change).”20 Of course this does not occur conscientiously; there is no active conspiracy to accelerate the destruction of the world. Climate change deniers, for example, certainly must believe (or desire to believe) their own claims. More than willful callousness, such thinking is the product of fantasy and of an ideology that induces people to unconsciously work toward this end. In “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature” (1995) William Cronon shows how the rise of nature as an inherent good paradoxically facilitates the destruction of the environment. A desire to experience a space without human beings brings explorers and tourists to previously untrammeled places. As “natural” environments are encroached upon by modern ones and become increasingly scarce, the operative myth of nature will continue to gain power, but it is not clear that this power will be able to stand in the way of environmental destruction. Even as nature takes on a spiritual value that might stand against the instrumental logic of capitalism and modernity, as an inducement to conservation, it is immediately subsumed into a system of supply and demand: the scarcity of the rhinoceros, for example, causes the value of its horn to increase and accelerates the process by which it is brought to extinction.21 The apotheosis of nature seems just as likely to reinforce the destructive effects of globalization as it is to slow them. Global catastrophe—­something like a total destruction of the environment or nuclear war, which would lead to a period of posthistoric survivalism or the end of the human race altogether—­tends to be imagined as the unintended side effect of eventualities that are beyond our individual control (the effects of global warming resulting from the burning of fossil fuels, for example). However, far more worrisome is the possibility that the end of history would be brought about by a secret collective desire that it be so. It is unclear if we have actually arrived at the cusp of the end of history, but if we ever do, it could very well be as the fulfillment of a self-­fulfilling prophecy. Therefore, further investigation into the desire for nature as the end of history must constitute part of an inquiry into our new political space. In order to understand a decline or crisis of the nation that is viewed as a return to nature, we must appreciate how the desire for national identity itself mobilizes those desires that would undo it. Jorge Luis Borges identifies this paradox in the myth of the return to nature as it relates to Argentine national identity. His story “El Sur” indicates that the desire for integrity and identity—­the ordering wall of national difference—­is inextricably bound up with a desire for self-­ destruction and the end of history.

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Desire for National Identity and the Death Drive “El Sur,” first published in the second edition of Ficciones in 1953, is the story of an urban librarian who, when traveling to his ancestral estancia in the pampas of Argentina, is drawn into a knife fight akin to those of Martín Fierro (1872), which were canonized as an expression of the national culture and spirit. It is strange that Juan Dahlmann, the protagonist, accepts the duel, which, as a greenhorn facing an experienced campesino, he is almost sure to lose. The events suggest a connection between the ideology of the nation-­state that appears to motivate his acceptance of the duel and a trajectory toward death. Insofar as Dahlmann’s trip south is framed as a return to his own familial past (with strong Oedipal overtones) and concludes in the lawless space beyond the city, “El Sur” is an observation of the connections among a desire for (national) identity, nostalgic return (to nature, to the homeland) or repetition of the past, and death. As such, years before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, “El Sur” articulates the conceptual nexus that defines the present political moment. In The Catastrophe of Modernity (2004) Patrick Dove interprets “El Sur” as a critique of a specifically modern notion of teleology supposed to culminate in “the end of history” described by Francis Fukuyama as “state of permanent accord.”22 In the Argentine context it is Sarmiento’s and Lugones’s imagination of a coming Argentine modernity as a “time when the nation will be freed from its prior restraints . . . and thereby arrive at, or return to a state of self-­agreement or wholeness.”23 For Dove, Dahlmann’s death and the manner in which it comes about represent a failure not only of the nation-­state form of the political but also of the larger theory of progress that informs it; “El Sur” describes “the catastrophic failure of modernity itself.”24 In accepting the duel, and with it his own death, “he chooses to accept this symbolic collapse [of modernity] as his own.”25 Dove argues that the story, in telling of the collapse of modernity, is a critique of nationalism. His reading is based largely on the fact that Dahlmann dies and that this death is meaningless. The meaninglessness of his death hinges on his passiveness in accepting the duel. Rather than deciding himself to duel, “the South” decides for him when the inscrutable, ecstatic gaucho throws him the knife and he absentmindedly picks it up, unwittingly signaling his agreement to fight. As such, the identity he attains by dying in a knife fight under the stars has little to do with who he really is. It is a matter of contingency more than the expression of any underlying reality. The duel has no possibility of producing justice, and Dahlmann himself seems to “bear no relation to the outcome as such.”26 In dying, Dahlmann doesn’t choose; he effectively does nothing. Dove writes, “Behind the illusion of choosing between opposing identities, Borges proposes that our identity in fact chooses us” and that “this is a tragic thought.”27 Dahlmann’s unnecessary death is an expression of his willingness to be interpellated by a Romantic imagination of the South as the location of canonical national

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identity resulting from a meaning ascribed by the gauchesque literary genre. His death is quixotic and ideological, caused on some level by his attraction to the fictional duels depicted in literature. As such, the story must be read as a “parodic treatment of criollo nationalism,”28 “a critique of nationalist ideology”29 and the “myriad attempts to organize the Argentine nation into ‘One,’ or a self-­identical and self-­sufficient totality.’”30 Dahlmann’s death also means that national identity takes on the quality of “Lacan’s Real” as a desire for self-­identity that can never be attained:31 “The Borgesian critique of nationalism hinges on the appeal of a ‘disinterest’ whose secret truth is an ‘experience’ of the limit—­of the opening that gives rise to and vanishes before every possible experience.”32 The fact that Dahlmann fails to reach the estancia he sets as the goal of his search is another representation of the unattainability of the national object of desire, a national “Real” of self-­identical immanence. Dove’s reading of “El Sur” as a critique of modern and nationalist teleologies and the nostalgic “dream of recovery” of the national Real must be qualified in a simple way.33 Although Dahlmann’s death is perhaps catastrophic and symptomatic of modernity, according to its own logic, it is not entirely “tragic.” One can read his death simply as the true aim of his search and a paradoxical but integral part of the logic modernity sets out from the start. Far from having his dream deferred, in the end Dahlmann’s wish is fulfilled. “El Sur” shows death to be a constitutive part of the nation-­state fantasy, not the undoing of identity but rather its culmination. Read in this way, “El Sur” would be a faithful representation of a myth operating at the center of the modern nation-­state and modernity in general as a secret will to destruction. To the extent that the nation-­state is the dream of utopia, Dahlmann’s death is the apocalypse—­or sacred end of history—­ that continues to haunt it. Be it absurd or be it terrifying, the implications of this interpretation are more serious than a reading that assumes the text is a parody—­or mockery—­of national identification. The interpretation of “El Sur” that I propose is simple but perhaps strange to a modern reader who is accustomed to understanding death as something that is inherently bad. The story seems conscious of this obstacle and actively seeks to make such a reading possible by facing the reader with the fact that Dahlmann himself does not consider his death to be tragic. His contemplation of two possible deaths immediately prior to the duel highlights a contrast between two regimes of value: modern, scientific instrumentalization, which seeks to foment life—­ or in the words of Michel Foucault, “‘make’ live”—­ (represented by the death in the city hospital) and the noninstrumental, sacrificial, Romantic embracing of death in a country duel.34 “Sintió, al atravesar el umbral, que morir en una pelea de cuchillo, a cielo abierto y acometiendo hubiera sido una liberación para él, una felicidad y una fiesta, en la primera noche del sanatorio, cuando le clavaron la aguja.” [He felt, upon crossing the threshold, that

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dying in a knife fight under the open sky, engaging in combat, would have been a liberation for him, a joy and celebration, during the first night in the sanitarium, when they stuck him with the needle.]35 It is no coincidence that the night in the hospital to which he refers here—­his subjection to modern medicine—­is a moment in which Dahlmann experiences hatred for his own identity: En cuanto llegó, lo desvistieron; le raparon la cabeza, lo sujetaron con metales a una camilla, lo iluminaron hasta la ceguera y el vértigo, lo auscultaron y un hombre enmascarado le clavó una aguja en el brazo. . . . En esos días, Dahlmann minuciosamente se odió; odió su identidad. [As soon as he arrived they unclothed him; they shaved his head, they secured him with metal braces to a cot, they shined lights on him until he was blind and reeling, they examined him, and a masked man stuck a needle in his arm. . . . During these days, Dahlmann thoroughly hated himself, hated his identity.]36

Dahlmann’s self-­hatred bears on those aspects of his identity that pertain to a modernity associated with scientifically driven progress, the medicine that would preserve his life through dehumanizing means. It is against this biopolitical, absolute valuation of survival that reduces man to bare life that the knife fight goes. Insofar as it rejects the regime of values upheld by science and instrumental reason, one can understand the death (and identity) that Dahlmann desires as a return not only to the site of national Romantic autonomy but also to the sacred, the vestige of modernity’s repressed theological content identified and recovered by literary and political Romanticism. Dahlmann’s death is indeed a form of sacrifice, as Dove suggests, but it is not a sacrifice to the “greater glory of the South,” akin to a pagan ritual seeking a supernatural recompense of rain or fertility.37 The logic of Dahlmann’s sacrifice is akin to that described by Georges Bataille: a deliberate destruction (often of a useful object) that suspends man’s relation of instrumentality (usage) with the world in order to experience it more truly. This impulse toward erotic fusion and the sacred at the heart of sacrifice is identified by Bataille explicitly as a desire for “the definitive emptiness of death,”38 the “totality of Being” or the “totality of the real,”39 all of which belong to the duel in “El Sur.” Bataille understands a suspension of instrumentality in sacrifice also as a bracketing of time and teleological history. If the preservation of life is the primary imperative that determines man’s orientation toward the future—­ the activities of accumulation and shelter making that anticipate future adversity and danger—­sacrifice disrupts this forward thinking, either by interrupting his normal relation to things that are useful for preserving life (through the destruction of those objects) or with life itself (as in human sacrifice). Sacrifice establishes a more intimate relation to the present, against the anxieties produced by

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a hypothetical future. “El Sur” first alludes to this kind of absolute present that is sometimes bracketed by sacrifice when Dahlmann is waiting for the train in a Buenos Aires café and sees a cat in a café window. He perceives it as a magical animal (“mágico animal”) that lives in the eternity of the present moment (“la actualidad, en la eternidad del instante”) and, as such, in a manner that is entirely alien to him.40 This motif resurfaces in the last sentence of the story, when the narrative unexpectedly shifts into the present tense: “Dahlmann empuña con firmeza el cuchillo, que acaso no sabrá manejar, y sale a la llanura.” [Dahlmann takes the knife firmly in his hand, which, perhaps, he will not know how to use, and walks out onto the plain.]41 Crossing the threshold of the sacrificial ceremony, Dahlmann crosses into the eternal present (tense) of the magical animal. His death amounts to a final communion with the Real synonymous with a suspension or end of history and a return to animal life. In addition to expressing a general logic of sacrifice and the desire for the national Real of the gaucho’s death in a knife fight, Dahlmann’s death takes on a specific meaning that casts familial communion and repetition of the past as the true bases for personal identification. By perishing in battle on the pampas, under the stars, Dahlmann doesn’t just reproduce a national ideology promoted by the fictional events of the gaucho novel; he also effectively reiterates a death akin to that of his grandfather, “aquel Francisco Flores, de 2 de infantería de línea, que murió en la frontera de Buenos Aires, lanceado por indios de Catriel” [one Francisco Flores, of the second infantry division, who died on the frontier of Buenos Aires, run through by the spears of Catriel’s Indians].42 Flores represents the more truly “Argentine” side of his family tree (against his paternal German namesake), but perhaps more important is the fact of his courageous death, which is the main reason cited for Dahlmann’s selective identification with this lineage: “En la discordia de sus dos linajes, Juan Dahlmann . . . eligió el de ese antepasado romántico, de muerte romántica.” [In the discord of his two lineages, Juan Dahlmann . . . chose that of his Romantic antecedent, who died a Romantic death.]43 At the end of the story, in death, Dahlmann comes to resemble that admired ancestor who made him want to be Argentine in the first place. He repeats his honorable death in combat on the pampa, forging the desired union between past and present. Dahlmann’s nostalgic communion can be read as an expression of the death drive, which Freud describes in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) as “a compulsion to repeat which overrides the pleasure principle,” the latter being the notion that human behavior is oriented by the desire to maximize pleasure.44 “Repetition, the re-­experiencing of something identical, is clearly in itself a source of pleasure,” even when the experience that is repeated is not in itself pleasurable.45 There is an impulse to relive not only pleasurable events but also traumatic ones, even those so unpleasant as to have been repressed. Behind this pleasure of repetition, Freud identifies “an urge in all life to restore an earlier

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state of things.”46 According to this principle, “the aim of all life is death” because “inanimate things existed before living ones.”47 Dahlmann’s desire for identity, a desire to be his grandfather that stands as an Oedipal act of displacement and supersession of the father (the pleasure principle), is at the same time a desire for return to a primordial state of being impelling him toward destruction (the death drive). An impulse toward destruction is contained in the desire to repeat. Insofar as this destructive impulse is also expressed in sacrifice, the suspension of history occurring therein at times becomes identical to a repetition of history.48 Borges’s observation about a relation between the suspension of history and its repetition, which is already interesting and complex in itself, resonates with yet another of the symbolic overdeterminations of “El Sur”: a tension between the city and the country introduced to Argentine culture and canonized by Sarmiento’s discourse of civilization and barbarism. It is significant that Dahlmann should find a national end of history—­one that is also a repetition—­and the location of Argentine culture, in a return to the “desert” of Sarmiento and Hernández.49 On an intertextual level Dahlmann’s return to the wild pampa iterates the discursive return to nature theorized and performed by Latin American culture as the fundamental act of nation building after independence from Spain as a means of manifesting cultural autonomy. Mirroring Dahlmann, through his act of writing, Borges returns to the natural landscape of national independence, the paradigmatically Argentine desert of the gaucho, and more broadly, the pan-­American state of nature described by José María Heredia, Andrés Bello, Esteban Echeverría, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, and José Martí, among others, as a realm standing outside the flow of history that could serve as the origin of new national cultures. The title of the story reinforces a sense that the ostensibly ahistorical and lawless nature on the other side of the frontier is in fact its main interest. As such “El Sur” reflects on the primary foundation myth of the new nation, which imbued nature with an importance that made it an object of desire for following generations, and must be seen as one of the most important iterations of a trope in which a hero goes on a search in the wilderness, as a literary means by which to think about that space and its bearing on national identity.50 This Latin American literary tradition, and the politics it defines, becomes an eternal return to a nature/nation that isn’t there. The searching return to nature, becoming return to return, which only turns up absence and death, is the ceremony by which the Latin American nation-­state is simultaneously constituted and undone. Today, it can also be read as the myth of an ongoing transition to a postnational condition, to globalization, “decontainment,” or the biopolitical state.

The Nation-­S tate as a Wild Garden “El Sur” registers the unity between a desire for the return of/to the sacred that is symptomatic of a more general backlash against modernity and a desire for an

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idea of nature particular to the history of the Argentine nation-­state and Latin American political Romanticism in general. Borges shows how Latin American states that take nature as their founding myth ingrain the desire for nature in their political subjects in its passage through the desire for the attainment of the plenitude of national identification. The state’s promise of identity effectively creates a desire for all those things that nature signifies, including a suspension of positive law and the end of history. Thus, it can be argued that the ideology of Latin American nations paradoxically sets in motion a trajectory toward a desire for their own dissolution, the end of the state. By establishing nature as its constitutive center, rather than as its constitutive outside as it had been with the traditional European nation-­state, the Latin American state intensifies the paradox of exceptionality already present in the earlier model and, in a sense, establishes itself on the brink of impossibility. If the wellspring of a new national culture and unity was the wild, unsettled, and undifferentiated landscape, which signified the possibility of returning to a state of ahistoricity, the necessity of a line demarcating the territory of the state’s legal domain (its sovereignty) remained. Giorgio Agamben notes that the canonical model for this territorial ordering in modernity (the nomos of the earth) is the Servian Wall encircling Rome. It is through the combination of the two paradigms of the Latin American state—­that it is nature and that it is a territorial legal entity—­that we arrive at the image of the Latin American nation-­state as the wall encircling nature. Borges himself evokes the strange image of wild enclosure that is so fundamental to Latin American political Romanticism in a pair of essays in Otras inquisiciones, published a year before “El Sur” in 1952: “La muralla y los libros,” which meditates on the construction of the Great Wall of China, and “El sueño de Coleridge,” which attends to a poem that describes the construction of Xanadu by the eponymous Mongolian emperor “Kubla Khan” (1816). In the first essay Borges considers how the construction of the Great Wall of China by Emperor Shih Huang Ti was accompanied by the destruction of the historical record: “Tres mil años de cronología tenían los chinos . . . cuando Shih Huang Ti ordenó que la historia empezara con él.” [The Chinese had three thousand years of chronology . . . when Shih Huang Ti ordered that history would begin with him.]51 In pointing to this mythical wall that predates both Rome’s Servian Wall and the Berlin Wall, Borges suggests not merely that it is a practical necessity for the spatial ordering of the earth but that perhaps it (and the act of territorial ordering itself) is also primordially an effect of a desire to enclose or exclude certain histories and temporalities. A similar sentiment can be found in Coleridge’s poem, which describes a “pleasure dome” that encloses the wilderness, with “forests” and a “deep romantic chasm,” “a savage place.”52 “El sueño de Coleridge,” in thinking about how the poem’s genesis in a dream felicitously repeats the circumstances of Khan’s original imagination of his palace (which also took place

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in a dream), invites the reader to consider the meaning of historical repetition and mirroring. In the proximity of the two essays in the text, Borges appears to invite a similar comparison between Khan’s palace as described by Coleridge and the Great Wall of China. If Borges raises questions about the association between the two reflections—­the repetition of the image of the wall whose purpose is to enclose a space divorced from history in “La muralla y los libros” and “El sueño de Coleridge”—­“El Sur” appears a year later as an addendum. It shows the Latin American nation-­state as another iteration within a long-­ standing tradition of building a wall to enclose a fantasy of ahistoricity, to establish rule through the erasure of the past.

The Meaning of Return The view that Borges expresses in “El Sur” challenges Marramao’s strongly epochal interpretation of a contemporary “nostalgia syndrome”: “the peculiar form assumed by the question of identity in a glocalized world that is no longer anchored to the territorial politics of nation-­states.”53 Marramao, seeming to refer to Deleuze’s thinking on repetition and difference, is emphatic that what appears to be a return to older forms of identity and community is in fact the marker of a departure from previous historical forms: We must therefore agree upon the meaning to be attributed to the expression “the return of the community.” Although it is expressed as a nostalgia for origins, this “return”—­precisely insofar as it takes the form of a demand for “compensation for damages” from Modernity and of a search for a compensatory warmth from the community against the “Big Chill” of the purely procedural institutions of our democracies—­is not really a repeat, a pure and simple rerun of the past, but is a claim which is subsequent to the modern individual, after the Leviathan, which follows the neutral styling of political association into a “large body” composed of atomized individuals, of indivisible monads isolated from one another.54

For Marramao, a failure of the Leviathan, or modern state, to fulfill its promise—­ especially its failure to create real community—­is a clear epochal marker, and a perception of this failure gives rise to “a proliferation of phenomena of reterritorialization, which increase exponentially the demands for autonomy and identity-­based belonging” in the globalized world.55 “El Sur” suggests that it is not merely a historical failure or exhaustion of nation-­state identity that inspires a nostalgia leading back to nature or older, more local forms of community but also the desire for identity that the modern state pursues at its inception and subsequently mobilizes, organizes, and reinforces. If the “post-­Leviathan” return to nature is a novel historical development, its repetition of the desire for return itself remains timeworn. Even if the return

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is not a simple repeat, it would nonetheless continue to dialectically retain the prophecy that such a return is supposed to fulfill and thus occur as a continuation of a long-­standing political theology. The desire underlying any “nostalgia syndrome” of today will not simply fade along with the memory of the state’s promise of community; we cannot reasonably expect a closure of Western metaphysics any time soon. If we have entered a new phase of world history, it will be misunderstood if it is characterized in terms of a rupture with the past. It will be comprehended only by examining its emergence from the past and its connection to it and, at times, recurring to the same vocabulary that was used to describe that past. “El Sur” shows this connection in an ongoing relationship between spatialized “nature” and the definition of the political, in a desire for the sacred that survives the transition to modernity preserved in the desire for national identity, and how it transforms into a desire to arrive at the end of the world in a state of mythical nature, the suspension of history in the magical animal. It thus allows us to see how a desire for the communion of the nation-­state leads back to the nature that it was supposed to negate. Perhaps the most significant irony of Dahlmann’s return is that, while ostensibly going against the modernity of the hospital and the imperative of “making live,” the nature he embraces is in fact the secret engine of the same modernity. The fantasy of becoming the magical animal is identical to the biopolitical fantasy of return in Martín Fierro, which understands its reality more clearly as a Darwinian regime of survival in which the life of the animal is the debased experience of precariousness, bare life as understood by Agamben. It is precisely the double register of this fantasy that “El Sur” describes so well—­the simultaneous truth of two seemingly incompatible visions of the end of the world, one as a celebration and the other as a hell, which maps onto a strange specular relationship between the South and the hospital, Xanadu and Auschwitz. It is an illustration of the thinking that traces a line from the one to the other, the thinking through which being killed in a knife fight in the absence of law and the state could somehow be good. This book will continue by pursuing a question about the definition of a global political space in light of these observations about a conceptualization of the state as an enclosure of nature taken alternately as utopia and inferno. The following chapter illustrates one way in which a fantasy of the nation as a walled garden becomes a model of a biopolitical state. It proposes this immured space of exception in which law has become the law of nature, where man is reduced to bare life, and where the only right is the right of the strongest, as the image that Galli seeks.

Chapter 5

The Garden, the Camp, and the Biopolitical State

Giorgio Agamben sheds light on a transition from traditional politics to biopolitics first described as such by Michel Foucault by arguing that the traditional political and legal order of the West has transformed into one that is modeled on the concentration camp. Whether or not it is useful to see the opposition between traditional politics and biopolitics as a clear-­cut historical supersession, Agamben sets forth an important theoretical tool for comprehending the present global scenario, which I understand through Borges to be the opposition and tension between the political model of a wall enclosing the city and that of a wall enclosing “nature.” Here I develop an idea of the biopolitical state as the enclosure of nature that is implied in Agamben’s work by showing how the politics of the camp he describes is historically and ideologically related to a politics of the botanical garden—­the garden taken as a model for the state arising in colonial Latin America. The garden and the camp are opposite faces of the same coin, enclosures of nature that have served as the basis for fantasies of a rational, scientifically ordered state. In short, the camp is the dark outgrowth of the garden, the latter being a more obviously Edenic vision of society’s return to goodness and truth. Understanding the historical and ideological relation between garden and camp can illuminate how the camp became a political model in the first place and, more importantly, how it continues to condition the political present as Agamben suggests. Imagined in a general way, as an abstract model, the enclosure of nature is unsettling because, contrasted with a city wall or a wall enclosing a building, the construction appears to protect and frame nothing. The poem “Kubla Khan” (1816) by Samuel Taylor Coleridge presents this abstracted view of a wall around nature and calls attention to the strangeness of the aesthetic impression it creates: 92

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So twice five miles of fertile ground with walls and towers were girdled round: And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills, Where blossomed many an incense-­bearing tree; And there were forests ancient as the hills, Enfolding sunny spots of greenery. But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted Down the green hill athwart a cedern cover! A savage place! as holy and enchanted As e’er.1

The extravagant uselessness of a turreted wall enclosing ten miles of land—­ including gardens but also wilderness—­appears to be an end in itself. One wonders why such a structure would exist and what its purpose could be. It seems one would only encounter such a structure in reality as a ruin, as a wall that once enclosed something substantial that has since been lost. At the outset of this chapter, I want to note the strangeness of the aesthetic impression left by the wall that surrounds nothing—­or what appears to be nothing—­which makes a place out of the no-­place and which, according to my reading of the Paraguayan author Augusto Roa Bastos, represents the utopia of the modern state. The impression can be understood in part as an effect of the erasure of history performed by the concept of nature itself. The fact that we sense the wall encloses nothing reflects a fulfillment of nature’s ideological function. Coleridge’s myth, which presents the image of a structure that protects and frames erasure, can be read as an expression of this erasure’s reification. In using this image to make sense of the biopolitical state, it is necessary to navigate a double imperative of recognizing the political centrality of an erasure in the admittedly vague image of a wall around nature while at the same time historicizing it, accounting for the specificity of the nature enclosed in each of its historical instantiations (which include not only concentration camps but sites of agricultural production such as the plantation, the ingenio, the cattle pasture, the siringal, and controlled sites of extraction such as the oil field, silver mine, emerald mine, etc.). In this way it becomes possible to see how it represents the political legacy that we have inherited, the bad paradise with which we continue to grapple.

The Camp as Epochal Marker and Global Horizon: From Politics to Biopolitics The enigmatic words that appear in the final sections of Giorgio Agamben’s work Homo Sacer (1995) carry special significance within an ongoing effort to describe today’s political space: “Today it is not the city but rather the camp that is the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West.”2 We must “regard the camp not

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as a historical fact and an anomaly belonging to the past (even if still verifiable) but in some way as the hidden matrix and nomos of the political space in which we are still living.”3 Agamben signals a historical shift away from a traditional notion of the political that is based on the model of the city toward the model of the camp, defined as the biopolitical: what I understand here as a shift from immured city to immured nature. His focus on the camp responds to and modifies Foucault’s definition of biopolitics, emphasizing the notion that politics cannot be politics if its locus is not the polis (a notion reflected in basic etymology).4 A “politics” whose principle domain is nature, bare life, or the lawlessness of exceptionality is not politics but rather biopolitics. It takes the nature existing beyond the walls of the city—­what had traditionally been understood as that which politics negated and excluded—­and places it within the walls (i.e., within the frame of history, law, and the state). In The State of Exception (2003), Agamben continues developing the concept of biopolitics that he presents in Homo Sacer, the “state of exception” being the thread that links the biopolitics of Nazism to that of the present.5 Agamben understands measures taken by the Bush administration following the terrorist attacks of 9/11—­torture and extrajudicial killings—­as exemplary of the present political space, evidence that nation-­states have come to depend on a permanent state of exception. But while the claim of Homo Sacer—­that the concentration camp, as a pioneering institution of the state of exception, is the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West—­resounds with political and historical significance, The State of Exception focuses tightly on the juridical significance of the shift to biopolitics and does not answer to its more disquieting implications. If Agamben sees the camp as the political model of the present, it is not as a spatial or ideological model but rather as a juridical one: the structure of a sovereignty that interiorizes the exception. Although he does not probe its implication beyond the juridical realm, his words nonetheless suggest that the political space in which we are living and the horizon it sets out for the world are akin to Auschwitz—­which is to say, unspeakable atrocity. In practical terms, from a privileged, white, middle-­class perspective in the United States, it certainly does not feel like we are living in a global space ordered by Auschwitz, and to read Agamben in this way seems to run the risk of belittling the experience of the people who suffered and died in the camps. Still, the words are alarming, a warning suggesting that even if the world today does not seem like Auschwitz, perhaps it is—­or that Auschwitz continues to stand as the logical conclusion of the present state of affairs and that something like it awaits in the future: a universalization of the state of exception, global war of all against all, and a historical unfolding guided by the principle of survival. It is important to note here that the epochal expansion of the camp—­a vision of its enclosure coming to encompass the world—­was observed by Primo Levi

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years earlier in The Truce (1963), a testimonial account of the days following the end of the Second World War in Europe. In the book’s closing words Levi describes a recurring dream that begins once he finally arrives home: “I am in the Lager once more, and nothing is true outside the Lager. All the rest was a brief pause, a deception of the senses, a dream.”6 This final sense of the camp as a new definition of truth was prefigured in a conversation with the merchant Mordo Nahum—­the Greek—­with whom he traveled shortly after having been liberated from Auschwitz: “‘But the war is over,’ I objected: and I thought it was over, as did many in those months of truce, in a much more universal sense than one dares to think today. ‘There is always war,’ replied Mordo Nahum memorably. . . . The Lager had happened to both of us; I had felt it as a monstrous upheaval, a loathsome anomaly in my history and in the history of the world; he, as a sad confirmation of things well known. ‘There is always war,’ man is wolf to man: an old story.”7 Levi’s experience of the camp’s complete expansion into the world at the end of the text mirrors the way he initially experiences the camp itself, as a monstrous upheaval in his personal history and the history of the world. Within his personal history it is a matter of his dawning awareness and disenchantment, as in the awakening from a dream. This disenchantment is not just Levi’s, however. It is an ostensibly epochal disenchantment of the world insofar as Auschwitz, along with the atom bomb, has come to represent the exhaustion of a simple progressive concept of history defining modernity. These sections of The Truce evoke Levi’s previous testimony, the preface to If This Is a Man (1958), in which he explicitly reflects on the philosophical bearing of the camp on world history. He sees the camp as what happens when an ordinary sense of the friend/enemy distinction is made systematic: “Many people—­many nations—­can find themselves holding, more or less wittingly, that ‘every stranger is an enemy.’ For the most part this conviction lies deep down like some latent infection; it betrays itself in only random, disconnected acts, and does not lie at the base of a system of reason. But when this does come about, when the unspoken dogma becomes the major premiss [sic] in a syllogism, then, at the end of the chain, there is the Lager.”8 Insofar as the friend/enemy distinction is the central premise of the modern concept of the political as Carl Schmitt defines it, Levi’s observation implies that the camp is the secret telos of politics in their current form, and his work must therefore be seen as a precedent for Agamben’s observations. If Agamben chose not to address the most disconcerting implications of the universalization of the camp that both he and Levi observe, the writing of Paraguayan thinker Augusto Roa Bastos can help do that work. Roa Bastos observes a similar structure: an expansion of the space of enclosure, or frame of the camp, from a limited area within the state, to the state itself, and then finally to the world. In his exploration of a vision of the biopolitical state (in this case, Paraguay) as a giant camp that interiorizes and universalizes nature (exceptionality,

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lawlessness, and bare life) within its borders, Roa Bastos carries out thinking not only of today’s biopolitical space but also of what might lie beyond it.

The Question of the Garden and the Camp In responding to Agamben, the point of departure for the present chapter is an assertion that there is an important conceptual relationship and secret identity between the camp and the walled garden and that a consideration of this relationship in Latin American thought can illuminate and complement Agamben’s claims. This is in part because the Latin American state was an integral discursive condition of possibility for the world order Agamben describes. As a colonized space of forced and coerced labor, resource extraction and agricultural production conceived as a garden and as a state of nature, the historical experience of the Latin American state both predicts and determines a global horizon defined in the same way. Although there is clearly a vast qualitative difference between the concentration camp and the walled garden, at bottom both are enclosures of nature (as opposed to the enclosure of the city that defines traditional politics). In the case of the concentration camp, the nature enclosed appears to be the bare life that exists in the absence of law and culture, the supposed precondition of human history as the history of the polis, what was imagined by Hobbes as a war of all against all. In the case of the walled garden, the nature enclosed is an Edenic landscape that evokes the freedom and beauty that was supposed to have existed prior to man’s emergence into history. As I have demonstrated in the previous chapter, these seemingly opposing views of nature share more in common than appears at first glance. Here I will take seriously the notion that the garden is a historical condition of possibility for the camp. One purpose of the present chapter is to understand their ideological similarity and at the same time discern more subtly the difference between the ideas of nature enclosed by each in order to better understand what each has brought into the world. While diverse states of exception are perhaps identical in their juridical effects, their ideological effects are different. Agamben’s own position in regard to the enclosure of nature, and more specifically the walled garden, is not entirely clear. On the one hand it appears that the theoretical thrust of the historical arc described in Homo Sacer—­which discusses the juridical function of the state of nature and the wall at length—­is to suggest that the state of exception defining modern states is akin to an enclosed state of nature. He draws the connection directly in The State of Exception, writing, “The state of exception constitutes . . . a kenomatic state, an emptiness of law, and the idea of an originary indistinction and fullness of power must be considered a legal mythologeme analogous to the idea of a state of nature.”9 On the other hand, he writes that the state of exception cannot be properly understood in spatial

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terms—­that is, as an enclosed or ordered state of nature: “In truth, the state of exception is neither external or internal to the juridical order, and the problem of defining it concerns precisely a threshold, or a zone of indifference, where inside and outside do not exclude each other but rather blur with each other.”10 I believe that despite Agamben’s latter claim, the mythological persistence of the walled garden and the camp as political models—­and their reflection in literature and culture—­constitutes the persistence of a spatial imagination of the state of exception. Even if for Agamben its juridical reality is better described as existing beyond the spatial, its ideological force remains grounded in the spatialized image. Materially, the territoriality of law and the political is ineluctable, and the bordered state persists. If the nation-­state conceived as the enclosure of nature determines the destiny of the world, a history of the imagination of the Latin American state as a walled garden amends and clarifies the genealogy Agamben presents. The novels of Augusto Roa Bastos are particularly helpful insofar as they consider the triad of the garden, the camp, and the nation-­state, setting forth a view of a Latin American nation-­state as a garden/camp and considering a shifting awareness of its ramifications—­in particular, the desire to escape a world system to which there is no outside. Roa Bastos’s notion of contravida, or “counterlife,” addresses Agamben’s claims and attempts to think past the concept of life at the center of the emergent biopolitical state. Before discussing Roa Bastos’s contribution toward the thinking of today’s political space, it is necessary to consider more generally the affinity between garden and camp, the conceptual and historical relationship between them in Latin America and beyond. To do this, I will examine Daniel Nemser’s genealogy of the concentration camp in Latin America and describe its intersections with Hannah Arendt’s observations about the totalitarian ideology that the camp reflects.

History Becoming Nature in the Garden and the Camp In Infrastructures of Race (2017) Daniel Nemser outlines a relationship between the walled garden and the concentration camp in historical terms. Following his aim of “trac[ing] the genealogy of concentration back to the early decades of Spain’s colonization of the Americas,” he shows how botanical gardens in Madrid and Mexico (Nueva España) acted as spaces in which concentration, as an epistemological and biopolitical technique, was developed.11 Nemser is interested in the historical relation between the garden and concentration particularly insofar as it conditions the dawning of scientific racism. He shows how the modality of scientific knowledge that was developed in the botanical garden contributed both to the reification of race and an epochal shift of focus in science and its application to the administration of the social body (whose significance is observed

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and emphasized by Foucault) from “living beings” to “life itself ”12: “Even as the project of imperial botany begins to drop away, then, it leaves behind a newly consolidated scientific apparatus that writes the racial as woven into the fabric of a global space that, for its part, serves as the stage of appearance of the category life itself.”13 He continues, “The modern concept of ‘life,’ assembled on the basis of an array of infrastructures and material practices that were inseparable from European colonialism, is itself inseparable from racialization  .  .  . ‘life itself ’ is always already racialized from the moment of its historical emergence.”14 One can see that in addition to the concentration camps of Spanish Cuba—­the point of departure for Nemser’s work—­Nazi camps are implied in this genealogy. The rise of the modern concept of life clearly does not stop after Cuban independence but rather develops into the organizing principle of the (bio)political that is exemplified most starkly in Auschwitz. Nemser’s claim that “life” (itself) is always already racialized clearly finds expression in the Nazi camps, and Hannah Arendt’s understanding of Auschwitz as an enclosure of bare life built for the extermination of unwanted races accords with Nemser’s observations and shows what is at stake in them. In his history of concentration Nemser focuses on the botanical garden at Chapultepec, which he presents through the dialogues of Francisco Cervantes de Salazar, a sixteenth-­century humanist and professor at the newly established University of Mexico. From a hilltop, Salazar views the enclosed gardens of Chapultepec alongside the city below and observes a parallel between them, seeing them both as microcosms—­small, self-­contained models of the universe. Salazar’s comparison of the garden and the city is a moment in which the garden starts to be imagined as a political model. Nemser reads it as the nascence of a biopolitics that would later become prominent in the eighteenth century, in which control, as well as the discovery of a scientific, universal truth, is achieved through twin techniques of enclosure: protecting and framing. Nemser writes, “It is precisely the act of enclosure that allows Cervantes de Salazar to reinscribe Chapultepec into a colonial regime of knowledge. On the one hand, the walls secure the garden and its contents from the threat of contamination posed by the indigenous population; on the other hand, this material expulsion subtends the insertion of the site—­and the territory at large—­into the epistemic frame of natural history.”15 If politics is to be rational, it must be passed through a scientific epistemological framework; the city must be like the garden, brought into the regime of natural history, enclosed. In light of the overall aim of Nemser’s book, the purpose of the chapter appears to be to draw a line of historical influence from the garden to the camp. Although in the chapter Nemser never mentions the camp itself—­instead describing the garden as “continuous with . . . the centralized town, disciplinary institution, and segregated neighborhood”—­the chapter implies a historical relation between the garden and the camp that consists in a shared epistemological outlook of

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collection mobilized as a means of subjection.16 He observes that scientific and political subjection is achieved by enclosure and that the major architectural function of the enclosing wall is not only protection and possession but also framing (and perhaps enframement).17 While in separate moments he observes that the wall of each is a means of subjection, he is not explicit in drawing out the structural parallel between garden and camp—­that both keep and frame nature/ life, the negative ground of the political and scientific object par excellence. It is possible, however, to draw this conclusion from what Nemser has shown and further explore not just the historical but also the ideological/conceptual relationship between the garden and the camp. Perhaps the most important conceptual link between the garden and the camp is their enclosure of nature as both scientific and political truth. If the garden is created as a space in which the truth will be scientifically distilled and in which the order governing life will be discovered, for the survivor, the camp is also the site of a deeper, underlying sociohistorical truth, which we can define through Levi’s growing sense that “nothing is true outside the Lager.”18 Just as the scientific garden seen at Chapultepec is imagined as a political model, the war of all against all in the camp is also implemented politically to order society in accordance to a scientific view of natural history. The place where this occurred most famously was Auschwitz. In The Origins of Totalitarianism (1948) Hannah Arendt elaborates an understanding of the ideological function of the camp as its garden-­like enclosure of nature, its meaning as a site where scientific and sociohistorical truth become indistinguishable. According to Arendt the camp was neither an arbitrary contingency of the Nazi regime nor a simple means to an end. It was instead the historical horizon and destiny of the Nazi movement, a political model for both its present and future. The camp reflects a Nazi-­totalitarian ideology that, transforming Darwinian principles into a morality, seeks to elevate nature (in the guise of survival, or bare life) above all else as the principle force of history. Arendt writes that totalitarian rule “operates neither without guidance of law nor is it arbitrary, for it claims to obey strictly and unequivocally those laws of Nature . . . from which all positive laws always have been supposed to spring.”19 She continues, “Totalitarian lawfulness, defying legality and pretending to establish the direct reign of justice on earth, executes the law . . . of Nature without translating it into standards of right and wrong for individual behavior.”20 Totalitarianism substitutes positive law—­that which had previously mediated between history and nature—­with nature itself. Thinkers such as Claude Levi-­Strauss and Georges Bataille maintain that positive law, first expressed through the designation of the taboo, is the basic condition for the production of the human, which is hypothesized as an event occurring in the distant past but which is understood to be ongoing. Therefore, an outcome of making nature into law is to return man to a state that is akin to his prehuman

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or animal being. Arendt links the Nazi circumscription of nature to its project of creating a master race—­the new man—­showing how the one helps realize the other. She writes, “The law of Nature . . . , if properly executed, is expected to produce mankind as its end product.”21 In setting the being of the German nation—­a collective human being, which is the principle object of the biopolitical—­as the highest value, survival of the nation is made into the highest virtue. The new man is precisely one who eschews the morality of positive law for a morality of survival based on a Darwinian ontologocentrism: “The problem is to fabricate something that does not exist, namely, a kind of human species resembling other animal species whose only ‘freedom’ would consist in ‘preserving the species.’”22 Roberto Esposito notes that even as the Nazi state sought to usher in a regime of natural law and natural history, it nevertheless clung to the concept of the “human,” categorizing races in these terms—­superhuman, subhuman, and so on. The fact that Nazis themselves understood their return to natural history not as a return to animality but rather as “the spiritualization of the zoe and biologization of the spirit” reflects structurally the logic of the garden: it is not so much a return to “true” nature—­an uncolonized ahistorical space—­as a dwelling in an enclosed nature, its artificial and colonized double.23 The law that produces the human is maintained (in the enclosing wall), but the human is redefined according to an imagination of prehuman being, bare life. As Arendt describes, if the goal of the Nazi regime is to fabricate a new human species resembling other animal species, “totalitarian domination attempts to achieve this goal both through ideological indoctrination of elite formations and through absolute terror in the camps”; the camp is the space in which the new regime of survival is instated and the new man is made.24 It is important to recognize that according to the plan of remaking man as animal, the state of animal-­ like abjection that the camp encloses is not reserved only for racial undesirables. Rather, the return to the nature of the camp is supposed to apply to everyone. While this nature is initially limited in scope, existing only in the camps, it will eventually be made universal through conquest; once it has brought the world under its power, the Nazi regime will begin to function as a global camp. Thus, the Aryan race will also occupy the camp as master among human animals, triumphant in a zero-­sum game of survival, asserting its right to be over and above all others. Still, on another level, as Primo Levi’s testimonial account suggests, even Auschwitz, a single camp, limited in scope, institutes a political regime of natural history in a universal manner. If Auschwitz does in fact enclose and contain the scientifically derived truth of being, it is already a global reality. The camp reveals the world to be one in which man’s only purpose is to preserve his being—­that is, to assert his continued existence. In this way, by integrating nature into history in such a way that they become indistinguishable from each other, Auschwitz performs an almost magical transformation of the world into a camp.

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Arendt understands the ideological origin of the political reconjunction of nature and history in Nazism to be specifically Darwinian: “Darwin’s introduction of the movement of nature, his insistence that, at least in the field of biology, natural movement is not circular but unilinear, moving in an infinitely progressing direction, means in fact that nature is, as it were, being swept into history, that natural life is considered to be historical.”25 Effectively, the function of the camp is to act as a crucible in which the process of evolution that Darwin theorizes—­ the historical unfolding of nature that already exists—­will be accelerated: “Total terror, the essence of totalitarian government, exists neither for nor against men. It is supposed to provide the forces of nature or history with an incomparable instrument to accelerate their movement.”26 Beneath this adoption and radicalization of a Darwinistic view of history, one finds an attempt to use science for the ordering of society (akin to Salazar’s vision from Chapultepec), which is an effect of a more general secularization. This secularization is not so much a displacement of God by science as a displacement of God by a scientifically defined notion of nature, which nonetheless remains mythical. The qualitative difference between the botanical garden and the concentration camp might be understood as a difference between the scientific/epistemological modes by which they are defined. The botanical garden, which finds its origin in the classical natural history of the eighteenth century associated with Linnaeus, is supposed to represent a nature that is ordered and whose content is fixed; as Foucault describes in The Order of Things, the botanical garden is imagined as a new Eden in its scientific function as a place for designating names to all the living creatures that would ever exist. The nature it contains is meant to represent a totality of organisms whose comparison and classification will provide a view of all that is biologically possible on the earth. The Nazi camp, on the other hand, predicated on a Darwinian view of natural history, is a linear temporal unfolding (as opposed to synchronic totality) defined by the violence of selection. While being different, these modes of viewing nature are not mutually exclusive, and they interpenetrate one another not only through a historical relation but also in their political function, which largely consists in their inflection of nostalgia, mobilizing the same desire for return that defines almost all conceptualizations of nature and the modern nation-­state. Both forms of nature represent not merely truth but also a desire for truth, the attempt to possess it, and the feeling that by returning to it one will be reunited with something that had been lost. As far as Nazi ideology is concerned, the nature enclosed by the Nazi camp is no less “Edenic,” or paradisiacal, than that which is enclosed by the botanical garden of the eighteenth century. As an object of nostalgic desire for “the true” that functions as a collective destiny, Darwin’s survival of the fittest becomes a new definition of paradise. The Nazis effectively attempted to bring about a

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Nietzschean transvaluation of values in which the terror of Darwinian nature, as the latest specter of scientific truth, became the greatest good. Insofar as the garden and the camp have both served as models for the conceptualization of the state, another difference between them might appear to be how one prioritizes extraction and accumulation, and the other racial unity. Recognizing this difference can help qualify the surprise produced by Agamben’s claim that the contemporary global political scenario is ordered by the concentration camp. Today it is perhaps difficult to imagine a return to the politics of outright racial extermination implemented in Auschwitz. A state that reinforces an agenda of capitalist extraction based on the ideological model of the botanical garden—­which was designed not only for scientific study but to gather the organic resources of the empire and facilitate their cultivation, commodification, and dissemination—­might seem more familiar today than one whose overt goal is racial purification. The fact that the Latin American nation-­state, for example, continues to be conceived as a site of free extraction suggests that the garden is a more likely vision of the global future than the camp. Yet Nemser, following Foucault’s observation that racism is a biopolitical technique, has shown that the regime of extraction and production facilitated by the garden is related fundamentally and inextricably to the racial discourse of the camp.27 Even if the Nazi race ideology appears to have largely met a historical dead end, something like it is preserved and maintained by the ideological conditions imposed by a capitalist state of exception and threatens to reemerge at any time. Further confirming the implications of Nemser’s genealogy is the sometimes-­ overlooked fact that the Nazi concentration camp, while acting principally as a machine of racial ideology, was also heavily determined by material concern. Although the implementation of the final solution was indeed strategically self-­ defeating as far as the Nazi state goes, it was not so for the businesses that utilized the concentration camp as a source of free (slave) labor.28 The worldview that Auschwitz affirms for Levi, as described in The Truce, is the worldview of the merchant and capitalist, Mordo Nahum: in commerce, man was already wolf to man, and it has always been a war of all against all. Indeed, a central focus of Levi’s narrative is the camp’s strange economy of spoons, cups, bread, soup, and shoes, which casts Auschwitz as an economic experiment as much as a racial one: a forcibly imposed free market in which the stakes of more or less profit was not comfort but rather survival. It is at the site in which regimes of extraction and racialization—­garden and camp—­overlap that Agamben’s prediction takes on force. The hidden matrix and nomos of modern biopolitics is not only the camp but also the garden in which it is rooted. In the unity of these spaces in which history becomes indistinguishable from nature, in a dialectical play between garden and camp—­the

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one becoming the other—­we find the true model determining the horizon of global political space today.29

Walls within Walls: The History of Paraguay as Garden-­C amp A view of Latin America as a walled garden has often functioned as a projective imagination of what it would be once its nature had been tamed.30 Margarita Serje shows how enclosure was seen as a means by which this taming would be carried out—­that the circumscription of wild nature through a drawing of lines on the earth and the building of fences and walls would transform it into a gentle space of production. Serje describes how this process was envisioned in the nineteenth-­century cuadro de costumbre, which promoted the “idilio del paisaje productivo” [idyl of the productive landscape] of the agro-­industrial complex, painting a landscape of circumscribed cultivation, “paisajes geometrizados por las cercas” [landscapes geometrized by fences].31 She quotes Medardo Rivas as he describes the jungle-­garden in his 1866 text: “Los campos estaban todos cultivados con el esmero y cuidado con que un alemán cultiva su huerta de hortalizas en Europa.” [The fields were all cultivated with the great care and trouble with which a German cultivates his vegetable garden in Europe.]32 The civilization (Europeanization) and homogenization of the nation-­state depend on an enclosure of nature, which at the same time as it establishes boundaries integrates the state into a world market and creates productive subjects. In his novels, Roa Bastos meditates on the historical unfolding of this view of the state as garden insofar as it applies to Paraguay. In part, his consideration of Paraguay as garden-­state follows a tradition set out by Latin American literary thinkers of the early twentieth century who criticized the “idilio del paisaje productivo” by representing the exploitations and depredations of the agriculture industry, exemplified in texts such as “Lo que son los yerbales” (1908) by Rafael Barrett, A margem da história (1909) by Euclides da Cunha, “Los Mensú” (1914) by Horacio Quiroga, and La vorágine (1924) by José Eustasio Rivera. Roa Bastos performs a similar critique and appears to develop ideas introduced by Rafael Barrett in particular, as observed by Alejandro Quin: a sense that the death and exploitation of the yerbales were now “extendidas a toda la geografía nacional” [extended to the entire national geography].33 Roa Bastos develops the notion that the garden (or its transformation, the ingenio or plantation) is not merely a space within the nation-­state; rather, the state is itself a garden, immured by the national boundaries—­an enclosure (framing) of nature whose purpose is extraction, accumulation, and subjection. Insofar as his work considers the dark side of this national fantasy and elaborates a vision of the garden-­state as one that is at the same time a prison-­state, the image of Paraguay that he composes evokes and also supplements the biopolitical paradigm that Agamben presents in

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Homo Sacer. In describing how Paraguay transitions from its period of national independence to the Stroessner dictatorship by passing through various regimes of the walled prison-­garden—­from botanical garden to yerbal to untapped oil field—­his series of novels Hijo de hombre (1960), Yo el Supremo (1974), El fiscal (1993), and Contravida (1994) can be read as an account of a transition to a biopolitical order during its historical emergence, the rise of the biopolitical state. Yo el Supremo is a good place to begin reading Roa Bastos’s history of Paraguay as garden-­camp because the period it describes is chronologically earliest. This novel contemplates Paraguay’s reputation as a remote and hermetic country at the center of the continent, closed off to the world. In exploring this reputation, it casts Paraguay as a prison and a garden and observes the irony that it would be both of these things simultaneously. The novel tells a satirical history of Paraguay’s independence under its nineteenth-­century founding father Dr. Gaspar de Francia in part to consider its relation to the dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner, which was ongoing at the time of the novel’s writing.34 Both dictators—­“bookends” of Paraguay’s independent history in 1974, when the novel was published—­made the country into a closed state, to which official trade and travel were restricted. This similarity appears to constitute a basis for the observations of a mythical or figural relation between the two men. The fictionalized Francia rants about the embargo imposed by Argentina as punishment for Paraguay’s secession and claim of national independence and discourses on the motivations for his repressive policies, which include the surveillance and detention of subversives. (Among those detained by the dictator were French botanist Aime “Amadeo” Bonpland, the Uruguayan revolutionary José Artigas, and the Robertson brothers, two English merchants who wrote Letters on Paraguay [1838] and Francia’s Reign of Terror [1839] about their ordeal.) It is through the figure of Bonpland, who was detained between 1821 and 1829, that Roa Bastos begins a history of Paraguay as an enclosure of nature that is both a botanical garden and a prison. The fictionalized Francia reflects on his justification for keeping Bonpland as a captive of the state and cites his detention as proof of his magnanimity, pointing to the fact that the latter was still allowed to pursue his study of botany while imprisoned in a space of privileged beauty and biodiversity: Sin ninguna añoranza de la Malmaison, del fausto de la corte napoleónica, olvidado de su propio renombre, Don Amadeo continuó disfrutando de su paradisíaco rincón en la campiña paraguaya, cada vez con mayor acomodo. . . . Oigo la risa fresca de Don Amadeo. La tierra de Paraguay, Excelencia, es el cielo de las plantas. [Without any longing for the bordello, or the pomp of the Napoleonic court, having forgotten his own renown, Don Amadeo continued to enjoy his

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paradisiacal corner of the Paraguayan countryside, which was more comfortable with each passing moment. . . . I hear the fresh laughter of Don Amadeo. The land of Paraguay, your Excellency, is a heaven of plants.]35

As we see, according to the dictator, Bonpland is actually grateful to be imprisoned in Paraguay, in part because it is a “heaven of plants.” He is also grateful because he is not restricted as a normal prisoner would be but rather free to access the entire territory of Paraguay: M. Bonpland no tendría que gemir, desde hace cinco años, en la cautividad que comparte con otros franceses, italianos, ingleses, alemanes y americanos que sufren la misma suerte. Por fin alguien entendía algo: Esos pocos particulares presos, aparte de los traidores y conspiradores, lo están en calidad de rehenes de la libertad de todo el pueblo. [Mr. Bonpland wouldn’t have any reason to complain, for the last five years, in a captivity shared with other Frenchmen, Italians, Englishmen, Germans, and Americans that suffered the same fate. Finally someone understood: these few special prisoners, unlike the traitors and conspirators, are like hostages at their liberty within the entire community.]36

The detainees are not kept in jails but are only prisoners in the sense that they may not cross the national borders. In this way it is the state itself that, for Bonpland, is both a garden and a prison: a place that he is not permitted to leave and in which he is obligated to carry out his scientific study of plants. Roa Bastos’s focus on Bonpland’s detention is not arbitrary. The echoes of Bonpland’s study of botany in Paraguay would be felt in its subsequent history, which Roa Bastos had already begun to explore in his previous novel, Hijo de hombre. As Stephen Bell describes, “[Bonpland’s] work developing the resources of Misiones was part of a large-­scale project involving various Frenchmen and designed to open up the commercial possibilities of Paraguay.”37 The plant whose “commercial possibility” Bonpland observed and sought to develop, and which subsequently became a major commodity of the region, was yerba maté. In what can be read as a reckoning with the dark outcome of Bonpland’s dreams, the chapter of Hijo de hombre called “Exodus” focuses on the indentured servitude and slave-­like captivity of workers in the yerbales, the agricultural zones where yerba maté is produced. What’s more, Roa Bastos portrays the yerbal as an enclosed space of forced cultivation that is also a microcosm of the state, structurally mirroring Bonpland’s botanical garden-­prison. Roa Bastos draws a parallel between the yerbal and nation-­state in Hijo de hombre when, in “Exodus,” the narrator describes the difficulty of escaping the yerbal of Takurú-­Pukú (located around what is today the municipality of Hernandarias): “Ningún ‘juido’ ha conseguido escapar con vida de los yerbales de Takurú-­Pukú.” [No “fugitive” has managed to escape from the yerbales of

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Takurú-­Pukú with his life.]38 The narrator goes on to describe this hermeticism in strange terms: “Takurú-­Pukú era, pues, la ciudadela de un país imaginario, amurallado por las grandes selvas del Alto-­Paraná.” [Indeed, Takurú-­Pukú was the citadel of an imaginary country, walled by the great jungles of the Upper Paraná.]39 This sentence makes the interesting suggestion that the yerbal—­ much like Paraguay itself—­can be seen as a walled structure insofar as the land encloses the workers and helps keep them captive. If it is strange to think of the jungle as the wall of the yerbal-­prison, it strikes one as even stranger to think of this walled structure as a citadel. The author claims to describe a place from which no one can escape, and yet a citadel is designed not to keep prisoners in but rather to keep invaders or enemies out. Strictly defined, a citadel is the fortified center of a city—­a kind of city within a city to which citizens retreat as a last resort during a siege. The yerbal is instead an agrarian space far away from the city. One must ask, For what city would the yerbal be a citadel? The answer appears within the same sentence: it is the citadel not of a city but rather of a country—­and not a normal country but rather an imaginary country. If the “imaginary country” he refers to here is Paraguay—­for of what other country could Takurú-­Pukú be a citadel?—­we find the image of the wilderness labor camp as the citadel of the state. The immediate sense in which the city can be compared to the state (of which the citadel is the heart) is as political space: the polis, or walled city-­state, as the model of traditional politics and a model for the nation-­state. As Agamben shows, the wall in this case is a border that marks the beginning and the end of the law. Traditionally, what lies within falls under the purview of human law and history, and what lies without is beyond law, an ahistorical state of nature. Through this lens the comparison between the yerbal and Paraguay takes shape: like the yerbal, the wall of the state is not in fact a wall but rather a border, an imaginary line on the earth, defined on some level by distance and obstacle but, in another sense, arbitrarily, as a matter of vague historical contingency. The analogy between the borders of the yerbal and those of the state also invokes a sense of Paraguay as a country defined by distance, far from the sea and from the world at large, the hole at the center of America where other countries end, and as such a circumscription of wilderness by wilderness that Roa Bastos elsewhere calls the “muralla china en Paraguay” [Chinese wall in Paraguay].40 The analogy suggests that if the citadel is a city within a city, the yerbal is a model of the state within the state—­country within a country—­and that it is the stronghold and heart of a country. Such a country, if it were anything like the yerbal, would have to be seen as a massive prison. Like the concentration camp as Arendt describes it defined the political order of the Nazi state, the yerbal, as the last defense of the state’s integrity, the seat of its power, and a version of it in miniature, defines Paraguay’s political order. Roa Bastos seems to suggest that Paraguay—­an imaginary country—­only exists through its de facto enclosure of the hapless citizens

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born within its borders or, perhaps more precisely, excluded by the borders of the states that surround it. More than a space of history and law, Paraguay is like a yerbal, a space beyond the law that can be understood as a state of nature. The motif of imprisonment and escape introduced in “Exodus” is carried through the entirety of Hijo de hombre, and the novel can be generally read as a meditation on the human impulse toward liberation. But more specifically, it can be read as an interrogation into a desire to escape the nation-­state insofar as it has become a labor camp. The chapter “Fiesta” follows a guerrilla soldier named Silvestre as he tries to avoid capture by the national army, sent to neutralize the uprising in which he participates. In the end he is caught and drafted into the same army. The chapter “Destinados” starts as the journal of a captive on an island prison camp, Miguel Vera, and then details his transfer to a military unit of the national army. He joins Silvestre (of “Fiesta”) and Cristobal Jara, whose parents escaped from the yerbal in “Exodus.” These three men are sent to the Chaco War and later struggle together to escape death in the wilderness in the chapter “Misión.” As in the exodus from the yerbal, escape from “nature” in this situation is analogous to escape from the enclosing walls of the prison, the state, and an all-­encompassing system of capitalist exploitation in which the state is a key actor.41 Descriptions of Vera’s experience in a Chaco wilderness encampment are especially interesting insofar as they reflect the phenomenon described by Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism and Levi in The Truce. Arendt’s theoretical suggestion that the secret function of the camp is to make the world into its own image—­into a camp on a global scale—­is confirmed by Levi’s testimony, his realization that escape from the camp is impossible not because of the difficulty of breaching its walls but because whatever lies beyond the camp is also a camp: that man is already a captive and that the camp is simply a microcosm of his larger prison. Roa Bastos affirms a sense that the biopolitical state’s walls are performative, that their enclosure of nature merely affirms that what lies beyond its walls is just more of the same. Hijo de hombre presents another vision of the camp becoming universal—­a recognition that it actually encompasses the globe akin to Levi’s testimony—­when Vera begins to die of thirst in the wilderness redoubt where he and his soldiers are on a mission to stop Bolivian reinforcements from reaching Fortín Boquerón, which is under siege by the Paraguayan army. Their vigil over captured Bolivian soldiers mirrors on a smaller scale the siege taking place miles away: Paraguayans fencing in Bolivians. But as thirst mounts, there is a growing sense that they are all in the same boat, trapped together by the wilderness: “Nos aguarda idéntica suerte. Entretanto, aquí hacemos una replica en pequeño del cerco. Sólo que aquí, paraguayos y bolivianos estamos metidos en una misma bolsa, acollarados a un destino irremediable, pujando ciegamente contra la enemiga sin cara que

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no hace distingos.” [The same fate awaits us. Here, in the meantime, we make a miniature replica of the siege. Only here, Paraguayans and Bolivians are in the same bag, united in an irremediable destiny, struggling blindly against an enemy without a face that makes no distinctions.]42 Enclosure of the captured Bolivian prisoners becomes absurd as both Bolivians and Paraguayans begin to perish at the hands of a common, faceless enemy: thirst. Walled in together by the wilderness, national difference disappears, giving way to a desperate regime of survival that exists above and beyond identity. The small, ordered war is absorbed into a larger, disordered one in which national distinctions are no longer made: a state of nature as a war of all against all. Focusing on a tension in this scene between war fought strictly in the name of national sovereignty and war fought over the right to extract mineral resources in the interest of private industry, it is tempting to read Hijo de hombre as an allegory of a transition from a nation-­state order to an order determined purely by market interests, seeing each regime as being rigidly epochal. It is clear that taken together Roa Bastos’s novels trace a series of generational echoes through various historical moments starting with Bonpland’s imprisonment during national independence, which appears to show this transition. But as in The Truce, it is perhaps not so much that the underlying reality shifted between Francia’s proclamation of national independence and Stroessner’s imposition of a contraband-­ kleptocracy (whose legacy is epitomized most clearly today by the free market zone Ciudad del Este, once called Puerto Presidente Stroessner). The ongoing return to the garden-­camp suggests that the appearance of an epochal shift is in fact an epistemological shift: the dawning awareness of something that was always the case. More than a change in the order of the world, it is the shift in awareness that is epochal. A tension between the sovereignty of the state and that of the global market—­the dynamic that defines the movement of globalization today—­appears to condition not just the most recent part of Paraguay’s history but its entirety. The overall view that Roa Bastos paints is of the nation-­state in its function as the organizing structure of a global system of subjection that forces its inhabitants to participate in specific modes of accumulation. In the unfolding of this history, it is revealed that the nature it is supposed to enclose, the system upon which it is supposed to be based, was never tamed but rather remained a “savage place.”43 Furthermore, this expression of biopolitics, although defined by the wall, at a certain point comes to resemble an actual state of nature to such an extent that it is as if there is effectively nothing beyond it: nothing beyond an order of states making themselves into free markets and nothing beyond the wall except more nature.44 If flight from the biopolitical state cannot be so simple as stepping across a threshold to the other side of a wall, Roa Bastos’s work proceeds by probing more deeply the difficulty of escape that his narrators discover.

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The Nation-­S tate and Its Counterlife Having found an alternate genealogy of modern biopolitics in the history of Paraguay, Roa Bastos considers its ramifications. If Hijo de hombre discovers the difficulty of escaping the biopolitical state, it also begins to describe one of the results of this bind, a dialectical movement that, rather than seeking to escape the state, instead seeks to negate it. In this novel, as well as El fiscal and Contravida, the state that acts as a circumscription of life produces a negative movement that Roa Bastos calls “counterlife” (contravida). Hijo de hombre begins to describe an impulse that appears to be the opposite of the attempt to escape from enclosure: a vertiginous plunge toward death in the “nature” that is the citadel of the state. “Misión,” the chapter in which Cristobal Jara perishes after driving into the wilderness to rescue Miguel Vera and his troops, depicts a trajectory toward death that can be read as an instantiation of a trope canonically archived by Borges in “El Sur” and that I discussed in the previous chapter of this work. Roa Bastos further develops Borges’s take on a desire for death at the heart of the state in the novels El fiscal and Contravida (which I will read as two versions of the same book).45 In these novels the nation-­ state is again represented as a camp, and each depicts the protagonists’ attempt at escape from la técnica, Stroessner’s secret police. But in both novels, a trajectory of escape at some point turns into movement that instead rushes toward the center of enclosure. In Contravida the protagonist returns to his hometown, Iturbe-­Manorá, instead of just getting out of the country. And in El fiscal, the narrator flees to a symbolic national monument, Cerro Corá—­described also as a site of Paraguay’s death and rebirth at the end of the War of the Triple Alliance. The transformation of a desire for escape into a desiring movement toward death supplements and modifies a biopolitical notion of the nation-­state as an enclosure of nature as life. In both cases, the narrators choose to go away from or against life—­contravida—­toward death. As such, the novels present a vision of the nation-­state that still has “nature” at its center but, following “El Sur,” is ordered by a mythical desire for death, dissolution, and destruction rather than a scientific administration and fomentation of life that Foucault indicates as a defining characteristic of biopolitical technique. El fiscal is presented as a long epistolary, the first two parts being written by the protagonist Felix Moral, who bears a number of striking similarities to Roa Bastos and can be read as his textual double. Much like Roa Bastos, Moral is a Paraguayan political exile living in France, and although he is a writer of literature, he teaches in a university to make ends meet. The protagonist directs the first part of the epistolary to his life partner Jimena. Writing in France, he describes the circumstances by which he is granted the opportunity to attend a cultural symposium in Paraguay organized by the Stroessner regime in a kind of ceremonial opening of Paraguay to the outside world after years of self-­isolation.

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In this section the narrator describes his intention to use the opportunity to assassinate the dictator with a poisoned handshake. The narrator writes the second letter to Jimena in his hotel room in Asunción, describing his thoughts and experiences while on the airplane in transit to Paraguay and the events leading up to the much-­anticipated handshake with Stroessner. The third section is a letter from Jimena to Moral’s mother, describing the details of his capture and torture by the Paraguayan secret police after his assassination attempt fails, his escape to the Chaco wilderness, and his subsequent murder by técnica agents at Cerro Corá. The reason for Moral’s flight to Cerro Corá after his initial escape from the secret police, deep into an inhospitable Chaco wilderness instead of trying to cross into Argentina, for example, is not clearly explained. Needless to say, it does not seem like a choice meant to preserve the protagonist’s life. Cerro Corá is a would-­be destination for history buffs but not a logical route of escape from Asunción. Moral’s decision to go there seems to disregard the danger he is in and, given his fascination with the death of Solano López, appears to be a kind of national-­religious pilgrimage. Earlier in the novel, through his discussion of an unfinished screenplay about the war, Moral outlines his sense of Cerro Corá’s importance. It is the site where Solano López is said to have uttered the words “muero con mi patria” [I die with my country] as he perished in battle, marking the defeat of Paraguay at the end of the War of the Triple Alliance. The apocryphal words express a sense that it was not just the field marshal who died on that day but the nation as a whole. For the protagonist, who has written a screenplay about the event, Cerro Corá is a metonym for the death of Paraguay. Moral also sees Cerro Corá as the site of Paraguay’s rebirth. His film is organized around an image of the field marshal’s death as a figuration of the crucifixion of Jesus—­“el cadáver del mariscal clavado en una cruz de ramas” [the field marshal’s cadaver nailed to an improvised cross].46 Long sections of El fiscal are dedicated to elaborating Moral’s thinking about this image, largely through a loose interpretation of Richard Burton’s Letters from the Battlefields of Paraguay (1870). The narrator is fixated on the intertextual play among several historical details, the first of which is a moment when Padre Fidel Maíz referred to Solano López while he was still alive as “el Cristo paraguayo” [the Paraguayan Christ] in a well-­known homily.47 The comparison was originally intended to suggest that the field marshal would be the savior of Paraguay, but Moral instead reads it as a prophecy of his martyrdom. If the field marshal’s death represents the death of Paraguay, the Christian logic of his martyrdom and resurrection would apply to nation-­state as well. As such, Cerro Corá is the place where Paraguay was martyred, only to find a new life after death. Moral’s Paraguayan counterlife is a Christian sacrifice translated through the political theology of the nation-­ state. Cerro Corá becomes the crux—­the cross and crossroads—­of Paraguayan

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national identity as the site where its martyrdom occurred and where its new life in death began. Roa Bastos expresses here how, insofar as the destruction of the War of the Triple Alliance indelibly marked the historical experience of Paraguay as a nation-­state, it became an inextricable part of its definition and “identity.” For Moral (and perhaps Roa Bastos) it appears that Paraguay must be understood as a nation-­state whose ongoing existence has become inseparable from the act of mourning its own death. Moral’s reading of Solano López’s death, and his subsequent decision to escape to Cerro Corá, in various ways exemplifies the concept of “contravida” as something akin to a Paraguayan being toward death, “a culture dominated by the death drive,” as Jennifer French describes it.48 The trajectory of escape that was problematized in Hijo de hombre turns inward, toward the place where López, and by extension Paraguay, died. Arriving there, Moral dies too. One must imagine that Moral views his death at Cerro Corá at the end of the novel—­which is precipitated upon him for attempting to save the country from Stroessner’s tyranny—­as a political sacrifice akin to that of Solano López, whom he so admires. As such, the novel reiterates the fantasy that also appears in Borges’s “El Sur,” in which one attains national identity by entering into a specular relation with mythical events and, specifically, by reliving, repeating, or returning to the Romantic death of the patriarch. El fiscal is Moral’s fantasy of finding his identity as a Paraguayan by entering into a mythical/figural relation of identity with Solano López. One senses that by choosing to flee to Cerro Corá, Moral chooses this fantasy over his own life. The significance of Moral’s trajectory toward death becomes clearer when compared to that of other characters in Roa Bastos’s novels. Most notably, in Hijo de hombre, the Jara family seeks to escape the slow destruction wrought by toil and malaria in the yerbal; which is to say, they seek life. When Moral finds himself a prisoner of the state, he instead adopts a sacrificial logic exemplified by Solano López and plunges into death. What is one to make of this contrast between escape toward life against an escape toward death? The notion of Paraguayan “contravida” embodied by Moral’s escape into death can be read as an allegorical representation of a historical turn, a dialectical negation of the biopolitical regime and the camp, and more broadly, a cultural tendency that arises through it. If the administration and preservation of life are a central aim of biopolitical technique, causing survival to become the central value of a “biopolitical state” modeled on the camp, the adoption of death as a value would represent their basic negation or transvaluation. Here, it is important to take note of Adriana Johnson’s interpretation of “contravida,” which she presents in “Paraguayan Counterlives” (2018). Johnson interprets contravida not as a trajectory toward death so much as a status of dwelling at its threshold.49 By understanding contravida as a zone of indistinction between life and death akin to that which is enclosed by the camp, it effectively becomes

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another word for the biopolitical as defined by Agamben. It describes Paraguay as a state in which people live as stateless people do, without rights, and with a precarious existence maintained at the threshold between life and death—­what Agamben would refer to as bare life. While I certainly agree that Roa Bastos characterizes Paraguay in this way, the value of the neologism would be negligible if it was simply another word for the biopolitical. Interestingly, Johnson’s main point of reference for her reading is not Agamben but Achille Mbembe, who sets out to describe a “necropolitics” beyond biopolitics. Johnson writes, “Paraguay, we might say, is one example of the ‘repressed topographies’ (as Achille Mbembe calls them in ‘Necropolitics’ [2003]) of the death-­worlds in our contemporary world.”50 She goes on to quote Mbembe, stating that Paraguay is one of these “new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead.”51 Seeing Paraguay as a necrostate is not much different than seeing it as a biopolitical state, reflecting a confusion between necropolitics and biopolitics inherent to Mbembe’s terminology. It is not always clear how necropolitics, which Mbembe defines as the “subjection of life to the power of death,” differs from a straightforward understanding of biopolitics, especially if biopolitical administration always resorts to the sovereign right to kill, as Foucault argues.52 There is a large amount of overlap between the terms. For Agamben, the biopolitical paradigm is the concentration camp—­which is itself a death world—­and so for him, at least, it would appear that biopolitics is already a necropolitics.53 While it is true that Roa Bastos represents Paraguay as a death world, it is more productive to read “contravida” as a reference to the places not where necropolitics overlaps with biopolitics but rather where it does not. Indeed, it is more productively read as an impulse or trajectory toward death, akin to the notion of inadaptability (“indadaptación”) elaborated by Barrett as described by Quin: a refusal to survive.54 In Mbembe’s article the most interesting observations are those that do not quite fit into the framework he presents and that are suggestive of what lies beyond biopolitics. We see this in the discussion of the paradox of the suicide bomber, who is bent on martyrdom within a biopolitical regime in which survival is supposed to be the highest value: “The logic of martyrdom proceeds along different lines. It is epitomized by the figure of the ‘suicide bomber,’ which itself raises a number of questions. What intrinsic difference is there between killing with a missile helicopter or a tank and killing with one’s own body? Does the distinction between the arms used to inflict death prevent the establishment of a system of general exchange between the manner of killing and the manner of dying?”55 The questions he raises here remain unresolved at the end of the essay. I believe Roa Bastos begins (anachronistically) to address them. In light of the fantasy of escape that turns into martyrdom in El fiscal, we share with Mbembe a

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basic question about how to reconcile a new drive toward death within a biopolitical regime of survival. As I have already suggested, one answer appears to be an ethical overturning of the value of life/survival at the center of the garden and the camp, the transformation of death into a value and object of desire. It may even be the mobilization of a desire to go against nature itself. To return to the question of what Agamben means when he observes the camp as the secret ordering matrix of modern (bio)politics, El fiscal suggests that the life negated in a movement contravida is not only experienced as horror at the threshold between life and death or the experience of statelessness within the state. The biopolitical regime that Moral seeks to overturn is also experienced simply as modern alienation, which itself has been understood as a form of exile. In his extensive treatment of Moral’s professional experience, Roa Bastos suggests that the imperative of “making live” is felt most immediately in the mundane necessity of making a living.56 Even before he returns to the origin of Paraguayan national identity when escaping the secret police, Moral’s initial return to Paraguay appears to be an escape from alienation: political exile for one, but also from professional obligation subtended by the necessity of putting food on the table. He rebels against “making a living” as a university professor in one of the strangest episodes of the novel, when he appears to murder his graduate student Leda Kautner. The main purpose that this episode appears to serve in the novel is to link his political martyrdom to a professional self-­destruction. His choice of death moves not just against life but against everyday life, against making a living, and finally, against making live. By reentering the nation-­state he had left behind, in a movement against the life it encloses, he revalues it not only as a space of death but as a space of literature and of the nonprofessional: indeed, a prefatory note describes the writing of El fiscal as “el acto de fe de un escritor no profesional en la utopía de la escritura novelesca” [the act of faith of a nonprofessional writer in the utopia of novelistic writing].57 Moral’s rebellion against the grind of professional obligation through a revaluation of death can be understood as the value of sacrifice akin to that described by Georges Bataille, by which man’s utilitarian mode of relating to the world is interrupted by a willful act of destruction. Thus, Roa Bastos predicts that a movement against the biopolitical state will entail not an outright rejection of the state itself so much as a return to whatever logic of sacrifice and religiosity it continues to organize. Indeed, Moral’s return to the nation-­state is guided by a specifically Christian logic of sacrifice. This Christianity appears to be circumstantial, an accident of Paraguay’s history, the return to forms of the past during a moment of crisis. But its logic of sacrifice appears to be dialectical, a reiteration of the negation of nature by which man is supposed to have invented himself. In this sense, it can be interpreted as a return to law. A question of whether such a return to law is also a return to history boils down to a question of whether anything is retained in the dialectical aufhebung

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of such a return or if it is instead a return to the same—­that is, a nihilistic, eternal return.58 A sign of dialectical movement can be seen in the difference between traditional Christianity and Christianity used against the biopolitical state as Roa Bastos imagines: the value placed on life. Even as it is organized by a logic of sacrifice, the imperative of choosing life is still maintained in traditional Christianity, whereas it is not in Moral’s view. Is this new value to become a means of imposing a new law and reentering history? Or is it simply an adjustment or harmonization within the biopolitical state, a way of learning to love the camp? There is also a question of whether, even if it is possible to transcend the biopolitical state, the means of doing so are too costly and whether the history entered into might be even worse than the suspended natural history of the camp: the true realization of a death world, whatever that might be.

The Imaginary Space of the No-­P lace, No-­T ime While Agamben traces the origins of the biopolitical state to the structures set out by Roman law and Foucault traces it to developments in scientific technique during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Roa Bastos considers its roots in Renaissance, Enlightenment, and Romantic political and literary thought. Roa Bastos conveys a sense of this legacy most succinctly in the prefatory note to El fiscal when professing (with some degree of irony, I think) a faith in the redemptive potential of “el espacio imaginario del no-­lugar y del no-­tiempo” [the imaginary space of no-­place and of no-­time], which can be seen as referring both to the novel and to Paraguay.59 It is not a coincidence that the formulation “no-­lugar” is a literal translation of the word utopia (ou topos). In Yo el Supremo the dictator notes the textual history of this concept, registering its introduction into discourse by Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) and Voltaire’s subsequent treatment of it in Candide (1759), which identifies More’s imaginary state with Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s “best of all possible worlds.”60 The dictator reads into the fact that the “utopia” visited in the latter text was in fact Paraguay—­or more specifically, its Jesuit missions—­ and uses this text to support a claim that utopia had attained its realization under his rule.61 According to the dictator, the imaginary space of the Enlightenment thought experiment, taken as a shorthand for the perfect society, has become real. The irony of this claim resonates on many levels, the most obvious of which is Paraguay’s history of violence, poverty, and isolation. If Paraguay is a “utopia,” for Roa Bastos it is not in its realization of the perfect society or the “best of all possible worlds” but rather in the extent to which it remains a “no-­lugar” in a negative sense: a chimera of a state, a jungle redoubt, a marginal and little-­known place. In El fiscal it appears to be in this sense that the recently named president of the assembly (in which Moral hopes to assassinate Stroessner) expresses “su satisfacción de conocer un país que él creía inexistente y que, según todas las

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apariencias, seguía siendo para él inexistente” [his satisfaction to get to know a country that he had believed to be nonexistent and that, according to all appearances, continued being nonexistent to him].62 In his treatment of Francia, Roa Bastos makes it clear that he is specifically concerned with the artificiality of the country, not only its having been invented in 1814, but the powerlessness of its founding principles: the failure of the state to achieve unity or to provide rights and safe harbor to its citizens—­much less bring about a perfect society. A vision of Paraguay as utopia intersects with the dictator’s view of Paraguay’s status as a botanical garden (“La tierra de Paraguay, Excelencia, es el cielo de las plantas” [The land of Paraguay, your Excellency, is a heaven of plants]), which is itself an expression of the biopolitical structure of the wall enclosing nature.63 Roa Bastos shows how the biopolitical state is an ironic realization of the dream that utopia sets out. While the nineteenth-­century nation-­state in Latin America is conceived by Enlightenment and Romantic thought as a return to paradisiacal nature, a state divorced from the burden of history, its enclosure of nature is revealed to be an enclosure of nothing, a placeless wilderness whose precious ahistoricity is revealed with time to be a languishing stagnation. For Roa Bastos, as an idealized state of nature, Paraguay is a no-­place and a no-­time, where history is suspended or whose history functions according to a mythical logic of repetition. In Contravida, Roa Bastos relates the Renaissance notion of utopia, and its historical connection to the biopolitical state, to the political Romanticism of the early nineteenth century. When describing Manorá, the place to which the narrator flees after escaping from the técnica, an imaginary town founded by the schoolteacher Maestro Cristaldo existing within (or parallel to) the narrator’s hometown Iturbe, Roa Bastos uses language similar to that which appears in the prefatory note of El fiscal, which refers to “el espacio imaginario del no-­lugar y del no-­tiempo” [the imaginary space of no-­place and of no-­time]:64 “El limbo del Maestro Cristaldo era exactamente eso: un lugar parecido a los sueños, fuera del espacio y del tiempo, donde moraban los personajes de las historias inventadas.” [Master Cristaldo’s limbo was exactly this: a dream-­like place, out of space and of time, where the characters of invented stories lived.]65 Manorá begins to exist with the arrival of a library and is portrayed explicitly as both a literary realm and a realm of death (limbo). Indeed, its foundation is attended not only by the creation of the library but also by the construction of a columbarium, “mausoleo donde los romanos colocaban urnas y vasijas funerarias” [a mausoleum where the Romans placed urns and funerary vases].66 Manorá, a utopian city standing outside of space and time and predicated on literature, can be read as an expression of Angel Rama’s lettered city, Benedict Anderson’s “imagined community,” or Friedrich Schiller’s “aesthetic state,” a body politic founded by the writer or poet.67 It invokes a concept of the state as envisioned by the political Romanticism of the nineteenth century, whose autonomy is part and parcel

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with the autonomy of art. As such, one can read this literary no-­place, no-­time as a reference not only to the fictional city of Manorá but to the utopia of the Romantic Latin American state in general. Finally, and most directly, “el espacio imaginario del no-­lugar y del no-­ tiempo” is the autonomous space of the novel itself, in which the author is free to explore his fantasies and desires and “bucear en los enigmas del universo humano de todo tiempo y lugar” [plumb the depths of the enigmas of the human universe of all time and place].68 It is thus the writing of El fiscal that is “el acto de fe de un escritor no profesional en la utopía de la escritura novelesca” [the act of faith of a nonprofessional writer in the utopia of novelistic writing].69 The conceptual relationship between the state and novel writing—­“utopic” in a creation of places that don’t exist—­is perhaps the most complex outcome of Roa Bastos’s thinking of the origins and destiny of the biopolitical state. While the ironic structure of the word utopia is clearly meant to criticize the state, one wonders if Roa Bastos does not in fact detect some redemptive potential in literature—­especially considering that he continues to write novels. The unity of Renaissance, Enlightenment, and Romantic discourses in the utopianism of the (bio)state lies in their shared use of fantasy—­the thought experiment on the one hand and the spontaneous creative act on the other—­in the pursuit of truth. Roa Bastos suggests that the use of these discourses in the creation of the modern state does not find a truer, more natural path as it intended to do but rather creates a space that is increasingly defined by that which is imaginary. The world he envisions shares similarities to Jean Baudrillard’s simulacrum insofar as it displays an ironic transvaluation of truth; the space set out as the garden, which in its enclosure of nature was supposed to act as a fount of truth, frees the power of myth to act in the world because the nature it encloses is a myth. Despite this similarity, the space that Roa Bastos describes is not so much the hyperreality of cyberspace or the simulacrum of reality TV that Baudrillard predicts but rather something that is fictional and that increasingly seeks not survival but rather death and the end of the world. Roa Bastos’s conceptualization of the biopolitical state as an enclosure of fiction calls attention to the ongoing importance of the legacy of “literary” thinking within the political, even as it is argued that literature and metaphor play less and less of a role in a world determined by brute force and instrumentalized scientific reason. His view of its future being defined by an impulse toward destruction expresses the stakes of literary Romanticism’s legacy not only for Paraguay but for the world.

Conclusion

The genealogy I have traced in this book, which shows how a dynamic between nature ideology and decolonization contributed to the emergence of the biopolitical state, though fragmentary, reflects a process that helped establish the global scenario in which we find ourselves today. As such, understanding the operation of nature ideology in Latin American decolonization creates insight into its continued operation in maintaining the order of today’s globalized world. In the United States, for example, COVID-­19 denialism, relentless privatization, the ongoing destruction of the social safety net, and the National Rifle Association’s legal attempts to (re)turn society into a war of all against all can be better understood in light of the processes I have described—­as a use of the legal apparatuses of the state against itself.1 These and other ostensibly novel phenomena, including processes of narco-­accumulation in Mexico, for example, can be illuminated when considered in light of the biopolitical state as described here. In short, the desire to make the state into a container of an anomic space is motivated by a desire to return to nature and cannot be understood otherwise. The biopolitical state uses law as a means of effectuating and containing an unraveling of order; it is a transformation of the state into a wall around a nature fantasy. The value of a theorization of a desire for the biopolitical state that determines the horizon of human history becomes clear in its relation to other terms that have been used to describe the contemporary global scenario—­that is, the postnational, postsovereign, interregnum, global war, passage west, infrapolitical passage, and so on. The model of the biopolitical state, and my description of its emergence into world consciousness, accounts for a patent reality that theories of the “postnational” do not: the fact that we have not actually arrived at a definitively “postnational” moment and that even with challenges to nation-­state sovereignty by transnational forces, the nation-­state continues to determine the ordering of the world. Understanding the development of states into containers 117

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of nature does not require us to make any predictions about what the future holds or to define the present in terms of that yet-­to-­be-­attained postnational future. Yet it accounts for an increase in global anomie in a way that can be reconciled with the ongoing sovereignty of the nation-­state. It does not depend on the epochal periodization that defines theories that focus on the katechonic function of the state and thus avoids getting bogged down in debate about precisely when global restraint was undone: Was it 9/11, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the failure of the Paris commune, or something else? In this way, it also avoids nostalgia for the katechon and a desire for return to a Schmittian, imperial order of clearly defined friends and enemies. This book is principally composed of diagnosis, observations about the challenges of decolonization and the ongoing evolution of the biopolitical state form. It has dedicated less time to considering how to address these troubling issues. Here in conclusion I will grapple with the ramifications of this work more directly. The main “prescriptive” conclusion to be drawn from this book is that changing a trajectory toward a world defined by the biopolitical state would require a confrontation with the fantasies and desires that produce the movement in the first place. I have already shown the difficulties of glimpsing and diagnosing ideological processes. It should be clear that affecting them would be even more difficult. Indeed, there are several problems defining the challenge of confronting a belief in and desire for nature. As I explained in the introduction to this work, one reason it is difficult to navigate the terrain of nature ideology is that one cannot simply say that nature doesn’t exist. Nor would it be productive, for example, to call for increased regulation or policing of the word nature in academic or conventional vocabulary. One reason for this is that the notions of inborn characteristic and proclivity, as well as a spatialized imagination of origin and universal law indicated by the word nature, fundamentally structure human thought in a way that cannot be easily revised. It is not possible to censor a concept that is essential to understanding so many other concepts and that is, in turn, reinforced by them. Changing a word will not change the need to recur to concepts such as the human, history, and the artificial. Nor will it remove a spontaneous and natural thinking about second chances, an approach to cause and effect that employs a thought experiment in which one imagines a return to the moment in which an error was made and thus a different course of action. For it is this thought experiment that stands behind a desire to return to nature, which is ultimately imagined as an attempt to correct one’s errors or those of one’s predecessors by starting again at the site of error or to cut this Gordian knot by wiping the slate clean and starting over from scratch. If the concept of nature and the desire that informs it cannot be simply done away with, it is hard to see how it would be possible to avoid the spontaneous

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recurrence of a hypostasized view of nature as the solution to society’s ills. Insofar as nature is a concept that pervades the Enlightenment and Romantic imaginaries that define our societies and our thinking, it remains available as the object of a spontaneously recurring personal and social desire. It is not easy to imagine such desire at this point being affected or altered from the “top down” in any way, much less by academic discourse. The question of a practical problem of nature ideology can be reduced to a question of how to get people en masse to no longer want to live in an idealized state of nature, or their imagination of it. If, as William Cronon and Ursula Heise have suggested, an ongoing expansion of the human habitus causes spaces not colonized by human beings (i.e., sites of so-­ called nature) to become increasingly rare and, as such, increasingly desirable, it seems that a desire for nature will only become stronger and more difficult to regulate in the future. In this way, concern about a trajectory toward a biopolitical state overlaps with concern about the destruction of the earth insofar as both appear to drive and be driven by nature fantasies. Insofar as a desire for nature is linked to the matter of environmental destruction, the latter is one of the other “practical” issues at stake in this work (not to mention one of the most difficult conundrums facing humanity at this time). If a desire for nature as wilderness can become an engine of the environment’s destruction, has operated as a driving impulse behind the enclosure of uncolonized spaces, and is inseparable from the ideology of modernity itself, it is necessary to try to imagine ways of advocating for the preservation of the environment that do not resort to the common approach of raising awareness of its value and thus generating more desire for it. Along lines similar to the critique of decolonial thought in the first chapter of this book, I believe that ecocritical academic discourse, though organized around a truly important imperative, sometimes undermines its own goals by failing to recognize the extent to which a desire for nature has acted in concert with colonialism, modernization, and the destruction of the environment. While ecological conscience (“conciencia ecológica”) and environmental concerns (“preocupaciones medioambientales”) motivate ecocriticism, as Gisella Heffes writes in her useful exposition of ecocritical discourse (and as many of the works of her edited volume of Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana demonstrate), these motivations are insufficient for the realization of their desire for environmental conservation.2 As ecocriticism gains popularity as a transdisciplinary academic field, it is important to remember how the nature-­centered Romantic literature of the nineteenth century did little to slow the industrial revolution it opposed—­that the challenge of conservation will not succeed by advocating for an environment that is often equated with nature. In particular, the anti-­humanist trend within ecocriticism, which places the value of nature/ wilderness in its opposition to the human or finds in nature an intrinsic value ostensibly divorced from its use by humans, actively reinforces ideological

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fantasies of nature’s purity and goodness, equating nature with environment and intensifying a desire for nature in a way that is deeply counterproductive.3 Ecocriticism, more than principally seeking to disseminate its “ecological conscience,” must instead create a critical understanding of nature and help develop an awareness of the pitfalls of nature thinking. I express my view on this matter in the technique that I have adopted and developed as the principal methodology of this study: the practice of a critical natural history, which seeks to reveal the erasure of history that is essential to nature’s operational effectiveness as ideology. Understanding the dialectical dynamics among history, “nature,” and the human—­understanding the scientific notion that landscape is not static as well as the fact that the concept of nature itself has changed over time—­makes it harder to ingenuously believe in a spatialized nature and to be motivated by a desire to return to it. It leads to a realization that what is at stake in “nature” is always ourselves and that a desire to conserve the environment should retain a desire to preserve the place in which we live and to live there in a way that is not merely abased survival. It entails grappling with the challenges of history as opposed to fleeing from them, requires one to see oneself as irrevocably caught up in a historical continuum. Even ecocritical works that demonstrate a more nuanced understanding of natural history such as Cronon’s “The Trouble with Nature” or Jens Anderman’s “Cosmopolitismos Telúricos” risk reinforcing the integration of nature and history as a value, as opposed to a mere description of the way things are, in a way that is potentially problematic.4 The argument I have made in this book demonstrates that while an architectural integration of nature and history in the gardens of Brazilian urban designer Burle Marx might be aesthetically pleasing, create spaces for reflection, and cultivate a deeper understanding of local ecologies as Anderman describes, these outcomes can appear trivial when considered in relation to the dark side of the political integration of nature and history that this study has shown. If the garden, as political model, has been mobilized in projects that seek to create the world as a war of all against all, it is other values not mentioned by Anderman that would make the gardens of Burle Marx valuable and exceptional—­above all, their function as public spaces that foment community and civil society. If the garden as vision of the integration of human history and nature can be revalued in a way that counters its use as a model of the biopolitical state, such a revaluation must focus on the human stakes of nature and work against the destruction of community implied by a fantasy of survival it mobilizes. In the example of the commons, whose focus on community stands against the fantasy of individual survival in the wild, perhaps one such “garden” can be found, although there can be little doubt that it is another nature fantasy. While Silvia Federici’s treatment of the commons accurately defines the stakes of the matter as a resistance to “life in a Hobbesian world” and (with George

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Caffentzis) actively seeks to avoid “nostalgic returns,” a Marxist elaboration of the commons cannot help but fall prey to the nostalgia and desire for an idealized past in its desire for the end of history.5 Though such an understanding of the commons is not exclusively focused on land (Federici observes “history itself is a common”), the guiding desire to demarcate a redoubt beyond the reach of capitalism is fundamentally utopian and depends heavily on a binary dynamic between inside and outside.6 Articulated in this way, the commons can only ever be another walled garden. I think that a realistic conceptualization of nature as commons cannot depend on a clear relation between inside and outside or believe in the possibility of any return to a precapitalistic society. It must instead be defined by an understanding that such return is not possible precisely insofar as modernity has already revealed the world itself to be a de facto commons, a space that is at this point always already colonized and always already shared. A similar notion has been expressed by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, who elaborate a view of resistance that does not depend on the circumscription of or return to a commons. Rather, their concept of undercommons sees the colonized space or “surround” that we all occupy as a kind of conquered state of nature, the ruin of a commons that has been enclosed but that nonetheless retains remnants of its original constitution that continue to provide resources for resistance.7 Even if no organized global collectivity currently exists, it does not mean, as Federici argues, that a de facto global commons or undercommons does not exist.8 Today, the nonglobalized state, the utopian redoubt, and perhaps even private property in the form of land have lost integrity insofar as the slow violence of climate change, rising sea levels, and pandemics do not respect borders, not to mention that the mere historical fact of capitalism in the world will always threaten the appropriation and subsumption of any circumscribed space, be it common or private.9 A wall cannot exclude these historical developments. There cannot be an entering and leaving modernity, as García Canclini argues.10 There can only be a reckoning with the remnants and ruins of the past from within the modernity they constitute. Through this perspective the question of land turns into a question of politics and community, the coexistence and conflict between a multiplicity of social and economic forms; the question of conservation turns into a problem of transnational organization and enforcement akin to the problem of international law explored by Carl Schmitt in The Nomos of the Earth. The (under)commons viewed as a space of labor might avoid taking on the value of a messianic end of history because, far from representing the end of struggle and the end of want, it is a space that will always call for more labor, work, and study. The utopianism of the commons might be tempered by an understanding that labor without exploitation is still labor. Against the belief that it will be possible to exit capitalism, perhaps this view of the world as the

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unresolved, mundane but also communal space of labor can help mitigate a desire for the end of struggle with the end of history. If nature cannot be avoided, it can nonetheless be revalued. Likewise, if the walled garden, like nature, is a figure that wields a certain ideological force—­as a vision of natural history, as a political model, and as an object of desire—­ perhaps its transvaluation as (under)commons might mitigate the more destructive elements of the fantasies it mobilizes. Or if not, perhaps there is some other vision of the garden that could overturn or supersede its biopolitical value. Without being prepared to fully undertake such thinking here, I can at least signal a path for thinking that imagines change occurring within the realm of ideology and desire. Because there can be no question that fantasy—­ and more specifically, nature fantasies—­will continue to determine the unfolding of human history. While a rational, theoretical tool such as natural history is an important means for creating a critical understanding that might check movement toward the biopolitical state or a destruction of the environment that would accelerate such movement, doubt remains as to whether understanding can counter the overwhelming power of nonrational desire for nature and a return to origins. If the fantasy at the heart of the social order otherwise known as myth is undergirded by irrational desire, historical agency might boil down to the administration of desire by way of myth. If the shape and fate of any collectivity cannot avoid being determined by its guiding fantasies—­if Enlightenment is nothing other than a dialectical procession of myths, one displacing the other, as Adorno and Horkheimer describe—­can historical agency, then, be sought in the selection or engineering those fantasies? Or would this simply be a reformulation of a failed political Romanticism? Perhaps, beyond the scope of literary creationism, it is possible to see a fashioning of fantasy also in the sober and mundane act of fashioning law. Scholarship might further inquire as to the relationship between myth and law today, making judgments about what it should and can be in the future. If theorists and scholars of literature and culture are able to help find solutions to the practical political and environmental issues being discussed here, it might be by engaging questions such as these that the relevance of their expertise will come into focus.

AC K N OW L E D G M E N T S

This book is dedicated to Juanita Bernal Benavides. Not only did she read it and provide valuable feedback at various stages; she also shared her life with me during its formation and realization. Her partnership—intellectual and otherwise— made the book possible. I am indebted to Gareth Williams for his mentorship and his 2017 seminar “On Decontainment,” which catalyzed the thinking that went into this book. Travis Williams, Martin Vega, and Shannon Dowd buoyed me with friendship, dialogue, and support during the often-difficult process of traveling the academic path. I wish to thank them, along with Elizabeth Barrios, Daniel Nemser, and David Johnson for their feedback on various chapters of this work. For their intellectual engagement, friendship, and support, I wish to express warm appreciation to Daniel Noemi Voionmaa, Kate Jenckes, Frieda Ekotto, Cristina Moreiras, Julie Highfill, Gustavo Verdesio, George Hoffman, Sergio Villalobos-­Ruminott, Alejandro Quin, Drew Johnson, Kyle Booten, David Collinge, Marcelino Viera, Federico Pous, Christian Kroll, Andrea Marinescu, Daniel Williford, Ludmila Ferrari, Adam Johnson, Raquel Vieira Parrine, Roberto Vezzani, Robert Wells, Jaime Rodríguez Matos, Brendan Lanctot, Abraham Acosta, Mauricio Gómez Valdovinos, Alberto Moreiras, Shane Meyer, Dave Hooper, Andrés Pletch, Matías Beverinotti, Erika Almenara, Rachel Tenhaaf, Vicent Moreno, Andrea Davis, and Justin Castro. I am grateful to Suzanne Guiod at Bucknell University Press for believing in this work and helping guide it through the process of publication. Regards also to Pam Dailey for her help and to Zack Gresham of Vanderbilt University Press for inquiring about my book project. University of Michigan Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, Arkansas State University, and SUNY Buffalo have provided invaluable institutional support for the development and realization of this project. 1 23

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Thanks to Alexandra Eastburn for allowing Glomflower’s Den to appear on the cover of this work. Finally, thanks to my mother, Gina Horowitz, and family. This book would not exist without you.

N O T E S

introduction All translations in this chapter are mine unless otherwise noted. 1. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, trans. Daniel Heller-­Roazen (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), 37. See chapter 5 for this elaboration of the concept of the biopolitical state and its emergence in Paraguay. 2. “La colonia continuó viviendo en la república” [The colony lived on in the republic] (José Martí, “Nuestra América,” in Ensayos y crónicas, ed. José Olivio Jiménez [Spain: Anaya & Mario Muchnik, 1995], 122). 3. Jorge Luis Borges observes a transformation of God into nature in “La esfera de Pascal” [“The Fearful Sphere of Pascal”], showing how a description of God originating in ancient Greek thought eventually forms the basis for Pascal’s description of nature (Jorge Luis Borges, “La esfera de Pascal,” in Inquisiciones / Otras inquisiciones [Buenos Aires: Debols!llo, 2012], 155–­159). Adorno and Horkheimer, in arguing that Enlightenment itself unfolds as a procession of myths, also consider how this conceptualization of nature as a uniform manifold, and as the central organizing concept of today’s mathematical definition of Enlightenment, was made possible by the notion of the monotheistic God (Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. Edmund Jephcott [Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002], 18–­19). In light of these arguments, it is clear that the “God/Nature” Spinoza describes in Ethics remains the theological heart of “Enlightenment” today. 4. For a more detailed discussion of the definition of nature and its evolution, see chapter 1. 5. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 110. 6. Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, trans. G.  L.  Ulman (New York: Telos, 2006), 96. Hobbes’s “state of nature” is often understood as a hypothetical past that never actually existed. Agamben writes, “We have seen that the state of nature is not a real epoch chronologically prior to the foundation of the City but a principle internal to the City, which appears the moment the City is considered tanquam dissoluta, ‘as if it were dissolved’ (in this sense, therefore, the state of nature is something like a state of exception)” (Agamben, Homo Sacer, 105). Insofar as nature is “produced” by both city and law that are defined spatially by the wall, nature, too, becomes spatial, as all that lies on the other side of the wall. 7. Schmitt, Nomos of the Earth, 92. 8. Schmitt, 93–­94. 9. Schmitt, 95.

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10. Schmitt traces the ascription of his “freedom” beyond the line to a scholastic-­theological debate during the sixteenth century about the humanity of Indigenous peoples. He even goes so far as to relate it to nineteenth-­century German conceptualizations of the superhuman and subhuman that would inform the biopolitical regime of the Nazis (Schmitt, 104). 11. Cronon writes, “As we gaze into the mirror it holds up for us, we too easily imagine that what we behold is Nature when in fact we see the reflection of our own unexamined longings and desires” (William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. William Cronon [New York: Norton, 1995], 2). Ursula Heise describes this phenomenon within the discourses surrounding conservation and environmentalism, writing that “however much individual environmentalists may be motivated by a selfless devotion to the well-­being of nonhuman species . . . their engagements with these species gain sociocultural traction to the extent that they become part of the stories that human communities tell about themselves” (Ursula Heise, Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016], 5). 12. Theodor Adorno, History and Freedom, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Malden: Polity, 2008), 107. 13. Adorno, 107. 14. See Foucault’s Madness and Civilization and The History of Sexuality. 15. Adorno describes Marx’s view of natural history as “the objectivity of historic life” (Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton [New York: Continuum, 1990], 354). He also writes that Hegel’s “world spirit is the ideology of natural history” (Adorno, 356). In his lectures he points to Kant’s essay “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim” (1784) as the origin of Hegel’s own thinking about the topic. In this essay Kant explores an incipient view of human history as natural history, the idea that “a history in accordance with a determinate plan of nature might nevertheless be possible even of creatures who do not behave in accordance to their own plan” (Immanuel Kant, “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim,” in Kant’s Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim, trans. Allan Wood [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008], 11). 16. Eric Santner, On Creaturely Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), xiv. 17. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 355. 18. Gareth Williams, Infrapolitical Passages: Global Turmoil, Narco-­Accumulation, and the Post-­sovereign State (New York: Fordham, 2021), 62. Williams uses Heidegger’s expression “standing reserve” in reference to the latter’s “definition of the world dominated by techne” (Williams, 205). He goes on to quote Heidegger: “Everywhere everything is ordered to stand by, to be immediately at hand, indeed to stand there just so it may be on call for a further ordering. We call it the standing reserve” (Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in Basic Writings, trans. William Lovitt [New York: Harper & Row, 1977], 17). 19. In his treatment of Lacanian psychoanalysis in The Sublime Object of Ideology, Slavoj Žižek describes the Real as “the illusion of a possible return to nature” (Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology [New York: Verso, 1989], 5). 20. “The Conquest, Colonization, Independence, and all of our struggles for freedom—­are these for us already a mere historical experience? The answer to these questions has to be no. If it were not, if in truth all of that past were an authentic past, it would mean that we had begun to realize our history in the dialectical sense which Hegel pointed out” (Leopoldo Zea, The Latin American Mind, trans. James H. Abbott and Lowell Dunham [Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1966], 5). 21. “The black man has two dimensions. One with his fellows, the other with the white man. A Negro behaves differently with a white man and with another Negro. That this self-­ division is a direct result of colonialist subjugation is beyond question” (Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann [London: Pluto Press, 1986], 17).

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chapter 1 —­ the natural history of latin american independence A version of this chapter first appeared as “The Natural History of Latin American Independence” in CR: The New Centennial Review 16, no. 3 (2016): 211–­232. CR: The New Centennial Review is published by Michigan State University Press. All translations in this chapter are mine unless otherwise noted. 1. Nature is a concept whose meaning is not fixed but rather has evolved over time according to concrete social and political exigencies. Today, a common definition of nature takes it to be the same as wilderness: an unpeopled terrestrial space. But this definition only entered into common usage during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It developed dialectically out of Enlightenment thought, in which nature was a scientific concept that primarily referred to timeless, eternal, or ahistorical attributes of things. The English word nature derives from a Roman translation of the Greek concept physis and invokes birth (the prefix nat-­ meaning “born”) to refer to the inborn quality of a person or thing (natura). Due to the duration and complexity of its usage, the task of comprehensively historicizing the concept of nature is truly daunting. The Veil of Isis (2006) by Pierre Hadot is one notable (but inevitably incomplete) attempt to do so. See also The Idea of Nature (1945) by R. G. Collingwood for a history of nature in Western philosophy. 2. Heredia began drafting the poem “En el teocalli de Cholula” in 1820. He published an early edition of it in 1825 and the “definitive, extended version,” as Frederick Luciani describes it, in 1832 (Frederick Luciani, ed., José María Heredia, in New York, 1823–­1825: An Exiled Cuban Poet in the Age of Revolution, Selected Letters and Verse [Albany: SUNY, 2020], 235). 3. In 1842 José Victorino Lastarria addressed the Santiago Literary Society with a speech about the state of Latin American cultural autonomy in which he maintained the importance of looking to France as an example for American culture while at the same time noting the danger of maintaining “nuestra literatura con una existencia prestada, pendiente siempre de lo exótico” [our literature with a borrowed existence, attached always to the exotic] (José Victorino Lastarria, Discursos académicos de J. V. Lastarria [Santiago: Impr. del Siglo, 1844], 172). In 1848 Andrés Bello appears to respond to Lastarria in an essay that has been republished under the title “La autonomía cultural de América,” expressing a more pessimistic view of American originality by imagining what French historians Jules Michelet and François Guizot would say about the state of Latin American culture: Dirán: la América no ha sacudido aún sus cadenas; se arrastra sobre nuestras huellas con los ojos vendados; no respira en sus obras un pensamiento propio, nada original, nada característico; remeda las formas de nuestra filosofía y no se apropia su espíritu. Su civilización es una planta exótica que no ha chupado todavía sus jugos a la tierra que la sostiene. [They will say: America still has not shaken her chains; she stumbles, blindfolded, over the path we’ve tread; in her works there breathes no thought that is proper to her, nothing original, nothing characteristic; she apes the forms of our philosophy and does not appropriate its spirit. Her civilization is an exotic plant that has still not absorbed the juices of the land that sustains it.] Andrés Bello, “La autonomía cultural de América,” in Conciencia intelectual de América, ed. Carlos Ripoll (New York: Las Américas Publishing, 1966), 49. 4. Walter Mignolo, a leader of the decolonial movement, is forthright in his belief that a rupture with modernity should (and could) be total, writing that “it is no longer possible, or at least it is not unproblematic, to ‘think’ from the canon of Western philosophy, even when part of the canon is critical of modernity” (Walter Mignolo, “The Geopolitics of Knowledge

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and the Colonial Difference,” in Coloniality at Large, ed. Mabel Moraña, Enrique Dussel, and Carlos Jáuregui [Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008], 234). 5. Octavio Paz, Hijos del limo (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1981), 17. 6. Leopoldo Zea, The Latin American Mind, trans. James H. Abbott and Lowell Dunham (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1966), 10. 7. “At a certain historical juncture the Hispanic American rebelled against his past, and hence against the responsibilities that it implied. He attempted to make an immediate break with the past. He denied it, by attempting to begin a new history, as if nothing had been accomplished previously” (Zea, 12). In the depiction of America as a space of nature that aimed to substantiate a claim of total historical rupture, independence thinking articulated the intertwining of a Creole desire for cultural autonomy from Spain with a more radical desire for autonomy from history itself. 8. Rather than imitating European systems of thinking (especially for the governance of the nation-­state), Martí argues that true cultural independence can only be achieved in Latin America by looking inward to its own unique nature: “La forma del gobierno ha de avenirse a la constitución propia del país. El gobierno no es más que el equilibrio de los elementos naturales del país” [The form of the government ought to accord with the unique constitution of the country. The government is nothing more than the balance of the natural elements of the country] (José Martí, “Nuestra América,” in Ensayos y crónicas, ed. José Olivio Jiménez [Spain: Anaya & Mario Muchnik, 1995], 119). Responding, apparently, to Sarmiento, he proclaims, “No hay batalla entre la civilización y la barbarie, sino entre la falsa erudición y la Naturaleza. El hombre natural es bueno y acata y premia la inteligencia superior” [There is a battle not between civilization and barbarism but rather between false erudition and Nature. Natural man is good and respects and rewards superior intelligence] (Martí, 119–­ 120). See Abraham Acosta’s Thresholds of Illiteracy (2014) for a discussion of Martí’s importance in the definition of Latin American resistance. Divergent Modernities (2001) by Julio Ramos and The Limits of Identity: Politics and Poetics in Latin America (2015) by Charles Hatfield are key accounts of Martí’s significance. 9. Scholarship describing the intellectual dialogue between Europe and Latin America overwhelmingly credits the Romantic scientist Alexander von Humboldt as being the most important influence on American depictions of terrestrial nature during the nineteenth century. Some of the works that detail his influence include Imperial Eyes by Mary Louise Pratt, “Humboldt in the Orinoco and the Environmental Humanities” by Jorge Marcone, Hacia una cultura de la naturaleza by Antonio Núñez Jiménez, Nature, Empire, and Nation: Explorations of the History of Science in the Iberian World by Jorge Cañizares-­ Esguerra, and Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America by Laura Dassow Walls. Against this trend, it is important to appreciate the much broader, heterogeneous body of Romantic thinking (especially English and German) contributing to a conceptual overdetermination of nature as land. There is no question that early thinkers of Latin American Romanticism were not just reading Humboldt. In his 1827 essay “Juicio sobre las Poesías de José María Heredia,” Andrés Bello finds Heredia’s work to be slightly too reminiscent of Byron. Another Latin American Romantic thinker, Esteban Echeverría, mentions Friedrich Schlegel in the introduction of La cautiva, and in epigraphs in the same work, he cites Byron in English and Hugo in French. In the Catedra edition of that book, Leonor Fleming cites from his journal: “Shakespeare, Schiller, Goethe y especialmente Byron me conmovieron profundamente y me revelaron un nuevo mundo” [Shakespeare, Schiller, Goethe, and especially Byron moved me deeply and revealed to me a new world] (Esteban Echeverría, El Matadero—­La cautiva [Madrid: Cátedra, 2003], 26). 10. “La ciudad es el centro de la civilización argentina, española, europea. . . . El desierto las circunda a más o menos distancia, las cerca, las oprime; la naturaleza salvaje las reduce a unas estrechas oasis de civilización enclavadas en un llano inculto” [The city is the center of Argentine, Spanish, and European civilization. . . . The desert that surrounds them at a

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greater or lesser distance encloses them, oppresses them; savage nature reduces them to a few narrow oases of civilization ensconced in the unrefined plain] (Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Facundo: Civilización y barbarie en las pampas argentinas [Buenos Aires: Stockcero, 2003], 21). 11. Roberto Schwarz describes the phenomenon in Brazil in his essay “Misplaced Ideas” (1992). Javier Lasarte Valcárcel describes a Latin American “nacionalismo paradójico” [paradoxical nationalism] as the dissonance between claims of national difference and a Creole admiration for European culture—­French especially—­during the nineteenth century (Javier Lasarte Valcárcel, “El XIX estrecho: Leer los proyectos fundacionales,” in Ficciones y silencios fundacionales, ed. Friedhelm Schmidt-­Welle [Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2003], 58). 12. Zea, Latin American Mind, 9. 13. Aníbal Quijano, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Social Classification,” in Moraña, Dussel, and Jáuregui, Coloniality at Large, 222. 14. Mignolo, “Geopolitics of Knowledge,” 234. 15. In The Spanish American Regional Novel (1990) Carlos Alonso expresses his view that “Latin America’s preoccupation with the affirmation of its cultural specificity has constituted the essence of its experience of modernity” and that the proclamation of difference is modern at heart, even as it seeks to articulate Latin America’s lack of modernity (Carlos Alonso, The Spanish American Regional Novel [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990], 31). Through Alonso, the articulation of the postcolonial crisis by today’s decolonial thinkers, as well as their reiteration of the imperative of decolonizing Latin American thought through a disavowal of the Western canon, appears as the paradigmatically modern “willful forgetfulness of history, a plunging into the immediacy of the present moment of crisis that is belied by the repetitive—­and therefore historical—­nature of that act” (Alonso, 17). Alonso describes the influence of Paul de Man in the formation of his view of the return to difference in Latin American thinking. See de Man’s Blindness and Insight (1971) for more on a “pattern of self-­mystification that accompanies the experience of crisis” that very much parallels and describes the ongoing claim of autonomy from the past in Latin America, which is not able to comprehend that making this claim is self-­defeating, a performance of the very gestures such a claim seeks to supersede (Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight [London: Methuen, 1983], 16). 16. Jorge Luis Borges, “La muralla y los libros,” in Inquisiciones / Otras inquisiciones (Buenos Aires: Debols!llo, 2012), 151–­154. 17. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002), xvii. 18. Marisol de la Cadena, “Indigenous Cosmopolitics in the Andes,” Cultural Anthropology 25, no. 2 (2010): 350. 19. Santiago Castro-­Gómez, “(Post)coloniality for Dummies: Latin American Perspectives on Modernity, Coloniality, and the Geopolitics of Knowledge,” in Moraña, Dussel, and Jáuregui, Coloniality at Large, 281. 20. “In his collection of poems, Caño signals a Maya epistemology linking the natural and spiritual worlds, and critically contrasts it with an occidental epistemology circulated through condemnation and erasure. The contrast between Catholicism and Maya spirituality lends in his poems to his vision of the Maya world as interrupting and problematising the spiritual project of the West in Guatemalan history” (Amy Olen, “Decolonial Translation in Daniel Caño’s Stxaj no’ anima / Oración salvaje,” Journal of Specialized Translation 24 [2015]: 226). “The physical structure of Catholicism—­the adorned temple—­cannot provide spiritual tranquility because it is separated from nature itself ” (Olen, 225). 21. Olen, 223. 22. Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 3. 23. Anthony Andersson, “Environmentalists with Guns: Conservation, Revolution, and Counterinsurgency in Petén Guatemala, 1917–­1996” (PhD diss., University of Michigan,

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2018). Sherman Alexie’s Reservation Blues (1995) is an important depiction of the paradoxes defining life on the reservation. 24. See Robinson Meyer, “The Amazon Rainforest Was Profoundly Changed by Ancient Humans,” Atlantic, March 2, 2017. For further discussion of ecocriticism, refer to the conclusion. 25. In 1932 Theodor Adorno wrote “The Idea of Natural History” in response to a post-­ Husserlian phenomenological project. The stated intention of his essay was to “dialectically overcome the usual antithesis of nature and history”: what can be read as a deconstruction of Heidegger’s neo-­ontological thought (Theodor Adorno, “The Idea of Natural History,” trans. Bob Hullot-­Kentor, Praxis International 4, no. 2 [1984]: 111). While my reading of nineteenth-­century Latin American texts does not embody Adorno’s approach in an orthodox manner, it reflects his understanding that nature is a form of myth. He writes, “The concept of nature that is to be dissolved is one that, if I translated it into standard philosophical terminology, would come closest to the concept of myth” (Adorno, 111). I do not believe it will be possible to “dissolve” or “shatter” a myth of nature, but I do believe natural history can carry out a forceful critique by acting as a point of inflection between a philosophical project of seeking the historical truth of being (Heidegger) and a project of tracing the history of ideology as developed by Michel Foucault. Nature articulates a bond between truth and ideology; natural history investigates this bond. 26. In his 1827 essay “Juicio sobre las Poesías de José María Heredia,” Andrés Bello praises Heredia and compares his work to that of Byron. In his essay “Heredia” (1889) José Martí proclaims the poet to be the father of independent Latin American letters. In José María Heredia, primogénito del romanticismo hispano (1955) Manuel Pedro González elaborates a view of Heredia as the father of Latin American Romanticism. 27. Anthony Pagden, Spanish Imperialism and the Political Imagination (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990), 10. 28. Pagden, 10. 29. In Imperial Eyes (1992) Mary Louise Pratt writes that Humboldt’s work “became essential raw material for American and Americanist ideologies forged by creole intellectuals in the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s” (Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes [New York: Routledge, 2008], 172). While Humboldt was certainly influential, nonscientific counter-­Enlightenment views of nature were also influential in Latin America but have received little attention. The imbalance in Pratt’s view is visible when she states that Heredia rewrites a description of the pyramid that had appeared in Humboldt’s Views of the Cordilleras (1814), reading a “dynamic of discovery” reminiscent of this travel narrative in the daytime section of the poem (Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 180). On the other hand, she attributes the “framework of nostalgia and loss” of the nighttime section exclusively to Heredia’s experience of exile and holds it up as an expression of the new criollismo of America (Pratt, 180). She makes no mention of the possible influence of other Romantic thinkers whose work was characterized by a melancholy that reflected the tension between a desire to recuperate the past and an awareness of the impossibility of this task, a problem closely linked to the Romantic desire for the immanence of the subject, or self-­identity. Nor does she note that the means Heredia chooses in order to express his sense of nostalgia and loss is a closely related trope, the work of art depicting a ruin within the ambit of a wild countryside, which has been discussed at length by thinkers such as Walter Benjamin in Origin of German Tragic Drama (1928) and Heidegger in “The Origin of the Work of Art” (1935–­1936). For more on the influence of the scientific travel narrative on Latin American letters, see Myth and Archive (1990) by Roberto González Echevarría. 30. José María Heredia, “En el teocalli de Cholula,” in Niágara y otros textos, ed. Ángel Augier (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1990), 106. 31. Heredia, 107. The clear personification of nature in the use of the personal “a” here resonates with another important trope that Annette Kolodny investigates at length in The Lay of the Land (1975), in which she describes how the New World is repeatedly depicted as a virgin woman.

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32. Heredia, “En el teocalli,” 107. 33. Heredia, 106–­107. 34. Heredia, 108. 35. Heredia, 108.

chapter 2 —­ renewing niagara falls and burning the archive in the cuban poetic tradition A version of this chapter was first published as “Renewing Niagara Falls, Burning the Archive in the Cuban Poetic Tradition” in An Island in the Stream: Ecocritical and Literary Responses to Cuban Environmental Culture, ed. David Taylor, Scott Slovic, and Armando Fernandez Soriano (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2019), 19–­31. All translations in this chapter are mine unless otherwise noted. 1. In The Limits of Identity: Politics and Poetics in Latin America (2015) Charles Hatfield describes the legacy of Martí’s nuestra-­americanismo within the larger phenomenon of a Latin Americanism defined by the claim of difference. “‘Nuestra América’ has been mobilized both as the forerunner of South Asian postcolonial theory and an organic Latin American theoretical alternative to it, and it has served as a model for what José David Saldívar calls ‘comparative cultural studies.’ Indeed, ‘Nuestra América’ is repeatedly held up as a fresh, new road map for the Latin American future or as an unfinished project whose state of unfinishedness defines the present tasks of Latin Americanism” (Charles Hatfield, The Limits of Identity: Politics and Poetics in Latin America [Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015], 12). The “decolonial” movement led by Walter Mignolo is the latest of these projects that seek to fulfill this incomplete decolonization of Latin American thought. Describing Martí as the “spiritual father of the revolution,” Jaime Rodríguez Matos traces his legacy within the foquismo of the Cuban revolutionary tradition through Cintio Vitier and Ernesto Guevara (Jaime Rodríguez Matos, Writing of the Formless: José Lezama Lima and the End of Time [New York: Fordham, 2017], 56). He develops an understanding of the influence of his Romantic belief in nature, observing the way in which for both Martí and Guevara “the idealism of the Revolution has to become a force of nature, sprouting wild, without being cultivated” (Rodríguez Matos, 60). 2. Julio Ramos, Divergent Modernities, trans. John D. Blanco (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001), xxxv. 3. Ramos, xxxvii. 4. It is a tradition in Martí criticism to try to pinpoint the way in which he was a prophet of modernity. In “Una aproximación existencial al ‘Prólogo al Poema del Niágara’ de José Martí” (1973), José Olivio Jiménez describes how the Romanticism within Martí’s thinking “impulsa a la moderna conciencia existencial” [drives the modern existential consciousness] (José Olivio Jiménez, “Una aproximación existencial al ‘Prólogo al Poema del Niágara’ de José Martí,” Anales de la literatura hispanoamericana, no. 16 [1973–­1974]: 410). José Miguel Oviedo in Breve historia del ensayo hispanoamericano (1990) states that the prologue “constituye la primera definición del espíritu modernista en América” [constitutes the primary definition of the modernist spirit in America] (José Miguel Oviedo, Breve historia del ensayo hispanoamericano [Madrid: Alianza, 1990], 38). Miguel Gomes cites this essay in “La nostalgia modernista del centro: Dos Prólogos” and expands on the connections between Martí, Darío, and Nietzsche. See also “El Prólogo al Poema del Niágara de José Martí y la revolución modernista” (1995) by Ángel Esteban and “El poeta y el cronista modernista en el Prólogo al Poema del Niágara” (2016) by Jaime Galgani Muñoz. For a more general theory of the crisis of modernity in Latin America in its relation to tragedy, see Patrick Dove’s The Catastrophe of Modernity (2004). 5. Ramos, Divergent Modernities, xxxviii. 6. Ramos, xxxix.

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7. The phrase time is out of joint, a quotation from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, is used by Jacques Derrida in Specters of Marx (1993) to think about the uneasy relationship between the intellectual and those who preceded him—­on the one hand Derrida’s own relation to Marx, but then also the relation between Marx and Hegel. It is Hamlet’s uneasy relationship with his father’s ghost that defines his feeling that time is out of joint. 8. Rodríguez Matos, Writing of the Formless, 31. 9. Ramos, Divergent Modernities, xxxviii. 10. See the previous chapter for a description of nature’s role in the foundation of the independent Latin American nation-­state in countries such as Cuba, Argentina, Paraguay, and Colombia. 11. José Martí, “Prólogo al ‘Poema del Niágara’ de Juan A. Pérez Bonalde,” in Ensayos y crónicas, ed. José Olivio Jiménez (Spain: Anaya & Mario Muchnik, 1995), 21. 12. Martí, 21. 13. José Victorino Lastarria, Discursos académicos de J. V. Lastarria (Santiago: Impr. del Siglo, 1844), 172; Esteban Echeverría, El Matadero—­La cautiva (Madrid: Cátedra, 2003), 119. 14. Octavio Paz, Hijos del limo (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1981), 17. 15. Martí, “Prólogo,” 33. 16. Martí, 39. 17. Rodríguez Matos, Writing of the Formless, 57. 18. “No quería componer otro Quijote—­lo cual es fácil—­sino el Quijote. Inútil agregar que no encaró nunca una transcripción mecánica del original; no se proponía copiarlo. Su admirable ambición era producir unas páginas que coincidieran—­palabra por palabra y línea por línea—­con las de Miguel de Cervantes” (Jorge Luis Borges, “Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote,” Sur, no. 56 [1939]: 11). [He did not want to compose another Quijote—­which is easy—­but the Quijote itself. Needless to say, he never contemplated a mechanical transcription of the original; he did not propose to copy it. His admirable intention was to produce a few pages that would coincide—­word for word and line for line—­with those of Miguel de Cervantes] (Jorge Luis Borges, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” in Labyrinths, trans. James E. Irby [New York: New Directions, 1962], 39). 19. Borges, “Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote,” 15; Borges, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” 42. 20. Borges, “Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote,” 12; Borges, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” 41. 21. Borges, “Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote,” 16; Borges, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” 44. 22. Martí sings his praises in the essay “Heredia” (1889). 23. José María Heredia, “Niágara,” in Niágara y otros textos, ed. Ángel Augier (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1990), 142. 24. Heredia, 143. 25. Martí, “Prólogo,” 31. 26. Martí, 32. 27. A few years after Martí writes his prologue, Nietzsche shows it is better not to name the master you wish to supersede. In Twilight of the Idols (1888) Nietzsche describes himself as a destroyer of the idols that uphold the “slave morality” of Judaism and Christianity—­ that is, as one who will “philosophize with a hammer.” Without naming him, he casts himself as Abraham (the patriarch of the morality he claims to destroy), who smashed with a hammer the clay idols his father made and sold. Despite the irony of this act of casting himself after the Jewish patriarch he claims to overturn, we must believe that Nietzsche understands what he is doing, because he explores an almost identical supersessionary gesture—­how Paul invents the Christian religion as a supersession of Judaism, as its fulfillment and displacement—­in The Anti-­Christ (1895). 28. In Natural Supernaturalism (1971) M.  H.  Abrams considers the discursive event in which the Romantic concept of nature takes on the qualities previously ascribed to God,

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reflecting a “secularization of inherited theological ideas and ways of thinking” that Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer describe in Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002), 12. 29. Heredia, “Niágara,” 143. 30. Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, “A vista de Niágara,” in Poesías líricas (Madrid: L. Lopez, 1877), 374. 31. Juan A. Pérez Bonalde, “Poema del Niágara,” in Ritmos (New York, 1880), 161. 32. Bonalde, 177–­178. 33. Martí, “Prólogo,” 29. 34. Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight (London: Methuen, 1983), 16; Rodríguez Matos, Writing of the Formless, 59.

chapter 3 —­ the fantasy of the creole as white indian All translations in this chapter are mine unless otherwise noted. 1. Here is another cultural motif, considered and critiqued by Philip Deloria in Indians in Unexpected Places (2004): finding humor in Native Americans who act modern, which derives from the expectation that they would not do so because they are supposed to be traditional and belong to the past (Philip Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places [Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2004], 4–­5). In this case, being white, English, and scientific is the sense in which Clarke seems modern, against which his indigeneity comes as a surprise. 2. In Facundo (1845) Domingo Faustino Sarmiento quotes Walter Scott’s description of gauchos as “cristianos salvajes” [savage Christians] (Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Facundo: Civilización y barbarie en las pampas argentinas [Buenos Aires: Stockcero, 2003], 20). He later describes the “gaucho malo” [bad gaucho] as a “salvaje de color blanco” [white-­colored savage] (Sarmiento, 36). With this latter expression Sarmiento assumes the reader will understand the word salvaje as referring to an Indigenous person—­why else qualify it with the words “de color blanco” [white-­colored]? Therefore, it can be translated alternately as “white savage” or “white Indian,” raising the possibility that the expression was also inspired by Hawkeye, a character in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans (1826), to which Sarmiento refers elsewhere in the same section: a white man who adopted Indigenous culture through his friendship with Indigenous people. I use the expression “white Indian” throughout this chapter with Sarmiento in mind, instead of writing “white Native American,” for example, in order to retain the sense in which the myth is fundamentally colonial and oppressive. The people to whom the word refers were described at the time not as Native Americans, a term adopted more recently in order to convey historical specificity, but rather as savages or with the term Indian erroneously applied by Columbus because he believed he was in Asia. 3. Calfucurá inquires of Clarke at the beginning of the novel if he and his counterparts come to impose some kind of law: “Los viajeros vienen al desierto—­decía—­a imponer una especie de ley?” [Do the travelers come to the desert—­he said—­to impose some kind of law?] (César Aira, La liebre [Mexico City: Biblioteca Era, 2017], 33). Clarke answers affirmatively, as a purveyor of the scientific method, one who attempts to confirm a hypothesis in order to derive a scientific principle reflecting a law of nature. The double sense of “law”—­a slippage between scientific law and positive law—­implies the colonizing role of the traveling scientist, the anthropologist’s imposition of a rational European episteme over “irrational” non-­European systems of thought. 4. Philip Deloria, by way of D. H. Lawrence, describes a phenomenon in the North American context similar to that which Aira depicts, as a “‘have-­the-­cake-­and-­eat-­it-­too’ dialectic” of desire and repulsion for Native American culture defining U.S. national identity (Philip Deloria, Playing Indian [New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998], 3). 5. As Dana Seitler observes in Atavistic Tendencies (2008), Darwin’s understanding of evolution and the place of man within it gave way to new understandings of human history

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and “makes thinkable the idea of infinite progress,” which was subsequently elaborated by August Comte and the positivist wave that would define the second half of the nineteenth century, as well as the theories of scientific racism that would define the beginning of the twentieth (Dana Seitler, Atavistic Tendencies [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008], 3). 6. Polygenist Arthur de Gobineau presented an early theory of biological race in 1853 in An Essay on the Inequality of Human Races. 7. In Genealogical Fictions María Elena Martínez shows that in colonial Latin America, race and bloodline are related but separate concepts and that prior to a narrowing of its definition by biological pseudoscience, race was inflected by religion, gender, and class (María Elena Martínez, Genealogical Fictions [Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2008], 12–­ 13). An example of the fluidity of racial definition can be found in “Blancos de todos colores: Intersecciones entre clase, género y raza en la escritura costumbrista colombiana del siglo XIX” by Mercedes López Rodríguez, in which the author shows how within a project of consolidating the nation-­state in the nineteenth century that sought stricter definitions of race, the Colombian writer Manuel Alcizar still viewed race and class interchangeably (Mercedes López Rodríguez, “Blancos de todos colores: Intersecciones entre clase, género y raza en la escritura costumbrista colombiana del siglo XIX,” in Revisitar el Costumbrismo, ed. Kari Soriano Salkjelsvik and Felipe Martínez-­Pinzón [Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2016], 145–­168). 8. Stephen Jay Gould suggests that The Origin of Species was a source of inspiration for the materialism of Karl Marx and relates that the German philosopher even offered to dedicate the second volume of Das Kapital to Darwin (Stephen Jay Gould, “Darwin’s Delay,” in Ever since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History [New York: Norton, 1977], 26). 9. Anna More, Baroque Sovereignty: Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora and the Creole Archive of Colonial Mexico (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 12. 10. More, 9. 11. More, 12. 12. More, 52. 13. More, 56. 14. Nietzsche describes Christian allegorical reading as the perpetration of an “unheard-­of philological farce concerning the Old Testament: I mean the attempt to pull the Old Testament from under the feet of the Jews with the assertion it contained nothing but Christian teaching and belonged to the Christians as the true people of Israel, the Jews being only usurpers. . . . However much Jewish scholars protested, the Old Testament was supposed to speak of Christ and only Christ, and especially of his Cross; wherever a piece of wood, a rod, a ladder, a twig, a tree, a willow, a staff is mentioned, it is supposed to be a prophetic allusion to the wood of the Cross” (Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak, trans. R. J. Hollingdale [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997], 49–­50). 15. Paul’s allegorical interpretation of the story of Hagar and Sara in Galatians is a key model of supersessionary allegorical reading. 16. Eric Auerbach emphasizes that the historical structure of prefiguration implied in Christian allegorical reading—­or more specifically, figural allegorical reading—­was seen as objectively real: “Figura is something real and historical that announces something else that is also real and historical” (Eric Auerbach, “Figura,” in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature [New York: Meridian, 1959], 29). 17. More, Baroque Sovereignty, 8, 40. 18. In reference to the word criollo she writes, “By the mid-­seventeenth century, however, in a clear attempt to reverse the association of the American climate with degeneration, the American-­born colonial elite began to employ the term as a more positive form of identification” (More, 8). 19. Martínez, Genealogical Fictions, 125. 20. More, Baroque Sovereignty, 12. In her use of the expression “natural lords” More synthesizes the work of Anthony Pagden and Peter Villella. Of Pagden she writes that he

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“provides a useful discussion of the politics of native nobility, who were protected under Spanish law, as applied to the Creoles” (More, 267). Pagden himself never uses the expression “natural lord” in the chapter to which More refers, but one can extrapolate that the legal designation by which the native nobility was protected and that the Creole elite appropriated is the term discussed by Villella, señores naturales. In general Villella is most concerned with Creole claims of direct genealogical relation to Indigenous lords. He writes, “Many Creoles sought to augment their prestige by representing themselves as heirs to the indigenous ‘natural lords’ of Mexico, which they claimed via their cacica grandmothers” (Peter Villella, “The True Heirs to Anáhuac: Native Nobles, Creole Patriots, and the ‘Natural Lords’ of Colonial Mexico” [PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2009], 185). He does, however, note the generalization of this sense of Creole natural lordship, which had more to do with cultural inheritance than direct bloodline: “In adopting the voice of injured aristocratic pride, they explicitly and implicitly postured as the new ‘caciques’ of Mexico—­the new ‘natural lords’ whose authority was derived, not from the conquest, but from the ‘native’ noble traditions and lineages of Mexico” (Villella, 408). 21. Leopoldo Zea, The Latin American Mind, trans. James H. Abbott and Lowell Dunham (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1966), 10. 22. Ricardo Rojas’s view of the gaucho in Eurindia (1924) is one notable exception. See also Jorge Furt’s treatment of Rojas in Lo gauchesco en “La literatura argentina” de Ricardo Rojas (1929) and Indios y gauchos en la literatura argentina (1951) by Augusto Cortázar. 23. Sarmiento, Facundo, 36. 24. Sarmiento, 9. 25. Sarmiento, 3. 26. Sarmiento, 3. 27. Sarmiento, 36. 28. Sarmiento, 32. 29. “The army partially substitutes for the law in the definition of the ‘gaucho’; to serve in the army is to accept discipline and the ‘glorious career of arms’: it is to be ‘moralized’ and ‘ennobled.’ To subtract oneself from its use is to fall back into illegality and also the definition of the law: to direct one’s ‘instincts of destruction and carnage elsewhere” (Josefina Ludmer, ed., The Gaucho Genre: A Treatise on the Motherland, trans. Molly Weigel [Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002], 10). 30. Sarmiento, Facundo, 37. 31. Sarmiento, 28. 32. Sarmiento, 29. 33. Ludmer, Gaucho Genre, 11. 34. See Jaime E. Rodríguez O.’s The Independence of Spanish America (1998). 35. See chapter 1 for a discussion of a debate about Latin American cultural autonomy between Andrés Bello and José Victorino Lastarria. For more on the importance of literature in the invention of new national cultures, see Doris Sommer’s Foundational Fictions and Angel Rama’s La ciudad letrada. 36. José Hernández, El gaucho Martín Fierro (Madrid: Cátedra, 2012), 105–­106 (my emphasis). 37. Hernández, 107. 38. Hernández, 142. Elena Castedo-­Ellerman’s “The Gaucho’s Attitude on Race and Nationality in Gauchesque Literature” (1984) indexes various moments in which attitudes about race are expressed in various gaucho texts but does not mark the distinction between different conceptualizations of race itself. 39. Hernández, Martín Fierro, 142. 40. Hernández, 143. 41. Hernández evokes Sarmiento again here when Fierro states, “El gaucho tiene su cencia” [The gaucho has his science] (Hernández, 162). 42. Hernández, 183.

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43. In Martín Fierro it is clear that Christianity is an important source of morality, and Fierro at times denigrates Indigenous people by invoking their status as heathens. It is not clear, however, that Christianity is understood as a set of teachings as much as another marker of identity, a sign of one’s inner nature. 44. According to David Castanien the didactic purpose of Martín Fierro is to raise awareness about the gaucho’s plight, his marginalization within Argentine society (David Castanien, “Hernández’s Didactic Purpose in Martín Fierro,” Modern Language Journal 37, no. 1 [1953]: 28). 45. Hernández, Martín Fierro, 188. 46. Josefina Ludmer insists that there is no ideological shift from La ida to La vuelta, that for Hernández the Indian is always barbarous: “The learned author does not concur with Fierro and Cruz’s final exile in Indian country” (Ludmer, Gaucho Genre, 71). 47. Sarmiento, Facundo, 36. 48. Borges, for one, emphasizes the affinity between Fierro and el Moreno in “El fin,” a reimagination of Martín Fierro’s conclusion in which el Moreno defeats Fierro in a duel. For another reading of the affinity between Fierro and the Black payador, see Nancy Vogeley, “The Figure of the Black Payador in Martín Fierro,” CLA Journal 26, no. 1 (1982): 34–­48. 49. Stephen Jay Gould demonstrates that a view of evolution as progressive history is a misinterpretation of Darwin’s theory, which is nonteleological. See his essay “Darwin’s Dilemma” for a summary of various understandings and misunderstandings of the word evolution. 50. Alberto Spektorowski situates and describes the evolution of Lugones’s fascism in “The Making of an Argentine Fascist. Leopoldo Lugones: From Revolutionary Left to Radical Nationalism.” 51. Leopoldo Lugones, El payador (Buenos Aires: Centurion, 1944), 15. 52. Lugones, 337. In “La tradición clásica grecolatina en la obra de Leopoldo Lugones: El caso de El payador” Ángel Vilanova understands Lugones’s intervention not in terms of race but rather purely in terms of cultural legitimation. He argues that in order to canonize a marginal text and its representation of a nonliterary, oral discourse, Lugones sought a validating “auctoritas” (Ángel Vilanova, “La tradición clásica grecolatina en la obra de Leopoldo Lugones: El caso de El payador,” in De amicita et doctrina: Homenaje a Martha Elena Venier, ed. Luis Fernando Lara, Reynaldo Yunuen Ortega, and Martha Lilia Tenorio [Mexico City: El Colegio de Mexico, 2007], 396). 53. Lugones, Payador, 337. 54. Lugones, 337 (my emphasis). 55. Lugones, 337. 56. Lugones, 351. 57. Lugones, 351. 58. Lugones, 351–­352. 59. Given the exponential proliferation of antecedents when tracing genealogy into the past, the only way an ancestor so distantly removed could mean anything to one’s identity in the present is as the founder of a nation whose coherence was maintained over the centuries by endogamy. This was most certainly not the case for Hellenic troubadours. 60. Gustavo Verdesio calls attention to and criticizes a fantasy of Uruguayan-­Argentine whiteness: the extent to which “Uruguay is imagined as a European and Western nation free of any indigenous contribution (or of any other non-­Western influence, such as an African one)” (Gustavo Verdesio, “From Meticulous Oblivion to Unexpected Return,” in Race, Colonialism, and Social Transformation in Latin America and the Caribbean, ed. Jerome Branche [Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2008], 16). 61. In the introductory material of the first Chilean edition of La Araucana in 1888, Abraham Konig describes it similarly to the way Lugones describes Martín Fierro, as the foundational epic poem of the nation (Abraham Konig, introduction to La Araucana de Don

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Alonso, by Alonso de Ercilla y Zuñiga, ed. Abraham Konig [Santiago: Imprenta Cervantes, 1888], ix–­x). But unlike Lugones, he views the Indigenous characters favorably, as its true protagonists, writing, “La Gloria de los araucanos es la nuestra; rebajarla es diminuir nuestra herencia de gloria i de grandeza” [The Glory of the araucanos is our own; to reduce it is to diminish our heritage of glory and greatness] (Konig, xv). 62. Leopoldo Lugones, “Un fenómeno inexplicable,” in Las fuerzas extrañas (Buenos Aires: Huemul, 1966), 60. 63. Lugones’s story demonstrates a surprisingly intimate knowledge of now discredited scientific theories. In addition to apparent references to Lombroso, the discussion about homeopathic medicine is detailed and technical, considering the proper utilization of a special pendulum (“péndulo de Rutter”; Lugones, 56). The narrator also applies principles of phrenology and craniometry to the Englishman’s skull upon meeting him in order to make an initial judgment about this character (Lugones, 55). 64. About this topic Nietzsche wrote, “Nearly every age and stage of culture has at some time or other sought with profound irritation to free itself from the Greeks, because in their presence everything one has achieved oneself, though apparently quite original and sincerely admired, suddenly seemed to lose life and color and shriveled into a poor copy, even a caricature. And so time after time cordial anger erupts against this presumptuous little people that made bold for all time to designate everything not native as ‘barbaric’” (Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Walter Kaufmann [New York: Vintage, 1967], 93). 65. In his idealization of Greece, Lugones appears to express a Nietzschian desire to cleanse society of Christianity, which he sees as racially Jewish and an undesirable “interruption” of Hellenic history (Lugones, Payador, 340). 66. See Gauchet’s The Disenchantment of the World (1985). 67. Another work by Lugones, La guerra gaucha (1905), represents the gaucho’s role in Argentine wars of independence, the work of creating the new nation-­state. 68. Aira, La liebre, 212. 69. Aira, 222. 70. “The black man has two dimensions. One with his fellows, the other with the white man. A Negro behaves differently with a white man and with another Negro. That this self-­ division is a direct result of colonialist subjugation is beyond question” (Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann [London: Pluto Press, 1986], 17). 71. Jorge Luis Borges, “El escritor argentino y la tradición,” in Obras completas (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1996), 268. 72. Santner, Creaturely Life, 6. 73. “Lugones elaborates first a fantastic literature, and later a political position, both of which investigate the biopolitical characteristics and potentialities of the modern nation-­ State” (Mariana Amato, “Force Majeure: Leopoldo Lugones toward a Vitalist Fascism,” Dissidences 3, no. 6 [2009]: 3). 74. Amato, 20. 75. Amato, 20. 76. Amato, 21. 77. Leopoldo Lugones, La organización de la paz (Buenos Aires: La Editora Argentina, 1925), 65. 78. Amato, “Force Majeure,” 22. 79. Lugones describes “el error de considerar a la humanidad como una entidad política, cuando no es sino una especie zoológica” [the error of considering humanity as a political entity, when it is nothing other than a zoological species] (Lugones, Organización, 10). 80. Hernández, Martín Fierro, 133. 81. Hernández, 113. 82. Hernández, 177. 83. Hernández, 182.

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84. Martín Fierro thus echoes Echeverría’s foundational poem La cautiva (1837), in which María, a Creole woman, discovers unknown reserves of strength during the trial of her capture and escape from the Indians. Her evolution into a warrior reflects an alteration in the moral law governing her actions once she enters the wilderness, a shift from the religious law of the old world to natural law. This shift is made visible just after María rescues Brian, when it occurs to him that they can no longer be lovers, since she has surely been raped, and her purity sullied. She responds to him by showing the blade she used to kill her Indigenous captors, stating, “Advierte que en este acero está escrito mi pureza y mi delito, mi ternura y mi valor” [Take heed that on this steel is written my purity and my transgression, my tenderness and my valor] (Esteban Echeverría, El Matadero—­La cautiva [Madrid: Cátedra, 2003], 155). 85. Aira, La liebre, 126.

chapter 4 —­ the end of history and the return to nature All translations in this chapter are mine unless otherwise noted. 1. Gareth Williams, “Decontainment: The Collapse of the Katechon and the End of Hegemony,” in The Anomie of the Earth, ed. Federico Luisetti (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2015), 163. 2. Patrick Dove, Literature and “Interregnum” (Albany: SUNY, 2016), 2. 3. Williams, “Decontainment,” 163. 4. Williams, 162. 5. Dove, Interregnum, 2. 6. Carlo Galli, Political Spaces and Global War, trans. Elisabeth Fay (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 189. 7. Galli, 189. 8. It is Hobbes who consolidates this myth by casting the foundation of the modern city “not as an event achieved once and for all” but as one that is “continually operative in the civil state in the form of the sovereign decision,” which itself acts as a redoubt of “nature” or foundational violence at the heart of the law (Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, trans. Daniel Heller-­Roazen [Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998], 109). 9. Agamben, 7. 10. Galli, Political Spaces, 187. 11. In The Origins of Totalitarianism (1948) Hannah Arendt understands the phenomenon of denationalization—­that which occurred during the period before World War II—­as a reduction of humanity to bare life that is also a return to nature. She writes, “The paradox involved in the loss of human rights is that such loss coincides with the instant when a person becomes a human being in general—­without a profession, without a citizenship, without an opinion, without a deed by which to identify and specify himself ” (Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism [New York: Harcourt, 1994], 302). To be a human being in general, as opposed to one with the legal status that goes along with national affiliation, is in effect a return to the state of nature: “They are thrown back, in the midst of civilization, on their natural givenness. . . . They begin to belong to the human race in much the same way as animals belong to a specific animal species” (Arendt, 302). Absent the legal protection of nationality, humanity is reduced to bare life. It is important that Arendt’s description is not of an epochal shift but rather of a specific, contingent historical phenomenon that might reemerge at any time. 12. Gareth Williams, Infrapolitical Passages: Global Turmoil, Narco-­Accumulation, and the Post-­sovereign State (New York: Fordham, 2021), 73. “There is no nationality or nationalism that is not religious or mythological” (Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx [New York: Routledge, 2006], 113). “Myth is always the myth of community, that is to say, it is always the myth of a communion” (Jean-­Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, trans. Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland, and Simona Sawhney [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991], 51). The organizing principle of this community, and the central messianic

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concept of the nation-­state order, is nation. This concept of original community—­the primordial unity of the people—­takes the place of the king within modernity, as that which acts as “a restrainer (katechon) of the Antichrist” (Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, trans. G. L. Ulman [New York: Telos, 2006], 87). 13. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002), 3. By contrasting the present monotheism of the concept of nature to what is theorized as its much older polytheistic conceptualization, it becomes possible to glimpse part of its contemporary ideological content, what might be called the Christianity of nature. 14. Marcel Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World, trans. Oscar Burge (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997), 6. 15. Nancy, Inoperative Community, 59. 16. Gauchet, Disenchantment, 4. 17. In Specters of Marx (1993) Jacques Derrida reflects on the fall of the Berlin Wall in terms of its evocation of “the eschatological themes of the ‘end of history,’ of the ‘end of Marxism,’ of the ‘end of philosophy,’ of the ‘ends of man,’ of the ‘last man’ and so forth” that were the “daily bread” of the 1950s: “We had this bread of apocalypse in our mouths naturally, already, just as naturally as that which I nicknamed after the fact, in the 1980s, ‘the apocalyptic tone of philosophy’” (Derrida, Specters, 16). Here Derrida not only evokes the neoliberal thinker Francis Fukuyama’s claim that, with the fall of the Soviet Union, we had arrived at a fulfillment of a capitalist prophecy, a reign of the free market that represents “the final form of human government” (Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?,” National Interest, no. 16 [1989]: 4). He also responds to the Marxist thinker Alexandre Kojeve, who in the first edition of Introduction to a Reading of Hegel (1947) imagines the end of class struggle attending the revolution as a return to nature: “The disappearance of Man at the end of History, therefore, is not a cosmic catastrophe: the natural World remains what it has been for all eternity. And therefore it is not a biological catastrophe either: Man remains alive as animal in harmony with Nature or given Being” (Alexandre Kojeve, Introduction to a Reading of Hegel, trans. James H. Nichols Jr. [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1980], 158). Kojeve qualifies this statement in the second edition by suggesting that even with Marxist revolution unrealized in a strict sense, the end of history “was already present, here and now” (Kojeve, 160). 18. Reinhardt Koselleck notes how the end of the world that would be initiated by the Second Coming of the Lord was a much-­anticipated event for early adherents of Christianity: “Until well into the sixteenth century, the history of Christianity is a history of expectations, or more exactly, the constant anticipation of the End of the World on the one hand and the continual deferment of the end on the other” (Reinhardt Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe [New York: Columbia University Press, 2004], 11). It appears that the coming apocalypse was expected with a combination of excitement and dread. Interestingly, the first political order that conceived itself through a Christian framework, the Roman Empire, saw itself as one that would forestall the apocalypse, which is synonymous with a forestalling of the Second Coming of Jesus. The word katechon refers to this function of restraining the coming of the Antichrist that heralds the return of the Messiah. For an in-­depth discussion and critique of the ongoing political significance of the katechon, see Williams, Infrapolitical Passages. 19. Evan Osnos, “Survival of the Richest,” New Yorker, January 30, 2017, 38. 20. Bruno Latour, “The New Climate,” Harper’s Magazine, May 2017, 14. 21. See Ursula Heise, Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). 22. Patrick Dove, The Catastrophe of Modernity (Lewisburg: Bucknell, 2004), 53. 23. Dove, 54. 24. Dove, 55. 25. Dove, 55.

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26. Dove, 83. 27. Dove, 78. 28. Patrick Dove, “Visages of the Other: On a Phantasmic Recurrence in Borges’ ‘El Sur,’” Latin American Literary Review 28, no. 56 (2000): 65. 29. Dove, Catastrophe, 74. 30. Dove, 54. 31. Dove, 87. 32. Dove, 89–­90. 33. Dove, 91. 34. Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), 241. 35. Jorge Luis Borges, “El Sur,” in Ficciones (Spain: Planeta DeAgostini, 2000), 207. 36. Borges, 201. 37. Dove, Catastrophe, 84. 38. Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share, vols. 2 and 3, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone, 1993), 101. 39. Bataille, 111. 40. Borges, “El Sur,” 201. 41. Borges, 207. 42. Borges, 199. 43. Borges, 199. 44. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1961), 24. 45. Freud, 42. 46. Freud, 43. 47. Freud, 46. 48. “Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote” is another fiction in which Borges equates the repetition of history with the end of history. In order to bring about a utopian future in which man’s intellectual capacity is effectively unlimited, which would represent the end of intellectual history, Menard attempts to spontaneously have the same “thought” as Cervantes by writing the Quijote again. 49. In Dahlmann’s death Dove reads an ambiguity that represents an impasse between two different projections of Argentine culture: the one embodied by Sarmiento, who advocated the development of an urban, European culture in Argentina, and the other by Lugones, who canonized Martín Fierro as the epitome of a distinctive and uniquely original culture rooted in the rural countryside. While Sarmiento and Lugones perhaps maintained distinct positions regarding the future of Argentine culture, both helped contribute to the mythical status of nature within the national imaginary. 50. Works that comment on nature by representing an allegorical search for the nation within its ambit include José Eustasio Rivera’s La vorágine (1923); Los pasos perdidos (1953) by Alejo Carpentier; Hijo de hombre (1960), El fiscal (1993), and Contravida (1994) by Augusto Roa Bastos; Lituma en los Andes (1993) by Mario Vargas Llosa; and Los detectives salvajes (1998) by Roberto Bolaño. 51. Jorge Luis Borges, “La muralla y los libros,” in Inquisiciones / Otras inquisiciones (Buenos Aires: Debols!llo, 2012), 152. Following Borges, Augusto Roa Bastos later reflects on Rafael Barrett’s description of his country’s natural isolation as “una muralla china en Paraguay” (Augusto Roa Bastos, Prologue to El dolor Paraguayo, by Rafael Barrett [Asunción: Servilibro, 2011], 28). 52. S.  T.  Coleridge, “Kubla Khan,” in English Romantic Poetry: An Anthology (Mineola: Dover, 1996), 105. 53. Giacomo Marramao, The Passage West, trans. Matteo Mandarini (London: Verso, 2012), 64. 54. Marramao, 72. 55. Marramao, 72.

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chapter 5 —­ the garden, the camp, and the biopolitical state All translations in this chapter are mine unless otherwise noted. 1. S.  T.  Coleridge, “Kubla Khan,” in English Romantic Poetry: An Anthology (Mineola: Dover, 1996), 105. 2. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, trans. Daniel Heller-­Roazen (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), 181. Carlo Galli articulates the need to describe “a new relation between space and politics” in Political Spaces and Global War, trans. Elisabeth Fay (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 4. 3. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 166. 4. Michel Foucault lays out the groundwork for the thinking of biopolitics in the final lecture of Society Must Be Defended. He introduces the word biopolitics, describing it as the techniques of social administration that differ from previously developed disciplinary techniques insofar as their principal object is not the body of the individual but rather the body of the population as a general mass. This notion of biopolitics, the aim of whose “normalizing” technique is to foment life, appears to contrast starkly with the model of biopolitics based on the concentration camp that is Agamben’s focus. Nevertheless, Foucault himself anticipated this contradiction when tracing the origin of biopolitical technique to racism. Agamben’s focus on the camp can be seen as an interrogation of a claim that Foucault makes in this questioning but from which he backs away: “The final solution for the other races, and the absolute suicide of the [German] race. That is where this mechanism inscribed in the workings of the modern state leads.  .  .  . Of course, Nazism alone took the play between the sovereign right to kill and the mechanisms of biopower to this paroxysmal point. But this play is in fact inscribed in the workings of all states. In all modern States, in all capitalist States? Perhaps not” (Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, trans. David Macey [New York: Picador, 2003], 260–­261). 5. “Modern totalitarianism can be defined as the establishment, by means of the state of exception, of a legal civil war that allows for the physical elimination not only of political adversaries but of entire categories of citizens who for some reason cannot be integrated into the political system. Since then, the voluntary creation of a permanent state of exception has become one of the essential practices of contemporary states, including so-­called democratic ones” (Giorgio Agamben, The State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003], 2). 6. Primo Levi, If This Is a Man—The Truce, trans. Stuart Woolf (London: Abacus, 1989), 419. 7. Levi, 242–­243. 8. Levi, 9. 9. Agamben, State of Exception, 6. 10. Agamben, 23. 11. Daniel Nemser, Infrastructures of Race (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017), 2. 12. In The Order of Things Foucault describes the epistemological shift within the sciences, whose application to social administration defines his view of “biopolitics,” as a transition from classical “natural history” to present-­day biology. He summarizes, “Up to the end of the eighteenth century, in fact, life does not exist: only living beings” (Michel Foucault, The Order of Things [New York: Vintage, 1994], 160). 13. Nemser, Infrastructures of Race, 162. 14. Nemser, 163. 15. Nemser, 152. 16. Nemser, 136. 17. In “The Question Concerning Technology” (1953) Martin Heidegger describes the essence of technology and the role it plays in modern subjection using the novel word enframement (in German, “Gestell”). It is tempting to see the framing of the wall as “enframement,” “that challenging claim which gathers man thither to order the self-­revealing as standing reserve”

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(Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in Basic Writings, trans. William Lovitt [New York: Harper & Row, 1977], 301). I will continue using the more common word framing, recognizing its resonance with the word enframement, especially given the extent to which “ordering” and subjection always entail partitioning. While the essence of modern technology might not seem to be inherently spatial, Heidegger writes that its essence (enframing) is “the way in which the real reveals itself as standing reserve”—­that is, as something to be used or exploited (Heidegger, 305). As such, a fundamental gesture in the history of this revelation of the real as standing reserve is the wall that marks property—­a wall built around a well or field. The national border—­the object of this chapter—­is a historical development of the original wall that enframes standing reserve. 18. Levi, Truce, 419. 19. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, 1994), 461. In this section Arendt discusses both Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism. For the Soviets, “history,” like nature, is a suprahuman force. It is the movement leading to the destiny predicted by Marx and Engels of a proletarian revolution that would bring about the end of history. For ease of reading I have omitted reference to the Soviet view in quotations. 20. Arendt, 462. 21. Arendt, 462. 22. Arendt, 483. One can see a transformation of a Calvinistic logic of predetermination: if one is to know he is saved in an eschatology defined as “survival of the fittest,” one can do nothing else but prove one’s fitness. 23. Roberto Esposito, Bios, trans. Timothy Campbell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 142. 24. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 438. 25. Arendt, 463. 26. Arendt, 466. 27. Foucault specifies that he is talking not about traditional racism defined by hatred but rather about a technique of “fragmenting the field of the biological that power controls” (Foucault, Society, 255). He continues, “The specificity of modern racism, or what gives it its specificity, is not bound up with mentalities, ideologies, or the lies of power. It is bound up with the technique of power, with the technology of power” (Foucault, 258). 28. For example, the chemical plant at Buna, where Primo Levi was imprisoned, was run by IG Farben, at one point the largest company in Europe. Although IG Farben was broken up, the resulting companies such as BASF, Bayer, and Hoechst still exist. Many other companies benefited similarly from their relationship to the Nazi regime. See Jason Weixelbaum’s dissertation “At the Crossroads of Fascism: The Decisions of Ford, General Motors, and IMB to Do Business with Nazi Germany” (2018). 29. The plantation is a historical instantiation of a place where the garden and the camp are clearly one in the same, and Paraguayan thinker Augusto Roa Bastos identifies its importance within his alternative genealogy of the biopolitical state. It is important to note, however, that I do not propose that the plantation should displace the garden and camp as the paradigm of modern biopolitics, as has been suggested in the field of ecology and anthropology. The plantation is one of many sites—­including sites whose specificities are yet to be determined—­that reflect the unity of the garden and the camp: racialized, productive/ extractive visions of paradise. Donna Haraway discusses the term plantationocene as an alternative to the term anthropocene as a paradigm for thinking about how “anthropogenic processes have had planetary effects” (Donna Haraway, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin,” Environmental Humanities 6, no. 1 [2015]: 159). The term was introduced in a discussion published as “Anthropologists Are Talking about the Anthropocene” in Ethnos. In a note Haraway compares the plantation to the botanical garden, writing, “Slave gardens are an unexplored world, especially compared to imperial botanical gardens, for the travels and propagations of myriad critters” (Haraway, “Anthropocene,” 162).

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30. It is more typical to find representations of the Latin American nation-­state as an untamed state of nature than as a cultivated garden, botanical or otherwise. It appears that there is a fuller tradition of imagining North America as “nature’s garden, a new paradise of abundance” (Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden [New York: Oxford University Press, 1964], 75). 31. Margarita Serje, “El cuadro de costumbres como modo de intervención en Los trabajadores de tierra caliente de Medardo Rivas,” in Revisitar el Costumbrismo, ed. Kari Soriano Salkjelsvik and Felipe Martínez-­Pinzón (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2016), 218. 32. Medardo Rivas, Los trabajadores de tierra caliente (Bogotá: Biblioteca del Banco Popular, 1972), 155. 33. Alejandro Quin, “Guerra, biopolítica e inadaptación: Los yerbales paraguayos de Rafael Barrett,” Latin American Literary Review 46, no. 92 (2019): 17. 34. The validity of a comparison between Francia and Stroessner and the possibility of reading the comparison in Yo el Supremo were important questions around the time of its publication. Retrospectively, considering the explicit discussion of both Stroessner and relations of mythical/figural resemblance in the following novel, El fiscal, it has become easier to read Yo el Supremo’s Francia as a figural imagination of Stroessner, despite the real differences between their economic policies. The absurdity of the fictional Francia can be read as a satire of Colorado Party propaganda. For more on a debate about a comparison between Francia and Stroessner, see Carlos Luis Casabianca’s “La dictadura del Dr. Francia en Yo el Supremo de Augusto Roa Bastos” and Helene Carol Weldt-­Basson’s “Augusto Roa Bastos’s Trilogy as Postmodern Practice.” For a discussion of the Colorado Party’s use of propaganda comparing the dictators, see Luís María Argaña’s “The Revolutionary Spirit of the Colorado Party.” 35. Augusto Roa Bastos, Yo el Supremo (Spain: Catedra, 2010), 410. 36. Roa Bastos, 412. 37. Stephen Bell, A Life in Shadow: Aimé Bonpland in Southern South America (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2010), 68. 38. Augusto Roa Bastos, Hijo de hombre (New York: Penguin, 1996), 78. 39. Roa Bastos, 79. 40. In an introduction written to a 1978 edition of Rafael Barret’s Dolor Paraguayo, which includes Barrett’s articles about exploitation in the yerbales entitled “Lo que son los yerbales,” Roa Bastos invokes the image of a “muralla china en Paraguay” [Chinese wall in Paraguay], the wilderness that isolates Paraguay from the rest of the world and makes it into an island: “Una isla, sí, pero rodeada de tierra por la inmensidad de las selvas, de los desiertos infranqueables. ‘La inmensidad nos tiene prisioneros,’ reconoció muy pronto Barrett” [An island, yes, but one that is set apart by land, by the immensity of jungles and by impassible deserts. Barrett soon understood “The immensity holds us prisoner”] (Roa Bastos, El dolor Paraguayo, 28). He takes Barrett’s words—­used when describing the experience of being on the farm in “En la estancia”—­and, in an apparent synthesis of Borges’s “La muralla y los libros” and Sarmiento’s description of Paraguay under Francia as “esta China recóndita” in Facundo, applies them to Paraguay as a whole (Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Facundo: Civilización y barbarie en las pampas argentinas [Buenos Aires: Stockcero, 2003], 5). 41. Shannon Dowd describes how the Chaco was imagined as an empty utopia at the center of the continent and that this fantasy, insofar as it mingled with the hope of finding oil, might be seen as another cause of the Chaco War: “The Chaco seemed to be an Eden of accumulation in need of definition in order to enclose and exploit it” (Shannon Dowd, “Moth-­ Eaten Maps and Empty Wells: Augusto Roa Bastos, Augusto Céspedes, and the Chaco War Archive,” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 28, no. 3 [2019]: 5). 42. Roa Bastos, Hijo de hombre, 211. 43. Coleridge, “Kubla Khan,” 105. 44. Nikolai Lenin observed a collapsing of the opposition between transnational capitalist entities and states and the formation of a world economic system to which there is no

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outside in 1916 in Imperialism: The Last Stage of Capitalism. For Lenin this moment of closure is marked by the Berlin Conference of 1884, as the moment in which no territory on earth remained unclaimed by a state. 45. El fiscal and Contravida in many ways mirror and haunt each other. One can read Contravida as the book mentioned in the strange opening passage of El fiscal, in which the narrator (ostensibly Roa Bastos) refers to a previous version of the novel that was “fuera de lugar” [out of place] and that “tuvo que ser destruida” [had to be destroyed] (Augusto Roa Bastos, El fiscal [Santillana, Spain: Alfaguara, 1993], 9). This relationship between the one book that must destroy and displace the other resembles a motif of the double, or doppelgänger, that Roa Bastos explores throughout his fiction and notably in his early tale “Lucha hasta el alba.” 46. Roa Bastos, 31. 47. Roa Bastos, 32. The title of El fiscal refers to this historical figure Padre Fidel Maíz, a priest who was jailed for denouncing Solano López and later released so as to preside over “los tribunales de sangre” [blood tribunals] during the War of the Triple Alliance. Mythically, the figure of this fiscal de sangre—­a “judge and executioner” of enemies of the nation who had himself been an enemy of the nation—­is incarnated and reflected in the other characters in the novel (Jorge Carlos Guerrero, “Rewriting in Roa Bastos’s Late Fiction,” in Postmodernism’s Role in Latin American Literature, ed. Helene Carol Weldt-­Basson [New York: Palgrave, 2010], 198). Stroessner, for one, can be seen as the “fiscal,” a self-­made prosecutor of communists and subversives. The narrator, Felix Moral, is also the “fiscal,” an “executor of justice” in his attempt to assassinate the dictator (Helene Carol Weldt-Basson, “Augusto Roa Bastos’s Trilogy as Postmodern Practice,” Studies in 20th Century Literature 22, no. 2 [1998]: 344). Given that El fiscal centers not on the life of Fidel Maíz, the real, historical “fiscal de la tiranía” [prosecutor of tyranny], but rather on that of Félix Moral (their initials point to a certain affinity), its title refers also to the mythical logic of correlation among the various “fiscales.” In his plan to regenerate the nation with violence, defining himself as its savior, Moral—­and consequently our sense of the mythical “fiscal”—­is identified not only with Stroessner but also to the scores of individuals throughout a long and painful history of civil war defined by a tradition of bypassing the mediating function of representative government in favor of direct action. 48. Jennifer French, “‘Letras terribles’: Mourning and Reparation in Two Poems by Augusto Roa Bastos,” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 28, no. 2 (2019): 165. French considers this section of El fiscal in relation to two poems written much earlier in Roa Bastos’s career. She understands Paraguay’s rebirth somewhat differently than I do through Roa Bastos, occurring later with Paraguay’s victory over Bolivia in the Chaco War. 49. For Johnson, contravida is a term that applies to people. For example, in reference to Hijo de hombre she writes, “If I think the fleeing couple and the lepers are antecedents of what is named by the term ‘counterlife’ in the later novel Contravida, it is because of their tendency to be described as something approaching the living dead” (Adriana Johnson, “Paraguayan Counterlives,” in Authoritarianism, Cultural History, and Political Resistance in Latin America: Exposing Paraguay, ed. Federico Pous, Alejandro Quin, and Marcelino Viera [Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018], 228). It also applies to places, to Paraguay in general. 50. Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 226. 51. Mbembe, 40. 52. Mbembe, 39. The play that is “in fact inscribed in the workings of all States” is “the play between the sovereign right to kill and the mechanisms of biopower” (Foucault, Society, 260). 53. Maintaining close dialogue with discussions of biopolitics presented by Agamben and Foucault, Roberto Esposito uses a similar term, thanatopolitics, to describe a Nazi expression of biopolitics in which the medical practitioner plays a central role. A system whose ostensible purpose is to preserve life transforms into a system for administering death (euthanasia). Referring to doctors, he writes, “It was in order to perform their therapeutic mission that they turned themselves into the executioners of those they considered nonessential or harmful to improving public health” (Esposito, Bios, 115). He continues, “The transcendental

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of Nazism was life rather than death, even if, paradoxically, death was considered the only medicine able to safeguard life” (Esposito, 116). 54. With his notion of inadaptability, “Barrett intenta desmontar la ideología de la adaptabilidad, en su doble proyección biológica y política” [Barrett attempts to dismantle the ideology of adaptability in both its biological and political projections] (Quin, “Guerra,” 18). 55. Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 36. 56. Hannah Arendt details the history of a complicated relationship among work, labor, and the political in The Human Condition. A shift in the relationship to “labor,” or making a living, is key to understanding a shift in a conceptualization of the political. While in classical times any subjection to the demands of survival was despised and excluded one from participation in the doings of the polis (politics), it becomes the idealized center of Marx’s “end of history.” A life devoted to political matters, for Aristotle, required freedom, and “this prerequisite of freedom ruled out all ways of life chiefly devoted to keeping oneself alive” (Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998], 12). Arendt translates Marx, showing the difference of his position: “The ideal society is a state of affairs where all human activities derive as naturally from human ‘nature’ as the secretion of wax by bees for making the honeycomb; to live and to labor for life will have become one in the same” (Arendt, 89). 57. Roa Bastos, El fiscal, 9. 58. John Kraniauskas affirms the latter view, reading Moral’s death at the end of El fiscal as a nihilistic return to “lo mismo” that delivers the protagonist “al tiempo . . . estancado paraguayo” [into the stagnated time of Paraguay] (John Kraniauskas, “Retorno, melancolía y crisis futuro: El fiscal de Augusto Roa Bastos,” in Las culturas de fin de siglo en América Latina, ed. Josefina Ludmer [Rosario: Viterbo, 1994], 216). 59. Roa Bastos, El fiscal, 9. 60. In “The Eldorado Episodes of Voltaire’s Candide as an Intertext of Augusto Roa Bastos’ Yo el Supremo: A Utopia/Dystopia Relationship” (2009) Henry Cohen explores intertextuality between Voltaire and Roa Bastos. 61. Roa Bastos considers the history of this imagination of Paraguay as a utopia in the introduction to La tentación de la utopía: Las misiones jesuíticas del Paraguay (1991) by Jean-­ Paul Duviols and Rubén Bareiro Saguier. 62. Roa Bastos, El fiscal, 335. 63. Roa Bastos, Yo el Supremo, 410. 64. “Hay dos pueblos que están metidos uno dentro de otro” [There are two intermingled towns, one within the other] (Augusto Roa Bastos, Contravida [Santillana, Spain: Alfaguara, 1995], 207). “Los que venían de afuera se podían notar que Manorá e Iturbe eran un solo y único pueblo, pero no el mismo” [Those who came from outside were able to note that Manorá and Iturbe were one single town but not one and the same] (Roa Bastos, 204). 65. Roa Bastos, 217 (my emphasis). 66. Roa Bastos, 211. 67. See Josef Chytry’s The Aesthetic State. 68. Roa Bastos, El fiscal, 9. The writer’s proclamation appears to be a reference to Julie’s proto-­Romantic proclamation in Rousseau’s La nouvelle Heloise (1761) that articulates a relation between the fictional no-­place of the novel and the self-­positing ego. Rousseau writes, “The land of chimera is the only one in this world that is worth dwelling in, and such is the nothingness of the human lot, that except the being who exists in and by himself, there is nothing beautiful except that which does not exist” (John Morley, Rousseau [London: Chapman & Hall, 1873], 2:45). In Blindness and Insight (1971) Paul de Man quotes this section of Rousseau’s novel to elaborate his sense that fiction, as a self-­consciously false genre, can help unveil the ideological structures of language (Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight [London: Methuen, 1983]). Especially in Contravida, Roa Bastos assigns a similar value to literature as language that understands itself to be false. 69. Roa Bastos, El fiscal, 9.

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conclusion 1. Paul Krugman argues that an “antisocial ideology” unites a conservative political movement in the United States in its push for gun deregulation and resistance to vaccination, among other policies (Paul Krugman, “Guns, Germs, Bitcoin, and the Antisocial Right,” New York Times, February 1, 2022). He observes that adherents of this movement “reject any policy that relies on social cooperation, and they want us to return instead to Hobbes’s dystopian state of nature” (Krugman). Chapter 4 of this work suggests that this desire would be bound up with a nature fantasy of a return to the individualism of life on the American frontier, whose filmic depictions have often centered on a pistol duel. 2. Gisela Heffes, “Para una ecocrítica latinoamericana: Entre la postulación de un ecocentrismo crítico y la crítica a un antropocentrismo hegemónico,” Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana 40, no. 79 (2014): 11. 3. This anti-­humanist approach is characteristic of “deep ecology,” a movement within ecocriticism based on the work of Arne Naess. The Twelfth Biennial Conference of the ASLE, entitled “Rust/Resistance,” seemed to encourage such thinking. The topics of panels and papers document a grand iteration of a belief in the redemptive potential of nonhuman environments and an imagination of nature as the concept that can mobilize resistance to modernity. 4. Cronon writes that environmental dilemmas will only be overcome “if we abandon the dualism that sees the tree in the garden as artificial” (William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. William Cronon [New York: Norton, 1995], 19). Here, the view of nature integrated with history in the garden is set forth as a solution to an idealization of nature as originary inhumanity. Jens Anderman acknowledges the political value of the garden in “Cosmopolitismos Telúricos: Jardín y modernidad en Latinoamérica.” However, more than exploring its political function, Anderman contemplates the aesthetic values of gardens designed by Burle Marx and Luis Barragán (Jens Anderman, “Cosmopolitismos Telúricos: Jardín y modernidad en Latinoamérica,” Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana 40, no. 79 [2014]: 201–­225). 5. Silvia Federici, Re-­enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons (Oakland: PM Press, 2019), 1, 87. 6. Federici, 86. 7. Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (New York: Minor Compositions, 2013), 17. 8. Federici, Re-­enchanting, 94. 9. The concept of slow violence is elaborated by Rob Nixon in Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor and considered in the Latin American context in Ecofictions, Ecorealities, and Slow Violence in Latin America and the Latinx World, edited by Ilka Kressner, Ana María Mutis, and Elizabeth Pettinaroli. Federici and Caffentzis ask, “How can we prevent the commons from being co-­opted and, instead of providing an alternative to capitalism, become platforms on which a sinking capitalist class can reconstruct its fortunes?” (Federici, Re-­enchanting, 86). If the commons is conceptualized as a walled garden, a circumscribed space, I would imagine that it cannot avoid being co-­opted. 10. Nestor García Canclini, Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity, trans. Christopher L. Chiappari and Silvia L. López (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995).

B I B L IO G R A P H Y

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I N D E X

Abrams, M. H., 132–­133n28 Acosta, Abraham, 20 Adorno, Theodor, 2, 6–­7, 8, 32, 80, 122, 125n3 Agamben, Giorgio: bare life, 9, 79, 91, 94, 112; biopolitical paradigm, 1, 9, 92, 93–­94, 103–­104, 112, 114; camp and, 95, 102, 112, 113; enclosure and modernity, 89; on enclosure of nature, 96–­97; Hobbes’s state of nature, 125n6; Homo Sacer, 79, 93–­94, 96, 104; natural history, 9; nature and politics, 79; spatialized view of nature, 3; The State of Exception, 94, 96; walls as borders of law, 106 “agricultura de la zona tórrida, La” (Bello), 19 Aira, César: biological heritage and return to nature, 49; biopolitics and the white Indian, 76; double/doppelgänger motif, 70–­73; La liebre, 47–­48, 49, 50, 70–­73, 76; rediscovery of biological heritage, 49; response to Hernández, 73; survival ethos, 76; views of nature, 50; white Indian, 47–­48 Alexie, Sherman, 23 Alonso, Carlos, 20, 129n15 A margem da história (da Cunha), 103 Amato, Mariana, 73–­74 America: as ahistorical, 38–­39, 54, 88; artificial nature, 26; Creole imagination of, 18, 27; site of nature, 3–­4, 17, 18; space of timeless nature, 24; state of nature, 19, 25, 26, 27, 33, 38–­39, 88; as tabula rasa, 27. See also Latin America Anderman, Jens, 120 Anderson, Benedict, 115

Andersson, Tony, 23 anthropocentrism, 22 Arendt, Hannah, 9, 98, 99–­101, 107, 138n11, 145n56 Argentina: as ahistorical, 69; as biopolitical state, 73; claim to whiteness, 62, 66, 67, 73, 136n60; Creole racial identity and the state, 62; decolonial nature ideology, 43; erasure of Indigenous history, 43–­44; gaucho as symbol of, 56, 66, 69; gaucho between nature and the state, 55–­56; inheritor of Greco-­Roman civilization, 63, 64–­65, 67–­69, 70; Martín Fierro as foundational text, 62, 69, 73; modernity and, 84; national identity, 49, 56, 66, 67–­68, 69; nature fantasy of national originality, 67–­68; politics as extension of land, 55; race, 58–­62; return to nature and, 54; as state of nature, 44, 69, 73; white Indian and cultural imaginary, 48, 55. See also Creoles; white Indian Ariel (Rodó), 18 Aristotle, 79 Artigas, José, 104 Auerbach, Eric, 134n16 Avellaneda, Gertrudis Gómez de, 31, 33, 40, 41, 88 “A vista de Niágara” (Avellaneda), 33, 40 Backlands (da Cunha), 18 Baroque Sovereignty (More), 51–­54 Barrett, Rafael, 103, 112 Bataille, Georges, 86, 113 Baudrillard, Jean, 116

15 7

158 I n de x Bell, Stephen, 105 Bello, Andrés, 19, 88, 128n9 Benjamin, Walter, 8, 52 Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud), 87–­88 biopolitical state: Agamben’s biopolitical paradigm, 1, 9, 92, 93–­94, 103–­104, 112, 114; Argentina as, 73; biopolitical worldview, 73–­74; camp as biopolitical paradigm, 93–­96, 112, 113; Christianity and, 113–­114; collective human being, 99–­100; concept of life and, 97; continuity with decolonization, 1; contravida/ counterlife, 97, 111–­112; defined against politics, 94; enclosure of nature, 1, 43, 44, 92; experience of modernity in, 43; Foucault on biopolitics, 10, 49, 94, 114, 141n4; global war, 94–­95; as hell on earth, 10; image of global future, 11; as imagined enclosure, 116; nature fantasy and, 119; Nazi biopolitical thought, 9, 126n10; necropolitics and, 112; origins and transition to, 44, 92, 104–­108, 114; Paraguay as, 95–­96; plantations and, 142n29; vs. postnational, 117–­118; race and racism, 49, 61, 102; state of exception, 94, 96–­97; state of nature, 108; survival over civilization, 76, 111, 113; theories of, 141n4; United States and, 117; as utopia realized, 115–­116; walls as performative, 107; white Indian and, 76. See also camps; gardens; nation-­state Blindness and Insight (de Man), 145n68 Bolaño, Roberto, 71 Bolivar, Simón, 19 Bonpland, Aime “Amadeo,” 104–­105, 108 Borges, Jorge Luis: desire for death, 109; on enclosure, 89–­90, 92; end of history, 77, 83, 91; “El escritor argentino y la tradición,” 71–­72; failure of decolonization, 20; failure of modernity, 84–­85; gauchos in literature, 71–­72; God transformed into nature, 125n3; imitation and originality, 36–­37; motif of the double/doppelgänger, 71–­72; national identity, 77, 83–­88, 91; Otras inquisiciones, 89–­90; parody of nationalism, 85; “Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote,” 37–­38, 42; return to nature in, 77, 83, 84, 91; “El Sur,” 66, 77, 83–­88, 91, 109; “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” 11 Brown, Wendy, 78

Buffon, Georges-­Louis Leclerc, Comte de, 53, 55 Burton, Richard, 110 Bush, George W., 94 Cadena, Marisol de la, 20–­21, 22 Caffentzis, George, 120–­121 camps: biopolitical state and, 93–­96, 112, 113; concentration camps, 94–­95, 97–­103, 112; contravida/counterlife vs., 111–­112; Cuba and, 98; death as object of value, 111–­113; as economic experiment, 102; enclosed garden and, 96–­97, 98–­99; global politics and, 102; goal to make world in own image, 107; history of, 97; making of new man, 100; nation-­state as, 109–­111; Paraguay as garden-­camp, 103–­108; plantations and, 142n29; racial discourse of, 97–­98, 102; as return to nature, 100; space of accelerated evolution, 100; state of exception, 96–­97; survival, 100; totalitarianism, 101–­102; truth and, 99–­100, 101–­102; universalization, 95, 107–­108. See also biopolitical state; gardens; Nazis Canclini, García, 121 Candide (Voltaire), 114 Caño, Daniel, 21–­22 capitalism, 77–­78, 102 Carpentier, Alejo, 18 Castro-­Gómez, Santiago, 20 Catastrophe of Modernity, The (Dove), 84–­85 cautiva, La (Echeverría), 35, 138n84 Cervantes de Salazar, Francisco, 98 Chapultepec, Mexico, 98–­99 Christianity, 50, 51, 52, 54, 113–­114, 134n14, 134n16 Clavijero, Francisco Javier, 24 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 92–­93 colonialism: colonist’s claim to victimhood, 76; desire for nature and, 5, 119; double/ doppelgänger and, 11, 71; enclosure and, 98, 121; gardens and colonized nature, 100; history and coloniality, 72–­73; after independence, 19; legitimacy and originality over colonized, 72; modernity as colonized, 121; nature perpetuating, 2; racialization, 98; white guilt, 48, 76; white Indian and, 48, 70, 76; whiteness as justification, 66. See also Creoles; decolonization; gauchos; Indigenous peoples

I ndex  Coloniality at Large (Moraña, Dussel, Jáuregui), 17–­18, 19 Contravida (Roa Bastos), 104, 109, 115–­116 contravida/counterlife, 97, 104, 109–­114, 115–­116 Cooper, James Fenimore, 133n2 Creoles: America in Creole imagination, 18, 27, 30; appropriation of Indigenous culture and history, 24–­25, 51–­52; break with Spain, 18, 24–­25, 27, 29, 30, 54; Christian-­allegorical view of history, 52, 54; Creole culture, 18, 19, 25, 27, 29, 30; Creole patriotism, 51–­52; double standards of, 30; erasure of Indigenous past, 24–­25, 27, 29, 43–­44; friendship and character, 60; gauchos inheriting race and culture, 69; identity challenged by Darwin, 49; as inheritors of Indigenous rule, 30, 54; language and animals, 74–­76; legitimacy and Indigenous knowledge, 51–­52; national identity, 59; as natural lords, 53–­54; nature as political redemption, 29; vs. other whites, 59–­60; political identity and race, 58–­62; quasi-­ indigenista projects, 25; racial identity and the state, 62; relations with Blacks, 61–­62; role of allegory, 52; rupture with the past, 27; theory of degeneration, 53–­54; utopia, 54. See also race; white Indian Cronon, William, 5, 83, 119, 120, 126n11 Cuba, 18–­19, 25, 38–­39, 98 da Cunha, Euclides, 18, 103 Darwin, Charles, 9, 49–­50, 69–­70, 100–­102 decolonization: continuity with biopolitical state, 1; vs. Creole European tendencies, 18; decolonial nature ideology, 43; fantasy of independence, 18, 23; history of thought, 17; as incomplete, 17–­18, 19, 20; independence thinkers and, 17; Indigenous history reclaimed, 18, 22; irony of return to nature, 23; nature’s role in incomplete decolonization, 17, 19; postcolonial crisis, 129n15; rupture with past, 20; rupture with western modernity, 18, 23; self-­defeating claims of, 18, 20, 22 degeneration, 53, 55 Deloria, Philip, 133n1, 133n4 de Man, Paul, 42, 129n15, 145n68 Derrida, Jacques, 43, 132n7, 139n17 Dialectic of Enlightenment (Adorno and Horkheimer), 32, 80

159 Disenchantment of the World, The (Gauchet), 81 Divergent Modernities (Ramos), 32 double/doppelgänger, 10, 11, 70–­73 Dove, Patrick, 77, 78, 84–­85 Dowd, Shannon, 143n41 Echeverría, Esteban, 19, 35, 54–­55, 88, 128n9, 138n84 ecocriticism, 17, 119–­120 Ecuador, 20–­21 “En el teocalli de Cholula” (Heredia), 17, 24, 25–­30, 38 “escritor argentino y la tradición, El” (Borges), 71–­72 Esposito, Roberto, 100, 144–­145n53 Ethics (Spinoza), 80, 125n3 Facundo (Sarmiento), 19, 54–­56 Facundo Quiroga, Juan, 55 Fanon, Frantz, 11, 70 Federici, Silvia, 120–­121 fiscal, El (Roa Bastos), 104, 109–­111, 112–­115, 116 Fleming, Leonor, 128n9 Foucault, Michel: on biopolitics, 10, 49, 94, 114, 141n4; fantasy of nature, 42; garden as new Eden, 101; ideology rooted in language, 8; “‘make’ live,” 85; necropolitics, 112; The Order of Things, 8, 101; on racism, 102, 142n27; Society Must Be Defended, 141n4 Francia, Gaspar de, 44, 104, 108, 115 French, Jennifer, 111 Freud, Sigmund, 87–­88 fuerzas extrañas, Las (Lugones), 66, 73 Fukuyama, Francis, 84 Galli, Carlo, 78 gardens: commons as walled garden, 121–­122; death as object of value, 111–­113; as historical condition of possibility, 96; history of, 97–­103; influence on camps, 96–­97, 98–­99; Latin America as, 89, 92, 96, 97, 103; nation-­state as, 92, 103–­108; nature and, 100, 101, 103; as new Eden, 101; Paraguay as garden-­camp, 103–­108; Paraguay as prison-­garden, 104–­108; plantations and, 142n29; as political model, 92, 98, 102; scientific racism and, 97–­98; state of exception, 96–­97; truth and, 101–­ 102, 116. See also biopolitical state; camps

16 0  I n de x Gauchet, Marcel, 81 gauchos: Black gauchos, 61–­62; as children of nature, 69; choice of white forebear, 66; Darwinist fantasy of, 69; as displacing Indians, 70, 72; Greek superiority, 72–­73; inheritor of Creole race and culture, 69; life as wild animal, 74–­76; as national symbol, 66, 69, 73; as natural man, 54; between nature and the state, 55–­56; originality, 57, 69, 70; race and, 58–­62, 63–­64, 65–­66, 67; straddling history and prehistory, 69; as white, 67; as white Indians, 54–­58, 68 Genealogical Fictions (Martínez), 134n7 globalization, 77–­79, 83, 88 Gould, Stephen Jay, 134n8, 136n49 Greeks, ancient, 3, 62, 63, 64–­65, 67–­69, 70, 72–­73 gringos, 59 Guevara, Ernesto “Che,” 18 Haraway, Donna, 142n29 Harney, Stefano, 121 Hatfield, Charles, 131n1 Heffes, Gisella, 119 Heidegger, Martin, 141–­142n17 Heise, Ursula, 119, 126n11 Hercules, 63, 64–­65, 67–­69, 70 Heredia, José María: America as site of nature, 38–­39; America as state of nature, 25, 27, 88; American landscape and, 29; Creole national claim of difference, 30; Cuban independence, 18, 25, 38; cultural autonomy and European Romanticism, 19; displaced by Bonalde, 35, 37–­38, 39–­40; displaced by Martí, 31, 38, 42; “En el teocalli de Cholula,” 17, 24, 25–­30, 38; engagement with Alexander von Humboldt, 25–­26; erasure of Spanish and Indigenous histories, 26, 27, 29; foundation of Creole nation-­state, 30; history and nature, 39; importance in Cuba, 38; Indigenous culture and nature, 24, 25, 26, 27, 29; on nature, 24, 26–­27, 29, 39, 40; “Niágara,” 33, 38–­39, 40; Niagara Falls and, 33, 34, 40; quasi-­indigenista and Creole autonomy, 25; scientific vs. literary thinking, 24, 25–­26 Hernández, José: Aira’s response to, 73; Creole language and animals, 74–­76; dehumanization, 74–­76; engagement with Darwin, 49; engagement with Sarmiento,

57; gaucho in, 57; gaucho vs. Indian, 72; Martín Fierro, 49, 55, 57, 62, 63, 69, 73, 74–­76; Martín Fierro as Argentine foundational text, 62, 69, 73; truth of Martín Fierro, 63; white Indian, 55 Hijo de hombre (Roa Bastos), 104, 105–­108, 109 history: Christian-­allegorical understanding, 50, 51, 52, 54, 134n14, 134n16; coloniality of, 72–­73; Creole erasure of Indigenous past, 21, 24–­25, 26, 27, 29, 43–­44; death and end of, 87; decolonization and Indigenous history, 18, 22; degeneration, 50, 51; end of history, 77, 83, 87, 91; Indigenous history erased, 43–­44; Martí’s relationship to, 32, 33–­34, 35–­36; and motif of the double, 71–­72; nature and, 17, 23–­24, 33–­34, 39, 79, 80, 83; nature erasing history, 11, 27, 31, 39, 42, 50, 93, 120; race and genealogy, 50–­51; renewal through destruction of, 33–­34; repetition, 10–­11, 87–­88, 90; rupture of, 17, 20–­21, 48; secularization of, 80; suspended in Paraguay, 115; theory of evolution and, 49–­50. See also natural history; rupture, tradition of Hobbes, Thomas, 3–­4, 125n6, 138n8 Homo Sacer (Agamben), 79, 93–­94, 96, 104 Horkheimer, Max, 2, 32, 80, 125n3 Human Condition, The (Arendt), 145n56 ideology: anti-­historical ideology of nature, 20; decolonial nature ideology, 43; ideology of modernity and nature, 119; independence and ideology of nature, 20, 27; nature as, 23; nature ideology, 1, 2, 4, 10, 23, 42, 43; nature ideology of Romanticism, 4–­5, 24, 25–­26, 40, 51; race and, 48; rooted in language, 8 If This Is a Man (Levi), 95 Imperial Eyes (Pratt), 25 independence: Cuban independence, 18–­19, 25, 38–­39; debate over Spanish culture, 56; decolonization’s fantasy of, 18, 23; ecocriticism of, 17; erasing the past, 27; as fresh start, 19; geographical determination, 38–­39; as natural history, 17; nature and, 17, 18, 19, 20, 27; originality and, 56–­57; political and cultural, 56; self-­defeating claims of, 17–­18, 19; Western canon and, 20; white Indian, 50. See also decolonization

I ndex  Indigenous peoples: attempts to erase, 7, 24–­25, 27, 43–­44; Creole appropriation of Indigenous culture and history, 24–­25, 51–­52; Creole erasure of Indigenous past, 21, 24–­25, 26, 27, 29, 43–­44; in Creole literature, 7, 24, 25, 26, 27, 29; Creoles as inheritors of rule, 30, 54; fantasy of nature harmony, 22–­23; gauchos displacing, 70; history erased, 43–­44; Indigenous knowledge granting legitimacy, 51–­52; Indigenous life as survival, 76; irreducible originality of, 68; nature and, 24, 25, 26, 27; Romantic view of, 21, 22–­23. See also white Indian Infrastructures of Race (Nemser), 97–­99 Inoperative Community, The (Nancy), 81 Johnson, Adriana, 111–­112 Kant, Emmanuel, 126n15 Kojeve, Alexandre, 139n17 Koselleck, Reinhardt, 139n18 Krugman, Paul, 146n1 “Kubla Khan” (Coleridge), 92–­93 land: as ahistorical, 26–­27; cultural difference and, 63; degeneration theory, 53, 54; nature and, 26–­27, 29, 50; nature as, 128n9; politics as extension of, 55; power to transform an individual, 54, 55; yielding science and art, 56. See also nature Lastarria, José Victorino, 19, 35 Last of the Mohicans, The (Cooper), 133n2 Latin America: as ahistorical, 88; as colonized space, 96; connection to philosophy, 23; cultural autonomy, 35, 57–­ 58, 69, 127n3; decolonization–­biopolitical state continuity, 1; as enclosed garden, 89, 92, 96, 97, 103; history of gardens and concentration camps, 97–­103; invented by poets, 29; national identity challenged by Darwin, 50; nation-­state as enclosure, 89, 96; nature and, 17, 23, 24, 31; oriented by resistance, 18; reinvention through destruction of the past, 33–­34; return to nature and, 88, 89, 91; Romanticism of independence, 39–­40; as state of nature, 1, 88, 96; tradition of rupture, 18; utopia and, 116. See also America; Argentina; biopolitical state; colonialism; Creoles; Cuba; decolonization; independence; nation-­state; Paraguay

161 Latin American literature, 1–­2, 6, 7, 32, 41, 62, 71–­72, 85. See also Agamben, Giorgio; Aira, César; Borges, Jorge Luis; Echeverría, Esteban; Heredia, José María; Martí, José; Pérez Bonalde, Juan A.; Roa Bastos, Augusto; Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino Latin American Mind, The (Zea), 18, 35, 54 Latour, Bruno, 22, 82–­83 Leclerc, Georges-­Louis, Comte de Buffon, 53, 55 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 114 Letters from the Battlefields of Paraguay (Burton), 110 Levi, Primo, 94–­95, 99, 102, 107 liebre, La (Aira), 47, 49, 50, 70–­73, 76 Limits of Identity, The (Hatfield), 131n1 Literature and “Interregnum” (Dove), 78 Lombroso, Caesar, 67 “Lo que son los yerbales” (Barrett), 103 Ludmer, Josefina, 55–­56 Lugones, Leopoldo: ape within, 66–­67, 73; Argentine modernity, 84; Argentines inheriting Greco-­Roman civilization, 63, 64–­65, 67–­69, 70; biopolitical worldview, 73–­74, 76; Christianity as racially Jewish, 137n65; double and history, 72–­73; establishing truth of Martín Fierro, 63; Las fuerzas extrañas, 66, 73; gauchesque nationalism, 18; gaucho as white, 66, 67; gaucho’s mestizaje and, 63–­64, 65–­66; La organización de la paz, 73–­74; El payador, 62, 67; preoccupation with Darwinism, 67, 73, 74; race and Argentine nation-­ state, 62; response to Hernández, 73; scientific racism of, 62, 63–­65, 66; white Indian and, 55 Marramao, Giacomo, 43, 78, 79 Martí, José: America as state of nature, 33, 88; Bonalde displacing Heredia, 39–­40; on Bonalde’s originality, 34, 35, 37–­38, 39–­40; Cuban independence, 18–­19; displacing Heredia, 31, 38, 42; exile from polis, 32, 42–­43; history and, 32, 33–­34, 35–­36; intentional misreading of Bonalde, 42; on modernity, 32, 131n4; nature as site of renewal, 31; nature’s redemptive function, 31; prologue to Bonalde’s “Poema del Niágara,” 31, 32, 33, 41; relation between literature and power, 32 Martínez, María Elena, 134n7

162 I n de x Martín Fierro (Hernández), 49, 57, 62, 63, 69, 73, 74–­76 Marx, Burle, 120 Maya, 21–­22. See also Indigenous peoples Mbembe, Achille, 112 Memmi, Albert, 11 “Mensú, Los” (Quiroga), 103 Mexico, 51–­52, 98–­99 Mignolo, Walter, 20, 23, 127–­128n4 modernity: biopolitical state, 43; as colonized, 121; crisis of secularization and technological advancement, 32; decolonization’s rupture with, 18, 23; enclosure and, 89; exile from polis, 42–­43; failure and “El Sur,” 84–­85; Martí and, 32, 131n4; nature and, 2, 5, 18, 32–­33, 81, 119; problem of history, 32; science and dehumanization, 86, 91 More, Anna, 51–­54 More, Thomas, 114 Moreiras, Alberto, 20 Moten, Fred, 121 Naess, Arne, 146n3 Nancy, Jean-­Luc, 81 national identity: in Borges, 77, 83–­88, 91; challenged by Darwin, 50; death as part of, 85–­88, 91; gauchos and, 56, 66, 69; nationalism, 18, 85; pursuit of, 90–­91; race and, 62; repetition and, 111; in “El Sur,” 77, 83–­84, 88, 91; unattainability of, 85. See also Argentina; biopolitical state; Creoles; Cuba; independence; Latin America; Paraguay; white Indian nation-­state: camps and, 92, 109–­111; enclosures and, 1, 92, 97, 103, 105–­107, 117–­118; foundation of Creole nation-­ state, 30; as garden, 92, 103–­108; nationalism, 18, 85; nature and, 1–­2, 92, 97, 117–­118; pursuit of identity, 90–­91; race and, 62, 64–­65, 70; sovereignty and, 118; state of exception, 94; as yerbal, 105–­107. See also Argentina; biopolitical state; camps; Cuba; gardens; Paraguay natural history, 8–­9, 17, 29, 65, 69–­70, 100–­ 102, 120 Natural Supernaturalism (Abrams), 132–­133n28 nature: as ahistorical, 20, 21, 25, 27, 38–­39, 42; American nature as artificial, 26; in Aristotle, 79; as benevolent destroyer, 28–­29; and the commons, 121–­122; as

Creole utopia, 54; cultural renewal and autonomy, 21, 27, 57–­58; defined, 24, 127n1; desire for, 5–­6, 119–­120, 122; divinity of, 40–­41, 42, 80, 81–­82, 125n3; enclosure of, 1, 43, 44, 89–­90, 92–­93, 96–­97, 99, 104–­105; erasing history, 11, 27, 31, 39, 42, 50, 93, 120; fantasy of, 42, 67–­68, 82, 119, 120–­121; giving right to rule, 70; human stakes of, 120; ideology, 1, 2, 4, 10, 23, 42, 43; independence and, 18, 19, 20, 27; Indigenous culture and, 25, 26, 27; inhuman and dehumanization, 22, 75–­76, 87, 100; land and, 26–­27, 29, 50, 128n9; made law, 99–­100; modern interpretation of, 17; modernity and, 2, 5, 18, 32–­33, 81, 119; as myth, 2–­3, 130n25; “natural” as term, 53–­54; Niagara Falls, 31–­32, 33, 34–­35, 38–­39, 40–­41; political space, 79; redemptive promise of, 18, 21, 22, 29, 31; repetition and misreading reinforced, 41; as resource, 38; in Roman Empire, 79; Romanticism vs. Darwinism, 50; science and, 24, 25–­26, 49, 99–­100, 101; secularism, 80, 81; site of renewal, 31, 38–­39; structure of belief and thought, 81, 118–­119; survival and, 82, 98, 99–­100; as tabula rasa, 5, 19, 27; territorialization of, 2–­6, 24; timeless and innocent, 27; totalitarianism and, 99–­101; truth and, 99–­100, 116; wilderness, 19. See also biopolitical state; camps; colonialism; decolonization; gardens; history; Latin America; nation-­state; return to nature; rupture, tradition of; yerbales Nazis: biopolitical thought, 9, 126n10; concentration camps, 10, 94–­95, 98, 99–­ 100, 101, 102; Darwinism and, 100–­102; natural history, 9, 101–­102; new human species, 100; thanatopolitics, 144–­145n53 necropolitics, 112 Nemser, Daniel, 97–­99, 102 “Niágara” (Heredia), 33, 38–­39, 40 Niagara Falls, 31–­32, 33, 34–­35, 38–­39, 40–­41 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 52, 132n27, 134n14, 137n64 Nixon, Rob, 146n9 Nomos of the Earth, The (Schmitt), 121 nouvelle Heloise, La (Rousseau), 145n68 Olen, Amy, 21–­22 Order of Things, The (Foucault), 8, 101 organización de la paz, La (Lugones), 73–­74

I ndex  originality: Bonalde and, 34–­35, 37–­38, 39–­40; over the colonized, 72; distorted in gauchesque literature, 72; gauchos and, 57, 69, 70; Greeks as originators of western civilization, 68, 69; imitation vs., 36–­37, 39–­40; independence and, 56–­57; Indigenous peoples’ irreducible originality, 68; Latin American cultural autonomy, 35; motif of the double, 71–­72; repetition and, 36–­38, 39–­40, 42, 67–­68, 69; tradition of rupture, 35, 56–­57 Origin of Species, The (Darwin), 49 Origins of Totalitarianism, The (Arendt), 99–­100, 107, 138n11 Osnos, Evan, 82 Otras inquisiciones (Borges), 89–­90 Pagden, Anthony, 24–­25, 30 Paraguay: as biopolitical state, 95–­96; as botanical garden, 115; contravida/ counterlife, 109–­114; decolonial nature ideology, 43; as enclosure of nature, 44, 104–­105; as garden-­camp, 103–­108; history suspended, 115; identity and repetition, 111; as prison-­garden, 104–­108; as utopia, 114–­116; War of the Triple Alliance, 111; as yerbal, 105–­107; yerbal and nation-­state, 105–­107 pasos perdidos, Los (Carpentier), 18 Passage West, The (Marramao), 78 payador, El (Lugones), 62, 67 Paz, Octavio, 18, 20, 35 Pérez Bonalde, Juan A.: disenchantment of modern world, 40–­41; displacing Heredia, 35, 37–­38, 39–­40; genealogy of “Poema del Niágara,” 33; history and the past, 33, 41; originality of, 34–­35, 37–­38, 39–­40; “Poema del Niágara,” 31, 33; return to Romanticism, 39–­40; rupture in poetry of, 35–­36 “Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote” (Borges), 37–­38, 42 Piglia, Ricardo, 71 poetry, 29, 36, 56–­57, 62, 64, 68, 71–­72. See also Latin American literature Political Spaces and Global War (Galli), 78 Politics of Nature, The (Latour), 22 Pratt, Mary Louise, 25, 130n29 Puig, Manuel, 71 Quijano, Aníbal, 19–­20 Quin, Alejandro, 103, 112 Quiroga, Horacio, 103

163 race: biological concept of, 49, 50–­51, 61, 62, 64–­65, 70; biopolitical state and, 49, 61; vs. bloodline, 134n7; camps and racial discourse, 97–­98, 102; capitalism and, 102; Christianity as racially Jewish, 137n65; colonialism and, 98; Creole identity and, 58–­62; culture as reflection of, 61, 62; degeneration, 53; environment determining, 64; Foucault on racism, 102, 142n27; and the gaucho, 58–­62, 63–­64, 65–­66, 67; history and genealogy, 50–­51; national identity and, 62; political ideology and, 48; racism as biopolitical technique, 102; in Romanticism, 49; scientific definition of nature and, 49; scientific racism, 62, 63–­65, 66, 97–­98; theory of evolution and, 49. See also Creoles; white Indian; whiteness Rama, Angel, 115 Ramos, Julio, 32, 34, 36 raza cósmica, La (Vasconselos), 66 return to nature: as apocalypse, 82–­83; in Argentina, 54; in Borges, 77, 83, 84, 91; camp as, 100; decolonialism and irony of, 23; dehumanization and animality, 75–­76, 87, 100; denationalization, 138n11; end of the state and, 89; erasing Indigenous presence, 7; globalization and, 77, 79, 83, 88; as nation building, 88, 91; nostalgia syndrome, 90–­91; secularization, 80; state as container of anomic space, 117; trope of, 77. See also nature Rivas, Medardo, 103 Rivera, José Eustasio, 103 Roa Bastos, Augusto: biopolitical state, 114, 116; Contravida, 104, 109, 115–­116; contravida/counterlife, 97, 109–­114; enclosure expanded, 95–­96; failure of decolonization, 20; El fiscal, 104, 109–­111, 112–­115, 116; Hijo de hombre, 104, 105–­108, 109; motif of the double/doppelgänger, 71; Paraguay as prison-­garden, 104–­108; state as garden, 103–­108; on utopia, 93, 114–­116; Yo el Supremo, 104–­105, 114 Rodó, José Enrique, 18 Rodríguez Matos, Jaime, 32, 36, 42, 131n1 Rojas, Ricardo, 55 Roman Empire, 3, 79 Romanticism: cultural autonomy and, 19; imperialism retained through, 19; independence and, 39–­40; modernity’s problem of history, 32; nature ideology of,

164 I n de x Romanticism (continued) 4–­5, 24, 25–­26, 40, 51; vs. positivism, 26, 33, 40; return to, 39–­40; theory of evolution and race in, 49; utopia, 115–­116; view of Indigenous peoples, 21, 22–­23; white Indian, 51; wild enclosure, 89–­90 Rousseau, Jean-­Jacques, 145n68 rupture, tradition of: about, 35; in Bonalde’s poetry, 35–­36; Creoles’ rupture with past, 27; decolonization and, 18, 20, 23; Ecuador’s Pachamama-­Nature, 20–­21; historical, 17, 20–­21, 23, 27, 34, 48, 56–­57; with modernity, 18, 23; nature and, 17, 23, 27, 30, 48; originality and, 35, 56–­57; as self-­defeating, 22; white Indian and rupture from Spain, 50 Santner, Eric, 8 Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino: on Argentina, 44, 84; civilization and barbarism, 88; cultural autonomy and European Romanticism, 19; Facundo, 19, 54–­56; gauchos as savage Christians, 133n2; land transforming the individual, 54–­55; original culture, 57; white Indian, 55, 61 Schiller, Friedrich, 26, 115 Schmitt, Carl, 3–­4, 6, 60, 78, 95, 121 Sebald, W. G., 8 secularization, 32, 42, 80, 81, 101 Serje, Margarita, 103 Sigüenza y Góngora, Carlos de, 24 Society Must Be Defended (Foucault), 141n4 Spanish Imperialism and the Political Imagination (Pagden), 24–­25 Specters of Marx (Derrida), 43, 132n7, 139n17 Spinoza, Baruch, 80, 125n3 state. See nation-­state State of Exception, The (Agamben), 94, 96 Stroessner, Alfredo, 104, 108 Stxaj no’ anima / Oración salvaje (Caño), 21–­22 “Sur, El” (Borges), 66, 77, 83–­88, 91, 109 “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” (Borges), 11 Truce, The (Levi), 95, 102, 107 Twilight of the Idols (Nietzsche), 132n27

United States, 117 utopia, 54, 93, 114–­116, 121 Utopia (More), 114 Vasconselos, José, 66 Verdesio, Gustavo, 136n60 Vilanova, Ángel, 136n52 Viscardo, Juan Pablo, 24 Voltaire, 114 Von Humboldt, Alexander, 25–­26, 128n9, 130n29 vorágine, La (Rivera), 103 Voyage of the Beagle, The (Darwin), 49 Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (Brown), 78 Western modernity. See modernity white Indian: in Aira’s La liebre, 47–­48; as ancient Greek, 62, 70; Argentine cultural imaginary, 48, 55; biopolitics and, 76; colonialism and, 48, 70, 76; Creole degeneration and, 53–­54; Creole legitimacy and, 49; Creole nationalism and patriotism, 50, 51–­52; desire to be, 73; and the double/doppelgänger, 70–­73; as figure of cultural difference, 51; gauchos as, 54–­58, 61, 68; history of, 48, 51–­54; independence and, 50; indigeneity of, 55; invalidated by Darwin, 49; legitimacy, identity, and race, 47–­48; as nature fantasy, 47–­48; rupture from Spain, 50; white guilt, 48, 76. See also Creoles; Indigenous peoples; race whiteness: Argentine claim to, 36n60, 62, 66, 67, 73; justification of colonialism, 66; transcending appearance, 61; white guilt, 48, 76. See also race wilderness. See nature Williams, Gareth, 78, 126n18 Wordsworth, William, 26 Writing of the Formless (Rodríguez Matos), 32 yerbales, 105–­107 Yo el Supremo (Roa Bastos), 104–­105, 114 Zea, Leopoldo, 10–­11, 18, 20, 35, 54 Žižek, Slavoj, 126n19

A B OU T

T H E

AU T HO R

Gabriel Horowitz is an assistant professor of Spanish at Arkansas State University in Jonesboro.

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