Poetics of errancy, politics of writing: Juan Gelman, Eduardo Milan and Ana Cristina Cesar. (Spanish Edition)

This dissertation addresses the relationship between poetry and an ethics of representation that developed in the wake of the most recent Southern Cone dictatorships. In response to a monologic, binary and exclusionary discourse which seeks to foreclose the possibility of alterity, the poetics I examine employ writing strategies which condemn the state's violence, both real and symbolic. At the same time, they develop approaches to indicating the Other in and through the text, and writing thus becomes a trace of the ethical gesture of responding to that which should not be forgotten. In the first chapter, I argue that Argentine poet Juan Gelman's Carta abierta and Incompletamente are constitutively open and unfinished works which impossibly seek to incorporate the absent Other through poems ridden with silences and fractures. The openness of the work brings about a "written speech" which opposes to the state's monologic rhetoric and thereby invites the reader to dialogue with the poem. In the second chapter, I analyze Uruguayan poet Eduardo Milan's Errar . Errancy is a writing strategy that destabilizes "truth" to expose systems of reason as systems of persuasion. The elimination of the lyrical subject thereby gives way to a poetry of language in which the signifier is no longer hound to a determined signified. Signification is thus produced through the contradictory relations among the text's signifiers and between the text and the reader's response. In the third chapter, I analyze the simulation of subjectivity and the resulting destabilization of the subject's space in Brazilian poet Ana Cristina Cesar's Correspondencia completa and "Tres cartas a Navarro." This poetry uses the epistolary genre to express a supposed subjectivity, but rather than reaching the interiority of a subject it produces the pure exteriority of language. The text thus attempts to free language from the binaries of inside/outside, I/you, and subject/object on which the law depends. In this way, the text makes the political gesture of erasing inner space at the very moment when the state's law demands to be internalized by those subject to it.