Valeria Wagner

Toward a Quixotic Pragmatism: The Case of the Zapatista Insurgence

This paper was first conceived in the context of Wlad Godzich’s research group on new humanism in the English Department at the University of Geneva. We would like to thank the members of this group—Guillemette Bolens, Lorenza Coray-Dapretto, Agnese Fidecaro, Simone Oettli, Borislava Sasic, Carla Scott, Bernard Schlurick, Agnieszka Soltysik, and Ward Tietz—for their stimulating discussion of a draft of this paper, as well as George Varsos, for his extensive comments on an earlier one. 1. ‘‘This is what we ask you respectfully, that you do not betray your ideals, your principles, your history, do not betray and deny yourselves. . . . The failure was in not trying.’’ Subcommander Marcos, speech before the National Democratic Convention, 8 August 1994; published in EZLN: documentos y comunicados: 1° de enero / 8 de agosto de 1994 (México: Ediciones Era, 1994), 307–8. Unless otherwise specified, references to EZLN communications or speeches will be drawn from this volume, hereafter referred to as EZLN I, and from the two subsequent volumes of the same collection: EZLN Docu-

Miradas advertidas: la escena narcisista en dos obras de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

Este ensayo examina la escena narcisista en dos obras de teatro de Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, leyendolos como dispositivos de “contra-proyeccion” que cuestionan y reorientan la mirada del publico (y de los lectores). Se interesa en la creacion de un publico “advertido” por la configuracion narcisista de las trampas especulares de la representacion, y llevado por la misma a “ver” los procesos de fijacion de la alteridad, sexual y/o colonial. Abstract This essay examines the narcissistic in two plays by Sor Juna Ines de la Cruz, reading them as “counter-projection devices” that question and reorient the public’s (and readers’) gaze. It is interested in the creation of a public “advised” by the narcissistic configuration to avoid the specular traps of representation, and led to “see” the processes that fix sexual and/or colonial alterity.

Introduction: Fiction and Economy

In Money to Burn, a recent narrative of a real historical event by the Argentinean writer Ricardo Piglia,1 a group of men steal seven million pesos (the equivalent of almost six hundred thousand US dollars in 1965, when the story takes place) from the Provincial Bank of Buenos Aires. After their initial plans of escape fail, they cross the border to Montevideo, where they end up besieged in an apartment previously bugged by the police. Sustained by an arsenal of weapons, a good provision of various drugs, their faith in their leader’s capacity to come up with a plan to rescue them and a deep hatred for the armed forces, the men resist increasingly violent attacks from the police force, scoring several ‘victories’ (deaths) in the process. According to a journalist’s account, ‘every victory achieved under such impossible conditions increased their capacity to resist. … This was why what followed had the aspect of a tragic ritual that no one who was there that night could ever forget’ (Piglia 2003b, 155). In the episode from which the narrative takes its title, the men’s resistance reaches its climax when they set fire to the stolen money and throw the burning 1000-peso bills out of the window, one by one, ‘in a move that left the city and the country horror-struck, and which lasted precisely fifteen interminable minutes, which is exactly how long it takes to burn such an astronomical quantity of money…’ (ibid., 157).

The Unbearable Lightness of Acts

Let me begin with a few words on the reference in the title of this paper to that of Milan Kundera’s novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, a title which has become a rather current expression of existential malaise. The expression is certainly not unequivocal, but it is often used to formulate the discrepancy between the weight our culture gives to the fact of being alive, and the fundamental arbitrariness of its happening: being (alive) is unmotivated and hazardous.1 In this sense its ‘lightness’ is an image for its ungroundedness: Being is not sustainable, it ‘floats’ in the air and cannot be borne — it is unbearable. This, I think, makes perfect sense insofar as Being is an abstraction: we cannot just BE, we must be something, somewhere, doing something. Unqualified Being is simply too abstract to be borne, and there should be, in principle, nothing unbearable about that: why should anyone want to just BE, anyway? The question, however, should be taken seriously, because it is only insofar as Being is asked to have weight that it may seem unbearably light. And Being is appealed to consistently, at least in Western tradition, whenever reasons and motivations fail to account for, unfold into, or ‘control’ actions. It is in this kind of situation that Being is asked to provide a ground and measure capable of justifying or sustaining acts, that it fails to do so, and that it appears, as a result, as unendurably inconsistent.