Zona De Dolor: Body and Mysticism in Diamela Eltit's Video-Performance Art

Abstract

Self-sacrifice as a moral gesture lies in a paradoxical zone between the internalisation of punishment and the affirmation of subjectivity. Recognised by the Christian tradition as redemptive suffering, practices of self-wounding traverse the history of the Western world but occupy an uneasy place in today's ‘wound culture' (Seltzer 1997). What is the social meaning of self-sacrifice? What are its consequences in the process of subject formation? This paper is a discussion of an unconcealed, yet highly experimental, self-inflicted ‘zone of pain' (zona de dolor). At the time of Chile's military dictatorship, the writer Diamela Eltit publicly displayed images of her self-burned and lacerated forearms and combined them with recorded excerpts from her reading of Lumpérica (her novel-in-progress) in an impoverished brothel. This video-performance, now iconic of the Chilean escena de avanzada, has often been analysed as an allegorical critique of the disciplining of bodies by the dictatorial regime. I revisit Eltit's video-performance in order to problematize these interpretations by looking at Judith Butler's discussion of the question of self-sacrifice in the light of recent reconsiderations of the relationship between agency, power, and subjectivity. Furthermore, I consider the use of religious motifs in Eltit's work and their relation to the Christian mystic tradition as crucial to understanding the way excess and pain become a parodic critique of power.

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank Geoffrey Kantaris, Joanna Page, Celia Dunne, Catriona McAllister, and the anonymous reviewers of the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies for their insightful comments in the process of revising this text.

Notes

 1 One version of this video is available in the online archive of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics: http://hidvl.nyu.edu/video/003448706.html. Accessed May 30, 2012.

 2 CADA was originally formed by the poet Raúl Zurita, the visual artists Lotty Rosenfeld and Juan Castillo, the sociologist Fernando Balcells, and Eltit.

 3 See Galaz and Ivelić (1988: 235–236).

 4 Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are mine.

 5 The original document was photocopied and distributed at the video biennial organised in 1980 by the Franco-Chilean Cultural Institute. Republished in Neustadt (2001: 139).

 6 Por mi patria ended up being the title of Eltit's second novel, published in 1986.

 7 Eltit did not originally refer to her piece as a performance or an art action, but simply used the term reading (lectura). Bringing the text to the brothel was for her a creative experiment, part of what she calls her ‘personal imaginaries’ (mis imaginarios personales), rather than a public spectacle (interview with the author, February 2012). In the process of transforming the performance into a video, its meaning, function, and targeted public changed.

 8 Interview with the author, February 2012.

 9 Although Eltit has often been considered a marginal writer, who positions herself at the edges of the literary canon (in order to contest it), she has referred to Cobra, by Severo Sarduy (1972) and the baroque tradition as important influences, particularly during the writing of Lumpérica (Morales 1998: 37).

10 Interview with the author, February 2012.

11 See Morales (1998: 168).

12 Words from the original video, emphasis mine.

13 Butler (1997a:52) considers this argumentative turn as being ‘more properly Hegelian that Hegel himself’.

14 Butler (1997a: xx) discusses this ‘paradox of subjectivation’ in her introduction to The Psychic Life of Power.

15 Richard (2007: 15) coins the term escena de avanzada in the early 1980s, to describe a non-official artistic scene that experimented with different creative languages and supported an allegorised expression of dissent which did not conform either to canonical art or to orthodox left-wing discourses. In recent years the term has been contested for failing to encompass the differences within the scene as well as its relations to previous artistic movements in Chile (Macchiavello 2011: 96).

16 Idelber Avelar (1999: 46) contends that ‘the Chilean dictatorial state imposed a thorough privatization of public life, an obsession with individual success, and a horror for politics and collective initiative, as well as a passion for consumerism, all grounded on sheer fear’. He also emphasizes the importance of conservative Catholicism in the regime's ideology, along with the doctrine of national security (46). See also Brunner and Catalán (1985).

17 From the writers' perspectives, this signifying mechanism is driven by an attempt to dissolve the boundaries between life and artistic praxis, in dialogue with a wider tradition of critique of aesthetic autonomy.

18 See Green (2007: 13).

19 This critic inspired the character of Sebastián Urrutia Lacroix in Roberto Bolaño's (2000) Nocturno de Chile. Similarly, Carlos Wieder's skywriting in Bolaño's (1999) Estrella distante bears a striking resemblance to one of Zurita's art actions, which involved writing a poem with airplane water vapour in the skies of New York (1982). The poem's religious theme evokes feelings of suffering, disempowerment, and marginalisation. Anteparaíso opens with this text and includes pictures of the action. Its first lines read: ‘MY GOD IS HUNGER/ MY GOD IS SNOW/ MY GOD IS NO/ MY GOD IS DISILLUSIONMENT/ MY GOD IS CARRION’ (Zurita 1986). See Jennerjahn (2002).

20 These kinds of ahistorical interpretations of Zurita's work, which overlook his veiled denunciation of the oppressive regime, can even be found after the end of the dictatorship. For instance, in the mid-1990s, Carlos Pérez Villalobos (1995:56) wrote the following critique in Richard's prestigious Revista de Crítica Cultural: ‘The poet converted the Chilean landscape into a metaphor for the suffering body searching for redemption through love. The poeticization of both nature and the body reflect a premodern gaze, unburdened by social and discursive mediations and divorced from the idea of history as a dialectical product of human labour. The only history in Anteparaíso is the wandering of fallen humanity’.

21 Interview with the author, February 2012.

22 Let us remember that Eltit mentions mystical acts when, in Zona de dolor, she interrupts the video to expose her creative and political principles.

23 This model of false transgression emulates a pervert's act, in the sense that, in Žižek's (2008: 292) words, ‘it fits the existing power constellation perfectly’ by practising the ‘secret fantasies that sustain the predominant public discourse’.