The Figure of the Enemy in Elizam Escobar's La Ficción

Abstract

On April 4th, 1980, Puerto Rican artist Elizam Escobar was arrested along with other members of the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional (FALN) in Evanston, lllinois. All the members of the FALN claimed to be combatants in an anticolonial struggle against the US government and were found guilty of seditious conspiracy against the government of the United States in a series of trials in which none of them participated. Escobar's art, theory and criticism cannot be detached from the criminal proceedings brought against him, the consequences of which have also been influential in Escobar's cultural production. In this essay, I will explore the relationship of art, law and politics in Elizam Escobar's La ficción, a painting from 1992 in which the Puerto Rican artist imagines his own funeral taking place in US Supreme Court. I will argue that the figure of the enemy in Escobar's La ficción, with its projection of the death of the juridical subject in all its undecidability, opens up the possibility of questioning the limits of art, politics, and law. As it invites us to consider the death of politics in connection to the figure of the enemy, Escobar's La ficción unfolds as a spectral return of the political.

Notes

1 Quoted in Georges Didi-Huberman 2005: 232.

2 Derrida questions Schmitt's tendency to eliminate from the concept of the political any extraneous element that would put at stake the purity of the concept: ‘The concept of the political undoubtedly corresponds, as concept, to what the ideal discourse can want to state most rigorously on the ideality of the political. But no politics has ever been adequate to its concept. […] Schmitt goes to great lengths – in our judgement totally in vain, a priori doomed to failure – to exclude – from all other purity (objective, scientific, moral, juridical, psychological, economic, aesthetic, etc.) the purity of the political, the proper and pure impurity of the concept or the meaning of the “political”’ (Politics of Friendship, 114–16).

3 Escobar suggests this idea in Los ensayos del artificiero: ‘Mas la broma es la siguiente: somos “el sujeto muerto” de “la muerte del sujeto” diagnosticada por el occidentalismo primermundista. Y desde nuestra no-existencia surge nuestra praxis de la muerte, que como discurso se experimenta desde la interpretación del otro a la inversa’ (124). Later he connects the death of the subject with the death of the artist and the death of the colonial subject: ‘Sucede que estamos acostumbrados a la forma de soñar del otro, a que el otro nos sueñe. […] El otro me reduce a un ciudadano invisible, que de pronto había comenzado a resurgir de su muerte colonial como los nuevos “sujetos libres” de la “historia” (los 50, los 60) y de momento se encuentra con “la muerte del sujeto.” Es decir, cuando “el sujeto malo” comenzaba a ser “el sujeto libre,” el intelectual occidentalista primermundista teoriza la muerte del sujeto. Somos los ornamentos culturales con valor de uso, valor de cambio y valor de status; meros participantes del simulacro, sin poder político ni libertad real. Nos reducen a verdaderos gusanos estéticos. Y nos reducen lo mismo en nombre del modernismo que del post-modernismo. Somos, entonces, “el sujeto muerto” de “la muerte del sujeto”’ (139).

4 The fear of a Puerto Rican insurrection against the US government has haunted the American imagination since Puerto Rico became a colonial territory of the USA. Efrén Rivera Ramos points out that one of the members of the US Supreme Court, Justice White, when discussing the incorporation of Puerto Rico to the United States in 1901, framed the issue as one involving a security threat. For Justice White, the immediate incorporation of a new territorial possession would open up ‘the possibility of “millions of inhabitants” being able… to overthrow “the whole structure of the government”’ (249–50). It was Justice White, according to Rivera's account, who formulated the doctrine of the non-incorporated territory that still applies to Puerto Rico today. Rivera explains the doctrine as follows: ‘the resulting discourse was one in which the “territory” – denoting the locality, but including its people – could be described as “belonging to” but not “a part of” the United States. Its inhabitants became derivatively “subjects” to be ruled and “disposed of”’ (250).