The poetics of reemergence: psetry, subjectivity, and political violence in the neoliberal age

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THE POETICS OF REEMERGENCE:
POETRY, SUBJECTIVITY, AND POLITICAL VIOLENCE IN THE NEOLIBERAL
AGE

by

Seth Robert Michelson

________________________________________________________________________
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(COMPARATIVE LITERATURE)

May 2013

Copyright 2013 Seth Robert Michelson
Table of Contents
Dedication……………………………………………………………………………….. 1
Abstract………………………………………………………………………………….. 2
Introduction: What Poetry Makes Happen……………………………………………… 5
Chapter 1: Fissures of Consciousness: Towards a Methodology for Engaging Poetic
Possibility in the Neoliberal Age………………………………………………. 40
Chapter 2: Vivos entre compañeros: Juan Gelman, Genocidal Politics, and the Affect
of Exile…………………………………………………………………………. 65
Chapter 3: Cadáveres que transitan a las semillas: State Violence and the Aporia of
Alicia Partnoy’s Poetry………………………………………………………...100
Chapter 4: Count-Time: Neoliberalism, Subjectivity, and Jimmy Santiago Baca’s
Prisoner Poetry…………………………………………………………………138
Chapter 5: Who Has the Time?: Stephen Dobyns and the Art of Poetic Resistance
to Neoliberal Violence…………………………………………………………169
Chapter 6: Enriching the Argument: Adrienne Rich and the Precarity of Neoliberal
Life……………………………………………………………………………….198
Conclusion: Poetry and the Politics of the Non-Subject ………………………………228
Notes…………………………………………………………………………………... 239
Bibliography…………………………………………………………………….…….. 245

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Dedication

This work is dedicated to my dissertation committee, Roberto Ignacio Díaz
(Chair), David Lloyd (Co-chair), and Macarena Gómez-Barris, each of whom offered me
unfailing counsel, support, and patience. It bears mention, too, that any missteps or errors
in the dissertation are entirely mine.
This dissertation is also dedicated to my wife, Maria Victoria, and my sons, Ilan
Sebastián and Joaquín, who inspire me to believe in the possibility of more egalitarian,
pacifistic, and just communities.

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Abstract

Neoliberalism is most often defined in scholarship as a matrix of political-
economic theories and policies that privilege privatization, deregulation, free trade, and
globalization. The vast majority of scholarship on neoliberalism therefore begins in
economic or sociological intervention. This dissertation, however, begins in aesthetics.
More specifically, it reckons with and theorizes a wide range of affective uses of poetry
to think through representational forms of contesting and circumventing the violence of
neoliberal subjectivation. To organize this, the dissertation takes very seriously a central
claim of neoliberalism: that market freedom equates to human freedom. In a gesture that
simultaneously impugns that equation and offers a counter-foundational ontology and
epistemology, the dissertation performs innovative close readings of poetry that theorize
a “poetics of reemergence,” meaning a mode through which formal poetic decisions can
articulate, archive, and put into discursive circuits the multidirectional meaning systems
of those who have been dispossessed of dominant forms of representation.
Those close readings also illustrate the incommensurability of subjectivation and
subjectivity, with neoliberalism coming to be redefined as the subjectivation of precarity.
This serves both to rethink neoliberalism as firstly an ontological violence and to offer

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the possibility of alternatives to it. In this manner the dissertation inaugurates an urgently
necessary reevaluation of the violence of neoliberalism by devising a literary
methodology for analyzing poetry as a site of subjective reemergence, whereby formerly
erased elements of subjectivity resurge symbolically through poetic artifice. At its core,
then, the dissertation comprises a poetic critique of absence, and this is yet another of it
divergences from extant scholarship on neoliberalism. Through the tropes and figures of
poetry, neoliberalism is exposed, contested, and superseded by a poetic recognition of the
present absences comprising the neoliberal subject. Thus where the vast majority of
extant critiques of neoliberalism occupy the same general terrain as what they critique,
that of homo economicus, this dissertation suggests poetry as embodying an alternative to
what it critiques by enacting an utterly recalcitrant way of being.
Such are the ambitions of this dissertation in its poetic bid to join, augment, and
problematize the rich global archive of scholarship on neoliberalism. Chapter One of the
dissertation initiates this by providing a historicized methodological framework for the
project of rethinking political violence through poetry. Perhaps most importantly, the
chapter theorizes poetry as a vital site of encounter with neoliberal precarity, through
which the poetic rendering of present absence both reckons and subverts the state-
sponsored violence of erasure intrinsic to subjectivation. In Chapter Two, close readings
of the poetry of Juan Gelman from the Argentine genocide (1976-1983) reveal its impact
on the poetic conditions of possibility for engaging present absence, with Gelman’s
poetry shown to renegotiate the violence of erasure by disrupting its false coherence and
positivism. In Chapter Three of the dissertation, the poetry of Alicia Partnoy is read as
symbolically bringing back or “reemerging” desaparecida/os from the Argentine

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genocide. Their poetic reemergence introduces a paradoxically present absence to post-
transition and mnemonic discourses in national and transnational literary and public
imaginaries. Chapter Four of the dissertation repositions Jimmy Santiago Baca’s Pinto, or
Chicano prisoner, poetry as the exposure and contestation of racialized forms of
ontological and cultural absence in the U.S. political economy. The chapter also
demonstrates how poetic form can reveal and rethink the current U.S. prison as both a
site and episteme of subjectivation. In Chapter Five, the poetry of Stephen Dobyns is
framed as the simultaneous performance and critique of neoliberal precarity in the U.S.,
especially in relation to subjective anguish. The sixth and final chapter of the dissertation
uniquely reconceives the poetry of Adrienne Rich from the mid- to late 1980s as
signifying the precarity of neoliberalized life under Reaganomics, as well as a resistance
to transcultural and transnational forms of neoliberal violence emanating from the U.S.
during that crucial period of neoliberal expansion. These six chapters combine to
introduce a poetics of reemergence, which hopefully contributes not only to questions of
and approaches to neoliberalism, but also to discourses on poetry, aesthetics, translation,
ethics, and the multiple meanings of sovereignty.

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Introduction: What Poetry Makes Happen

For more than seventy years, a tired but persistent platitude has been circulating in
discourses of Anglophone letters: The idea that “[p]oetry makes nothing happen.” It is an
oft-invoked fragment from the poem “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” by W.H. Auden, from
his 1940 collection Another Time. Here is the context of that misunderstood fragment:
…poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth. (36-41)

This excerpt comprises the majority of the second section of the tripartite poem, which,
as its title indicates, is an elegy to the Nobel prize-winning Irish poet, statesman,
playwright, mystic, and literary critic William Butler Yeats, who had died in 1939. And,
importantly, despite decontextualized appropriations of its denotative meaning, this
poetic claim very much makes things happen. Not only does it occur in a poem
celebrating the poetry of Yeats and Yeats as poet, but also is followed by a third section
to the poem, wherein poetry is vaunted for many of its practical, nourishing, and

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necessary capabilities. For example, Auden extols the ability of poetry in general and
Yeats’s poetic “voice” in particular to “persuade us to rejoice” (57) despite our fears and
terror in life. Auden similarly explains that “[w]ith the farming of a verse / [poetry can
m]ake a vineyard of the curse [of human frailty, failure, and mortality]” (58-59), thereby
illustrating the transformative, salvific potentialities of poetry. In humbler terms, poetry
“survives,” and its very endurance is a notable happening. With World War Two
underway by the time of this poem’s publication, a concept like endurance is thick with
meaning and import. Extermination camps and gas chambers will soon enter global
discourses of violence, and the concept of survival will gain grim material, social,
cultural, psychic, and ontological heft and nuance. In short, then, poetry can do more than
merely makes things happen; it can make crucial things happen.
Evidence of poetry ‘making things happen’ abounds in the aforementioned second
section of the poem, too, where the fragment “poetry makes nothing happen”
paradoxically performs its claim of inactivity. That is, the fragment is an active poetic
performance. Its very claim of nothingness is enacted and endures through the realization
of the poem. Moreover, it details how poetry can signal and sculpt a crucial and vital
imaginative zone –“the valley of its making”—beyond and/or against the violent reach of
the market and its “executives,” who are implied by the poem as sullying the mind and
the maker with grubby “tampering.” The section also creates a perspectival shift for the
living, augmenting their purview on mortality so as to help to soothe them in their
“griefs,” which notably are plural, meaning they are many, an onslaught of suffering.
More importantly, though, this claim about poetry subtly but forcefully insists that poetry
is “a way of happening,” meaning it is both a phenomenology and its ontology. Poetry is

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a way and a rationale of being. And most importantly of all, this way of being is “a
mouth.” It is corporeal, a conjunction of thought and body collapsing the false Cartesian
duality and emphasizing the materiality of being. Poetry is a way of being through the
body. It is an affective mode of registering, recalibrating, and communicating the
sensorial. Importantly here, this includes the sensory experience of nothingness. That is,
nothing can be privative, as in “There is nothing to be done,” or substantive, as in
“Nothing will come of nothing,” with both forms rendering nothingness as vital presence.
In this manner, the duality of nothingness resembles the “O” of the human mouth: It is
both that through which utterance comes, meaning a privative nothingness in itself, and a
substantial thing in its own right.
To illustrate this further, one might look to the poem “No creo en la vía pacífica”
(58), by the acclaimed Chilean poet, Nicanor Parra. Of note, Parra is the founder of
antipoesía, or anti-poetry, which comprises a self-critical poetic mode of writing poetry
that, among other things, questions, undercuts, and teases the art of poetry. Parra’s
antipoesía thereby exemplifies a process of making and unmaking. His antipoesía is the
paradoxical poetic enactment of the undoing of poetry through the production of poetry.
Parra chiefly enacts this lexically, foregrounding self-conscious deflations of poetic
language by invoking quotidian words, phrases, and even clichés to construct his verse.
That language is further refigured by its poetic context, meaning Parra’s reconfigurations
of the uses of poetic form, rhythm, and tropes to organize and redeploy language. In this
manner, Parra’s antipoesía—which is in a sense a poetry against poetry—comes
ironically to stand as a critically acclaimed and even canonical poetry, much celebrated
for its signature disarticulations of poetic traditions which nevertheless are produced

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poetically. That is, despite its aesthetically subversive elements within a poetic
continuum, Parra’s antipoesía nevertheless codifies an extension of poetic tradition,
including Parra’s augmentation of the spectrum of poetic language, which itself ramifies
directly from antecedent beliefs about diction in poetry, and especially vernacular diction.
In other words, Parra’s antipoesía signals both a rupture and a continuity; it is
simultaneously presence and absence. It is an assertion and retraction, a concurrence of
creation and destruction. It is the musculature and meat of the mouth, and the void around
which it forms and through which it speaks. To exemplify this, here is the
aforementioned poem “No creo en la vía pacífica” in its entirety. While reading it, one
might bear in mind its provocative epistemological paradox: It is a poetic declaration of
belief in non-believing, which is itself an affirmative assertion of present absence
wrought through poetic artifice:
no creo en la vía violenta
me gustaría creer en algo—pero no creo
creer es creer en Dios
lo único que yo hago
es encogerme de hombros
perdónenme la franqueza
no creo ni en la Vía Láctea.

Furthermore, a quick juxtaposition of the Spanish-language original poem with its
translation into English reveals immediately and definitively the intensity and intricacy of
the poetic artistry of the original poem, meaning in this case Parra’s deft use of rhythm,
consonance, and assonance despite his claims to anti-poetry and “anti”-artistry. Here, for
example, is Miller Williams’ translation of the poem, which he titles “I Don’t Believe in
the Peaceful Way” (59):
I don’t believe in the violent way
I’d like to believe

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in something—but don’t
to believe means to believe in God
all I can do is
shrug my shoulders
forgive me for being blunt
I don’t even believe in the Milky Way.
Perhaps, then, one might see in Parra’s antipoesía a sustained poetic genealogy dating
back to Ovid in The Art of Love, where one learns through a subversively playful poetry
that the art lies in hiding the art, so to speak. The poetry uses its artifice to create an affect
of artlessness, even when seeming upon further review to be careful in its artistry. It
nevertheless communicates an aesthetic ease through affective communication,
regardless of the intensity and/or urgency of the poetic utterance and event. In other
words, through artifice the poem proceeds to seduce its readers, easing them into an
encounter with change, divergence, and transformation. In this manner one could argue
that poetry produces indirectly. It operates allusively, through a presentation of evasion,
and this again instantiates poetry as present absence. It is a structuring of encounter and
utterance through and beyond the structures that engender the encounter and utterance,
and therein exists its wily recalcitrance, its vibrant intractability. That potentiality, that
disruptive verve, inundates and exceeds subjectivated life, and it stakes poetry’s
formidable ability to frustrate political systems and economic logics, for example.

Present Absence and Absent Presence: The Rudiments of Poetic Resistance

Such is the epistemological basis for this dissertation: It intends to illustrate
precisely and deeply how poetry makes things happen, how poetry is a mouth, how
poetry articulates nothingness and absence. More specifically, through that mouth, this

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dissertation innovatively questions the relationships between violence and poetry. It
performs close readings of five central poets— Juan Gelman, Alicia Partnoy, Jimmy
Santiago Baca, Stephen Dobyns, and Adrienne Rich—for their engagement of the links
between state violence and subjection. Through that work, this dissertation orchestrates
an urgently necessary re-evaluation of the violence of neoliberalized life. More
specifically, this dissertation will organize a literary methodology for analyzing poetry as
a site of subjective reemergence, whereby formerly erased elements of subjectivity
resurge symbolically through poetic artifice and are redeployed into multidirectional
meaning systems. At its core, then, this dissertation is a critique of absence, and this is
where it diverges from the existing scholarship on these poets and the related archives on
neoliberalism, violence, aesthetics, and literature. Through the poetic analysis of
neoliberal subjectivation, this dissertation comprises a pained and desperate, but
measured and methodical, clarion call for artists, activists, and scholars to confront and
subvert the violence of neoliberalism.
To be sure, scholars have at times performed astute and useful close readings of
the poetry of Gelman, Partnoy, Baca, Dobyns, and Rich. However, those close readings
are most often brief, cursory, and/or scattered within arguments that not only prefer to
emphasize the summarization and explication of denotative, biographical and/or
contextual considerations of the poem and its maker, but also the overall poem as a whole
taken as generalized evidence contributing to the scholars’ privileged themes and subjects
of primary interest, such as grief, exile, and imprisonment. In contrast, this dissertation
foregrounds the aesthetics of poetry. It is fascinated by the poetic processes at work in a
poem, morpheme by morpheme, and including white space. Thus the insights in this

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dissertation emerge from the identification and analysis of the specifically poetic
decisions of these poets, which in turn inaugurate fresh configurations for thinking
through the relationships between state violence and subjectivation.
As a result the poetically produced ontological and political arguments in this
dissertation are markedly distinct from the current archives of scholarship on subjectivity,
aesthetics, and neoliberalism, for example. Just as the antecedent archive of scholarship
on the poetry of Gelman, Partnoy, Baca, Dobyns, and Rich includes close readings of
their poetry as embedded, subordinate, instrumental, and/or supplementary modes of
introducing and/or emphasizing important biographical, historiographical,
anthropological, and/or cultural claims, the existing archive of sociological, economic,
and philosophical scholarship pertinent to this dissertation’s study of subjectivation and
subjectivity in the neoliberal age utilizes poetry in sweeping, perfunctory, and cursory
gestures, if at all. More often, if literature enters these sociological, economic, and/or
philosophical texts, it is from the genre of literary prose, and it is mentioned in broad,
categorical commentary. For example, the only literature referenced in Daniel Stedman
Jones’s Masters of the Universe comes in his brief mention of “Ayn Rand’s libertarian
novels The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957), which would influence the
future head of the federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan among others” (35). In other words,
there is little literary analysis in the historiographical, philosophical, and sociological
texts on neoliberalism, affect, and subjectivity pertinent to this dissertation as their
emphases lie elsewhere. And on the rare occasions when these books do invoke a literary
reference, it is in the service of accentuating non-literary insights and assertions.
Moreover, in these texts there exists no close reading of poetry, no sustained and discrete

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direct analysis foot by foot of the function of its tropes, forms, and figures, at least not as
of the date of publication of this dissertation.
There are, however, examples of superb insights being gleaned through the close
reading of poetry in the archive of literary criticism on Gelman, Partnoy, Baca, Dobyns,
and Rich, but these texts rarely, if ever, privilege close reading as their primary mode of
analysis, let alone as an ontology or epistemology. Rather the close readings of excerpts
of poetry offer substantiations and/or inflections of the broader biographical, historical,
and cultural claims preoccupying the scholar. For example, within the archive of
scholarship on Gelman’s oeuvre, which is the largest of the archives on the five primary
poets under consideration herein, one learns much about Gelman’s life, politics, and
artistry from the sampling of close readings of Gelman’s poetry integrated by María del
Carmen Sillato into Juan Gelman: las estrategias de la otredad (2002), by Miguel
Dalmaroni into Juan Gelman: contra las fabulaciones del mundo (1993), by Geneviève
Fabry into Las formas del vacío: La escritura del duelo en la poesía de Juan Gelman
(2008), and by Sarli Mercado into Cartografías del destierro: En torno a la poesía de
Juan Gelman y Luisa Futoransky (2008). Similarly B.V. Olguín occasionally offers
prescient and powerful close readings of Baca’s poems in La Pinta: Chicana/o Prisoner
Literature, Culture, and Politics (2010), and Peter Stitt engages Dobyns’ poetry through
its craft in Uncertainty and Plenitude: Five Contemporary Poets (1997), albeit with a less
rigorous methodological and theoretical framework than those in the aforementioned
books. Notably Cheri Colby Langdell’s Adrienne Rich: The Moment of Change (2004)
offers close readings of Rich’s poetry, but the book serves more as an admirable
introduction to the process of carefully reading Rich’s oeuvre as opposed to the deep

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theorization of its formal workings. Langdell suggests as much with her “Note to the
Reader,” wherein she explains that her “book is designed to be read in accompaniment
with volumes of Adrienne Rich’s poetry and rose: the commentary is best understood
when readers read the poetry for themselves along with this analysis” (xi).
Nevertheless these are all well researched and well-written books that include
delicate and thoughtful poetic analysis; their difference from this dissertation is simply a
matter of emphases. This dissertation differentiates itself from those texts by its vigorous
insistence on reading the poetry firstly for its aesthetics, for its analysis of the
orchestration of the poetic event, from which emerge alternative ontologies and
epistemologies for subjective subsistence in the neoliberal age. It should go without
saying that this is not a claim to preeminence of one approach over another. The focus of
each of these texts is different, and this dissertation simply aspires to eliminate an
absence of the critical close reading of poetry at the conjunction of discourses on poetry,
politics, aesthetics, and subjectivity. It therefore goes almost without saying that the
importance of the existing archive on the work of Gelman, Partnoy, Baca, Dobyns, and
Rich—upon which this dissertation gratefully depends and from which it also diverges—
is as indisputable as it is impressive. The distinction here lies in the aim of this
dissertation to foreground the poetic as an innovative addition to an already rich, vibrant,
and influential series of overlapping archives. More specifically, by privileging the act of
close reading as the driving force of analysis herein, the craft of poetry—its tropes,
figures, and forms—is repositioned as a promising medium for rethinking neoliberal
violence, abusive state power, and the complexities of subjective life under neoliberalism.

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In other words, of special emphasis here will be the poetic exploration and
critique of the ontological violence of neoliberalism, which this dissertation will argue as
conceiving of subjects as permanently destabilized, precarious, and vulnerable beings.
This is not to abandon the agency of neoliberalized subjects. In fact quite the opposite is
being claimed herein. This dissertation aims to articulate a few of the many modes,
media, and opportunities for subordinated, abused, oppressed, tortured, and/or otherwise
precarized neoliberal subjects to reckon that violence, reclaim censored, disfigured,
and/or erased aspects of their subjectivity, and reassert it to effectuate more egalitarian,
pacifistic, and humanistic “ways of happening.” It is a “mouth” for announcing and
disarticulating some of the multitude of “griefs” of neoliberalized life. It is a poetically
produced epistemology of resistance to the suffering of neoliberal injustices, damages,
dispossessions, oppressions, and losses. Furthermore such an approach—the
identification and critique of neoliberal violence of erasure through poetry—will
hopefully prove as clarifying as it is unprecedented, and as necessary as it is innovative.
More modestly, the dissertation aspires to enact this within a reasonable spectrum of
understanding and expectation, keeping in mind always the lived realities of the material
and psychic violences suffered by subjugated bodies. In other words, the analysis,
critique, and theorizations of the potentialities of poetry to make things happen are
contextualized within a broader schema postulating the insufficiency of poetic mouths to
effectuate clear, immediate, and direct large-scale remediation of state violence. To
presume otherwise would be to succumb to what the literary critic and theorist Derek
Attridge calls “a wild overestimate of the power of literary works to effect political
change” (9). Nevertheless, this dissertation strives to identify and theorize what poetry

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can make happen, such as the ability of the poetries herein to instantiate, without
necessarily proposing, not only a rejection of the neoliberal forms of violence, but also an
utterly removed set of values. Thus while these poetries may inhabit, take on, and/or
mimic violence, they never endorse it, offering instead another apprehension of what
being in common might be.

Life Is Violence and Violence Is Life: Neoliberalism Defined

Neoliberalism is most often historicized as a series of political-economic
principles privileging privatization, deregulation, free trade, and globalization rooted in
the aftermath of World War Two. Its originary theorists, such as the individualist
economists of the Austrian School, such as Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich von Hayek, and
Joseph Schumpeter, and the German ordoliberals from the Freiburg School, such as
Walter Eucken, Franz Böhm, and Hans Grossmann-Doerth, developed theories of
market-based liberties and economies from the 1920s to 1950s in Europe. Their work
would be developed in the United States beginning in the 1950s by two generations of
economists and thinkers organized loosely around the Department of Economics at the
University of Chicago (where Hayek coincidentally would work, too, though not in the
Economics Department). First were the Chicago economists such as Paul Douglas, Henry
Simons, Jacob Viner, and Frank Knight, who propounded the relative efficacy of free
markets. The subsequent generation of the so-called Chicago School included students of
the first, chief among them the neoclassical monetarist economist Milton Friedman and
his colleague George Stigler, who developed the theory of regulatory capture, delineating

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the capacity for special interest groups to manipulate the law to their economic benefit.
Despite their geographical, temporal, and cultural differences, what such clusters of
neoliberal thinkers shared in common over these first sixty or so years of theorizing and
testing neoliberal ideas and policy were their overlapping calls for a resuscitation of
economic liberalism as a means to stabilize both markets and living standards. Then, with
the election of Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom in 1979 and Ronald Reagan in
the United States in 1980, neoliberalism bloomed from a desultory scattering of relatively
localized efforts across the United States and Western Europe into a global, imperial
trend of market liberalization, deregulation, and privatization to adjust taxation and to
expand and refine trade and capital accumulation.
Long before that global explosion of neoliberalism towards the end of the
twentieth century, the first major milestone in the realization of neoliberalism came via
the creation of a global infrastructure in 1944 at the United Nations Monetary and
Financial Conference in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, where the forty-four Allied
nations in attendance most notably established the General Agreement on Tariffs and
Trade (GATT), the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), and
the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
1
Importantly, as the anthropologist David Harvey
points out in A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2007), that burgeoning, post-war “system
existed under the umbrella protection of US military power…[with o]nly the Soviet
Union and the Cold War plac[ing] limits on its global reach” (10), thereby emphasizing a
foundational link between economics and militarism in neoliberalism. One might even
dare to go so far as to state that the political-economic system was brokered by violence.
Moreover, there was a pronounced social component to this new system. As the

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economic historians Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy note in The Neoliberal Crisis
(2011), “[t]he challenge for governments during the 1930s and 1940s was not only to
reverse the contraction of output, but also to lay the foundations of a new, sustainable
social order” (281, emphasis added). However rather than benefitting the many, that new
social order would be realized through neoliberalism as the radically disproportionate
accumulation of capital by the ruling elite via the domination, exploitation, and
subjugation of enormous swaths of the global population.
More neutrally, one could simply acknowledge that in the aftermath of World
War Two, a new transnational network of policies, theories, and institutions had been
established among nations. The majority of its theorists and advocates sincerely believed
themselves to be working in the service of promoting strong economic growth,
international collaboration, egalitarian politics, and humanistic individualism. As Andrew
Glyn remarks of privatization—a primary tenet of neoliberal economic theory—in
Capitalism Unleashed: Finance, Globalization, and Welfare (2007), “the fundamental
motivation for privatization was the theory that firms would be more efficient when
subject to competitive private sector disciplines and that this would bring real benefits to
the economy in the form of lower prices and higher living standards” (38, emphasis
added). In reality, though, neoliberalism would result in quite the opposite: the pandemic
destabilization and degradation of living standards across the globe. For Harvey this in
fact epitomizes neoliberalism; it is a transnational economic-political system that coerces
subjects and states into debt so as to dominate and subjugate them through a “practice of
prioritization of the needs of banks and financial institutions and [a correlative]
diminishing [of] the standard of living of the debtor” (73). All the while, though,

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neoliberal leaders cynically present it as a framework for promoting, defending, and
engendering freedom, health, prosperity, and justice. They articulate a deceptive verbal
codex that at its most discursively sinister equates the freedom of markets to the freedom
of human beings. Thus where Ludwig Wittgenstein famously suggested the imposition of
mind on world through language to signify that “[t]he limits of my language mean the
limits of my world” (74), the neoliberal leader twists language to spread as if
commonsensical the mantra that “the limits of the market mean the limits of my world.”
In other words, there clearly exists a decidedly volatile rhetorical component to
the neoliberal project. For instance, proponents of neoliberalism frequently couch its
economic and political assertions in moral claims. A good example of this comes from
the Mont Pelerin Society, a seminal group of neoliberal thinkers and scholars, which
declared in its Statement of Aims in 1947 that:
[t]he central values of civilization are in danger…human dignity and freedom
have already disappeared…[and t]he position of the individual and the voluntary
group are [being] progressively undermined by extensions of arbitrary
power….[T]hese developments have been fostered by the growth of a view of
history which denies all absolute moral standards…and by a decline of belief in
private property and the competitive market.
2

Thus neoliberalism exists at the intersection of economics, politics, ethics, aesthetics, and
rhetoric. In a sense, then, the economic theories of neoliberalism are only as important as
their articulations of belief in the system are persuasive. This leads Harvey, for example,
to posit the rise of neoliberalism “as a political project to re-establish the conditions for
capital accumulation and to restore the power of economic elites…[via] a system of
justification and legitimation for whatever needed to be done to achieve this goal” (19),
and the role of discourse in such a system is patent. It is likewise evident in more
pointedly economic analyses of neoliberalism, where again the social seems to surge

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irrepressibly to the fore. Note, for instance, the twining of economic ambition and social
control that Duménil and Lévy discern in the social hegemonies and antagonisms
intrinsic to the building of neoliberal capitalist systems, which fuse the growth of “the
income and wealth of a privileged minority…[with] the dominance of a country” (1).
This recognition of the discursivity of neoliberalism is not new; what is newly
proposed through this dissertation is the literary analysis of poetry as a point of entry. For
decades scholars of economic, social, and political theory, for example, have identified,
examined, and challenged the rhetoric of neoliberalism, and the fruits of their labor have
been bittersweet. For instance Harvey insightfully discerns a pattern: “when neoliberal
principles clash with the need to restore or sustain elite power, then the principles are
either abandoned or become so twisted as to be unrecognizable” (19). This is in part why
he further argues neoliberalism as a veiled “monopoly of the means of violence” (64).
Lisa Duggan similarly foregrounds the rhetorical violence of neoliberalism in The
Twilight of Equality?: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy
(2003), where she defines neoliberalism as merely “[n]ominally pro-democratic,” adding
that “neoliberal financial institutions have operated autocratically themselves, primarily
through financial coercion” and that they have “consistently supported autocratic
governments and plutocratic elites around the world” (xiii, emphasis added). Duménil
and Lévy emphasize the discursivity of neoliberalism by explicating the importance of
politicking and legislating to the creation of the conditions for the installation and growth
of neoliberal markets, explaining that:
[t]he international neoliberal order—known as neoliberal globalization—was
imposed throughout the world, from the main capitalist countries of the center to
the less developed countries of the periphery…[and] the major instruments of
these international power relations, beyond straightforward economic violence,

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are corruption, subversion, and war. The main political tool is always the
establishment of an imperial-friendly government. (9)

In other words social and cultural conflict are necessary to the rise of neoliberal power,
and some of that conflict occurs in language. More precisely, to propagate the conditions
for a populace to accept a self-destructive shift to the exploitative conditions of labor to
the benefit of the capital accumulation of the ruling elites, neoliberalism dissimulates its
intrinsic violences, instabilities, and antagonisms via discursive prestidigitation. Harvey
explains this metaphorically, arguing that neoliberalism wears:
a benevolent mask full of wonderful-sounding words like freedom, liberty,
choice, and right… [that] hide[s] the grim realities of the restoration or
reconstitution of naked class power, locally as well as transnationally, but most
particularly in the main financial centres of global capitalism. (119)

In short, neoliberal power is enacted through artifice. It is performative. It is affect.
Here, then, enters this dissertation. It aims to join the fractious, competing, and
often contradictory discourses attempting to identify, clarify, promote, and/or refuse the
workings of neoliberal power, and it aims to do so through the poetic. That is, this
dissertation offers an unprecedented poetic intervention in an archive of scholarship on
neoliberalism that typically foregrounds economic, political, and/or sociological
interventions. Much has been written importantly and convincingly on the subject of
neoliberalism and its many intrinsic and consequent violences, but none of that writing
has emerged from the close reading of poetry. Thus, to intervene poetically in the
neoliberal crisis of transnational, transhistorical violence, this dissertation parses the uses
of the tropes and figures of poetry from a diversity of highly visible, highly accomplished
poets writing under, through, and against the violence of neoliberalism. Through that
close attention to and privileging of the poetic decisions of these bards, this dissertation

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builds a unique, syncretic methodology and epistemology for rethinking neoliberal power
through the close reading of poetry. In other words, this dissertation aims to augment,
inflect, and problematize the existing, rich cross-disciplinary global archive of neoliberal
scholarship and cultural production by engaging them afresh through an explicitly poetic
mode of analysis and critique of neoliberal power, with one of the chief achievements
herein being the espousal of a poetics of resistance to neoliberal violence. Where existing
materialist critiques of neoliberalism occupy the same general terrain as what they
critique, that of homo economicus, this dissertation suggests that poetry embodies the
alternative to what it critiques, an utterly recalcitrant way of being. In this manner the
poetic work of this dissertation can be understood as building, for example, upon
Theodor Adorno’s wonderful remark in Aesthetic Theory (1970), and elsewhere in other
terms, that “only what does not fit into this world is true” (76).

Historicizations, Permutations, and Poetries of Resistance

For decades scholars across the globe have produced important insights into
neoliberal power and violence by studying neoliberalism through political, cultural, legal,
critical, economic, and social theory, to name but a few. However none, as
aforementioned, has studied the operation of this power through a specifically poetic
intervention. The possibilities of such analysis are as dizzyingly kinetic as they are
apparently untested, and this dissertation will introduce some of the most promising
among them. In particular, this dissertation will engage neoliberal violence by rethinking
the power of the tropes and figures of poetry to influence subjectivity. Accordingly the

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close readings of poetry will serve to illuminate, instigate, and complicate dominant
theorizations and critiques of neoliberal life through a convergence of literary theory,
literary criticism, sociology, economic theory, political theory, cultural criticism, and
critical studies. In converse terms, this dissertation would be an impossibility without the
existing archive of scholarship on neoliberalism. This dissertation therefore aspires
consciously to position itself as a modest but promising extension of the remarkable work
by an inspiring coterie of premiere scholars, philosophers, and artists from around the
globe.
In this manner this dissertation contributes to the rigorous and urgent
historiography, criticism, and theorization of neoliberalism and its impacts, albeit through
a restrictive focus on poetry and, more specifically, poetry concerning the Argentine
genocide
3
from 1976 to 1983 and overlapping state violence in the United States as
instantiated in the racialized state violence against minoritized Chicana/o subjects and the
violence of subjective life during the most recent U.S.-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In this way, neoliberal violence will be traced through a coherent disciplinary locus that
allows for the careful elucidation of nuances, commonalities, and differences among
these instantiations of neoliberalism. In particular, this dissertation will reconceive the
importance of the poetry of Alicia Partnoy and Juan Gelman regarding the Argentine
genocide, and the poetry of Jimmy Santiago Baca, Stephen Dobyns, and Adrienne Rich
from the United States during an overlapping chronological frame. More specifically,
Partnoy was a political prisoner in a concentration camp in Argentina during the
genocide, and Gelman’s work from exile during that period will be juxtaposed to
Partnoy’s. Through the close reading of their respective poetries, one can glean the

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violence of neoliberalism, which is a violence of precarization and erasure, as
exemplified by the intrastate erasure of Partnoy by incarceration and torture, and the
extraterritorial erasure of Gelman from the state by exile. Likewise, this dissertation will
argue for the power of these poets to manipulate the tropes, forms, and figures of poetry
into poetries of reemergence, meaning the poetry performatively enacts the return and/or
rescue of erased subjectivities and their reintroduction into multidirectional meaning
systems in the present.
In comparison, the poetry of Baca, Dobyns, and Rich illustrates modes of
reemerging from neoliberal censure and erasure, too, though in the United States. Rich’s
poetry, for example, instantiates forms of neoliberal precarity and erasure through her
ceaseless and bold exploration of identity, thereby highlighting the struggles of a poet to
craft not only a verse capable of signifying the ephemerality and complexity of a self, but
also the subjective violence of neoliberalism, which Rich engages in a dramatic diversity
of interwoven locations, ranging from the battlefield to the synagogue to the bedroom. In
contrast Baca’s poetry from prison signifies a poetic contestation of the racialized forms
of erasure imposed upon minoritized communities in the U.S. by the prison regime
serving the neoliberal political economy. To intensify the analysis of a specifically U.S.
neoliberal violence, including its global extensions, Dobyns poetry is then analyzed,
including but not limited to his poetry about U.S.-led invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.
More deeply, the illumination of Dobyns’ innovative orchestration of poetic craft will
reveal an affect communicating the agonistic precarity founding the neoliberal subject.
And, again, the root of the instability of the neoliberal subject is an ontological violence
that, according to this dissertation, defines neoliberalism, however much the violence of

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neoliberalism may be most immediately apprehensible in its economic, social, and/or
political manifestations. To build a poetic argument out of the sociological work of
Susana Kaiser, this dissertation inaugurates a poetic mode of accounting for a neoliberal
instantiation of the idea that “in societies that suffered generalized or centralized
violence, ‘fear is paramount feature of social action’… [and therefore] postmemories of
terror are relevant to the extent that they shape attitudes and actions in the present and,
consequently, influence the future” (62). In other words, in an effort to understand the
past in the present so as to work for an improved future, this dissertation looks at the
state-sponsored terror of neoliberal subjective violence as reckoned, implied, and
rendered symbolically by poetry from Dobyns, Rich, Baca, Gelman, and Partnoy. In this
manner poetry importantly becomes an active site of production of alternative
ontological, social, and political potentialities. It becomes a means of resistance to
abusive state power and a mode of generating less violent, more egalitarian
epistemologies.
More broadly, then, it seems important here to offer a brief, historiographical
introduction to the operative understanding of the term neoliberalism in this dissertation,
particularly as definitions of neoliberalism vary so drastically across time, place,
sensibility, and discipline. Herein the theories and praxes of neoliberalism are understood
as rooted in an international, transcultural concatenation of events that together comprise
what the scholar of Human Geography Clive Barnett refers to synoptically as the
“standardized narrative” of neoliberalism. By this he means:
a period of economic crisis which shook the foundations of the post-World War
Two, Keynsnian [sic] settlement as the conjuncture in which previously marginal
neoliberal economic theories were…translated into real-world policy scenarios;
[leading to] the role of economists from the University of Chicago in Pinochet’s

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Chile in the 1970s; Reaganomics in the USA in the 1980s, and so-called
Thatcherism in the UK in the 1980s; [as well as] the role of key international
agencies, such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank as
responsible in diffusing neoliberalism globally through the so-called Washington
Consensus in development and foreign policy. (2)

As Barnett himself sagaciously demonstrates in his text, such a ‘narrative’ is useful if
simplistic as it implies through the diversity of its examples the continuous permutations
and adaptations of the synergistic interplay of politics, economics, epistemology, and
rhetoric comprising the neoliberal age. Of course one could add any of a multitude of
other, well established historical, cultural, territorial, and/or cultural markers to Barnett’s
narrative; such is the nature of the neoliberal horizon of possibility: it absorbs, stretches,
and transforms itself in its continuous re-ascription of power, just as aggressively
usurping counterhegemonic cultural production as reterritorializing that which might
have initially announced itself as a spatial beyond to neoliberal borders. It is a form, then,
of infinite forms, an actor with limitless costumes, and it is best to explore individual
instantiations of neoliberalism in depth and detail before working comparatively in more
generalized terms, whereupon the tenability of claims seems to dissolve in the departure
from specificity.
Thus this dissertation intensely focuses upon poetry from two discrete moments.
Just as Harvey pursues his historiographical aim by emphasizing chronological precision,
such as the importance of the OPEC oil crisis of 1973, and Duménil and Lévy prefer to
cite “[t]he year 1979, when the [U.S.] Federal Reserve decided to raise interest rates to
any level allegedly required to curb inflation…[as] emblematic of the entrance into the
new period [of neoliberalism]” (8), this dissertation dwells in the fastidious analysis of
poetic detail as marking, exemplifying, and challenging neoliberal power, such as Baca’s

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use of metaphors of absence to craft a powerfully counter-foundational Pinto (or Chicano
prisoner) poetry that symbolically resists neoliberal carcerality from the late 1970s on.
And just as Ralph Stedman Jones theorizes an economic genealogy comprising three
phases of neoliberalism (the 1920s to 1950, 1950 to the 1980s of Thatcher and Reagan,
and post-Thatcher and –Reagan to the present), this dissertation theorizes the poetic
possibility of reemergence from neoliberal erasure from concentration camps, exile,
prisons, and foreign war. To return to an earlier suggestion, then, the terrain of any
‘standardized narrative’ of neoliberalism quickly becomes as precipitously intricate as it
is exponentially expansive, with the neoliberal project emerging in a diversity of
permutations across a stretch of more than three decades of early, erratic ascendancy, and
then entrenching itself globally across four more decades of imperial domination through
an almost inconceivable diversity of forms and functions.

A Tale of Two Countries: Neoliberalism in the United States and in Argentina

Where a common critical impulse might be to root the comparative analysis of
poetic responses to neoliberalism in the poetries of Chile, commonly known as “un país
de poetas,” and the poetries emerging genealogically since the 1960s from the Black Arts
Movement in the United States, this dissertation has carefully determined to evaluate a
different framework. The shift in emphases signifies a conscious effort to offer a fresh,
clarifying set of theorizations about the potentiality of poetry to respond to neoliberal
state violence through Argentina as the site of an idiosyncratic but illustrative
instantiation of the volatility of neoliberal life, and the undertheorized violence of

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neoliberalism wrought against targeted gendered, Latina/o, and non-citizen bodies by the
United States in its domestic and international networks of neoliberal destruction by
erasure. Of importance, too, both Argentina and the U.S. in the 1990s were deemed by
many across the globe to be examples of the triumph of neoliberalism, with Argentina
having emerged uniquely from its inauguration of neoliberal policies via its installation of
a facsimile of the neoliberal template that had been initiated in Chile in 1973 with U.S.
support. Nevertheless, scholarship could and should be undertaken to elucidate further
the links and divergences between the sites of analysis in this dissertation and the
neoliberal violence in Chile and the African-American literary movements and events of
the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In fact such work is perhaps urgently
needed, particularly as Chile is, as aforementioned, deeply bound to the violence of
neoliberal political thought and action in the United States, such as the U.S.-backed
overthrow of the democratically elected Chilean President Salvador Allende in 1973.
Congruent with the interests of this dissertation in determining the interplay of
(trans)national neoliberal policy and state violence across the hemispheric Americas, the
work of the scholars and writers like Cecilia Menjívar, Néstor Rodríguez, J. Patrice
McSherry, Walter Mignolo, Eduardo Galeano, and Martha Huggins leaps to the fore.
Huggins, for example, interestingly frames the synergy of policy and violence through an
argument about policing. More precisely, she identifies a generalized pattern of U.S.
collaborations with fascistic politicos, police forces, militaries, and paramilitaries across
Latin America, with those collaborations resulting in the develop of a transnational
network of exchange of methods and modes of subordinating populaces to their leaders
through rigorous and often torturous policing. Moreover, such efforts not only create

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pathways for transnational institutional communication and collaboration necessary to
neoliberalism, but also cultivate the conditions for neoliberal subjectivation driving
neoliberal experimentation and eventual empire. Thus, for instance, Huggins studies the
connections between the governments of Chile and the U.S. in conspiring to perpetrate
political violence. Moreover, she emphasizes the role of the U.S. government in these
disturbances, detailing, for example, how it knowingly and purposefully committed
flagrant “violations of international law” in 1973, when the Central Intelligence Agency
(C.I.A.) “engineered the demise of Chile’s democratic government and its President,
Salvador Allende” (167).
More broadly, Chile would prove a fertile territory to analyze poetic production
responding to neoliberalism because Chile represents an exemplary, highly visible
intersection of neoliberal reform, state violence, and poetic recognition of and resistance
to the political-economic power of the state. Chile was the first laboratory for testing the
theories of neoliberal thinkers. If one were to build upon the work of Themis
Chronopoulos, then an inquiry into the poetics of resistance to Chilean state power and
neoliberal subjectivation would not only be sensible here but also likely very fruitful
because:
Chile is widely known as the first country to experience neoliberal reforms; it is
also one of the few countries in which neoliberal restructuring occurred quite
comprehensively and rapidly, with the military government repressing any
possible opposition to this emerging economic order. (174)

As aforementioned, superlative poets also emerged during this period, which was
brokered by the ruthless dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet for an astonishing
sixteen years, from 1974-1990, before transitioning into transitional democracies, which
have continued to privilege tenets of the globalized neoliberal economy. It bears mention,

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too, that Pinochet entertained Milton Friedman, one of the most prominent and influential
advocates of neoliberal economics, as an adviser (Klein 8). That factoid in fact
strengthens the plausibility of thoughts to explore the Chilean cultural production of the
neoliberal age as a possible locus of this dissertation in its evaluation of the intersections
of economic theory, political violence, and poetry during the emergence of neoliberalism,
which of course included the Economics Department at the University of Chicago as one
of its epicenters. Accordingly, pertinent Chilean poets to study in relation to both the
transformations of the Chilean state and the project of this dissertation would therefore
include such literary luminaries as Enrique Lihn, Raúl Zurita, and Diamela Eltit, to name
but three. Their books of poetry certainly engage the violence of neoliberal erasure as it is
theorized and analyzed in this dissertation. However, due to the limits of space, process,
and time, this dissertation must suspend the investigation of their groundbreaking verse,
acknowledging a hope to explore it more deeply in future writings to be thought at least
in part as extensions of this dissertation.
Likewise, the Black Arts poets from the U.S. could and should be evaluated
through the ideas postulated herein. However, there is neither the space nor the priority to
do so as this dissertation intends to emphasize other, less theorized but very deserving
modes of poetic production within necessarily delimited territories. Nevertheless, were
the parameters of this dissertation less limited by time, space, and scope due to the
intended depth of analysis through a methodology privileging the close reading of poetry,
then the analysis of Black Arts poetries would certainly be included herein. Chief among
the Black Arts poets of interest would be Amiri Baraka, Gwendolyn Brooks, Ishmael
Reed, Etheridge Knight, Nikki Giovanni, and Sonia Sanchez, each of whom writes

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remarkable verse about the precarity of neoliberalized life in the U.S., particularly in
terms of racialized, gendered, and/or minoritized forms of subjective erasure. Alas the
analysis of their poetries within the critical framework of this dissertation must remain a
project for this author in his near future. To wedge it in here would be to do a tremendous
disservice not only to the rigor of this dissertation but also to those poets, who deserve far
more than hasty reference or cursory survey. That is, the symbiotic importance of their
poetry and the urgency of this dissertation demands nothing less than the meticulous
scrutiny and theorization of the particularities of each of the poetries contributing to this
crucial, mosaic delineation of the violences of neoliberalism. For now, then, the focus
will be upon the comparative analysis of the violences of subjectivation in Argentina and
the United States through the poetries of Gelman, Partnoy, Baca, Dobyns, and Rich.
In an attempt to clarify the purpose of choosing to juxtapose the work of these
poets from Argentina and the U.S., one might look to an unlikely but fitting source: the
prose of the world-renowned Victorian novelist Charles Dickens. More precisely, one can
recontextualize the famous opening sentence of his novel A Tale of Two Cities (1859)
within this dissertation’s framework as an overdetermined but orientating articulation of
the dramatically dichotomous, dialectical realities of neoliberalized life that initiated the
idea for this dissertation to re-engage and re-theorize neoliberalism through poetic
production. That is, through a reconsideration of Dickens’ most famous of sentences, one
might glean insights into the orientation of this dissertation to the intertwined and
competing narratives of the emergence of neoliberalism in Argentina and the U.S. that
the poetry under analysis aims to confront. Here is Dickens’s sentence in its entirety,
which is offered here with the complementary suggestion that one read it as a synoptic

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commentary on the radical dichotomies, inequalities, and antagonisms instigated by
neoliberal policy and violence in Argentina and the U.S.:
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was
the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it
was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope,
it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before
us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—
in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest
authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative
degree of comparison only. (1)

When transposed onto the context of this dissertation, that famous sentence can be
understood in at least three important ways: It could be read as a description of the
neoliberal age in the U.S., a description of the neoliberal age in Argentina, and a
comparison of the two, with Argentina in a position of subordination to the U.S. in that
final iteration. All three of those possibilities hinge upon an understanding of
neoliberalism as socially transformative through political-economic policy. More
specifically, neoliberalism is frequently defined through the impact of its fiscal theories
and practices, which register and redistribute profit and income in modes that redesign
social stratification. For instance, in his global study of the emergence of neoliberalism
from its roots in the economics of financialization in the U.S. and United Kingdom, the
economist David Kotz notes that “[f]oreign exchange transactions in the world economy
rose from about $15 billion per day in 1973 to $80 billion in 1980 and $1,260 billion in
1995” (4-5). Consequently, for the oligarchic minority running the epicenters of
neoliberal power, the last four decades might be characterized as “the best of times,” with
the circulation and accumulation of wealth surging for them. As Duménil and Lévy note
through their analysis of class-based logic and terminology, this is the “financial
hegemony” of the neoliberal framework comprising “class power configurations,”

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whereby the “capitalist classes,” as opposed to the subjugated and exploited “managerial
classes” and “populist classes,” are permitted to “benefit from a rather unchecked
capability to lead the economy and society in general, in accordance with their own
interests or what they perceive as such” (14-15).
More importantly here, the interests of Duménil and Lévy exceed the narrow,
reductive strictures of strictly class-based analyses of neoliberalism. To escape that
critical myopia, they note not only the heterogeneity and transgression of class divisions
and social stratification as components of neoliberal life, but also the social
transformations intrinsic to advancing “the interests of the upper classes…[and] the
maximization of high incomes” (18). And those social transformations are transacted
discursively through social and political life in the public domain. Certainly, as Duménil
and Lévy explain, neoliberalization involves the redistribution of wealth and labor. As
they argue, it demanded that:
[t]he purchasing power of workers was contained, the world was opened to
transnational corporations, the rising government and household debts were a
source of large flows of interest, and financialization allowed for gigantic incomes
(wages, bonuses, exercised stock options, and dividends) in the financial sector.
The hegemony of the upper classes was [thusly] deliberately restored. (18)

But it bears noting that this was actuated at least in part through rhetorical machinations.
As Duménil and Lévy themselves note, the restoration and reinforcement of the power of
the upper classes signified that a “neoliberal ideology emerged, [and it comprised] the
expression of the class objectives of neoliberalism. This ideology was a crucial political
tool in the establishment of neoliberalism” (18, emphasis added). Again, then, one
discerns the foundational role of discursivity to the emergence and expansion of
neoliberalism. Its public and social establishment depended at least in part upon the

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creation and dissemination of a misdirectional rhetoric re-enshrining power in a wealthy
elite ruling class to the detriment of an ever-expanding sector of disempowered and
exploited people. As Naomi Klein details in The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster
Capitalism (2007):
In China, despite its stunning economic growth, the gap between the income of
city dwellers and the 800 million rural poor has doubled over the last twenty
years. In Argentina, where in 1970 the richest 10 percent of the population earned
12 times as much as the poorest, the rich were by 2002 earning 43 times as
much…In December 2006, a month after [Milton] Friedman’s died, a UN study
found that “the richest 2 per cent of adults in the world own more than half of
global household wealth.” The shift has been starkest in the U.S., where CEOs
made 43 times what the average worker earned in 1980, when Reagan kicked off
the Friedmanite crusade. By 2005, CEOs earned 411 times as much. (562)

More deeply, it is argued in this dissertation that the sweeping disempowerment,
dispossession, and exploitation of growing numbers of people by neoliberalism begins
not in the economic changes enacted by neoliberalism, but in neoliberal subjectivation,
which is to say it is rooted in ontological violence.

Profits, Gulags, and Availability without Function

As aforementioned, the narratives of the emergence of neoliberalism are as
diverse in the details of their economic historiography as in their geographical specificity.
Accordingly, the story can be localized to and inflected within the unfurling of
neoliberalism within the U.S. as one of its originary loci. Acknowledging the impact of
neoliberal reform on profit within the U.S., for example, Kotz uses a 2008 study by the
U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis to illustrate the spike in corporate wealth, explaining
that:

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[i]n the USA the pre-tax profits of financial corporations rose from an average of
13.9 per cent of all corporate profits in the 1960s to 19.4% in the 1970s, fell
slightly to 17.2 percent in the 1980s, and then rose to 25.3 per cent in the 1990s
and 36.8 per cent of all corporate profits during 2000-2006. (5)

In a study of concomitant economic concatenations in Argentina, the economist Miguel
Teubal cites the neoliberal prioritization of “[w]holesale privatization, deregulation,
flexibilization of labor markets, and [a general] ‘opening up’ to the world economy’” as
leading to newfound “regimes of accumulation” constituting “enormous transfers of
income, wealth and power into the hands of the economic and political establishments”
(460-1). Again, for those running these corporations, for instance, this accumulation of
wealth most certainly would qualify as among the “best of times.” Conversely, however,
the living conditions and quality of life worsened for an exponentially growing labor
sector in direct correlation to the rise of the neoliberal oligarchy. How could it be
otherwise in a nation where management comes to out-earn labor by an average of 411%,
and where Stigler’s theory of regulatory capture, for example, has been casually
integrated into and tolerated by sociopolitical discourse as an inevitability, thereby
reinforcing the cultural hegemony of neoliberalized life in the U.S. along the lines of
Antonio Gramsci’s well known argument about common sense?
In Argentina one finds curious overlaps with and radical distinctions from the
unfurling of neoliberalism in the U.S., not to mention the destructive cultivation by the
U.S. of a dependency relationship to the disproportionate detriment of the Argentine
middle and working classes. This began in 1930, with the collapse of the British Empire,
which had been driving the booming Argentine agro-export economy. According to
political historian James Brennan, this crisis in Argentine industry, economics, and

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therefore politics was then exacerbated in the post-war period by U.S. agricultural
policies that:
undermined Argentina's traditional agricultural exports, especially [by steeling]
the continuing restrictions on Argentine farm products in the U.S. market and [by]
the decision to forbid recipients of foreign aid under the Marshall Plan to
purchase Argentine goods. (53)

As President of Argentina, Juan Perón attempted to redress this through his economic
model of national capitalism, through which Argentina enjoyed the development of social
welfare programs, more just labor laws, and more egalitarian income redistribution.
Unionization succeeded in asserting itself on the market, and Argentina seemed soundly
perched as “a semi-industrialized country in which labor organizations had historically
acquired substantial power” (Teubal 460). However, Perón’s economic policies can also
be understood as contributing to the conditioning of Argentina for the blooming of
neoliberalism with the dictatorship from 1976 to 1983. As Brennan argues:
[t]he Peronist governments of the 1940s and 1950s had profoundly shaped the
contours of the Argentine political economy in manifold ways. Perhaps nowhere
was their influence more important than in the establishment of corporative
interests that would struggle for their share of national income and influence over
national economic policy until the 1976 military coup and subsequent government
of the "Proceso" eviscerated them and created the rudiments of a new [neoliberal]
economy based on the financial sector and powerful holding companies. (54)

Through these shifts in policy launched by coup in 1976, the benefits and protections of
the welfare state were gradually undone. New, oligarchic regimes of accumulation
emerged, and as is typical of the neoliberal production of wealth, they depended upon the
large-scale “exploitation of labor, as evidenced in a reduction of wages (both direct and
indirect), a greater regressiveness in income distribution, and increased unemployment”
(Teubal 461). Beginning with the dictatorship in 1976, these policies were also marked
by so-called “structural adjustments,” including agreements with the International

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Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. These “adjustments” would thereby ensure
links between Argentina and the global neoliberal networks of power. Moreover, these
links would be fortified and even expanded by the subsequent, democratically elected
Presidents of Argentina who succeeded the dictatorship, namely Raúl Alfonsín (1983-
1989) and Carlos Menem (1989-1999).
In fact, these Presidents intensified the neoliberalization of the state to such a
degree that Argentina came to be viewed in the eyes of many, both domestically and
globally, as an example of the triumph of neoliberalism. However, any meaningful,
collective sense of “triumph” was short-lived. As Chronopoulos summarizes it:
[f]or a few years [in the 1990s] Argentina was the IMF's success story, but the
social cost of these neoliberal reforms was high. Many Argentines lost decent jobs
and were forced into low-wage employment without benefits. Underemployment
and unemployment increased. Exports suffered because the peso was too
expensive. As the economy declined, international investors withdrew, the IMF
discontinued its loans, the peso parity to the dollar became unsustainable, and the
economy collapsed. This is a classic case of the state's following neoliberal
prescriptions and failing. (176, emphasis added)

And Teubal explains this decline similarly, albeit through his wage-based analysis of this
period. Specifically, he writes that the relative “success” of this period quickly dissolved
as “income distribution became more regressive, real wages (both direct and indirect) and
incomes of lower income groups fell, and unemployment and poverty in all their forms
increased” (466). What bears emphasis here is that both scholars mention unemployment,
which in this dissertation is linked to the theorization of neoliberalism as the production
of precarity; precarity is theorized herein as foundational to the interpellation of the
neoliberal subject.
As alluded to above, that precarity can be found in the economic and
historiographical narratives of the ascension to dominance of neoliberalism in the U.S.,

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too. Like their Argentine counterparts, the North Americans would endure a concurrent
“best of times/worst of times” dichotomy. This is readily apprehensible not only in the
intensification of class division in the U.S. under neoliberalism, but also in the
intensification of racialized forms of social stratification and disempowerment. Of the
latter, one could build upon the work of Ruth Wilson Gilmore on the dramatic boom in
incarceration since the 1980s as a marker of the ontological violence of neoliberalism
through racialized forms of erasure in the U.S. That is, Gilmore emphasizes
socioeconomic and juridical dispossession in racialized terms that support the suggestion
in this dissertation for neoliberalism to be understood as the subjectivation of precarity.
Thus, where Gilmore writes skillfully of the unprecedented expansion of the carceral
system of California in Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in
Globalizing California (2007) by explaining “[t]he California state prison population
grew nearly 500 percent between 1982 and 2000, even though the crime rate peaked in
1980 and declined, unevenly but decisively, thereafter” (7). Moreover, as Gilmore goes
on to note, “African Americans and Latinos comprise two-thirds of the state’s 160,000
prisoners” (7). To explore these statistics more deeply, she positions the prison to be read
in Foucauldian terms as one of the privileged “institutions of modernity” in so far as it
has “faced a challenge—most acutely where capitalism flourished unfettered—to produce
stability from ‘the accumulation and useful administration’ of people on the move in a
‘society of strangers’” (11, emphasis added). Such an assertion is as astute as it is
important. However, it merits a minor adjustment: As this dissertation will illustrate, it is
precisely the instability of subjects that corresponds to the flourishing of unfettered
capitalism over the past thirty years. Thus Gilmore is prescient in discerning that “[t]he

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practice of putting people in cages for part or all of their lives is a central feature in the
development of secular states, participatory democracy, individual rights, and
contemporary notions of freedom” (11), but that act of caging is a gesture of
destabilization, disarticulation, and dissolution as opposed to one of stabilization,
articulation, and coherence. That is, the prison is emblematic of the violence of erasure
driving neoliberalism through (re)subjectivation.
Consequently, one could read and inflect Gilmore’s scholarship on U.S. carceral
culture over the past three decades as a helpful analogue to the work being done here in
this dissertation on state violence, cultural politics, and erasure. Most importantly,
through Gilmore, one can gain (unintended) insights into the workings of neoliberalism
as rooted in the interpellation of the subject. In other words, Gilmore’s claims about the
production of prisoners can lead one to comprehend the prison as an exemplary site of
simultaneous incapacitation and subjectivation; it is a site for the reification and
institutionalization of precarity. What it produces is surplus labor, not in a Marxist sense
of being a form of absolute and relative surplus through the amassed bodies and their
access to technological advances for industrialized production, but rather as being a pure
potentiality. Thus the resubjectivation of prisoners exemplifies the ontological violence
founding the processes of the neoliberalization of life. To recontextualize an idea from
the scholar Gabriel Giorgi, the U.S. prisoner in the neoliberal age comes to embody and
symbolize “availability without function” (12), through which the prisoner reifies the
ontological violence that grounds neoliberalism. Such are the stakes of this dissertation in
juxtaposing the economics, politics, and poetries of Argentina and the U.S. during the
rise of neoliberalism. What is under analysis is their convergence in conceptualizations of

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subjectivity, including a longstanding battle over the modes of interpellating a subject.
More precisely, this dissertation aims to perform close readings of poetry as a mode of
illustrating the incommensurability of subjection and subjectivity. In this manner, the
dissertation will re-center artifice as a focal point for discerning and critiquing the
violence of neoliberalism, which, it is argued herein, is firstly an ontological violence.
Moreover, the sinister ontological violence of neoliberalism is argued herein as
something perpetrated by—and therefore susceptible to deconstruction by—discursive
force, and that discursivity will be engaged through poetry, through the artifice of the
tropes, forms, and figures of poetic craft.

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Fissures of Consciousness: Towards a Methodology for Engaging Poetic
Possibility in the Neoliberal Age

The intrinsic violence of poetic production merits acknowledgement here, too.
That is, poetic production is neither benign nor innocent. More specifically, poetry is
presupposed herein to comprise its own form of violence, a violence of being, in so far as
it disrupts processes of naming. That is, poetry offers not a naming but an utterance of the
singularity of the encounter, thereby coursing through and exceeding reductive
taxonomies that serve the political or economic, for example. This thereby compounds
the complexity of analyzing and theorizing the potentiality of poetry to contest neoliberal
violence. Poetry introduces a violent destabilization and/or recalibration of the violence
of subjectivation. It seeks to sunder and undo the arrogations of naming, which ids itself a
form of violence. To clarify this, one might build a poetic extension of Idelber Avelar’s
argument about narrative violence in The Letter of Violence: Essays on Narrative, Ethics,
and Politics (2004), whereby poetry could be claimed to be intrinsically violent in so far
as it inevitably comprises “a linguistic war that takes place around the act of
naming….[such that f]or the political and therapeutic task of confronting trauma,
languages and dictionaries are battlefields” (49). More deeply, poetry offers an encounter

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with the violence of naming, and the poetic treatment of neoliberal violence therefore
signals layers of violence. One could further add to these layers the subsequent discursive
violence of the critic in her engagement of such poetries of violence. Consequently this
dissertation admits to partaking in that intricate network of layered violences, including
the violences of encounter, of naming, and of critiquing. All of this is presupposed and
engaged herein in an attempt to suggest a methodology for aiming through poetry to
attenuate the agony of victims of state violence.
To pursue this—to read poetry as a site for the analysis of acute suffering—the
dissertation aims to be as delicate as possible when confronting the violence of
neoliberalism and its afterlife in poetry.
4
To exacerbate such violence through its clumsy
handling would be a terrible analytical misstep. Thus this dissertation proceeds with
analytical and theoretical patience, building layers of argumentation through the
meticulous close reading of poetry responding to state violence. In this manner the
dissertation signals a scrupulously self-conscious writing process that extends to poetry a
practical insight from Avelar’s work on narrative prose and state violence: that “urgency
may never be an excuse for hurry” (106). Slowly, incrementally, this dissertation builds
its syncretic, transcultural, and transhistorical methodology for reading the poetries of
reemergence, all the while resisting positivisms, teleologies, and false coherences. What
emerges is a methodology privileging the fragmentary, the illusory, the incondite, the
accidental, the fluid, the erratic, and the hybrid. It acknowledges, as Priscilla Archibald
does, that “[a]ll cultures are transculturated” (108), and it realizes, as Nelly Richard does,
the importance of insisting upon seeking the “[b]lind spots that demand an aesthetic of
diffuse lighting, so that their forms acquire the indirect meaning of what is shown

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obliquely, of that which circulates along the narrow paths of recollection, filtered by the
barely discernible fissures of consciousness” (21). Such is the delicate work of
identifying and theorizing poetries of reemergence, and its methodology is therefore ever
cautious to resist even the speculative security, surety, and/or eloquence of the work of
paradoxically taxonomizing ephemera, instabilities, erasures, and incompletions.
However seemingly counterintuitive, the need for analytical caution proceeds
from the very audacity of the claims of this dissertation to be undertaking unprecedented
work at the conjunction of aesthetics, historiography, political theory, and literary
criticism. There, at the convergence of rich and overlapping inquiries into the workings
of neoliberal power, this dissertation postulates a mode of reading poetry that discloses
the production of the neoliberal subject through erasure. Hence this essay emphasizes the
violence of neoliberalism to be firstly ontological. Through its production and
manipulation of absence, neoliberalism manipulates subjectivity to produce subjects
befitting the maintenance and perpetuation of its political economy. Thus the question of
subjectivation, meaning here the production of the subject by the state, surfaces as a
central concern of this dissertation.
To establish a framework for rethinking neoliberal subjectivation through poetry
as the production of absence, this dissertation builds upon the work of Michel Foucault
on subjectivity for its powerful contemplation of the construction of subjectivity by
power. This is evident, for example, in so-called “early” Foucault in his arguments about
the subject in relation to power in the section of Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the
Prison (1975) analyzing “panopticism” (195-308). Of course in so-called “late” Foucault,
one also sees an emphasis on the production of the subject through domination. For

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example, in the chapter titled “21 January 1976” in Society Must Be Defended (1976),
Foucault considers the subject through power relations involving sovereignty, war, and
race struggle (43-64). Tangentially, this is one of many divergences in this dissertation
from dominant scholarly traditions, such as the (specious) postulation by many scholars
of a discontinuity and/or rupture between Foucault’s early and late thinking of
subjectivity, whereby “early” Foucault is reduced to signifying the construction of
subjects by disciplinary power and “late” Foucault to exploring the aesthetic self-
construction of the subject. Instead, this dissertation agrees with minority scholars like
Sebastian Harrer, who argues “that on the theme of subjectivity [and power], we find a
conceptual continuity traversing the whole of Foucault’s oeuvre” (76, emphasis added).
Foucault himself asserts as much during an interview late in his career. When asked
about the contributions of his oeuvre to analytics of power that could be understood as a
priori to the subject, he correctively responds that “what I try to do is rather the
correlative constitution, throughout history, of objects and the subject” (“Interview” 110).
The scholar and philosopher Mark Kelley goes so far as to assert that “[i]ndeed, all
Foucault’s talk of subjection is in fact an attempt to bracket everything from subjectivity
but the influence of power”(89). And this dissertation admits to harboring a similarly
fervent interest in the relation of power to subjectivation, albeit through neoliberal state
violence as unveiled and critiqued through poetry.
This is yet another type of scaffolding in the construction of this dissertation’s
focus on the ontological violence of neoliberalism, which is a violence of subjectivating
erasures. To promulgate a poetic variation of Paul de Man’s emphasis on the configured
self in Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and

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Proust (1979), this dissertation suggests poetically that “[w]ithin the epistemological
labyrinth of figural structures, the recuperation of selfhood would be accomplished by the
rigor with which the discourse deconstructs the very notion of self” (173). Thus what is
argued most fundamentally herein is that certain poetries can offer the chance to
deconstruct, subvert, and transform the neoliberal subject through an elucidation and
manipulation of its consubstantial absences, its constitutive erasures. And such work is
actuated through the tropes, forms, and figures of poetry, which paradoxically render
absence as presence, thereby both recognizing and appropriating the state-sponsored
violence of erasure so as to reclaim banished aspects of subjectivity in a
counterhegemonic, counter-foundational epistemological claim to more democratic life.

Power to the (Non)People: Poetry and the Politics of Resistance

To be democratic, politics must consider absence, and one of the most crucial of
its instantiations is the conspicuous and pressing absence of the non-subject. The non-
subject is s/he who is yet to be interpellated or who is banished from interpellation by the
political. Here the use of the term political draws heavily upon the work of Jacques
Rancière, who offers a deepening of the Aristotelian logic of the political by arguing that:
Aristotle states that a citizen is someone who has a part in the act of governing
and being governed. However, another form of distribution precedes this act of
partaking in government: the distribution that determines those who have a part in
the community of citizens. (“Aesthetics”, 12)

Consequently, for Rancière, politics hinges upon the sensory or, in his terms, “the
distribution of the sensible,” which is what determines “who can have a share in what is
common to the community based on what they do and on the time and space in which

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this activity is performed” (“Aesthetics”, 12). Such an argument overlaps and perhaps
clarifies the undergirding argument of this dissertation that the aesthetics of poetry can
influence the political. A poet’s orchestration of experience through the tropes and
figures of poetry can reorder the sensible in innovative and influential ways. Poetry can
not only critique the political; it also precedes and founds the political in the sense that
the “[p]olitical revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who
has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the
possibilities of time” (Rancière, “Aesthetics”, 13). Such is the irruptive force of Alicia
Partnoy’s poetry, emerging from a torture center in Argentina, which had intended to
produce silence and absence. Such, too, is the irruptive counterstrike of Juan Gelman’s
poetry from exile, where Gelman speaks a resurgent silence, a language of transformed
absence, exposing the false coherence and security of the dictatorial state. Likewise
Jimmy Santiago Baca poetically counters the state through its own violence, though
unlike Gelman’s poetry, Baca’s strikes from within, erupting from a site of internal
colonialism: the prison. Adding to Baca’s critique of neoliberal violence is Dobyns’
poetic redistribution of the sensible, which charges the reader with a sensory experience
of subjective precarity, something Rich masterfully enacts through her inventive
recombination of poetic tropes to express the identitarian turmoil and precarity of the
neoliberal subject at the height of Reaganomics.
These are but a few, preliminary introductions to ways to think through the
importance of absence to poetic formalisms and to poetic modes of resisting, subverting,
and escaping the tyranny of the neoliberal state, which operates through the violence of
erasure. It also limns the importance to democratic praxis of continuously reconsidering

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the non-subject, she or he who is incapable of being interpellated and therefore beyond
the political. For there are the limits of a democratic system; the non-subject is the
threshold of possibility of democracy. As Alberto Moreiras suggests in his two-part essay
“Children of Light,” the non-subject is a figure that remains uninterpellated, indeed
beyond interpellation, not because interpellation never reaches it, but rather because it
marks the very limit of interpellation. (“Part I”, 2). And this dissertation insists repeatedly
upon the question of how poetry might address such a figure. Through the poetic
engagement of that unanswerable, limitless question, this dissertation inflects the field of
significations of absence, arguing in poetic terms what Rancière explores in aesthetic
philosophy, namely that “[t]he political dispute is distinct from all conflicts of interest
between constituted parties of the population, for it is a conflict over the very count of
those parties. It is not a discussion between partners but an interlocution that undermines
the very situation of interlocution. (“Disagreement”, 100, emphasis added). And it is with
the purpose of disclosing the violence of such counting—of the construction,
enumeration, and accumulation of subjects in the service of the political economy—that
the poetries analyzed herein disrupt, interrupt, and derail neoliberal discourse, striving as
they do to unveil, subvert, and refuse its logic, which pivots upon the violence of
neoliberal subjectivation and reverberates outward to its many consequent material,
social, and psychic violences, too.

Political Aesthetics: The Double Character of the Poetic Redistribution of the Sensible

Of special pertinence to the development of the cross-disciplinary methodology
for reengaging poetry herein are Jacques Rancière’s books The Politics of Aesthetics

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(2000) and The Politics of Literature (2006). Through these overlapping, symbiotic texts,
Rancière argues for a literary politics illuminating the power of literature to expose and
contest the very conditions of the production of the sensible, and especially the visible
and sayable. For this reason, Rancière is duly concerned with the literary aesthetics.
Importantly, he meticulously and insistently locates the emergence of the sensible at a
point a priori to any notions of personal or collective politics. That is, in those two books,
Rancière develops conflating arguments for literature as a specific onto-epistemological
mode of enacting and transacting the emergence of sensible as a basis for subjectivity.
For Rancière, that subjectivity emerges through sociopolitically conditioned parameters
and constraints, yet literature also can be an active site of creation and distribution of
(possibly new) sensory experience that leads to (possibly new) modes of thought with
ramifications for existing ontological, social, cultural, political, and economic
taxonomies.
Accordingly, literature can be read as an important activity; it is a mode of
inventing, reifying, subverting, and disseminating processes of subjectivation, and the
inscription of the subject into social and political orders. With their potential to alter the
conditions of the visible and sayable, literary politics possess the capability to disrupt and
even undermine social and political orders. That power derives from the very
recalcitrance of poetry. It refuses to collapse subjectivity into subjection, and its
intractability ruptures the rhetorical designs of neoliberal leaders and thinkers who want
to equate the freedom of markets with the freedom of human beings. Thus the counter-
foundational threat of poetry emerges from its situation within and beyond the neoliberal
logic. More broadly, one could pointedly build upon the aesthetic theory of Adorno here

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by noting the “double character of art,” meaning art as “something that severs itself from
empirical reality and thereby from society’s functional context and yet is at the same time
part of empirical reality and society’s functional context” (328). In other words, the
poetries under analysis herein are both of and beyond the market logics that structure the
conditions of their emergence. Furthermore, as Adorno suggests, this double character “is
directly apparent in the aesthetic phenomena, which are both aesthetic and faits sociaux”
(328), and this dissertation proposes to combine such an insight with Rancière’s
conception of political aesthetics such that poetry is read herein as a singular encounter
with the violence of the distribution of the sensible, which manifests itself in this case in
poetries erupting to expose and protest state violence occurring in the service of market
logics targeting subjectivity. Consequently, one could come to argue that through the
poetic manipulation of the sensible, the conditions of possibility can be disturbed if not
altered.
Along these lines, Rancière’s work presciently directs attention away from
conceptions of affect as the study of the sensory impact of artistic practices. Instead he
focuses his readers upon a redefinition of affect as an attunement to the “ways of
distributing the sensible that structure the manner in which the arts can be perceived and
thought” (“Literature” 14). Consequently, literature can be understood as containing both
the conditions of its production and the production of its conditions; it can reveal the
conditions of its construction and legibility just as it can perpetuate and/or influence those
conditions, which produce, among other things, the interpellated subject. Thus one can
examine the literary production of affect as a locus for analyzing and critiquing the
production and constitution of subjectivity, which is why Rancière suggests thinking

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affect as an “aesthetics of politics” (“Aesthetics” 9). After all, for Rancière, “[p]olitical
activity reconfigures the distribution of the sensible” (“Aesthetics” 4), thereby rendering
the poetic an activity of political aesthetics. In other words, literary practices and
production are always already ontological, epistemological, and political due to their
intrinsic concessions, acknowledgements, and challenges to the sensory. The poetic is
always already battling over who can speak, hear, see, smell, and feel; poetic affect
becomes an armament in the inevitable, endless struggle over what is articulable, audible,
visible, smellable, and felt, with those sensory contingencies being both participatory in
the reification of the social order and political economy, and exceeding the social order
and political economy. This is one way of advancing and specifying to poetry Adorno’s
antecedent claims about the double character of art. And more urgently here, this
redeploys poetry, for example, as a genre-specific mode of (re)producing,
(re)distributing, and resisting through affect the political and subjective violence of the
conditions of its materialization.
To develop such a logic through ideas of neoliberal subjectivation is therefore to
interrogate the conditions of the sensory production of the neoliberal subject. It is to
confront the sensory construction of experience that leads to neoliberal (re)subjectivation
and intersubjectivity. In other words, the orchestration and/or (re)distribution of the
sensible produces the conditions for subjective experience, and this occurs as much
through the language as the tropes of literary activity. In this chapter, poetic language,
forms, and figures will be privileged for careful study such that poetry will become a site
for the generative recontextualization of one of Rancière’s most important questions:
“from what position do we speak and in the name of what and for whom?” (“Aesthetics”

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2). In response, this dissertation proposes the potential of poetry to redistribute the
sensible in acts of political aesthetics that expose, contest, subvert, and/or eschew the
violence of neoliberal subjectivation.

Doing and Making: Charting a Semiotic Process of Anthropological Affect

Through the formal analysis of poetry, one can begin to reckon the power of
language to construct the conditions for the (re)creation of sensory experience within and
between human beings. Those (inter)subjective relations in turn reinforce, if not produce,
potential networks of signification of personal and social existence. They also foster the
political. In other words they not only forge new modes of being and making, but also
new solidarities and communities. Thus aesthetic can be understood to condition not only
the ontological and subjective, but also the political and the social. This is not to
resuscitate philosophical arguments from German Romanticism about the moral value of
aesthetics, for example. Rather, it concerns the aesthetics of the political; it is the
repositioning of the politics of ontology as disclosed by the poetic reproduction and
reorganization of the sensible. It is precisely such a logic that leads Rancière to realize a
“politics of aesthetics” at play in the realm of ontology, which can be developed into a
helpful intervention into the formal analysis of poetry in relation to political violence.
For Rancière, aesthetics influence ontology, with his ontological claims
importantly preceding the political. For this reason he focuses on interrogating “the
relationship between the effects of language and the positions of bodies in shared space”

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(“Aesthetics” 13) that anticipate social bonds and political formations. Accordingly he
exposes and rethinks the role of the “distribution of the sensible” in the:
delimitation of spaces and times, the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise,
that simultaneously determines the place and the stakes of politics as a form of
experience. Politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it,
about who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of
spaces and the possibilities of time. (“Aesthetics” 13)

And such attention to the baseline conditions of visibility and audibility, for example,
become foundationally political. These sensory modes conceive and direct the political.
Hence Rancière emphasizes how art signifies “a recomposition of the landscape of the
visible, a recomposition of the relationship between doing, making, being, seeing, and
saying” (“Aesthetics” 45), and one could build upon Rancière’s claims by extending
them to poetry.
The best poetry from Gelman, Partnoy, Baca, Dobyns, and Rich recomposes the
suffering of the neoliberal subject under the conditions of her exploitation as virtual
labor, thereby poetically illuminating a rhetorical political question about the
commodification of subjectivity by neoliberalism. However unintended, Mirta Antonelli
and Gabriel Giorgi’s critique of neoliberal privatization proves helpful here as a spur to
the formal literary evaluation of poetry as an aesthetic defiance of neoliberalism or, more
precisely, as an aesthetic inflection and expansion of the conditions of possibility for
resistance to neoliberal subjectivation. To orchestrate such an intervention, one might
inaugurate a methodological coupling of affect theory and literary theory through the
performance of close readings of poetry.
The former can emerge in part from Antonelli and Giorgi’s aforementioned
theorizations of affect in relation to neoliberal privatization. More specifically, they

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powerfully redefine affect as “cultural constellations that are historically configured,”
with those affective constellations being “constitutive of the relationship between politics
and the body: of forms of government and modalities of the social bond as well as the
socio-historical forms of subjectivity; of their possibility as well as their impossibility;
their calculation and their incalculability. (1) And if one dovetails Rancière’s position on
aesthetics with that of Antonelli and Giorgi, the importance of foregrounding an affective
analysis of the ontological violence of neoliberalism in poetry comes clear. Or, as
Antonelli and Giorgi explain,“[i]n order to theorize, analyze, and enact (through political
and aesthetic practices) the relations between affect and politics, we must also interrogate
the relationship between bodies and signification; that is, we must link the anthropology
of affect to semiotic processes” (Antonelli 1). And that is the aim herein: To illuminate so
as to refuse and rethink the violence of neoliberal subjectivation.
To rethink neoliberal violence through its sensory recalibration of the links
between bodies and signification, this dissertation parses poetry. Through the analysis of
the surfaces, connotations, and allusions of formal poetic constructions, as well as
through their denotative content of their narratives, this dissertation reveals and theorizes
the potentiality of these poetically produced aesthetics and their ontological,
epistemological, and social ramifications. Here again Rancière becomes helpful. He
historicizes the possibility of scrutinizing the denotative content of the narrative of a
poem for its politics when he creates a genealogy of mimesis. More precisely, Rancière
brackets the Aristotelian critical tradition of foregrounding through mimesis the idea that
“[i]t is the substance of the poem, the fabrication of a plot arranging actions that represent
the activities of men, which is the foremost issue” (21). However, as Rancière duly

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argues, there remains, too, the philosophical and critical possibility of a reckoning of the
politics of the composition—as opposed to the constitution—of the enunciation, its form.
In another realm of critique, that of epistemic disobedience through decolonial theory,
this is what Walter Mignolo has categorized as a necessary, epistemological “shift[ing of]
the attention from the enunciated to the enunciation” (“Epistemic” 2). And perhaps this is
what the poetry selected herein does at its core: It foregrounds the political violence of
the enunciation, which most often discloses the suffering and erasures consequent to
neoliberal subjectivation.
In other words a poem is always already political because of its relation to notions
of who and what is visible and audible to the senses of the community receiving the
poem, and the work of the poets in this dissertation exemplifies and complicates this by
rendering visible and audible the elisions and silences intrinsic to the violent production
of the neoliberal subject. This can be theorized through a reworking of Rancière’s
provocative insight that mimesis should be thought “not [as] the law that brings the arts
under the yoke of resemblance” but rather as “a fold in the distribution of ways of doing
and making…a fold that renders the arts visible” (“Aesthetics” 22). Through such folds,
through their potential to present new modes of doing and making and a concomitant
potential to redistribute the visible, the arts link to the social and political. Rancière’s
theorization of that link is the grounds for building upon his work through the formal
literary analysis of poetry. Through it, one can come to realize that a:
regime of visibility is at once what renders the arts autonomous and also what
links that autonomy to a general order of occupations and ways of doing and
making…[whereby] the logic of representation…enters into a relationship of
global analogy with an overall hierarchy of political and social occupations.
(“Aesthetics” 22)

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Here, then, particular attention will be drawn to the social and political aspects of poetry,
with a special focus on its uses of poetic form to broach, elucidate, contest, and subvert
aspects of neoliberal subjectivation through his redistribution of the sensible.

Partage du sensible and Poetic Assaults on Neoliberal Institutional Frameworks

In other words, poetry presents to the senses of the reader forms of making visible
and audible some of the sights and sounds that have been strategically erased by the
neoliberal state in the service of a globalized, free-market economy equating market
freedom and human freedom, and privileging privatization, deregulation, and
globalization. However tenuous this link between poetic form and neoliberal economics
might initially seem, it can be stabilized through the development of a poetic theory of
affect. Here, then, one can recontextualize and adapt some of Davide Panagia’s exegesis
of Rancière’s political aesthetics through poetry such that his poetic illumination of the
violence of neoliberalized life illustrates precisely how and why “politics involves, for
Rancière, the rearticulation of a partage du sensible by the excluded or unaccounted-for
elements in a political society” (Panagia 95). To understand the poetic implications of
this more fully, it is important to point out that Rancière’s partage du sensible
encompasses “the tension between a specific act of perception and its implicit reliance on
preconstituted objects deemed worthy of perception. This tension is expressed through
the related concept of dissensus, which is at once a dissent from inequality and an
insensibility (i.e. an inability to be sensed, noticed or accounted for” (Panagia 95-6). Thus
this dissertation argues for the reconsideration of poetry as capable of rendering an

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aesthetics of resistance to neoliberal subjectivation via the potentiality of poetry to
paradoxically illuminate absence and transform it into the basis of a counter-foundational
logic and discourse.
More explicitly, poetry expressly actuates the insensible to confront the
inequalities intrinsic to neoliberalized subjectivity. As Panagia notes through Rancière,
“[d]emocratic politics occurs when certain elements in society that are deemed insensible
are challenging the governing political order. The task of political action, therefore, is
aesthetic in that it requires a reconfiguration of the conditions of sense perception so that
the reigning configuration between perception and meaning is disrupted by those
elements, groups or individuals in society that demand not only to exist but indeed to be
perceived” (96, emphasis added), and the poetry of the poets included in this dissertation
performs precisely this. Their poetry exemplifies how a “partage du sensible is thus the
vulnerable dividing line that creates the perceptual conditions for a political community
and its dissensus” (Panagia 96), which is something Rancière himself explicitly
emphasizes and privileges, insisting that “[t]his dividing line has been the object of my
constant study” (“Philosopher” 225). Moreover, this is not a mere reinscription of the
logic of a liberal politics of recognition or acknowledgement of rights. Rather, the very
recalcitrance and intractability of poetry position it as frustrating the taxonomical
rigidities of the rhetoric of governments attempting to censor and shepherd their
populaces in the service of neoliberal political economies, which hope to commodify
even the imagination of its subjects. As a result, one can look to the poetry herein as a
locus and performance of an extension of Rancière’s call for a rigorous examination of
“the lines that divide and connect political allegiances, social organizations and aesthetic

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formations” (Panagia 96), with the illumination, if not blurring, of such lines comprising
an insurgent poetic counterstrike to the violence of the state.
Along these lines, poetry unveils neoliberalism as being far more than an
economic policy and/or legislative doctrine. Certainly neoliberalism entails—and perhaps
strategically foregrounds—such components. It is in fact most commonly explored as
such, meaning as situated economic historiography. Thus, for example, David Harvey
explains that:
Neoliberalism is in the first instance a theory of political economic practices that
proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual
entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework
characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade. (2)

Nevertheless, however prevalent—or perhaps because of its prevalence—such an
understanding of neoliberalism demands immediate critique. For starters, it locates
neoliberalism squarely within an economic matrix of analysis, embedding privatization
and free markets as symbiotic foundations of the political economy driving the globalized
state. Moreover, Harvey’s definition perpetuates one of the most devastating myths of
neoliberalism: Its claim of global inevitability. That is, the definition (re)presents
neoliberal presuppositions about knowing what is “best” for a seemingly singular and
global Platonic conception of “human well-being.” This is its colonial tyranny, and its
linguistic violence. And it therefore can be reengaged through language, which in this
chapter will be focused on poetic formulations of language.
Furthermore, through Rancière’s aforementioned reorientation of the sensible, one
might further interrogate the very conception of the “individual” at stake in conceptions
of neoliberalism like Harvey’s. That “individual” could be interpreted as a late-capitalist
reincarnation of the Platonic citizen, who is visible and audible in direct correlation to his

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social and professional station. The neoliberal “individual” of Harvey’s definition also
hauntingly echoes the Aristotelian citizen, whom Idelber Avelar has aptly critiqued as a
category that exclusively and narrowly includes only “Athenian-born, Greek-speaking,
property-holding adult males” (36), thereby reminding one of the role of citizenship in
contemporary debates about belonging. Likewise, the neoliberal “individual” in Harvey’s
definition belongs to the “Western” tradition including the Kantian subject, who must be ,
much as the “individual” benefitting from Rousseau’s social contract required a
distinguishing, privileged visibility within a framework of popular sovereignty. Thus the
concept of the “individual” is at stake in neoliberal models, and, more properly, the legal
citizen of the state within neoliberal models at work today such as that in the United
States of America, for example, where citizenship is a contingent mosaic of identitarian
claims and traits–of dubious ontological basis—that hinge upon privileged conception of
belonging.
Conversely, in their articulation, these congeries of privileges that come to
constitute the neoliberal individual represent a process of erasure: To enunciate such
citizens, citizenship must be delimited, meaning non-citizens must be identified,
disempowered, marginalized, and occluded. Subsequently, through the orchestration of
belonging, there emerges an indiscernible, inaudible, and unrepresentable mass of the
excluded. And therein arises the aim of this chapter: How can poetry illuminate the
violence of belonging, which is a violence of erasure, and can poetry offer social,
historiographical, and ontological alternatives to such violence? More simply put, this
chapter asks who is visible as an individual within a neoliberal framework, and how and
why? And, more pressingly, what, if anything, can poetry do to respond to the absences

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created by neoliberal belonging? Can those who have been silenced and erased return to
audibility and visibility, and how and to what effect? Such is the constellation of
questions permeating and sustaining this dissertation, which will seek its insights through
the practice of closely reading the politics of the aesthetics of poetry.
To engage such questions, this dissertation will focus also upon
conceptualizations of affect. That is, affect will be argued herein as the coordination of
the sensory in relation to the historical (re)configurations of power in relation to the
organization of the state and the expansion of transnational, privatized markets. And
within and against those reconfigurations of power, affect will be identified as the onto-
sociological propellant actuating neoliberal local, national, and transnational relations
determining the subject. In other words, neoliberalism is being proposed herein as a
social force interpellating subjects. Subjects are being formed through and by neoliberal
organization of bodies in the service of somewhat paradoxical process of the
simultaneous privatization and expansion of global markets through protections
orchestrated and enforced by neoliberal states. Consequently, when turning to the
analysis of the affect of subjects of such states, one gains access to the foundational
power undergirding the economic, legislative, and juridical formations that rationalize
and authenticate the violence being perpetrated in the name of commercial growth
through the capitalization of bodies, of life.

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Neoliberalism Defined and Redefined: The Poet Speaks

Here the necessity comes clear to revisit the (re)definition of neoliberalism as
firstly an ontological model. Rather than beginning as economic or social force,
neoliberalism reshapes the production of self in order to render capitalized subjects in the
service of the production and perpetuation of the neoliberal state and its participation in a
globalized, privatized, free-market, and expansionist political economy. Consequently,
there exist at least two foundational reasons for highlighting this through poetry. First, it
reorganizes the reader’s contemplation of neoliberal subjectivity by shifting her away
from the tradition of economic historiography and towards an affective framework for
thinking through the neoliberal production of the subject as fundamentally an act of
ontological violence. Second, that presentation of neoliberalism as ontology will allow
for the close study of the power relations of affect within the processes of neoliberal
subjectivation. Hence affect, or the relations between and within bodies through
historically determined modes of cultural signification, becomes a nexus for thinking
through the production of individual and collective identities contributing to the
formation of transnational and transcultural neoliberal matrices of power.
One mode through which that nexus is revealed and questioned is the poetic,
whereby the use of poetic forms and tropes allows for a language-driven experience and
exposure of the violence of neoliberal subjectivation and possible responses to it,
including potential redistributions of the sensible. Examples of this pervade the poetry
under analysis in this dissertation, wherein the violence and propagation of neoliberal
subjectivation in the U.S. and beyond becomes discernible and contestable along an

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intensifying geo-historiographical arc traceable in a poetic genealogy of overlapping,
innovative poetries.
To orientate oneself towards the aesthetic analysis of such a genealogy of
recursive poetic reconsiderations of the ontological, cultural, and political violence of
neoliberalized life, one might rethink the structures of power that intertwine to formulate
the neoliberal state. Implicitly building upon the work of Samuel Weber, Harvey defines
that state through its “monopoly of the means of violence” (64), with the violence of that
‘monopoly’ ultimately leading one to understand neoliberalism as the subjectivation of
calculated subjective vulnerability, of the enforced precarity of subjects.
5
To develop
such an understanding, precarity is to be understood as the transformation of the social,
political, and economic conditions under neoliberal capitalism into an ontology via the
undoing of the distinction between labor and social life, thereby collapsing the public in
the personal. More precisely, that collapse of the distinction between labor and social life
emerges from neoliberal capitalism. Neoliberal capitalism is grounded in a fusion of
privatization, globalization, and “democratization.” Each of these components merits
detailed elucidation and critique, which will come later in this chapter. For now, though,
they are mentioned as categorical markers and conduits of the normalization of precarity,
of precarious labor, which had previously been exceptional, seasonal, temporary, and/or
marginal relative to the primary forms of labor of the body politic. That is, unstable,
tenuous, and or unguaranteed forms of labor surge to the fore and pervade the body
politic under neoliberal capitalism. That normalization of precarious labor, in turn, results
in a heretofore unprecedented centering of an intrinsically unstable mode of production of
life, one through which life is no longer protected and supported by the state but is

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instead rendered exposed, vulnerable, and precarious, with that very precarity
commodified in the globalized neoliberal market. As a result, neoliberal life organizes
itself around a new axis of being, whereby subjective life is no longer defined, altered,
and/or protected by political and social structures of the state, for example. Instead, it is a
life of precarity pivoting upon an ontology of instability, with that instability born of the
continuous threat of abandonment, exposure, and dissolution.
Such is the essential injunction of the Argentine historian, Ignacio Lewkowicz, in
his book on neoliberalism, Pensar sin Estado (2004). Therein he enjoins his readers to
recognize that neoliberalism signifies the disarticulation of the state, its
“desfondamiento,” or “debasement.” As the scholar of comparative literature and culture
Gabriel Giorgi points out, Lewkowicz’ use of the term “desfondamiento” is richly
layered. In Giorgi’s words, it not only means “a “bankruptcy,” but also a “debasement,”
with that “debasement” resonating in “desfondamiento” as both “degradation” and
“baselessness” or “groundlessness,” a “de-basing” [of the state]” (1). Within the logic of
this analysis, such a debasement of the state involves its displacement as the grounds for
subjectivity. More precisely, the neoliberal debasement of the state entails a stripping
away centuries of social, legal, and political definitions and protections of the subject, of
individuated life. As Lewkowicz explains, “[w]ith the fall of that ordering power of the
State, all that remains is diffuse human material…human material of an essentially
changed quality. Among those changes in quality is the loss of the human, which
becomes inessential” (Giorgi 2). And the affect of the poetries under analysis herein
actuates and interrogates the neoliberal ‘inessential,’ the chaff of life cast to the winds by
neoliberal subjectivation.

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To illuminate this further, one might look more deeply at the concept of the
“inessential” within a neoliberal framework, and particularly its ontological implications.
Here again Giorgi’s work on Pensar sin Estado in relation to twenty-first century
Argentine and Brazilian cultural production offers a point of departure for the critique of
neoliberal life through poetry. Of particular importance, Giorgi suggests that Pensar sin
Estado:
not only argues that neoliberalism is…a subjectification of precarity…but the
book also, and above all else, asserts that “subjectivity” is the conceptual and
affective horizon making intelligible the core of neoliberal economic and political
logic. By placing the individual…at the center of its economic, political, and
cultural investment, and by dismantling the State network of social protections,
neoliberalism simultaneously produces and undoes subjectivity, making and
unmaking subjects; neoliberalism invests and empties—it precarizes and
valorizes—the “self” that seems to be at the very core of its dynamics. Pensar sin
Estado teaches us that the task of both aesthetic and intellectual practices in the
present is to deal with this double bind to which neoliberalism subjects us, and to
create modes of subjectivity that work through this logic. The practice of
thinking—both aesthetically and critically—is henceforth inseparable from the
ways that subjectivity is made and unmade against the horizon of a generalized
precarization. (3, emphases added).

Thus neoliberalism marks a significant change to the conditions of subjectivation as well
as a change to the impact of neoliberal subjectivation upon the social and political
through labor. Moreover, it can be reckoned and tweaked through affect. Consequently, a
theorization of affect is important to understanding this recontextualization of subjectivity
within poetry.
More specifically poetry exposes and tests the junction of subjectivity, aesthetics,
and precarity, thereby becoming a crucial, if under appreciated and insufficiently
theorized, node of analysis. One generative intervention therefore comes through a close
reading of the poetic construction and deployment of affect. Through their production of
affect, the poetries under analysis herein poetically realize and dilate the force of

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neoliberal subjectivation, highlighting and inflecting, for example, claims about the
subjective violence of neoliberal life. In this manner, the work of the poets in this
dissertation could be read as developing an affective realization of the critique of
neoliberal labor politics by the German political scientist Isabell Lorey, who argues, for
example, for a collective recognition and revaluation of “the ways in which ideas of
autonomy and freedom are constitutively connected with hegemonic modes of
subjectivation in Western, capitalist societies” (117).
According to such arguments, then, neoliberalism signifies the undoing of the
modern state, which in turn exposes the subject to her own fragility and vulnerability. Of
course there is sound scholarship arguing precisely the opposite, too. For example, as
Themis Chronopoulos notes, Marcus Taylor in his book From Pinochet to the “Third
Way” (2006):
rejects the idea that neoliberalism requires the retreat of the state from society,
viewing it instead as ‘categorically a state-led project of social engineering that
seeks to reformulate the institutional forms of state-society relations’ (2006: 7)…
[and] arguing that democracy had to be temporarily suspended so that the state
could transform social, economic, and political institutions into engines of
neoliberal technocratic economic process. (174, emphasis added)

Although this dissertation concurs more thoroughly with Lewkowicz than Taylor, the
crucial point of emphasis here is that the neoliberalization of life is a process of
destabilizing and disempowering the subject. Neoliberalism enacts these foundational
subjective violences by undoing mental and physical healthcare, public education, living
wages, employment, housing, domestic production, defensive war, and democratic
political visibility, to name but a few instantiations. More deeply, then, it is being
suggested herein that the subjectivation of precarity repositions neoliberalism to be
thought firstly as ontological violence. In this manner, neoliberalism becomes far more

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than an economic doctrine or social formation; instead it is the paradoxical
materialization of absence. It is a being in and of the world through the commodification
of lack, with neoliberalism itself trading on insinuations of scarcity despite the abundance
of production circulating about and through the neoliberal economy. Importantly, then,
neoliberalism can be understood as a paradoxically performative act: It is the production
of an affect of lack, whereby the processes of subjectivation foreground and materialize
precarity, exposure, vulnerability, and absence. The violence of neoliberal subjectivation
is thus the violence of forcing the subject to a threshold of groundlessness in the instant
of her interpellation, which is precisely the instant of the precarization of the neoliberal
subject. She emerges through a dismantling of the subjective safeguards once regulated
by the now ramshackle (or redesigned) state to produce absence as subjective presence,
with that presence always threatened with dissolution. And this, it is suggested herein, is
the most crucial concern of the poetries under analysis in this dissertation.

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Vivos entre compañeros: Juan Gelman, Genocidal Politics, and the Affect of Exile

“Political art should stop using references and start creating references.”
—Tania Bruguera
6

One of the most haunting lessons of the Spanish colonization of the Americas is
that conquest involves the domination of imagination. It involves the eradication of the
mythos of the subordinated subject, and it signifies a totalitarian quest to smother and
singularize the imaginary of the multitude. It is a narrow and repressive brokering of
what could be, and it is a politics of disallowed potentiality. It is a discourse of blocked
and redirected becoming, and it is a radical inhospitality and a homicidal hostility to
otherness. Such are the markers of conquest that continue to circulate within and across
the Americas. Within these patently discernible and active logics of domination and
oppression, one comes to understand that to dispossess a subject is to delink her from her
literary, cultural, and philosophical inheritance and to replace it with the idiocultural
system of the oppressor(s). It is excision and prosthesis, deterritorialization and
reterritorialization, erasure and the denial of those very erasures.

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This is why, for example, Jorge Huerta argues through Chicano/a drama for a
dialectical cultural analysis of historicized literary texts. In his words:
one culture’s heroes are another’s nemesis. Thus, like all colonizers, the Spaniards
had to eradicate the spiritual beliefs of the indigenous peoples in order to conquer
them. Early missionaries fought valiantly and indiscriminately in their attempt to
replace indigenous gods and origin ‘myths’ with one Almighty God and Old
Testament accounts of The Creation and Fall from Eden. (16)

Some four centuries later, in Argentina during the genocide from 1976 to 1983, one hears
an overlapping discourse of violence in the rhetoric of the dictatorship, which aimed to
eradicate the beliefs of its perceived enemies. To quote General Jorge Videla, “[e]l
terrorista no sólo es considerado tal por matar con un arma o colocar una bomba sino
también por activar a través de ideas contrarias a nuestra civilización occidental y
cristiana a otras personas” (Avellaneda 163). Consequently a discursive field opens to
continuous (re)evaluation, with particular importance on the reconstructions of past(s),
present(s), and future(s). One could therefore foreground the importance of cultural
production to life during and after state-sponsored violence, displacement, and
oppression. To build upon the work of sociologist Macarena Gómez-Barris, “culture and
memory are both terrains where meaning is constantly under negotiation, and it is
through culture that shared meaning of memory is given salience” (6-7). Thus the
production of cultural memory becomes a focal point of critical analysis.
More specifically, poetry from and about the dictatorship becomes a site for the
contestation and theorization of the attempted conquest of the Argentine populace by the
military dictatorship from 1976 to 1983. There one can transform Huerta’s
aforementioned Chicana/o countercultural epistemology into a nuanced Argentine
counterhegemonic, anti-imperialist, and anti-colonial epistemology. To reveal the latter,

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this chapter performs close readings of Argentine poetry written from, against, and in the
afterlife of the genocidal state violence of conquest from 1976 to 1983. Through that
poetry, the reader can realize specifically poetic modes of engaging and subverting the
core violence of the dictatorship, which comprised its tyrannical abuse of subjects
through the state terror stemming from technologies of “disappearance,” meaning the
abduction, torture, murder, and secret disposal of the corpses of residents and subjects of
Argentina. Thus the technologies of the terror of disappearance included the psychic
abuse of the public imaginary via the ceaseless threat of subjective erasure. Not only
would people disappear off the street never to be seen again, but the permanent void of
their absence became an influential force acting upon the imaginative possibility of those
who remained present. In other words, absence became a weapon. It became a technology
of violence that the state deployed and manipulated in the service of streamlining and
controlling Argentina, including its transnational political economy and military
obligations and ambitions, and such absence was transformed by cultural production into
a tool of resistance to state violence, too.
7

To elucidate the latter, one might look to the poetry of resistance to the Argentine
genocide. There, through the tropes and figures of poetry, one can reclaim, reckon, and
redeploy aspects of imagination that had been erased or “disappeared” by the
dictatorship. To organize a methodology for engaging in the symbolic recovery of erased
and/or disfigured aspects of the public imaginary as well as of individual subjects, one
can work to develop epistemologies of absence. Here such an epistemology will be
theorized via the introduction of features of the impact of exile on the poetic conditions
of possibility for (re)engaging absence. More precisely, the poetry written in 1979 and

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1980 from exile by Juan Gelman will offer a mode of renegotiating the violence of
erasure structuring the discourse and historiography of the Argentine dictatorship and its
legacy.

A Poetry of Absence: Organizing an Intervention in Genocidal Discourse

Within this chapter, absence most broadly signifies an invisible network
comprising the social, cultural, political, and ontological erasures of empire. More
specifically, these absences paradoxically constitute the modern nation-state, functioning
as a sort of negative space defining material conditions and presence. Thus, in poetic
epistemologies for rethinking subjectivity in relation to absence and domination, the
formal tropes and figures of poetry offer a mode of reclaiming absence by appropriating
it as an organizing principle of resistance to hegemonic state power and of alternative
sociopolitical, cultural, and ontological possibilities. This can be thought directly through
the materiality of a poem, and this will be explored in this chapter through the poetry of
the internationally acclaimed Argentine poet Juan Gelman. Particular emphasis will be
placed on Gelman’s specifically poetic response to the Argentine genocide in Si
dulcemente (1980), written in exile between August of 1979 and March of 1980. That
book, which actually comprises three collections, Notas (1980), Carta Abierta (1980),
and Si dulcemente (1980), will be historicized and analyzed through close readings of its
poetry so as to theorize a poetics of reemergence contesting genocidal state power and
broadcasting alternative, more egalitarian and pacifistic social and political formations
through the poetic production of affect.

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In play, then, in the analysis of Gelman’s poetry will always be the relationship of
the printed word to its absence. As Nicanor Parra sarcastically teases “El deber del poeta /
Consiste en superar la página en blanco” (“Cartas de poeta” 71-72). Or as Samuel Taylor
Coleridge explains facetiously in English, poetry writing is as simple as putting “the best
words in their best order” (46). In a sense, both Parra and Coleridge are preoccupying
themselves with the logic of absence; they are discussing the organization of the
language—whether seen and/or heard—in space-time. More pointedly, it can be argued
that the sole uniquely poetic device is the line break. Lineation might be the single and
distinguishing formal organizational principle of poetry relative to the other literary arts.
Certainly there is poetry within drama, and there is experimental prose (aka poetry!) that
employs something like lineation to create and utilize the space of the page or within the
ear through an inscription of typographical and topographical difference. But lineation is
the hallmark of poetry. It grounds and structures rhythm, metaphor, tone, and more. It
also pivots upon absence.
In this context, this chapter suggests to its readers an innovative mode of
reconsidering formal poetic tools as instruments of evocation of absence. For example,
caesura, enjambment, and stanza breaks will be analyzed as conduits of absence, leading
to the reformulation of ontological and social formations through aesthetics. Similarly
pagination, titling, and moveable margins will be posited as aesthetic evocations of
absence, as will be poetic form, meter, and rhythm. Even the poetic structuring of
allegory, personae, collages, parataxis, hypotaxis, scansion, and more will serve as entry
points and agents of ontological and epistemological change and resistance to
normalizing state power. What is being recentered, then, for contemplation herein is the

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white space on a page, itself a metaphor for absence. Where is it being used, how it is
operating, what does it paradoxically produce, and why?
In a Foucauldian logic, this poetic production of absence through the restructuring
and recalibration of white space might be read as a mode of illuminating subjection. The
poetic manipulation of white space, of absence, by the poet can inaugurate modes of
illustrating and instrumentalizing the distance between subjectivity and subjection,
between the imagination and its oppressive conquest, and this white space is therefore the
realm of freedom, of democracy. To build upon Alberto Moreiras’ Levinasian
theorization of “infrapolitical literature” (183), one could develop through Gelman’s
poetic innovation a formal poetic argument for the importance of reading the tension born
of lineated language—the tension between affective absence and affective presence—as a
catalyst for thinking the word as the limit or threshold of an inundating objectivity both
constitutively coursing through and exceeding the subject. Extending that logic, such
excess could be theorized through the reader as a locus for thinking through a blend of
Deleuzian minor literature and nomadology. That is, the silenced, the erased, and the
invisible come to bear on the subject through their deterritorializing (re)inscription into
the reader’s body through the poetic structuring of absence as presence. Here the
Deleuzian schizoid self functions as an arbitrary but powerful organizing principle for
structuring a life out of discontinuous, erratic, and fractured aspects of self. More
precisely, the subversive violence of the nomad strikes from within, not without. The
borderlands are sites of internal colonialism, points that are circumscribed in attempts to
falsely cohere the subject in the service of a subjective wholeness necessary to the
smooth and steady function of a political economy privileging stability to ensure its

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continuation and growth. Thus the internal nomad of absence irrupts and disturbs the
placidity that the market desires; the self poetically realizes itself built of absence through
these nomadic bursts, these disruptive intrusions. And these are but a few, preliminary
introductions of ways to think through the importance of absence to poetic formalisms
and to poetic modes of resisting, subverting, and escaping the tyranny of colonizers that
ultimately targets the imagination.
A good example of such an epistemology of resistance to abusive state power
comes through the poetic innovation in Si dulcemente. More explicitly Si dulcemente
comprises the poet’s response not only to the genocidal governance of Argentina during
that period, but also to the state-sponsored abduction (and likely torture and murder) of
the poet’s son, Marcelo, and his pregnant daughter-in-law, María Claudia.
8
Gelman’s
poetic response in Si dulcemente to such violence comes through his subversive
contestation of state power through his manipulation and orchestration of the tropes and
figures of poetry to question, impugn, and undermine the legitimacy and the logic of the
military regime. Thus, through his formal innovation, Gelman offers a fresh, urgent, and
vital poetry that at its core aims to debilitate genocidal state power by symbolically
transforming the junta’s power to erase subjects. More precisely, Gelman in Si
dulcemente poetically enacts an affect of absence that hijacks the state’s monopoly on
violence. He paradoxically (re)produces absence in order to challenge the interwoven
ontological, psychic, social, and political violences perpetrated by the state via abduction,
torture, and forced exile. More pointedly, through those topoi, Gelman poetically engages
and problematizes conceptions of subjectivation, both during and after the dictatorship,

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through his iconoclastic poetic questioning and thematization of fascistic gender
normativity, subjectivation, and political subordination and domination.

Historicizing Si dulcemente: Memory, Militancy, and Mourning

After publishing more than a dozen books of poetry and after living in exile for
almost five years, Juan Gelman offers the heartbreaking book of mourning, Si
dulcemente. Through its innovative poetic engagement of aspects of the Argentine
genocide, including the pain of exile, the book reads as a convergence of Gelman’s
poetics and politics. More specifically, the book has been written in the immediate
aftermath of the disappearance and murder of not only Gelman’s son and daughter-in-
law, but also many of his friends, including prominent disappeared writers such as
Rodolfo Walsh, Haroldo Conti, and Paco Urondo. Investigating their absences as
metonymic of the violent epistemology of absence wrought by the dictatorship through
its consolidation of power via forced disappearance, Si dulcemente suggests through its
poetic decisions a counter-foundational epistemology, born of absence, too, but of
absence reclaimed and reconfigured through the symbolic poetic rescue of desaparecidos
from total annihilation in the abysses of state-cleansed collective and subjective memory.
This is Gelman’s counterattack against the murderous state by turning its own weapons
against it.
To understand this is to grasp how Si dulcemente poetically redeploys absence.
The book foregrounds absence as both theme and affect, with that combination allowing
Gelman to plumb the sadness, despair, displacement, and agony of victims of the

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genocide, thereby allowing his personal grief to be transcended by the reader into a
collective countercultural opposition to the genocidal state. This is one way to seize and
build upon Geneviève Fabry’s insight that in certain poetries “la experiencia del vacio
vuelve con fuerza para colocarse en el centro de la poética del autor. Antes de ser una
experiencia personal, la ausencia es una categoría antropológica y poética de alcance
general” (221). And Gelman’s poetry in Si dulcemente can be understood through
precisely such a framework. Thus, for example, although the twenty-six poems
comprising the “Carta abierta” section of Si dulcemente are intimately addressed by Juan
to his disappeared son, Marcelo, those poems are simultaneously portals to a collective
suffering that circulates through and around absence. And while existing scholarship has
suggested thematic understandings of this convergence of public and private resistance
and suffering in Gelman’s poetry, such as Fabry’s nuanced exploration in Las formas del
vacío: la escritura del duelo en la poesía de Juan Gelman of the idea of “duelo” in
Gelman’s verse as both “combat/dueling” and “mourning/grieving,” and María del
Carmen Sillato’s powerful consideration in Juan Gelman: las estrategías de la otredad of
the plurality of selves constituting the heteronymous voices in Gelman’s poetry that
destabilize and deconstruct the speaking “yo,” the identification and theorization of
Gelman’s poetic construction of these intricate and consubstantial simultaneities and
complexities are yet to be undertaken, particularly in relation to their engagement of state
violence.
9
Hence this chapter inaugurates a methodology for rendering an epistemology
of resistance to state violence through the close reading of the poetry in Si dulcemente.
More precisely, this chapter proposes the poetic construction of an oxymoronic
intimate collectivity in Si dulcemente to be the primary affective force propelling its

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poetry. Once identified and theorized, this sheds light on broader claims about Si
dulcemente, such as Pablo Montanaro’s suggestion that the poems in Si dulcemente “se
dirigen a los sueños de una generación ensangrentada por la injusticia y la crueldad. El
dolor, por supuesto, es personal pero Gelman lo transforma en colectivo” (64). In making
absence present and affective for readers, Gelman is offering a mode of grieving
desaparecida/os without diminishing or simplifying their violent erasure. Consequently
the private agony for Gelman of “Carta abierta,” which Susana Cella, for example,
correctly identifies as “convulsiones del llanto que emergen subiendo y bajando,
apareciendo y desapareciendo lentamente para evocar, preguntar, callar, asomar,
resurgir” (65), is far more than personal catharsis; it is a collective call for new
solidarities and for justice in the wake of inexcusable acts of state violence. And perhaps
this is one way to rescue from hyperbole Mario Benedetti’s claim that in reading
Gelman’s poetry of political resistance to the genocide, “uno tiene la impresión de
que...Gelman no solo ha vivido con la gente sino que también ha muerto, o se ha sentido
morir, que es casi lo mismo, con los que murieron. Y esta singular comunicación ya no es
letal sino que es vital” (292)?
Furthermore, that revitalizing poetry unveils the conditions of possibility within
and after genocide as attributable in part to discursive power. And herein arises a crucial
paradox of any such cultural production: It partakes in the complex and irremediable
discursive politics intrinsic to acts of representing genocide. To build upon the
sociological work of Avery Gordon, for example, the poetry in Si dulcemente must be
reckoned as signaling “the difficulty of representing what seems unrepresentable, if not
unthinkable” (70). And, in discursive terms, such thresholds of representability and

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thinkability implicitly underscore the lack of pre-existing language for their articulation.
Conversely, those thresholds require innovative recognition and postulation, and their
enunciation must resist retrogression to pre-established discursive modes that would
merely reinstate the trauma, tyranny, hegemony, and exploitation of the master narratives
of abusive state power. Thus, for example, Alberto Moreiras warns that discourses,
however ostensibly progressive, must be scrutinized for their potential to unintentionally
reify hegemonic and normative forms (Exhaustion 264-265). Similarly, Nelly Richard
emphasizes the importance of the “semantic rupture” in the search by Chilean artists for
the non-existent language necessary to illuminate the violence of the dictatorship of
General Augusto Pinochet without reinscribing its hegemony (5). For Richard, the
urgency of:
[t]his rupture grew out of the challenge of having to name fragments of
experience that were no longer speakable in the language that survived the
catastrophe of meaning. On the one hand was the fraudulent language spoken by
the official power. On the other were the ideological mold of militant art serving
the culture of political parties and the discourses of the social sciences, whose
research sought to frame a poetics of the crisis within an explanatory rationalism
far removed from the instability of meanings unleashed by the critical juncture
itself. Neither of these two languages was sufficiently sensitive to the turmoil of
signs that had shaken the very machine of social representation. (5)

This is a crucial insight because it can be understood as grounding an understanding of
Gelman’s poetry in Si dulcemente, which similarly pivots upon ‘semantic rupture,’
offering an alternative discourse to that of both ‘official power’ and ‘explanatory
rationalisms.’ To build upon a pertinent, overlapping Deleuzian claim by Miguel
Dalmaroni, this is how Gelman’s poetry operates via “un movimiento que avanza
mediante oscilaciones entre estabilidad y quiebre” (85). That is, Gelman’s poetic
innovation in Si dulcemente offers a disruptive affect of absence that avails new

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ontological, epistemological, and social possibilities through his willingness to dwell in
instability, fragmentation, incompletion, irruption, and ambiguity.

Nota III: Violence, Invention, and the Possibility of Freedom

As Slavoj Zizek notes in his book Violence (2008), which critiques abusive state
power and possible responses to it, “the witness able to offer a clear narrative of his camp
experience would disqualify himself [as truthful witness] by virtue of that clarity” (4). In
other words, a poetry of semantic rupture resists easy transparency, coherence, and
stability as such traits would misrepresent the intrinsic opacity, incoherence, and
instability of life during and after extreme state violence. One can therefore begin to
discern in Si dulcemente the importance of its formal poetic production of allusive,
indirect, and disintegrated communicative gestures; they are what founds the possibility
of poetry in the aftermath of abusive state power, or at least of a poetry that does not
simply reinscribe dominant discourses, including the historical dialectics of the torturer
and victim, for example, concerning the Argentine genocide. Thus Si dulcemente refuses
to perpetuate the “systemic” and “symbolic” violence of the state by thwarting its
redeployment of master narratives of conquest, domination, oppression, and/or
exploitation.
10

More pointedly, through Si dulcemente, Gelman attempts poetically to dismantle
the entire dialectical logic of the torturous state, attacking those aforementioned, easy
taxonomies of torturer/tortured, good citizen/guerrilla, justice/injustice, and right/wrong.
In doing so, he posits a powerful Benjaminian approach to historiography and cultural

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production in Argentina, insisting counter-foundationally upon the irreducibility of
absence in the Argentine imaginary. In other words, he refuses to dismiss the violence of
erasure of the dictatorship, which Gelman poetically transforms into a counterhegemonic,
mnemonic void constitutive of life after the genocide. In this manner, his poetry can be
understood as a genre-specific parallel argument to Richard’s critical theory espousing
the need in post-Pinochet Chile for “new creative works…that refused to attend to the
merely figurative contingency of the ‘NO,’ without simultaneously critiquing the entire
discursive regime responsible for transforming the dogmatic rigidity of ‘YES’ versus
‘NO’ into an imprisoning paradigm” (4-5). In other words, Gelman is searching for new
poetic paradigms. His project demands poetic innovation. As Linda Zerilli writes of
revolutionary poetry, “[f]reedom emerges not through the rememoration of the past but
through invention” (102, emphasis added), and if presupposing such freedom to exist,
then Gelman’s poetry from exile is rife with its possibility in so far as Si dulcemente
exemplifies poetic invention, including Gelman’s use of neologisms, diminutives,
slashes, colloquial tone, erasures of letters, feminizations, and more.
The poem “III” (50) offers itself as a superb example of Gelman’s poetic
innovation. The poem comprises a plangent series of unanswerable questions addressed
in disconsolate grief to the speaker’s disappeared child. In short, it is a poem about living
absence, with that absence made present through poetic innovation. Here is that poem in
its entirety:
¿era escrita verdad que nos desfuéramos? /
¿qué voy a hacer con mí/pedazo mío? /
¿qué pedacitos puedo ya juntar? /
¿cómo reamarte/amor callado en

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lo que compraste con tu sangre? / ¿niña? /
¿encerradura de que no salís? /
¿país gravísimo donde gritás
contra la padre doledor de tanto? /

¿padre que te dolía/para vos? /
¿padrecimiento o lengua padecida
que habla/como no son de mi cabeza
estas canallas/estos padeceres? /

¿almita que volás fuera de mí? /
¿tan me desfuiste que ya no veré
crepuscularte suave como hijo
compañándome a pulso? / ¿delantales

que la mañana mañanó de sol? /
¿bacas que te pacieron la dulzura? /
¿cuaderno de la vez que despertabas
como calor que nunca iba a morir?

Most conspicuously one immediately notes the unconventional punctuation of the poem,
including its lack of capital letters and Gelman’s signature use of the slash. The former
serves as a poetic device to engender an affect of intimacy. The lack of capital letters
implies the poem to be a casual, personal act unintended for public scrutiny within the
parameters of official discourse, which would require certain norms and propriety.
Instead, this seems to portray the poem as a silent, private act of the poet asking
unanswerable questions of himself in unbearable grief. Such is the artifice of his non-
conformity.
Likewise the lack of capital letters could be a typographical and grammatical
metaphor for absence. Not only are the sounds softened visually and aurally by their
seeming withdrawal from public domain into smaller gestures via their aberrant
capitalization, but that lack of capital letters could be argued as a visual metaphor for

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absence, that motif of Si dulcemente. One cannot help but notice the absent capitals,
thereby bringing to mind all sorts of registries of power, from the educational to the
literary to the political. This nuanced use of typography and grammar is intensified by the
use of the slash in the poem, which is a signature of Gelman’s poetry and a grammatical
symbol of ambiguity: and/or. Thus the slash instantiates the ideological instability of
Richard’s call to aesthetic arms in the wake of state violence, for example, and it imbues
the poem with a sense of incompletion and uncertainty that are diametrically opposed to
the complete and certain acts of murder comprising the regime of violence against which
Gelman fights poetically from exile. The slash itself symbolizes how Gelman in forced
exile (from Argentina, from his children, from friends, from culture) is fissured by
ambiguities of attachment and detachment. He is cleaved from and clinging to Argentina,
to his disappeared children, to the possibility of alternatives to the genocide. He is
therefore the slash, the and/or, the ambiguity sans relief; he is a life of conflicted present
absences. He is living death, the desaparecida/os coursing through him consubstantially.
Such is the lot of the exile according to Julio Cortázar, who from first-hand experience
explains that “[e]l exilio es la cesación del contacto de un follaje y de una raigambre con
el aire y la tierra connaturales; es como el brusco final de un amor, es como una muerte
inconcebiblemente horrible porque es una muerte que se sigue viviendo
conscientemente” (11).
In this manner, the poetic use of the slash elicits its affective intent to destabilize
and to draw into question the very act of articulation. Moreover, this intensifies the
existential pain of the speaker of the poem by protracting his/her agony. It is an
insufferable anguish because of the uncertainty of the fate of the child, and the poem

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must refuse to attenuate that uncertainty, thereby unintentionally exacerbating its
attendant pain by sustaining it ad infinitum. Here, then, one could theorize the role of that
pain by importing an insight from Sarli Mercado into a different poem in the book,
through which she perceives the poetry to locate its reader:
ante una persona poética que, en diálogo con el dolor que la habita, recurre
persistentemente a la pregunta con un discurso literalmente fragmentado por la
característica barrita gelmaniana, Pero además, el poeta nos sitúa ante un juego de
palabras donde su propios nombre, su nombre y apellido, vuelto verbo, es la
acción que ejecutar el yo poético y la firma que le representa…. [L]a cita del
nombre propios actúa como una referencia al poeta y equipara la escritura y el
nombre como la actitud de la persona poética inscrita en el texto—estableciendo
así una especie de operación especular entre sujeto poético y poeta. (161)

In a sense, then, the pain of the poem is its purpose and persistence. It must be effectuated
and endured. To alleviate it would be to clarify and resolve falsely the violence of the
genocide being suffered. Yet the poem is vital, too. It emphasizes the pain of living, the
grief and angst of a life of absence, of existing through erasures. Such is the and/or
conundrum at the core of “III” and exemplified by its innovative typography and
grammar. As Gelman himself explains of his poetic ethos and process:
Cuando escribo algo escucho en el acto de escribir silencios de la imaginación,
tal vez, por donde pasan las relaciones disparatas. El silencio de la imaginación no
es el silencio de la palabras. Entre los dos se abre una terra ignota que es un vacío
muy particular. Ese vacío no es la nada, está vivo y lleno de rostros que persigo y
nunca veré del todo….¿Busco alguna respuesta? ¿Hay respuestas?...¿Su silencio
marca nuestro cuerpo? ¿Es la huella de nuestro límite? (Montanaro 81)

Digging Deeper into a Life of Absence: Nota III

To deepen the analysis of Gelman’s innovative poetic production of the affect of a
life of absence, one might benefit from additional contextual knowledge about the poem
“III” in Carta abierta. As one might intuit from the title of the poem, it is the third of

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twenty-six poems in the cycle. Throughout that cycle, Gelman mourns the disappearance
of his son, Marcelo Ariel. In the words of Daniel Friedemberg:
La voz del poeta hurga encarnizadamente en lo real para dialogar con la ausencia
de su hijo. Lo literariamente prodigioso y humanamente sobrecogedor es el
turbulento modo en que, más que hablar del dolor, Gelman hace hablar al dolor
mismo, que es, a la vez hacer hablar al amor, a la incertidumbre sin remedio, a la
imposibilidad de entender y de pensar. (Montanaro 65)

Consequently Gelman is poetically structuring an affect of turbulence, which creates the
opportunity for the reader to engage in Gelman’s ‘irremediable uncertainty.’ As Gelman
himself notes in prose in Si dulcemente, Marcelo and María Claudia are “ausentes para
siempre” and “hasta que no vea sus cadaveres o a sus asesinos, nunca los daré por
muertos” (73). As Fabry notes, here:
[e]sta nota explicativa final sitúa todo el poemario en un contexto anímico
caracterizado por un duelo imposible: el cadáver ausente impide al padre
reconocer que la muerte ha ocurrido; impide elaborar el duelo que requiere como
premisa la evidencia física de la muerte tanto más cuando que las circunstancias
particularmente violentas e injustas del doble asesinato refuerzan aún más la
tendencia a rechazar en su totalidad el acontecimiento de la doble muerte. (167)

Thus the poet’s uncertainty, his double bind, and the ensuing turbulence of his inability to
reckon it are in fact the propulsive affective experience of his poetry in the book.
Moreover, they are enacted repeatedly in compounding ways in the poem “III” through a
diversity of innovative poetic manipulations, including the orchestration of syntax, tone,
and diction.
Like Gelman’s aforementioned purposeful deployment of idiosyncratic
capitalization, the use of punctuation in “III” is crucial to its performative enunciation of
the violence of erasure. Here is a poem composed entirely of question. In that fact alone
one encounters the relentless instability of the survivor’s searching. There are no answers,
only questions. There is no rest, only seeking. There is no stability, only a continuous

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intensification of its absence. This is complicated further by the relationship between
enjambment and grammar, whereby a question is literally fragmented in the midst of its
articulation by a line break, with fragments become self-contained questions in
themselves, as well as elements of a larger question, including the singular question of
the poem, which is how does one live saturated by absence? Thus the slashes again play
an influential role is constructing the meaning of the poem. They direct the affective
disarticulation of speech about state violence, which is choppy, ragged, and stammering.
They also illuminate in flashes angles of ephemeral meaning and experience within the
larger, mosaic project of the poem. Such is their power to disrupt and disassociate. But
true to their intrinsic ambiguity, they also connect and extend. And in “III” they can
resurrect a question beyond its seemingly terminal question, haunting a new question
with ideas unanswered in previous questions with the poem. This, too, emerges from
genre-specific artifice: The lineation of “III” can juxtapose in a single line fragments
from two separate questions, with that line (of fragments) creating its own unit of
meaning and being. Thus the syntax uses a variety of grammatical and poetic tools to
enact divisions and connections simultaneously. In a similar way, this syntax conducts
the music of the poem, which is a music of fractured rhythms. Thus the poem hinges
upon an artifice of violent disruption, indecision, incompletion, and instability that
paradoxically insists upon endurance and communication (of the incommunicable). In
other words, this is a poem of either/or’s, and/or’s, and both’s. Moreover, as the poet
asks, “qué pedacitos puedo ya juntar?” and to what end?
Paralleling the affect of violence emerging from the poem’s syntax is the affect of
violence emerging from its tone. That tone, as aforementioned, conveys an intimacy with

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the poem’s subject and openness to its audience. Here the speaker is vulnerable, and his
fury is very present, clear, and approachable, even if unknowable. The tone thereby
maintains the political violence of the poem’s origin, not only in the thematic violence of
the narrative of a son kidnapped by a murderous military dictatorship, but also the
political violence intrinsic to the risk of a poet announcing a crime committed by a
dictatorship known to “disappear”, torture, and murder its challengers. Despite such
palpable threat, the poet structures an intimate appeal. In part this is achieved through the
casualness of the “vos,” as evident in the verb conjugations in the poem. One sees them,
for instance, in the verbs “salís”, “gritás”, “volás,” and they elicit an almost unbearable
tenderness. Here is a father speaking from exile to his disappeared son in idiomatic
Argentine Spanish. He is using a demotic, ubiquitous grammar of cultural belonging to
articulate the agony of his dislocation. There is also a desperate plea within that second-
person verbiage via its signification of a casual command, an impossible imperative for
his absent son to answer, to return. Thus the verb tense signals the intensity of the filial
bond as well as its agony; Gelman is linked and delinked from his son. He is hopeless
and/or clinging to impossible hope.
To this discussion of Gelman’s orchestration of affect through tone and syntax,
one might also mention their exemplary synthesis in the lines “¿padrecimiento o lengua
padecida / que habla/como no son de mi cabeza / estas canallas/estos padeceres?” (10-
12). It is that “como no son de mi cabeza” that is especially powerful and essential to the
poem. It cultivates the violence of conditionality: “como no son de mi cabeza.” The poem
is offering a complex layering of significations and disassociations within that single
phrase. He is saying that his suffering and its resulting language do not come from him,

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and yet they do. He is entangled in the father-suffering of the disappearance of Marcelo
by the state, and he also perpetuates that suffering by reiterating it poetically. More
deeply, though, he is also attempting to invert the paradigmatic process of suffering under
the dictatorship. One presupposes suffering to derive from the military’s violent
imposition of upon its subjects. Yet in the lines excerpted above, Gelman also imbues his
speaker with a counterintuitive form of agency. Through these lines, the reader realizes
the speaker’s act of reflection on his suffering to comprise an attempt, however ultimately
impossible, to reclaim control over himself. He is searching (in vain) to discover and
reassert a degree of autonomy by laying claim to his paternal process of mourning. His
pain has certainly been instigated by the military, but what freedoms and expiations
might the poet find in his excruciating compulsion to rememorate Marcelo poetically in
the void of his absence? Perhaps the answers are ambiguous; they are a linking and
delinking, another and/or.
To clarify this, one might look to the diction of the poem. Take, for example, the
noun “canallas” in the abovementioned excerpt. It is an idiomatic marker of Argentine
identity. In other words, it is signifies cultural belonging, despite the words bitter,
negative denotative and connotative meanings in this context, not to mention the
enunciation of the word by an exile. Again, then, Gelman is building an affect of absence
as an effectuation of irresolvable ambiguity. Here the speaker mourns his disappeared
son, and in the act of his mourning he claims his cultural belonging, his cultural
membership, from a position of exclusion and erasure. His pain is linguistically amplified
and nuanced by neologisms in the poem, too. Good examples of this include the use of
the word “lloradera” for “llevadera,” and “padreciemiento” for “padecimiento.” In short

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his language is saturated by grief; grief and suffering erupt through and from his language
of mourning. Hi grief is unbearable; his suffering dismantles his identity as father.
This world-altering and self-remaking language of agony permeates the poem.
For example, the neologisms of “desfuéramos” and “desfuiste” not only create new
verbal enactments of the affect of absence, but also give new edge and bite to the verb
“despertabas” in penultimate line. In other words, connotative meanings of language are
being actively and generatively augmented by acts of cultural production. This, too, is
part of the vitality of the poem, its declaration of survival, of endurance. The speaker is
brutalized by pain but he remains; he is inventing alternatives that expand the conditions
of possibility for life during and after the violence of the genocide. Perhaps this is some
of what Eduardo Galeano had in mind when he extolled Gelman’s poetry as “pure words,
and never innocent: certainties that dwell in doubt, liberties that live imprisoned, and a
celebration of life from the exact center of death” (Unthinkable xi).

Luz, Pena, and The Ineradicability of Resistance to Abusive State Power

As Gelman himself explains it, there is something inextinguishable in the survivor
of state violence. Thus, for example, he opines in De palabra (2004) that the “[h]ombre
al que le han segado la familia, que ha visto morir o desaparecer a los amigos más
queridos, nadie ha podido matar en él la voluntad de subtender esa suma de horror como
un contragolpe afirmativo, creador de nueva vida” (7). This indomitability is paralleled in
Si dulcemente in sporadic poetic effusions where he suggests that amidst the slaughter
and confusion, one must “seguir buscando luz” (32) despite “la pena de haber sido/ser”

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(39) and despite “los perros del olvido” (40). In other words, he poetically counters the
annihilating impulse of the genocidal dictatorship. The dead resurge through the living.
Memory formulates its own politics, articulated and circulated through affective
discourse. And Gelman’s poetry in Si dulcemente is concerned precisely with the creation
and calibration of such an affect of indomitability and inextinguishability.
For example, in “Nota XII” (27) Gelman writes:
los sueños rotos por la realidad
los compañeros rotos por la realidad/
los sueños de los comapñeros rotos
¿están verdaderamente rotos/perdidos/nada/

se pudren bajo tierra?/¿su rota luz
diseminada a pedacitos bajo tierra?/¿alguna vez
los pedacitos se van a juntar? (1-7)

Similarly, in the poem “Esperan” (102), for example, Gelman writes of being constituted
by the dead, whose murders and remembrance define both him and the present state. He
exists in a “país que no se quiere despegar” with “ojos que duran contra
soledades…tímidos / abrigando la sangrera / de la separación” (7-10), and, in the
subsequent poem titled “Esperan” (104), he concludes Si dulcemente by writing “vamos a
empezar la lucha otra vez” (1), with the poem—and book—ending “otra vez/otra vez/otra
vez” (16).
That invention in agony, that endurance of annihilation, emerges from Si
dulcemente as a trope of superlative importance. Its formal poetic production therefore
merits further analysis, and, again, the poem “III” offers itself as a site of consideration.
More specifically, its aforementioned neologisms suggest the discursive possibilities for
resistance to abusive state power. Within the poem, the ethos of creation as vitality drives
Gelman to conceive—even in his desperate anguish—of such verbally ingenious nouns

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as “doledor,” “encerradura,” and “padrecimiento,” and verbs of such startling, undeniable
verve as “crepuscularte,” “compañándome,” “mañanó,” “desfuéramos,” and “desfuiste.”
Such inventive language, such revolutionary vernacular, allows for the expansion of the
articulability of the inarticulable. It confronts the rigidities and fixities that all the
hallmark of fascism by poetically inflecting and layering the significance of existing
language with previously non-existent language.
Adding to the neological vigor of the performative enunciation of life force
surging through the poetry in Si dulcemente and in opposition to the extinguishing of
subjectivity, Gelman also invokes phonetic (mis)spelling and gendered speech as a poetic
tropes. For example, in “III” he writes through and to his son by misspelling “vacas,” for
“cows,” as “bacas” (18) with that homophonic b/v confusion typical of orthographical
mistakes in children’s writing in Spanish. Of technical note, were the context and the
narrative of the poem not both so fierce, a poetic gesture such as the child-like
misspelling of “vaca” might read as sentimental and cloying. But in this case, the context
and narrative, as well as the sparing use of the gesture, result in its successful use. In
other words, this is Gelman masterfully modulating the tone of his poem through a single
deployment of misspelling in this poem, and as a result, it is subtle enough to add texture,
depth, and force to the emotions of the poem. At the risk of excessive analysis, one could
even postulate the invocation of misspelling as a corrupt reminder of spelling class in
elementary school, where one was forced to stand and recite words to be learned by rote
regardless of the aurally indistinguishable b/v, thereby invoking and marking an early
memory of social indoctrination by a state institution (school) as retrospectively serving

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to foreshadow the narrow methods of indoctrination employed by the military
dictatorship.
Like the misspellings, Gelman’s use of the diminutive suffix “-ita” to modify the
noun “alma” into “almita” (13) amplifies and nuances the grief of the poem. This time,
though, the workings are more complex as they destabilize gendered norms of speech in
Argentine Spanish. More specifically, the diminutive is most often used by mothers or
maternal figures to soften and warm their speech to children. Thus, in Gelman’s
invocation of the diminutive in “almita” to address his son, he is engaging in a small but
impactful and resonant subversive gesture combating the dictatorship. For as Gómez-
Barris notes, modern Latin American dictatorships are often “hypermasculine
institution[s]” (120), and this is certainly the case in Argentina from 1976 to 1983.
Consequently Gelman’s poetic introduction of questions about gendered identity through
linguistic variation bespeaks Francine Maisello’s notion of the aesthetic realm as “an
important avenue for re-creations and representations of gender regimes” (qtd in Gómez-
Barris 120). In a twist on gender and poetic tradition, Geneviève Fabry explains this with
a theoretical precision born of Gelman’s poetry itself when she suggests that “[e]l tono
marcadamente elegíaco se femeniza como si se tratara de evitar a toda costa la épica
viril” such that throughout Si dulcemente “esta[s] feminizacion[es] del léxico podría ser
la señal de un paso de la tentación spectral y su consiguiente melancholia a la voluntad de
exteriorizar el duelo y asignarle una función política y moral” (185). Again, then, this is
Gelman’s artful orchestration of poetic forms, figures, and traditions to write a collective
poetry of social transformation through infusion of personal content with verbal
imagination.

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In this manner, his poetry transforms the poetry of exile into a variation of his
larger, counter-foundational poetic project of rendering a counterhegemonic, egalitarian
affect of absence. This thereby suggests one way of extending and complicating Sarli
Mercado’s insight into the double function of Gelman’s “vision auxiliary,” meaning that
“se expresa, por un lado, como la reformulación y actualización del sentido de perdida y
exclusión…[y] por otro lado, en esta vision ‘exiliar’ está también la nostalgia, la ausencia
y el desengaño” (56). Gelman’s innovative poetic reorganization and expansion of
language contains a rich simultaneity of poetic historicity and avant-garde invention; he
is both rooting his work in the poetic past and creating future poetic potentiality. In short,
he is collapsing false binaries of chronology, aesthetics, poetics, politics, and more into a
vibrant, mosaic simultaneity. To build upon the critical theory of Nelly Richard on art
after dictatorship, Gelman’s poetry from exile enacts the idea that:
[p]art of the critical task incumbent on postdictatorial thought is to overcome the
rigid dichotomy of values and representations imprisoning ‘the standpoint of the
vanquished’ by exploring more oblique forms, together with resolving the conflict
between assimilating (incorporating) or expelling (rejecting) the past. (21)

Such is the density and dexterity of his poetic vision.

Absence, Affect, and Alternative Epistemologies

Through the agonistic poetic exploration of absence, Gelman affectively
illuminates and communicates a diversity of counterhegemonic possibilities. He is
poetically defying and subverting the genocidal state by developing an alternative
epistemology of absence. Here, then, one might look more deeply into the formulation of
absence in Gelman’s oeuvre. A useful starting point might come in the scholarship of

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Silvia Barei, who suggests that Gelman’s poetry comprises “una experiencia de la
memoria que se convierte en texto, es decir, no tanto la fielded de un contenido, sino la
forma de esa material recordable, de esa experiencia—propia, ajena o cultural—pasada
por el tamiz, por las ‘filtraciones’ de la subjetividad y de la capacidad humana de
creación” (11). However, such a claim begs to be radicalized here. That is, where Barei
posits Gelman’s poetry as converting memory into text, this chapter pushes that idea one
step further by claiming that textual representation of memory generates an affect forging
new memory through affect. One could even argue Gelman to have been pursuing a
poetic project of memory (re)formation since his first collection, Violín y otras
cuestiones, wherein he introduces some of his earliest counter-memories to personal,
national, and international commemorations of the boundaries between child and adult,
self and society, subject and state, and physical and imaginary worlds. A good example
of this comes in the paradoxical poetic enunciation of absence in the poem “Oración de
un desocupado” from Violín y otras preguntas (1956), published when Gelman was but
twenty-six years old. Note in the following excerpt from that poem how Gelman links the
poetic and psychic, for example, to create new forms of suffering, enduring, and
transforming absence:
…contempla
esto que soy, este zapato roto,
esta angustia, este estómago vacío,
esta ciudad sin pan para mis dientes, la fiebre
cavándome la carne,
este dormir así,
bajo la lluvia, castigado por el frío, perseguido
te digo que no entiendo, Padre, bájate,
tócame el alma, mírame
el corazón,
yo no robé, no asesiné, fui niño
y en cambio me golpean y golpean. (14-25)

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Emerging twenty-four years later, the poetry in Si dulcemente explores absence
with a heightened intensity and subtler complexity. Inverting the filial relationship in
“Oración de un desocupado,” Gelman in Si dulcemente has become the father, and he is
desperate to ‘bajarse para tocar el alma’ of his abducted and surely tortured son Marcelo,
as well as his beloved daughter-in-law, María Claudia. And with unprecedented power,
Gelman poetically effectuates a fervent affect of absence, radicalizing and radiating his
loss as a signifier of the violence being perpetrated by the military junta through its
genocidal reign of terror. To deepen the analysis of Gelman’s poetic rebuke of that state
violence, the concept of affect requires theorization here, particularly in relation to
Gelman’s capacity to produce it poetically.

Affect and Impossible Poetic Acts of Re-presentation of Desaparecida/os

In her analysis of Eugenio Dittborn’s photographic art about state-sponsored
disappearance and terror in Chile, Nelly Richard suggests that it “makes visible a new
form of solidarity with the detained-disappeared through the problem of bodies as
trajectory and circulation” (9). One could build upon this to create a methodology for
understanding Gelman’s poetic production of affect in response the concomitant
genocidal violence in Argentina. More specifically, Gelman’s poetic production of affect
in Si dulcemente could be argued as a mode of symbolically resurrecting the disappeared
from the state-sponsored void of their tombs and reintroducing them into overlapping
circuits of discourse to contest their official absence within the official national narratives

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of the dictatorship and its legacy. In other words, Gelman’s poetic affect is counter-
foundational. It contests the official historiography of the genocide as “Dirty War”
between Western, Christian democrats and nihilistic, godless subversives. Instead, Si
dulcemente tenderly enacts a pluralistic singularization of desaparecida/os; each is
individuation in his or her invocation, adding signifiers of subjectivity to a public
imaginary that had been pared down to a more tractable—and trackable—form. As the
political scientist Dale Krane explains in his analysis of the Brazilian dictatorship from
1965 to 1985, this is the common impulse of dictators and totalitarians to attempt “to
shrink the size of the political arena in order to stabilize what they and supportive civilian
groups perceived to be a chaotic and threatening situation” (28).
Consequently each symbolically resurrected desaparecida/o in Si dulcemente
augments subjective possibility. Each affectively constitutes what Richard calls “another
Benjaminian allegory of memory as trace and reinscription,” and together these
recovered presences convert “the corpse of dictatorship” into:
a new signifying constellation, composed of many other submerged or
shipwrecked identities…set[ting] up a configuration of subidentities that de-
ideologize the portrait of the Victim of the Dictatorship, mobilizing its image
outside official catalogs. And joining it together—in fresh associations—with
more dispersed fragments and the (still) unfound remains of various collapses and
submergings that speak about residual subjectivities and drifting codes. (10)

And it is important to emphasize that they do so poetically. Through his manipulation of
the tropes and figures of poetry, Gelman inundates the present with absences that
paradoxically amplify subjective possibility.
Such work necessarily begins in the body. In other words, it is a poetic
instantiation of an aesthetics of absence; Gelman is writing a corporeally communicable
experience of erasure. Here, then, it might prove clarifying to invoke Patricia Clough’s

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affect theory about the “biomediated body” (207). More precisely, Clough argues that
“affect points…to a dynamism immanent to bodily matter and matter generally” (207).
More pertinently here, she argues against readings of affect as “a return to the subject as
the subject of emotion,” preferring instead to theorize “affect as pre-individual bodily
forces augmenting or diminishing a body’s capacity to act and who critically engage
those technologies that are making it possible to grasp and to manipulate the
imperceptible dynamism of affect” (207). For Clough, this results in the aforementioned
“biomediated body,” meaning the body synthesized and mediated by technologies for
reproducing genetic material, thereby exposing it to shifting interconnections with its
environment, and this can be adapted to and problematized through Gelman’s affect of
absence by repositioning the technologies of disappearance being wielded by the
Argentine dictatorship in order to create the conditions for subjectivation necessary to a
totalitarian domination of the Argentine public.
However counterintuitive, one might therefore begin to think of Gelman’s
ostensibly intimate poetry of grief over the disappearance of his son, for example, as a
public, political contestation of the technologies of disappearance powering the genocidal
state. It would therefore help to theorize public affect in ways similar to Gabriel Giorgi
and Mirta Antonelli, who bracket and define “[p]ublic affect” by explaining that it:
is not so much about a pacified ‘encounter’ with others as it is the irruption of a
common power; it is the dimension in which social singularities (forms of life in
their specificity, in their experience, and in their experimentation) are inscribed in
the space of traffic, in the exchanges, mixtures, and frictions. (emphasis added)

Gelman’s poetry in Si dulcemente realizes this common power; it exhorts its readers to
understand the social,” as Antonelli and Giorgi do, “ as an arena in which ‘life in
common’ is a zone of redefinitions, of struggles around new rules and new possibilities”

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Moreover, this is the means by which Gelman writes a poetry that produces an affect
capable of politically opposing the genocidal fascism of the Argentine state. That is,
Gelman’s poetry in Si dulcemente (re)defines “public feelings [such that they] signal the
moment when democracy is not a mechanism of representation but rather an exercise in
singularization, of work and experimentation among subjects, bodies, groups, and
territories” (Antonelli and Giorgi). And such exercises and experimentations are rich with
possibility.
For example, in this context Si dulcemente might deepen Clough’s theorization of
the hybridity of the biomediated body as blurring thresholds of containment and
broaching the possibility of dissolution of divides. Here one might turn to “Nota XVIII”
in Si dulcemente (33), through which a close reading of the poem can reveal Gelman’s
self-depiction as an iteration of the affect of absence and a contestation of subjectivation.
More specifically, the poem offers a glimpse at Gelman’s poetic construction of an
affective experience of reckoning the biomediated body, with that resulting affect
effectuating a symbolic counterstrike to normalized and normalizing violence of the
Argentine dictatorship. That violence is addressed through its destructive manifestations
in the first-person speaker, who introduces himself by saying “yo me llamo tristeza” (7).
The reader understands that sadness to be layered: It includes the sadness of exile, of
violent subjectivation, and of the disappearance of the speaker’s friends and family
members. And however much those losses may seem familiar to the reader and therefore
stable and knowable, they are not. Rather, they are in motion; they are instable and
erratic, active and changing. This is a key factor of the power of the poem’s artifice; it is
able to render suffering as a dynamic, pluralistic beginning to a life painfully diversified,

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augmented, and nuanced by being fractured, diminished and impoverished. Hence,
Gelman writes:
con pies de triste pisa la tristeza/
la noche donde los compañeros vivos aún
rostros fosforescentes vemos como astros

subir/volar/callar a pedacitos/
lámpartas de la ciega libertad
que reventó ojos amados
para que salga toda luz[.] (10-16)

This is Gelman at his best, using the poetry of impossible witness to approach and blur
the threshold between life and death. Here the dead are living, the absent are present, and
death itself suggests the potential for a purifying light to transform existence. Perhaps this
exemplifies Giorgio Agamben’s notion that “[t]he survivor, rather than bearing witness to
historical, human atrocity, serves as a theoretical construct who as such bears witness to
‘the missing articulation between the living being and logos’” (Auschwitz 134).
Evidence of this abounds in Si dulcemente, and a prime example comes in the
opening stanzas of the aforementioned poem, “Nota XVIII” (33). Here they are:
estamos vivos/entre compañeros
caídos por delación o combate/envueltos
en la intensidad de morir por el mundo/solos
o cada vez más solos bajo la noche clandestine/es decir

respira el pecho tristeza/
arden los huesos con tristeza/
yo me llamo tristeza/
son tristes la paloma y la tórtola

que tortolea la paloma[.]

From the first line, Gelman is linking the living with a logos: “estamos vivos entre
compañeros.” More important is the preposition “entre.” It is a linguistic lynchpin of that
logos, implying that one exists not in himself, but in the space between his friends and

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him. Thus the gap—an absence—allows for commingling, which is the flux of life itself;
the animation of the absence means ‘estamos vivos’. But ‘estamos vivos’ only is so far as
the deaths of the ‘compañeros caídos’ illustrate Gelman’s assumption of “the charge of
bearing witness…in the name of the impossibility of bearing witness” (“Auschwitz” 34).
In other words, as aforementioned, there is a disjunction between survivors who ‘bear
witness’ and those who died, “the true witnesses” (“Auschwitz” 33), meaning those who
have perished. Consequently, as illustrated by Gelman’s poetry of impossible witnessing
of desaparecida/os, “[t]estimony appears here as a process that involves at least two
subjects: the first, the survivor, who can speak but has nothing interesting to say; and the
second, who ‘has seen the Gorgon,’ who ‘has touched bottom,’ and therefore has much to
say but cannot speak” (“Auschwitz” 120). Hence Gelman again blurs the threshold
between existence and non-existence, life and death, and human and inhuman, and this is
actuated by his poetic technique. For example, note his use of lineation to enact the
surprise of death by offering the stable line “estamos vivos/entre compañeros” and
following it with a line beginning “caídos,” with the second line plunging the reader
down into death.
This constructed space between “compañeros” and “caídos” takes on further
significance via its protracted duration. The reader’s eye is delayed in its quest to
complete the thought by the necessity of sweeping off of line one and down to line two to
resume reading, and in that interval, that interstice of absence, the sudden surprise of
death is plotted and created by the poet. Hence, through the absence/gap, one can witness
the dying of a subject grammatically, and that emulates the impossible act of witnessing
which Gelman attempts to narrate, however falsely or externally. Moreover, as Agamben

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suggests, the survivor’s testimony constructs a space in which “to listen to what is
unsaid” and the voice of this “testimony says [. . .]‘human beings are human insofar as
they bear witness to the inhuman’” (“Auschwitz” 121). Consequently, testimony is
manufactured from outside of death, and it regards the space between—“entre”—the life
of the survivor and the death of victim as a vantage point for nearing closer to the
inhuman and thereby defining the human. Thus the gap between ‘compañeros’ and
‘caidos’ is significant. Significant, too, is the transformation of Gelman’s absent friends
into stars in the poetry’s massive darkness. In the black void between them and him, the
‘unsaid’ of existence and the ‘inhuman’ emerges to inflect his life with absence.

Returning Absence: una conclusión en pedacitos

Absence also returns insistently to Gelman in his irrepressible, impossible
reaching for his son through and throughout Si dulcemente. Via that reaching, his son’s
absence symbolically becomes a presence via the artifice of poetry, meaning only in the
material of language, whose referentiality represents yet another form of impossibility.
Gelman recognizes this and so impossibly reaches for the his son and other
desaparecida/os again and again. For example, as he writes in “Nota XVIII,” just as they
are “envueltos / en la intensidad de morir por el mundo”, so is he. Within the biological
continuum, their human bodies have disappeared, but the entirety of the cosmos’
composition is continuously and contiguously reforming and announcing itself through
the living. The absent are incorporated into the living, through whom they endure. Hence
Gelman describes his body as infused with and constituted by their absence, so much so

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that “respira el pecho tristeza/ / arden los huesos con tristeza” (5-6). In other words, the
boundaries between inside and outside, and self and other are again blurred.
Not only do those themes recur throughout Si dulcemente, but they also are each
time refused. In the very moment of their enunciation, Gelman refuses their
reconciliation. This amplifies not only the intellectual complexity of Gelman’s vision in
the book, but also the emotional intensity of the reader’s experience. In other words, this
is a triumph of poetic affect. A good example of this is “Nota XII” (27). There Gelman
asks:
y los pedacitos de los compañeros/¿alguna vez se junatarán?
¿caminan bajo tierra para juntarse un día como dice manuel?/¿se
juntarán/un día?
de esos amados pedacitos está hecha nuestra concreta soledad/
per/dimos la suavidad de paco/la tristeza de haroldo/la lucidez de
/Rodolfo/el coraje de tantos

ahora son pedacitos desparramados bajo todo el país
hojitas caídas del fervor/la esperanza/la fe/
pedacitos que fueron alegría/combate/confianza
en sueños/ sueños/ sueños/ sueños[.] (9-16)

Immediately one notes Gelman’s emphasis on the impossibility of his testimonial desire.
His poetic dream to reconnect with his annihilated friends is a patent impossibility.
Consequently this theme recurs obsessively throughout the poem (and the book) in the
form of unanswerable questions and of the listing of the names of desaparecida/os. In
other words, Gelman is yet again employing the literary device of repetition, which is
itself a false dream of recursion here: No matter how eloquently, beautifully,
innovatively, and/or rabidly Gelman writes, his poetry will intrinsically fail as an
enterprise due to the intrinsic impossibility of its ambition.

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Yet even here Gelman wriggles free from notions of fixity. He refuses to remain
in this impossibility’s grip without a struggle. And soon the grip loosens through his
testimonial process. More precisely, the source of the potential for continuous
transformation comes clear as the imagination itself. This notion is perhaps what coheres
Si dulcemente. The imagination is the source of Gelman’s tremendous biopolitical
empathy, which surges through the writing. Moreover, this is as clear in his writing as it
is in his reading (which must be noted with irony as coming to the reader via Gelman’s
writing). For example, note the characteristic biopolitical tenderness and nuance in his
reading of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818):
La novela es, en realidad, una parábola que contradice al statu quo: habla del uso
despótico del poder—gubernamental, científico social, familiar—, que
desemboca en la crueldad contra los débiles y los desprotegidos. Al final se
simpatzia con el monstruo, más lúcido y humano que el humano Frankenstein.
(Miradas 31)

The imagination conjures and defines; it creates and categorizes. Hence, the continuous
work of Gelman’s imagination in Si dulcemente to conjure, fashion, and refashion the
impossible act of witnessing the desaparecida/os. As he writes in “Nota XVIII,” he
concerns himself time and again with his “compañeros que / cayeron por el pueblo”,
whom he maintains “en la memoria acostaditos / para seguir buscando luz.” And perhaps
all one can do is continue to remember and search.

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Cadáveres que transitan a las semillas: State Violence and the Aporia
of Alicia Partnoy’s Poetry

“La constancia del horror puede no destruir materialmente todo, pero al mismo
tiempo nadie se salva de esa presencia permanente.”
—Beatriz Sarlo
11

Alicia Partnoy was born into a Russian Jewish family in 1955 in Bahía Blanca,
Argentina, where she was abducted at gunpoint from her home at noon on 12 January
1977 by uniformed members of the Army representing the military dictatorship of
General Jorge Rafael Videla.
12
She was subsequently incarcerated for almost three years,
yet no charges were ever filed against her.
13
Nor was she ever formally accused of any
crime, named in any court documents, informed of being a political prisoner, or court-
martialed. Instead, as Partnoy herself explains, she was loosely “considered a threat to
national security” (Little School 16), perhaps due to her Peronista sympathies,
14
and
however vague and/or baseless, such presumptions were sufficient for her to be held
indefinitely, incommunicado, and without a writ of habeas corpus via the
unconstitutional
15
protocol of the dictatorship. In short, to invoke the lexicon of the

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period, she had become a “desaparecida.”
16

Partnoy was in fact one of the estimated 30,000
17
such “desaparecidos” from the
genocide in Argentina from 1976 to 1983, during which time the “the armed
forces...regarded much of the civil population as potentially or actually subversive”
(McSherry, “Political World” 21, emphasis added). That adverb “potentially” is crucial
here. It introduces one of the discursive origins and aims of the genocide: the eradication
of “potential” criminality, meaning the eradication of a state-devised and -defined
category of personality presupposed to possess the threatening potential to oppose and/or
disrupt the dictatorship’s autocratic rule. Partnoy was apparently identified as one such
‘potential criminal,’ thereby triggering her abduction, torture, and detention in several of
the dictatorship’s estimated 340 concentration camps, prisons, and torture centers.
18
To
camouflage such abuses of state power, the dictatorship publicly announced its Proceso
de Reorganización Nacional, invoking a Christian nationalist rhetoric of exclusion to
attempt to paint the dictatorship’s usurpation of constitutionality and installation of
martial rule as an urgent, honorable, and patriotic defense of Argentina for “la posterior
instauración de una democracia republicana, representante y federal” (Troncoso iii).
Meanwhile, however, the dictatorship was also secretively circulating an internal,
genocidal discourse, detailing, for example, an explicit protocol for the identification of
potential criminals,

including children and elected officials, to be abducted, tortured,
and/or murdered.
19
What was at stake, then, was the power to name.
Ironically, the dictatorship intended for that originary rhetorical violence—i.e. the
violence of naming, meaning in this case the violence of naming potential criminality—to
becalm the public, or at least to normalize genocidal violence. To abet this, the

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dictatorship in essence criminalized rhetorical and ideological opposition and alternatives
to its authority. As Videla himself explained publicly of his government in 1977:
consideramos que es un delito grave atentar contra el estilo de vida occidental y
cristiano queriéndolo cambiar…no solamente es considerado como agresor el que
agrede a través de la bomba…sino también el que en el plano de las ideas quiere
cambiar nuestro sistema de vida a través de ideas que son justamente
subversivas… El terrorista no sólo es considerado tal por matar con un arma…sino
también por activar a través de ideas contrarias a nuestra civilización occidental y
cristiana a otras personas. (Bossié 8, emphasis added)

Yet rather than consolidating and reifying the dictatorship’s power (to name), such
declarations contributed to the conditions for its disarticulation. That is, not only did the
enunciation of such discursive limitations patently produce its targets through the
intrinsic unsustainability of the prohibitions, but in doing so they also created social
divisions and dissent. Perhaps more damagingly, by introducing and targeting potential
criminality in the form of “ideas contrarias,” for example, the dictatorship also was
unintentionally foregrounding the subversive force of language in the Argentine
imaginary. As a result, the dictatorship’s rhetoric was empowering, if not fostering,
oppositional and alternative discourses, thereby undermining both its rule and its intended
legacy.
More precisely, with each attempt to articulate and materialize its national(ist)
vision of a homogenously “occidental y cristiana” Argentine consciousness, politics, and
economy, the dictatorship was engendering instability, incompletion, and irruption. And
how could it be otherwise? The dictatorship was implementing its new order via the
violent, sudden, and unexplained disappearance of thousands of subjects, thereby
saturating the national corpus and imaginary with the aporetic spectrality of an
irresolvable past born of inarticulable violence. And this is precisely where Partnoy’s

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postdictatorial poetry intervenes, using genre-specific tropes and figures to contest,
rupture, and reconceive dictatorial and postdictatorial discourses, historiographies, and
cultural production concerning torture and genocide. Most importantly, Partnoy’s
postdictatorial poetry does this by paradoxically making present the absent
desaparecidos. That is, through Partnoy’s innovative poetic choices, the desaparecidos
are revealed as permanently active and influential in the present, where they irresolvably
haunt the Argentine imaginary precisely because of the violence of their “disappearance.”
Thus one of Partnoy’s most important poetic achievement is the resuscitating
illumination and transformation of their absence.

Torture, Genocide, and the Poéticas de la Derrota

Through an innovative combination of poetic decisions, Partnoy paradoxically
transforms absence into an active and affective presence permeating her two books of
postdictatorial poetry, Venganza de la manzana (1992) and Volando bajito (2005). In the
latter Partnoy explicitly names this mode of poetic (re)production of absence a “Poéticas
de la Derrota” (1), signifying a poetics of non-language, an anti-rhetoric, that strives
impossibly yet indefatigably to enact the absent and inarticulable. In the process, it
contests and transgresses the limits of antecedent, normative postgenocidal discourses
and mourning, thereby producing a vigorous inflection of the two. Moreover, although
the label “Poéticas de la Derrota” first appears in the second of her two books of
postdictatorial poetry, it could be argued as the driving force of her entire postdictatorial
literary oeuvre to date, including her best-selling memoir The Little School (1986), where

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the most affective writing reads like prose poetry, (re)presenting and transforming
absence via a poetic emphasis and richness deriving from an innovative combination of
verbal compression, rhythm, metaphor, the musicality of language, and a quintessential
prose-poetry tone of synergistic irreverence and irony.
More broadly, then, the Poéticas de la Derrota can be read as a mode of contesting
the legacy of genocide, which Partnoy portrays as being as agonistic and it is
inarticulable. Consequently her postdictatorial poetry can be read as comprising a
permanent and irresolvable action: the action of continuously recognizing the
impossibility of representing the violence of the genocide, including its thousands of still-
missing victims, its use of torture, and its pernicious afterlife.
20
Through her direct,
poetic engagement of that impossibility, Partnoy tropologically reveals the present
absence of the desaparecidos, thereby enacting the perpetual struggle in postgenocidal
life to endure the aporetic legacy of the desaparecidos, who implacably affect the present
and make claims to the future, all while resisting representation. Thus, by deploying
poetic tropes to (re)produce and transform their absence, Partnoy is unveiling their
presence, thereby disrupting postdictatorial discourse by rupturing its false fluidity and
coherence, layering it with silences, and sundering its linear conceptions of time.
Again, then, the power to name is crucially foregrounded. Partnoy is struggling in
her postdictatorial poetry to (re)articulate and (re)present a violence that exceeds
representation. And through that struggle one of the most important, contestatory
valences of her work emerges: Where the dictatorship used the power to name to
exterminate lives, Partnoy redeploys it to struggle to name the deformations and erasures
inflicted by that dictatorial violence; she is (re)deploying the power to name to resurrect

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the tortured and murdered, to reveal their activity in the present, and to return their voices
to audibility. And this is important work not only in relation to the desaparecidos, but
also to survivors. Thus, if one were to build upon Partnoy’s advocacy, for example, of the
need to recognize how “[w]riting…and poetry, have helped victims [to] recover their
voices, fragmented by the pain of torture, and…to chronicle those events for future
generations” (“Poetry as a Strategy for Resistance” 236), then the Poéticas could be read
as highlighting—but intentionally not alleviating—the constitutive fractures in
postgenocidal voices, through which the desaparecidos can surge forth to help to
‘chronicle’ the Argentine genocide ‘for future generations.’ In other words, Partnoy’s
Poéticas engenders a Benjaminian process of rescue, retrieving the dictatorially shattered,
murdered, and banished from the oblivion of History. Yet Partnoy also simultaneously
(fore)knows such retrieval to be only partially and/or allusively possible at best, grounded
as it is in the aporetic struggle of the postgenocidal subject to (re)present the genocide,
which in its violence exceeds representation.
To clarify that aporetic struggle, one might import and extend a complimentary
aspect of Giorgio Agamben’s analysis of Nazi death camps.
21
Specifically, in Remnants
of Auschwitz (1999) he argues that the witnesses of Auschwitz are incomplete witnesses
in that they experienced “a reality that necessarily exceeds its factual elements” (12).
That is, those witnesses lack the capacity to process and represent the totality of
genocidal violence, which exceeds the sum of its parts. Such is its paradoxical excess
born of lack, and this is evident in Argentina, too, where one agonistic example of it
comes in the form of the paradoxically permanent presence of desaparecidos in
postgenocidal Argentine life. Further complicating such notions of incompletion, the

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Argentine testimonial subject must also often struggle to recollect experiences during
which she slipped in and out of consciousness due to torture, exhaustion, hunger, sexual
abuse, and/or terror. And, finally, such witnesses are incomplete, too, in the
phenomenological sense that they ultimately must testify to and (re)present that which
they themselves have not completely experienced: the death of the subject. Thus, if
building upon Agamben’s logic, then one could argue that the testimony of survivors of
genocide, whether from Argentina or Auschwitz, has “at its core an essential lacuna…the
survivors bore witness to something it is impossible to bear witness to” (13).
22
And,
consequently, as the Poéticas argues, one must learn to “listen” for, to, and with that
lacuna.
23

In short, then, one could argue the Poéticas to be an innovative and radical mode of
listening. Such listening unveils the instability of the present by exposing its elisions,
excisions, illusions, and delusions, and, however unintended, this is perhaps one layer of
meaning to be extrapolated from Partnoy’s claim in her essay “Cuando Vienen Matando”
that “[w]hen considering the contributions of testimonial subjects who have survived the
[Argentine] repression, a shift from speaking to listening might prove useful” (1668,
emphasis added). In its original context, that claim is a defense of testimonial subjects
against challenges to their historiographical reliability. But here that claim could also be
read as helping to explain the work of the Poéticas, which creates the conditions for ‘a
shift from speaking to listening’ to the present absence of the desaparecidos until what is
heard, paradoxically, is their silence, their essential lacunae.
At the risk of circular argument, one could thereupon claim such listening to
produce new modes of speaking. More precisely, according to Partnoy, postgenocidal

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cultural production should engender a “speaking with” desaparecidos (“Cuando vienen
matando” 1668, emphasis added), and such speaking with is implicitly contingent upon
listening. The listening founds the plurivocal, transhistorical, and atemporal speaking
with of Partnoy’s Poéticas, and this is precisely how she contests the aporetic afterlife of
genocidal violence. Moreover, this allows the Poéticas to resurrect and rememorate not
only Argentine desaparecidos, but also a transnational, transcultural, and transhistorical
diversity of other desaparecidos, ranging, for example, from a fourteenth-century
anonymous Spanish prisoner (“Romance del prisionero/Romance de la prisionera,”
Volando 12-13) to a Guatemalan feminist resistance fighter kidnapped and murdered in
1980 (“Diálogo con Alaíde Foppa,” Volando 56-7) to the immolation of a Chilean youth
by the Pinochet dictatorship in 1986 (“A Rodrigo Rojas,” Venganza 82-3) to twenty-first-
century victims of rape and murder by Mexican federales in Ciudad Juárez (“Calles,”
Volando 64-7).
24
Consequently, then, the Poéticas becomes a compassionate, vigorous,
and agonistic action of listening to and speaking with desaparecidos so as to contest,
(re)conceptualize, and (re)articulate the foundational aporia intrinsic to postdictatorial
and postgenocidal discourses on memory, representation, authority, torture, and justice.

Reading Absence: The Paradoxical Process of a Poéticas de la Derrota

When the Poéticas de la Derrota transforms the significance of absence by
paradoxically making it present and articulate, the Poéticas becomes, in the
phenomenological language of Achille Mbembe on state violence and sovereign power, a
formulation of “the imaginary realized and the real imagined” (Postcolony 242). This

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occurs in the Poéticas through a variation on Mbembe’s “necropolitical” Hegelian
process, which posits that “the human being truly becomes a subject…in the struggle and
the work through which he or she confronts death” until finally “politics is…death that
lives a human life” (“Necropolitics” 14-5). More crucially, here those necropolitical
conditions are counterhegemonic instead of normative, and they are created poetically
through the Poéticas. That is, through her poetic choices, Partnoy is able to transfigure
both the content and theme of a necropolitical absence until it becomes a heterogeneous,
layered, and shifting signifier, and this is exemplified by the poem “Torture Machine:
Vocabulario” (Volando 34-9). There Partnoy gropes in multiple, and multiply
unsatisfactory, languages to articulate the experience of torture until ultimately producing
a generative aporia via the heterodox, transnational, transhistorical, and transcultural
scattering of absences. More precisely, absence begins in the poem in the form of silence
as a marker of the brute triumph of the torturer in silencing his victims on behalf of the
state, but Partnoy then transforms that silence into a symbol of the collective
disempowerment, dispossession, and erasure of the victims of torture. Here is the poem:
severe and prolonged...:
amputation of...:
picana eléctrica:
¿qué se siente
cuando
el idioma de uno
es el único
adecuado
para nombrar
wet submarine...:
potro:
no vergüenza
no culpa
burns:
la bandera...:
¿qué

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se siente?
parrots perch:
sexual torture:
teléphono:
rápido
a corregir
no hay
ph
en
español
pero...
apollo:...
diagnosis of...:
falanga:
portugués
ellos
¿qué
sienten?
black slave:
cachots noirs:
o
¿qué...?
el quirófano:
sí dolor
los franceses

sí miedo.
Dice el Mingo que es como si miles de terminaciones de cables eléctricos
te tironearan de la carne.

Una mujer
con los labios pintados
de azul
le explica
al público
“el dolor físico no solamente
se resiste a ser verbalizado
sino que
destruye el lenguaje,
inmediatamente lo
revierte
al estado previo al lenguaje
a los sonidos y gritos
que profiere el ser humano
antes de aprender
la lengua”

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le petit déjeuner...:
le déjeuner:...
le rodeo:...
cajones:...
¿qué?
...
...
...
plantón:
...
pie
¡dad!

Besides immediately noting the poem’s multilingualism, including its first line in
English, Partnoy’s second-language, as a clear and purposeful problematization of
representative language responding to torture, one also recognizes the poem’s frequent
use of ellipses, which are crucial to the Poéticas. One might note, for example, that there
are eight ellipses in the first stanza, including two in the first two lines; none in the tiny
second stanza; and eight again in the final stanza, where they appear in eight of the final
twelve lines and comprise four of the final seven lines. Like this, the seemingly
hyperlingual poem actually pivots upon absences or silences in language, which permeate
the poem’s speech act. They stammer the reader and fragment the potential for narrative,
thereby echoing the impact of torture upon its victims, who can only struggle in vain to
respond to their experience. In Jean Franco’s words “[v]ictims grope for a language that
fails them, so that their narrative of horror is often banal” (242, emphasis added), with
that banality being a direct consequence of the inexpressibility of the experience of
torture and genocide. They are acts that by definition silence their witnesses, and this
contributes to Partnoy’s poem climaxing in her going almost mute in the final lines,
where the few scattered fragments of language face annihilation by the silence of the
ellipses circumscribing each uttered sound.

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In other words, the poem transforms silence by serializing its symbolic functions
through poetic decisions, such as its poetic deployment of punctuation like the ellipses.
Those ellipses begin by representing the simplest silence: that of torturer’s success in
silencing his victims on behalf of the state, yet they serve finally as a mode of speech for
resisting such state-sponsored silence. More precisely, the ellipses come to formulate a
language of non-language, an anti-rhetoric, with their eloquent silence signaling the
spectral return of desaparecidos to presence through the portal ellipses. Hence the ellipses
paradoxically articulate the desaparecidos’ silence and absence, speaking eloquently of
their traumatic disappearance and re-sounding their influence in the present. Moreover,
by (re)emerging through ellipses, the present absence of the desaparecidos unhinges time,
and this is a direct consequence of the poetic transformation of the grammatical function
of ellipses. That is, ellipses grammatically mark the postponement of speech, and in the
poem this becomes a trope for elucidating the inarticulability of the genocidal past, which
leaves its witnesses stammering, groping for language, struggling impossibly to find
modes of speech to represent the unrepresentable violence of torture and genocide. Thus,
in their grammatical postponement of speech, the ellipses intrinsically promise speech to
come, with that forthcoming speech in the poem implicitly to comprise a critique of state
violence. Consequently, those ellipses tropologically promise a postgenocidal justice to
come via a rearticulation of the past in the future, with such a movement being
profoundly layered and complicated.
More precisely, one of the most agonistic “derrotas” of the many ‘defeats’ or
‘failures’ comprising the “Poéticas de la Derrota” might be its permanent postponement
of any justice-to-come. This, too, is exemplified by the ellipses in “Torture Machine:

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Vocabulario.” There they promise justice-to-come by producing the conditions for the
spectral return of the desaparecidos, and it is important here to foreground that their
return is intrinsically disjunctive chronologically: The desaparecidos erupt in the present
from a past returned to affect the future. Thus the ellipses destabilize time as the basis for
justice. That is, their very spectrality, which is the aporetic core of the Poéticas de la
Derrota, disassembles the conditions for the possibility of the arrival of a just future
because the desaparecidos’ spectral return is as recursive as it is constant. To elucidate
this, one might extend Idelber Avelar’s postphenomenological analysis of genocidal
violence in Latin America by paying particular attention to his assertion that
“[s]pecters…are never coming for the first time. They are always returning” (86). As a
result of their oxymoronic destabilizing constancy, it is impossible, as Jacques Derrida
himself argues, “to distinguish between the future-to-come and the coming-back of the
specter” (“Specters” 38). Thus, when the desaparecido is (again) made present through
Partnoy’s Poéticas, the desaparecido is permanently postponing the arrival of justice to
come by collapsing the divide between the past and future. At best, Partnoy’s poetic
return of the desaparecido reasserts in the present the importance of recognizing the
impossibility of justice to come due to “the very fallenness of time as the condition of
possibility, as the basis, as the foundation for all justice as such” (Avelar 88). And this
comprises yet another painful layer of meaning of the term “derrota” in the Poéticas de la
Derrota: Partnoy foreknows that the aporetic return to presence of the desaparecido
ensures the permanent postponement of justice. In this manner, her Poéticas extends to
the Argentine genocide the Derridian postulation that “justice as such always means
justice to come” (Avelar 88). And in the meantime, while permanently waiting, one is left

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to struggle agonistically with the irresolvable and implacable afterlife of genocide,
including the intrinsic, a priori defeats illuminated by a Poéticas de la Derrota.

Time, Spectrality, and the (Im)Possibility of Justice

The exposure of the permanent displacement of the possibility of justice to come
counts among the most crucial methodological operations of the Poéticas de la Derrota. It
allows for the poetic theorization of the collision of justice, spectrality, and the state. This
occurs through the reemergence of those tortured to death during the Argentine genocide,
with their continuous spectral return revealing the impossibility of justice because the
specter is “that which returns, the one whose essence resides in returning itself…[and
therefore is] the embodiment of the law of iterability” (Avelar 86). Hence, when the
Poéticas inundates the present with an unresolved and irresolvable reiterable past,
Partnoy is not espousing the arrival of justice; she is espousing the defeat of justice via its
displacement, its inexorable suspension, its permanent postponement. More crucially, she
is espousing that defeat as richly generative. That generative defeat positions the Poéticas
to do more than merely reiterate familiar claims about the impossibility of representing
genocide due to the chasm between language and experience, for example. Rather, the
Poéticas elucidates the impossibility of justice due to the fragmentation and dissolution of
time as the foundation for justice, with that impossibility itself being profoundly affective
and productive.
That affective and productive impossibility is embedded within Partnoy’s ellipses,
for example, which contain foreknowledge of the futility and failure of the pursuit of

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justice. Consequently, while those ellipses signify the place and time of the paradoxical
conversion of absence into presence, as well as the spectral promise of an impossible
justice, they also help to construct the Poéticas’ tone. Tone is herein defined as the poet’s
disposition towards subject and audience, and the tone of Volando bajito, for example,
could be importantly discerned as one of agonistic, impossible yearning. This thereby
inflects Derrida’s aforementioned spectral framework, which recognizes both the
impossibility of justice and the productive impossibility of nevertheless “yearn[ing] for a
justice that one day, a quasi-messianic day, would finally be removed from the fatality of
vengeance” (Specters 21, emphasis added). And Partnoy’s Poéticas enacts and nuances
this. It could in fact be read as the poetics of an impossible struggle to reengage the
genocidal past beyond notions of mere vengeance so as to avoid reinscribing into the
present a merely retraumatizing rememoration. In this manner, it also eschews the
reductive collapse of justice into vengeance and/or restitution. Thus, the ellipses not only
mark the impossibility of the desaparecido to haunt the present and lay claim to the
future, but also the critical importance of the futility of that struggle.
In fact, the impossibility of that struggle becomes a mode of resisting state torture
in the Poéticas. To realize this, one might again track Partnoy’s transformations of
absence in the form of silence through her poetic use of ellipses in “Torture Machine:
Vocabulario.” There the first two ellipses initiate an agonistic silence underpinning the
experience of torture, whose memory alone returns the victim to traumatic silence. In
short, those ellipses, like torture, literally produce the nullification of the victim’s voice,
at least initially, although the spectral remnant of that nullification endures indefinitely.
Thus Partnoy’s opening claim of torture as “severe and prolonged” is accentuated non-

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linguistically by the ellipsis prolonging that first remembrance of the torturous
experience. Similarly, a (re)consideration of torturous “amputation” again plummets her
into voiceless suffering. This effect is then intensified linguistically by the poem’s
invocation of proper nouns naming forms of torture, like the “picana eléctrica” and “wet
submarine.” Those acts of (re)naming forms of torture—itself a problematic enterprise—
again silences the speaker, not only through an agonizing rememoration of experience,
but also through a grammar intrinsically positing that which cannot be named. This is in
fact the linguistic function of the proper noun, which is an absence, a ciphering of
experience as the inarticulable.
25
Hence the poem’s proper nouns speak silence, too,
much like the ellipses. That grammar of silence is further nuanced by other punctuation,
such as the Poéticas’ use of colons to equate language to silence and absence. Those
colons also disorientate the reader by confusing the institutional systematicity of
representative language through their ungrammatical usage between nouns and ellipses,
for example.
The poem can therefore be read as innovative poetic political dissent. It is the
inventive deployment and layering of various poetic techniques to enact an eloquent
silence paradoxically articulating the inconceivable and incommunicable experience of
torture, which silences its victims by dislocating them from language. In this manner, the
poem becomes metonymic of the broader political work of the Poéticas as a mode of
resisting sanitized, coherent, and/or completed official forms of historiography. Thus,
when the poem’s final four ellipses signal a surge of violence pushing the victim to the
brink of an absolute silence, she writhes and resists annihilation by eking out fragments
of speech, with that speech poetically structured by non-speech. And those complex

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utterances enable the reader to (re)consider the (re)formulation of speech through and
after torture, thereby granting the victims’ silence a generative agency: It can redeploy
absence against itself to resist the afterlife of state terror.
This poetic political resistance also illuminates torture’s legacy as the inexorable
deformation of language, with such deformation importantly containing newfound
potentiality in silence. In a sense, the poem could be thought as a protracted silence
ruptured only by disjointed, fragmentary utterances. This is epitomized by the cry for
help at the poem’s conclusion where the speaker begs the “plantón,” or “guard/torturer,”
to have pity on her. Even the enunciation of the word pity itself, “pie / ¡dad!,” enacts the
violence of the speaker’s confrontation with absolute silence. But it does so not through
language but through the non-language of the Poéticas. More precisely, in this case, the
word “piedad” follows an ellipsis, is split violently by enjambment, and concludes the
poem’s agonistic attempt at a speech act with an eruption of failed language dissolving
into silence. Thus, that confrontation with silence might seemingly emerge through
language (i.e. the disjointed “pie / dad”), but in actuality it is poetically produced through
a poetic grammar of silence (i.e. the use of the ellipses, enjambment, and white space)
privileging non-language.

Labios pintados de azul and The Inexpressibility of Physical Pain

Despite being predominantly produced by non-language, the agonistic and violent
processes of the Poéticas de la Derrota certainly include the innovative poetic
manipulation of language, too. In a more conventionally verbal sense, Partnoy transforms

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traditional poetic tropes, for example, into new forms of communicating genocidal
violence. One such trope is the metaphor, which she converts into a mode of producing
what might be termed a “language of the resurgent fragment.” And despite its emergence
through language, this is yet another iteration of the Poéticas’ primary aporia: the
paradoxical struggle to make absence present in an impossible effort to represent that
which exceeds representation. But in this case, rather than resurging through non-
language like the spectral white space or the ellipses in “Torture Machine: Vocabulario,”
the desaparecidos’ absence is made present through verbal metaphor. A good example of
this comes in the spectral “labios pintados / de azul” in “Torture Machine: Vocabulario,”
where those lips formulate a profound metonym for the poem’s—and the Poéticas’—
(re)presentation of the process and impact of enduring torture. More precisely, those lips
implicitly circumscribe the void of a mouth, from whose darkness emerges a ghostly
voice that “le explica / al público” that “dolor físico no solamente / se resiste a ser
verbalizado / sino que /destruye el lenguaje.” In other words, the lips metaphorize the
verbal and ontological inability of the survivor to articulate the constitutive void inside of
her in the wake of torture.
Of further note, those “labios pintados / de azul” also metonymically espouse the
rich intertextuality of Partnoy’s Poéticas. More specifically, the blue-lipped speaker in
the poem is the scholar Elaine Scarry, and her blue-lipped “explanation” of torture in the
poem is a quote from her book The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the
World (1985). That quote comes from a section of the book pertinently subtitled “The
Inexpressibility of Physical Pain,” where the original text reads “Physical pain does not
simply resist language but actively destroys it, bringing about an immediate reversion to a

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state anterior to language, to the sounds and cries a human being makes before language
is learned” (4), and this certainly overlaps some of the Poéticas’ central arguments and
insights about torture, absence, silence, and death. Yet such intertextuality can be
developed further, especially on phenomenological grounds.
For example, one could extend the intertextual dialogue about torture and pain
between Partnoy and Scarry to Avelar’s postphenomenological work on torture, justice,
and mourning in The Letter of Violence. There he directly contests Scarry’s claim in The
Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of Worlds that “torture ‘unmakes’ the world,”
calling such a perspective “naïve” and instead encouraging his readers to recognize
violence as constitutive and propulsive of world(s).
26
And Partnoy’s Poéticas argues
shares in his disposition. More specifically, one of the foremost “derrotas” of the Poéticas
de la Derrota—one of its most dispiriting ‘defeats’ and a priori ‘failures’—resides
inexorably in its foreknowledge and re-presentation of violence as complicit in, if not
constitutive of, the action of making world(s) through language. That is, the Poéticas is as
agonistically self-aware of its constitutive violence as it is aware of the violence(s) it
contests. In other words, just as the Poéticas agonistically exposes the constitutive
violence of the Videla dictatorship’s discursive attempts at (“occidental y cristiana”)
world-making, so, too, is the Poéticas aware of its own constitutive violence, which is the
violence of rupture, of irruption, of contestation, and of revelation. Thus, when Avelar
chides Scarry for philosophizing “as if this world had even been constituted
independently of pain” (31), he could be read intertextually here as arguing in
explanatory critical prose what Partnoy enacts through her Poéticas: the struggle to
represent the originary, inarticulable, and unrepresentable violence of world-making.

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Perhaps most importantly, such a struggle must be sustained in order to resist and/or
avoid submission to, if not complicity in, the perpetuation of dangerous contortions,
camouflagings, and/or elisions of the constitutive violence of world-making. To ignore or
overlook it—i.e. to ignore or overlook the agonistic aporia of striving to represent the
originary violence of world-making—is to risk its dangerous displacement to utopian
musings of worlds beyond suffering, with one such nightmarish, genocidal version being
Videla’s teleological, perfectionist vision of a forcibly homogenous “occidental y
cristiana” Argentina.
To intensify reflection on the intertextual analysis of violence intrinsic to Partnoy’s
Poéticas, one might further note that she has translated Scarry’s quote into Spanish in
“Torture Machine: Vocabulario.” As such, the translated excerpt metonymically re-
presents the very stakes of a poem about the impossibility of speech about torture. That
is, both the act and appearance of translation in this multilingual poem highlight its
argument about language as always already mediated, and therefore approximate,
imprecise, inadequate, and ‘defeated’ or ‘failed.’ And not only does that complicate
linguistic acts of representation, but, to extend the work of Nelly Richard on
postdictatorial cultural production, it avails them to poetic processes that “provide certain
aesthetic-critical counterpoints suggesting conflicting representations of the relationship
between history and memory” (19). This is clear in “Torture Machine: Vocabulario,”
where the act of translation can be read as emphasizing the self-alienating impact of a
language of torture. It distances the victim from acts of both intrapersonal and
interpersonal communication of the always already incomprehensible and inexpressible
experience of torture. Thus the suffering of the victim is intensified by the foreknown

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assurance of a self-destructive isolation in her agonistic realization of the ‘unsharability’
of torture. And that violence infuses the poem with yet another layer of absence in the
form of silence, which sets ‘history and memory’ in conflict.
More precisely, that agonistic, divisive silence emanates through self-alienating
linguistic slippage, imprecision, and misdirection. In Richard’s terminology, this creates
“a precarious narrative of the residual…capable of staging the decomposition of general
perspectives, centered visions, and finished portraits” (14). And this again is clearly
enacted poetically by Partnoy. Through her innovative combination of lineation with
translation in “Torture Machine: Vocabulario,” for example, she poetically conducts and
commingles the concomitant actions of mediating, fragmenting, stammering, halting, and
beginning anew, all the while (re)introducing to the poem the occlusions and
obfuscations intrinsic to the difficulty of translating the experience of torture into and
between language(s), despite the ostensible facility with which torturous regimes discuss,
exchange, and implement various “vocabularios” of “torture machines” and torture. Thus,
like Partnoy’s poetic use of punctuation like ellipses, her poetic use of translation and
lineation make further claims about the complicated, if not impossible, process of
conceiving of and articulating that which exceeds representation. Nevertheless, this is
precisely how the poem might meet Richard’s call for a Benjaminian, postdictatorial
aesthetics offering a “critique of monologic totalizations” by creating “plural
constellations of dispersed significations…[to] enter into a complicity of styles with
social imaginaries disintegrated by ruptures in the chain of a historical macrosyntagm”
(14).

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Again this comes in Partnoy’s Poéticas through poetic revelations and
installations of absence and failure. For example, as aforementioned, Partnoy’s
translation of Scarry’s text emphasizes the failure of attempts to communicate the
experience of torture, but it can now be recognized as doing so by productively layering
forms of failure. For example, in the case of the translation, failure emerges through a
double act of poetic transformation and dislocation: First the agony of torture is
incompletely (mis)represented in inadequate and splintered discursive speech in English
by Scarry. That process itself can be further nuanced by noting Partnoy’s intimation of
English, the language of her forced exile, as a “language that I had learned with such
difficulty” (Fire 12). Second, that inadequate and difficult English speech of Scarry’s is
then (re)mediated by its trans/deformation into a Spanish approximation to produce a
doubly flawed text regarding Partnoy’s perspective on torture, which she experienced in a
Spanish-language context in Argentina. Consequently, the return to Spanish in the
translation of Scarry’s text pertaining to Partnoy’s experience is a paradoxical act of
alienation, distancing Partnoy doubly from her native tongue, which is the originary
language of not only her experience of torture, but also of the genocide that she
predominantly seeks to interrogate. Most impressively, Partnoy carefully crafts the poem
such that these linguistic convolutions become remarkably productive, thereby
illuminating the innovative power of the Poéticas to respond to the deformations of
language and communicability by torture.

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“Aquellos que no fueron salvados:” Solidarity and the Survival of the Subject

Another means to identify and elucidate the deformations of language by torture
comes from reading the Poéticas de la Derrota through the question of survival. That
question in fact permeates the Poéticas, producing a poetry that ultimately transforms the
pursuit of that question into an active process of surviving torture, including its violent
afterlife. To enact that process, the question of survival is engaged transhistorically and
transculturally. Thus, Volando bajito, for example, invokes contexts as geographically,
temporally, and culturally diverse as Jerusalem, Ciudad Juárez, Baghdad, and Buenos
Aires. Through these various manifestations, that painful and pressing activity of survival
transcends the merely personal to gain a collective, counterhegemonic political heft,
much like classical testimonio. This is exemplified by the aforementioned juxtaposition
of locales of abusive state power in Volando bajito, which more or less offers a political
taxonomy of murder victims, including Montoneras, Sandinistas, Zapatistas, Mexican
children, Iraqi children, U.S. peace workers, and others. And despite such geographical,
temporal, and cultural diversity, the ghosts of those victims coalesce in Volando bajito
around a thematic of surviving injustice, with their different experiences being
amalgamated poetically by their structural collocation in the book as a poetic mosaic
offering a collective call for (impossible) justice for global victims of state violence.
Simultaneous to its international and public iterations in the book, that call for
justice is also pursued in excruciatingly personal terms. This is exemplified by the poem
“Respuesta” (“Volando” 28-31), which follows in its entirety:
¿…y vos
COMO TE SALVASTE?

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Es casi
acusación.
Es lápida.

Se me congelan
las ganas de contarte
lo de aquellos
que no fueron salvados,
lo de
ZulmaMaríaelenaBenjayBraco
MaryNestorGracielaRauleugenio
Y el
Proyectodeliberacionacional.

Yo
no me salvé.
Me salvaron
los pies caminadores
de mis padres,
los pies que daban vuelta
a la Pirámide,
las manos
que escribieron una carta,
la “sol
i dar
i dad”
de la Cecilia
y el cachetazo a tiempo
de la suerte,
el dedo de algún dios
desprevenido,
la decisión
de un tribunal de asesinos
que como
dice siempre
don Emilio
estará registrada en microfichas

y escondida en algun caja
fuerte
que se resiste
a todas las Pandoras.

Y ¿por qué me salvé?
Ahora andá y preguntales

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a ellos, los milicos.

Ellos sí saben.

Here Partnoy is furiously interrogating her own survival of torture until discovering
herself constituted by death(s). She lives, but her survival is attributable to death(s), the
deaths of thousands of desaparecidos. Their deaths comprise her; her postdictatorial life
is constituted by desaparecidos, whose absences saturate her being in the present. Thus
she recognizes herself as a porous materiality, or as the materialization of porosity. And
as a result, one of her ‘responses’ to the question of surviving torture is the recognition of
the (re)formulation of postdictatorial life as life lived through death, through absence and
loss. Thus the materiality of her life is constructed paradoxically of the absence(s) of
those tortured to death during the Argentine genocide: “aquellos / que no fueron
salvados.” Those desaparecidos, who are doubled absences in that they signify both the
absence of bodies of victims and the absence of discrete explanations for their absence,
found and pervade Partnoy’s postdictatorial life. Their spectral resurgence forms in her a
disconcerting collective of formerly singular subjectivities that have returned as a blurry
knot by the violence of their erasure and the struggle to resurface from it. Moreover, that
spectral knot forms the lacuna at the center of Partnoy’s survival and her questioning of
survival, with the reemergence of those desaparecidos being absence made present as
absence in the form of a knotted cipher of disappeared people, whose poetic resurgence
evacuates each desaparecido’s subjectivity of autonomy in its mutation into the
conglomerated, complex absence haunting Partnoy and founding her postdictatorial life.
However seemingly counterproductive and/or aporetic, this process of poetically
ciphering the doubly absent to produce a postdictatorial life through state-sponsored

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absence and death is nevertheless productively counterhegemonic. Those desaparecidos
exist intersubjectively through Partnoy’s Poéticas, resurging in the present to create a
heterogeneous amalgamation and (re)formulation of past opposition to abusive state
power. In other words, those disparate desaparecidos (re)convene in the postdictatorial
present as a counterhegemonic network (re)structuring opposition to the postdictatorial
“slogan of transparency that, in the name of the instrumental realism of consensus and of
its sociocommunicative logic, attempts to file down every rough spot on the already too-
polished and polite surface of the signs of agreement” (Richard 6). Tearing off that “too-
polished and polite surface” of official historiographies and facile postdictatorial cultural
production, the Poéticas probes the inchoate and ramshackle, and it produces a nonlinear,
non-positivist poetic experience of auto-destabilization, which splinters existing
denotative, ontological, and cultural meaning by incapacitating common discursive
modes of articulating torture and survival. Consequently, the Poéticas celebrates the
fluidity of identity, the impossibility of legibility, and the delusion of coherence, all of
which the genocidal dictatorship would want to oppose to perpetuate a univocal
domination of the state. Thus, one of the fundamental powers of a Poéticas de la Derrota
is its enactment of a generative destabilization of discourse through impurity, dispersal,
and incoherence. To build again upon Richard’s work on postdictatorial cultural
production, “[i]t is the impurity of that recollection that merits being made productive
through a practice of memory unconcerned with the linear restitution of a single
history…presuming to represent a totality of meaning” (6). And this is precisely the work
of the Poéticas. It privileges ‘impurity’ through a logic of ‘defeat’ that derails totalizing

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and/or foreclosing historiographies of the genocide and any associated cultural
production.
For the Poéticas, then, defeat is the generative process of surviving by making
absence presence. That is the action of survival, and it is actuated poetically by Partnoy.
This is again exemplified by “Respuesta,” this time in its poetic use of linguistic
compression. For example, Partnoy writes of “ZulmaMaríaelenaBenjayBraco /
MaryNestorGracielaRauleugenio” to resurface desaparecidos.
27
Here their amalgamation
signifies a political aesthetics critiquing abusive state power, with each protracted
compression metonymically signifying the genocidal state’s murderous work of
“Reorganization” by bluntly clumping together diverse Argentine subjects for
disappearance to eradicate subversion. And therein, Partnoy is suggesting another
“response” to the agonistic question of surviving genocide: One survives by enduring the
injustice of the process, including its seemingly capricious murders. And this is
emphasized in “Respuesta” by the naming of a plurality of opponents to abusive state
power. In other words, the Poéticas is innovatively using proper nouns here. Where
proper nouns are intended grammatically to individuate, here they appear
ungrammatically as a blurred, categorical lump, with that transformation being a crucial
action of the Poéticas: The invocation of individual names of desaparecidos rememorates
each specific victim while acknowledging their terrible inclusion in the state’s brutal,
anonymizing violence of repressive homogenization. In other words, through the proper
nouns, individual victims conjoin poetically into an emblem of the dictatorship’s process
of abduction, torture, murder, and disappearance.

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Quite poignantly, each proper name also resurfaces an individual subjectivity
from the oblivion of the past, thereby positioning the Poéticas as a counterhegemonic,
Benjaminian historiographical force. It poetically rescues individual desaparecidos from
historiographical oblivion to critique the violence of the state that aimed to banish them
to that aforementioned oblivion. This process can be illuminated further through
intertextual analysis. For example, via Partnoy’s aforementioned memoir, The Little
School, one can intertextually infer that the “María Elena” in “Respuesta” is likely María
Elena Romero, and that “Benja” is likely Gustavo Marcelo “Benja” Yoti. The couple, age
16 and 17, respectively, was incarcerated and tortured in La escuelita alongside Partnoy
before being anesthetized, transferred, and murdered by the military (106-7). Similarly,
“Graciela” likely refers to Graciela Alicia Romero de Metz, one of Partnoy’s closest
friends in La escuelita. Graciela was abducted with her husband, Raúl Eugenio Metz, by
the military on 16 December 1976, when she was twenty-four-year-old, a mother of a
two-year-old, and five-months pregnant. During her abduction, Graciela was repeatedly
tortured by the common method of electrocution by cattle prod—the “picana eléctrica,”
as found in “Torture Machine: Vocabulario,” too, for example—although in this case it
was set repeatedly to her pregnant belly. Six days after giving birth to a son on 17 April
1977, she was taken from La escuelita never to be seen again, with her son having been
illegally given to one of the torturers at La escuelita according to its guards (105-6). And
through “Respuesta,” Partnoy poetically reemerges these disappeared friends, whose
absence is made present and agonistically constitutes her survival.

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Buried in the Body: Locating the Poéticas de la Derrota

The Poéticas de la Derrota utilizes non-language and language to make absence
present through the reader’s body with political, epistemological, ontological, and poetic
purpose. This is clear, for example, in the aforementioned protracted utterances. They
poetically affect the reader corporally by altering her very breath, which must enact a
discomfiting, atypical, and extended rhythm to articulate those conglomerated proper
nouns. That act of atypical articulation importantly de- and re-materializes those
desaparecidos. They had disappeared during the genocide, reemerged in print in
“Respuesta,” and disappeared again by being internalized by the reader, through whom
the desaparecidos ultimately regain corporality, being carried in the reader’s body. Thus,
the Poéticas instrumentalizes the reader as a vehicle for reemerging desaparecidos, who
are re-incorporated death in the living bodies of readers. Like this, Partnoy’s survival is a
necropoetics. It is a poetics of absence, defeat, and death forcing her to endure a complex
construction of ciphers and imbuing her readers with similar absences via the verbal and
non-verbal grammar of the Poéticas.
That poetically innovative grammar agonistically reconstructs life through the
materiality of a poetry (re)producing absence. To illuminate that grammar quite literally,
one could revisit “Respuesta,” for example. There, as aforementioned, lineation becomes
a crucial means of composing the breath unit of the line to resist more official forms of
postdictatorial historiography. The syllabic density of lines like
“ZulmaMaríaelenaBenjayBraco / MaryNestorGracielaRauleugenio” creates suspense
through the protracted duration of the compound proper noun(s). That suspense is made

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more disturbing by the ungrammatical surprises of the capital letters interspersed
throughout the “word,” thereby further destabilizing the act of reading via a convolution
of normative grammatical standards. This also controls the reader’s breath to the point of
exhausting it via the unbroken polysyllabics, with the reader granted only the briefest
respite by the single line break before beginning again the exhausting process with the
next line’s protracted compression. And, in an infinitesimally minute and approximate
way, that use of lineation disturbs, surprises, and exhausts the reader through her
breathing to reenact some of the destabilizing shock and complexity of physically and
cognitively enduring the dictatorship, with the reader thereby realizing her corporality as
permeated by the absent dead.
Of note, this process of reemerging the dead through the living is not restricted to
the reemergence of dead people; it also includes “dead” or defeated political ideology.
For example, “Respuesta” uses its aforementioned poetic trope of lineation to reemerge
the defeated “proyectodeliberacionacional,” which was a counterhegemonic ideology of
resistance crushed by the genocidal state. Thus, the poetic reemergence of that movement
as a protracted compression illustrates that political project’s defeat by the dictatorship
and its reemergence in the living through its defeat and death. Moreover, punctuation
becomes poetically purposeful in that line, which is a polysyllabic referent culminating in
a period to end-stop the line, which is followed by a stanza break. In essence, then, the
line is forcefully and abruptly stopped by a grammar metaphorizing the forceful end of
the movement (the period) and the subsequent void left in its wake (the stanza break).
More broadly, that punctuation inaugurates a metonymic reference to the sociopolitical

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voiding of alternative spaces to the dictatorship, as well as the generative potentiality of
such violently produced voids.
Thus one mode of survival enacted by the Poéticas’ comes via its violent
production of voids, including the realization of their affirmative, counterhegemonic
potentiality. This is exemplified in “Respuesta” by the generative disarticulation of the
word “solidaridad” as “sol / i dar / i dad.” More precisely, the Argentine dictatorship
aimed to crush oppositional solidarity movements, thus the very word of “solidarity” is
disarticulated in the poem by violent (de)lineation. That verbal violence poetically
signifies the dictatorship’s work to dismantle solidarities of resistance, as well as its
overarching attempt to scatter the very possibility of the concept. However, in her
survival, Partnoy transforms the violence of fragmentation into a new mode of
postdictatorial meaning through fragmentation. Thus, for example, in the fragmentation
of the word “solidaridad” one recognizes the sudden (re)emergence of the “sun” (“sol”).
Similarly one can discern the surprising return of variations of “giving” (“dar” and
“dad”), with the dictatorial state implicitly counterposed as a mode of taking (e.g. taking
freedoms, taking property, taking land, taking life). Hence the shards of state-sponsored
violence are collected and reexamined through a Benjaminian historiographical process,
reconfiguring defeat as a mode of resistance and hope despite the overwhelming violence
of the dictatorship and its afterlife. And ironically, it is the state’s assault on oppositional
solidarity that unintentionally creates the conditions for new ontological, epistemological,
and political formations of oppositional solidarity, both during and after the genocide,
with those new formations emerging precisely through the rupture, fragmentation, and
dispersal that paradoxically reconstitute the survivor’s body.

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Thus, the speaker of “Respuesta,” for example, concludes by reiterating her
confusion at her own survival, which is the survival through death-as-life and which feels
like “el cachetazo a tiempo / de la suerte.” Perhaps more painfully haunting is her
survival being directly attributable to “la decisión / de un tribunal de asesinos,” who
inaugurated her life’s baffling, agonizing transfiguration by death. As a result of being
forced ineluctably to endure postdictatorial life as constituted by death, Partnoy speaks
with incandescent indignation, repeatedly asking in her deformation “Y ¿por qué me
salvé?” And the answer to that question is even more painful as it demands the
reinvocation of the survivor’s torturers as yet again founding her postdictatorial life
because, unlike her, “los milicos. // …sí saben” why she survived. In other words,
Partnoy cannot herself elucidate the central cipher of her existence, which is both
reinscribed yet again in her through that painful recognition and rendered extrinsic and
inaccessible.
Moreover, in this manner the problematization of response to the question of
survival becomes more than something merely contrary to the state and/or merely
reinscribing the state’s violence. Instead, it enacts the paradoxical processes of the
Poéticas, which (re)construct and (re)present the survivor as a body whose materiality is
both painfully and productively riddled with plural, present absences. Thusly the Poéticas
again espouses its process of reemergence through absence, which importantly posits
more than mere opposition to the genocidal state. Rather, the Poéticas produces a mode
of sense-making that has ontological, epistemological, and political ramifications well
beyond a narrow dialectic, however important, of the Argentine dictatorship and its
victims. If extending again the work of Nelly Richard on postdictatorial Chilean art, then

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one could read Volando bajito, for example, as aspiring to be more than “merely contrary
to the dominant point of view…[and instead] taking aim at the larger order of its
signifying structure…[so as to avoid] remaining inscribed within the same linear duality
of a Manichean construction of meaning” (4). And even if Partnoy’s book fails in this
ambition, then it fails in ways producing a more astute and transformative actuation of
the corporeal process of surviving torture and genocide.

Concluding the Inconclusive: Absence as Counterhegemonic Weapon

Partnoy’s Poéticas de la Derrota is neither innocent nor pacifistic. It responds to
state violence by inaugurating its own forms of violence. Principally, that violence is the
violence of rupture, and it aims to assault falsely codified, coherent, and/or
institutionalized forms of knowledge and culture. The Poéticas attacks those forms of
knowledge and culture in an attempt to make present formerly foreclosed and banished
absence without merely retraumatizing the public or perpetuating the tyranny of the state.
In other words, the Poéticas works to redress the problem of representation as it pertains
to the victim’s experience of torture in relation to official historiographies and discourses.
To pursue that, the Poéticas aporetically disrupts, disturbs, and fractures. It then ferrets
through the destabilized and dismantled spaces, structures, systems, and rhetoric of the
genocidal state in a searching, agonistic effort to reclaim the generative power of
absence. In short, then, Partnoy’s cultural production operates through a violence of
destruction, although mere destruction is not its purpose. Rather, it splinters lucid and

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coherent historiographical narratives so as to create from the consequent wreckage the
opportunity for new ontological, political, and epistemological meaning.
Of special importance, this poetic process renders absence as communicative as
materiality, with both non-language and language, in themselves and in symbiosis,
producing new modes of re-presenting the Argentine state’s domination of life by
marginalization and extermination in the name of “National Reorganization.”
Consequently, one could claim the Poéticas’ paradoxical (re)production of absence as
contestatory presence to be among the most powerful challenges to official discourses
and historiographies of the postdictatorial Argentine state. Through the Poéticas, it comes
clear that survivors of genocide endure its deforming afterlife by oscillating between
materiality and absence, creating new conditions for life out of death, out of a
necropoetics, a Poéticas de la Derrota. As a result, the Poéticas becomes a mode of
action; it exists in resisting abusive state power. It invokes and arranges poetic tropes and
figures to orchestrate the action of enduring the present absence of an agonistic past in
the form of spectral violence. This can perhaps be further illuminated by building upon
the work of Gilles Deleuze on the modern biopolitical state.
For example, in his 1986 book on Foucault, he could herein be read intertextually
as speaking prophetically of Partnoy’s 2005 announcement of her necropolitical Poéticas
when he explains that “power does not take life as its objective without revealing or
giving rise to a life that resists power; and finally that the force of the outside continues to
disrupt the diagrams and turn them upside down” (94). The Poéticas certainly develops
along such lines. It arises through a poet expulsed from the social order by both her
experience as a desaparecida within Argentina and then as a forced exile in the United

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States, meaning that the Poéticas certainly strikes in a variety of ways from the “outside”
of the “reorganized” Argentine state. Furthermore, in following the logic in the excerpt
from Deleuze, the Poéticas also aims to flip “upside down” the state’s official
historiographical, epistemological, and ontological legacies. In fact, the Poéticas aims to
shatter the very mechanisms of its oppression by exposing the conditions of genocidal
violence and its afterlife as disallowing coherent and lucid representation. The afterlife of
genocidal violence renders life always already disordered, disrupted, and instable due to
the continuous return to presence of its constitutive desaparecidos.
As such the Poéticas ironically becomes the type of counterhegemonic force that
the Videla dictatorship had feared in Partnoy when deciding to kidnap her. The Poéticas
seeks to disarm the murderous illogic of the state, contesting the prevarication and
dissimulation of the Proceso de Reorganización Nacional. Where the dictatorship
espoused it as a defense of “nuestra civilización occidental y cristiana” (emphasis added),
the Poéticas unveils the originary violence in the rhetorical sleight of hand in pronouns
presupposing and implying claims to a collective, uniform, coherent, and just purpose in
usurping democratic power by autocratic force. In other words, the dictatorship was
brutally aware of the importance of rhetorical authoritarianism to what Deleuze would
later term “societies of control” (“Postscript”), and the action of exposing this is
foundational to the political potentiality of the Poéticas. That action positions Volando
bajito, for example, as a counterhegemonic, subversive weapon, and this is cause for
hope. For if societies of control define themselves by their shift “to rule on death rather
than to administer life” (Deleuze, “Postscript”), then one potential counterstrike to such
control and its violent afterlife might come through Partnoy’s necropoetic wresting of

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death from state control by transforming death into life by paradoxically making absence
present as a newly (re)configured porous materiality.
This conflates with Partnoy’s most direct and assertive claims about her poetics in
Volando bajito, such as her ars poetica in the poem “…Poética” (9). There she explains
that “[e]scribo rescatando sedimentos” that include “a veces / un cadáver” in order to
reformulate life through death. In this manner, her poetic process makes state-sponsored
absence present and eloquent as a critique of the genocidal state and its violent legacy.
However, as she aptly declares in the very title of her project as a Poéticas de la Derrota,
her failure is inevitable. No matter how industriously, innovatively, and/or valiantly she
may attempt to (re)formulate life through death via poetic modes of “volando bajo,” she
will fail. And she will fail because her poetics necessarily contains an essential lacuna at
its core: it is founded upon absence, upon the absent, upon their permanent and
permanently recursive return. Hence, no matter how meticulously she may scour the
postdictatorial landscape for scattered “palabras,” including the most “olvidadita” of
them, her aspiration to create a transformative, counterhegemonic poetry can at best
function “como la carne / cadáver que transita / a la semillas” (Volando 4, emphasis
added). That is, the poetic trope of the simile becomes crucial here as a metonym,
structurally arguing the failure intrinsic to acts of approximation; the desaparecidos will
always be present, but they will be present as absence; they are permanent absences, but
their absence will remain always present. Thus the simile conjures both their availability
in the present and their simultaneous unreachability, with the latter signaling the
inevitable and intrinsic defeat or failure of actions attempting to approach and (re)present
them.

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This is the irresolvability of the aporia founding the Poéticas. It paradoxically
materializes absence, thereby emphasizing the distance between experience and
representation. As a result, the Poéticas at best offers an instable, approximate, and
fragmentary discursive mode of living life through defeat, death, and absence. With
astute self-awareness, the Poéticas aims to articulate its own undoing. Thus, for example,
Partnoy explains in the poem “…Poética” (8) that even when she is able to locate and
rescue a forgotten corpse, it evanesces in the poetic process of its (re)production: “[l]o
traigo a superficie, lo reanimo, / [y] lo despierto / a golpe de verbo y adjetivo,” but that
reanimated corpse “…casi siempre / …me juega la mala pasada de esfumarse / al más
leve contacto con mi verso” (7-13). And therein one sees yet again both the aim and
failure of the aporetic Poéticas. One sees both the poet’s vigorous poetic engagement
with death to produce life, and the powerful resistance of death to its reinscription in life,
with that antinomy intensifying the stakes of the Poéticas as a possible response to the
question of surviving torture and genocide. In other words, the Poéticas may offer a
somewhat Benjaminian process of rescuing a forgotten corpse from the past, lodging it in
the present, and insisting upon that action as a mode of enduring and evading societies of
control. Yet as a direct consequence of such a mode of rescue and reconstitution of life
from historiographical oblivion, the reemerged desaparecido dissolves and disappears
maddeningly again into oblivion, thereby reabsorbing the poet/reader into the violent,
historical legacy of the genocidal state.
Nevertheless, such moments of poetic (re)implosion also posit the generative
power of the Poéticas, however infinitesimally minute that power may be in relation to
the massive and overwhelming historical facticity of genocide and its legacy of suffering.

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More precisely, the Poéticas’ small but potent generative power lies in the productive
potentiality of the aporia of poetically produced absence. This is discernible, for example,
in the aforementioned adverb “casi” in the line “casi siempre” from the poem
“…Poética.” That “casi” emblematically suggests the radical incompletion of defeat and
absence. And through that incompletion, the Poéticas can pose poetry as a mode of
cultural production (re)opening the past to the present for critical intervention and
reinterpretation. More succinctly, that “casi” metonymically signifies the productive
potentiality of the Poéticas to reemerge desaparecidos as a postdictatorial process of
survival that privileges absence and death as constitutive of a mode of resistance to the
violent afterlife of the legacy of the genocidal state. In other words, incompletion is the
basis of a poetic struggle, however much that struggle self-consciously presupposes itself
to fail. And regardless of failure, Partnoy persists in writing and rewriting that
(impossible) struggle to try to overcome the dissolution of reemerged life into spectral
smoke and then oblivion, with her aim being the necropoetic (re)incorporation of that
spectral residue into the corporality of the reader, to whom Volando bajito, for example,
exhaustively presents ontological, epistemological, and political alternatives to the
retraumatizing violence of the legacy of the genocidal Argentine state in the Argentine
imaginary and beyond.

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Count-Time: Neoliberalism, Subjectivity, and Jimmy Santiago Baca’s Prisoner Poetry

In the mapping of global struggles for subjective reemergence from state
domination and oppression in the neoliberal age, one fascinating form of resistance
comes from Pinta/o, or Chicana/o prisoner, poets in the United States.
28
Written from
deep within systems of carceral control, their poetry exposes and contests the ontological,
social, political, and material violence of the U.S. prison regime. Of note that layered
network of violences is argued herein as constitutive of the state, as opposed to
consequential or tangential to it. Furthermore that violent process of state formation is
posited as a function of neoliberal subjectivation, meaning the production of individual
subjects under the conditions and in the service of neoliberal structures of power.
Consequently the prison can be theorized as an important threshold: It becomes both a
site and an episteme of neoliberal (re)subjectivation. That is, the prison is a locus for the
violence of subjectivation as well as a logic of it. To illuminate and critique such
violence, this essay performs close readings of Pinta/o poetry with the aim of
inaugurating and foregrounding a specifically poetic argument about the interplay of
subjectivity, neoliberalism, and U.S. carceral culture, thereby reconsidering and
expanding the archive on those subjects, which is predominated by sociological,
economic, and historiographical interventions.

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To initiate its poetic argument, this essay builds an aesthetic, or sensory, vector of
analysis of Pinta/o poetry within a discursive matrix integrating literary theory with
political history, cultural criticism, economic theory, and Chicana/o studies. There the
canonical Pinto poetry of the self-identified Chicano-Apache poet Jimmy Santiago Baca
in Immigrants in Our Own Land (1979) and What’s Happening (1982) emerges as
important to reconsider for both its cultural visibility and its poetic innovation.
29
More
precisely, through historicized close readings, that poetry becomes a site for the poetic
exploration and contestation of the neoliberal subjectivation of Pinta/o bodies. Such an
approach to Baca’s poetry is as sociopolitically necessary as it is critically unprecedented
despite the depth and diversity of existing, outstanding scholarship on his oeuvre. For
example, the most comprehensive and nuanced book to date on Pinta/o cultural
production, B.V. Olguín’s groundbreaking La Pinta: Chicana/o Prisoner Literature,
Culture, and Politics (2010), argues Baca’s Pinto poetry to be a “rhetorically problematic
and ideologically ambiguous” (66-8) variant of Pinto ethnopoetics growing out of
medieval literary traditions and firmly rooted in the material conditions of Chicano prison
life. Thus Olguín’s emphasis is on the historicization, localization, and categorization of
Baca’s Pinto poetry as opposed to its formal literary analysis. Similarly, Rafael Pérez-
Torres suggests in Movements in Chicano Poetry: Against Myths, Against Margins
(1995) that Baca “[p]erhaps more than any other contemporary poet…writes out of the
pinto poetic tradition,” meaning “a tradition in which poetic and political consciousness
grow out of the institutional confinement endured by Chicanos” (118), and Pérez-Torres
even mentions Baca’s Pinto verse as an imperative poetic opportunity “to transform and
connect [the free world and prison] through the process of aesthetic creation” (118,

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emphasis added). But rather than investigate that aesthetic creation through the formal
analysis of Baca’s poetry, Pérez-Torres diverges into important and insightful historical,
sociological, and psychological arguments about institutional dehumanization, carceral
violence, prisoner transcendence, and Chicana/o identities.
30

Thus the purpose of this essay comes clear: To augment the archive of scholarship
on Baca’s oeuvre by performing meticulous close readings of his Pinto poetry. Through
that analysis, this essay is able to theorize a powerful Pinto poetic affect capable of
revealing not only the many forms of violence suffered by prisoners, but also the very
conditions of neoliberal violence in the U.S. More deeply, that theorization of that double
impact of Baca’s Pinto poetic affect—of confronting the prison as both a site of
neoliberal violence and logic of it—will unveil a foundational paradox of neoliberalism:
It creates through erasure. Thus the formal analysis of Baca’s Pinto poetry will expose
the U.S. prison regime as a system pivoting upon a normativizing, neoliberal violence of
erasure, meaning that it elides and/or excises targeted subjective elements from the body
politic in a teleological, positivist effort to produce a seemingly cohesive and uniform
U.S. society meant to maintain the smooth and steady function and expansion of its
political economy. Consequently a core contention of this essay is that identitarian,
social, and political formations in the U.S. are produced and structured by absence, with
Baca’s Pinto poetry affectively making such absences present, active, and available for
reconsideration.

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Baca’s Pinto Poetic Affect: A Coming to Terms

Jimmy Santiago Baca was born into poverty in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1952.
Soon thereafter his parents separated and each independently abandoned him, leaving
him to live with his paternal grandparents in Estancia, New Mexico. In 1959, his paternal
grandfather died, forcing Jimmy’s blind and enfeebled paternal grandmother to place him
in a Catholic orphanage in Albuquerque. A frequent runaway from that orphanage, Baca
states matter-of-factly in his memoir, A Place to Stand (2001), that he was thirteen years
old when he landed “behind bars for the first time, in a detention center for boys” (20).
31

From there he would go on to a life on the streets, hustling to survive, which brought him
into frequent contact with law enforcement. In 1973, he was convicted in Arizona of
federal drug charges, for which he would spend nearly six years in the maximum-security
prison in Florence, often in solitary confinement, where he struggled to subsist.
32

Nevertheless he managed to teach himself to read and write while imprisoned, and today
his oeuvre includes more than twenty books of poetry, fiction, and memoir, and several
screenplays. That oeuvre also has received sustained critical attention from some of the
brightest minds in Chicana/o and literary studies, such as B.V. Olguín, Cordelia
Candelaria, and Rafael Pérez-Torres. However the rigorous formal analysis of his Pinto
poetry—and particularly its powerful poetic production of affect—remains unrealized to
date.
To establish the critical conditions for the close reading of Baca’s poetic
production of affect, several foundational terms require definition. Chief among them is
the term affect because its use varies widely across and within the fields of literary,

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cultural, and critical theory. Here affect will signify a sensory codex. It is a corporeal
calculus of the sensory and the sensible that stimulates, registers, and conducts
ontological thought, experience, possibility, and action, with that ontology ramifying
through social, cultural, and political life. Affect, then, is the recognition, if not creation,
of a sensory vocabulary for being. It is a modality for conducting, identifying, and
arranging subjective experience, and through Baca’s Pinto poetry, it paradoxically makes
absence present, felt, and active, thereby exposing the productive violence of erasure at
the core of neoliberalism. Thus Baca’s affect of absence is grounded in and
communicated by the Pinto body. To build upon Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa
Gregg’s use of cultural theory and ontological philosophy to define affect as “a gradient
of bodily capacity…[comprising] a supple incrementalism of ever-modulating force-
relations” (Seigworth 2), Baca’s prisoner poetry explores the ‘ever-modulating force-
relations’ of neoliberalism that structure absence within and through the Pinta/o body.
In other words neoliberalism subjectivates by the violence of erasure, and Baca’s
Pinto poetry unveils this. He poetically cultivates in his readers an affective
understanding of the U.S. prison as a site of Pinta/o (re)subjectivation by erasure in the
service of state formation. More precisely, Baca’s Pinto verse instantiates and questions
the violence of erasure against the prisoner body. In doing so, it recognizes and
denounces what cultural critic Dylan Rodríguez calls the “carceral-punitive regime” in
the U.S., which he further defines as a colonialist, white-supremacist system of
domination and exploitation that renders “the captive as both the state’s abstracted legal
property/obligation and intimate bodily possession” (42). That idea of bodily possession
is especially important here as Baca’s Pinto poetry thematizes and impugns the legalized

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co-optation and abuse of the captive body through neoliberal (re)subjectivation within
U.S. prisons. Furthermore Baca’s affect of absence suggests these (re)subjectivating
erasures to be firstly ontological. Through his affect of absence, Baca evokes and re-
presents state-sponsored erasures of potentially and/or actually subversive and/or
alternative ontological elements of prisoner subjectivity. To build upon Rodríguez’s
Foucauldian, historicist terms, those re-presented erasures subversively mark in the
Pinta/o body the traces of the U.S. prison as the institutionalization of a “white-
supremacist desire for surveiling, policing, caging, and (preemptively) exterminating
those who embod[y] the gathering storm of dissidence” (22). More trenchantly, through
Baca’s Pinto poetry, affect becomes an ontology of present absence.
Rejecting the violence of neoliberal subjectivation, Baca’s affect of absence
engenders the symbolic return of erased Chicana/o and Native American dissidence as a
radical liberation and prison(er) abolitionist politics. Here, then, neoliberalism must be
redefined. As realized through Baca’s Pinto poetry, neoliberalism is far more than the
national and transnational economic model of power devised in the 1950’s by Friedrich
von Hayek, Milton Friedman, and others according to a foundational socioeconomic
“assumption that individual freedoms are guaranteed by freedom of the market and of
trade” (Harvey 7). Instead neoliberalism is firstly an ontological violence: It is a violence
of subjective disallowance, proscription, and erasure. It targets and bans dissidence
through processes of (re)subjectivation, whereby select aspects of subjectivity (which,
ironically, are themselves elements of ‘individual freedoms’) are erased to foment a
political economy of embodied and commodified absence. Consequently the terms
subjectivity and subjectivation merit definition, too. In this essay the latter signifies a

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structuring and ordering process through which converging power relations result in the
normalizing production of the individual subject. This is not to be confused with
subjectivity, meaning the subjective possibilities and potentialities that always already
exist both prior to and in excess of the subject produced or interpellated by
subjectivation. In fact, one of the greatest strengths of Baca’s Pinto poetry is its use of
poetic affect to illustrate the incommensurability of subjectivation and subjectivity.
That incommensurability delimits a crucial distance or difference between
subjectivity and subject, which is the measure of what is erased, excised, and/or lost in
neoliberal subjectivation. It also therefore comprises the possibility of resistance.
Subjectivation is never totalizing, and Baca’s Pinto verse opens a postcolonial horizon of
subjective freedom in the neoliberal present. It inflects and contemporizes Alberto
Moreiras’s Hegelian insight into subjective unfreedom during colonial state formation,
when “the principle of subjective particularity [was] also denied its right in favor of the
substantiality of the state” (“Freedom” 120). Moreover, Moreiras adds that “[t]he liberal
state form, postindependence, did nothing to alter this structure, which secretly subsists
through the national-popular state form and into the neoliberal present” (“Freedom” 120).
And perhaps Baca’s Pinto poetry can be thought here precisely as the purposeful
revelation of that ‘secret.’ The colonial unfreedom of denied subjectivity is the violence
of erasure in the neoliberal present. To reframe Sean Kicummah Teuton’s pertinent work
on the violence of settler colonialism, Baca’s Apache-Chicano prisoner poetry performs
the counter-foundational, counterhegemonic work of clarifying “the inherited and lived
colonial realities of political subjugation and cultural destruction, [and] the
incontrovertible facts of social location…[because s]uch experiences inform cultural

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identity, and identity, in turn, serves to interpret these experiences” (Teuton 170). In other
words Baca’s Pinto affect of absence makes explicit the distance between subjectivity
and subjectivation; it exposes the political, cultural, and ontological erasures that
formulate the neoliberalized Pinto subject. In short, then, it illustrates the incompletion of
subjectivation and the ineradicability of opposition and alternatives to it. Much as Gilles
Deleuze explains of Foucault’s conception of biopower, Baca’s Pinto poetry shows how
“power does not take life as its objective without revealing or giving rise to a life that
resists power; and finally that the force of the outside continues to disrupt the diagrams
and turn them upside down” (“Foucault” 94).
To elucidate further the terms of Baca’s poetic inversion and subversion of
neoliberal power, one might hereby tweak Brian Massumi’s political theorization of the
affect of the public threat, which he suggests as signaling that “[w]hat is not actually real
can be felt into being” (54, emphasis added). For Massumi, that affect is a normalizing,
disciplinary force realized through the body. In Baca’s Pinto verse, however, that affect
of threat is turned against itself, formulating a liberation ontology through the counter-
foundational production of the affect of absence. That is, Baca manipulates and exhibits
the threat to show through the Pinta/o body his reclamation of political, cultural, and
ontological erasures, thereby making racialized, state-enforced absences
counterhegemonically felt into being. Baca’s affect of present absence can therefore be
understood as the symbolic re-presentation and contestation of the trauma of state-
sponsored acts of oppression, disempowerment, and exclusion. More radically, one could
theorize Baca’s affect of absence as an unprecedented literary extension of Catherine
Malabou’s avant-garde study of neuroscience, trauma, and identity in The New Wounded:

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From Neurosis to Brain Damage (2007). There she conceptualizes “a destructive
plasticity” of brain lesions, meaning “a type of plasticity that, under the effects of a
wound, creates a certain form of being by effacing a previously existing identity” (xv).
Seizing that concept, Baca’s prisoner poetry could be analyzed as Pinto poetic destructive
plasticity: It exhibits the power of poetic form to symbolically recover, reactivate, and
reintroduce erasures as present, affective absence. It asks if Pinto poetic “plasticity
make[s] form through the annihilation of form?” (Malabou xv).

The Pinto Poetic Destructive Plasticity of Overcrowding

A good example of the Pinto poetic destructive plasticity of Baca’s prisoner
poetry comes in the poem “Overcrowding” from What’s Happening (1982). As a whole
that book thematizes the violence of erasure, offering poem after poem of the prisoner’s
enforced disintegration and his subsequent (re)constitution by absence, and this is
certainly evident in “Overcrowding” (21-22). It exemplifies a Pinto destructive plasticity
by reconfiguring the prisoner body and imaginary as a realm of overlapping present
absences. Through its emphasis on creation through erasure, “Overcrowding” can
therefore be understood as pushing its readers to a threshold of neoliberal life, where the
subject’s interpellation through erasure marks a historicized moment of subjectivating
violence. There, at that outermost boundary of neoliberalized life, Baca exhorts his
readers to realize, as Michel Foucault suggests, that “[w]e should not…be asking subjects
how, why, and by what right they can agree to being subjected [assujettir], but showing
how actual relations of subjection [assujettissement] manufacture subjects” (SD 45). And

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in “Overcrowding,” the manufacture of subjects is explored as the incorporation of
absence in prisoner bodies. Here are the first two stanzas of the poem:
The maintenance man was banging loudly
Fixing the mechanism above one of the cell doors.
Showers were sputtering out water on each tier,
TV and radio sounding deafeningly in a duel
All over the cavernous cellblocks extra loud,
The last of the cons just returning from supper
When they found Gary lying up on the tier,
With stab wounds too numerous to count,
“Looked like Swiss cheese,” one guard said.

I caught a glimpse of him…
Face covered with a sheet, one blood-spotted boot
Dangling out of the sheet,
One puffed and pale hand turning blue,
Being wheeled out on a stretcher.
From the very title—“Overcrowding”—Baca is already introducing and
thematizing a fundamental paradox of the neoliberal prison regime: It fills prisons with
absence. It produces through erasure, enacting a Pinto destructive plasticity. It inflects the
Foucauldian logic of relation between power and subjectivity, whereby “the subject really
is and remains a ‘hollow gap’ in the field of power relations” (Harrer 81). And it
exemplifies the infrapolitical possibility of an affect of absence. After introducing
paradoxes like these through the poem’s title, Baca employs poetic tropes and
conventions such as rhythm, internal rhyme, lineation, diction, image, and metaphor in
order to (re)formulate and (re)enact his experience with that theme. Ultimately his poetic
efforts create a reverberant affect that allows the poem to supersede itself by presenting
more than it can contain. That is, through a composite layering of poetic evocations of
erasure and absence, the poem tropologically conjures the violence of neoliberal
subjectivation through the prison regime, which is a violence that both founds and

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exceeds the poem. Nevertheless, Baca is able to harness and focus it temporarily through
the poem, chiefly through his artful manipulation of poetic conventions to render active
sites of absence.
For example, in the opening two lines, Baca introduces the spatial and sensory
conditions for the (re)subjectivation of prisoners. He organizes this by focusing the reader
upon a site of that subjectivation: the cell. That cell, however, is merely outlined; it is
sketched indirectly by the mention of its façade, which is alluded to via “the mechanism
above one of the cell doors.” Thus even the naming of the “cell doors” in the poem is a
ghostly affective gesture, whereby the poet verbally signifies the cell without doing so
directly. In other words, it is absence made present; the specter or shadow of the cell is
elicited; the cell is present, but only through its outline, thereby rendering the volume of
the cell itself an emptiness, a void, a gap, both figuratively and literally. This is
accentuated by Baca’s use of internal rhyme within those opening two lines re-presenting
“cell doors.” That is, besides visually orientating the reader to the honeycomb of empty
spaces, of individual cells, constituting the interior of the prison, the poem also enacts the
aural atmosphere of the prison, which is portrayed affectively as a cacophonous pounding
of harsh, loud sounds. For instance, the reader hears the reverberant clatter of the
maintenance man “banging loudly” on metal, and that noise is joined in lines three and
four by the sound of “[s]howers…sputtering out water” and “TV and radio sounding
deafeningly.” In this manner, that “banging” resounds as an aural signifier of the greater
mechanism of the prison, its tiers of mechanically maintained cells, each a nook for
subjectivation that as an image multiplies in the reader’s mind both vertically and

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horizontally to become a mechanical, metal network of rows and columns of crowded
cells extending out to an indefinite horizon.
Moreover, the poet carefully orchestrates the synesthesia of that image, meaning
in this case the aurality of that vision. Baca hammers away at his readers through rhythm,
assonance, and consonance, creating an aural affect of discomfort, even harassment,
through the reader’s ear. For instance, one notes the use of long “a” sounds in the first
line, which enacts a nagging sound pattern within a mostly iambic framework. Equally
grating on the ear, the second line quickly stacks the harsh sibilance of the “x” in
“Fixing,” the “ch” in “mechanism,” the “c” in “cell,” and the “s” in “doors.” Also
modulating the aural affect emanating from those two lines are the “uh” sound, like the
sound of exhaled breath upon being punched in the gut, in the words “was,”
“mechanism,” “above,” and “one.” And altogether, those sounds enact the affective aural
metaphor for the loud cacophony of daily life—of regular maintenance—in prison: The
maintenance man was banging loudly / Fixing the mechanism above one of the cell
doors.” Consequently, between the maintenance work, the televisions, and the radios, the
poem is “extra loud,” as it says in line six in reference to the cell blocks, with that noise
serving as an ominous cover for the murder of an invisible inmate, Gary, who appears in
name, though always cloaked, blanketed, covered, and erased.
More specifically Gary is a metonym for the process of subjective erasure
depicted in the poem. Quite literally his murder goes unseen and unheard by the
cellblock. It also is unrepresented to the reader. Gary enters the poem deceased; he is
“found [dead]… lying up on the tier.” Furthermore, his dead body, which materially
marks the site of an erased life, is literally porous with holes to the extreme of having

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“stab wounds too numerous to count.” In other words, he is an image of materiality shot
through with absence by the prison experience; he is constituted by what he lacks; he is
defined as being a composite of empty spaces, a network of gaps. Baca accentuates this
visually through the simile of Gary’s corpse looking “like Swiss cheese,” which is an
interesting metaphor not only for the vision of the gaping porosity of the cheese, but also
its other affective functions in both sight and taste: Swiss cheese is wan and sour.
Moreover, that simile offers an added aural component in that it comes dialogically in the
poem. A guard intones the simile, and one can hear in the line a grimness, a macabre
humor, and the insensitivity—or desensitivity—of the guard’s voice, which in turn strike
the reader abrasively, intensifying the poem’s overall affect.
That affect, which allows Baca’s intended sensory discomfiture to build and
percolate, is intensified by the visual absence of most of Gary’s body. His head, for
example, is erased in so far as his “[f]ace [is] covered with a sheet” as he is “wheeled out
[of the cellblock] on a stretcher.” Such imagery perpetuates and layers the poem’s claims
about the subjective disfigurement performed and/or permitted by the prison regime in
the name of (re)subjectivating prisoners through erasure and absence. That violence of
(re)subjectivation is made all the more gruesome, even ghoulish, by the visual
dismemberment and description of Gary’s body—a hidden network of wounds, of gaps—
exiting the cellblock partially covered by the guards, during which time the speaker of the
poem mentions seeing little more of the corpse than “one blood-spattered boot” and
“[o]ne puffed and pale hand turning blue.” Thus the body, like the cell, is sketched by its
fringes; the body is implied by a boot, a hand, and a sheet over a face. It is also implied
by its blood, which in this context further implies violence and absence: the rending of a

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body such that the endogenous becomes exogenous, and vice verse. Furthermore the
descriptors of that body speak to the extreme violence of its disarticulation. It is riddled
with holes “like Swiss cheese,” “blood-spotted,” “puffed and pale,” and “turning blue.”
In short, it has been brutalized, mutilated, dismembered, and discarded, and in its
blueness that beaten body is already decomposing, implying further layers of meaning to
the idea of the violence of erasure founding the prison regime.
As a final note, it is worth recognizing that this violent scene occurs in the poem
within a cellblock choicely described as “cavernous.” Thus the violence of the poem—
the mechanical, pounding noise, the discursive violence of the guard, and the silent
murder—is circumscribed, dwarfed, and seemingly swallowed by a spatial vortex. The
scene unfolds within an enveloping and isolating emptiness framed by the prison walls,
which are likened to a massive cave’s. Therein, the prisoners are immured, separated
from and lost to the “society” both circumscribing them and inscribing them in that
vacuum of violence, with that evacuated space—the interior of the prison—also a hole
within the landscape, imaginary, and body politic of the U.S., much like the cell within
the prison, or the holes in Gary from knife wounds. Thus the space of the prison—“the
cavernous cellblocks”—comprises a confining space that both is and creates emptiness or
absence. It is both constative and performative, with the ambiguity of this coexistence
itself marking forms of destructive plasticity. That is, the cavernous prison both situates
and performs the prisoners’ dislocation from and relocation to an inescapable,
comprehensive void, wherein they are organized into cells for (re)subjectivating
mutilation. In short, within this internal structure, the prisoner will suffer violent,
agonistic excisions and erasures, often to the point of total erasure: death, which itself

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often goes unwitnessed and unrecorded, the absencing of the subject finally completed, as
in Gary’s case. Nevertheless, the Pinto poet, however minute and disempowered,
protests, insisting affectively upon what Alberto Moreiras has theorized in a different
context as an “intellectual infrapolitics,” meaning “the kind of practice that refuses to
totalize the political as its own sphere of action” (“Infrapolitical” 186).

Availability Without Function: The Neoliberal Subject and Baca’s Pinto Prisoner

In reading the violence of erasure in a poem like “Overcrowding,” what is at
stake, then, are conceptions of both neoliberal subjectivation and the potentiality of
poetry to reckon, reclaim, and reformulate subjectivity. One could further argue that
those interrelated concerns form the deep structure, or the organizing principle, of Baca’s
prisoner poetry in Fired Up With You!: Poems of a Niagara Vision. (1977), Immigrants
in Our Own Land: Poems (1979), Swords of Darkness (1981), and What's Happening.
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Rooted in the prison, where Baca learned to read and where he realized his
counterhegemonic Chicano political identity and agency, these books are linked foremost
by their poetic production of a sensory codex of absence. It conjures the intrinsic
violences of neoliberalized Pinto life, which is to say a life of present absences, of
corporeal gaps and hollows, of destructive plasticity, and of brutalizing foreclosures of
the infrapolitical. In short that affect signals the poetic engagement and contestation of
neoliberal power relations through the subject, adding a vital, if unintended, layer of
meaning to Pérez-Torres’s insight that Pinta/o poetry “attempt[s] to construct some
meaning out of dreariness of that [institutionalized] life by connecting it to processes

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occurring throughout society” (118). That is, through Baca’s subversive Pinto poetic
project, he discloses and connects the violence of erasure that drives neoliberalism both
inside and outside the U.S. prison, as well as the corollaries between.
To help to explain this, one might turn to Gabriel Giorgi’s prescient critique of
neoliberalism through Brazilian and Argentine cultural production. Giorgi argues
neoliberalism to be “less an economic doctrine or social plan than a fundamental
transformation of the modes by which individuals relate to themselves, to their bodies
and their ‘own’ lives, and to the bodies and lives of others” (3), and this can be evaluated
and problematized through the formal poetic analysis of Baca’s production of the affect
of absence. More specifically, if relocated to the U.S. prison regime, then Giorgi’s
theorization of neoliberal subjectivity can reframe the Pinta/o prisoner in Baca’s poetry as
a limit or threshold of the neoliberal matrix of power. The prisoner body becomes the site
and conduit of neoliberal erasure through (re)subjectivation, with Baca’s Pinto poetry
striving affectively to expose, contest, and reclaim those erasures. More deeply, in
making those absences and erasures present and felt, Baca’s Pinto poetry participates in
both the explication and contestation of the neoliberal reduction of the imprisoned subject
to the embodiment of pure potential productivity, or pure capital. In other words, through
the affect of absence Baca’s readers realize the prisoner body as an agonistic instantiation
of the neoliberal objectification and commodification of the subject as property,
serviceable to the state in direct correlation to its potential free-market productivity. This,
in turn, deepens Rodríguez’s historicizing redefinition of the contemporary U.S. prison
regime as a permutation of “chattel logic, a structure of abject and non-human
objectification: to the extent that the ‘inmate’ is conceived as the fungible property of the

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state” (42). And where Rodríguez, as aforementioned, is developing notions of property
and possession in relation to the captive body, the goal here is to identify a nuanced
sensorial codex of absence that affectively reveals, confronts, and refuses the violence
and injustice of that regime in its reduction of prisoner subjectivities to productive
potentiality, which as a process begins materially—and sensorially, affectively—through
the transformation of prisoner bodies.
To reckon this complex process of productive erasure, one might look, for
example, to its instantiation in Baca’s prisoner poem “Count-time” (3) from his book
Immigrants in Our Own Land. Here is the complete poem:
Everybody to sleep the guard symbolizes
on his late night tour of the tombs.
When he leaves, after counting still bodies
wrapped in white sheets, when he goes,

the bodies slowly move, in solitary ritual,
counting lost days, mounting memories,
numbering like sand grains
the winds drag over the high mountains
to their lonely deaths; like elephants
they go bury themselves
under dreamlike waterfalls,
in the silence.

In the context of this essay, the poem can be thought as an affective presentation to the
reader of a baseline condition for the imprisoned body under the neoliberal U.S. prison
regime, with that baseline condition being one of phantasmal or spectral living death.
Thus “Count-time” renders an eerie or ominous affect that hauntingly imbues its readers
with a symbolic sense of the subjectivating violence that forces prisoners to feel
subjectively evacuated to the point of evisceration and suspension; they feel reduced to
hollowed shells living in sepulchral isolation, where they wait immobilized, suspended,

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and if they do move at all, they do so “slowly” and only “in solitary ritual,” implying a
subjective life devoid of variability and interconnectedness with their co-inhabitants of
the cellblock and/or prison. According to this carefully structured logic and affect, the
prisoner body is understood by the reader as an agonistically censored, cleansed,
packaged, shelved, and regulated commodity; the prisoner body is assailed, possessed,
and subjugated by the regular, regulating, and normativizing violence of erasure that
produces the neoliberal prisoner-subject. Accordingly, then, the poem can be read as a
suggestion that neoliberal (re)subjectivation occurs through state-sponsored acts of
erasure that aim to reduce the prisoner to a crude, enumerable quantity. This is
destructive plasticity. Subjectivation censoriously restricts subjectivity to a manageable
selection of strategically determined, operative neoliberal criteria, thereby enforcing
elisions, gaps, and present absences in the Pinta/o subject. Moreover, by homogenizing
and neutralizing prisoners through the resubjectivating violence of erasure, each prisoner
becomes but one more stilled body in the continuous, ritualized, and militarized
“counting [of] still bodies.” The poem explains this materially, both by discussing the
degradation of the prisoner body and by creating a visceral or abject affect for the reader.
In other words, Baca uses the tropes and figures of poetry to articulate the degradation
and humiliation of being reduced to a number in a “count” during “count-time,” and in
doing so, Baca poetically produces that affect for the reader.
That affect also accentuates the neoliberal destructive plasticity at work in and
through the poem, which pivots upon the poetic postulation in “Count-time” of creation
through erasure. This is evident, for example, in the enumerative processes enacted
symbolically by the poem. More specifically, via the logic of carceral ‘count-times’ like

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the one taking place in the poem, the prisoner is identified, distinguished, and reinscribed
in prison as an individual by numerical assignation; he becomes his prison number, which
displaces his personal identity and past and articulates and prioritizes his new, prison-
produced data-life. In other words, he is being (re)subjectivated by the slow erasure of his
personal past, of his idiocultural present, and of his agency, all of which is elided,
fragment by fragment, memory by memory, with those bits of deconstructed and
displaced subjectivity being scattered “like sand grains / the winds drag over the high
mountains / to their lonely deaths.”
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Thusly he is recreated through erasure and absence
in the instant of his being counted; he is anonymized by the homogenizing power of
enumeration, which replaces the proper noun of his name, chipping away at his former
identity and quarantining the potentiality of his subjectivity. Moreover, within a
neoliberal matrix of power, the aim of such erasure is to transform the prisoner-subject by
enforced absence into pure potential; he is being subjectively stripped to render him pure
productive potentiality, which is the foundational condition of neoliberal subjectivity.
This is why Giorgi, for example, theorizes neoliberal subjectivation as cultivating a
“logic of servitude” that aims to force the subject “to maintain the disposition to be ready
to perform a service…[and to be] availability without function” (11-12). And although
Giorgi is suggesting this through an argument about precarity in neoliberal Argentina and
Brazil, his work could be grafted onto and developed by the arguments herein about the
U.S. prison regime, particularly in relation to the potential of poetic affect to reveal the
power of neoliberalism to reduce prisoners to sheer “availability without function.”
In short, then, a poem like “Count-time” can be read as a demonstration and an
actuation of poetic affect to arm and disseminate a radical liberation logic. More

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specifically, the poem’s affect becomes an abolitionist mode of reckoning and
redeploying the neoliberal ‘logic of servitude’ against itself in order to contest and
undermine the U.S. prison regime. In this manner, the affect of absence of “Count-time”
signifies and effectuates counterdiscursive forms of counterhegemonic struggle against
the foundational violence of erasure driving the neoliberal U.S. prison regime, and Baca
produces that potent affect of absence by poetically layering a diversity of
(re)presentations and (re)enactments of the violence of erasure into the poem through
conventional tropes, forms, and figures of poetry. For example, he immediately
introduces and thematizes this in the poem “Count-time” through its title, which
comprises a lexical tag—“count-time”—signifying the prison routine of continuously
reinscribing the prisoner body within an anonymizing enumerative system. That title is
also a spondee, with the doubled stress of that poetic foot sonically accentuating the force
of the physical and metaphysical action of the “count-time” being portrayed by the poem.
Furthermore, at the risk of overanalyzing accentual-syllabics and grammar, one could
even suggest that the title is a visual and aural metaphor for the relentless, inundating
violence of erasure of the neoliberal prison regime in that the poem’s title is wholly
comprised of a single compound noun, with both the absence of unstressed syllables and
the presence of the hyphen of the compound noun each in their own way metaphorizing
the core, comprehensive violence of the enumerating, homogenizing force eradicating
subjectivity as it links “still[ed] bodies” in prison into an inventory of availability without
function. Thus on various levels and in various poetic modes, the title of the poem is
engaging and enacting an affect of absence, of the violence of erasure, thereby opening

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the poem with an overpowering blast of neoliberal force articulated in the parlance of
power and aimed at prisoner bodies.
The title is followed in the poem by the guard’s injunction in the opening line:
“Everybody to sleep.” Here, too, Baca is craftily invoking poetic form to re-present the
violence of erasure. That is, he invites a monologic voice into the poem to texture and
layer its aural experience. In other words, the juxtaposition of the title with the dialogic
injunction immediately implies a plurality of personas in play; there is the voice of the
title and the voice of the injunction, which not only contrast but also overlap to the point
of both possibly being announcements by the guard, who could have announced to the
cellblock that it is “Count-time” before swiftly adding “Everybody to sleep.” And that
injunction is complicated more still. In its injunctive mood, the command is a
grammatical metaphor for the harsh, officious, and hegemonic system of neoliberal
violence being inflicted on prisoners. As implied by a command to alter one’s conscious
state (i.e. to force oneself to sleep or risk corrective violence by prison officials), the
neoliberal prison regime is an ontological system in the service of political economy. It
militaristically and ritually coheres, homogenizes, organizes, and stores the enumerated
prisoner bodies idly within cells, where they await further acts of subjective erasure until
they are merely enumerated and stored vessels of availability without function.
Consequently the guard’s injunction rings out with a richly layered menace, a
public threat. It intransigently promises the violence of erasure, with his speech-act
aurally accentuating the affect of menace emerging from the poem. That affect of menace
emerges visually, too, through the image of the prisoner contained, numerated, and
immobilized within his cell under the menacing psychological pressure of constant,

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militarized panoptic supervision. Thus the affect of menace, which contributes to the
overall affect of absence of the poem, is enacted aurally, visually, and psychologically in
the reader, who resonantly hears and feels the threat of the guard through the hard-driving
accentual-syllabics of the title and the toothy growl of the injunction in the first line. That
affect is further accentuated by the diction of the poem. For example, Baca’s chooses the
term “tombs” to refer to the cellblock, where the guard is taking his “tour.” In the context
of the poem, the connotative sense of danger, eeriness, and creepiness of the word
“tombs” contributes to the poem’s affect of menace, as does the word “tour” by implying
the normalizing regularity and recursivity of the guard’s menacing patrols of the
cellblock, which continuously reinforce by force the compartmentalization and control of
prisoner bodies. Thus the word “tour”—and this “tour” during this “count-time”—enacts
the violence of the presence of the guard, and not only in this single moment but also as
an infinitely protracted, omnipresent moment; the “tour” of this “count” is but one,
undifferentiated thread within a web of continuous surveillance and subjugation.
That is yet one more way that Baca uses the poetic trope of the metonym to create
affect. Just as this “tour” represents the endless, omnipresent “tour” by officials of power
through the subjective lives of prisoners, so, too, does the guard himself metonymically
“symbolize” the violence of erasure constituting and structuring the U.S. neoliberal
prison regime. That is, his presence is both a material presence during this “count” and a
spectral presence before and after it, thereby implying a temporal construct: His
surveillance in the present extends infinitely into the past and into the future; his promise
of violence is the promise of violence returned, with no beginning and no end, thereby
adding to the affect of absence, of menace, of the ferocity one feels when coming in

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contact with the neoliberal prison regime. This is also why Baca’s use of the clichéd
prison metaphor of the “tomb” remains affective. It is a metonym for a spectral system of
power haunting the prisoner psyche, the poem, and the reader’s experience of it, with all
such haunting reinscribing the homogenizing, organizing force of neoliberal
subjectivation. The poignancy of all of this is intensified further still by Baca’s choice of
indefinite pronoun in the guard’s command. Even if unconsciously, the reader
understands that the guard is addressing “everybody,” not “everyone.” This is an
important, resonant distinction. The latter—“everyone”— would imply a presupposition
of subjective singularity, of individuality, as opposed to the biopolitical violence of
erasure of the neoliberal prison regime, which aims to normatively reduce each “one” of
its prisoners to a mere “body,” an “everybody.”

Lonely Death, Dreamlike Waterfalls, and Resisting the Neoliberal Prison Regime

More generally, then, one might note that through(out) Baca’s Pinto poems he is
evoking a sinister, menacing affect of absence via poetic choices. He is using the tropes
and figures of poetry to produce an affect imparting the insistent, threatening promise of
both the past neoliberal violence and neoliberal violence to come. The resubjectivated
Pinto body therefore comprises competing temporalities in the present, each of which
emanates the threat of the U.S. prison regime to maim, disfigure, and even kill prisoners.
Consequently Baca’s affect of absence presents the Pinto body as transmitting both a
genealogy of its erasures and a promise of futural violence. Baca is evoking through past
erasures a permanent, institutionalized future of inexorable threats of violence. His

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formal poetic decisions enact the psychic violences that haunt the present via a fractured,
infrapolitical inundation of racialized personal and historical suffering, as well as the
threat of imagined, forthcoming erasures. Baca is poetically conducting a Pinto variation
of Massumi’s theorization of the affect of public threat, meaning the affective menace of
a speculative futurity of feared violence. This is threat of violence intrinsic to Baca’s
exposure of present absence. As Massumi explains of threat:
[i]t is not just that it is not: it is not in a way that is never over…There is always a
remainder of uncertainty, an unconsummated surplus of danger. The present is
shadowed by a remaindered surplus of indeterminate potential for a next event
running forward back to the future, self-renewing…The future of threat is forever.
(53)

This, then, is the apex of neoliberal ontological violence. It engenders in the subject an
intrinsic fear of violence through the enforced absences of subjectivation, which
broadcast a foundational myth or ideology of neoliberalism, namely its inevitability, that
it is inescapable and that its future is “forever.”
Baca confronts this poetically, with a good example being the poem “Count-
time.” There one notes the poetic evocation of the affective threat of violence through the
diction of the poem, for instance, which convokes a diversity of words and phrases
denotatively and connotatively making death (that greatest of absences) present. Not only
is this true of more explicit referents like the “tombs” and the “lonely deaths” of the
cellblock, but also of euphemisms like “sleep,” and allusive imagery like that of the men
who “bury themselves” and of metonymic descriptions of prisoners as “still bodies” that
are “wrapped in white sheets” as if in death shrouds. More deeply, the resulting affect
perpetuates the violent epistemology of the neoliberal matrices of power coursing
through the prison regime. That ontology positions the violence of erasure to produce

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pure productive potentiality, pure capital, which is the foundation of the “lonely death” of
prisoners in the poem. That is, the concept of “death”—of “lonely death”—in the poem
implies ontological transformation via the reconfiguration of subjectivity; the death is
partial and symbolic; it is the erasure of targeted aspects of subjectivity in order to reduce
the prisoner to availability without function. It is a destructive plasticity of affective
death. Consequently, the concept of death in the poem is not denotative; it is not
indicative of the complete and irreversible biological dissolution of life. Rather, death is
figurative in the poem, thereby yet again demonstrating Baca’s crafty use of poetic forms
and tropes to produce affect, which in this case is the haunting and menacing resonance
of reading and feeling the enactment of a ghostly, omniscient narrator presenting the
“lonely deaths” of prisoners “wrapped in white sheets” to the reader, with the “deaths”
behind and beneath those sheets signifying the selective elision of prisoner subjectivity
by the prison regime. In other words, “death” in the poem is an oxymoronic state of being
living death, or of living as dead life. The prisoner has been emptied violently to render
him a vessel of availability without function, and the horrifying and haunting violence of
that reduction, objectification, and instrumentalization of the subjectivity is made
immediate to the reader by poetic affect.
However, within that “lonely death,” within its “solitary ritual,” the prisoners can
also be understood as escaping “count-time.” There is an implication of resistance to
subjective mutilation in the prisoners’ defiant acts of “bury[ing] themselves / under
dreamlike waterfalls,” wherein exists their counterhegemonic agency, their subjective
potentiality. Thus, for example, that adjective “dreamlike” is crucial; it is an epistemic
metonym for a radical liberation politics: The prisoner can work to refuse, resist, and

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elude the violence of erasure of count-time, for instance, by engaging in a dreamlike
escape from its enumerative violence. He is not mentally present for the count; he is
elsewhere, dreaming. He is neither acquiescent nor complicit in the easy perpetuation of
subjugation. Instead, the prisoner is tweaking his material conditions to produce
resistance; he is contorting the guard’s injunction of “everybody to sleep.” Rather than
obey the count-time directives and ritual, the prisoner is exercising his subjective agency
by electively withdrawing from the official count into a self-directed, self-sustaining
“solitary ritual,” wherein he enacts both a self-defense and (counter)attack. That is, the
prisoner extricates himself from the physical reality of count-time by transporting and
relocating himself imaginatively through ritual to an alternative space of the mind. And
although immured within his cell and being “counted” nevertheless, he also exists in the
“dreamlike,” created alternative space of the “waterfall.” In escaping to that self-hewn
space of the waterfall, which as an image produces a becalming and soothing effect and
affect through the visions, sounds, and tactility of a misting, foaming, cascading stream
of water, the prisoner is enacting a defiant resistance to abusive state power through
escapism. He is self-protectively retreating from a more direct engagement with the
guard, who himself embodies and vocalizes the threat and promise of the violence of the
prison regime.
Thus the waterfall serves as scrim and shield, offering the prisoner a sense of
distance and protection from the violence of erasure constituting his environs, and in this
manner, the prisoner is partially loosed or freed to nurture his embattled and bruised
subjectivity. Thus the metaphor of the “waterfall” can come to signify a
counterhegemonic movement in that it proposes the possibility of the existence of

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alternative spaces to the brutality of the prison regime, with the waterfall counterposed to
the cell as a halcyon, pastoral mindscape rememorating natural beauty, physical ease,
psychological security, and organic relaxation, with those characteristics being as
restorative as they are shielding, even if it is but a “dreamlike” illusion circumscribed by
carceral violence. Moreover, they resonate affectively in the reader, thereby partaking in
the dissemination and reproduction of modes of resistance to and subversion of the
tyranny of the neoliberal violence of erasure at work in the prison regime. In short, then,
one discerns through the poem that to “dream” as prisoner is to resist; it is to defy the
count and operate subjectively beyond the domain of neoliberal control and
(re)subjectivation being exemplified, reinforced, and perpetuated by the guard on behalf
of the regime. Consequently, these “dreamlike waterfalls” importantly mark the
incompletion of the regime’s quest for the total control of prisoners. They signal the fluid
gap between subjectivity and subject, and the destructive violence of neoliberal
subjectivation. As the poem concedes, the prison has produced the prisoner as visible
absence, as present erasure, as a still body censored and reduced to availability without
function, idly waiting in its subordination beneath a masking white sheet. However, even
as such, that body retains subjective potentiality because its erasure is intrinsically and
always already incomplete; despite the regime’s best efforts, the prisoner permanently
retains subjective agency. It remains extant beneath the homogenizing veneer of a prison
number and beneath the homogenizing veneer of the white sheets. And it exists, too, in
the gap of the hyphen between “count” and “time” in the poem’s title, with that enforced
pause opening a portal to a liminal space of subjective resistance to the definition of time
through the count, which the prisoner can subvert by imaginatively disengaging from that

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process upon its announcement, with the prisoner withdrawing into his counterhegemonic
“solitary ritual.” And these are but a few of the affective modes through which Baca
enacts the subtle but indelible availability of epistemologies of abolitionist resistance to
the prison regime. The prisoner can resist by creating alternative spaces and modes for
reserving and exercising his subjectivity. He can create; he can “dream;” he can contest
and resist; and he can seek and conjure the protective scrim of “waterfalls,” behind which
to fortify his subjectivity through acts of rememoration, “counting lost days, [and]
mounting memories” and thereby resisting a regime seeking to erase and evacuate his
subjective (and subjectivating) past in a violent attempt to render him a husk, a breathing
emptiness, a present absence, a subordinated body, a living death signifying availability
without function in an infinite present.

Concluding through Incompletion: The Pinto Elephant in the Room

As exemplified by “Count-time,” prisoner dreams, for example, can be neither
regulated nor eliminated by the violence of erasure that founds neoliberal subjectivation
and states. Thus in dreaming (whether asleep or awake), the prisoner retains an
inalienable ontological power to resist the neoliberal prison regime and imagine new
identity formations and solidarities. This is how Baca’s poetic production of affect
espouses the potentiality of the “dreamlike” to resist and unmake the neoliberal prison
regime. It is through the power of poetic affect to inform and connect readers that Baca
announces and spreads his radical liberation and abolitionist prison(er) politics, which
resound in the reader’s ear like the roar of a nearby “waterfall” misting the air with its

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revolutionary fervor and protective beauty. That is, Baca’s poetic manipulation of
affect—of audibility, visibility, and tactility in the case of “Count-time”—both explicates
and critiques the state’s process of neoliberal (re)subjectivation. And in this manner,
affect both reinscribes state violence in the reader and inaugurates a mode of subjective
resistance to it. The prisoner in “Count-time,” for example, is understood through the
affect of absence as signifying both a subject immobilized, muted, and haunted in the
agonistic darkness of his “solitary” cell, and a subversive reclaiming his agency. He is
both an iteration of availability without function and the mobilization of resistance to and
circumvention of the violence of erasure founding the neoliberal prison regime
“symbolized” by the guard.
This is finally the importance of the “dreamlike,” of the “waterfall.” They enact
the power of poetic affect to identify, compose, and broadcast possible alternative modes
of subject formation and modes of forming counterhegemonic and antinormative
solidarities through the senses. Thus they mark the intrinsic possibility of the reclamation
of subjectivity from the violence of the neoliberal prison regime, and in doing so, they
signify the possibility of surviving and escaping neoliberal subjectivation, of resisting
carceral subordination, and of reemerging from the blanketing violence of erasure into a
reformulated, more self-directed life. In essence, then, Pinto poetic affect of Baca’s verse
is creating an intricate liminal space between the experience of the overwhelming and
inundating subjectivating violence of the neoliberal matrix of power, and the actuation of
contestatory and/or alternative subjective potentialities. Thus, for example, the “elephant”
in “Count-time” stands as a metaphor for the prisoner as captured, enchained,
subordinated, and abused, and it also is a metaphor for the possibility of the prisoner to

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resist and refuse such violence through defiant acts of rememoration and reimagining.
Metacritically, then, the elephant symbolizes Baca’s striving throughout his Pinto poetry
to combine diction, syntax, lineation, and metaphor into a mode of producing affect
capable of eliciting both the agony of the prisoner’s reduction to availability without
function, and his potential to resist such dissolution.
This is rendered poignantly by the conclusion of the poem “Count-time,” whose
final word— “silence”—is yet another instantiation of present absence. Most obviously,
the word paradoxically makes audible the absence of sound that the word signifies
denotatively. This absence is affectively made present through the ear. That absence is
also visible in the printed presence of the word. More deeply, though, that present
absence becomes a lexical metonym for the function and logic of neoliberalism, which
makes absence present through the violence of erasure driving its distinct mode of
subjectivation. Thus the concluding “silence” of the poem is not a conclusion at all.
Rather it is a commencement and an extension. The “silence” at the end of the poem
inaugurates a long, loud, and protracted clamber announcing the process of continuous
(re)subjectivation perpetuating the neoliberal state. Thus that “silence” is the audible
absence driving neoliberalism; it is the visible erasures of neoliberal subjectivation.
Moreover, this lexical metaphor for neoliberal subjectivation is accentuated by the
metaphor of the syntax and lineation delivering the term. That is, the final line of the
poem comprises a single, swift prepositional phrase—“in the silence”—that abruptly
ends the poem with a grammar signaling the place of the entrapped neoliberal subject,
who must struggle ‘in the (enforced) silence’ of the neoliberal prison regime.

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In contrast, the reader of the poem is released from the discomfiting affective
experience of the line and the poem by the period concluding that swift, stabbing final
phrase. Yet it is precisely the brevity of the line and its abbreviated staging of the
violence of subjective struggle in prison that causes the poem to (re)sound beyond its
conclusion as present absence. Baca’s affective production of that paradoxical present
absence leaves readers reeling in the vacuum of white space following the poem on the
page, and this, too, is a powerful, affective triumph: That final period—the final mark of
authorship, subjectivity, agency, authority, and control—releases the reader from the
captivity of the poem, with that release itself being a complex metaphor about captivity
and freedom, about exogenous and endogenous change, about self and society. Thus in
this context, the final period of the poem is a mark of both containment and release, and
that antinomy inaugurates the final paradox of the poem: The reader is loosed into a post-
poem freedom that is nevertheless somehow newly structured by and suffused with a
spectral feeling “of the tombs,” their oppressive presence, their living death, their
availability without function, the stench of which wafts into the reader’s present,
lingering, conjuring absence, and thereby inviting contemplation of the subjectivating
violence of the prison regime, which remains ever present, disquieting, affective.

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Who Has the Time?: Stephen Dobyns and the Art of Poetic Resistance
to Neoliberal Violence

The author of more than thirty-five books, Stephen Dobyns was born on February
19, 1941, in Orange, New Jersey, to an Episcopal minister and his wife, a graduate of
Columbia Teacher’s College. The family moved around the country throughout his
childhood, leaving Jersey for Michigan, Virginia, and Pennsylvania, yet regardless of its
physical location, “[t]he family home hummed with intellectual activity, and Stephen
grew up surrounded by people who sought knowledge for the sake of activism” (King
73). That synergy of travel, learning, and activism seems to have marked Dobyns deeply
because throughout his extensive oeuvre, one notes Dobyns’ continuous questioning and
reimagining of conceptions of community, and particularly within and through the United
States of the past forty years, when Dobyns has written his texts. As a result, one of the
many strengths of his writing is its heretofore critically unrecognized ability to reveal and
critique some of the many violences intrinsic to neoliberal life, beginning with neoliberal
subjectivation.
Dobyns’ best writing vigorously exposes the suffering consequent to neoliberal
subjectivation through his skillful production of poetic affect. That affect performs a

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crucial double operation: It simultaneously enacts and questions neoliberal subjectivity.
More pointedly, it both instantiates and contests the foundational precarity of the
neoliberal subject. As argued earlier in this dissertation, such a double operation signifies
the fundamental double function of art for Theodor Adorno, and that deep duality is
evident in Dobyns’ best poetry. Note, for example, the palpable tension of subjective
precarity, poised against imaginative ingenuity, that is both elicited and questioned by the
poem “How to Like It” (6-7) from Cemetery Nights (1987), a poem of muted rage about
the impossibility of “liking” a life of inescapable subjective insecurity, vulnerability, and
instability, which in the context of this dissertation is shorthand for the life of a neoliberal
subject. Here is the poem in its entirety:
These are the first days of fall. The wind
at evening smells of roads still to be traveled,
while the sound of leaves blowing across the lawns
is like an unsettled feeling in the blood,
the desire to get in a car and just keep driving.
A man and a dog descend their front steps.
The dog says, Let’s go downtown and get crazy drunk.
Let’s tip over all the trash cans we can find.
This is how dogs deal with the prospect of change.
But in his sense of the season, the man is struck
by the oppressiveness of his past, how his memories
which were shifting and fluid have grown more solid
until it seems he can see remembered faces
caught up among the dark places in the trees.
The dog says, Let’s pick up some girls and just
rip off their clothes. Let’s dig holes everywhere.
Above his house, the man notices wisps of cloud
crossing the face of the moon. Like in a movie,
he says to himself, a movie about a person
leaving on a journey. He looks down the street
to the hills outside of town and finds the cut
where the road heads north. He thinks of driving
on that road and the dusty smell of the car
heater, which hasn’t been used since last winter.
The dog says, Let’s go down to the diner and sniff
people's legs. Let’s stuff ourselves on burgers.

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In the man's mind, the road is empty and dark.
Pine trees press down to the edge of the shoulder,
where the eyes of animals, fixed in his headlights,
shine like small cautions against the night.
Sometimes a passing truck makes his whole car shake.
The dog says, Let’s go to sleep. Let’s lie down
by the fire and put our tails over our noses.
But the man wants to drive all night, crossing
one state line after another, and never stop
until the sun creeps into his rearview mirror.
Then he'll pull over and rest awhile before
starting again, and at dusk he’ll crest a hill
and there, filling a valley, will be the lights
of a city entirely new to him.
But the dog says, Let’s just go back inside.
Let’s not do anything tonight. So they
walk back up the sidewalk to the front steps.
How is it possible to want so many things
and still want nothing. The man wants to sleep
and wants to hit his head again and again
against a wall. Why is it all so difficult?
But the dog says, Let’s go make a sandwich.
Let’s make the tallest sandwich anyone’s ever seen.
And that’s what they do and that's where the man’s
wife finds him, staring into the refrigerator
as if into the place where the answers are kept—
the ones telling why you get up in the morning
and how it is possible to sleep at night,
answers to what comes next and how to like it.

Most importantly here, this is a poem of “unsettled feeling” that can be neither
fully articulated nor resolved. It is instead an injunction to the reader to ask how to live
with such a complex knot of feelings. It is the longing and the restlessness, the emotional
confusions and occlusions, and the exposure and vulnerability. Together these feelings
help to foster the affect of instability of the poem, which effectuates the baseline
condition of neoliberal life. Thus one could claim more broadly that Dobyns through the
poem is generating a sense of the Pyrrhic drive of the neoliberal subject to find pleasure
and comfort in the darkness and anxiety of her subjective paralysis, meaning that the

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political economy requires her to be subordinated and tractable. Such subjects are
necessary to the smooth and steady dominance and growth of the neoliberal political
economy. Hence the need in the neoliberal age for hyper-policing, for example. Such
subjection must be enforced. However counterintuitive and self-destructive, the populace
must partake in its own dispossession and disempowerment. The market demands that its
subjects be quietly but actively complicit in their own repression, which emerges from an
epistemology that without irony equates human freedoms with market freedoms. The
neoliberal subject must therefore consent to, if not promote, her commodification as
availability without function. She must become visible as an actionable product within
the market. Having realized his precarity as such, the “man” in the poem at best hopes to
ignore his defeat. Acquiescing to it, he simply “wants to sleep.” But such sleep is
impossible for a sentient being under these conditions. He therefore lights upon a more
violent and active variety of self-destruction: He “wants to hit his head again and again /
against a wall,” perhaps hoping to render himself unconscious and therefore detached
from waking consciousness despite his insomnia. Meanwhile, in the midst of considering
this, he cries out what could be read in the context of this dissertation as a global mantra
of the neoliberal subject in the moment of her realization of her entrapment: “Why is it all
so difficult?” That rhetorical question, as angst-fueled as it is unanswerable, can only
signal the unappeasability of the tumult of neoliberal life, meaning in the poem’s terms a
life of permanently “unsettled feeling[s].”

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The Neoliberal Fall: Dobyns and the Deconstruction of Consciousness

In “How to Like It” Dobyns carefully stages this existential deconstruction of self
in the Fall. It is a time of “change,” a time of transition to bleakness and disrepair. In the
poem, the “man” matches the material conditions of the season, which Dobyns marks as a
negative moment, a time of deterioration and death, with a mental state driven by despair,
regret, and impossible hope. In the dead of night, the man is sleepless and angst-ridden.
He is “struck / by the oppressiveness of his past.” Simultaneously, by a trick of the mind,
via the machinations of his imagination, he thinks that somehow “his memories / which
were shifting and fluid have grown more solid.” However, what has solidified is not the
past but the stasis of the resent, of his present life. He is deactivated, inert. He is
availability without function. He is, in short, a neoliberal subject. He is a ship in a bottle,
and he is left searching for “how to like it,” meaning how to endure this gritty presence of
absence, this activity of inactivity. He understands painfully well that “the road is empty
and dark,” but what, the poem implies, is there to be done? The man’s resistance to
alternative ways of being is communicated through his dismissal of the dog’s suggestions
of civic insubordination and social transgression. He prefers to stare idly at “wisps of
cloud / crossing the face of the moon” or to stand stalled in reflection on “the dusty smell
of the car / heater, which hasn’t been used since last winter,” both of which intensify the
sense of the man’s inactivity, his paralysis. In the latter image, he conjures layers of dust
on a heater gone cold, and the man in his inactivity is linked to the inactivity of the car
and its inactive heater, all of which is infused with a “dusty smell,” thereby layering

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sensorial descriptors upon the reader to create an affect of longstanding and seemingly
incontrovertible immobility.
This is the experience of the reader reading this poem, stopped in time and space
to decode letters on a page like so much dust fallen over an unused truck part. This, then,
is a metacritically added layering of inactivity upon inactivity, and undergirding it all is
the surety of mortality, whether one pauses to reckon the “unsettled feeling,” as does the
protagonist of the narrative poem, or whether one is a reader of the poem, paused to scan
its lines and perhaps even take additional time to reflect upon them. Regardless, the poem
seems to explain, stasis ineluctably and inescapably permeates conscious life. Thus the
man wants nothing but to “sleep;” it is posited as the only solution to the inescapable
angst of an awake consciousness. All, for him, is dust. It is the matter to which all life is
finally reduced. Moreover, it is a paradoxical substance: It is active inactivity. As
famously announced in the Biblical injunction of Genesis 3:19: “for dust thou art, and
unto dust shalt thou return.” Thus the cycle of life—of existing and being—is predicated
upon the manipulation of these inert, inanimate motes. Conversely, then, the dust might
signify limitless possibility, that is, at least until controls are asserted upon that
possibility, much as neoliberal subjectivation deforms, delimits, and attenuates
subjectivity. And the man’s timorousness in the face of his recognition of this implies the
depth of his subjectivation, with the comprehensiveness of that subjectivation in turn
implying the triumph of neoliberalism. Rather than revolt (as the dog suggests he do), the
man withdraws into himself. He folds into himself, meekly withdrawing from his
powerful recognition. The man is capable of recognizing the harshness of a life stripped
of so much subjective possibility, but he fails to see in the violence of subjectivation as a

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fractional part of an inverted chiaroscuro rendering of the circumscribing and inundating
possibility. In psychoanalytic terms, the man is a throbbing, gargantuan superego
dominating the present, as opposed to the dog, who signals pure id, a wildness beyond
strict subjective (self)control, which is akin to the recalcitrance, too, of poetry, especially
in Adorno’s aforementioned terms.
Interesting, too, then is the realization that all of this argumentation is staged and
enacted within a poem. The poem is an active encounter with the agony of subjective
stasis, of interpellated paralysis, and it is also beyond it, or at least pints to its beyond.
That is, despite the action of the narrative, which implies the man’s superiority to his dog
through the former’s intellectual complexity and self-discipline, the poem is also
articulating a subtle but radical recalcitrance to conformity and subordination. Through
the figure of the dog, the poem gestures towards the intrinsic defiance of the will, of an
ineradicable desire to face oppression by disturbing and disrupting, by wanting to “get
crazy drunk,” to “tip over all the trash cans,” and to “dig holes everywhere.” When
constrained and besieged, one response is to rebel and to rebel by creating. Thus the dog
suggests that the man and he respond to this moment of dark existential crisis and despair
by collaborating to “create the tallest sandwich anyone’s ever seen.” However, despite
emerging from the mind of the poet (a man himself, and the one breathing into being the
poem), the “man” of the poem has been conditioned to comply with an inculcated sense
of the immutability of his subordination. Even if he recognizes it, he does not know how
to live otherwise. He knows not how to escape living the torturous ontological turmoil of
a life of stasis, of availability without function. He is trapped by the violence of his
subjection, a prisoner of the logic of the political economy that structures the conditions

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of his emergence. The only existential ripple he makes is a sad one: Ironically, despite his
reluctance to challenge the destruction of his agency, he seems to feel himself superior to
the dog, as exemplified by his snide tone of judgment in a line like “This is how dogs
deal with the prospect of change.” Where the dog wants to build—and to build
community—as implied by his recursive suggestions of “Let’s,” “Let’s,” “Let’s,” the
man prefers to dodge and deconstruct such possibilities. He participates in his own
disempowerment and domination, and Dobyns enacts this affectively for his readers
through a diversity of overlapping and complementary poetic figures and tropes,
including lineation, rhyme, repetition, symbolism, and metaphor.
When reckoning the artfulness of this conjuring of neoliberal precarity in a poem
like “How to Like It,” it is perhaps unsurprising to learn that Dobyns has repeatedly self-
identified as a poet, casting himself in the tradition of writers like Thomas Hardy, for
example, who wrote potboiler novels in order to survive as poet. To date Dobyns has
published more than twenty novels, including ten of serialized crime fiction. As he
himself explains, “[a]lthough I sometimes write fiction, I do it only as a diversion. I
consider myself entirely a poet, am concerned with it twenty-four hours a day,...feel that
myself and any poet is always at the beginning of his craft” (Fifarek 131, emphasis
added). And it is that “craft” of poetry that is the focus of my analysis today. More
precisely, I contend that the close reading of Dobyns’ manipulation of craft, meaning the
deployment of the tropes and figures of poetry, can reveal Dobyns’ creation of an affect
capable of unveiling, questioning, and eschewing the violence of neoliberal
subjectivation.

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Dobyns’ orchestration of poetic craft produces what I call an “affect of
reengagement,” signifying a poetically produced redistribution of the sensorial that
inspires ontologies and epistemologies against, through, and beyond neoliberal
subjectivation. This is nowhere more clear in his oeuvre than in his three most recent
books of poetry, The Porcupine's Kisses (2002), Mystery, So Long (2005), and Winter’s
Journey (2010), though it will be traced back through Dobyns’ prolific oeuvre to his first
full-length poetry collection, Concurring Beasts (1971). Nevertheless, in those three most
recent books, and especially throughout Winter’s Journey, this is most explicit. It is
where one apprehends that Dobyns’ affect of reengagement aims for nothing less than the
dissolution of colonialist taxonomies and their attendant violence, including those
structured by neoliberal frameworks perpetuating interrelated symbolic and material
violence through binaries like subject/state, self/society, and inside/outside. Dobyns
ambition to undo these repressive strictures poetically is made more feasible when one
recognizes that neoliberal subjectivation quite literally embodies its ideology.
Consequently, Dobyns’ affect of reengagement offers an immediately available and
mobile apparatus for probing and disrupting the conditions of the realization of
subjectivity within, through, and beyond neoliberal logics and structures of power.

Critical Errors and the Cub Reporter

Through careful analysis, the aesthetics driving Dobyns’ poetic interrogation of
politicized subjectivity can be traced retrospectively back to his first book of poetry,
Concurring Beasts, honored as the Lamont Poetry Selection for 1971. A good example of

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this comes through the imagery and aurality that emerge from the verbal play in the poem
“Name-Burning” (67) in Concurring Beasts. There, through the tropes and figures of
poetry, Dobyns thematizes subjective identity by ruminating on the proper noun of a
person’s name. To actuate this, the poem “Name-Burning” offers an aggressive first-
person, present-tense narrative that includes vivid, violent imagery of the burning of a
scrap of paper with the speaker’s name on it, whereupon “the edges / of my written name
begin to curl, the ink / still visible through the fire” (1-3). Through this layering of
images—fire over ink over paper—Dobyns offers one of several, surreal juxtapositions,
each of which pivots upon its sensory representations. Thus the flaming paper is followed
by the image of “the absence of stars” (3), the sound of “frogs” whose familiar croak is
hauntingly defamiliarized by an eerie protraction whereby “the consonants hold their
sounds long after / the vowels have died” (5-7), and a phantasmagorical conductor “at the
top of the stairs / … keeping the silence of mice / [by] orchestrating the works of Satie”
(9-11), to name but a few of the initial visual and aural stimuli in the poem. That
overlapping of sensory elements builds the affective force of the poem, continuously
tweaking its central theme of the neoliberal subject’s suffering of his perpetual
destabilization, of his relentless precarity.
Dobyns coheres these seemingly disparate elements around a core narrative and
ideological element of the poem: the idea of the intrinsic frustration of an aesthete who
dreams of transforming the material world through art. Here, then, Dobyns is offering a
surrealistic critique of aestheticism through the poetic (re)presentation of the many
violences of neoliberalized life. He begins this complex and layered process from the first
syllable of the poem, “name,” thereby announcing, locating, and launching his emphasis.

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He will engage the violence of naming; he will grapple with discourse through discourse.
His emphasis is on enunciation, as opposed to the enunciated. He will poetically
reconsider the act of naming in the poem, which he immediately rescinds with the
participle “burning.” And impressively, affectively, this begins instantaneously, with the
antibacchic verve of the title.
To instantiate the violence of its title, the poem opens with the speaker of the
poem setting his own name—that most powerful of subjective signifiers—ablaze,
reducing it to “ashes.” In fact, this reduction, this transformation of self into living ash,
occurs in the gap between the title of the poem, “Name-Burning,” and the first word of
the first line of the body of the poem, which is “Ashes.” The self therefore is staked as the
emergence of absence through auto-erasure, through re-subjectivation by violence, and
even the scansion of that crucial opening words—“ASH-es,” a trochee—can be
understood as attesting to this premise of dissolution, or existing through attenuation and
attrition. Subjects, the poem argues connotatively and denotatively, are configured
through erasure, through their atomization and resurrection, through their reconfiguration
through erasure. In other words destruction is posited as productive; it is the production
of a generative and mobile subjective absence. The speaker insists upon his against
through absence. Through the presence of his absence in those ashes, which are a
material reality—he is describing the literal burning of a scrap of paper with his name on
it—he creates the possibility of a relabeling, of a reemergence of self through alternative
signifiers. He emphasizes not only the violence but also the possibility of being renamed
through the production of present absence.

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The speaker then links that personal transformation through auto-erasure to a
mode of nominally beginning the transformation of larger worlds than one’s self. This is
why the speaker laments the many latent potentialities yet to be released from “[p]oor
vowels, asleep / in their boxes, dreaming of proclamations” (7-8), and it is also why the
speaker dreams of impossibly remaking the myths of the world, of “gather[ing] / the
seeds of new sounds, fit[ting] letters together, / making a puzzle of the United States,
Vermont / lying buried in the south, all in his head” (12-15). He dreams of remaking time
and space, of replacing tired myths; he harbors a “disbelief in unicorns and concurring
beasts” (16); he is repulsed by the systems of meaning humans have constructed. This is
why the poem concludes with the subtle yet forceful metaphor of a bear who, indifferent
to such metacritical speculation, wakes, “shakes himself, [and] grumbles off through
fields / of flowering clover” (22-23). Thus pre-labeled world of “bears” and “flowering
clover” ultimately reasserts itself at the end of the poem around and through the figure of
the contemplative aesthete, who like the grumbling bear yields to and re-enters the
gorgeous splendor of the natural world, which is both recognized through its labels and
exceeds them; it is both named and nameable and exceeds naming. Thus the intrinsic
violences, displacements, and erasures intrinsic to discourse, let alone neoliberal
discourse, are foregrounded. Dobyns isolates and exposes the violence intrinsic to acts of
naming, which are both painfully destructive and also frustratingly unavoidable in any
process of communication and concurrence between, among, and of beasts, including
human beasts. Moreover, Dobyns does not merely reveal this ineluctable violence of
being; he reconsiders it, finally offering a cautious faith in materialism to drive the world
to joys and pleasure. The violence of vocabularies and of enunciations are englobed

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within a sphere of possibility containing “fields / of flowering clover” (22-23), with the
metaphorical field summoning an egalitarian horizon of ontological and social
possibility. In other words, the poem concludes with a surprising rush of optimistic
futurity via the metaphorization of life as being as seemingly inexhaustible as it is
beautiful, as indomitable as it is boundless.

Redressing Misdirection: Reexamining the Archive on Dobyns’ Poetry

To illuminate the critique of neoliberal subjectivation in a poem like “Name-
Burning,” Dobyns’ poetic production perhaps requires a fuller elucidation and broader
contextualization. For example, it is important to note that since writing Concurring
Beasts, wherein “Name-Burning” first appeared in book form, Dobyns has penned more
than fourteen award-winning and critically acclaimed books of poetry, with his most
recent title, Winter’s Journey, appearing in 2010.
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Prior to publishing Concurring
Beasts, Dobyns had aspired to be a writer, though his publications were predominantly
journalistic. This is significant in relation to both the development of his poetic style as
well as to its reception by critics and scholars. Thus it bears mention that after earning his
BA from Wayne State University in 1964 and his MFA from the Iowa Writers’
Workshop in 1967, Dobyns began two crucial years of work as a cub reporter for The
Detroit News, where he claims to have “learned more about style and discipline from
working as a journalist than he did from all of his schooling combined” (King 76). More
specifically, his time at The Detroit News helped him to develop not only a sensitivity to
the artifice of narrative, but also an innovative poetic mode of reformulating narrative to

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enact a subversive, ‘jarring’ affect. That poetic production of affect, which will be termed
herein an affect of reengagement, is in fact frequently, if inadequately, described as
“journalistic” (Gregson 50), likely due to Dobyns’ subtle use of lineation, consonance,
assonance, scansion, and syllabics to dress innovative poetic boldness as commonplace
literary narrative. In this regard, one might claim Dobyns poetry to exemplifies the
Horatian creed that the art lies in concealing the art.
Consequently, his poetry is often labeled derisively as “accessible” (King 84) and
“mainstream” (Beach 46). Such misnomers mask and dismiss the power of the poetic
affect emanating from Dobyns’ strongest poetry, which rescues and remobilizes
ontological, social, cultural, and political alternatives to the subjective and systemic
violence of neoliberalism in the United States in the late twentieth and early twenty-first
centuries. Furthermore, it is precisely Dobyns’ innovative redeployment of the forms and
tropes of poetry that inaugurates those alternatives. In other words, it is through his poetic
choices that his poetry realizes an affect capable of informing his readers of the violences
and erasures intrinsic to neoliberal(ized) life.
Unfortunately the extant scholarship on Dobyns’ poetry has yet to explore this
deeply. For example, there seems to be a trend among literary scholars to undertheorize
Dobyns’ formal innovation by reducing it to a mere hybridizing “clash [of genres]
between journalism and poetry” (Gregson 49). Too entrenched in comparative genre
politics at the expense of engaging Dobyns’ purposeful use of such bedrock poetic tropes
as rhyme, meter, and lineation, the aforementioned trend in analysis edges towards what
is most crucial about Dobyns’ poetry—its production of affect through formal
innovation—but ultimately misses and/or dismisses the opportunity to reveal, historicize,

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and theorize the innovation. And Dobyns’ poetics is equally shortchanged by the camp of
scholars that all too willfully and frequently sets up Dobyns as straw-man foil against
whom to “make clear the continued importance, and the continuing sociocultural reality,
of the poetic avant-garde in the United States” (Beach 46). In fact, such criticism is
doubly problematic as it both occludes Dobyns’ poetic ingenuity and muddies the pool
for the poetic avant-garde in general, with the latter being confined to dog-paddling in
narrow, repetitive circles in order to remain afloat in recognizable—i.e. familiar,
uninventive—ways.
Thus such dismissals of Dobyns’ aesthetic by scholars and critics reveals little
about Dobyns’ poetic project, with said scholarship seeming to miss its opportunity to
illuminate Dobyns’ urgent engagement of the consubstantiating interplay of poetic
innovation, ontological inquiry, and political theory. In other words what the
aforementioned archive of cursory criticism of Dobyns lacks is the deep theorization of
the potentiality of those synergistic vectors to converge through Dobyns’ poetry in a
manner that offers radical lines of flight from state power. This is, it is argued herein, the
most crucial point of critical engagement with Dobyns’ poetic project. If willing to
recontextualize and build upon the poetry scholarship of Marjorie Perloff, who is herself
a staunch and eloquent critic and defender of poetic innovation, then one can find a sound
defense of Dobyns’ demotic poetics in Perloff’s attack on the fatuousness of Anthony
Libby’s 1995 review of Dobyns’ Velocities: New and Selected Poems, 1966-1992 (1994)
in the New York Times Book Review. In her response to Libby’s piece, Perloff takes him
to task for writing superficially that Dobyns is most interesting and praiseworthy for his
ability to offer his readers a “constant awareness that ‘we are the creatures that love and

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slaughter’” (15). To this platitude, Perloff acidly rejoins “do we in fact need poetry to tell
us that ‘we are creatures that love and slaughter’?” (173). While her intent is to
interrogate “largely impressionistic, uninformed, and philistine” (172) discourses on
contemporary poetry, it can be recontextualized herein to resonate as a call for critics to
attend more subtly and deeply to Dobyns’ poetics.
Dobyns is a poet who throughout his oeuvre has orchestrated the tropes and
figures of poetry to insist upon reminding his reader that subjective experience is both
world-making and self-deception. As he phrases it with tender contempt in the poem
“Garden Bouquet” (53-54) in his 1996 book Common Carnage, “[y]ou try to think the
flowers / and blue sky offer an essential worth // beyond any you impose on them” (9-
11). And as he remarked twenty-five years prior to that in the poem “Contingencies”
from Concurring Beasts in what sounds like a Buddhist koan or a riff on Heraclitus’s
conceptualization of time, “[t]heir only knowledge / is the knowledge of water: the river
moving / to the sea and the sea moving to accept their punishment” (12-14). The point
here is that such thinking contributes to a longstanding poetic engagement by Dobyns of
ontological questions that lead him repeatedly to understand subjective life as precarious,
manufactured, and vulnerable to abuse “until your own private light blinks out” (“Garden
Bouquet”, 48). Thus, at the risk of fringing on melodrama, the gravest peril in ignoring
Perloff’s call for the vigorous close reading of poetry in relation to Dobyns’ oeuvre is the
risk of squandering an opportunity to confront neoliberal empire through poetic artifice;
Dobyns’ poetry seethes with the precarity of the neoliberal subject.

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Ship in a Bottle: Dobyns and the Demands of Neoliberal Subjectivity

All of this is not to say that Dobyns’ poetry lacks critical praise. He has certainly
received quite a bit of it both in the U.S. and abroad, and his poetry and prose have been
translated into at least fifteen languages, including Spanish, German, Italian, French, and
Japanese. Nevertheless, much of the praise for his poetry, like much of the
aforementioned detraction, fails to interrogate and critique the poetry deeply, especially
for its aesthetics. For instance, it is insufficient merely to identify and celebrate Dobyns’
writing for its consistent commitment to “story, clarity, a democratic voice, [and]
whenever possible, the gift of a laugh,” however much those traits may be “hallmarks of
Dobyns’ style, no matter what his genre: poetry, essay, short story, or novel” (King 76).
And it likewise seems premature to yield in one’s analysis of Dobyns’ poetry at the
suggestion that “[h]is followers expect a lot of entertainment but very little comfort [from
his poetry], unless it is the comfort of hearing an unflinching admission [that] is wretched
with pain and bloated with preposterous desire” (King 91). Instead, one might
deconstruct Dobyns’ engagement and (re)presentations of those pains and desires so as to
discern in his verse its profound formal poetic innovation, which creates an affect capable
of enacting an epistemology for registering and resisting the violent paradoxes of
neoliberal life in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in the United States
and beyond.
To reckon this, one might look, for example, to the existential angst driving the
prose poetry in The Porcupine’s Kisses. Published in 2006, at the height of neoliberal
power in the U.S., meaning just prior to the devastating economic collapses beginning in

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2007 and rippling across the globe, the book comprises four main components: prose
poems by Dobyns, poetic aphorisms by Dobyns, poetic definitions by Dobyns (with all of
the sarcasm, bite, and wit of Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary), and black-and-
white drawings by the artist Howie Michels. The symbiosis of the components renders a
poetic experience that exceeds the sum of its parts, and these components also compose
in their mosaic form an affective signification of the fragmentary, of how the world
splintered to it fractions can be reconstructed through the recombination of the fractions
into new wholes, new worlds, through new artifice. All of this conflates with the
ontological aegis of the book, which affectively reinscribes the agony of precarized life
into the reader, which, again, is an affect of vulnerability, futility, disempowerment, and
struggle. This is evident in the untitled poem “(Although in the thick of a journey),”
which follows in its entirety, wherein one notes through an extended metaphor of a ship
in a bottle the imbrication in the poem’s meditation on life of the layers of availability
without function that constitute the ontological violence of neoliberal subjectivation:
Although in the thick of a journey, the ship in the bottle isn’t going anywhere. It
has already reached its destination, while the bottle itself is long past being
emptied of its contents and has become an absence, the very atmosphere of the
ship rushing nowhere with wind-filled sails. There is no end in sight; being is the
paradox of stationary motion. And the wind that swells the sails, ruffles the
whitecaps on a blue plastic sea, is the wind of the ship’s creation, which blew in
the workshop of its maker, whose restlessness was physical and existential, whose
materials were chosen from the cast off and abandoned; and who, when he had
completed his work, corked the bottle, walked out to the dirt street of his small
fishing village to smoke a cigarette and gaze at the sea, which churns and plunges
and goes no place. (7)

Even the form of the poem, which is a prose poem, communicates the frustration and
futility of suspended life: The prose poem is an intermediary poetic genre, lodged
somewhere indefinite between being a lineated poem and micro-fiction. Moreover, that

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formal indefinition contributes to the text’s creation of identitarian frustration and
confusion by insisting upon the permanent occlusion of formal identity. All that exists for
the neoliberal subject is bottled and corked subsistence; she “churns and plunges and
goes no place.” Her life is defined by a “restlessness” that cannot be relieved, and it is
both “physical and existential.” She has “become an absence,” and her every effort
results in her “rushing nowhere.” She may think herself “in the thick of a journey,” but
she in fact “isn’t going anywhere.” She is a bottled ship, an ornamental bottle, and “the
paradox of stationary motion.” Such is neoliberalized life.
Nowhere does Dobyns insist upon this more clearly and urgently than in Winter’s
Journey, which also happens to be his most overtly political and most critically ignored
collection of poetry. The paucity of critical attention paid to Winter’s Journey is
symptomatic of the ideology of the neoliberal violence to which the book is attempting to
respond and offer alternative ontological spaces, social formations, and political
strategies. While the dearth of critical attention to the book might also bespeak its relative
newness, having been published less than two years ago, it is nonetheless a major work
by a highly visible poet, who published thirteen books of poetry prior to Winter’s
Journey. Moreover, those antecedent books had won numerous prizes, awards,
fellowships, grants, and critical acclaim from such institutions as The Academy of
American Poets, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the
Poetry Society of America, and the National Poetry Series. Dobyns’ writing also had
been the subject of a diversity of scholarship, including books, articles, and at least one
doctoral dissertation.
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So perhaps the critical indifference to the appearance of Winter’s
Journey is in part also attributable to longstanding, if inaccurate, critical attitude towards

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Dobyns’ work. In particular, that strain of criticism circulates around the
misapprehension that “Dobyns’s [sic] career is centered within a relatively self-contained
creative writing culture that is much less connected to movements and practices in other
parts of the world” (Beach 50). This is a hasty and clumsy misreading of the oeuvre of a
poet that with uncommon global scope in U.S. poetry directly and distinctly treats such
geographically, politically, and culturally diverse geopolitical crises as the genocidal
dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in Chile from 1973-1990, the U.S. war in the Persian
Gulf in 1991, and the “international coalition” that toppled Saddam Hussein in Iraq in
2006. Somehow, though, critics seem to overlook this, much to the detriment of their
readers. To begin to redress that gap in criticism of Dobyns’ work, one can therefore turn
to the poetic analysis of Dobyns’ engagement in Winter’s Journey of ontological, social,
and political turbulences pertaining to and/or exemplified by the nuanced and
overlapping violences of the geopolitical matrices of power that converge and spawn in
the most recent, illegal, and unconstitutional wars in Iraq and Afghanistan by the so-
called “coalition of the willing.”

Testing the Paradox: Poetry and The Neoliberal Violence of Present Absence

In particular, Winter’s Journey is concerned with the violence of the production
and administration of that present absence, which Dobyns artfully identifies and
represents so as to challenge, dodge, and reimagine it. As such Winter’s Journey becomes
the grounds for an epistemology of resistance to neoliberalism and neoliberal violence, to
which poetry becoming a counterstrike and an alternative. Where the welfare state

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dismantles itself in the name of neoliberalism, Winter’s Journey highlights and archives
the violence of that process in order to structure alternative spaces and escapes. That is,
the book poetically enacts and rebuts instantiations of the neoliberal subjectivation of
precarity by poetically evoking the neoliberal subject as embodying a commodity of
emptiness, which Dobyns positions for transformation. Under neoliberalism, gone is the
modern state’s promise (some would say “myth”) of protection of human life, and
Dobyns intends to test the waters at the edge of that unbound sea. He writes at the
intersection of economics and ontology. The neoliberal subject is she who has been
loosed from the disciplinary powers of normativizing local and national practices in order
to be reconfigured and offered to a transnational market fusing subjectivity to capitalist
modes of expansion privileging privatization, globalization, and so-called
“democratization.” And Dobyns elucidates this affectively through his poetry so as to
reengage his readers with it.
Dobyns poetically performs the conversion of materiality into precarity in his
poetry, conjuring thresholds of precariousness, deprivation, and violence. This is
thematized in the book by Dobyns’ invocation and exploration of the U.S.-led wars in
Iraq and Afghanistan, which according to the poem “Napatree Point” (4-7), have
contributed to the transformation of the U.S. into:
a country that has become an embarrassment,
disliked and even hated around the world, a constant
source of bickering among its people and led by men
and women who seems stupid, but are probably only
scared, greedy, egotistical, and ignorant. (4-8)

Of note, Dobyns’ use of the list, a common poetic trope, includes adjectives
consonant with markers of the psychosocial conditions for neoliberal life: “scared,

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greedy, egotistical, and ignorant.” Dobyns has poetically contemplated such affective
states since his first book, Concurring Beasts, and he admits in fact to a lifelong worry
“that human life, and particularly human suffering, have no [intrinsic] meaning” (King
73). Within the context of neoliberalism, such worry becomes neoliberal praxis; it is an
emotional trope for thinking the groundless grounds of neoliberal subjectivity, thereby
reaffirming the neoliberal subject, whose subjective suffering is intrinsically meaningless
in so far as neoliberalism intrinsically reduces the human to material, though that material
is managed through the production of an affect of human suffering, meaning through the
performance of subjective precarity, though individuated, personal suffering remains
nevertheless meaningless. To build upon the work of Lewkowicz, this is neoliberal life;
“[w]ith the fall of that ordering power of the State, all that remains is diffuse human
material…human material of an essentially changed quality. Among those changes in
quality is the loss of the human, which becomes inessential.”
As if in direct response to Lewkowicz, Dobyns writes against and through the
violent, biopolitical debasement of the human, with Winter’s Journey striving dually to
reveal dehumanization and to recover the human. It pursues those interrelated aims
through its affect of reengagement, which incites the contestation and circumvention of
aspects of neoliberal dehumanization. More importantly, Winter’s Journey induces
readers to reconsider neoliberal subjectivity and react to it. This is why the affect of his
poetry is so important to study. It enacts resistance and alternatives to neoliberal violence
by altering sensorial conditions. This is one way to understand Dobyns’ claim that “I
want my poems to jar the reader’s complacency” (Sánchez 171). State-sponsored apathy
is a hallmark form of the neoliberal containment and administration of life. This, then, is

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a central paradox of Winter’s Journey: It aims to mobilize the interior life of the reader
through her body by suffusing it with the historicized context of its emergence that
blended together absence, apathy, and dehumanization. In short, it is the opening of the
body to the reinscription of its own diffusion.
Yet Dobyns’ does more than merely reinscribe neoliberal ideology through affect;
he also cunningly assails it. For example, by paradoxically personalizing the
depersonalization and dehumanization of neoliberal subjectivation, he is individuating
public and impersonal exposure and precarity. As a result, divisions between subject and
state, for example, are rendered false binaries, with the affect of reengagement
repositioning the reader’s body as a sensory zone of indistinction between subject and
state. And this is how Winter’s Journey thrusts into presence alternative modes of being
in and of the world through absence.

The Recursivity of Neoliberal Violence: “Poem” Is a Poem Is a Poem Is a Poem

Dobyns poetic effort to create an affect encouraging the reader to reengage,
clarify, rethink, and/or transform the conditions of her emergence as a subject is
exemplified by the poem simply titled “Poem” (3). It is the first of the fourteen poems
comprising Winter’s Journey, and although the poem constitutes a mere five couplets, it
aptly introduces the overlapping themes of the book in particular and of Dobyns’ poetic
project in general, namely the violence of neoliberal life, the instability of thought, and
the fragility of human collectives. Here is the poem in its entirety:
Who has the time? he asked.
But none in the room wore a watch.

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On the hearth lay a dog, its two
front paws making parallel lines.

It’s eleven o’clock, said another,
the day has scarcely begun.

But the dog was a black dog,
black with one blind eye.

It’s nearing midnight, said a third,
and which of us is ready?

However brief and slender, the poem powerfully presents neoliberal life: those “in
the room” are stripped of the structures ordering and comforting a life, such as
instruments of time and organizations of companionship. As a result, the reader senses
the precarity of the subjects in and of the poem; they are lost and bewildered, and
therefore vulnerable. One senses their exposure, positioned on the brink of an
encroaching, encompassing violence, and their unpreparedness for it implies not only
their defenselessness but also the impossibility of preparedness itself within the logic of
their being: “Who has the time … and which of us is ready?” Moreover, that exposure
and vulnerability, that reeling bewilderment and the lurking menace, are poetically
constructed through subtle artfulness. Dobyns is tweaking poetic craft to jar his readers
from their complacency via his paradoxical poetic presentation of absences, which affect
the reader first through the tone of menace driving the poem.
That tone, meaning here the poet’s disposition towards subject and audience, is
aural affect created by poetic artifice. Dobyns has carefully combined rhythm, lineation,
and consonance to create an affective musical conduit and counterpoint to the danger and
mystery articulated by the content of the poem. Together, the eerie sound and the
disconcerting denotative content combine to offer a resonant music to the reader, which is

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one example of the affect of reengagement. To broach it without making the reader
defensive and therefore less susceptible to its affective designs, the rhythm of the poem
delivers its discursive content in a lyrical act of poetic prestidigitation: Dobyns sounds
like he is singing an appealing and enchanting song, largely because of the repetitive lilt
of the iambic play across the lines of the poem. Thus, through her ear, the reader might
initially hear and feel the poem as something akin to the calming rhythm of soft surf
breaking on a sandy sore, though the flowing tide of this poem subtly brings mostly pain,
despair, and bafflement. Nevertheless, upon its first sounding, the poem might entrance
the reader with its casual, melodic rhythm, initially allaying any anxiety, hesitation,
and/or resistance the reader may offer before relinquishing herself to the poem.
In other words, Dobyns begins his poetic project in this poem through a strategic
attention to structure: He is organizing the poem through the orchestration of its music.
His aim is ease his readers into a shock of introspection. The musicality lulls the reader
so as to prime her for a series of precisely timed ontological and epistemological blows,
which themselves arrive carefully arranged in the form of seemingly gentle, swift
propositions despite comprising some of the most profound—and profoundly
distressing—ontological, epistemological, and socioeconomic questions one might pose
about time, mortality, and knowledge.
Dobyns’ attempt to jar his reader from her complacency is enacted on more
affective fronts than the aurality of the poem’s rhythm. To similar effect, Dobyns proffers
the false stability of end-stopped lines, which grant the reader a compounding sense of
balance, symmetry, and completion, line by line. In short they signify control,
misdirecting the reader to sense the poem as ordered, orderly, structured. Yet while those

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poetic devices might (seem to) offer to the reader a sense of familiarity, stability, and
intelligibility of form, they simultaneously structure the affect of the neoliberal
unstructuring of subjective possibility through the subjectivation. The neoliberal subject
is precisely she who is constructed out of a stripping away of ordering principles once
wielded and imposed on the life of a subject by the state. And the confusion that results
from a neoliberal stripping away is sprung upon the reader of “Poem” by Dobyns’
calculated disordering of time. For example, in lines five and six, the poem claims that
“[i]t’s eleven o’clock… / the day has scarcely begun,” but a mere two lines later “[i]t’s
nearing midnight.” Is this juxtaposition a mere compression of the linear progression of
time? Or perhaps it’s a correction, illustrating the confusion born of a lack of ordering
principles and instruments such as time and watches? This is, after all, a group of people
in a room where, within a poem so brief, Dobyns takes the time and space to detail that
“none…wore a watch.” A third explanation of the warped chronologies might come by
thinking through the juxtaposition as a diffusion of time itself as an ordering principle? It
is a distortion of experience fomented by subjective and intersubjective incomprehension
and/or incapacity, with the members of the collective left to lament their own
“unreadiness.” Moreover, isn’t that unreadiness itself a trope for thinking the debasement
of the subject in the process of neoliberal subjectivation? Regardless of one’s answers to
such questions, and also in consonance with them, the resulting confusion and
inadequacy of the orientating details of chronology for the reader contribute to the
creation of a disorienting and disordering affect by the poem.
Yet another shade of tone in this complex orchestration of affect to interrogate
neoliberal subjectivity comes via Dobyns’ question in the opening line of the poem,

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where he asks with both commiserative sincerity and caustic sarcasm of the (reluctant)
reader of poetry, “[w]ho has the time for such reflection?” The world is busy, disordered,
chaotic, and violent under the imperializing aegis of late consumer capitalism and
neoliberal globalization, whose roots and whose ever-expanding network of branches
emerge from the seed of neoliberal subjectivation. Again, neoliberalism is an ontological
double-bind: We subjects are produced through absence, and we exist through exposure
to erasure of that present absence. And within that destabilizing, disordering, and
disorientating existential maelstrom, even if one did ‘have the time’ to reflect on these
foundational aspects of neoliberal life, “which of us is ready” to confront its darkness?
The “black dog / …with one black eye” might imply one answer via his signification of
an epistemology of resignation. Like Odin, the he might signal the cost of wisdom; we
see the nothingness of our neoliberal being, and of note, that poetic manipulation of
blindness links Dobyns’ dog to a long lineage of literary characters signaling that motif,
beginning with Oedipus and Tiresius, for example, who saw through blindness a means
to confront darkness and realize in it its own echoing answer. Today for Dobyns, that
echo might resound in the human suffering of grievous acts of material violence to gain
insight into human precarity. This is yet another iteration of the idea that through
neoliberalism subjective suffering is born of the exploitation and abuse of the material
conditions of the subject’s emergence.
Furthermore, within the context of affect and neoliberalism, the one-eyed dog’s
wisdom might be further read as his apparent resignation to the ontological turmoil that
results from the paradoxical recognition of life as existing through structures it is unable
to discern, comprehend, or change. In short, his blindness is its own futility. Yet therein

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lies a subtle but powerful critique of neoliberalism by Dobyns. The dog’s front paws
point together in the one and only one direction possible within the ideology of
neoliberalism: forward. It is a directional gesture, marking the positivist ideology rigging
a neoliberal system of perpetual expansion. The marketplace must expand, even if and
when the new subjects, territories, and markets to be conquered are virtual. Thus the
“parallel lines” of the black dog’s paws might be read like railways lines extending to the
horizon, which will strike scholars and readers as a familiar symbol of progress and
modernity in Futurist, Modernist, and modernista poetries and art in the early twentieth
century, for example. Ditto for thinking those paws to symbolize a clock, yet another
instrument and icon of modernity. And via the historicization of these paws as symbol—
whether railway lines or clock—within a literary and political genealogy of culture, one
comes to understand the poem as showcasing the myth of state progress.
Like those symbolic railway lines of artistic Modernisms that mythologized
capitalist industrialization, Manifest Destiny, and the so-called “development” of
resource-laden zones of the Americas, these neoliberal lines of the one-eyed dog point
out a key myth of neoliberalism: its supposed inevitability. Neoliberalism presents itself
as inevitable. The capitalist commodification of life is an unavoidable global reality, it
tells us. More interestingly, to maintain that myth, neoliberalism somewhat
counterintuitively perpetuates imbalance: these are the market fluctuations, the
transnational political discord, the exploitative labor politics, the redistribution of
borders, the oppression of cultures, the territorial dispossession, the commodification of
pollutants, the privatization of natural resources like water, the “preemptive”
transnational wars, and the national and transnational economic collapses of recent years,

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and especially in relation to bubble economies. In short, it is the debasement of human
life by its decoupling from its modern safeguards, which for centuries had been
developed and provided by various forms of state-sponsored infrastructure. Thus the
force of neoliberalism correlates to its ability to destabilize, and this imbues yet another
layer of meaning into Dobyns’ intimation that “none in the room wore a watch” and none
“is ready.” These become figures for thinking through the unstructuring of the modern
citizen-subject, and they might prove important to keep in mind.

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Enriching the Argument: Adrienne Rich and the Precarity of Neoliberal Life

To contextualize Baca’s and Dobyns’ poetic innovations in producing poetries of
reengagement in the United States, one might look by way of comparative contrast to
other U.S. poets laboring to contest the unstructuring of the citizen-subject in the
neoliberal age. In other words, the poetry of Baca and Dobyns belongs to a powerful
subgenre of poetry in the U.S. that can be identified as formulating itself around the idea
of contesting the precarity of the neoliberal subject. As an inaugural gesture, one might
initiate a highly rudimentary, arbitrary, and incondite grouping of such poets by
suggesting that it include, by way of tentative example, poets such as Amiri Baraka,
Martín Espada, Nikki Giovanni, Terrance Hayes, June Jordan, Etheridge Knight, Audre
Lorde, Nathaniel Mackey, Simon Ortiz, Claudia Rankine, Luis Rodríguez, Raul Salinas,
and Gary Soto for their amplification of racialized elements of precarity in the
neoliberalized U.S.; poets such as Ai, Gloria Anzaldúa, Rafael Campo, Judith Ortíz
Cofer, Mark Doty, Denise Duhamel, Thom Gunn, Marilyn Hacker, Rob Halpern, Denise
Levertov, Timothy Liu, Cherríe Moraga, Pat Parker, Marge Piercy, Carl Phillips, and
Margaret Randall for their critiques of gendered forms of neoliberal precarization; poets
such as Charles Bukowski, Hayden Carruth, Jim Daniels, Susan Eisenberg, Juan Felipe

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Herrera, Philip Levine, Pedro Pietri, Karen Weyant, and Nellie Wong for their critiques
of neoliberalized life through labor- and class-based perspectives; poets such as Rae
Armantrout, Ibtisam Barakat, Frank Bidart, Robert Creely, Kimiko Hahn, Raza Ali
Hasan, Safiya Henderson-Holmes, Li-Young Lee, Harryette Mullen, and C.D. Wright for
their explications and contestations of the ontological agony of neoliberal precarity; and
poets like Ray Gonzalez, Sam Hamill, Fady Joudah, Grace Paley, Benjamin Alire Sáenz,
and Brian Turner for their opposition to the precarization of life through anti-war and
anti-nuclear proliferation platforms. Certainly these poets address more aspects of the
precarization of life than the theme to which they are attached in the hasty list assembled
above. Certainly, too, from among those estimable ranks, no poet surpasses the overall
poetic achievement of Adrienne Rich in her vibrant, sustained engagement of the
violence of neoliberalism in the U.S. and beyond.
Throughout Rich’s prolific literary career, which has been well documented and
critiqued, her poetic fervor remains matched by political fervor. This duality
synergistically drives her continuous, innovative work to transform herself socially and
aesthetically. That is, throughout her adult life, Rich lived and wrote her ceaseless
struggle to work through identity politics in gendered, economic, sexual, political, and
ontological terms. Of note she grounds this struggle in an originary violence, which she
famously describes as being “split at the root,”
37
meaning that she was born into
identitarian crisis as the oldest daughter of a Jewish father and Southern Protestant
mother, with her parents raising her as a Christian. In the process of writing about that
originary identitarian clash, as well as other wrenching and profound fractures and
ruptures in her life, she gained a vast audience as a poet, not only among U.S. readers, but

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also among those abroad. Her poetry, in fact, exists in translation in at least a dozen
languages, and within the U.S., her reputation as a preeminent poet is longstanding. For
example, in 1987 the scholar Albert Gelpi writes that “Adrienne Rich is one of the few
contemporary poets who really matters, and in the course of her career she has become
our most accomplished and influential feminist poet” (649). Twenty years later, the
scholar Helen Emmitt echoes that sentiment, writing in 2007 that “Adrienne Rich is one
of the most important poets writing today, both for her style and her mission” (227). To
illuminate aspects of that ‘style and mission’ in the service of a critique of neoliberal
subjectivation, the close reading of her poetry in English will be performed herein. The
intent in doing so is to offer a complementary and elucidating mode of thinking through
the poetic resistance in the U.S to neoliberal subjectivation as argued above through
Dobyns’ work, not to mention Baca’s, with that resistance emerging from the specificities
of neoliberalized life in the U.S. and expanding outward across national boundaries. To
recontextualize an insight from Judith Vollmer, “Rich speaks sanely, eerily, from the
interiors of the US, from the inside out of our closed society” (13), thereby exposing its
cloistered, core violences to scrutiny. More specifically, then, the close reading of Rich’s
poetry of resistance to neoliberal violence will inflect, problematize, and extend key
claims about the possibility and importance of poetry to render for its readers an affect of
the ontological precarity founding the neoliberal subject.

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Your Native Land, Your Life: Rich and the Poetic Disruption of Neoliberal Power

Born on 16 May 1929 in Baltimore, Maryland, Rich is roughly a decade older
than Dobyns and two decades older than Baca, but like them, she bristles with a special
anger at the sociopolitical violence of the U.S. over the past three decades. Unlike the
poetry of Baca and Dobyns, though, Rich’s emerges from an emphasis on gendered
forms of violence, which informs her critique of neoliberal subjectivation. This focus on
gendered violence in fact pervades Rich’s oeuvre, and it has inspired much debate,
including vigorous disagreements between scholars of feminist, gender, and women’s
studies. The distinguished feminist scholar Michele Wallace, for instance, voices a
concern that is frequently heard in feminist discourses: That Rich’s oeuvre carries
disproportionate clout within feminist studies. More specifically, Wallace intimates that
when compelled by academic context to account for Rich’s famous “politics of location”
from her 1983 essay “North American Tunnel Vision” (Blood 160-166), for example,
Wallace felt “angry that I had been asked to speak within a framework defined by a white
feminist who had probably exercised more power than any other in the U.S. in
determining the essential reading list for Afro-Americans and Third World feminist
literature” (168). Another frequent critique of Rich’s feminist transculturality focuses on
her collapse of differences in female sexuality into a utopian homogeneity, which Rich
promotes under the banner of lesbianism. Thus one finds a multitude of careful
scholarship criticizing Rich’s definitions of the term “lesbian,”
38
for example, for erasing
the distinctions between multiple and differing forms of anti-normative female sexuality,
with the feminist poet and scholar Alicia Ostriker, for one, critiquing this as Rich’s

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espousal of a “Lesbian Imperative” (121). More broadly, the scholar of feminist studies
Marilyn Farwell summarily explains that for Rich’s critics, her use of the term “[l]esbian
as metaphor…ignored specificity, subsuming racial and historical differences among
women or, in our contemporary philosophical vocabulary, lesbian writ large essentialized
and ahistoricized lesbian and female existence” (101).
In short, then, it is important to note here as a gesture of inclusion the many,
varied voices contributing to the rich and varied feminist discourses overlapping,
critiquing, and extending Rich’s writing. The importance of Rich’s poetry to this
dissertation, in fact, lies in aspects of many of them. However the dominant framing
device herein for the analysis of Rich’s poetry is neoliberalism, to which Rich herself
might duly respond along the lines of her argument about economics in the
aforementioned essay (and lightning rod of critical discourse), “North American Tunnel
Vision,” where she rather persuasively argues for “the bedrock significance of hunger as
a feminist issue” (Blood 163), meaning that starving women cannot begin to fight for
their sexual, reproductive, educational, political, and/or civil rights. This, for Rich, is the
primacy of “the fundamental issue of having something to eat” (Blood 163), and one
might perceive an analogue between that bedrock hunger of Rich’s argument and the
bedrock agony of a life of neoliberal precarity as proposed in this study, with the latter
including all sorts of fundamental deprivation and its consequent pain, including but not
limited to that of starvation.
In other words, the emphasis in Rich’s writing on the development of a feminist
praxis for assuaging the most basic forms of suffering converges with the designs of this
study in its contestation of the abuse of the subject. It also offers a link between poetry,

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criticism, economic theory, and the violence of neoliberal precarity. To reframe an
insight by Alice Templeton into the criticism of Rich’s conceptualizations of feminism,
the argument in this dissertation about neoliberal precarity transcends the politics of
literary representation from which it emerges in much the same way that Templeton
explains the heated discourse over Rich’s ideas of feminism as emerging from Rich’s
theorization of poetry as a genre. More precisely, Templeton explains that:
[b]ecause Rich’s poetry constantly puts the practice and use of literary art under
suspicion, almost no critic of Rich’s work can avoid discussing the paradoxes and
politics within the criticism itself; however, along with weaving its own self-
reflexive narrative, criticism also needs to account for the cultural currency of
Rich’s work outside the academy. (339, emphasis added)

A similar aegis is in play in this dissertation, where the affect of select poetries is
examined for the poetic elements of its production of ontological and sociopolitical
impact and influence. This is a poetic epistemology, and it both critiques neoliberalism
and offers an alternative to it. More precisely, it is an ontology capable of disrupting, if
not disarticulating, neoliberal networks of power, much in the way the feminist scholar
Joan Nestle sees Rich’s oeuvre as existing:
in a continuum of thinking about sex/gender constructions and inequalities…[that
does the work of] preparing the ground for the next generation of ideas that will
challenge what we think we know and give us new tools to dismantle the systems
of power that constrict our humanity. (Nestle 56, emphases added)

That foregrounding of Rich’s ardent opposition to abusive systems of power, as well as
her high profile as a U.S. poet, positions her well to join this study, too, and not only as a
comparative frame for thinking through the poetries of reengagement and reemergence
from neoliberal subjectivation in the U.S., such as Dobyns’ and Baca’s, but also in
relation to the poetries of Gelman and Partnoy on similar grounds.

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For instance, in Rich’s fourteenth book of poetry, Your Native Land, Your Life:
Poems (1986), she offers a fierce poetic exploration and critique of the neoliberal
precarization of life. The book has garnered a diversity of critical engagements, but it is
yet to be analyzed in relation to the ontological violence of neoliberal subjectivation.
Thus the aims of this chapter are at least threefold. First, the close reading of Rich’s
poetry through a critical perspective privileging her poetic relation to neoliberalism aims
here to elucidate Rich’s poetic orchestration of present absence as a means to inflect the
aforementioned analyses of Baca’s and Dobyns’ poetic innovation in rendering the
neoliberal subject in the U.S. Second, the direct poetic analysis of Rich’s encounter with
neoliberalism will augment the archive of existing scholarship on her important oeuvre.
Third, the illumination of present absence in Rich’s poetry will inflect the close readings
of the Argentine poets under analysis in this dissertation, thereby diversifying, stretching,
and nuancing the argument herein about the possibilities of engaging state violence
through poetry. To clarify this layered process, it is important, too, then, to contextualize
this approach to Your Native Land, Your Life within the extant archive of scholarship on
it. This will clarify the need for and utility of this chapter’s engagement of the book
through its specifically poetic response to neoliberal violence.

Contradictions: Reaganomics, Your Life, and Unbelonging

In this chapter, Your Native Land, Your Life is posited as a poetically constructed,
alternative ontology to that of the neoliberal subject. Like the work of Gelman, Partnoy,
Baca, and Dobyns, Your Native Land, Your Life offers a way of being in the world that

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exceeds and frustrates the market-based ontology of the neoliberal subject. To date there
is an absence of scholarship engaging the book in this manner, meaning there is superb
scholarship on Rich’s oeuvre in general and on Your Native Land, Your Life in particular,
but there is none that performs the combination of literary analysis, political criticism,
economic theory, and aesthetics that are blended into the methodology of this study. For
example, it is auspicious here that Cheri Colby Langdell performs close readings of
Rich’s poetry in Adrienne Rich: The Moment of Change, and Langdell even promisingly
remarks that Rich “is concerned with the nature and aesthetics if poetry here and now, as
explored, for instance, in [the long poem] ‘North American Time’ [in Your Native Land,
Your Life” (172). However, Langdell’s emphases in her close readings, while quite
understandable and helpful, are more classically literary and biographical than those
herein, meaning she invokes little ontological and economic critique through the poetic.
Thus this dissertation aims to deepen Langdell’s precedent of privileging close reading,
thereby not only honoring Langdell’s precedent by augmenting its avenue of analysis in
the archive of scholarship on Rich’s poetry, but also answering some questions broached
amid secondary scholarship on the subject, such as the complaint by Helen Emmitt that
“Langdell’s readings of individual poems are not particularly daring or challenging; they
rely too heavily on paraphrase, and they use biographical material that seems unnecessary
and is often repetitive” (226).
Like Langdell’s auspicious start to her analysis of Rich’s poetry through an
emphasis on close reading, the poet and critic Jane Miller offers a promising orientation
to Your Native Land, Your Life in her review of the book by highlighting the political.
Miller remarks, for example, that Rich “has chosen engagement at the level of

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emotional/political statement” (19). This syncretic reading of the emotional and political
is a frequent combination in criticism of Rich’s oeuvre. As Marilyn Farwell writes, for
instance, in her admirably perceptive and ranging evaluation of the “lesbian literary
imagination” in Rich’s oeuvre, the emotional and political are linked in that the writer
works through “images that evince the conflict and turmoil surrounding the woman's
effort to create (100). However, in Farwell’s article, the emphasis is on historicizing
conflicting definitions of lesbianism in relation to theorizations of metaphor, and in
Miller’s review, the political goes undertheorized. Miller does go so far as to assert
through the 1984 poem “Poetry: III” (68) that “[i]n this [poem], post modern language
theory and feminist theory correspond, rejecting a belief in historicism, progress, linear
thinking” (20), but Miller fails to recognize this as signaling a counterstrike against
neoliberal logic, perhaps due to the relative newness of both Reaganomics and the poetry,
with the review appearing in 1988. Nevertheless, Miller presciently edges towards an
ontological apprehension of the violence of neoliberal precarity through the aesthetics of
poetry when she writes that Rich in Your Native Land, Your Life proposes that:
the self is an example of a new consciousness, for here the poetry, its long,
statement-like mobility, its blunt admissions and questions, is in the service of
Life, and theory and practice are one. She's gone further into the beast than
anyone might have anticipated. (20)

Thus this chapter again finds its niche in both extending extant scholarship on Your
Native Land, Your Life and in stitching together those diverse initial scholarly texts,
which offer components of the methodology herein without even realizing them in full
combination.
Here, then, another purpose of this chapter might come clear: to elucidate and
critique the neoliberal violence that structures and suffuses Your Native Land, Your Life.

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Written during the most vigorous years of the rapid institutionalization of Reaganomics,
Your Native Land, Your Life seethes with the knowledge of the quantifiability and
commodification of life. Not only is the book broken into chronologically progressive
thirds, but the first and the final third comprise poems titled only by numbers. Like the
book, these poems are enumerated in ascending order. In other words, emerging from
Reagan’s neoliberal landscape, this book is structurally conceived and received through
numbers, thereby signaling, even if unknowingly, the socioeconomic conditions of its
emergence by mimicking the quantification of life by neoliberal theorists and
policymakers. Thus the book, which centers thematically upon an agonistic, tri-partite
quest after answers to shifting questions of identity and (un)belonging, can be thought of
as continuously divided and subdivided into functional fragments, much as neoliberalism
splinters subjectivity through subjectivation, not to mention how neoliberalism
disarticulates sociality through numbers-driven labor, profit, and tax policies. Thus the
trope of the fragmentation and quantification of a self is introduced immediately in the
first section of the book, “Sources,” which comprises a long poem about the “sources” of
Rich’s identity, with that genealogical endeavor broken into numerated segments. More
precisely, that long poem comprises twenty-three segments enumerated by ascending
Roman numerals. In contrast, the final section of the book, “Contradictions: Tracking
Poems,” comprises twenty-nine poems, with each enumerated in ascending order by a
cardinal number followed by a period. That punctuation in itself is interesting. Not only is
it unusual for a poem title to contain punctuation, but also, more importantly, for that
punctuation to end-stop the line, and to do so with the finality of a period. The affective
impact of the period is to induce an abrupt stop, as if to stagger the reader from the outset.

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Here are brief, simple, and sequentially numerated titles, but each stops its reader dead in
her tracks from the start. More broadly, then, this trope of offering punctuated numerical
titles might induce in the reader an emotional understanding of the complexity and ardor
of the attempt of the subject to speak beyond her subjection. The poems in this section
pulsate with the pain of their maker, which they transmit through crafty poetic decisions,
such as the juxtaposition of numbers with periods. Such is their artistry, their artifice. It is
as subtle as it is evocative, and it is as apt for conveying Rich’s subjective angst as it is
trenchant in its critique of neoliberalized life. Furthermore, the book is permeated by
variations on this aesthetic manipulation of the reader through an affect performing the
angst of neoliberal subjectivation. Consequently, regardless of where one looks in the
book—whether in the first, second, or third section—the precarity of neoliberalized life
can be recognized, rethought, and critiqued.

Growing Up Safe, American: Confrontations with Subjective Despair

As aforementioned, the first section of the book is titled “Sources” (1-27), and it
comprises a reprinting the long poem of Rich’s 1983 book of the same title. That poem,
written between August of 1981 and August of 1982, spans twenty-four printed pages,
and it includes free verse in a variety of forms, ranging from spare couplets to thick
blocks of text fringing on prose poetry. The content of the poem pivots upon Rich’s
interrogation of her personal history, paying particular attention to its intersection with
her understanding in the moment of composition of her gendered, sexual, and religious
identity. Without seeking reconciliation, Rich is attempting to reckon and move beyond

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her earlier apprehensions of herself and her place in the world through the clash of her
religious inheritances, for example, repeating variations throughout the poem of the idea
in section “IV” (6) that “in the beginning we grasp whatever we can / to survive” (7-8).
This struggle to survive occurs both endogenously and exogenously. It signifies both the
internal conflict and external turmoil that suffuse her poetic meditation. Thus, for
example, in section “V” (7), when Rich reflects on her childhood during World War II,
she erupts in a metaphor by now very familiar to Rich’s readers:
I was growing up safe, American
with sugar rationed in a Mason jar

split at the root white-skinned social christian
neither gentile nor Jew

through the immense silence
of the Holocaust

I had no idea what I had been spared (7-13)

Furthermore, this section is metonymic of the rest in so far as it emphasizes the
permanence and implacability of identitarian struggle. And importantly to this
dissertation, that poetic evocation of struggle hinges upon the poetic production of
absence. There is the overarching struggle over the absence of a coherent identity, there is
the absence of the comfort of religion(s), there is the absence of the victims of the
Holocaust (and even the absence of their “immense silence” in so far as that printed
language is the antithesis of the absence it intends to acknowledge), and there is the
child’s absence of knowledge of the violence intrinsic to her Jewish genealogy. This is all
accentuated by the grammar of the poem, which is itself codified by absence: there is the
absence of punctuation, the absence of the unconventional gaps between words, and the

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absence surrounding key phrases like “neither gentile nor Jew” and “of the Holocaust,”
which seem to hover as if suspended in white space, protracting time for the reader and
thereby exacerbating her experience of these compacted, loaded phrases and references to
absence, evacuation, and emptiness. Of tangential note, that trope of white space within
lines of poetry recurs frequently and effectively throughout Your Native Land, Your Life.
The second section of the book, “North American Time,” offers nineteen
previously published, individual poems written between 1983 and 1985. Among its most
pertinent pieces to this study is the poem “Yom Kippur 1984” (75-78). In nine, thick
stanzas of sprawling free verse spanning four dense pages of text, the poem dwells
inextricably in the unanswerability of its opening line: “What is a Jew in solitude?”
Importantly, this question follows epigraphs from Robinson Jeffers, that self-styled Nero
of his collapsing republic, and Leviticus, a text of violence if ever there was one. More
specifically, after importing Jeffers’ claim that “I drew solitude over me, on the long
shore,” and after echoing the admonition in Leviticus that “For whoever does not afflict
his soul throughout this day, shall be cut off from his people,” Rich goes on to ask “What
would it mean not to feel lonely or afraid” (2)? More pointedly, that gesture towards
subjective precarity is immediately rooted in a recognition of gendered violence: “What
is a woman in solitude: a queer woman or man” (3)? That violence is literally
staggering, causing the poet to stammer in asking her question with the caesura in the
middle of the line emerging in an intensified, extended form not only by the natural
rhythm of the syntax of the question as a whole, but also by the colon and white space,
with the white space initiating a present absence into which the reader falls vertiginously.

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Similarly, the poem “Dreams Before Waking” (44-46), written in 1983,
foregrounds the precarity of neoliberalized life through the poetic enactment of present
absence. Rich introduces it in the body of the poem as “despair” (1), which is a loaded
word that follows two telling epigraphs to the poem. The first epigraph, from Elie Wiesel,
who is himself a renowned secular Jewish writer who engages questions of the limits of
subjective pain, reads “Despair is the question” (44). The second epigraph immediately
follows, and it comprises two excerpted lines of poetry from the acclaimed feminist Afro-
Cuban poet Nancy Morejón, reading “Hasta tu país cambió. Lo has / cambiado tú mismo”
(44). In the first line of Rich’s poem, she rearticulates this focus on despair and subjective
agency within national concerns by writing “Despair falls:” (1). In short, this combination
of the “dreams” of the title with the epigraphs and opening line supercharges the poem
and its theme of subjective “despair” from the start.
That is, the opening line posits despair, read herein as a synonym for the
subjective suffering of neoliberal precarity, as “falling” in the sense of it descending upon
the populace, to blanket and constrain it much as night would. Thus there is a visual
sensory association in play from the start of the body of the poem. Simultaneously this
line could be read as a valiant counter-claim to the domination of life by neoliberal
“despair;” it will fall, as in it will collapse or implode, like each empire has throughout
history, unsustainable in its global ambition. Third the punctuation of the line, its colon
opening to white space, invokes the present absence that both defines the neoliberal
precarity structuring “despair” and the possibility for alternative interpretations and re-
workings of that present absence to escape, exceed, and/or resist neoliberal empire. This
is then followed by a jazz-like series of dark, melodic riffs on permutations of despair,

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including the daring, counterhegemonic questions of “What would it mean to live / in a
city whose people were changing / each other's despair into hope?” and “what would it
means to stand on the first / page of the end of despair?” (66-68, 75-76).
Through the tropes and figures of poetry, Rich poetically structures into the verse
the intrinsic precarity and hesitation of the subject in voicing such questions. This is one
way to understand what is implied, for example, by the line break between the words
“first” and “page” in the poem. That use of lineation induces a visual, spatial, and
temporal experience of the precarity. In other words, that gap as structurally created by
Rich through poetic form symbolizes rupture, including even the rupture of the page,
which, according to Rich’s logic, is supposed to be the very place or plane of change. It
was/is to be the site where new possibility is to emerge and declare itself, but now it, too,
is a site of rupture and disruption. In response to her concession to perpetual rupture,
Rich is herself unyielding. She insists upon striving to empower the subject to resist
despair as both ontological and political adversary, or as she puts it in two places in this
poem, “You yourself must change it” (69, 72). Even from a national perspective, she
insists on the power of the individual, asking, for example, “what would it feel like to
know / your country was changing?” (70-71) and answering again with the refrain “You
yourself must change it” (72). The subject must endure and persist, recognizing her
subjective potentiality despite the fact that at times “life [has] felt arduous / new and
unmapped and strange” (73-74). Such are the complex trapping of the neoliberal subject,
against which she must struggle, using acts of poetic creation to write herself beyond its
market-based logic that would have her permanently destabilized in the service of a
political economy that commodifies her freedom. She must change that. She must dream

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hope beyond despair, and in that dreaming “stand on the first / page of the end of
despair.”

Edges that Blur: Learning Grief from Absence through Poetry

However, for chronological, historiographical, and aesthetic reasons, the
complexity of Rich’s encounter with neoliberal subjectivation is most evident in the
poems from the third section of Your Native Land, Your Life, “Contradictions: Tracking
Poems.” That section comprises poetry written between 1983 and 1985, and it not only
offers the newest poetry in the book, but also links the poetry to the conditions of its
emergence from a landscape of pervasive and profound geopolitically volatility and
violence, including Reagan’s global economic push for neoliberalism, his Cold War
assertion of military might through the invasion of Grenada, his announcement of the
Strategic Defense Initiative and its attendant intensification of the nuclear arms race, and
his unfurling of the hawkish Reagan Doctrine, arming and training so-called “anti-
communist” groups across the Americas, Africa, and Asia. In other words, Rich’s poetry
written during this period is saturated with state violence as absorbed from and in various
forms. It also therefore merits careful literary analysis through the methodology of this
dissertation in general, and through the antecedent argument about Dobyns’ poetry about
state violence in particular. It bears mention, too, here that Rich chose to compose Your
Native Land, Your Life by preceding the new poems with a republication of the poetry
from Sources as the eponymous first section of Your Native Land, Your Life, and a

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second section, “North American Time,” that also had previously appeared, as if staging
a compounding, living argument in its transformations over time.
To be sure, the poetry is as purposefully composed as it is arranged. For example,
“Contradictions: Tracking Poems” comprises twenty-nine enumerated poems. Each is
titled only by its cardinal number within the series, and each comprises between ten and
twenty lines of free verse. The ostensible subject matter is the poet’s suffering of arthritis,
which becomes, like Gelman’s private imagery of suffering the murder of his son and
daughter-in-law, a nexus for public grief. More precisely, Rich’s intimate portrayal in
compounding poetry of her acute suffering is rendered in such exquisitely individuating
detail that it paradoxically becomes apprehensible and therefore accessible to the reader
as a metaphor for public suffering. In “29.” (111) Rich herself explains this poetically
when she reminds readers to “remember: the body’s pain and the pain in the streets /
are not the same but you can learn / from the edges that blur” (9-11). To push this
further, one might recognize the particularized pain of Rich’s singularized precarity as
symbolic of the pain of neoliberal precarity in general through their conjunction in the
affect of metaphor. Here the work of the scholar Susan Hardy Aiken in her book Making
Worlds: Gender, Metaphor, Materiality (1998) proves clarifying. There Aiken cite Rich’s
aforementioned lines as the formulation of a response to “very difficult questions about
how metaphors actually do become material forces” (181). In other words, the affect of
precarity is realized through the metaphorization of its agony, which is both personal and
communal, private and public, and singular and pandemic in the neoliberal age.
It bears mention here, too, that this recognition of the violence of neoliberal life is
both apprehended and confronted via a poetic device: the metaphor. Again, then, one

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notes Adorno’s argument about the fundamental double function of art: that it both render
and resist the world; poetry ought to be both of and against the world. As a useful critical
precedent to the evaluation of Rich’s poetry in this light, meaning through a methodology
blending the aesthetics of Adorno and Rancière to spur a sociopolitical project through
poetic affect, one might therefore look to the book Embodied Literacies: Imageword and
a Poetics of Teaching (2003) by the scholar Kristie Fleckenstein. There Fleckenstein
invokes Rich’s aforementioned lines as both an epigraph and as content in her analysis of
the pedagogical value of Rich’s poetry. More germane to this dissertation, Fleckenstein
interprets those lines as a Foucauldian exhortation to human health—something much
deprived under neoliberal empire—through literacy. Specifically she interprets the lines
as Rich’s paradoxical encouragement of her readers to “cut loose from words” so as to
rethink “the myriad ways in which the literacies of bodies and of place, of culture and of
time evolve out if the shifting borders of an imageword ecology” (75). In this manner,
Fleckenstein argues, Rich’s lines prove salubrious in so far as they help readers to learn
through literature how:
to forge somatic, cultural, and environmental health as we live within historical
and experiential time. By focusing on the edges that blur [the private and public,
the self and other, the human and her world]…[a person] shapes for herself a
multifaceted identity out of an ecology of imagewords. (76)

Among the healthiest modes of subsistence for the neoliberal subject is to exist like
Proteus, through continuous change, bearing the conditions of besiegement as the catalyst
for continuous struggle to blur, escape, and reformulate the self, often through the
appropriation of enforced absences.

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(Not) Conditions of My Choosing: Living in and through Pain

Rich poetically exemplifies the simultaneous agony and possibility of enduring
enforced absences throughout Your Native Land, Your Life, and this is especially evident
in the twenty-nine sections of “Contradictions: Tracking Poems.” For example, in the
poem “7.” (89) she writes with an unabashed directness about the agony of her life, using
absence as a trope for the presence of her suffering, which to a degree constitutes her.
Here is the poem in its entirety:
Dear Adrienne,
I feel signified by pain
from my breastbone through my left shoulder down
through my elbow into my wrist is a thread of pain
I am typing this instead of writing by hand
because my wrist on the right side
blooms and rushes with pain
like a neon bulb
You ask me how I'm going to live
the rest of my life
Well, nothing is predictable with pain
Did the old poets write of this?
—in its odd spaces, free,
many have sung and battled—
But I'm already living the rest of my life
not under conditions of my choosing
wired into pain
rider on the slow train
Yours, Adrienne

From the opening line—“Dear Adrienne,” one is thrown into an intense mode of
metacritical reflection. Here is the poet baldly talking to herself, which is often an act
culturally interpreted as a sign of madness despite its ubiquity as a tool of human
consciousness. Nevertheless, here us Rich addressing herself, and she is doing so in an
epistolary form within a poem. Thus the address is born of a blur: It is a letter within a

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poem, and it opens a section or fragment within a longer, segmented poetic work. It is
also a letter addressing its writer, and that multiplicity of selves blurs any semblance of a
cohesive, singular speaking self: Who is talking to whom when one speaks in such a
manner? Moreover, that deconstruction of the self is accompanied by a forceful, almost
Althusserian address interpellation of the subject. That is, where Louis Althusser writes
of the violent power of the police officer to interpellate the subject by shouting “Hey you,
there!” (118), Rich’s poetic auto-interpellation of the subject as multifarious subjects
begins in her singularizing interpellation through the poet as law-enforcement agent
barking “Hey you, there! Adrienne!” but rather then emerge as presence, the subject in
the poem emerges as present absence. The address of “Adrienne” is followed by both a
wide right margin of white space on that first line, and a wide left margin of white space
on the subsequent line before the text of the poem resumes. Furthermore, when the text
does resume, it is to explain that “I feel signified by pain.”
More than the topical pain of the arthritic agony under direct discussion in the
narrative of the poem, this is a deep, relentless ontological pain; it is the pain of the
neoliberal subject in her precarity. This is not to minimize or dismiss the very real and
immediate material sources of pain being described by the poem in very clear, anatomical
detail. Certainly Rich is dwelling in that physical pain and the accompanying anguish of
an aching body. As she delineates it, that pain throbs “from my breastbone through my
left shoulder down / through my elbow into my wrist is a thread of pain / I am typing this
instead of writing by hand.” But, more deeply, erupting from that physical pain as a site
of release is the scalding ontological demand of how to live. It is raw, and it is piercing.
And it drives the interrogative challenge at the poem’s center: “You ask me how I'm

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going to live / the rest of my life / Well, nothing is predictable with pain” (emphasis
added). Implicit, then, are several important claims. First and foremost, life is pain. This
can be deuced from thinking those three lines as syllogism. Second is the implicit
concession to a conceptualization of life as perpetual struggle. Third, the pain is both an
inevitability and a instability; its presence is a certainty, though its intensity varies. Thus
pain is a conduit of precarity. Perhaps pain is even the conduit of precarity. The dilemma,
then, is a primordial one: To live is to suffer, so how to live?
According to the logic of the poem in itself, as well as within the sequence of the
poetry in the book (and to some extent within Rich’s oeuvre as contextualized by this
dissertation), the subjective answer to the acute pain of neoliberal precarity is to
galvanize subjectivity. In a sense, this is a reprisal, then, of Adorno’s dictum that “only
what does not fit into this world is true.” It allows instantiates the idea of poetry as
excess, as disruptive play beyond the market’s reach. In other words, Rich answers her
pain by attempting poetically to reinvigorate the subject, and her specific quest is to track
down and reemerge erased elements of her subjectivity. In rendering those absences
present she contributes to the undoing of the annihilation of subjectivity by subjection.
She must delve into her own subjectivation in order to realize and rescue excised and
absented fragments of human subjectivity. To build upon the language itself of the poem,
she must move subjectively between losses, across chasms, and amidst fissures in
subjectivity, seeking it “in its odd spaces, free.” There where it had been banished
through neoliberal subjectivation it can be symbolically recovered through poetry.
Poetry is, after all, that which exceeds subjectivation. To revisit a poetic extension
of an idea from Moreiras, poetry is the infrapolitical flooding of subjectivity with

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objectivity; it illuminates the incommensurability of subjectivation and subjectivity. It is
how she joins those who have “sung and battled,” forming a contiguity of incongruities
with her forbearers, including “the old poets” who confronted violence, pain, and
injustice in their own times and poetic modes. It is how and why she intimates to her
many fractured and dispersed selves, as well as her readers’, that “I'm already living the
rest of my life” as an ineluctable “rider on the slow train” to death, yet it is also living.
She struggles and resists; she strains to sing and battle. She punches holes in the gorgeous
surfaces of neoliberal masks, just as its violence has punched holes in her. She therefore
endures “not under conditions of my choosing,” and she is “wired into pain.” But her
articulation and representation of her singular encounter with that pain, as rendered by the
caesura between the words “wired” and “into pain,” marks her resistance, her squirming
under the jackboot of neoliberalism, away from which she wriggles in the act of creating,
partaking in play beyond the logic that equates human freedom to market freedom. Even
in her creaky arthritic pain, she finds reprieve, if not relief, in the poetic production of an
alternative ontology and its ecology of imagewords.

How to Live in a Damaged Body: Redefining Neoliberal Absence through Poetry

To conclude a chapter on the interminable subject of the ceaseless, erratic, and
agonistic transformations of self in relation to ceaseless, erratic, and enigmatic
transformations of neoliberalism in its imperial ambition, one might note how in the
poem “7.”, as in elsewhere throughout Your Native Land, Your Life, Rich exhorts her
readers and herself to turn inwards and appropriate absence. However counterintuitive

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this may seem in a sociopolitical landscape dominated by the turbulence and tension born
of the manipulation of subjects by exogenous institutions, forces, and policies, it is an
implicit acknowledgement by Rich, however unintended, of the violence of neoliberalism
as ontologically grounded. It is a devastation of the self, a disfigurement of subjective
potentiality. Neoliberalism is the radical disarticulation and annulment of subjectivity in
the process of subjection. And Rich both implies and illustrates this affectively in “7.” It
emanates from the gap between the first line and the second, a virtual gulf of emptiness
that swallows up the articulation of the proper name of the poet, Adrienne, “Dear
Adrienne.” Through that void, the reader plunges inward, falling into a crevasse in
identity. Here is the poet talking to herself. Ashe addresses herself in the third person—
“Dear Adrienne”—and after a prolonged silence, resumes speaking in the first-person—
“I feel signified by pain.” When the poet attempts to reckon herself, she is immediately
split at the root. She is a plurality of voices in constant conversation, with their
commonality being the pain that signifies them. That pain binds the speaker of the poem
with her addressee, who is of course herself, as well as that masochistic voyeur here, the
reader, who cannot help but be ensnared by the poem with its fascinating poetic form and
figures: a woman in pain talking to herself, a dialogue shot through with absences, a
metacritical comparative inquiry about the status of poetry writing in time—“Did the old
poets write of this?” And once ensnared, the reader becomes an accomplice to the
subjective violence being endured by the Rich signified by pain, though it would be
reasonable to assume, too, here that the empathy of the reader might compel her to suffer
vicariously through the agonized Rich, thereby making the act of reading the poem a
masochistic one, too, in terms of its emotional force, its dramatic affect.

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All of this emerges from the insistence of the poem upon the inward turn as an act
of political resistance and escape, of fight and flight. As a rhetorical gesture, it is clear
and compelling, and its foundational antinomy recurs conspicuously throughout this
section of Your Native Land, Your Life. For instance, it is also discernible in the poem
“18.” (100). Here is that poem in its entirety:
The problem, unstated till now, is how
to live in a damaged body
in a world where pain is meant to be gagged
uncured un-grieved-over The problem is
to connect, without hysteria, the pain
of any one’s body with the pain of the body’s world
For it is the body’s world they are trying to destroy forever
The best world is the body’s world
filled with creatures filled with dread
misshappen so yet the best we have
our raft among the abstract worlds
and how I longed to live on this earth
walking her boundaries never counting the cost

Here the poem is arguing implicitly for an accounting of destruction despite the wish to
move beyond “counting the cost.” That is, in “18.” Rich is arguing for the importance of
stating the body’s damage, of un-gagging the mouths of the aggrieved and pained, and in
doing so of forming new solidarities and communities beyond the neoliberal world of
agony and “dread.” And as she suggests in the poem, such counterstrikes are not only
possible but urgently necessary, and one means to enact them is to write into being new
sensory connections. They are to signal new networks in the world, a mode of
reconfiguring world though aesthetic networks. It is a poetic call for the recognition, if
not creation, of new counterhegemonic solidarities through corporality, or as Rich
phrases it, it is a need to “connect, without hysteria, the pain / of any one’s body with the
pain of the body’s world.”

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In other words, the poem “18.,” for example, is a poem of witness, and it is an
endorsement of the ethos of testimonial poetics. When a minoritized subject speaks of
personal suffering, dispossession, and oppression, that speech act carries political clout
through its representative voicing of collective of suffering, dispossession, and
oppression. Admittedly such labor has its “costs,” both private and public, personal and
collective. This is evident in the smoldering anger and agony in this poem’s narrative,
which is readily apprehensible to the reader in a gesture of inclusion. Rich also generates
this affect of inclusion, of commiseration, through other poetic decisions. For instance,
one reads and feels it through the syntactical and denotative fragmentation of the poem’s
speech act, with Rich craftily structuring and emphasizes that fragmentation through
lineation and enjambment. Consequently in many ways and on many levels, this poem is
riddled with gaps. It is a poem composed of emptiness, which is made present and
apprehensible by poetic form.
One such poetic gesture in “18.” through which absence emerges to affect the
reader involves Rich’s manipulation of white space. Note, for instance, the
communicative vitality and nuance of emptiness when that Rich introduces it through the
gaps in the lines “in a world where pain is meant to be gagged / uncured un-grieved-
over The problem is / to connect” (3-5). There, where Rich, an accomplished and
masterful poet, attempts to narrate her insight in the agony of the censure and
disarticulation of the self, she is unable to speak. It is as if to concede that even the most
eloquent of subjects remain gagged and muted. She realizes that “the problem is / to
connect,” yet she cannot even articulate the “problem” without interruption or, more
precisely, disruption; hence the line break after “is.” And these disruptions do not only

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erupt through gaps of white space and enjambment; they also erupt through Rich’s deft
use of caesura. Note, for example, the pauses generated by syntax in the lines “The
problem, unstated till now, is how” (1) and “to connect, without hysteria, the pain” (5).
There Rich is using interposed dependent clauses to disrupt syntactical fluidity. She
cannot and does not speak with smooth coherence. Consequently she cannot be read as
such, either. Those pauses stammer the mouth, and then they resonate in it with complex
meaning: with the pain of emptiness, which speaks, and its eloquence is agonizing. That
is, through Rich’s adroit deployment of poetic elements like white space, enjambment,
syntax, and metaphor, these poems through their artifice radiate a continuous frustration,
which becomes the reader’s. In other words, Rich is using poetic artifice to craft an affect
capable of inducing an acute sensory experience of neoliberal precarity in her readers,
which Rich, according to the logic of the poem, intends as a catalyst to self-exploration,
to a deep introspection bringing the reader into contact with the absences and violences at
her core, splitting her at the root, so to speak.
Moreover, through its push for introspection, the poem challenges te reader to re-
engage those absences and violences until ultimately appropriating them as signifiers of a
counterhegemonic self. In this manner the counter-foundational claims of this poem are
both disseminated and replicated exponentially. The poem becomes engine of change at
the blurred fringes of neoliberal subjective experience. Through neoliberal subjectivation,
the subject is riddled with enforced absence, but the poem empowers her to reckon and
reconfigure those absences against and beyond neoliberal empire. This is the horizon of
ontological possibility that is most importantly limned by Your Native Land, Your Life,
however daunting or bruising the challenge may be. Your Native Land, Your Life is a

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book of suffering, and of suffering transformed. But it is suffering nevertheless. Thus the
warning in the poem “18.” that this is “a world where pain is meant to be gagged /
uncured [and] un-grieved-over” (3-4). Similarly this is