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Gastropoetics: Cultural figurations of eating in modern Argentina, Brazil, and Cuba

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Gastropoetics: Cultural figurations of eating in modern Argentina, Brazil, and Cuba

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GASTROPOETICS:
CULTURAL FIGURATIONS OF EATING
IN MODERN ARGENTINA, BRAZIL, AND CUBA

by
Ali Kulez

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)

August 2018

Copyright 2018 Ali Kulez
ii
Table of Contents

0. Introduction: Gastronomy, Poetics, and Politics in Modern Latin America 1

1. Cannibalism in the Periphery: Antropofagia and Its Specters 19
1.1 The Seeds of a Movement: A Meal and a Painting 21
1.2 “Manifesto antropófago”: An Irreverent and Voluptuous Feast 25
1.3 Beyond the Manifesto: The Forgotten Meals of Antropofagia 42

2. Between Hunger and Appetite: Virgilio Piñera and José Lezama Lima 72
2.1 Eating Well: Consumption and Relationality 74
2.2 Piñera’s Hungry Bodies: The Political Ethics of Self-Cannibalism 79
2.3 Lezama Lima’s Baroque Appetites: An Aesthetics of Plenitude 99

3. Wastes of Consumption: The Fiction of Osvaldo Lamborghini 117
3.1 The Sexualization of Writing 120
3.2 “El fiord”: Routes of Abjection 123
3.3 “El niño proletario”: The Abject, Inc. 147

4. Lobster with Diet TuKola: Cuban Art after the Special Period 173
4.1 Winds of Change: More Tourists, Less Sugar 173
4.2 A Downsized Industry: Abandoned Mills, Underwater Farmers 175
4.3 Hotels, Coca-Cola, Chesucristo: Cuba Libre? 193

5. Epilogue 210

References 211

iii
List of Figures

Figure 1 Tarsila do Amaral, Abaporu

Figure 2 Tarsila do Amaral, Illustration in RA

Figure 3 María Clemencia, Illustration in RA

Figure 4 Patrícia Rehder Galvão (Pagu), Illustration in RA
Figure 5 Patrícia Rehder Galvão (Pagu), Illustration in RA

Figure 6 Emiliano di Cavalcanti, Illustration in RA

Figure 7 Marcel Molina Martínez, Memoria

Figure 8 Marcel Molina Martínez, Comentario
Figure 9 Marcel Molina Martínez, El paraíso

Figure 10 Marcel Molina Martínez, El testamento

Figure 11 Marcel Molina Martínez, La familia

Figure 12 Marcel Molina Martínez, Soñar no cuesta nada

Figure 13 Marcel Molina Martínez, Un nudo en la garganta

Figure 14 Marcel Molina Martínez, Elegía

Figure 15 Alejandro Saínz Alfonso, En el mar la vida es más sabrosa

Figure 16 Alejandro Saínz Alfonso, Sobreempleado

Figure 17 Alejandro Saínz Alfonso, Mira pa’ la cámara

Figure 18 Reinier Nande Pérez, Habana Libre

Figure 19 Reinier Nande Pérez, Tulipán

Figure 20 José Toirac and Meira Marrero, Looking for Happiness

Figures 21, 22 José Toirac and Octavio Marín, Renaissance

Figures 23, 24, 25 José Toirac and Octavio Marín, Diógenes y la luz
26, 27, 28, 29
1
Introduction: Gastronomy, Poetics, and Politics
in Modern Latin America

I. The universe would be nothing were it not for life, and all that lives must be fed.
II. Animals fill themselves; man eats. The man of mind alone knows how to eat.
III. The destiny of nations depends on the manner in which they are fed.
—Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, The Physiology of Taste (1825)
1

The first three of the twenty aphorisms with which the French lawyer, politician, and
gourmand Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin opens The Physiology of Taste touch on the
crucial themes of modern consumption with striking rhetorical economy. Eating, an
activity essential for all life on earth, is construed at the same time as a domain where the
human subject distinguishes itself from animals; rational choices and social conventions,
assumed to be proper to “man” alone, distinguish human “eating” (manger) from the
indiscriminate and unruly oral “intake” (repaître) of animals. In the modern age, Brillat-
Savarin notes, eating is no longer an activity whose significance can be confined to the
private space of home, but a field that belongs to politics through and through: the entire
destiny of nations depends on the proper nutrition of their citizens, who are principally
conceived here—reflecting the perspective of the modern biopolitical state—in biological
terms, as lives to be fed (nourrir).
Let us move from France to Cuba, and from the early-nineteenth century to the
difficult years of the Second World War. Virgilio Piñera has just penned his story “La
carne,” in which the inhabitants of a small town begin to eat their own bodies after a
prolonged scarcity of livestock. Piñera was enraged and inspired by a current food crisis,
one of the many that would haunt Cuba before and after the Revolution. Beef prices in

1
Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, The Physiology of Taste; or Transcendental
Gastronomy, trans. Fayette Robinson (Philedelphia: Lindsay and Blakiston, 1854), 25.
2
the island had increased steeply following a similar inflation in the United States;
moreover, the government of Fulgencio Batista had decided to provide locally bred cattle
for the American army, provoking further price increases. When Cuban cattle producers
and butchers finally protested, meat vanished from the Havana market for as long as five
months.
2
In Piñera’s story, Mr. Ansaldo—a pioneer citizen bored with his vegetarian
diet—cuts one of his buttocks, fries it on a pan, and eats it with pleasure; when the town’s
mayor learns about Ansaldo’s feat, he immediately pays a visit to congratulate the self-
cannibal, asking for a public demonstration so that the townspeople could be nourished,
like him, “de sus propias reservas.”
3
There we have it: a food scarcity in the Caribbean,
provoked by a violent conflict in Europe among the major powers of the First World; a
story that not only exposes the precariousness of life in the periphery, but also reflects on
the ethical and political stakes of autonomy. To satisfy pleasures and not merely needs,
to eat (manger) and not merely to fill themselves (repaître) with vegetables, and to take
their doubly peripheral community’s destiny—literally—at their own hands, Piñera’s
citizens adopt self-cannibalism.
“La carne” resonates deeply with the history of consumption in Latin America,
which has been marked by precariousness, forced labor, and the encounter between
radically different culinary traditions. Since Christopher Columbus distinguished between
the docile maize-eating Indians and the “beastly” man-eating Caribs in his letters to the
Spanish court, considerations of eating have been at the center of discourses on

2
Thomas F. Anderson, Everything in its Place: The Life and Works of Virgilio Piñera
(Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2006), 125.
3
Virgilio Piñera, Cuentos fríos / El que vino a salvarme (Madrid: Catedra, 2008), 129.

3
coloniality, national identity, and cultural expression.
4
Indeed, since the coercion of
indigenous peoples and the later introduction of slavery in the 16
th
century, the continent
has provided “flavors” to Europe and the rest of the world: first cocoa and sugar, then
tobacco and coffee. Increasingly after the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century wars of
independence that eventually resulted in the foundation of the modern nation-states,
various forms of the cocina criolla, which emerged at the “contact zone” between the
European, indigenous, African, and Asian cultures, became the emblems of singular yet
hybrid national identities.
5
In the age of global tourism, Latin America today is a site of
abundance and scarcity, responsible for providing “affect” to the rest of the world yet
condemned to malnutrition and food crises, like the one fictionally reimagined by
Piñera.
6

This dissertation explores the ways in which twentieth- and twenty-first century
cultural artifacts from Argentina, Brazil, and Cuba respond to this material history,
repurposing images, tropes, and affects linked with gastronomy for ends that are at once
aesthetic and political. I examine how acts of eating function in poems, stories, paintings,
and manifestos, opening up alternative and dissident forms of belonging and expression.
When the Brazilian avant-garde movement Antropofagia appropriates the trope of
cannibalism for a wild cosmopolitanism, or when the contemporary Cuban artist
Alejandro Saínz Alfonso imagines macheteros (cane cutters) toiling under water in

4
Christopher Columbus, The Four Voyages of Christopher Columbus, trans. J.M. Cohen
(London: Penguin, 1969), 136.
5
Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York and
London: Routledge, 2008), 8.
6
For a discussion of Latin America’s role of providing affect to the metropolis, see Jon
Beasley-Murray, Posthegemony: Political Theory and Latin America (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 129-130.
4
diving suits, the gastronomic archive to which these artifacts refer (and in part belong) is
resignified in ways that contest traditional notions of national identity and masculinity,
respectively. The overall objective of this dissertation is to understand and acknowledge
the political force that gastronomy might acquire in such cultural contexts, in Latin
America and beyond.
There are many ways of writing and portraying consumption, some arguably more
interesting than others. Many Latin American texts that include extensive scenes of
eating exploit the affects involved in the act to entice the reader, or deploy food and the
social customs surrounding it to reinforce the illusion of a singular cultural identity.
7

Such representations often gloss over the blurring of limits that characterizes the act of
eating as well as the expropriation that makes consumption possible. By contrast, the art
and literature I examine in this dissertation offer ways of thinking identity, politics, and
cultural expression that diverge from the nation-state’s identitarian, hegemonic, and
colonialist narratives. The affects, tropes, and images of food and consumption here
envision fluid identities defined by an openness to alterity, cultural practices that lay bare
the state’s deprivation of its constituents, and a thoroughly libidinal field that undermines
discourse and ideology. In other words, these authors mobilize the libidinal, affect-
ridden, and border-crossing act of eating, along with the larger gastronomic sphere
defined by it, to signal those moments of lack or excess that are excluded from state
narratives.
Osvaldo Lamborghini’s El fiord provides a good example: in this violent story
replete with references to the conflicts within Peronism, the political is shown to be

7
See, for instance, Laura Esquivel’s novel Como agua por chocolate, which represents
food only as laws to be repeated and as marks of cultural singularity.
5
inseparable from the libidinal, which for the Argentine author includes the sphere of
consumption. In this biopolitical tale, we constantly hear political slogans—e.g. “¡Dos,
Tres, Vietnam!”—babbled without any use or effect, but what truly “turns the table” is
the narrator defecating at a feast that celebrates the birth of a new political actor.
8
When
the subjugated inmates of the cellar finally overthrow their abuser-sovereign, they
nevertheless eagerly consume his phallus, thus incorporating and repeating his patriarchal
Law. Lamborghini thus highlights how libidinal excess, which in traditional notions of
politics is cast to the sphere of private life, informs and shapes the political from within.
Furthermore, it is not the common strategies of hegemonic articulation but the material
impulses of the body that appear as politically meaningful. Of course, the moral—if there
is one—is not to abandon party or union politics. But El fiord underlines the libidinality
of politics and the politicity of the libidinal by presenting us scenes of consumption
where the two spheres appear simply indissociable from one another.
Several critical works in literary and cultural studies have been instrumental in the
conception and development of this project. Mikhail Bakhtin’s seminal Rabelais and His
World (1965) has influenced my work in probably more ways than I can account for; the
Russian critic’s arguments concerning the grotesque, the carnival, and the transition from
medieval to modern images of the body remain indispensable for any study at the
intersection of eating, politics, and representation.
9
Another major source of inspiration
was Maggie Kilgour’s From Communion to Cannibalism: An Anatomy of Metaphors of
Incorporation (1990), which innovatively employs the deconstructive strategies of

8
Osvaldo Lamborghini, “El fiord,” in Novelas y cuentos, ed. César Aira (Barcelona:
Ediciones del Serbal, 1988), 33.
9
Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington:
Indiana UP, 1984).
6
Jacques Derrida, Barbara Johnson and J. Hillis Miller in its examination of Western
tropes of consumption.
10
I have also benefited from the critical approaches of recent
works in the emerging field of Critical Food Studies. Kyla Wazana Tompkins’ Racial
Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19
th
Century (2012) was useful in exploring the queer
possibilities of eating acts in the third chapter on the Argentine writer Osvaldo
Lamborghini’s fiction.
11
Likewise, Allison Carruth’s Global Appetites: American Power
and the Literature of Food (2013), an exploration of the nexus between industrial
agriculture, radical food movements, and American notions of global power, was
particularly helpful in developing my final chapter on representations of the sugar and
tourist industries in recent Cuban art.
12

In the field of Latin American Studies, several studies have explored the aesthetic
and political capacities of gastronomic imagery in cultural products, works that have
proved to be indispensable in the formation and elaboration of my own arguments. Luís
Madureira’s Cannibal Modernities: Postcoloniality and the Avant-Garde in Caribbean
and Brazilian Literature has been methodologically important in its insistence on
questioning developmental models of progress from “peripheral” texts like Oswald de
Andrade’s “Manifesto antropófago.”
13
Carlos E. Jáuregui’s Canibalia: canibalismo,
calibanismo, antropofagia cultural y consumo en América Latina (2008), to date the most
thorough exploration of cannibalism as a trope in Latin American literature and culture,

10
Maggie Kilgour, From Communion to Cannibalism: An Anatomy of Metaphors of
Incorporation (New Jersey: Princeton UP, 2014).
11
Kyla Wazana Tompkins, Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19
th
Century (New
York: NYU Press, 2012).
12
Allison Carruth, Global Appetites: American Power and the Literature of Food
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2013).
13
Luis Madureira, Cannibal Modernities: Postcoloniality and the Avant-Garde in
Caribbean and Brazilian Literature (Charlottesville: Virginia UP, 2005).
7
has likewise been a constant point of reference, especially for my second chapter on
Antropofagia.
14
Similarly, Gabriel Giorgi’s Formas comunes: Animalidad, cultura,
biopolítica (2014), which productively brings together the conceptual toolshed of
Deleuze and Guattari with the recent theories of biopolitics, has proven to be an
important inspiration.
15

Yet I have found that critics of Latin American literature and culture have often
focused exclusively on cannibalism—indubitably the most resonant gastronomic trope in
Latin American cultural history—and, as a result, overlooked other forms and stages of
consumption. The overemphasis on cannibalism causes several critical blind spots. First
of all, since cannibalism has often been understood as a highly ritualized incorporation of
alterity, surveys of the trope tend to overlook what cannibalism shares with more
ordinary forms of consumption. Like any other act of eating, for instance, cannibalism
obstructs speech—we cannot speak as we eat. When Oswald de Andrade, then, calls for a
cannibalization of Western culture, his demand necessarily and paradoxically implies a
certain bestial silence for Brazil, a silence that has not been addressed in criticism.
Similarly, because of a focus on the symbolic aspect of cannibalism, Antropofagia and its
readers have often ignored (and in some cases actively disavowed) the very mundane
pleasure of eating meat involved in the act.
Secondly, when one only focuses on the cannibalistic consumption of the other,
certain variations of the act as well as its parallels with non-cannibalistic modes of
consumption tend to be overlooked. For instance, self-cannibalism, explored by Virgilio

14
Carlos E. Jáuregui, Canibalia: canibalismo, calibanismo, antropofagia cultural y
consumo en América Latina (Havana: Fondo Editorial Casa de las Américas, 2005).
15
Gabriel Giorgi, Formas comunes: Animalidad, cultura, biopolítica (Buenos Aires:
Eterna Cadencia, 2014)
8
Piñera in “La carne” and “La cena,” complicates the symbolic relations normally
associated with the theme of cannibalism; one’s own body satisfies need and pleasure,
suggesting a different political reading than anti-colonial gestures like that of
Antropofagia. Finally, we overlook the production of food and waste when we merely
concentrate on the moment of intake. Cultural theories like José Lezama Lima’s La
expresión americana, which metonymizes the singularity of the New World through its
diverse cuisine, often erase the violence with which cocina criolla, this ideal hybrid of
distinct racial flavors, have come about. Similarly, the study of cultural artifacts that
explore the production and distribution of food like the Cuban artist Reinier Nande
Pérez’s Calorías por metro cuadrado allow us to think about the hierarchical networks of
global consumption in ways that an exclusive focus on cannibalism does not warrant for.
Gastronomy is an overwhelmingly large subject and its manifestations in Latin American
culture are manifold. My dissertation attempts to consider this vast field holistically in
order to see how tropes, affects, and images of consumption interact and, to use a
Bakhtinian term, “interanimate” one another.
Gastropoetics explores the aesthetic and political possibilities of the various
forms within which figures of consumption appear in literature and art. I look at how
Latin American cultural products appropriate the tropes, affects, and images linked with
gastronomy and repurpose them in ways that subvert traditional modes of understanding
identity and politics. Whereas the first chapter focuses on cannibalism, the most
paradigmatic trope of Latin American culture, the second and third chapters examine the
uses of gastronomic affects including hunger, appetite, and disgust; the final chapter
complements this inquiry on trope and affect by looking at the images of food and
9
consumption in recent art. My objectives in organizing the dissertation around these
different figurations of eating were twofold. On the one hand, I wanted to account for the
particular aesthetic and political force of each type of gastronomic figure. A repurposed
trope like cannibalism, for instance, has the distinct power to instigate a rereading of the
colonial and modern history of a nation like Brazil. On the other hand, I equally desired
to explore the ways in which these tropes, affects, and images refer to and reinforce one
another. Antropofagia’s use of cannibalism as a trope, for instance, invokes affects—e.g.
the pleasure of meat eating—to strengthen its rhetorical force. To a certain extent, then,
my argument isolates literary and cultural forms that are almost always found in intricate
conjunction; yet this “artificial” separation has proved very useful for the purposes of
analysis.
My project examines crucial moments of the twentieth-century Latin American
cultural history in three national contexts. I start with Brazil just before the Great
Depression, when São Paulo’s financial growth, as well as cosmopolitanism, was at its
points of culmination. I then continue with Cuba during and after the Second World War,
whose effects on the Caribbean periphery create a very different cultural and political
scene. My next body of texts comes from the turbulent 1960s in Argentina, where we
witness the aesthetic effects of the collapse of national projects and the eruption of
revolutionary militancy. I conclude with a look at Cuba since the fall of the Soviet Union,
examining the ways in which globalization encroaches even on the politically and
economically isolated island. While I do not believe that a single diachronic argument
can subsume all the diverse manifestations of gastronomy in twentieth- and twenty-first
10
century Latin American culture, each chapter partly focuses on how figures of
consumption are shaped by and in turn engage with their historical and political context.
In Latin American Studies, critics often group Argentina and Brazil (along with
Chile and Uruguay) due to their shared political history; Cuba and Brazil, on the other
hand, are often studied together due to their participation in the transatlantic slave trade.
To that extent, bringing cultural products from these national traditions into dialogue is
somewhat an unusual and controversial move. I firmly believe, however, that these
cultural contexts are crucial for the study of one another. The Argentine tradition of “the
feast of the monster” (fiesta del monstruo), for instance, construes the relation between
meat-eating and sovereignty in ways that prove crucial for understanding the social and
political effects of meat scarcity in the 1950s and 1990s in Cuba. Likewise, the “cold”
cruelty that emanates from the stories of Virgilio Piñera as well the neo-baroque
expression of José Lezama Lima help us in conceptualizing the pornographically violent
stories of Osvaldo Lamborghini. Gastropoetics therefore makes a case for the
comparative study of these national traditions whose histories and ways of representing
food and consumption are different yet indissociably related. That said, I should reiterate
that the driving force behind my project is neither the history of these national traditions
nor culture read as representative of that history, but a desire to delineate a theory of
eating in Latin American culture.
I examine scenes of consumption with recourse to the critical tools afforded by
psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and recent theories of biopolitics. Some of the authors I
study consciously engage with the ideas of Freud, Lacan, and Bataille on language,
patriarchy, and civilization for aesthetic and political ends. Even when this is not the
11
case, psychoanalysis provides an indispensable point of reference in thinking the nexus of
relations between eating, power, and pleasure. I also refer frequently to the writings of
Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler on questions of alterity in order to think about the
ethical stakes of “eating the other,” whether that other happens to be human or
nonhuman; their ethical thought has proven crucial in exploring the relationality of
consumption. Finally, the theories advanced by Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, and
Roberto Esposito on the modern relation between life and power provide the broader
framework for my arguments on the politics of consumption. I have found biopolitics,
which does not necessarily refer to a unitary and coherent theoretical field, particularly
helpful in exploring the ways in which modern states and corporations shape and regulate
consumption, nourishing those that are deemed proper subjects while condemning others
to starvation.
* * *
Cannibalism, a mode of consumption that has fascinated Western philosophy,
psychology, and anthropology, has been a key trope in Latin American and Caribbean
cultures since the colonial times. With accounts of indigenous cannibalism like Hans
Staden’s True History: An Account of Cannibal Captivity in Brazil (1557), cannibalism—
the term itself deriving from a variant of “Carib” recorded first by Columbus—came to
be linked with the “barbarism” of the New World.
16
The emergence of Western
disciplines like anthropology and psychoanalysis prompted a renewed in interest in
cannibalism; in Totem and Taboo (1913), Freud famously imagined the totem as the
product of feelings of guilt after a cannibalistic consumption of the authoritarian father-

16
Hans Staden, Hans Staden’s True History: An Account of Cannibal Captivity in Brazil,
eds. Neil L. Whitehead and Michael Harbsmeier (Durham: Duke UP, 2008).
12
sovereign.
17
Blurring the limits between the self and the other, cannibalism is
inexhaustibly rich in its sexual, political, and philosophical connotations. As a study of
Latin American images of food and consumption, Gastropoetics naturally begins with a
reflection on cannibalism as deployed by the Brazilian avant-garde movement
Antropofagia (1928-30), and explores various declensions of the trope in Cuban and
Argentine literatures. Whether directed against the Western culture as in Oswald de
Andrade’s “Manifesto antropófago,” against a Peronist father-sovereign as in Osvaldo
Lamborghini’s “El fiord,” or against the eater’s own body as in Virgilio Piñera’s “La
carne,” cannibalism is a trope of key importance and continuing relevance for Latin
American literatures and cultures.
Yet, as I have argued, an exclusive focus on cannibalism would have overlooked
the ways in which other items and modes of consumption have shaped Latin American
notions of national identity and cultural expression, especially since the nineteenth-
century wars of independence. Local food is among the first things that come to mind
when we think about the singularity of a culture. Prepared with locally-grown ingredients
that—even though they would grow equally well in similar climates—easily create a
sense of authenticity and, especially in the Latin American context, often come from
distinct cultural histories (e.g. Spanish, African, and indigenous), plates like the Mexican
mole and Brazilian feijoada easily become persuasive metonyms for hybrid national
identities. Yet, as Walter Benjamin argues in his Theses on the Philosophy of History,
such preoccupation with—in this case, edible—“documents of civilization” often hides
the history of “barbarism” behind them, namely the exploitation, expropriation, and

17
Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, trans. James Strachey (Oxford: Routledge, 1999),
141-142.
13
inequitable distribution that had made these cultural artifacts possible in the first place.
18

The sumptuous plate tourists consume as the singular mark of a hybrid national identity
tends to have emerged from a violent context of colonization and enslavement, to have
been prepared by laborers who are paid the minimum wage if not less, and to have
become economically inaccessible to the very people whose culture it is supposed to
represent. Literature and art have the distinct capacity to deconstruct this relation between
food and identity, exposing the violence of consumption without, however, reducing
themselves to mere documents of critique. It is this force that I explore particularly in my
chapters on mid-century literature and contemporary visual art from Cuba.
All consumption, whether cannibalistic or not, leaves behind waste, which, due to
precisely its status as rest, excess, and surplus acquires a distinct political and aesthetic
force in literature and art. As Georges Bataille argues in The Accursed Share: An Essay
on General Economy, such loss marks diverse areas spheres of human activity (wars,
luxury, poetry) and cannot be explained away through the principle of utility.
19
That
which resists digestion and assimilation has the power to put in question the limits and
exclusions through which consumption operates. Furthermore, as Julia Kristeva
highlights in Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, abjection often marks, by
opposition, our notions of the sacred.
20
The feelings of disgust elicited by cultural
representations of this excess interpellate their audience in ways that can become

18
Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry
Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Shocken Books, 2007), 256.
19
Georges Bataille, “The Notion of Expenditure,” trans. Allan Stoekl, in The Bataille
Reader, eds. Fred Botting and Scott Wilson (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1997), 167-
171.
20
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New
York: Columbia UP, 1982), 17.
14
ethically and politically significant. The notion of inassimilable rest will be most fully
explored in the third chapter on the early fiction of Osvaldo Lamborghini, who arguably
creates a whole aesthetics around abjection, understood equally as the remains of body,
language, and ideology. Nevertheless, from Virgilio Piñera’s beggars inhaling their own
intestinal gases and imagine delicious meals in “La cena” to José Toirac and Octavio
Marín’s installation “Renaissance,” which features a red carpet woven out of used cans of
beer and soda, the critical reflection on waste remains of key importance for this project.
Human consumption is necessarily relational: we need human and nonhuman
others for the production, distribution, and preparation of food items. This implies that
our eating, much like our gender and sexuality as Judith Butler has argued, is never fully
ours.
21
At its latest stage of development, this relational act depends on a hierarchically
organized global network within which Latin American and Caribbean nations have often
held dependent and peripheral positions. Literature and art have the capacity to engage
with and reflect on these local and global networks by recontextualizing emblematic
images from the sphere of gastronomy. In this project, the relationality of consumption
resurfaces at many moments. We see, for instance, Antropofagia defend cultural
cannibalism in order to stop being a “dessert country,” metonymizing through sugar and
coffee Brazil’s peripheral position in the global symbolic order.
22
In Virgilio Piñera’s “La
carne,” on the other hand, self-cannibalism will appear as a “resourceful” solution to the
very same problem of economic dependence. The hierarchical relationality of

21
Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (New York and
London: Verso, 2004), 19-28.
22
Quoted in Schwartz, Jorge, ed., Vanguardas Latino-Americanas: Polemicas,
manifestos e textos criticos (Sao Paulo: Iluminuras, 1995), 254.

15
consumption will also be central for the final chapter, where I look at how recent Cuban
art engages with the recent developments in the island’s sugar and tourist industries.

CHAPTER SUMMARIES
I begin with an exploration of the Brazilian avant-garde movement Antropofagia (1928-
30), which reappropriates the colonial trope of cannibalism to envision a modern and
cosmopolitan nation identity. The chapter examines Oswald de Andrade’s famous
“Manifesto antropófago” (1928) alongside with overlooked poems, lampoons, and artist
sketches from Revista de Antropofagia to interrogate the possibilities and pitfalls of
thinking cultural intake as a form of indigenous cannibalism. Eating the other here stands
for a number of actions, including creatively assimilating the cultural legacy of the West,
defeating the group’s adversaries like the established members of the Brazilian Academy
of Letters, and engaging in amorous intimacy. I show the ways in which Eurocentric
biases about religion and morality distort the group’s readings from the colonial archive
and, consequently, their understandings of indigenous cannibalism and sexuality. The
texts and images that follow Oswald’s influential manifesto develop its points, add
further nuances, and at times clash with its arguments. I particularly focus on the
nationalist praises of Afro-Brazilian cuisine that reify national identity in ways that
contradict Oswald’s cosmopolitanism, and on the illustrations by women artists that
contest his androcentric critique of bourgeois morality. Overall, the chapter is a reflection
on the possibilities of the figural use of cannibalism, and by extension eating, in culture.
The next chapter uses these insights on cannibalism and cultural intake to contrast
the literary aesthetics of two Cuban authors, José Lezama Lima and Virgilio Piñera,
whose works from the 1950s deploy hunger and appetite in opposed ways. Whereas
16
Piñera imagines scenarios of self-cannibalism in two stories from his collection Cuentos
fríos (Cold Tales), in Lezama’s Expresión americana (American Expression), which
consists of five essays on the cultural singularity of the New World, food imagery is used
to define an “American” form of cosmopolitanism. Through their distinctive approaches
to gastronomic affects, the authors develop contrasting “regimes” of representation.
Piñera’s stories present us situations of hunger to which they then propose solutions so
absurd that we always remain aware of the precarious reality behind the illusion; in “La
carne” (Meat), for instance, the inhabitants of a small town start to eat their own flesh
after an extended scarcity of meat, a solution that brings about a catastrophic dissolution.
By contrast, Lezama erases hunger and focuses instead on appetite. In his lectures, he
creates a proto-American called the señor barroco (the Baroque gentleman), a model
subject who, with a voracious and cosmopolitan “will to eat,” devours the African,
indigenous, and Spanish legacies of the continent. I show that this differential use of
hunger and appetite points to a major schism in literary politics. Whereas for Piñera
literature is a means of self-gratification that does not, however, stop pointing at violence
and scarcity, for Lezama culture presents an abundance that glosses over absence—both
the absence of material resources and the absence that founds representation.
The third chapter continues this reflection on affect by exploring the aesthetic and
political possibilities of disgust in the fiction of the Argentine author Osvaldo
Lamborghini, whose experimental stories from the 1960s mobilize abject imagery in their
overdetermined engagement with Marxist analysis and Peronist politics. Lamborghini
deploys the political antagonisms of Argentine society to create a sexualized expression
where characters embodying classes, institutions, and syndicate leaders engage in
17
orgiastic acts of eating and penetration. I look at his early stories “El fiord” and “El niño
proletario,” where scenes of vomiting, defecation, and consumption acquire a political
charge that is not, however, detachable from the violent exchanges between the bodies.
Arguing that abjection is thoroughly political in Lamborghini’s fiction, I show how putrid
waste at once pushes the subaltern to the limits of the human and forms alliances among
the powerful. While these stories have been called “pornographic” because of their lurid
representations of sexual violence, I contest this terminology by showing that
Lamborghini’s abject imagery interrupts the detached enjoyment of violence
characteristic of most pornography. The texts do violate the norms of Argentine
literature, turning the reading experience into an ethical aporia—we are “forced” to
witness rape and murder, narrated without any sympathy for the victim; moreover, much
like pornography, the stories use social antagonisms as catalyst for sexual violence. Our
scopophilia, however, is interrupted by the scenes of abjection, which provoke feelings of
disgust and thus viscerally attack us, implicating our bodies within the story’s libidinal
dynamics.
The final chapter draws from the previous insights on coloniality and waste to
examine references to the national and international food industry in recent Cuban art.
Specifically, I explore how the downsizing of the sugar industry and the thriving sector of
tourism figure in the artworks and installations from the twenty-first century. Since Fidel
Castro announced the decision to downsize the sugar industry in 2002, almost half of the
mills have been closed and a quarter of the workforce has been dismissed. Through the
engravings of Marcel Molina Martínez and Alejandro Saínz, I examine the ways in which
the economic devastation and political disillusionment caused by the closure finds an
18
expression in recent Cuban art. In these works the spectral ruins of abandoned sugar mills
provide a dystopian setting that oscillates between critique and melancholy. In the years
that the sugar industry was being hastily dismantled, tourism became one of the most
important sources of hard currency for the Cuban economy; starting with the fall of the
Soviet Union in 1989, which for Cuba meant the loss of its major trade partner, the
government has taken active steps to encourage tourism and thus ameliorate the
economic crisis that came to be known as the Special Period (El período especial). In this
part, I examine several artworks that critique this increased dependence on tourism
through references to food and consumption. Artists like Reinier Nande, José Toirac, and
Octavio Marín reflect on the contradictions of the Cuban dual economy, where tourists
gladly pays $25 for a plate of lobster, which corresponds, more or less, to the average
monthly salary of a civil servant. In their artworks and installations, we see emblematic
buildings such as the Hotel Habana Libre transformed into a refrigerator full of food and
drinks, empty canisters of Coca-Cola and the local variant tuKola forming a red carpet
towards a waste bin. The dissertation thus concludes with a broader look at the
hierarchical food networks that condemn Latin American and Caribbean citizens to states
of precariousness.

19
-1-
Cannibalism in the Periphery:
Antropofagia and Its Specters

We usually don’t eat books—we read them. Yet our ideas about reading (and
cultural life in general) are shaped, often inadvertently, by gastronomic metaphors: critics
still lament the senseless “consumption” of romance novels, some texts are “difficult to
digest,” and those who “devour” multiple tomes a week are “bookworms.” This chapter
explores Antropofagia, a literary movement that playfully metaphorized reading (and a
host of other events and activities) as eating. But it wasn’t just any form of eating through
which Oswald de Andrade and his friends reflected on the “readings” of Brazil. From the
colonial history of the Republic, Oswald picked the most visibly violent and symbolically
suggestive mode of consumption: cannibalism. In “Manifesto Antropófago” (from here
on MA) and other texts published in Revista de Antropofagia (from here on RA),
cannibalism became the central trope in debates on national identity, cosmopolitanism,
history, religion, and sexuality.
23
As a violent yet ritualistic, erotic, and inclusive act,
cannibalism was instrumental in rethinking Brazil’s relations with the West, Catholicism
as a colonial yet transculturated institution, and contemporary gender relations. Recurrent
in colonial historiography and linked with the indigenous cosmovision, yet flexible

23
Oswald de Andrade, “Cannibalist Manifesto,” trans. Leslie Bary, Latin American
Literary Review 19, no. 38 (1991): 38-47. RA had two periods of publication or dentições.
From May 1928 to February 1929, it was published as an eight-page journal under the
direction of Antônio Alcântara Machado and management of Raul Bopp. In the second
period, which lasted from March 17 to 1 August, 1929, the journal became a single-page
supplement to Diário de São Paulo. In citing from RA, I will first indicate the dentição,
followed by the issue and page numbers. Since the second dentição only consisted of a
single page, I will only indicate “2” and the issue number (e.g. RA 2.3). From here
onwards, I will refer to the entire literary movement as Antropofagia.

20
enough to articulate, criticize, and satirize contemporary concerns, cannibalism opened
up the way for a brasilidade that was authentic and “ours,” and at the same time modern
and cosmopolitan.
And yet, Antropofagia was never one—neither ideologically, nor discursively, nor
mediatically. From the very beginning, divergent ideologies were expressed side by side
on the pages of RA. Though gathered by similar concerns, the avant-garde intellectuals
did not agree on their vision of Brazil or Brazilian culture. Converging on certain points
such as their critique of the Brazilian Academy, they diverged on others—and pursued
very different paths after the group dissolved. In other words, the cultural cannibals had
different takes on what to eat, how, and how much. Nor was Antropofagia unitary in
discourse: poetry, fiction, and literary reviews were accompanied by political
provocations, anthropological essays, and even “ready-made” excerpts from
contemporary newspapers. Finally, the movement was mediatically diverse: artist
sketches, music sheets, and autographs by foreign authors made frequent appearances.
In this chapter, I consider the uses of cannibalism in a number of discursive and
non-discursive pieces from RA. After briefly reflecting on the emergence of
Antropofagia, I examine how Oswald employs the cannibal trope in his claims about
national culture, religion, and morality. I then move to lesser known texts and artist
sketches from RA to mark the different positions within the avant-garde group’s
ideological constellation. My guiding questions are fourfold and take their cue from
different aspects of cannibalism. First and foremost, cannibalism is a violent
incorporation: assimilation here depends on murder. What does it mean, then, to identify
as cannibals, to place a murderous principle at the center of national identity? What does
21
it imply, for a peripheral nation like Brazil in the late 1920s, to think cultural assimilation
through such violence? While violent, cannibalism is an integral part of numerous
religions in both real and symbolic form. Antropofagia uses Tupi cannibalism to rethink
Catholicism, and vice versa. What kind of a desacralization would such reconsideration
imply? Thirdly, like all acts of incorporation, cannibalism is deeply erotic. To what use
does Antropofagia put these sexual connotations in their revolt against bourgeois
morality? In this respect, I will look at how Oswald’s manifesto and other pieces by male
authors contrast with the illustrations by women artists. Finally, cannibalism interrupts
speech. What does this muteness, this bestial silence, this silent consumption imply for
Antropofagia’s approaches to materiality and literature?

1.1 | The Seeds of a Movement: A Meal and a Painting
Quite appropriately, the idea behind Antropofagia (or at least the creative use of
cannibalism as a trope) first comes up at a restaurant. The anecdote provides insights into
some of the literary movement’s key dynamics. From the start, we are at a rather
luxurious, exclusive setting. After a reunion at their house in early 1928, Oswald and the
painter Tarsila do Amaral take a group of friends to a restaurant in Santa Ana that
specializes in frog legs.
24
Some order the house specialty, others prefer scallops—all to
be washed down by an ice-cold Chablis. The idea of identifying as cannibals, of
reappropriating the colonial trope to discover the indigenous Brazil behind the European
façade, will come up during this highly exclusive social event. Despite their nationalist

24
Raul Bopp, Vida e morte da Antropofagia (Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio Editora,
2006), 62.
22
claims to identify with the people’s Brazil,
25
Antropofagia will be an elite intellectual
endeavor—perhaps inevitable in a country with a 29% literacy rate.
26
Also significant is
the simple fact that the meal takes place at a restaurant. Examining medieval
representations of banquets, Bakhtin argues that the moment of eating is a celebration of
human labor, of the victory of man against the world, which becomes edible as food.
27
In
our case, however, what we have is a merry consumption without work: like any group of
restaurant goers, the bohemians are about to consume what they themselves have not
produced. This detachment from labor foreshadows the erasure of “class specifications”
that would lead the prominent critic Roberto Schwarz to conclude that Antropofagia
“throws absolutely no light on the politics and aesthetics of contemporary cultural life.”
28

In any case, when the sumptuous meals finally arrive, Oswald (always ready for
provocation) stands up to deliver a eulogy to the frog. Referring to the theory of
evolution, alchemical writings about the homunculus, and the work of several invented
biologists, the poet-provocateur claims that man has descended from the batrachian. At
this point Tarsila intervenes to say that the frog-eaters would be, by this logic, “quase-
antropófagos.”
29
Both Oswald’s amusing claim and Tarsila’s conclusion are probably
inspired by the way frog legs are traditionally served in the French cuisine. With their

25
See, for instance, “Algumas notas sobre o que ja se tem escrito em torno da nova
descida antropofágica na nossa literatura,” RA 2.4.
26
Luís Madureira, “A Cannibal Recipe to Turn a Dessert Country into the Main Course:
Brazilian ‘Antropofagia’ and the Dilemma of Development.” Luso-Brazilian Review 41,
no. 2 (2004): 98.
27
Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington:
Indiana UP, 1984), 281-283.
28
Roberto Schwarz, “Brazilian Culture: Nationalism by Elimination” in Misplaced Ideas:
Essays on Brazilian Culture, ed. John Gledson, trans. Linda Briggs (London: Verso,
1992), 9.
29
Bopp, Vida e morte da Antropofagia, 62.
23
original form intact, frog legs do not let one forget about the violence that turns the
animal into food. It is arguably the specter of this animality that sparks Oswald’s
reference to the evolution of species as well as Tarsila’s comment about their alleged
cannibalism. The group will frequently use this animalizing violence of eating in their
onslaughts against enemies.
30
Antropofagia, then, emerges at an eating situation where
the everyday veil of mystification around food gives way. The idea of using cannibalism
metaphorically, as a figure of speech, occurs—paradoxically—at a moment when speech
is interrupted by eating, when the metaphorization of food is suspended. Antropofagia’s
recourse to cannibalism, their identification as cannibals, will always remain
metaphorical in a non-trivial sense: the indigenous cannibal will remain a figure, a
“metáfora de choque vanguardista,” a polysemic trope that allows Oswald and others to
articulate their views on national identity, cosmopolitanism, and morality—and to
discursively attack their adversaries.
31
Yet the trope of cannibalism, the very trope that
allows this discursive articulation, signals the interruption of speech itself. Like all eating,
cannibalism keeps the mouth busy.
Beyond her jovial conclusion at the inaugural banquet, Tarsila played a crucial
role in the conception and later life of Antropofagia. Indeed, according to Bopp, she was
the group’s “chefa”—desiring “a return to Brazil, to its primitive tenderness,” Tarsila was
constantly “seeding ideas.”
32
These were expressed in the artist’s modernist paintings,

30
Neither should we miss the anti-Catholic gesture in Oswald’s mocking reference to the
theory of evolution. His eulogy is shockingly delightful partly because it contests the
divine narrative of filiation provided by Catholicism. This ludic affront to bourgeois
morality will be another characteristic of Antropofagia as a movement.
31
Carlos Jáuregui, Canibalia: Canibalismo, calibanismo, antropofagia cultural y
consumo en América Latina (Havana: Fondo Editorial Casa de las Américas, 2005), 579.
32
Bopp, Vida e morte da Antropofagia, 108.
24
which combined local colors, figures, and landscape with avant-garde abstraction. In
Tarsila’s art, Oswald and others found literally a vision of what they wanted to achieve in
literary terms: a language that was direct and modern yet, at the same time, decidedly
Brazilian. A few years before the formation of Antropofagia, Tarsila had illustrated
Oswald’s poetry collection Pau-Brasil (1925). Her naïve, primitivist sketches resonated
well with Oswald’s anti-colonial poetry of export, which urged “a rediscovery of
Brazil.”
33

But it was undoubtedly Abaporu (literally “the man that eats people” in the Tupí-
Guaraní language) that played the most crucial role in the formation of Antropofagia.
Bopp tells that a few days after the momentous frog banquet, the same group convenes at
Oswald and Tarsila’s house for the “baptism” of a new painting.
34
It portrays a figure that
is resistant, or better still, oblivious to Western “civilizing” missions or what Oswald

33
Jáuregui, Canibalia, 594.
34
Bopp, Vida e morte da Antropofagia, 63.
Figure 1: Tarsila do Amaral,
Abaporu, 1928.
25
would later dub “catechism”:
35
a gigantic nude, presumably Tupí, contemplating a cactus
under the sun. Vivid colors (yellow, blue, orange, green) delineate the thinking man-eater
and landscape in abstract terms. The cannibal is depicted disproportionately: while his
head is miniscule, his leg and arm dominate the painting surface. With its replacement of
the Cartesian subject with a “savage” native, its synthesis of primitivist imagery with
Modernist abstraction, its large slabs of vivid colors reflecting the artist’s desire for a
simpler and more genuine expression, Tarsila’s painting encapsulates the tenets of
Antropofagia in a single image. Carlos E. Jáuregui goes as far as referring to Abaporu as
the movement’s “first manifesto.”
36
Oswald and Bopp must have felt the same way:
according to Tarsila, they contemplate the painting for a long time, feeling that it could
provide the seeds for “a great intellectual movement.”
37
The central and carnal figure of
the thinking cannibal inspires the idea of “recovering the colonial image of Brazil.”
38

Shortly afterwards, Oswald pens the manifesto.

1.2 | “Manifesto antropófago”: An Irreverent and Voluptuous Feast
Appearing on the inaugural issue of RA in May 1928, MA was an emblematic document:
Oswald reinterpreted Brazil’s colonial past, retheorized its exchanges with Europe, and
proposed a new way of conceiving national culture. While Antropofagia brought together
intellectuals of differing ideologies and evolved considerably over its two periods of
publication, Oswald’s manifesto was to remain of central importance as point of
reference, quoted time and again in the later issues of RA. In this section I examine

35
Oswald de Andrade, “Cannibalist Manifesto,” 38.
36
Jáuregui, Canibalia, 600.
37
Quoted in Jáuregui, Canibalia, 601.
38
Jáuregui, Canibalia, 601.
26
Oswald’s figurative use of cannibalism to rethink Brazil from pre-Cabraline times to the
present. Why adopt a violent act such as cannibalism, an incorporation that murders,
swallows and digests the Other, to think the past, present, and future of brasilidade?
What are the implications of choosing a form of eating, an oral intake that disallows
speech, in other words an act of silence, to theorize Brazilian culture vis-à-vis the West?
What role does the cannibal trope play in Oswald’s claims about the religions and
religiosity of Brazil? Finally, how does cannibalism figure in Oswald’s utopian rebellion
against patriarchy?
To begin with, the trope of cannibalism provides Oswald a means to rethink the
original “ingredients” of Brazil. As in “Manifesto da Poesia Pau-Brasil” (from here
onwards PPB), this revision of colonial history involves a romanticization of the
sixteenth-century Portuguese explorers who for the first time made contact with the Tupi.
Ilan Rachum highlights that Oswald thinks the sixteenth century as “the golden age of
Brazil,” a time when the initial contact between Portuguese adventurers and Indians
created “a society of loose morality in which the colonizers shed the traits of their older
civilization.”
39
MA claims that the early explorers are not “crusaders” but “fugitives from
a civilization that we are eating, because we are strong and vindictive like the Jabuti.”
40
It

39
Ilan Rachum, “Antropofagia against Verdamarelo,” Latin American Literary Review 4,
no. 8 (1976): 68.
40
Oswald de Andrade, “Cannibalist Manifesto,” 41. “Jabuti” is a common Portuguese
word for a species of red tortoise native to South America. Who exactly is this “we,” the
collective unity affirmed as the subject of this incorporation? It cannot be the Tupi—it
would be preposterous to claim that the natives, decimated by the Portuguese,
victoriously incorporated them, and it is certainly not the Portuguese. It is a retrospective
national subject, only available in its unity as an afterthought, that does the incorporation.
And yet, to consider Oswald’s assertion as nothing more than a “triumphalist” rewriting
of colonialism, an empty avant-garde provocation, would be amiss. See Schwarz,
“Brazilian Culture,” 7. Oswald accounts for the profound transformation of the
27
is not the selfless missionaries of Christianity but the rejects of the West, criminal
outsiders who cannot belong in Europe, that become a main ingredient of the Brazil-to-
come; a journey across the Atlantic Ocean transforms the abject residues of one culture to
the raw material of another yet to form. Wilfully forgetting the crimes of these
bandeirantes (bandits) against the Indians, the very people whose image MA seeks to
redeem, Oswald romanticizes the early colonizers, preferring these savage pillagers to the
Jesuit missionaries who catechize the indigenous. Rather than the “crusaders” who
embody and enforce the Law, the poet picks the fugitive outlaws as the true fathers of
Brazil.
But Oswald’s claim makes another change in Brazil’s narrative of filiation, one
that is tantamount to a complete interpretive reversal. To assert that Brazil “ate”—that is,
absorbed or incorporated—the Portuguese explorers contests the phallocentric history of
colonialism, where the New World appears as a virgin land to be “penetrated” by
European nations. For Oswald, colonization does not mark the annexation of Brazil to the
Portuguese Empire but the assimilation of an abject residue from the latter into something
new. Catholicism undergoes the most significant, if not the most readily visible,
transmutation. MA ludically signals this incorporation by referring to a local rendering of
the city of Bethlehem: “We made Christ to be born in Bahia. Or in Belém do Pará.”
41

Such localization represents for Oswald not the triumph of Catholicism in the formerly
“savage” colony but a mutation whose blasphemous nature is reflected by its philological
disregard for the original name. What is at stake is not a penetration, that is, an

Portuguese culture in the New World, a transformation so thorough that it cannot be
understood by the traditional notion of colonization as an annexation to the Empire.
41
Oswald de Andrade, “Cannibalist Manifesto,” 39.
28
insemination followed by the reproduction of the same. Neither is it a complete overhaul,
but a repetition with difference: Christ does remain Christ but he is made to be born in
Brazil, that is, made Brazilian. It is through the ambivalence of cannibalism (and more
generally of incorporation) as a trope that Oswald “queers” History and reinterprets the
military intrusion of a foreign force as a victory for the intruded.
From this history of cultural assimilations, Oswald deduces a cosmopolitan
agenda for the present day, crystallized in MA’s famous slogan: “Tupi or not Tupi, that is
the question.”
42
The homophony between the English copula and “Tupi,” a common
name for one of the indigenous peoples of Brazil, allows Oswald to place his expression
into Shakespeare’s phrasal nest, there to feed parasitically from the original syntax and
dramatic context of Hamlet. Renaissance skepticism, as Schwartz notes, is redirected
towards Brazilian culture in its relation to the West.
43
As Jáuregui underlines, Oswald’s
graphemic rewrite demands, in its performative ventriloquism, the “savage devourment”
of metropolitan high culture.
44
In order to be, to achieve “intellectual autonomy” (Nunes)
and become “the subject…of its own history” (Schwartz), Brazil has to devour its other
and go cannibal—that is, Tu-pí.
45
As in the hybrid image of Christ from Belém do Pará,
what is at stake is not a creation ex nihilo but a repetition with difference, a creative
appropriation of the original for present day purposes. Such hybridization would in turn

42
Ibid., 38 (English in the original).
43
Jorge Schwartz, “Um Brasil em tom menor: Pau-Brasil e Antropofagia,” Revista de
Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana 24, no. 47 (1998): 63.
44
Jáuregui, Canibalia, 637.
45
Schwartz, “Um Brasil em tom menor,” 63; Benedito Nunes, “Antropofagia ao alcance
de todos,” in A utopia antropofágica, ed. Benedito Nunes (São Paulo: Globo, 1990), 15.
29
deconstruct, as Andermann rightly points out, the supposed universality of being itself.
46

Brazilian authors need to assimilate the West to forge an original expression, but one that
would go—as Leslie Bary notes—precisely against the Romantic notion of originality.
47

For all its expressive force, Oswald’s performance of “savage” cosmopolitanism is not
without problems.
48
While the hierarchy between grammar and vocabulary—neatly
corresponding to the traditional dichotomy of form and content—is surely illusory, it is
curious, especially for a text that insistently attacks grammar as the incarnation of law in
language, to “mold” the indigenous into the confines of a Western syntax. While
contesting traditional notions of originality that condemn Brazil to a position of imitation
and dependency, Oswald still gives formal primacy to the West, allowing it to shape and
discipline indigenous or local content.
While Oswaldian cannibalism calls for the savage incorporation of metropolitan
culture, such openness is counterbalanced by a decidedly anti-colonial posture. As
Schwartz highlights, MA and PBB “depart from a common project of decolonization.”
49

And while MA’s invective is naturally directed against the Portuguese, it is this resistance
against coloniality rather than identity politics that motivates Oswald. The poet

46
Jens Andermann, “Antropofagia: Testimonios y silencios,” Revista Iberoamericana 68,
no. 198 (2002): 81.
47
Leslie Bary, “The Tropical Modernist as Literary Cannibal: Cultural Identity in Oswald
de Andrade,” Chasqui 20, no. 2 (1991): 16.
48
Leslie Bary argues that Oswaldian cannibalism reduces diversity and
underdevelopment to aesthetic pleasure in its attempt to forge a metropolitan Brazilian
identity, and thus evades the “real problems” presented by the nation’s heterogeneities.
See Bary, “The Tropical Modernist,” 17. While I do not subscribe to the idea that
economic and political issues are more “real” than questions of culture, it is important to
emphasize—as does Jáuregui—that Antropofagia was mostly a “culturalist” reaction to
contemporary antagonisms and did not propose social, economic, or political solutions.
Jáuregui, Canibalia, 627-629.
49
Schwartz, “Um Brasil em tom menor,” 60.
30
reappraises Portugal’s cultural, political, and economic significance for Brazil from the
sixteenth-century to the present. Starting with the overdetermined first encounter between
the natives and colonizers, MA scoffs at the idea that the Portuguese “discovered” Brazil
yet affirms—as Toller Gomes highlights
50
—the equally Eurocentric idea of a
prelapsarian innocence: “Before the Portuguese discovered Brazil, Brazil had discovered
happiness.”
51
“The great men” of national history here appear as traitors who
disenfranchise Brazil for personal gain. Catholic missionaries like Father António Vieira
are as culpable as colonial governors, if not more: they disguise material interests behind
faith. Rather than a champion of Indian rights or a prosaist of inimitable eloquence (as he
usually appears in history textbooks), the Jesuit is here portrayed as a treacherous
hypocrite:
…Author of our first loan, to make a commission. The illiterate king had
told him: put that on paper, but without a lot of lip. The loan was made.
Brazilian sugar was signed away. Vieira left the money in Portugal and
brought us the lip.
52

Counseling João IV to found the Brazilian Trade Company, Vieira signs away local
resources for profit and brings back nothing but “lip” [a labia], or empty sermons.
Neither do better than the nineteenth-century statesmen who played a part in
Brazil’s independence from Portugal. José de Silva Lisboa, the viscount who persuades
Dom João VI to open Brazilian ports to all nations friendly towards Portugal, is
dismissed as a vicious liar: “Down with the truth of the missionary peoples, defined by

50
Heloisa Toller Gomes, “A questão racial na gestação da antropofagia
oswaldiana,” Nuevo Texto Crítico 12, no. 23-24 (1999): 253.
51
Oswald de Andrade, “Cannibalist Manifesto,” 42.
52
Ibid., 39.
31
the sagacity of a cannibal, the Viscount of Cairu:—It’s a lie told again and again.”
53
This
is only part of a larger onslaught on the court of Dom João, who, along with his son Dom
Pedro I, appear as mischievous opportunists rather than liberators: “An expression typical
of Dom João VI: ‘My son, put this crown on your head, before some adventurer puts it on
his!’”
54
The independence of Brazilian Empire is here reduced to a sleight-of-hand to
remain in power.
From this reappraisal of national history, MA concludes that coloniality, despite
the appearances, persists to the present day:
Our independence has not yet been proclaimed…We expelled the dynasty.
We must still expel the Bragantine spirit, the decrees and the snuff-box of
Maria da Fonte.
55

Like a modern day Zarathustra, Oswald urges Brazil to dispose of the god it has already
killed, to let go of its Portuguese sympathies or allegiances, its residual colonialism—and
become truly independent at last. As part of this decolonial attack, MA derides saudade
(melancholic yearning)—the affect that allegedly defines the Portuguese, and by
extension Brazilian, character—by naming some of the non-Portuguese subjects that
supposedly feel it: “Discovered and loved ferociously with all the hypocrisy of saudade,
by the immigrants, by slaves and by the touristes. In the land of the Great Snake.”
56
By
invoking Raul Bopp’s epic poem “Cobra Norato,” MA points out how arbitrary and
unbefitting it is to characterize Brazil through saudade, a gesture that simply disregards

53
Ibid., 41.
54
Ibid., 44.
55
Ibid.
56
Ibid., 38.
32
the indigenous heritage. Even if it somehow applied to Brazil, melancholy is a
“hypocritical” affect: yearning for a past that no longer exists (and probably did not ever
exist), it rejects the living present, the contemporary reality of the country.
57
With quick
yet pithy jabs, MA thus carves Brazil’s history of dependence from colonization to the
present. By exposing the cultural, religious, and economic aspects of this persistent
coloniality, Oswald aims to shift the reader’s loyalties from the Catholic Portugal to a
cannibalistic Brazil. MA is a “culturalist” call to action, a demand to forge an authentic
national culture that would be, at last, truly independent.
58

As might be expected from his anti-colonial posture, not all cannibalism is
healthy for Oswald, nor all forms of cultural consumption desirable. Echoing his position
in PPB, Oswald vehemently criticizes “importers of canned consciousness,” that is,
pseudo-intellectuals who accept European ideas and movements without any attempt at
assimilation or critique, pseudo-poets who consume and at best reproduce Western
artifacts rather than create something authentic through their means.
59
Furthermore, the
cannibal impulse can easily go astray. When the desire to incorporate alterity or “that
which is not mine” becomes sublimated, it degrades into “low cannibalism,” an unhinged
will-to-power prone to “the sins of catechism—envy, usury, calumny, murder.”
60
Not just
everyone achieves “carnal cannibalism,” an intake that remains immanent to desire; in
truly Nietzschean fashion, Oswald affirms that “only the pure elites” can partake in this

57
Oswald’s critique of saudade as a hypocritical affect is rather ironic given his own
utopian melancholy for pre-colonial Brazil.
58
Jáuregui rightly distinguishes Antropofagia’s “culturalist” opposition to colonialism,
which remains in the bourgeois circles and amounts to a change of perspective, from
counter-colonial struggles like the indigenous uprising that was taking place in Bolivia
around the same time (1927). Jáuregui, Canibalia, 627-29.
59
Oswald de Andrade, “Cannibalist Manifesto,” 39.
60
Ibid., 43.
33
higher form of cultural assimilation.
61
For Oswald, true cannibalism is an incorporation
that desacralizes the incorporated. Misreading Freud’s Totem and Taboo, where the totem
does have an aura of untouchability albeit of a different kind than the taboo,
62
Oswald
describes cannibalism as “the permanent transformation of the Tabu into totem.”
63
As
opposed to the Catholic Eucharist, where ordinary food items (bread and wine) are turned
into divine sacraments, cannibalism irreverently grabs and assimilates that which was
formerly sacred and untouchable. MA mobilizes this idea of cannibalism as blasphemous
consumption to attack Brazil’s “high” discourses—religious and cultural.
64

Above all, MA attacks the Catholic missionaries who adulterate the Tupi with
“God’s word.” In particular, it comments on the case of Pedro Fernandes Sardinha, the
sixteenth-century bishop of Bahia killed and consumed by the Caeté. This becomes the
manifesto’s archetypal scene—a properly Brazilian master-slave dialectic. Oswald signs
MA “in Piratininga. The 374
th
year of the swallowing of Bishop Sardinha,”
65
thus
tweaking the Gregorian calendar to take Sardinha’s consumption (rather than the birth of
Christ) as the year zero, or the point of origin, of national history.
66
The poet takes full
advantage of this cannibalistic victory and its symbolic significance. In the historical

61
Ibid.
62
See Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, trans. James Strachey (Oxford: Routledge,
1999), 2-4.
63
Oswald de Andrade, “Cannibalist Manifesto,”40.
64
Since the critical interventions of Haroldo de Campos in the 70s, this desacralization
came to be interpreted in the Bakhtinian keys of parody and carnivalization. See Emir
Rodríguez Monegal, “Carnaval/Antropofagia/Parodia,” Revista Iberoamericana 45, no.
108 (1979): 404.
65
Oswald de Andrade, “Cannibalist Manifesto,” 44.
66
Jeffrey Schnapp notes that Oswald is actually off by two years: 1928 would be the
376
th
(not the 374
th
) anniversary of the memorable event Jeffrey Schnapp, “Biting the
Hand that Feeds You (On the 70th Anniversary of the Manifesto antropófago),” Nuevo
Texto Crítico 12, no. 1 (1999): 244.
34
anecdote, cannibalism overturns the hierarchies between the Portuguese missionary and
“savage” Indians. A holy subject that represents the divine law, a law that claims to
govern all creatures of earth, is forcedly reduced to the level of base materiality. With this
return to matter, cannibalism brings about silence: the bishop can no longer propagate the
word of God, no longer feed the Caeté that highest of discourses, as he is transformed
into mute food—once again to be consumed, but this time for good. Sardinha loses his
aura, his taboo status, his veil of unapproachability as he becomes food—no different
than the dried fish or sardines that his name suggests—to be eaten, digested, and
defecated. Finally, cannibalism effects a libidinal reversal: the bishop qua meat yields
gastronomic pleasure—or is at least imagined by Antropofagia to do so. A bearer of the
divine law, which Oswald associates with the repression of carnal desires, is made to give
pleasure as carne (meat).
Oswald’s cannibal onslaught, however, is not merely against Catholicism. MA is
equally averse to other forms of “high” culture, whether bred in Brazil or imported from
Europe. Through cannibalism, Oswald deconstructs the West’s self-proclaimed centrality
in world history. “Without us, Europe wouldn’t even have its meager declaration of the
rights of man,” MA declares, and in the next lines explains: “Heritage. Contact with the
Carib side of Brazil. Où Villegaignon print terre. Montaigne. Natural man. Rousseau.
From the French Revolution to Romanticism.”
67
It is to “us,” to the cannibal Tupi with
whom Oswald identifies or claims filiation, that Europe owes its modern understanding
of human rights; with staccato leaps in European intellectual history, MA claims that the
concept of homem natural (natural man)—the subjective premise underlying the

67
Oswald de Andrade, “Cannibalist Manifesto,” 39.
35
Declaration of Human Rights—ultimately derives from the reports of Western observers
of cannibals like Jean de Léry (who went to Où Villegaignon print terre) and
Montaigne’s reflection on cannibals in his famous essay of the same name. While this
genealogy of human rights inscribes the cannibal into world history, MA does not
ultimately question or critique the Hegelian notion of history as progress. From
Montaigne’s early modern skepticism towards Keyserling’s technized barbarian, “we
push onward,” that is, do progress; in fact, in his later philosophical work, Oswald would
envision the latter as the desired future of man.
68
Montaigne and Rousseau are cited as
part of a “heritage,” a cannibal or decolonial one but still a heritage, a progressive history
of revolutions that extend until the telos of Keyserling’s technicized barbarian. Even
though Castro-Klarén defends that the idea of synthesis is alien to Oswald’s critique of
patriarchy, it is hard to ignore the affirmation of teleology in these lines.
69

Furthermore, while rejecting the supposed autonomy of Western reason, MA
nevertheless affirms Eurocentric theses about the indigenous mind. Oswald claims that
neither laws of grammar nor Western categories made sense in pre-colonial Brazil: “It
was because we never had grammars, nor collections of old plants. And we never knew
what urban, suburban, frontier and continental were.”
70
MA marks the latter’s difference
by asserting, paradoxically, terms that come directly from Lévy-Bruhl’s anthropological
work: “a participatory consciousness, a religious dynamics.”
71
At the same time, one can
feel Oswald’s indignation at being reduced to an object of study in the next lines: “And

68
See Oswald de Andrade, A crise da filosofia messianica, in Obras completas (São
Paulo: Globo, 1990), 101-155.
69
Sara Castro-Klarén, “A Genealogy for the ‘Manifesto Antropofago,’ or the Struggle
between Socrates and the Caraibe,” Nepantla: Views from South 1, no. 2 (2000): 300.
70
Oswald de Andrade, “Cannibalist Manifesto,” 39.
71
Ibid.
36
the pre-logical mentality for Mr. Lévy-Bruhl to study.”
72
Oswald, then, walks on a
tightrope: while invoking the West’s scientific discourses to specify indigenous or
Brazilian difference, the manifesto rejects the status of an object to be studied, or an
exotic specimen.
Oswald’s critique of indianismo, another “high” discourse that claims to represent
the Indian, is equally problematic. MA rejects the prevalent representations in Brazilian
culture, substituting them, however, with another idealized image, that is, the cannibal. In
one of the densest lines of the manifesto, Oswald cries out: “Down with the torch-bearing
Indian. The Indian son of Mary, the stepson of Catherine of Medici and the godson of
Dom Antonio de Mariz.”
73
The attack begins with colonial architecture. Oswald rejects
the reconciliatory syncretism of certain Baroque churches, where the Indian is
incorporated into the sculptural work (in this case, the chandeliers), because he
recognizes the native’s subjugation in this illusory harmony.
74
He goes on to renounce the
“familiarization” of the Indian, that is, his cultural and political capture by the patriarchal
logic of Catholicism, which appropriates by filiation: the native convert, a beloved and
recurrent figure in Brazilian literature, becomes the “Indian son of Mary.” The dense
quote makes reference to the Indian Paraguassu (an apocryphal version made Catherine
of Medici his godmother), who was brought to France in the sixteenth century, thus
condemning the European exoticization of the native into a monster (monstruo) to be
shown (mostrar).

72
Ibid.
73
Oswald de Andrade, “Cannibalist Manifesto,” 42.
74
Oswald de Andrade, “Le manifeste anthropophage,” trans. Benedito Nunes, in
Surréalisme périphérique, ed. Luis de Moura Sobral (Montreal: Université de Montreal,
1984), 189-190.
37
After these historical cases of proselytism, exoticization, and appropriation,
Oswald concludes with a reference to José de Alencar, the most prominent representative
of indianismo. As Jáuregui highlights, there will be continuities between indianismo and
Antropofagia. Antropofagia too appropriates an image of the Indian to reflect on the
colonial past, harmonize antagonisms, and define brasilidade.
75
Nevertheless, in MA’s
invective against indianismo, there is more than a wishful denial of filiation. For one, MA
offers a critique of the appropriative logic of filiation at play in literary representations of
the Indian. Oswald ridicules Alencar’s famous novel O Guaraní, where the Indian
protagonist Peri offers his chivalric services to Ceci, the daughter of a Portuguese knight
named Dom Antonio de Mariz—Oswald’s comment refers to Peri’s baptism in the novel.
Rather than indulging in the highly allegorical union of Peri and Ceci, Oswald reads O
Guaraní against the grain to side with the villains, that is, the cannibal Aimoré people
who attack the Portuguese family. Later in the manifesto, Oswald will similarly mock the
opera production of O Guarani by Antônio Carlos Gomes. Here, however, the critique
goes beyond dismissing a certain image of the Indian:
We were never catechized. What we really made was Carnaval. The
Indian dressed as senator of the Empire. Making believe he’s Pitt. Or
performing in Alencar’s operas, full of worthy Portuguese sentiments.
76

The Indian emerges an untameable and rather cunning figure that, despite the
appearances, is not indoctrinated but merely pretending, parodying and carnivalizing
proselytism in disguise. Though he seems Christianized, though he seems to be absorbed
into the logic of sovereignty, the Indian continues to subvert the hegemony. While

75
Jáuregui, Canibalia, 606.
76
Oswald de Andrade, “Cannibalist Manifesto,” 40.
38
deriding the opera’s “worthy Portuguese sentiments,” Oswald at the same time suggests
that the Indian carnivalizes the performance from the inside—despite Alencar and
Gomes’ idealized representations. What Oswald attempts, then, is a subversive recovery
of the Indian from the colonial (and post-colonial) archive.
Oswald thus parodies the discourses of hegemony (Catholicism, Western science,
Romanticism) through the cannibal trope. Yet MA also critiques, on a more abstract level,
the grammaticality of discourse itself. Oswald identifies the grammar, understood as a
body of laws deduced from concrete enunciations that are then used to regulate the norms
of speech and writing, as a Western invention alien to Brazil: “we never had grammars,
nor collections of old plants.”
77
Grammar governs language with the zeal of a (Western)
biologist who strives to master the Amazons through the naming and collection of plant
specimens; it is an attempt to subsume the ebullient multiplicity of Brazil. Oswald here
comes close to Bakhtin’s theory of language, where concrete expressions continuously
deform the abstract laws that regulate linguistic use.
78
It is the immanent plane of
Brazilian language with its African and Amerindian elements, shortcuts, and
idiosyncrasies that MA embraces over the transcendent laws of continental Portuguese.
Just like logic and catechism, grammar is conceived as a set of laws that through abstract
repeatability aim to subjugate the Brazilian social reality. Grammar is logic applied to
language (“But we never permitted the birth of logic among us,” Oswald defiantly
claims); as such, it represents European reason, a colonizing enterprise that names,

77
Ibid., 39.
78
See Mikhail Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination, trans.
Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 259-275.
39
categorizes, and thus subjugates the other.
79
Oswald later adds: “We knew how to
transpose mystery and death with the help of a few grammatical forms.”
80
Mystery and
death, along with the mystery of death, opacities resistant to the light of reason, are
“transposed”—a musical expression that, rather than accurate designation, suggests
refraction—with little grammar. MA conceives grammar and grammaticality, then, as
Western attempts to repress language, to cleanse its impurities, and to subjugate its
materiality through abstract and iterable laws.
Against such transcendence, MA elaborates a “concretist” position where instinct
and experience, rather than ideas and reason, guide ethical and aesthetic practice. For
Oswald, cannibalism is first and foremost an instinctual drive for otherness, an “interest”
(literally, “between-being”) in what lies beyond: “I am only concerned [me interessa]
with what is not mine.”
81
All humans share this desire for alterity. The “us” in MA’s
daring opening (“Cannibalism alone unites us. Socially. Economically. Philosophically.”)
does not merely refer to the peripheral nation of Brazil, but extends to the human species
at large, united by their instinct on an ontological level.
82
Rather than the murderous
ritual of “savage” natives, cannibalism is the drive behind all human beliefs and
endeavors, all egotism and self-sacrifice: “Disguised expression of all individualism, of
all collectivisms. Of all religions. Of all peace treaties.”
83
And while MA on several
occasions refers to cannibalism as a “law”—in fact, once as “the world’s single law”—
such denomination emphasizes the ubiquity of the cannibal instinct rather than describe

79
Ibid.
80
Ibid., 41.
81
Ibid., 38.
82
Ibid.
83
Ibid.
40
the secular codification of a convention. Oswald’s dislike for law, understood as abstract
and iterable principle, becomes manifest in his (comically brief) parody of the Platonic
dialogue: “I asked a man what the Law was. He answered that it was the guarantee of the
exercise of possibility. That man was named Galli Mathias. I ate him.”
84
The
philosopher-cannibal, a Tupi Socrates, devours his interlocutor to end his galimatias, or
nonsense. Law is just another “high” discourse that pretends to order the concrete
multiplicity of experience; it is to be devoured and done with.
For Oswald, cannibalism is not a law that applies with cold indifference or
disinterest, but an interest in or instinctual desire for that which is different. MA proposes
an ethical praxis that stays in touch with this most basic (and inherently good) instinct.
Such a concretist ethics is needed because ideas, especially when deemed as the rational
guardians of our basic drives, lead us astray. Oswald’s example is the Inquisition,
which—like many other atrocities in history—begins with an idea, one that quickly
spirals out of control: “Ideas take charge, react, and burn people in public squares. Let’s
get rid of ideas and other paralyses.”
85
Rather than elemental units of reasoning, ideas
appear here as ossified abstractions that capture and paralyze thought: “Down with the
reversible world, and against objectified ideas. Cadaverized. The stop of thought that is
dynamic.”
86
It is worth noting that Oswald’s concretist ethics is not opposed to reason per
se, but to the arrest of its movement by static and fetishized ideas. Through “the

84
Ibid., 41.
85
Ibid., 43.
86
Ibid., 40.
41
cannibalistic vaccine,” Antropofagia promises to shake off the paroxysm of thought,
letting it once again move its limbs.
87

This all sounds great, but one cannot stop wondering how exactly we are to take
this journey from fetishized thought to lively instinct. Oswald answers, albeit in a
deliberately cryptic way: “By means of routes. Believe in signs; believe in sextants and
stars.”
88
Stripped naked of our ideas in the pitch-dark night, we are to take these “routes”
or lines of escape, guided both by nature (stars) and technology (sextants). The futurist
belief in technology here joins hands with the Romanticist embrace of nature in a
mystical reaction to instrumental reason. Later, Oswald will quite enigmatically repeat
the word “routes” seven times. Given Oswald’s defense of instinct over ideas, I here
find—beyond a deliberately obscure and ritualistic performance—the affirmation of an
immanent plane of existence, of “the Carib instinct” that is the waters below our feet, of
the cannibal drive that continues to pulsate beneath transcendent ideas. Antropofagia
promises a renewed life, a return back to immanence, where the cannibal instinct is going
to be experienced directly, without “antagonistic sublimations.”
89

In MA’s “concretist”—or, more precisely, anti-ideatic—vision, Oswald plays the
sensory immediacy of taste against the abstract generality of logos; two functions of the
tongue—tasting and word formation—here find themselves at odds. Against fetishized
ideas that steer us away from our instincts, the (apparently) immediate experience of taste
provides a corrective. For despite Antropofagia’s repeated disavowals, cannibalism is

87
Ibid., 39.
88
Ibid., 43.
89
Ibid., 41.
42
never merely a symbolic ritual for the “absorption of the sacred enemy.”
90
Through the
cannibal trope MA also evokes, albeit mostly in an implicit way, the mundane pleasure of
eating meat. Without this evocation of gustatory enjoyment, attacks such as “the
swallowing” of Bishop Sardinha would lose much of their rhetorical power. Indeed,
Antropofagia will frequently use the affective force of taste against religious and secular
men of authority, who were referred to as “comida bôa” (good food) or, especially if old,
ridiculed for their “hard meat.” An example is Coelho Neto, the founder and chair of the
Brazilian Academy of Letters, whom a satirical piece on RA imagined to be placed on a
skewer, barbecued, and fed to multitudes. Plucking the author’s white hairs to make the
plate more agreeable, the text’s narrator comments that “all that is new, including meat,
has a tasty attractiveness to it.”
91
What emerges from MA, then, is an ethical position
(with aesthetic implications) where the body, with its instincts and appetites, takes
precedence over the mind. At this cleavage of instinct and reason, Oswald bends the
cannibal trope against itself to articulate his stance, playing one layer of meaning against
the other.

1.3 | Beyond the Manifesto: The Forgotten Meals of Antropofagia
With its incisive slogans, intriguing aporias, and suggestive gaps, MA became the best—
and in many instances, the only—known intervention of Antropofagia, eclipsing all the
other texts and images in the journal’s over one year of publication. An ambiguous text
that defies unitary readings, MA strangely came to represent Antropofagia as a whole,

90
Oswald de Andrade, “Cannibalist Manifesto,” 42.
91
RA 1.3.5.
43
included in anthologies
92
and syllabi as an example of peripheral cosmopolitanism.
Nevertheless, perhaps as signaled by the contradictions of the manifesto itself, the authors
who published in RA—both the main cadre and one-time contributors—expressed
different, and at times even contradictory, opinions on national identity, religion, and
sexuality. While some texts and images would nuance and develop the arguments that
MA puts forward in aphoristic form, thus exposing their ambiguities and oversights,
others would simply contradict them. Furthermore, there is textual evidence to suggest
that even Oswald’s own views shifted throughout the journal’s two periods of
publication. An appreciation of these disjunctures, then, becomes necessary for a better
understanding of MA’s inner schisms and gaps as well as Antropofagia’s multivalent
recourse to cannibalism as a trope.
It was on their vision of national culture, or what brasilidade should look like,
that Antropofagia diverged most. While the entire MA, along with the cultural
cannibalism it advocates, is an answer to this question, Oswald does not address certain
aspects of the larger debate. What exactly makes a novel, for instance, Brazilian? Is it the
use of local scenery, characters, and dialects? In the pages of RA, these questions, often
discussed under the heading of regionalismo, become a source of controversy. Whereas
there appear defenses of cosmopolitanism like “How I Became a Brazilian Author” by
the future presidential candidate José Américo de Almeida, who argues that only by
reading foreign texts, and thinking about Brazil through comparison and contrasts, can
one appreciate the singularity of brasilidade, others like Ascenso Ferreria publish

92
See, for instance, Translation and Identity in the Americas: New Directions in
Translation Theory, ed. Edwin Gentzler (London: Routledge, 2012).
44
regionalist poems with a decidedly anti-Western attitude.
93
Like Oswald, who uses
cannibalism in articulating his “savage” cosmopolitanism, the authors often have
recourse to food imagery to express their diverse positions. In these texts, gastro-images
at times become a source of irony, at others, of pride in local culture and contempt for the
metropolis.
Antropofagia’s most unequivocal response to the question of brasilidade,
however, was Mário de Andrade’s novel Macunaíma (1928), which was hailed time and
again as a model (Oswald would even call it “a maior obra nacional,” or the most
important national work).
94
Drawing on the author’s anthropological research on Afro-
Brazilian and indigenous cultures, it was indeed to become one of the masterpieces of
Brazilian modernism. In a review announcing the novel’s publication, Antônio de
Alcântara Machado makes reference, among other regionalist commonplaces, to images
of Bahian food to distinguish Mário from others who, “sweaty and misguided run after
the famous brasilidade.”
95
Local meals, scenery and characters do not make a novel
Brazilian—a foreigner can do that perfectly well, argues Alcântara Machado. A true
“romance da terra” (a novel of land) like Macunaíma, which laughs, suffers, and rejoices
with the land, is much harder to accomplish:
Just by itself, this refrain of Macunaíma—Ah! Such laziness!...—is worth
more as brasilidade than all the suburb alleys [ruazianhas de arrebalde],

93
RA 1.1.8
94
RA 1.5.3
95
RA 1.5.4.
45
all the refried beans [tutús de feijão], all the brunettes in cotton [chita] that
crowd the verses of our contemporary boys.
96

Alcântara Machado argues—much like Borges, who writes about the absence of camels
in the Quran
97
—that an author does not have to scream “I’m a Brazilian” if he is one.
98

Mário makes creative use of local myths and legends, forging a poetic language that
captures the Brazilian spirit. Macunaíma was indeed a perfectly justified yet rather
strange choice for Antropofagia since, as Toller Gomes notes, the nation’s African
component—that very tutú de feijão alluded by Alcântara Machado—was to become,
quite ironically, “a taboo” for the movement.
99
While Macunaíma’s appropriation of the
novel as a genre (the novel’s subtitle, let us remember, is “A Hero Without Character”)
and modernist return to autochthonous material do resonate with Oswaldian cannibalism,
the novel also signals a crucial gap therein, namely, the failure to address the nation’s
Black legacies.
Alcântara Machado’s critique of running after brasilidade finds an echo in the
muted yet deeply cynical parodies of nationalism in RA’s Brasiliana section, which
Augusto de Campos describes as a “Flaubertian sotisserie...[of] ready-made texts that
denounced the mild [amena] pollution of imbecility.”
100
The section rehashed excerpts
from contemporary newspapers and ridiculed them by sheer recontextualization. In the
ninth issue of RA, there appears a news story—suggestively titled “Brasilidade” by RA—

96
Ibid.
97
As many have noted, there indeed are camels in the Quran.
98
Jorge Luis Borges, “El escritor argentino y la tradición,” in Discusión (Buenos Aires:
Emecé, 1981), 270.
99
Heloisa Toller Gomes, “A questão racial na gestação da antropofagia
oswaldiana,” Nuevo Texto Crítico 12, no. 23-24 (1999): 252.
100
Augusto de Campos, introduction to Revista de Antropofagia, 4.
46
about an official banquet organized for the northern São Paulo press.
101
After singing
praises to the local deputies who sponsored the meal, the journalist describes the
exquisitely Brazilian nature of the entire event. Regionalism is here taken to comical
proportions. Only “genuinely national” food is served; “not a single plate with foreign
name,” approves the journalist.
102
The music played at the event is likewise “all
Brazilian,” featuring arias from O Guarany and Salvador Rosa by the famed compositor
Antônio Carlos Gomes. The journalist ends with a nationalist bravado:
We don’t need to look for inspirations in ancient Greece or old Rome:
here we have our Paraíba do Sul, the plains of Mar and Mantiqueira, our
woods [mattas], and our grasslands [campinas] and our canoe [igara].
They are enough!
103

Antropofagia achieves parodic effects by simply reproducing the original under the light
of its ironic gaze. On the pages of RA, the text’s myopic nationalism deconstructs itself,
revealing the impossibility of a purely Brazilian identity while making claims for it.
Neither the food nor the music that the journalist praises is as Brazilian as he makes them
to be; for each claim of brasilidade, a certain erasure of origins needs to be performed.
Included in the “genuinely national” meals, for instance, is tutú—a plate of West African
origin. The journalist similarly disregards that the opera is a European genre if the
compositor and his themes are from Brazil. Over and above these appropriations,
however, is the faulty assumption that one can achieve cultural authenticity by gathering
together all that pertains to Brazil and excluding all that is foreign. That a romanticized

101
RA 1.9.8.
102
Ibid.
103
Ibid.
47
portrayal of the Amerindian such as O Guarany is affirmed as an authentic Brazilian
cultural product also adds to the irony. In the author’s final exclamation, one can hear
both senses of the adjective “enough”: Brazil has, on the one hand, enough natural and
cultural assets to not depend on ancient Greece or Rome for inspiration; on the other
hand, it has almost more social and racial diversity than it can handle—enough is enough.
Insofar as Antropofagia also reacted against neoclassicism, the parody becomes rather
murky towards the end. What is clear, however, is that the journalist’s nationalist praise
of local scenery appears ludicrous under Brasiliana.
Contradictions, however, were abundant in RA’s first dentição. While such
parodies of regionalism were common, there also appeared poems that wholeheartedly
espoused similar forms of nationalism. Indeed, Jáuregui notes that the first dentição was
the last space in Brazilian letters where ufanismo (over-optimistic patriotism) and
modernist cosmopolitanism could share the page.
104
Some of these poetic performances
employed food imagery in the very way critiqued by Alcântara Machado and others. To
see how much Antropofagia diverged on this point, one only has to contrast the banquet
from Brasiliana with Ascenso Ferreira’s poem “Bahia,” which joyously pits Afro-
Brazilian plates against those from the French cuisine, and laments their perceived
inferiority:
Bahia—Vatapá!
Bahia—Carurú!
Bahia—Acaça!
Bahia—Oxinxin!

104
Jáuregui, Canibalia, 629.
48
…
Petit-pois damns you!
Macarrão damns you!
Paté-de-foie-gras damns you!
Long live Carurú!
105

Exuberant that he just consumed “the Bahian soul, at the sumptuous table of Black Eve,”
the poetic persona delivers a eulogy, comparing the region with his native Recife:
My sirs!
Recife has bridges,
Recife is beautiful,
…
But Recife
Does not have anymore Eves
Under flashy cabanas,
Selling in the evening
—Fried fish!
—Fried meat!
—Boiled crab!
—Pirão de Aratú!
While a beautiful city on its own right, Recife is no match to Bahia with its Afro-
Brazilian food culture. As in the official banquet in Brasiliana, regional food here
functions as a mark of popular identity, constructed in opposition to luxury French goods.

105
RA 1.2.8.
49
When the Bahian author Orris Barbosa criticizes this poem, Ferreira pens a lengthy
defense where he prioritizes local food over poetry: “I ate there tasty treats which are
worth more than any literature of mine, of yours, or of anyone else… And I see the
Bahian [Barbosa] talking rather than eating! Losing time!”
106
As part of Brazil’s national
heritage, the tasty eats are infinitely more valuable than any modern text. The Deleuze-
Guattarian eating/writing disjunction is here used to chastise the critic, who is accused of
dwelling on trivialities.
In the first dentição, such regionalist defenses of Brazilianness were quite
frequent. Indeed, several proponents of verde-amarelismo (green-yellowism), a
nationalist literary movement that originally surged in response to PPB’s cosmopolitan
aesthetics, published in RA during this time. An example that features local food products
is “Indifference” by Achilles Vivacqua, who would later contribute to the journal Verde.
Vivacqua’s poem, dedicated—with intended or unintended irony—to Oswald, dismisses
the metropolitan art scene in sweeping lines to praise the tropical green of palm trees and
yellow of fruits:
Paris—New York—Roma!
Cabarets—running around mansions [correira de casarões]—art?

The sun of my country has long hair of gold
The palms of my country are green
with yellow fruits
107

106
RA 1.6.5.
107
RA 1.3.2.
50
In their affirmations of Brazil as a sovereign nation, some authors even had recourse to
racial terminology. Ascanio Lopes, another fervent proponent of verde-amarelismo,
publishes “Sangue Brasileiro,” which enumerates and romantically celebrates all the
different “bloods” that make up the national spirit.
108
The verde-amarelistas, then, amend
MA’s erasure of race but do this in racist and regionalist ways. Augusto de Campos
criticizes this “ostrich stomach” of the first dentição, which could devour—quite
indiscriminately—parodies of regionalism and regionalist poems at the same time.
109
The
cannibal’s first bite [dentição] is rather careless—he does not have any food restrictions.
All “that is not mine,” including nationalist outcries, is sacred enemy to be consumed.
An anonymous essay in the second dentição, which aims to clarify “the cannibal
descent in our literature” reveals the shifts in Antropofagia’s approach to the question of
national identity.
110
Identifying a conflictive duality within the nation, the author (most
probably Oswald or Costa) distinguishes between “the Carib Brazil”—that is, the real
Brazil of the people—and Brazil as conceived by the elites, or “the one that merely
carries the name.”
111
In plain contrast with MA’s Nietzschean elitism, where “only the
pure elites” could partake in cannibalism, Antropofagia here openly sides with the
people.
112
The text declares war against not only Brazil’s Europeanized intelligentsia, but
against Western colonial enterprise in its various manifestations:
In the position of [em função de] the mameluco, of the discontented
European, of the adventurer absorbed by the Indian, and against the reinol

108
RA 1.3.6.
109
Augusto de Campos, introduction to Revista de Antropofagia, 4.
110
RA 2.4. The original essay on “the cannibal descent” was penned by Oswaldo Costa.
See RA 1.1.8.
111
RA 2.4.
112
Oswald de Andrade, “Cannibalist Manifesto,” 43.
51
mentality, against Western culture, against the governor, against slavery,
against the Inquisition.
113

Rebelling against Brazil’s political and economic exploitation as well as its cultural and
religious repression, the author nevertheless sides with Europeans who turn against their
own culture or get “absorbed by” Amerindians. What is more surprising in this passage,
and those to follow, is the racial self-identification as mameluco, an Arabic-origin term
that in the Latin American context refers to the offspring of European and Amerindians.
While there are frequent references to Brazil’s racial and cultural hybridity in the
individual literature and essays that appeared in RA, Antropofagia had never identified
unequivocally as “mixed” before.
To this racial reference, the text then adds a class component—one that hints
Oswald’s imminent espousal of Marxism. The author sides with “the inferiority of the
working mestiço against the superiority of the Arian corrupted by vice and the softness of
decades” in a sexist praise of labor.
114
Besides this unexpected (and very vaguely
defined) racial alliance, the most significant shift is from Antropofagia’s early
identification as cultural vanguard to its populist solidarity with the “inferior” multitudes
of Brazil. Yet even in this populist affirmation, the text defends Oswaldian cannibalism
as a cultural model: “Antropofagia corrected the impossibility of closing the ports with
the most authentic [ingênuo] and Brazilian process of nationalization, which is the
assimilation of qualities.”
115
Antropofagia, according to the text, seeks to recover “the
natural spirit” of the Indian from the Inquisition’s distorting perspective. Declaring their

113
RA 2.4.
114
RA 2.4.
115
Ibid.
52
ultimate aim as “to construct, in Brazil, the great Brazilian nation,” the text claims that
only Antropofagia can solve “the problem of Brazilian language and of a Brazilian
Brazil.”
116
While Antropofagia from the start included zealously nationalist thinkers in its
ranks, there had never appeared an anonymous (and presumably collective) endorsement
of nationalism such as this one. There were, then, significant shifts in Antropofagia’s
approach to national identity in its course over the two dentiçōes. The cultural avant-
garde of São Paulo, who had assumed a role similar to their peers in Paris and metropolis
elsewhere, eventually adopted a populist ideology with race and class references.
Another crucial element in Antropofagia’s varied interventions in the debate on
national identity was a reconsideration of Christianity and its colonial legacies.
Elaborating on the aphoristic diagnoses of MA, the authors reflected on Catholicism as a
hegemonic doctrine and institution, its assimilation in Brazil, relation to indigenous
beliefs, and prejudices towards Indian sexuality. Through this desacralization,
Antropofagia aimed to specify and affirm the “tasty” [gostoso] religiosity of Brazil.
Cannibalism, both used as a trope and taken as a historical fact, had a pivotal role in these
arguments.
The Indian’s archival trace, originally registered under the repressive symbolic
order of Catholic missionaries, had a central importance for Antropofagia, a movement
that took its name and based its aesthetic vision on an indigenous ritual practice. In a
brief essay on national historiography titled “Revisão Necessaria” (Necessary Revision),
Oswaldo Costa calls for an assimilative critique, a cannibalization that would take a step

116
Ibid.
53
towards ending the persistent condition of coloniality.
117
Costa diagnoses a Spenglerian
“pseudomorphosis” in Brazil, a case where, because of their subjugation by an older alien
culture, “a young Culture, born in this land, cannot get its breath and fails not only to
achieve pure and specific expression-forms, but even to develop fully its own self-
consciousness.” European hysteria, argues Costa, has shaped and distorted Brazilian
history. Since the journal entries of Columbus, Brazil has been the land “where people
are born with tails.”
118
In other words, rather than reliable observations, European fears
and fantasies have determined its representations in history. This surreal distortion is not
confined to early representations but persists more than a century after the Independence,
as Brazilian historians continue adhering to Eurocentric biases. Looking at their own past
through Western lenses, they wishfully misread Brazilian history. Prominent historians
like Capistrano (João Capistrano de Abreu), whose account of the colonial period inform
modern works like Paulo Prado’s Retrato do Brasil, represent the conversion of Indians
as a harmonious process: “They would give the Indian a rosary and the catechesis, and
expect him to sing Kyrie Eleison in abanheenga.”
119
There is, in other words, a desire to
erase any resistances to or miscomprehension of Catholicism, to think of conversion as a
translation without remainder. After this critique, Costa boldly concludes that
Antropofagia will cure Brazil’s pseudomorphism “by eating it.” Yet what would “eating”
mean in this context? Judging from the author’s deconstruction of colonial history, it may
denote a critical reevaluation that transcends the neurosis by comprehending it fully.

117
RA 2.1.
118
Ibid.
119
Ibid.
54
The essay reveals a persistent problem in Antropofagia’s approach to the colonial
archive. While arguing—quite rightly—that the Catholic lens a priori distorts European
perceptions, Costa himself commits the same error by ascribing a prelapsarian innocence
to the Indians. He notes that when authors like Prado contemplate the Indian, “in his
innocence they see sexual sin, hedonistic corruptions, nefarious vices.”
120
They evaluate
Indian practices through the moral categories of Christianity—just like Costa, who
revisits the colonial archive to prove them innocent. The author first quotes Padre
Christovam de Gouveia, who claimed that the Indians “lived much less sinfully than the
Portuguese,” and then the Franciscan monk Claude d’Abbeville, who noted that the
Indians, while nude, were in no way “offensive to the eyes.”
121
Referring to an
observation by Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, where the Jesuit father admires how after their
first menstruation the cunhãs are submitted to a (dietary?) regime in preparation for
marriage, Costa even claims that “the Indian had already solved sexual education.”
122

Costa’s use of colonial history exposes Antropofagia’s aporias in revindicating the
Indian. To begin with, in his attempt to undo centuries of Eurocentric bias, Costa has to
depend on early missionary accounts for archival insight and evidence. Besides this
hermeneutic impasse, Costa inherits the same Catholic tradition, which evaluates the
Indian along the moral axis of sin and innocence. Perhaps the Indian does not commit
“sexual sin” in his account, but neither does he leave the Catholic matrix of morality.
Rather than trying to comprehend indigenous practices on their own terms, and thus take
a step in deconstructing the Catholic misrepresentations, Costa simply inverses the terms.

120
Ibid. (my emphasis).
121
Ibid.
122
Ibid.
55
While pointing out the biases of Brazilian historiography, Costa’s essay shows how
difficult—if at all possible—to go beyond such Eurocentrism in its ascription of
innocence to the Indian. Although the colonial archive offers a distorted image of the
subaltern, it is the only source to his traces. Costa’s response to this impasse is
cannibalizing the archive—only by digesting it fully can one decolonize Brazilian history
and culture.
Approaching colonial historiography with this critical distance, Antropofagia at
times playfully retold episodes of cannibalism, taking them as victories against Catholic
missionaries and thus redeeming the Indian as a figure of resistance. The poet and
journalist Álvaro Moreyra’s “The Visit of St. Thomas,” which reimagines the apostle’s
supposed visit to Brazil as narrated by Vicente do Salvador, is a good example.
123

Moreyra quickly recaps the episode: Shocked by the licenses (e.g. polygamy) and lack of
faith in Bahia, the apostle begins to preach the Indians, who—since mandioca and banana
plants grow miraculously as he speaks—listen to him “with open mouths” until he dares
to proscribe cannibalism.
124
Running for his life, the saint manages to escape—but
without his sacrosanct untouchability. “They wanted to eat the saint,” comments
Moreyra, revealing how even the threat of cannibalism may denude a sacred figure of his
aura by showing that he too, like all other men, is edible.
125
Cannibalism, then, is the
antidote to catechism: if a Saint (or any other Catholic authority) is as edible as other
men, he is no position to repress the Indian libido with the divine law. The paradigmatic
scene of Bishop Sardinha, on the other hand, returns in an anonymous essay that re-

123
RA 1.1.8.
124
Ibid.
125
Ibid.
56
elaborates Antropofagia’s vision of Brazilian culture.
126
What is noteworthy about this
umpteenth reiteration is its emphasis on the Indian’s lack of comprehension. When the
Caeté devour Sardinha, they have no idea that he is a bishop (and probably do not
comprehend what a bishop is). They merely see him as an “outsider [emboaba], the
invader.”
127
This incomprehension—or, more precisely, this minimal comprehension
through a logic of us against other—undoes “God’s word,” which is reduced to mere air.
The Caeté see the bishop for what he is: an outsider that invades their land. Not
understanding is the key to clarity—and to resistance.
Antropofagia’s attack on religion, however, was not only aimed at the historical
figures that took part in the colonization of Brazil. On the pages of RA, there continually
appeared invectives against Christianity as a doctrine and the Catholic church as an
institution. In these vanguard onslaughts, authors often had recourse to the affective force
of cannibalism as an act of violence. In a tirade (“Guerra”) in line with Moreyra’s take on
the colonial encounter, Oswald (Japy-Mirim) conceives Christianity as a religion of
limited scope and bellicose logic. The poet quotes Matthew (“I am not sent but unto the
lost sheep of the house of Israel”) to conclude that “God is a municipal spirit,” thus
mocking Bible’s claims to universality. Christianity has reproduced, according to the
poet, a bellicose logic of exclusion since its very inception; its entire history—from St.
Paul’s submission to authority to the Crusades and the Inquisition—has been a history of
war.
128
The Catholic Church has been nothing but an “instrument” in this game of
political subjugation. Drawing the implications of his genealogy for the present, Oswald

126
“Algumas notas sobre o que ja se tem escrito em torno da nova descida antropofágica
na nossa literatura,” RA 2.4.
127
Ibid.
128
Ibid.
57
notes a similar complicity in the “spiritual” alliance between fascism and the church.
While the poet-philosopher wants the history of Christianity, especially its episode in
colonial Brazil, to be revealed for what it is, he is not one to protest against the logic of
war—if anything, Oswald fully embraces it: “We accept the war. We want the war.”
129

The cannibal trope provides Oswald the language of aggression he needs. Rehashing the
account of Hans Staden, he writes: “The Carib nation, with tacape on the wrist, looks at
the food that comes jumping.” The ravenous cannibal, ready to attack the enemy, cannot
wait for the war. Soon, there will be “screams and grinding of teeth / and our classic
trophy: the enemy’s cranium.” If Jesus thinks “it is not right to take the children’s bread
and throw it to the dogs,”
130
the Carib nation “boils the dogs. Most gluttonous.” After
denouncing Christianity as the enemy, Oswald fully embraces the primitive logic of war
as a more truthful response or attitude against it.
Besides this critical evaluation of Christianity as a doctrine and historical practice,
Antropofagia deconstructed the supposedly incommensurable difference between
Catholicism and indigenous beliefs. Inverting the cultural dichotomy that ascribes
civilization to the Portuguese and barbarism to the Amerindians, the group defended that
Catholicism, with its ceremony of the Eucharist, involved—albeit in symbolic form—
cannibalism. In an essay titled “Schema ao Tristão de Athayde”—penned in response to
the literary critic in the title, who accuses Oswald of being influenced by the “de-
Christianizers of the modern world”—Oswald contends that Catholicism only took hold
in Brazil because of its similarities with indigenous beliefs and practices. Besides totemic
divinities (Jesus, the Holy Spirit) and matriarchal elements (the Immaculate Conception),

129
Ibid.
130
Mark 7.27.
58
the Catholic religion includes a ritualized form of cannibalism. Quoting the Bible both in
Latin and Portuguese to rest his case (“Este é o meu corpo. Hoc est corpus meum”),
Oswald argues that the Holy Communion is, in fact, cannibalism. However, if
Catholicism is not that different from indigenous beliefs, if the colonizers are as violent
and ritualistic as the savages they are supposed to civilize, if they too practice
cannibalism—that ultimate proof of the Indian’s lawless state of nature—then the
dichotomy of civilization and barbarism, which depends on the absolute non-coincidence
of its terms, simply becomes unsustainable.
Unfortunately, Antropofagia did not stop at declaring the Holy Communion as
cannibalism, but also sought to redeem Tupi cannibalism as a form of communion. In the
second dentição, a brief essay titled “The Matter Resolved” argues—against those who
deny the systematic cannibalism among the Indians—that this “elevated institution” is
found in nearly all religions. In any case, the cannibalism of Amerindian peoples such as
the Tupi was, according to the author (writing under the pseudonym China), more “a
communion with valiant flesh” than a form of nourishment; the Indian ate his enemies or
chieftains not “out of a gastronomic intention” but in order to incorporate their virtues.
This refusal to acknowledge cannibalism as eating, to affirm the pleasure of eating
(human) flesh, this redemption of cannibalism as a communion of virtues, betrays a very
Eurocentric, and specifically Christian, bias. While advocating a Nietzschean return to
the concrete, to the mundane, to intimate experience, Antropofagia cannot ultimately
accept the materiality of eating itself. The Indians could not have derived any pleasure
from eating human flesh—only animals are capable of doing that; there is no way that the
Tupi could have enjoyed their ritual meals. Antropofagia, then, is contradictory in its use
59
of cannibalism as a trope. While many texts in RA—including MA—deploy the affective
force of eating in their calls for a “concretist” aesthetics and their attacks against
perceived adversaries, the group at times disavows the animalizing materiality of
consumption. If the rite of the Eucharist denies the pleasure of bread and wine in favor of
a spiritual union with Christ, Antropofagia—at least in this instance—rejects the pleasure
of eating meat in favor of virtues to be consumed. It is one and the same elision, the same
metaphorization or dematerialization of eating.
One of the ultimate aims of Antropofagia’s demystification of Christianity—as a
bellicose doctrine, as disguised cannibalism, and as biased historiography—was to
specify and affirm the “tasty” (gostoso) Catholicism of Brazil. Providing a critique of
Catholicism as a repressive and colonial apparatus, the group sought to identify the
hybrid and diverse religious culture of Brazil as a prime example of cannibalism and as a
challenge to Western reason. The essay on “the cannibal descent” in the second dentição,
which I examined while looking at the shifts in Antropofagia’s approach to national
identity, is also an attempt to clarify the group’s perspective on Catholicism.
131
The
(anonymous) statement distinguishes, quite categorically, between the lived experience of
the Catholic belief in Brazil and its institutional hierarchy. Citing Raul Bopp, the author
affirms the “tasty” (gostoso) Catholicism Brazil has baked under four centuries of
tropical heat, which loosens the rigid laws and forges a religion “to its likeness….with
large and profane concessions.”
132
Carnivalesque elements, the legacy of Amerindian and
African cultures, form an integral part of this synthesis. The essay fully endorses this
transculturated religion, affirming it as a distinguishing aspect of Brazilian culture and

131
RA 2.4.
132
Ibid.
60
prime example of cannibalism. What Antropofagia opposes is the “catechist
Catholicism,” characterized here by “the cassock, the Latin, the sermon, the Inquisition,
and the sign of the cross.”
133
It is the Catholic Church—with its elitism, persecution,
indoctrination, and somber rituals—that is the problem. Oswald summarizes this position
as “all the religions. But no church. And, above all, lots of magic.”
134
The concrete
experience of Catholicism, hybrid and unruly, is distinguished here from the hierarchical
institution that imposes uniform laws, persecutes deviance, and sacralizes rituals.
Needless to say, this is a problematic stance: what is affirmed in Catholicism is the
historical product of what is vehemently rejected about it.
Behind Antropofagia’s multifaceted critique of Catholicism lied the utopian
desire for a moral revolution. The group (particularly Oswald and Costa) sought to
redeem what they perceived as the cannibal Indian’s ebullient sexuality through the
modern lens of Freudian psychoanalysis. But RA also intervened in the current debates on
secular marriage, divorce, and gender hierarchies in professional life. It thus expanded
MA’s critique of Catholic repression, nuancing its bold assertions about catechism,
patriarchy, and monogamy. Moral liberation demanded a cultural expression that
candidly accounted for human sexuality. To this effect, RA published erotic poems that
mobilized food imagery, and fiction that realistically depicted the amorous relations in
contemporary São Paulo. Nevertheless, like MA, the texts in RA provided their critique
from a deeply androcentric perspective. It was only the artist sketches by women artists
that somehow challenged Antropofagia’s otherwise male-centric outlook.

133
Ibid.
134
Ibid.
61
Moral liberation was at the center of Antropofagia’s aspirations for a modern
Brazil. In “Schema ao Tristão de Athayde,” Oswald calls for nothing short of a moral
revolution.
135
Antropofagia, asserts Oswald, aims to liberate Brazil from its patriarchal
yoke through a radical revision of its social institutions. As in MA, however, there is a
two-pronged argument. On the one hand, Brazil has already cannibalized the Catholic
laws that attempted to repress its libido and erase its multiplicity. “We have absorbed
Christianity,” writes Oswald, reiterating his position in MA about the Brazil’s
transformative appropriation of Catholicism.
136
Moreover, Brazil has undermined the
imposed patriarchal order through “customary anti-traditional rights.”
137
While illegal,
divorce already exists in practice. When the example of Portugal—which had legalized
divorce in 1910—is brought up in discussions, people respond with ease: “Here one does
not need to think about these things because there is a judge in Piracicapiassú that annuls
all bad marriages.” On the other hand, there still remains much to be done before Brazil
could be freed from the fetters on its libido and vitality. Oswald calls for a thorough
revision of Brazilian society—its language, history, religions, family relations, and the
right to property. Antropofagia will make “a topographical survey of Brazilian morals,
the profound sexuality of our people.”
138
Sexuality, then, is at the center of Oswald’s
project for a new society and culture.
In this re-evaluation of Brazilian mores, Antropofagia takes Freudian
psychoanalysis as an event that invalidates bourgeois notions of morality. In the opening
essay (“Appetizer”) of his series Moquem, Oswaldo Costa once again criticizes Prado’s

135
RA 1.5.3.
136
Ibid.
137
Ibid.
138
Ibid.
62
Retrato do Brasil for its outmoded perspective on Indian sexuality, taking, however, a
step beyond his own position in “Revisão Necessaria.”
139
Labeling Prado as “a romantic
artist, a sufferer” with unquestioned trust in “bons costumes portuguezes” (good
Portuguese manners), Costa mocks how the author, with sincere horror, talks about the
Indian’s “sexual sin” and “nefarious vices.”
140
Prado imposes an arbitrary normativity on
the Indian: “From Arouche to Paysandú is normal. From Paysandú onwards, abnormal.
Ridiculous.” Holding on to such a naïve sense of morality after the Freudian
breakthrough is simply a “bobagem” (stupidity).
141
“The Indian sinning!” exclaims Costa,
implying that the Catholic category does not even apply to the indigenous
cosmovision.
142
While “Revisão Necessaria” ascribes innocence to the Indian, Costa here
argues that the notion of sin simply does not belong to the indigenous morality. Christian
ethics, Costa seems to suggest, is not universal and does not apply. The essay reflects
Antropofagia’s shared belief that after the breakthroughs of psychoanalysis, a new
understanding of sexuality—and particularly of Indian sexuality—is needed.
A brief note titled “provincial journalism” similarly reproaches the use of moral
terms such as “reasons of honor,” “disgraced,” and “stained” in contemporary
newspapers.
143
Criticizing such language as “anti-scientific” and unbecoming for “a city
that considers itself civilized,” the author concludes by noting that Freud “long taught the
quite the opposite,” that is, that the concept of honor itself is dishonorable. Freudian
psychoanalysis is taken as a milestone in ethical thought, as an event that invalidates

139
RA 2.4.
140
Ibid.
141
Ibid.
142
Ibid.
143
RA 2.3.
63
former (religious) bodies of knowledge. To become modern and to escape provincialism,
one has to rethink traditional morality through contemporary approaches—in this case,
psychoanalysis. Such re-evaluation is here taken as the prerequisite of urban
cosmopolitanism.
As part of this critique of morality, RA devoted a second dentição issue—which
featured a modified Abaporu with a central female figure—entirely to the question of
monogamy. While Antropofagia never identified explicitly with dialectical materialism,
quotes from materialist thinkers—on monogamy as the subjugation of women (Engels)
and the guarantee of inheritance (Lewis H. Morgan)—were used in order to buttress the
arguments. A brief essay titled “Porque Como” (Why do I Eat) holds monogamy
responsible of all the social ills afflicting Brazil—including the writer and politician Ruy
Barbosa. Under the pseudonym Marxillar, a creative twist that links Marx to the jaw, the
author argues that before the Portuguese arrived, there were
no police, no repression, no neuroses, no delegation of social order, no
shame in wandering naked, no class struggle, no trafficking of white
women...no secret vote, no one of was proud of Brazil, which was neither
aristocrat, nor bourgeois, nor low class.
144

Brazil lacked these discontents of civilization because the natives did not practice
monogamy. Overlooking the relations of kinship among indigenous groups, the author
claims that the Indian did not know his legitimate children or see the family as the “pedra
angular” of society. Taking this polygamous native as his ancestor (“The Indian is what

144
RA 2.6.
64
man was”) and his model, the text announces that “the time of ‘cannibal descent’ has
arrived. We are going to eat all over again.”
145

Other texts took issue with more practical concerns. In A pedidos, an invective
titled “Assim falou nosso padrinho Padre Cicero” (Thus Spoke Our Father Cicero)
defends civil marriage against religious radicalism, employing the cannibalist trope with
humor. Criticizing the bishop of Bragança’s recent comments, which identify civil
marriage and secular education as “the two great evils” afflicting Brazil, the author—with
the pseudonym Coroinha (acolyte)—contrasts him with Brazil’s Padre Cícero, who
affirms civil marriage as “an indispensible sacrament.”
146
Antropofagia defends “the
Brazilian religion” against such “reactionary Romanism.” Twisting the Catholic motif,
the author notes, with humorous approval, that the Brazilian priest “is walking with great
strides towards cannibalism.”
147
Defending secular laws when needed, RA nevertheless
does not lose sight of the ultimate goal: soon, it will be only about “eating the safeguard
of family.”
148
Criticizing monogamy as a political-economic institution and as the root of
all social issues, RA nevertheless defends civil marriage strategically to intervene in
popular debates—without, however, compromising from their radical position.
RA also encourages the inclusion of women in professional life—with, however,
deeply androcentric means and ends. In a mock letter to the editor, “a modern but
Christian father of family” criticizes the recent legislation that prohibits minor single
women from working in bars and cafés, making a subtle reference to the cannibalist trope

145
Ibid.
146
Ibid.
147
RA 2.6.
148
Ibid.
65
and themes in the meanwhile.
149
One young waitress he knows has got married with a
friend only to keep her job. Therein lies the great danger of the new legislation: “It
permits one law devour another.” Others too will thus beat the law, living as they please,
beyond the reach of authorities. The disintegration of the family, along with a concurrent
increase in polygamy, “a state so pleasurable to everyone’s taste in this land,” is nearby.
With an ironic twist, the author proposes that minors be allowed to work at all hours, but
prohibited from getting married. Antropofagia’s mock-critique of the discriminatory law
itself betrays a deeply male-centric perspective. Behind the screen of parody, one can
hear the juvenile laughter of the author, a male intellectual who desires to flirt with the
young waitresses at the cafés and restaurants he frequents. The ironic petition does
advocate—however obliquely—women’s integration into the professional life, but only
insofar as such integration serves the male desire. While criticizing the conservative
legislation, along with the larger patriarchal structures that confine women at home and
repress their (non-reproductive) sexuality, the text fails to affirm laboring women as
anything beyond objects of desire.
Such objectification is also prevalent in a number of erotic poems in RA, where
we find the desire for a new literary expression, itself articulated through the semantic
nexus between eating and sexuality. As Jáuregui notes, there is a “happy erotism” to
these texts.
150
The first issue includes Guilherme de Almeida’s “Fome” (Hunger), a
sensuous call to the beloved where “the cannibal poet” sits in Café Guarany (with
obvious reference to José de Alencar’s famous novel) rhyming verses to his beloved.
Almeida links writing with fasting—much like Deleuze and Guattari in their book on

149
RA 2.2.
150
Jáuregui, Canibalia, 612.
66
Kafka: the poet, versifying in his beloved’s absence, is “fasting” for her. The poem ends
with a desire for sensuous address: “He wants to call you strange—voluptuous—beautiful
/ He calls you tasty—hot—good food.”
151
I here find a demand for a new way of writing
the body—a sensual and intimate way of writing desire. Sexuality is conceived as
mundane, intimate, and vital as eating. In a similar vein, Guilhermino César’s
“Deslumbramento” (Fascination) likens the breasts of a brunette to fruits that the poet’s
eyes covet with hunger,
152
and in Franklin Nascimento’s “Pomo Ruido” (Rotten Fruit), a
former beloved is compared to a mango which—once young, green, and untouched—has
now matured and has the dents of someone’s teeth in her “pulp.”
153
Beyond their
voluptuous imagery, what links these poems is their blatant androcentrism. There is
certainly an attempt to bring the sensuous materiality of desire onto the page, to go
beyond “the Portuguese sentiments” of earlier literature. Yet this is invariably a
masculine desire, one that objectifies the coveted woman as appetizing food. A morsel to
be savored, she does not have agency or even desires of her own; the woman is merely
inscribed by the male appetite, by the rapacious teeth that bite into her flesh.
Antropofagia’s critique of patriarchy, and repeated calls for moral liberation and a more
candid expression of sexuality, then, do not escape the male-centric perspective that
excludes female agency as well as desire. As Jáuregui puts it, “the anthropophagous ego
is an androcentric ego.”
154

Antropofagia’s persistent male-centrism was only questioned by the illustrations
of woman artists, which were—along with the other illustrations in RA—virtually

151
RA 1.1.5.
152
RA 1.5.2.
153
RA 1.6.2.
154
Jáuregui, Canibalia, 614.
67
forgotten by critics. Before examining these images, however, we need to note that there
was a sexist division of intellectual labor in RA: while the textual materials (poetry,
fiction, essays) were penned exclusively by men, in most cases the illustrations were done
by women artists. These images marked the rare moments when Antropofagia took a step
beyond its usual critique of bourgeois patriarchy. Tarsila herself inserts a sketch of her A
negra (1923) into Abaporu (Figure 2).
155
In the new pastiche, the black woman’s
gigantic breast displaces the centrality of the male (or sexless) subject in the original
painting. The Argentine illustrator María Clemencia, on the other hand, reinscribes the
female subject into a primal scene of Latin American historiography (Figure 3).
156
While
published with an excerpt from Mário de Andrade’s Macunaíma, the sketch was
completed four years before and hence does not illustrate the novel. Under the
compassionate gaze of a lowered sun, a colonizer flourishes—with suggestive
ambiguity—a flag or an axe to a native woman, who, daunted, raises her hands in
surrender. By imagining the colonial encounter as an event across genders (and not, say,

155
RA 2.6.
156
RA 1.2.3.
Figure 2: Tarsila do Amaral, 1929.
Illustration.
Figure 3: María Clemencia, 1929.
Illustration.
68
between male conquistadors and native chiefs), the artist inscribes women into this
paradigmatic scene and signals the conquest’s libidinal dynamics.
Another contributor was Pagu, the young writer—only 18 at the time—who was
to marry Oswald shortly after the dissolution of Antropofagia. In one of her crude yet
powerful sketches, the artist depicts a white naked woman fishing amid a hostile
landscape (Figure 4). Snakes as well as phallic vegetal outgrowths, all black and in plain
contrast with the vulnerable female body, viciously approach the figure from behind—her
open mouth signals fear and shock. While Pagu’s “pastoral” scene admittedly
hypersexualizes the female figure, it is not an empty glorification of matriarchy over
patriarchy, or leisure (ocio) over work (negocio). Rather than annexing another image to
Oswald’s androcentric utopia, she portrays a laboring female eroticized and fatally
threatened by nature. In another sketch, Pagu depicts two women—one, European
looking, dressed in what looks like a bathing suit, and holding a pitchfork; the other,
indigenous, with only a headgear and perhaps a skirt (Figure 5).
157

Both look scared, or possibly in pain, as they sit next to a fire. The sketch is

157
RA 2.2.

Figure 4: Patrícia Rehder Galvão
(Pagu), 1929. Illustration.
Figure 5: Patrícia Rehder Galvão (Pagu),
1929. Illustration.
69
irreducibly ambiguous: the lines below the indigenous woman’s waist either depict a skirt
or her outflowing bowels after the European’s violent blow. Whether they fear the same
enemy or are each other’s enemies, the female subjects are linked by pain, by affect. In
their gender-confined space of illustrations, the women artists thus inscribe the
Amerindian women back into history, as powerful figures that undo the centrality of the
male, as laboring subjects threatened by the androcentric universe; the artists there find a
space to reflect on their own relation to the native women as women, going beyond the
male-centric utopias of Oswald and others.
Last but certainly not the least, the illustrations at times provided a (very limited)
corrective to Antropofagia’s racial oversights. With notable exceptions like Mário de
Andrade’s ethnographic essays on slave songs aside, RA did not include the African
social quotient in its considerations of national identity or culture.
158
It is this insistent
“borramiento del negro” (erasure of blackness) that some artist sketches sought to amend
on a visual level.
159
In what may be considered an African or Afro-Brazilian Abaporu,
Emiliano di Cavalcanti portrays a naked black male gazing at a black star, placed in a
black frame that his legs and arm overflow (Figure 6).
160
Through this simple yet
effective use of color, di Cavalcanti suggests that the African subject is in intimate
communion with nature. While this animalizing ascription of nudity and closeness to
nature—which closely mimics Oswald’s idealized representation of the Indian in MA—is
problematic in itself, within the context of Antropofagia’s complete erasure of blackness,
di Cavalcanti’s sketch serves as a painful reminder of Brazil’s African legacies. The

158
See RA 1.4.5-6 and 1.5.5-6.
159
Jáuregui, Canibalia, 607.
160
RA 2.1.
70
visual component of Antropofagia, then, works against the racial and sexist biases of the
movement, grafting images—as if by force—of black and female subjectivities onto the
page, opening a visual space for those excluded or reduced to mere objects of masculine
desire.
* * *
During its two “bites” or periods of publication, RA explored the rhetorical
possibilities of cannibalism as a trope. Turning the colonial emblem of barbarism into a
locus of identification for the modern Brazilian nation, Oswald opened up a peripheral
space from which to dissect and devour Western culture. While critics have tended to
reduce Antropofagia to MA, and MA to a theory of cultural incorporation, the
movement—as well as the manifesto—brought together disparate voices. Especially in
the beginning, Oswald’s cultural incorporation shared the page with a verde-amarelista
nationalism that reified Indian cosmology, stressed the use of local images, and despised
certain strands of European culture.
When it came to Catholicism, the group oscillated between affirming the
Brazilian transculturation as an instance of creative appropriation and criticizing the
Figure 6: Emiliano di
Cavalcanti, 1929. Illustration.
71
Catholic Church as a colonial and repressive institution. Interpreting the Holy
Communion as symbolic cannibalism, Antropofagia sought to deconstruct the supposed
hierarchy between Catholicism and autochthonous beliefs, between the Indian and
European. While constantly mobilizing the affective force—its aggression and appeal to
the taste of meat—of cannibalism as a trope, Antropofagia also sought to redeem Indian
cannibalism as a form of communion. The group was most consistent in its critique of
bourgeois patriarchy and called for a candid artistic expression attuned with modern
theories of sexuality. It nevertheless reproduced gender hierarchies in its own division of
intellectual labor and androcentric criticism of Catholic repression. Despite repeated
claims to the contrary, Antropofagia remained a culturalist, and therefore limited,
response to Brazilian modernization.

72
-2-
Between Hunger and Appetite:
Virgilio Piñera and José Lezama Lima

For all living beings, but especially for the human species, to eat is to depend on
others. In order to survive, our bodies need the nutrients—organic and otherwise—that
we gather from the environment. In a network that is much more intricate, multi-layered,
and wide-reaching than the biosystems of plants and animals, human beings also depend
on their own peers for the continued gathering, production, and distribution of food. Each
act of eating is made possible and determined by others—human and non-human, living
and non-living—of varying degrees of visibility. Conceptualizing human eating
exclusively in terms of need or dependency, however, runs the risk of overlooking the
feeling of pleasure attached to this basic activity, a pleasure that follows from, among
other things, incorporating the other. There is, then, an irreducible tension at the very
center of human nutrition—between need and pleasure, relationality and assimilation,
vulnerability and aggression.
In this chapter, I explore how these contradictory aspects of human eating are at
play in the work of two extremely influential figures of Cuban literature: Virgilio Piñera
and José Lezama Lima. I argue that their different ways of treating the need and pleasure
involved in eating ultimately lead up to rather incompatible literary styles and aesthetics.
In the short stories “La carne” (“Meat”) and “La cena” (“The Dinner”), both originally
published in Poesía y prosa (1944) and later included in Cuentos fríos (1956), Piñera
foregrounds the social mediation of eating by imagining what can be considered a limit
case: self-cannibalism. I read Piñera’s stories not only as highly ambiguous responses to
73
Cuba’s economic and political subjugation within the neocolonial world order, but also as
performances of an anti-humanist aesthetics that links absence, auto-affection, and
representation. Turning to Lezama, one sees a different organization of the gastronomic
sphere. The author’s preferred gastronomic trope in La expresión americana (1957)—
which gathers together five lectures Lezama delivered at Centro de Altos Estudios in
Havana—is not hunger, but appetite. Through a close look at the author’s deployment of
food imagery in his famous “literary banquets,” the voracious appetite of the semi-
fictional señor barroco, and the use of figurative language, I argue that Lezama erases the
relationality of incorporation in his effort to highlight the creative and assimilative
energies of American culture.
My discussion is informed by Jacques Derrida’s theorization of eating (and more
broadly, introjection) in “‘Eating Well,’ or The Calculation of the Subject,” as well as the
ethics of alterity he develops in other works.
161
I also refer to Judith Butler’s writing on
corporeal vulnerability in Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence to
draw the fuller implications of Derrida’s arguments for the domain of consumption.
162

While a consideration of our need for—and responsibility towards—the other is crucial
for a critical interpretation of Piñera and Lezama’s thematization of eating, it is not
enough. The pleasures of incorporation, which both authors affirm joyously in their
works, demand a reflection on the relation between eating, luxury, and waste. My
allusions to Georges Bataille’s economic theory, which integrally links loss and pleasure,

161
Jacques Derrida, “‘Eating Well’, or the Calculation of the Subject,” interview by Jean
Luc-Nancy, trans. Peter Connell and Avital Ronell, in Who comes after the subject?, ed.
Eduardo Cadava (New York and London: Routledge, 1991), 96-120.
162
Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (New York and
London: Verso, 2004).
74
as well as Derrida’s discussion of the supplementary figure of onanism in Jean Jacques
Rousseau’s writing, are efforts on my part to be attuned to the call of desire in Piñera and
Lezama.
163

In the prerevolutionary works of these Cuban authors, there emerge strikingly
different ways of conceptualizing the relation between eating and aesthetics. While the
absurd remedies of Piñera’s characters (e.g. practicing self-cannibalism to cope with a
scarcity of meat) foreground the very relationality of human eating, in Lezama’s cultural
theory hunger is eclipsed by an appetite that performs transculturation through acts of
eating. I argue that the desensitized humor Piñera develops throughout Cuentos fríos,
where the human form is subjected to violence without pain being registered on a
narrative level, acknowledges the constitutive absence that grounds language. Lezama’s
Baroque aesthetics, on the other hand, values plenitude and erases the lack through which
representation, literary and otherwise, functions. The authors’ different takes on the
relation between hunger and fullness, which correspond to the interplay between absence
and presence in representation, thus defines their distinct literary politics.

2.1 | Eating Well: Consumption and Relationality
To open up some of the questions that will be addressed in this chapter, I would like to
begin with a discussion of self-cannibalism through the ethics of alterity that Derrida and
Butler elaborate in their works, ethics that depart from the relational nature of human
subjectivity. Derrida visits the question of eating on a number of different occasions in

163
Georges Bataille, “The Notion of Expenditure,” trans. Allan Stoekl, The Bataille
Reader, eds. Fred Botting and Scott Wilson (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1997), 165-
220. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore
and London: The John Hopkins UP, 1997), 152-164.
75
his work.
164
In “Eating Well,” his interview with Jean-Luc Nancy on the status of the
category of subject in contemporary philosophy, the philosopher discusses this basic
human activity as a metonym for all instances of introjecting the other.
165
Playing on the
double meaning of the French expression “il faut bien manger,” which can alternately
signify “one has to eat well” or “one really has to eat,” Derrida raises the following
question:
since one must eat in any case and since it is and tastes good to eat, and
since there’s no other definition of the good (du bien), how for goodness
sake should one eat well (bien manger)?
166

The need to eat is here accepted as a biological and ethical given. Rather than merely
satisfying a need, however, introjection also brings pleasure: it “tastes good” to eat. This
double affirmation of need and pleasure, which Derrida does not develop further during
the rest of the interview, will be extremely important for my reading of “La carne.”
Starting from these a priori of human existence, Derrida raises the ethical question
involved in the act of introjecting the other, which—unlike the necessity and pleasure of
eating—remains an open question. Derrida takes the first step towards a thinking of
“eating well” when he writes:
The infinitely metonymical question on the subject of “one must eat well”
must be nourishing not only for me, for a “self,” which, given its limits,
would thus eat badly, it must be shared, as you might put it, and not only

164
See, for instance, The Beast and the Sovereign, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago
and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2009), 23, for a discussion on
“devourment” and vociferation.
165
Derrida, “Eating Well,” 113-115.
166
Ibid., 115.
76
in language. “One must eat well” does not mean above all taking in and
grasping in itself, but learning and giving to eat, learning-to-give-the-
other-to eat. One never eats entirely on one’s own: this constitutes the rule
underlying the statement, “One must eat well.”
167

The philosopher here urges us to consider the subjective moment of eating, the moment
of its consummation, with the other(s) that invisibly populate it and through the network
of relations within which it takes place. Eating never takes place in a vacuum: human
beings necessarily depend both on human and nonhuman lives for the production of and
the access to food. Even snacking alone at night in front of the fridge involves a lot more
than we often think about. This constitutive relationality of eating implies, for Derrida, an
infinite responsibility towards the other. Eating is only ethical when my act of
introjection nourishes others as well, only when it is accompanied by a giving-to—or a
sharing-with—the other. In both “La carne” and “La cena,” Piñera will foreground the
irreducible relationality of human eating through scenarios of scarcity.
Judith Butler’s Precarious Life allows us to explore the intersection between
ethics and social dependence further.

Butler’s larger project in the book is to elaborate an
ethics of living together through a reconsideration of loss, grief, and vulnerability. It is
due to our social constitution, notes Butler, that we are exposed to violence at the hands
of others.
168
Belying the narratives of autonomy that we tell ourselves, we are “made” to
a large extent by social relations that we cannot fully possess or control. While not
underestimating the importance of self-identification, she notes that neither our gender

167
Ibid., 115 (emphasis in the original).
168
Butler, Precarious Life, 19-20.
77
nor our sexuality is fully ours.
169
We are dispossessed and put beyond our own bodies by
virtue of our mutually constitutive relations with others.
While the relationality of consumption lies outside the focus of Butler’s chapter,
the connections she establishes between bodily life and sociality apply directly to a
consideration of this subject. A certain vulnerability follows from the fact that my eating
is made possible by a web of relations that I cannot ultimately control. The relationality
of human nutrition is particularly visible in stagnant economies of the developing world
where, despite the availability of local produce, millions of people suffer from
malnutrition. Even a food-conscious resident of the First World, however, is not in full
control of his eating. Though entitled to choose (e.g. a brand of bread without added
sugar), his consumption is as determined by socio-economic relations as that of the
starving children from Niger he sees on UNICEF ads. From this perspective, it does not
matter whether the hierarchical web of relations these subjects inhabit ends up nourishing
or starving them—both situations of eating are equally determined by transactions
beyond their control. This ultimately means that my nutrition, exactly like my gender or
sexuality, is never entirely mine. Although my eating may seem like—and is to a certain
extent—an individual act of consumption, I am dispossessed of my body, ex-corporated
beyond it by the invisible others who make such nutrition possible.
Looking at the first years of human life, it is impossible to ignore the relational
aspect of eating: an infant fully depends on his mother (or another adult caregiver) for its
nutrition. While the human child eventually takes eating into his own hands, such
consumption continues to occur within a social nexus that he can never fully control.

169
Ibid., 24.
78
Following Freud, Butler argues that it is loss that makes us aware of our constitutive
relations with others.
170
Similarly, it is in nutritional disasters (e.g. foodborne illness
outbreaks) that the socio-economic relations that shape our eating become particularly
visible. The sociality of human eating exposes us potentially to starvation, obesity,
malnutrition, and disease. Butler’s connection between sociality and corporeal life thus
offers a way of thinking the Derridean ethics of introjection on more concrete terms. It is
because eating functions within and is determined by relations beyond the control of a
single subject that one “never eats alone.”
171
Though the individual act of consummation
seems to belie it—I, after all, eat alone—eating is a thoroughly social activity that
dispossesses and ex-corporates us of our own bodies. Furthermore, if my introjection is
profoundly connected to yours or your inability thereof, then for me to “eat well,” my
consumption should be nourishing not only to me, my “self,” but to you as well. Piñera’s
stories will allow us to reflect on both the basic sociality of human introjection that
unmakes us as we eat and the global hierarchical system of differential relations that
determines modern nutrition.
172

170
Ibid., 28.
171
Derrida, “Eating Well,” 115.
172
There is yet another level of vulnerability in the sphere of eating that Butler’s theory,
due to its exclusive focus on intersubjective relations, cannot account for. To start with
the obvious, human beings necessarily depend on nonhuman lives for their nutrition. The
fact that our technologies have become increasingly successful in the controlled
reproduction of these lives for consumption does not free us from the continued need to
digest organic material in order to survive. Above and beyond the animals and plants we
consume, however, human life depends on environmental conditions that remain beyond
control. That is to say, there is a nonhuman component to the vulnerability of human life
vis-à-vis eating. Our bodies need to open up to nonhuman others, which themselves
depend on environmental conditions, in order to survive.
79
2.2 | Piñera’s Hungry Bodies: The Political Ethics of Self-Cannibalism
“La carne” tells the bizarre story of a small town whose citizens adopt self-cannibalism
after a prolonged scarcity of livestock. Instead of accepting the vegetarian diet like his
fellow townsmen, a pioneer citizen called Mr. Ansaldo decides to take the matter into his
own hands—quite literally: he cuts off one of his own buttocks, fries it in a saucepan, and
eats his “beautiful fillet” with pleasure.
173
Ansaldo’s “resourceful” solution quickly
becomes popular practice as the townspeople begin to consume their own meat. Insofar
as self-cannibalism is a practice that severs one’s eating from the complex web of social
relations within which it takes shape, it is a desire for “eating alone” in Derridean terms.
The self-consuming citizen in the story could be thought as “seizing” the natural
resources, the means of production, and the means of distribution for which he would
naturally depend on others—human and nonhuman. If I cut my own flesh, cook it, and
have it for dinner like Ansaldo, my act of eating would depend on no one but myself.
Alberto Garrandés thus rightly detects in the citizens’ self-mutilation “a desire to exist for
the absolute I.”
174
Since the particular kind of self-cannibalism in “La carne” short-
circuits the social mediation that normally determines any eating situation, it could be
thought as a deliberate renunciation of the relationality of human nutrition. Turning to
one’s own body for resources is a refusal against letting one’s eating to be shaped by
relations beyond one’s own control—an outcry against the ex-corporation that human

173
Piñera, Cuentos fríos, 9. As Valerio-Holguín notes, any kind of pain that one would
normally associate with acts of mutilation is completely absent from Piñera’s stories.
Poética de la Frialdad, 35-36. In this context, Reinaldo Laddaga’s discussion of Piñera’s
“cold” narration in connection with the “profound apathy” Bataille finds in Manet’s
paintings is particularly relevant. See Andares Clancos (Buenos Aires: Beatriz Viterbo,
2001), 97-100.
174
Alberto Garrandés, La poética del límite (Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1993),
40.
80
eating normally involves. It is a “calculable” form of eating where the subject knows, in
advance and with the precision of a butcher, when and what he is eating, and how much
meat he has left for the coming days. However destructive and desperate a solution it may
be, and for however a brief time it could be practiced, self-cannibalism offers a
dependable mode of eating that is not implicated on factors beyond the subject’s control
(i.e. socio-economic processes, the availability of natural resources, or environmental
conditions). It is probably the most radical form of eating alone—and thus badly. Self-
cannibalism is a mode of eating without invisible others, one that nourishes the subject
only.
In a politically and economically dependent country such as Cuba in the 1940s,
this “sovereign eating” is also the expression of a desire to transcend the precarious
conditions of the periphery. Although there are no references to historical context in “La
carne,” the story engages with the global economic and political relations that largely
determine the Cuba of its time. Around this time, meat shortages were common in the
country. With the increase American beef prices during the Second World War, a similar
inflation took place in Cuba; when cattle producers and butchers reacted against these
prices, the meat vanished from the Havana market for as long as five months.
175
Piñera
himself seems to have held the Machado government partly responsible for these dire
economic circumstances. When he revisits this episode in his highly autobiographical
play Aire frío (1958), the government’s decision to provide cattle for the American army
is interpreted by Luz Marina, the alter ego of the author’s sister, as a ploy to “increase the

175
Thomas F. Anderson, Everything in Its Place: The Life and Works of Virgilio Piñera
(Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2006), 125.
81
prices.”
176
Piñera will also voice this claim in an article published in La Gaceta de
Cuba.
177
In this context, the author’s financial circumstances are also of relevance. Piñera
remarks in a 1956 interview that
In those days there was a lack of meat in Havana. Therefore I wrote
“Meat.” But it wasn’t just that it was lacking, for even if the butcher shops
had been full, I didn’t have a cent to buy it…So I protested, and my
protest was that story.
178

From this authorial and historical perspective, the self-cannibalism in the story appears as
an absurdist engagement with the national and global socio-economic relations that
determine the present. Indeed, one can hear echoes of contemporary economic
discussions in the words of the mayor, who asks for a public demonstration so that the
townspeople could be “nourished—as was Ansaldo—by drawing on their private
reserves.”
179

Despite the mayor’s optimism, self-cannibalism is not a sustainable mode of
consumption since, unlike any other diet, the eater’s nourishment is here predicated on
the mutilation of his own body. When a subject like Ansaldo cuts a limb for
consumption, a curious displacement of the boundaries between the individual and the
world takes place; as the meat-hungry citizen mutilates one of his buttocks and prepares it
for lunch, what was once an integral part of his body confronts him as an external object
that is part of the outside world. Modifying Jacques Rancièré’s suggestive formulation in

176
Virgilio Piñera, Aire frío (Madrid: Publicaciones de la Asociación de Directores de
España, 1990), 56.
177
Virgilio Piñera, “Notas sobre la vieja y la nueva generación,” La Gaceta de Cuba 1.2
(1962): 2.
178
Quoted in Anderson, Everything, 125.
179
Piñera, The Cold Tales, 10.
82
The Politics of Literature, one could say that self-cannibalism performs a “redistribution”
of the corporal.
180
This material shift becomes distinctly visible in the narrator’s
description of this first act of self-mutilation:
With great tranquility, he began to sharpen an enormous kitchen knife and
then, dropping his pants to his knees, he cut a beautiful fillet from his left
buttock.
181

Such is the repartition on which self-cannibalism depends: the buttock, a part whose
orientation (“left”) depends on the body it belongs to, becomes a “beautiful fillet,” an
appetizing body out there in the world. In Rabelais and His World, Bakhtin discusses the
medieval feast as marking the victory of collective human labor against the world, which
at that moment yields itself as food.
182
If self-cannibalism amounts to a “victory,” it is a
strange one at best: in the war between the individual and the world, it amounts to killing
a soldier that one has cast out of one’s own army—an illusory recompensation.
Though Ansaldo does experience pleasure and perhaps a brief feeling of
plenitude, self-cannibalism amounts to loss in the long run and loss, as Butler reminds us
in Precarious Life, always transforms the subject.
183
It could be argued that such losses
remain unaccounted for on a rhetorical level in the story as the narrator keeps referring to
“Ansaldo”—that is, keeps calling him by the same name—as if he did not undergo
irrevocable alterations with each act of self-cannibalism. This repetition in address
conceals the gradual trans- or de-formation that is changing the citizen without the

180
Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Literature, trans. Julie Rose (Cambridge: Polity
Press, 2011), 4.
181
Piñera, The Cold Tales, 9.
182
Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington:
Indiana UP, 1984), 281-283.
183
Butler, Precarious Life, 21.
83
possibility of return; with each bite, his name actually refers to a more mutilated body.
Limbs that were (tacitly) assumed to be integral to Ansaldo’s body appear in retrospect as
contingent attachments. A story like “La carne,” which imagines mutilation taken to
extreme limits, highlights such unacknowledged redefinitions and, more generally, the
intimate relation between the body and identity.
As self-cannibalism quickly becomes common practice after Ansaldo’s public
demonstration, the transformation reaches a societal level; the community undergoes a
becoming that is at once a line of escape and a frightful dissolution. It is on the most
closely inspected and regulated bodies that the effects of this transformation first become
visible.
184
Women who have consumed their own breasts, for instance, no longer feel
obligated to wear clothes that would cover their upper torso. In the absence of these
highly eroticized limbs, the sexual topography of their bodies no longer obeys the
patriarchal regime of secrecy. Disciplinary punishment similarly falters as the simplest
methods of authentication become nearly impossible; a convict escapes capital sentence
as the warden to sign the death sentence has already eaten his own fingertips.
Furthermore, the conventions that regulate social life become difficult if not impossible
to follow after the limbs with which they are performed are eaten away. Women who
have prepared fried delicacies out of their lips, for instance, cannot kiss when they cross
paths on the street; some quit the oral symbolic realm altogether after eating their own
tongues, that “delicacy of monarchs.”
185
Though its effects are not entirely coherent, the
transformation in “La carne” is thus partly an escape from modern processes of

184
For the following analysis, the obvious reference is to Michel Foucault’s Discipline
and Punish. Allowing us to glimpse how mutilation problematizes the operation of
disciplinary regimes of power, Piñera’s story has implications for Disability Studies.
185
Piñera, The Cold Tales, 10.
84
subjectivation: the mutilated citizens no longer have the body parts that allowed their
integration into disciplinary systems of gender, identity, or thought. A line of escape, but
towards an abyss unknown.
I adopt this Deleuze-Guattarian terminology so as not to refer to the
townspeople’s transformation either as dehumanization or animalization. The first term is
problematic as it assumes that we can know what constitutes “the human” and recognize
its loss with precision. Animalization, on the other hand, is simply not accurate: while the
citizens reproduce on their own bodies the exploitative relations that they used to have
with certain species of animals, what is at stake in Piñera’s story is not a return to
animality. Out of the transformation brought about by self-mutilation and self-
consumption, a new relationality emerges: the body, once “proper” to the subject, now
stands before him as an object—part of a world that, according to Bakhtin’s theory of
eating, confronts the individual as an “enemy.”
186
While suspending the dependence on
nonhuman animals for meat, self-cannibalism divides the citizen and reproduces the
hegemonic relations between species—and, more largely, between the subject and the
environment—on the human body itself. Each citizen becomes a butcher to his own
body, taking sovereign biopolitical decisions about his own flesh. Commenting on the
recurrent motif of the matadero (slaughterhouse) in Argentine literature, Gabriel Giorgi
writes, “the slaughterhouse’s social function is that of separating death from life and the
animal from the human.”
187
In Piñera’s story, such hierarchical ordering does not take
place between the species, but literally cuts across the human body itself. The zone of

186
Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, 283.
187
Gabriel Giorgi, Formas comunes: Animalidad, cultura, biopolítica (Buenos Aires:
Eterna Cadencia, 2014), 26. My translation.
85
indistinction between qualified life (bios) and life that is sacrificeable (zoe) that Agamben
refers to, and which is otherwise contained in the margins of society, expands to coincide
with the public sphere.
188
Each citizen mutilates himself and “kills” his own flesh,
marking the schism between life that is protected and life that can be taken with impunity
on his own body. What remains of this biopolitical self-inscription is neither human nor
animal, but a creature that merely survives in the zone of indistinction between these
terms, one that might perhaps be called “bare life.”
189
Therefore, a Deleuze-Guattarian
understanding of becoming—neither a metamorphosis from one fixed pole of identity to
another nor a filial return to origins—that is informed by Agamben’s writings on
biopolitics comes closest to describing the deformation in Piñera’s story.
190

At one point, the narrator’s persistent denial of the social consequences of self-
cannibalism and his rhetorical questions intended to silence any form of criticism begin
to sound alarming. Following Nicholas Abraham and Mária Török’s distinction, the
town’s self-cannibalism—which in their disavowal of the losses falls short of a proper
“introjection”—amounts to a melancholic “incorporation.”
191
Although self-cannibalism
yields immediate gratification, once the pleasure wanes, the subject is left with nothing
but the lack of consumed limbs. While the citizens do get a glimpse of the dark end

188
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-
Roazen (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998), 7-9.
189
Ibid., 6.
190
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1987), 233-239. Juan Carlos Quintera Herencia has similarly argued that there are non-
metaphorical becoming-animals in Piñera that bring his literature closer to Kafka’s. See
“Virgilio Piñera: Los modos de la carne” in La memoria del cuerpo (ed. Rita Molinero,
San Juan: Editorial Plaza Mayor, 2002), 411.
191
Nicolas Abraham and María Török, “Mourning or Melancholia: Introjection versus
Incorporation.” in The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis, trans. Nicholas
T. Rand (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 125-7.
86
awaiting them when the town’s dancer (bailarín) eats his beautiful toes, which he leaves
to the end out of respect for his profession, they nevertheless rush down a spiral of self-
incorporation instead of confronting their losses. When, in the midst of a “bloody
silence,” the dancer gobbles down his raw last toe, “everyone present suddenly became
very serious.”
192
The narrator’s exasperating denial of this “event” (“But life went on,
and that was the important thing”), where the spectators for a brief moment see their own
(corporeal as well as social) mutilation mirrored in the dancer’s performance, seems to
reflect the common attitude.
193
Wilfully ignoring any regrets they might have or ethical
concerns they might have to face, the townspeople hold on to the banal continuance of a
self-mutilated life. The ephemeral yet immediate satisfaction of eating pushes them down
a vicious spiral of consumption where, instead of introjecting—that is, confronting and
coming to terms with—their losses, the citizens partake in a delirious incorporation until
all the available meat on their bodies is consumed. In other words, the townspeople
choose melancholia over mourning until they cannot continue to do so.
The story’s dark ending, where the citizens who have consumed all the available
meat on their bodies go into hiding, is a warning against what Derrida calls “eating
badly.”
194
With the consumption of all the disposable flesh and skin, which, as Butler
highlights in Precarious Life, expose us to the gaze and touch of others and through this
exposure guarantee our sociality, the body withdraws from the public sphere.
195
The first
account of hiding we read is of an obese man who consumes all the 440 lbs of available
meat in his body in only two weeks. While the narrator’s description of the citizen as

192
Piñera, The Cold Tales, 11.
193
Ibid.
194
Derrida, “Eating Well,” 115.
195
Butler, Precarious Life, 26.
87
“goloso” (gluttonous) suggests that the hiding might be motivated by a specifically
Christian shame, the issue at stake here seems to be more about the particular mode of
eating rather than the quantities consumed.
196
Others not so edacious follow the obese
man’s example, bringing about a generalized state of atomization. The narrator’s
insistence towards the end that the hiding was nothing but a mere inconvenience, and his
rhetorical questions intended to shut down any criticism of the town’s self-cannibalism—
“For how could a town that was assured of its subsistence complain?”—only serve to
emphasize the gravity of the situation.
197
In their desire to overcome lack (and all the
dependencies that lack implies) once and for all, the citizens in the story “eat alone”—
they begin to practice an introjection that depends on neither human nor nonhuman
others, an eating without relationality, or more precisely, of perfect circularity. Derrida’s
ethical injunction against solitary eating, that is, against a consumption that only
nourishes the subject, is literalized into a concrete image by the self-consuming citizens
of Piñera’s story. As a mode of consumption that defies all social mediation, self-
cannibalism ends up destroying sociality itself, metonymized in the story by public
visibility. Instead of becoming aware, through loss, of the ties that bind and constitute
them, the citizens in “La carne” enter into a cycle of incorporation and take destruction to
its utmost limit.
“La carne” thus captures a contemporary desire for national sovereignty without
affirming or disavowing it unambiguously. Given the story’s historical context and
Piñera’s own comments, one could perhaps find here expressed, in however mediated
way, a critique of American hegemony over the island. In the same line, the story might

196
Piñera, Cuentos fríos, 131.
197
Piñera, The Cold Tales, 11.
88
be seen as aspiring for an economically and politically autonomous Cuba—a desire,
perhaps, to eat alone on a national scale, the vision of a state that can be draw on “its own
reserves,” one that does not have to make political favors at the expense of its own
citizens. Nevertheless, it is hard to determine the story’s critique in an unequivocal way,
not least because Piñera deliberately avoided literature with explicit message, be it
political or philosophical. While I share, therefore, Anderson’s reserve against reading
the “La carne” as a “highly distorted sociopolitical allegory,” his way of identifying
existentialist themes expressed avant la lettre in the story—e.g. “the futility of modern
man’s efforts to overcome the difficulties that turn human existence into a constant
struggle”—does not seem convincing to me either.
198
In any case, “La carne” does not
leave the idea of national unity intact, but deconstructs it to bits and chunks, quite
literally. The townspeople’s self-cannibalism is an extremely individualistic solution to
their common plight; while there is no Hobbesian omnium contra omnes, each citizen is
to provide for himself. The citizens do not establish, for instance, a collective system that
would guarantee the availability of meat for the whole town.
* * *
Part of the ambiguity of “La carne” is due to the genuine pleasure the citizens
derive from self-cannibalism. I have so far discussed the particular mode of eating in the
story as revealing a desire for sovereignty that, when realized, paradoxically undoes the
individual and the society. This account, while certainly justified by the events in the
plot, nevertheless does not sufficiently address the element of pleasure in Piñera’s story;

198
Anderson, Everything, 125. Garrandés, on the other hand, argues that the theme of
bodily mutilation in Cuentos fríos signals a “spiritual mutilation.” In his collectivist
reading, mutilation amounts to the individual’s imaginary escape from the oppression of
an alienating society (44).
89
the citizens, after all, enjoy eating their own meat so much that they are willing to
sacrifice limbs. Derrida himself affirms the pleasure of introjecting the other as he raises
the ethical question involved, assuming a priori that it “tastes good to eat.”
199

Nevertheless, as I mentioned earlier, Derrida does not elaborate further on this crucial
aspect of introjection. At this juncture, Georges Bataille’s theory of consumption, which
considers loss as integral to the functioning of economy and inherently linked to pleasure,
proves to be helpful. In “The Notion of Expenditure,” Bataille highlights activities that
cannot be explained away through the notion of utility, which comes down to either “the
production and conservation of goods,” or “the reproduction and conservation of human
life.”
200
In wars, luxury items, non-reproductive sex, and the arts (to name some fields of
practice examined by Bataille), the losses seem to outweigh the gains.
The self-cannibalism in Piñera’s story falls precisely under this category of
“wasteful” human activities. To begin with, though Anderson has argued that the citizens
begin to eat their own meat out of “a fear of starvation,” the narrator informs us that—
while certainly not thrilled about their new diet—the townspeople do survive “devouring
the most diverse vegetables” before Ansaldo’s ingenious solution.
201
In this respect, the
scenario in “La carne” differs from the accounts of cannibalism in states of emergency
recurrent in the Western tradition.
202
Perhaps more importantly, production equals loss in
self-cannibalism: each bite of meat depends on its irreversible mutilation from the eater’s

199
Derrida, “Eating Well,” 115.
200
Georges Bataille, “The Notion of Expenditure,” trans. Allan Stoekl, The Bataille
Reader, eds. Fred Botting and Scott Wilson (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1997), 167.
201
Piñera, The Cold Tales 9; Anderson, Everything, 124.
202
Cătălin Avramescu traces how in the Western philosophical tradition cannibalism was
imagined as part of a state of nature considered to be at once preceding and lying in wait
as a threat behind the social order. See An Intellectual History of Cannibalism (Princeton:
Princeton UP, 2009), 9.
90
body. The only justification for this irreversibly destructive activity, this “unproductive
expenditure” in Bataille’s terms, seems to be the pleasure it yields.
203
Indeed, Ansaldo’s
practical demonstration quickly turns into a “glorious spectacle” of self-destruction from
whose gory details we are thankfully spared by the narrator.
204
Though the town’s doctors
quickly come up with exact calculations about how long the town’s newfound “meat
supply” would last, the only thing that the citizens care about is that “each person could
eat his beautiful fillet.”
205
The fact that they do not contend with eating their buttocks, but
quickly move on to sacrifice limbs of finer taste and more crucial functionality such as
the tongue and the lips further highlights the luxurious, and thus inherently wasteful,
aspect of self-cannibalism.
Beyond the accent on loss common to all unproductive expenditure, self-
cannibalism above all suggests and resembles another “wasteful” activity: masturbation.
With the semantic nexus that links carnality with sex and sinfulness in the Christian
tradition, “eating one’s own meat” already suggests pleasuring oneself sexually. Perhaps
more importantly, there is a “structural” similarity between the two activities: in both
self-cannibalism and masturbation it is the subject that affects herself. While
masturbation allows the subject to experience climax without a sexual partner, with
autophagy one gets to consume meat without depending on either human or nonhuman
others. Following Derrida’s discussion of masturbation in Of Grammatology, one can
argue that self-cannibalism, very much like masturbation, “dispenses with the passage

203
Bataille, “The Notion of Expenditure,” 169.
204
Piñera, The Cold Tales, 10.
205
Ibid.
91
through the world.”
206
If the toucher is touched in masturbation, the eater becomes eaten
in autophagy—immediately. In both instances, the bypassing of the world yields an
immediate restitution of presence.
Reformulating this discussion of self-cannibalism as masturbation through the
Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito’s writing on “immunization,” one could perhaps
argue that in Piñera’s story we find a biopolitical impulse out of control, an onanism that
afflicts the society as a whole.
207
From this perspective, self-cannibalism would be a
pathological excess, an autoimmune disease where the polis, instead of subjecting other
species for consumption, began to eat away its own body. Piñera’s story, however, goes
beyond this pathological conception of self-cannibalism to reveal that incorporation is
always already driven by a desire for immediate presence. Hence a major aporia:
although incorporation only becomes possible through the mediation of the world, it is
motivated by a desire for immediacy. While I never “eat alone,” while my act of eating
depends on a number of human and nonhuman others of varying degrees of visibility, the
pleasure I derive from eating, what makes it “taste good,” aspires for the elimination or
bypassing of that alterity. As Derrida argues with respect to Rousseau’s treatment of
onanism, auto-affection is the very “origin” of the self rather than a disease, a
pathological state of exception that is otherwise exterior to it; the self-distancing and -
consumption involved in autophagy is how subjectivity operates.
208

Before moving on to “La cena,” I would like to comment briefly on some of the
implications of “La carne” for Piñera’s literary aesthetics as a whole. The case of the

206
Derrida, Of Grammatology, 154 (emphasis in the original).
207
Roberto Esposito, Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy, trans. Timothy Campbell,
(London: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 45-56.
208
Derrida, Of Grammatology, 153.
92
town’s male dancer (bailarín), who invites his friends to witness the consumption of his
own toes, is the story’s most suggestive passage in this respect. The dancer’s restlessness
in the days before, together with the presence of others as witnesses, marks the dancer’s
last act of self-cannibalism as an event of consequence to the society as a whole. In fact,
the narrator will tell us afterwards that the dancer’s ballet slippers are placed in “The
Museum of Illustrious Memorabilia.”
209
It is as if the fate of art—or at least a certain, i.e.
humanist, conception of art—that is being decided. We read: “In the middle of a bloody
silence, he cut off the last portion, and, without even warming it up, dropped it into the
hole that had once been his beautiful mouth.”
210
The dancer’s last bite, considerably
closer to “nature” in Levi-Strauss’s triangle culinaire than the town’s self-cannibalism
where human flesh is cooked with the techniques of European cuisine, could be read as
criticizing the “collective savagery” of a society that values consumption above other
spheres of human activity, including art.
211
The description certainly reveals the
horrifying flip side of auto-consumption, which brings about not only the conversion of a
buttock into “a beautiful fillet,” but also the transformation of a “beautiful mouth” into a
grotesque hole. According to this interpretation, art and consumption would be posed
against each other in the story, at the opposing poles of a metaphoric substitution.
Nevertheless, there is another way of reading this episode, one that takes into
account the recurrence of mutilation as a theme throughout Cuentos fríos. As Valerio-
Holguín highlights, Piñera elaborates an anesthetized aesthetics in the collection where
the pain one would normally associate with violent acts such as mutilation is deliberately

209
Piñera, The Cold Tales, 11.
210
Ibid.
211
Claude Lévi-Strauss, “The Culinary Triangle,” trans. Peter Brooks, Partisan Review
33, no. 4 (1966): 586. Anderson, Everything, 129.
93
absented.
212
This creates an absurdist literary style that is at once comical and
terrifying—comical because of the absence of terror, and terrifying the realization that
such violence could be registered as comical. Piñera’s anti-humanist aesthetics, which
functions by doing violence to the human form, also becomes manifest in stories such as
“The Fall,” where two mountaineers experience an accident that ends up reducing them
to limbs, or “The Actaeon Case” which minutely depicts the violent interpenetration of
two bodies that end up becoming one. Instead of interpreting the dancer’s self-
cannibalism through a clear-cut antagonism between art and consumption, then, the
episode is better read as the concretization of an aesthetics that, rather than defending an
uncritical humanism, unfolds through violence to the human form.
* * *
“La Cena” (The Dinner), a bizarre story where a group of beggars inhale their
intestinal gases and imagine consuming a sumptuous feast, is another fine example of
Piñera’s aesthetics of hunger. As in Cuentos fríos the hungry subjects turn to their own
bodies for nourishment, but self-cannibalism takes place on a more imaginary level in
“La cena.” The desire for a sovereign eating I identified in the former story, along with
the bypassing of relationality and the immediate access to pleasure, is present here as
well. What distinguishes “La cena,” however, is its critique of representing cocina criolla
as a material artifact of Latin American transculturation, which will become
commonplace in the neo-Baroque fiction of Alejo Carpentier and José Lezama Lima.
Through an imaginary consumption that is grotesque, comical, and horrifying all at once,

212
Fernando Valerio-Holguín, Poética de la frialdad: La narrativa de Virgilio Piñera
(Lanham: University Press of America, 1997), 35-36.
94
Piñera gestures towards the contradictions at the heart of Latin American regimes of
eating.
“La cena” portrays a society that “eats badly” from the perspective of the
marginalized subjects that, as a result of the inequitable distribution of wealth, do not
have enough to eat. The story begins with a refusal, in Derrida’s words, “to-give-the-
other-to-eat”: the beggar-narrator is returning empty-handed from Auxilio Nocturno,
where he has solicited food in vain.
213
This social abandonment later takes on
existentialist dimensions in the story, becoming a “thrownness” into a world; in
Anderson’s words, the narrator feels “forsaken by a cruel God who has left him to live in
a society that is indifferent to his misfortunes.”
214
If in “La carne” Piñera stages a
wholesale social disintegration, the present story highlights the schisms within a society.
The narrator and his beggar friends are part of lumpenproletariat, a class—if it is one—
united not by a specific mode of labor but “misery,” as the narrator observes.
215
In their
precarious situation, they are precisely the “people,” to follow Giorgio Agamben’s
analysis of the double meaning of the term, that are excluded from politics while being
discursively included in the body politic; they are supposedly part of the “nation,” while
not having access, in the narrator’s terms, to “platos nacionales.”
216

213
Derrida, “Eating Well,” 115. That a subject has to beg for food, independently from
whether or not someone responds to his call, is always already a symptom of “eating
badly.”
214
Anderson, Everything, 134.
215
Piñera, Cuentos fríos, 142; Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
(New York: International Publishers, 1975), 23.
216
Piñera, Cuentos fríos, 143; Giorgio Agamben, "What Is a People?" in Means without
End: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesar Casarino (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 29-35.
95
Self-eating offers, very much like in “La carne,” a line of escape from the
precarious material conditions. The story begins with a spectral mode of enjoying the
afterlives of food: burping. Though the narrator has been denied food at the aid station—
three miles away from the miserable shack he shares with fellow beggars—and now has
to walk back home hungry, he is content with the “delicious belches” that remain from
lunch, whose material remains have long left his stomach.
217
This spectral return of food,
consumed long before to yield any feeling of fullness, provides an imaginary plenitude to
the narrator, alleviating his distress and allowing him to tolerate the miserable miles that
lie ahead. While I agree with Anderson that the imaginary escape is never complete in
Piñera’s stories, the genuine pleasure characters like the narrator of “La carne” derive
from auto-affection should not be ignored either.
218

The imaginary meal that gives the story its title will similarly make use of
digestive gases. Unlike the narrator’s self-deception through burping, however, the
beggars’ feast will be of a communal kind: the story’s hungry subjects form a “desiring-
machine” that turns waste into food.
219
The beggars turn into anonymized parts through
an all-enveloping darkness where, in the absence of distinctly visible forms, sounds take
precedence and link bodies together. When the narrator finally arrives at the house he
shares with other beggars, upon entering the dark room he is greeted by unrecognizable
sounds that do not seem entirely human. He describes these strange noises, later
understood to be sounds of flatulence, with mechanical terms: while the first combine “a

217
Piñera, Cuentos fríos, 142.
218
Anderson, Everything, 135.
219
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans.
Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1983), 2.
96
certain musicality with the proper dryness of a discharge,” the second is “like the sound
of air escaping from the tubes of an organ when the one playing it presses all the keys at
once.”
220
In the darkness that rules out the possibility of recognizing distinct forms, each
anus is thus transformed into a nonhuman musical instrument, forming part of a flatulent
chorus. The desiring-machine of the beggars operates by letting out intestinal gases,
which are then sniffed in and imagined as delicious national meals. Though the beggars’
excited whispers (“Meat and potatoes!, Rice with shrimp!”) seem to interrupt the
nonhuman orchestra, they still remain as the rather anonymous parts of a desiring-
machine, which functions by the intersubjective recognition of odors and the reciprocal
augmentation of affect through the expression of that recognition.
221
Bataille notes the
unconscious association of jewelry with excrement in dreams; through a desiring-
machine that converts intestinal gases turn into sumptuous meals, “La cena” highlights
this connection between luxury and waste even more clearly than “La carne.”
222
Piñera
thus performs a redistribution, or in Ranciére’s terms, “repartition” of the digestive circle
in both stories.
Grotesque elements abound in the narrator’s description of this bizarre feast, but
the union with the world that usually accompanies such representations in pre-modern
texts remains absent. As Carmen L. Torres has observed, Virgilio Piñera’s stories often
incorporate elements from the grotesque tradition, which has a long history in the Spanish
language going back at least to the picaresque novel.
223
While their mouths remain

220
Quoted in Anderson, Everything, 133.
221
Ibid., 133.
222
Bataille, “The Notion of Expenditure,” 170.
223
Carmen L. Torres, La cuentística de Virgilio Piñera: Estrategias humorísticas
(Madrid: Editorial Pliegos, 1989). 93-94.
97
closely shut, the inhaling noses become, very much in line with Bakhtin’s observations
regarding the grotesque, the most prominent organ on the beggars’ faces; the narrator in
fact will at one point refer to them as “ten pathetic noses [that] sucked in
rhythmically.”
224
Hyperbolic representations of this organ, which Bakhtin highlights in
the Rabelais’s work, reinforce the scene’s grotesque quality: “each nose, growing
gradually, was sure reach the roof proper.”
225
This carnivalesque feast, however, hardly
brings about the promised cosmic union between the individual and the world. As in the
case of the self-cannibalising citizens of “La carne,” it is not the world but the eater’s
body that provides the food—however imaginary it may be. In this sense, “La cena” is
another narrative of auto-affection where, faced with lack, the characters opt for a
solution that uses “their private reserves.”
226

In his stories of self-cannibalism, Piñera carves an anti-humanist aesthetics of
hunger that, through an imaginative exploration of the links between pleasure, waste, and
representation, reflects on the relation between eating and sovereignty. This unusual
trope, which underlines the subject’s dependence on alterity for survival, becomes the
ground for a highly mediated critique of modern nutrition on a national and global scale.
On the one hand, Piñera shows how the nation-state appropriates from the alimentary
inventions and habits of its citizens for the—allegedly singular—national culture it
promotes, while depriving large portions of society from these goods, leaving them—to
use Piñera’s succinct expression—to “their own resources.” It is also possible to find in
these stories, however, a broader critique of the global relations of dependency that

224
Quoted in Anderson, Everything, 134.
225
Piñera, Cuentos fríos, 144 (my translation).
226
Piñera, The Cold Tales, 10.
98
determine national regimes of eating in the modern era. As such, Piñera’s fiction
channels the desire for sovereign eating in pre-revolutionary Cuba as a nation situated in
the global periphery. These stories imagine the mutilating consequences of “eating
badly,” that is, a mode of eating where the subjects achieve complete autonomy from the
socio-economic relations that condemn them to hunger and lack.
Beyond their highly mediated political import, however, Piñera’s stories of self-
cannibalism define an aesthetic plane where auto-affection, violence, and writing are
intimately connected. Imagination—and, more broadly, representation—negates material
lack, but only through a deception that deceives no one, an illusory sphere of plenitude
whose cracks, and therefore pathetic escape from precarity, remain visible throughout. In
these grotesque stories, and indeed throughout Cuentos fríos, literature appears as a
wasteful practice where the reader gains access to plenitude, illusory yet pleasurable, by a
cannibalization of his own imaginative resources. Rather than praising existentialist
virtues (e.g. perseverance in the face of destitution) avant la lettre as Anderson claims,
and thus endorsing a secular humanism, Piñera’s fiction unfolds by doing violence to the
human form, and through this violence explores the libidinal and political network within
which human bodies are shaped, nourished or starved, violated, and killed. This unique
treatment of lack, understood as the precarious material conditions as well as the
constitutive absence that grounds representation, gives Piñera a unique place in Cuban,
and indeed Latin American, literature.

99
2.3 | Lezama Lima’s Baroque Appetites: An Aesthetics of Plenitude
If not hunger per se, food—and, more largely, gastronomy—is crucial for the poetic
imagination of José Lezama Lima: from the extravagant family lunches in Paradiso to
essays like “Corona de las frutas” that reflect on “American” culture through food,
gastronomic imagery is at the heart of Lezama’s writing.
227
While I will be referring to
various texts from this vast “prandial” archive, my focus in this section will be primarily
on “La curiosidad barroca,” one of the five lectures that Lezama delivered at Centro de
Altos Estudios in Havana under the collective title La expresión americana. This essay
not only includes some of Lezama’s most significant references to food imagery in the
collection, but also reveals tensions in his poetic approach to the question of (Latin)
American cultural identity. There is a tendency in the literature (partly motivated by the
long-lasting personal conflicts between the authors) to think the aesthetics of Piñera and
Lezama in opposition to each other.
228
After my analysis of Lezama’s essay, I will
reconsider the relation between these two important figures of Cuban literature through
the different uses they make of the trope of eating.
As Irlemar Chiampi notes in her introduction to the Portuguese edition of La
expresión americana, critical reflection on America had already become a century-long
tradition (with illustrious authors such as Sarmiento, Martí, Vasconcelos, Rojas, Ureña,
and Mariátegui in its ranks) when Lezama presented his lectures in January 1957.
229
In

227
Lezama Lima’s famous luncheons in Paradiso have been reimagined in recent Cuban
literature and film. See Senel Paz’s story “El lobo, el bosque y el hombre nuevo” and
Tomás Gutierrez Alea and Juan Carlos Tabío’s film adaptation, Fresa y chocolate.
228
See Anderson, Everything, 25-41.
229
Irlemar Chiampi, “La historia tejida por la imagen” in La expresión americana
(Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1993), 9. The page numbers refer to the
Spanish translation of Chiampi’s essay.
100
the essays, Lezama revisits many of the questions that had troubled his predecessors: the
distinguishing characteristics of American culture, its relation vis-à-vis European
tradition, place in world history, and future. As Chiampi highlights, with Fernando
Ortiz’s influential studies of transculturation, and the writings of Alfonso Reyes, Alejo
Carpentier, Mariano Picón Salas, and Uslar Pietri that foreground the hybrid nature of
American culture and its openness to foreign influences, the critical thinking on the
continent had moved to a new phase in the first half of the twentieth century.
230
While I
agree with Brett Levinson that Lezama’s major aim in La expresión americana is not
defining the American “difference” (i.e. a unique set of characteristics that would
distinguish its culture from its European origins), through references to Lezama’s writing
on food and eating, this chapter will argue that the author’s position remains within,
rather than radically contest, the larger framework of transculturation.
231
The use of
gastronomic imagery becomes crucial at this juncture since, as Pérez Firmat highlights,
the author of La expresión americana conceives the process of artistic creation, where the
metaphorical subject turns his attention to former threads of culture and weaves in novel
patterns, “in literally alimentary terms.”
232
When thinking about the symbolic interactions
that bring about American culture, Lezama not only makes frequent use of expressions

230
Chiampi, “La historia,” 10.
231
Brett Levinson, “Possibility, Ruin, Repetition: Rereading Lezama Lima’s ‘American
Expression,’” Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos 18, no. 1 (1993): 52. Similarly,
though Gustavo Pérez Firmat is certainly right when he argues that Lezama’s interest in
American culture is, as the title of the collection indicates, on expression, and hence
“rhetorical” rather than ontological, I do not think that a focus on the continent’s
“talante” acquits Lezama completely from identitarian thinking. See Gustavo Pérez
Firmat, “The Strut of the Centipede: José Lezama Lima and New World Exceptionalism”
in Do the Americas Have a Common Literature?, ed. Gustavo Pérez Firmat (Durham:
Duke UP, 1990): 316.
232
Pérez Firmat, “The Strut,” 316
101
that ultimately derive from gastronomy such as “incorporation” or “enjoyment”
(disfrute), but also gathers up literary banquets that amount to, in the words of Roberto
González Echevarría, “culinary-poetic anthologies”
233
; the author even refers to the
medieval concept of “protoplasma incorporativo” when theorizing the openness of
American culture to foreign influences.
234
A careful analysis of Lezama’s references to
appetite, eating, and food is, therefore, is necessary to understand his intervention in the
critical thinking on American culture.
The señor barroco (also referred to as “nuestro señor americano”), an idealized
semi-fictional character that exemplifies America’s assimilative energies in the concrete
image of his life, is a crucial figure in Lezama’s baroque aesthetics of plenitude. While
this American settler from around 17
th
century, who could be thought as a (historically
distant) alter ego of the author, makes several appearances in the essays that make up La
expresión americana, it is in “La curiosidad barroca” where the señor barroco is
developed most fully. Lezama imagines him
235
as the first truly American subject, an
authentic product of the continent’s cultural landscape (paisaje).
236
The señor barroco’s
sophisticated taste performs tensión and plutonismo, the two qualities that, along with an
overwhelming abundance, characterize the culture of the continent in Lezama’s account.

233
Roberto González Echevarría, “Apetitos de Góngora y Lezama,” Revista
Iberoamericana 41, no. 92-93 (1975): 489 (my translation).
234
Lezama Lima, La expresión americana, 177.
235
While Lezama devotes important parts of La expresión americana to Sor Juana
Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz, the archetypical American subject is imagined as a man
without second thoughts. It is important to note that this rhetorical choice is part of a
larger discursive economy where the sovereign subject (el señor) actively subjugates the
rich landscape (paisaje), construed implicitly as female. Señor barroco is “el primer
americano que va surgiendo dominador de sus caudales.” Lezama Lima, La expresion
americana, 81 (my emphasis).
236
Ibid. As Pérez Firmat notes, landscape (paisaje) is a tertiary term that transcends the
opposition between nature and culture in Lezama’s argument. Firmat, “The Strut,” 319.
102
Tensión refers to the “orden pero sin rechazo” that señor barroco imposes on the rich,
wild, and rebellious American landscape, whose singular components are able to preserve
their identity within “una imposible victoria.”
237
Through plutonismo, on the other hand,
Lezama seems to allude both to Pluton (the Greek god of the underworld) and to the
“igneous magma” that makes up the earth’s crust;
238
the term refers to the “fuego
originario” that, in Chiampi’s formulation, “contiene la ruptura y la unificación de los
fragmentos para formar un nuevo orden cultural.”
239
It is the señor barroco’s
sophisticated palate, which savors the continent’s flavors with a characteristically
Lezamian “no rechazar” (non-rejection), that puts tensión and plutonismo in practice.
240

Unlike his antecessor señor estanciero, whose major aim in life is “fundar un
dominio verbal y terrenal,”
241
this fully American subject “ha comenzado por disfrutar y
saborear.”
242
In fact, to say that the señor barroco is conceived to a large extent through
his appreciative taste is not an exaggeration. Lezama describes him as a receptacle with
the capacity of synthesizing European and indigenous cultural elements: “Su vivir se ha
convertido en una especie de gran oreja sutil, que en la esquina de su muy espaciada sala,
desenreda los imbroglios y arremolina las hojas sencillas.”
243
Recalling Piñera’s “diez
patéticas narices” in “La cena,” Lezama thus reduces his semi-fictional character into a
“grotesque” orifice, that is, to a point of contact between the individual and the world.
His sophisticated palate—understood literally and as a capacity for intellectual

237
Lezama Lima, La expresión americana, 81.
238
Chiampi, “La historia,” 26 (my translation).
239
Ibid.
240
Levinson, “Possibility, Ruin, Repetition,” 52.
241
Lezama Lima, La expresión americana, 151.
242
Ibid., 82.
243
Ibid.
103
appreciation—synthesizes European tradition with the autochthonous, pre-Columbian
cultures. Lezama makes him hold a cup of soconusco (an Aztec drink made with cacao of
premier quality), thus linking in his image the European baroque tradition with the
indigenous gastronomic culture.
244
At the end of his essay, the author will assign a
protective role to his appreciative taste:
Vemos así que el senor barroco americano, a quien hemos llamado
auténtico primer instalado en lo nuestro, participa, vigila, y cuida las dos
grandes síntesis que estan en la raiz del barroco americano, la hispano
incaica y la hispano negroide.
245

The syntheses of American baroque material culture, which Lezama exemplifies in the
essay through the sculptural work of the Indian Kondori and the wooden ornaments of
Aleijadinhno, are in need of the disfrute (enjoyment) of señor barroco(s) in whose
unifying taste their tensión and plutonismo would be re-activated and preserved.
The highly literary description of the señor barroco’s appearance reveals how,
through this idealized American figure, Lezama articulates his baroque aesthetics of
fullness. The author dresses his protagonist through a literal and literary pastiche that
makes repeated use of the preposition “with” (con):
Con su caricioso lomo holandés de Ronsard, con sus extensas tapas para el
cisne mantuano, con sus plieguillos ocultos con malicias sueltas de
Góngora o de Polo de Medina, con la platería aljofarada del soneto
gongoriano o el costillar prisionero en el soneto quevediano.
246

244
Ibid., 81 (my emphasis).
245
Ibid., 106.
246
Ibid., 81.
104

Plenitude marks the señor barroco’s everyday life: he inherits, or is supplied with, the
garments that come from the Spanish baroque tradition. Echevarría, specifying the
contrary tendencies of the baroque literature that Lezama discusses in “Sierpe de Don
Luis de Góngora,” notes that
El movimiento hacia la plenitud lleva, o a la repetición y acumulación de
figuras, metáforas—a los dislates, a la locura—, o por la vertiente
correlativa y opuesta al vacío, a la noche unánime que borra toda traza.
247

Even though Echevarría elsewhere argues that Lezama’s aesthetic ideal is rather a
transubstantiation where the gap between language and the world would collapse, the
señor barroco’s image, which grows incessantly through metonymic addition, suggests
that Lezama here takes the second path, represented in the Spanish tradition by
Góngora.
248
What Brett Levinson notes about Lezama as a writer directly applies to the
señor barroco: he is an “ecstatic, affirmative, erotic figure.”
249

Before moving forward to Lezama’s literary banquets, it might be a good idea to
ask ourselves: How does the señor barroco eat? Does he “eat well” in the sense I
discussed at the beginning of the chapter? Through the señor barroco, Lezama certainly
affirms the pleasures of “eating,” that is, of cultural assimilation. “It is and tastes good to
eat” other cultures—American expression thrives by the incorporation of European and
indigenous traditions.
250
And yet, what does the señor barroco’s eating “give” to the
other? Does it offer anything other than the representation of that appropriated element of

247
Echevarría, “Apetitos,” 487.
248
Ibid., 490.
249
Levinson, “Possibility, Ruin, Repetition,” 52.
250
Derrida, “Eating Well,” 115.
105
alterity within the señor barroco’s glorious life? Lezama’s archetypal American
flourishes by the cancellation of the others it assimilates—it is the desire for sovereignty
that guides his culinary interests. Though the explicitly declared ideals of tensión and
plutonismo might suggest otherwise at the first sight, American culture asserts itself
through an incorporation of the European and the indigenous that ultimately denies them
any rights to autonomous existence on the continent. The señor barroco extracts elements
selectively from traditions to which he has varying degrees of proximity, appropriating
them to his own life. He relates to the other, enjoys its taste, but his eating does not offer
anything other than a place at his own body—taken out of the worldview to which it once
belonged. The señor barroco affirms relationality in order to negate it in the last instance.
His “espléndido ideal de vida,” nourished by the Luso-Hispanic and indigenous cultures,
amounts to a defense of cultural appropriation and a privileging of plenitude.
251

The literary banquets gathered from the poetic archive of Hispanic letters, which
could be thought as the meals that the señor barroco feasts on, complement Lezama’s
Baroque aesthetics of plenitude. These pastiche feasts, which prefigure the family
luncheons in Paradiso, offer a concise image of Lezama’s understanding of the baroque
as an artistic movement—both in its European origins and American revival. Before
taking the reader to an intertextual journey that will establish bridges between poets of
the Baroque (Spanish and American, historical and modern), Lezama theorizes the
banquet itself as a Baroque topos. There is, according to the author, something
quintessentially baroque about literary representations of food: “el banquete literario, la

251
Chiampi, “La historia,” 22 (my emphasis).
106
prolífica descripción de frutas y mariscos, es de jubilosa raíz barroca.”
252
The choice of
fruits and seafood in Lezama’s argument is significant, as these, in their uncommon and
extravagant forms, constituted some of the most fascinating aspects of the American
scenery for the colonizers. The meticulous descriptions of meals, which overwhelm the
senses in their abundance and extravagant formal proliferation, represent for Lezama the
Baroque impulse to assimilate the multiplicity of the world in a single image, “el afán,
tan dionisíaco como dialéctico, de incorporar el mundo, hacer suyo el mundo exterior, a
través del horno transmutativo de la asimilación.”
253

In other words, the literary banquet is the poet’s effort to contain, in and through
language, the sensory multiplicity of the landscape (paisaje) around him, a literary
performance of tensión and plutonismo. While Lezama’s the conception of the banquet
seems to follow Bakhtin’s writings on the subject, differently from the Russian theorist’s
account, incorporation here functions as a model for cultural assimilation as well. The
“Dionysian” problematization of the limits between the individual and the world is as
important as the “dialectical” unity that is forged through assimilation.
254
For Lezama,
poetic representations of banquets—with their minute description of the proliferating
forms of food, with their promise of plenitude contained, in and through language, in a
single image—are quintessentially baroque performances. The literary banquet becomes
an eloquent metaphor for American expression as well as Lezama’s own poetic activity,
whose motivating impulse is to contain the world’s plenitude.

252
Lezama Lima, La expresión americana, 90-91.
253
Ibid., 91.
254
Ibid., 91.
107
In fact, in “La curiosidad barroca,” Lezama will gather together a banquet
himself, one that is and is not his own at the same time, where he invites the reader to an
uncritical enjoyment of plenitude. In the essay, the author does not create his own
banquet (as he will famously do in Paradiso), but gathers together from the Hispanic
archive individual plates, which he combines into a single delicious meal. Like a maitre
d’, Lezama introduces plates, drinks, and accompaniments one after the other, conjuring a
pastiche feast before the reader—as, for example, when he presents a passage from Lope
de Vega’s El vaquero de Moraña:
Así, como le dimos entrada en la materialidad de la col y la berenjena,
vuelve ahora Lope de Vega, con los vestidos cangrejos, resistentes a la
doma del fuego de su blancona ternura y perfección:
No los mariscos al peñasco asidos
cuyos salados cóncavos desagua,
retrógrados cangrejos parecidos
al signo que del sol por signo es fragua.
255

Piece after piece, Lezama thus assembles a literary banquet where authors—Spanish and
American, historical and contemporary—that partake in the Baroque topos “offer,”
“give,” or “bring” us their plates. It is this never thematized “offering” of presence that I
find most problematic in Lezama’s performance of literary pastiche.
Through the affective power of poetic representations of food, Lezama erases—or
at the very least glosses over—the constitutive absence through which language, as a
system of representation, functions. Maurice Blanchot reminds us that the possibility of

255
Ibid., 93.
108
referring to a person in his absence already implies his eventual death—the absolute
absence, so to speak.
256
As a representational order, language murders the world, only to
resuscitate it then as meaning. When Lezama conjures appetizing images of food from
poetry, it is precisely this primary death, this spectral quality of language that is
concealed in the process. Representations of food, whether verbal or visual, have the
distinct capacity of vividly bringing their referent before us by stimulating “prandial”
memories; they can easily produce certain physiological effects on us as readers such as
watering our mouths or cringing us in disgust. Through (sometimes merely imagined)
memories of taste, these images recall the presence of their referent with force, almost
working against the absence on which their representation depends. It is this illusory
effacement of signification, this transition from representation to presentation that
Lezama performs when he brings, one after the other, images of appetizing plates from
Spanish and American poets. The literary banquet thus elides language’s founding
absence, in the same way the señor barroco’s appetite is always supplied with presence.
In “Nacimiento de la expresión criolla,” another essay from La expresión
americana, there is a much shorter banquet, one that reveals how quickly Lezama’s
aesthetics of plenitude could verge on a defense of cultural appropriation. In the lecture,
which offers a genealogy of American expression from its introjection of the Spanish
Baroque to its autochthonous modern forms such as the Argentine gauchesque poetry and
Mexican corrido, the banquet is intended as an eloquent—and savory—allegory of the
processes of assimilation that mark and reinvent the European culture in its contemporary
form. Before America even comes to the table, however, Lezama briefly alludes to

256
Maurice Blanchot, “Literature and the Right to Death” in The Work of Fire, trans.
Lydia Davis (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995): 323-325.
109
Europe’s previous exchange with the East (or, more precisely, with the Ottoman Empire),
the alterity that confronted the West before the discovery of the New World:
El occidental, amaestrado en la gota alquitarada, añade el refino de la
esencia del café, traído por la magia de las culturales orientales, que trae el
deleite de algunas overturas a la turca realizadas por Mozart, o la
referencia que ya hicimos de algunas cantatas alegres en que se entretuvo
el majestuoso divertimento bachiano. Era esa esencia, como un segundo
punto al dulzor de la crema, un lujo occidental que ampliaba con esa gota
oriental las metafísicas variantes del gusto.
257

The continental cuisine, already a refined connoisseur of spirits, becomes even more
sophisticated after its assimilation of coffee, which it discovers through the contact with
the East. This basic yet novel “essence” in turn inspires—only, however, when cooked in
the oven of the creative European mind—magnificent works of high culture such as
Mozart’s music. In Lezama’s allegorization of cultural exchange, “las culturas
orientales”—and, as we will see, all non-European cultures—are reduced to singular and
unchanging flavors whose only function is to complicate and enrich the “lujo
occidental.”
258
Perhaps it should not come as a surprise that Lezama’s “Orientalist”
tendencies become most visible when he writes about “culturas orientales.” America,
however, will not receive a different treatment, justifying a broader use of Edward Said’s
term as a Eurocentric way of essentializing alterity, whether located to the east or west of
the continent.

257
Lezama Lima, La expresión americana, 138.
258
Ibid.
110
Just like the contact with the East serves to nothing but to “extend” the intellectual
taste of the continent, the discovery of the New World will, rather than propelling a
radical re-evaluation, give European culture its final form. America’s distinct
contribution to European culture, however, will be “natural”:
…a esa perfección del banquete, que lleva la asimilación a la cultura, le
correspondería al americano el primor inapelable, el rotundo punto final
de la hoja del tabaco. El americano traía a ese refinamiento del banquete
occidental, el otro refinamiento de la naturaleza.
259

American tobacco, which accompanies the coffee (the offering of another latecomer to
the table of Culture), gives European taste its final form, a last flavor to please the palate
and give closure to the banquet. Lezama quite resourcefully twists America’s supposedly
belated encounter with Western culture into a challenge that the continent successfully
overcomes: “en el banquete literario, el americano viene a cumplir la función que realiza
la prueba mayor.”
260
Despite the high level of sophistication the European “palate” has
already reached at the belated moment of its integration, America succeeds in refining his
“lujo occidental” even further. In her introduction, Chiampi highlights that one of
Lezama’s larger goals in La expresión americana is to counter Hegel’s Eurocentric
dismissal of the New World, which casts the continent outside History by reducing it to
mere geography.
261
Ironically, what comes to be America’s contribution in this world-
historical banquet ends up being the tobacco leaves, which provide—after coffee—“el

259
Ibid., 138.
260
Ibid., 137.
261
Chiampi, “La historia,” 27.
111
otro refinamiento de la naturaleza.”
262
Lezama’s Orientalism, then, is of a peculiar kind:
Eastern and American cultures are leveled to fulfill an equivalent function—that of being
the accompaniments through the assimilation of which Europe, at the unquestioned
receiving end of the banquet of culture, becomes richer and more sophisticated.
Lezama’s gastronomic conceit ultimately works against the more elaborate theory
of cultural assimilation he develops in La expresión americana and other works, literary
and non-literary. In the banquet, there are no indigestible items (what Lezama elsewhere
calls “incomprehensible differences”) that defy the homogéneo and end up displacing it
from within.
263
Cultural elements are extracted violently out of their world and
assimilated to the Western tradition; their otherness becomes, in the process, nothing
more than innocuous novelty. The Cuban author’s prandial imagery refers to a much
simpler process of cultural appropriation, where the alterities that come in contact with
Europe are added to its culture without significant repercussions. There is no “internal
excess” that the “homogéneo contains but cannot assimilate,” no room for indigestion in
Lezama’s culinary allegory.
264
Each item has a well-defined place and comes to the table
at the appropriate moment in this teleological reconstruction of world history; the
“Oriental” coffee, for instance, is not served until the meal is near completion, thereby
not barring any pleasures of the main—that is, European—plates. Assimilated without
problems, each non-continental culture merely supplements and further refines the
European banquet. It is, ironically, metaphor itself that betrays the thinking of “el sujeto
metafórico.”

262
Lezama Lima, La expresión americana, 138
263
Levinson, “Possibility, Ruin, Repetition,” 55.
264
Ibid., 54.
112
Gastronomic imagery in La expresión americana extends beyond the grandiose
scenes of banquet and the voracious appetite of the señor barroco to include a
metaphorical network of expressions, where one sees a curious omission. As Pérez
Firmat notes, Lezama imagines creative assimilation as a form of eating in the lectures:
“the metaphorical subject feasts on culture, his curiosity [is] a species of voracity.”
265

There is, however, a physiological state that is almost altogether missing from this
allegorization of cultural intake. While there are lots of “characters” (from a semi-
idealized figure like the señor barroco to Faustian poets Sor Juana and Domínguez
Camargo) with a voracious appetite, there is no hunger in La expresión americana.
266
To
start with Lezama’s archetypal American subject, the señor barroco is a “well-settled”
character, comfortable in his new scenery; he is, after all, “[el] auténtico primer instalado
en lo nuestro.”
267
Hunger, on the other hand, is precisely unsettling—it reveals the
vulnerability of our bodies and dislocates the subject (with the pícaro being the
paradigmatic example) in search of food. While the señor barroco has a sophisticated
palate that introjects the indigenous and the European with equal appetite, hunger pangs
are unknown to him. The señor estanciero, who fights against and subjugates the
American paisaje, has paid his dues so that the next generation, the first authentic
Americans in Lezama’s account, can feel at home in their new setting, now truly “theirs.”
All that the señor barroco has to do is “disfrutar” or “saborear”—verbs that imply
deliberate choice and pleasure rather than bodily need; he does not eat to survive.

265
Pérez Firmat, “Strut,” 318.
266
In distinguishing between hunger and appetite, I follow the commonsense distinction
between these terms: while hunger denotes a physiological state of precarity where the
subject needs to eat—rather indiscriminately—for the simple purpose of survival, I
understand appetite to be a much more specific craving motivated ultimately by pleasure.
267
Lezama Lima, La expresión americana, 106 (my emphasis).
113
Although a will to incorporate alterity defines his existence as an American subject, he is
not subject to hunger and does not seem to need the other.
Furthermore, neither tensión nor plutonismo—cultural operations that the señor
barroco’s palate performs—allow for the idea of lack. They both connote fullness: while
tensión suggests the digestive difficulties after overeating, plutonismo as a concept
depends on the presence of fragments (from Luso-Hispanic and indigenous cultures) that
are to be merged into a unitary whole. Lezama’s banquets further reinforce this erasure of
hunger. While the literary feast in “La curiosidad barroca” glosses over the primary lack
at the heart of representation through successive descriptions of food, the historical
banquet in “Nacimiento de la expresión criolla” allegorizes cultures as food, thereby
ruling out a consideration of lack from the start. La expresión americana deploys
gastronomic imagery to conceptualize cultural assimilation, but does this very
selectively: bending the semantic field of eating, Lezama refers to an appetite without
hunger, a search for presence that is motivated by pleasure rather than need.
268

Privileging appetite over hunger inevitably defines a certain stance towards
alterity. As I briefly discussed at the beginning of this chapter, hunger as a physiological
state renders visible the relationality of human alimentation—the dependence of our
bodies to human and nonhuman others—by reminding us of our need to eat. By contrast,

268
In the one and only instance that Lezama refers to poverty in his description, such lack
is interpreted not in a way to reveal the precariousness of life in the New World, but as a
productive absence that “dilata las placeres de la inteligencia” (81). Though we
sometimes refer to curiosity as intellectual hunger, the scientific zeal of figures as Sor
Juana or Don Carlos Sigüenza y Góngora, whose “demonic” will to knowledge is, for
Lezama, characteristically baroque, is better described as appetite. When Lezama refers
to an American poet or artist, he uses a similar lexicon. For instance, what distinguishes
Domínguez Camargo from the Spanish followers of Góngora is his “apetencia de frenesí
innovador, de rebelión desafiante, de orgullo desatado” (87, my emphasis).
114
with appetite the emphasis is more on the desire to take in the other: we crave for specific
food, food whose consumption would yield us pleasure. By glossing over hunger through
appetite, Lezama construes eating as a sovereign desire that, rather than laying bare the
relations with alterity that make it possible, ultimately strives for the negation of that
other through incorporation. Lezama’s gastronomic metaphors communicate a creative
assimilation that only highlight acts of cultural appropriation, disavowing the subject’s
dependence on paisaje. It is as if the American only incorporates the autochthonous
cultural elements out of a sophisticated desire for alterity—as if he didn’t need his new
“others” to survive in his new, yet by now familiarized, setting. In Lezama’s utopia,
desire joyously wanders the (cultural) plains of the continent alone, without need. By
separating hunger from appetite, and need from desire, the author of La expresión
americana conceives cultural assimilation as a sovereign taking in—an “eating alone”
that disregards the alterity that makes its act possible and aims for the negation of the
other towards which it is oriented.
* * *
Ironically, one of the rare moments when La expresión americana refers to a state
of precariousness in American history takes the form of a sentence that could be read, if
taken out of context, as a celebration of Virgilio Piñera’s stories of self-cannibalism.
Commenting on how the American continent “regala” its rich natural resources to the
destitute Spanish colonizers, Lezama argues that there thus comes into existence “un
espléndido estilo surgiendo paradojalmente de una heroica pobreza.”
269
On an aesthetic
level, the idea of a style of plenitude (“un es-pléndido estilo”) that emerges out of a

269
Lezama Lima, La expresión americana, 101.
115
primary lack is very suggestive for the work of both authors. This, I believe, is a good
place to think about their fundamentally different approaches to lack, understood both in
material and aesthetic terms.
As I have highlighted in my reading of La expresión americana, Lezama is all too
ready to forget lack. His focus is on appetite rather than hunger, on lavish banquets rather
than lack; even the colonial appropriation of natural and cultural elements is referred to as
“presents” or “offerings” to the European settlers.
270
It is as if Lezama, faced with
centuries of colonial violence, hastens to hide or at best move away from the traumatic
memories of the American continent at the moment when he sets out to define its
characteristic expression. Along with violence, lack is erased from history by an
exclusive concentration on the “rich” products—alimentary, linguistic, or cultural—that
remain of that past, glossing over the processes of appropriation in their making. With
eyes set on sumptuous “plates,” Lezama wilfully forgets, as it were, the exploitation in
the kitchen and the farm. Piñera’s stories of self-cannibalism, on the other hand, do not
ever let us forget about hunger, understood as the material condition of need as well as
the constitutive lack at the heart of language. Adopting the perspective of the miserable,
these stories propose “solutions” so absurd that the reader remains painfully aware of the
destitution that lies beneath the imaginary. Nor does Piñera gloss over the vacuity of
representation: when re-presenting plenitude through imagination, literary or otherwise,
we become beggars—desiring and half-experiencing fullness without ever having real
access to it—and the author does not let us forget the joyous deception.

270
Ibid., 101.
116
Hunger and appetite—these two affects mark the difference between the literary
politics of the two authors. While Piñera reveals how the nation, in its double operation,
appropriates popular culture and leaves people hungry, in Lezama we see the American
imagined with a sovereign appetite to consume, and in the act bring together, the
heterogeneous elements of the continent. The beggar-banquets we find in Piñera’s stories
owe their abundance to the extreme deficiency from which they emerge. Lezama’s
pastiche banquets, in turn, gloss over lack, both material and linguistic, through a
repeated succession of poetic representations of food. Simply put, Piñera does not let us
forget Walter Benjamin’s famous maxim—“There is no document of civilization which
is not at the same time a document of barbarism”—as Lezama Lima erases it in the
sensory abundance of meals.
271
While there might be a desire for sovereign eating in both
authors, such aspiration is taken to its absurd limits in Piñera’s self-cannibalism whereas
in Lezama’s banquets it is affirmed as a transculturating will to power.

271
Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” in Illuminations, trans. Harry
Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Shocken Books, 2007).
117
-3-
Wastes of Consumption:
The Fiction of Osvaldo Lamborghini

It is only after his death, eventually, that the writer of abjection will escape
his condition of waste, reject, abject. Then, he will either sink into
oblivion or attain the rank of incommensurate ideal.
Julia Kristeva
272

In this exploration of gastronomy in Latin American literature and culture, my
emphasis has so far been on the tropes and affects of incorporation. Consumption,
however, is only the intermediary stage in a sphere of human activity that necessarily
involves the production of food, on the one hand, and the production of waste, on the
other. Overlooking that which makes consumption possible or that which consumption in
turn leaves behind is to risk erasing its violence, its excesses and exclusions. The final
chapter will consider production through contemporary Cuban artists whose works
critically comment on the island’s agricultural and tourist industries. To explore the
aesthetic and political valence of waste, this chapter in turn examines the early fiction of
Osvaldo Lamborghini (1940-85), arguably the most notorious “writer of abjection” in
Argentine literature.
Lamborghini had a history of reception with radical twists and turns, closely
resembling the one predicted by Kristeva. Instantly acquiring mythical status with the
publication of “El fiord” (1969), available only at a bookstore on Corrientes Avenue and
mostly passed from hand to hand, Lamborghini published Sebregondi retrocede in 1973,

272
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez
(New York: Columbia UP, 1982), 16.
118
which likewise reached a very limited audience, selling about 1000 copies.
273
Shortly
after his third and final book Poemas (1980) came out, the author exiled himself to
Barcelona, where he was to live and write until his death in 1985. At that moment,
Lamborghini was virtually unknown to Argentine, or for that matter Latin American,
readership. It was only with the publication of Novelas y cuentos (1988) by Ediciones del
Serbal, under the care of the author and long-time friend César Aira, that a large bulk of
Lamborghini’s works became widely available for the first time. While somewhat
shedding his clandestine aura (Alan Pauls recalls how “El fiord,” whose Chinatown
edition was set entirely in bold, seemed like an “original” that could not have been
published in any other font), the gradual publication of Lamborghini’s complete works
could and did “acaba[r] con un mito y funda[r] otro.”
274

Today, Lamborghini continues to be perceived as a quintessential poète maudit
(cursed poet), a notoriety that results as much from his experimentation with language as
from his violent and controversial treatment of sexuality. Indeed, it is common to find
references to “pornography” or the “pornographic” in the critical literature that attempts
to account for the particular intensity of Lamborghini’s oeuvre. Josefina Ludmer, in her
influential reading of “El fiord” in El género gauchesco: Un tratado sobre la patria,
ascribes to pornography the role of “multipl[ying] the possibilities of the story’s
interchange and action, of possible and impossible figures in never-written positions.”
275

Pauls himself finds in Lamborghini’s late works “una guerra sin cuartel contra lo

273
César Aira, prologue to Novelas y cuentos, ed. César Aira (Barcelona: Ediciones
Serbal, 1988), 7.
274
Alan Pauls, “Lengua: ¡sonaste!,” Babel no.9 (1989): 5.
275
Josefina Ludmer, The Gaucho Genre: A Treatise on the Motherland, trans. Molly
Weigel (Durham: Duke UP, 2002): 151.
119
simbólico…cuyo botín…es lo real de la pornografía.”
276
Lamborghini’s transgression of
literary norms—his portrayals of violent sexuality and violence towards language itself—
as well as his collage of pornographic images in Teatro proletario de cámara all suggest
pornography as a frame of reference in approaching and understanding his works.
Nevertheless, “pornography” is a loaded and often poorly defined term that refers to a
wide range of erotically stimulant imagery (this is even truer for its adjectival form
“pornographic”).
This chapter looks at two early stories, “El fiord” and “El niño proletario,” in
order to explore the ways in which Lamborghini’s uses of the abject at once provoke and
interrupt “pornographic” pleasures. As Nestor Perlongher has aptly observed, bodily
transactions (mutilation, penetration, consumption, defecation) incarnate power relations
in Lamborghini’s fiction.
277
Within this libidino-political economy, the abject occupies a
privileged position, serving a number of contrary purposes. While the intractable outburst
of bodily matter at times appears to resist the disciplinary inscription of bodies, at others
its consumption forges hegemonic alliances. The inevitable condition of the proletariat (a
class deemed subhuman), the abject may also confirm membership to bourgeoisie, a class
of “proper” subjects. One unequivocal effect of abjection, however, is to interrupt
voyeuristic pleasures by interpellating the reader in visceral terms. While Lamborghini
does develop a “pornographic” aesthetics where violence becomes a cruel spectacle, his
texts interrupt the detached enjoyment of such violence through scenes of abjection.

276
Pauls, “Lengua: ¡sonaste!,” 6.
277
Nestor Perlongher, “Ondas en El fiord: Barroco y corporalidad en Osvaldo
Lamborghini,” in Papeles insumisos, ed. Adrián Cangi and Reynaldo Jimenez (Buenos
Aires: Santiago Arcos, 2004), 199.
120
Lamborghini thus allows us to rethink the political and aesthetic force of the abject, and
more generally of waste in literature and culture.

3.1 | The Sexualization of Writing
In Argentina, the politically turbulent period from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s
witnessed what Perlongher has called “la sexualización de la escritura.”
278
Works like
Germán García’s Nanina (1968), which portrays a sexualized adolescence with a dirty
realism, Lamborghini’s own “El fiord” (1969) and Sebregondi retrocede (1973), and Luis
Gusmán’s El frasquito (1973), a surreal tale of incestuous sexuality, rendered the
libidinal with an unreserved intensity that was unprecedented in national literature. This
“sexual turn” in literature was partly motivated, or at least heavily mediated, by a
renewed engagement with psychoanalysis. As Noé Jitrik observes, while Argentine
authors did not discover psychoanalysis itself in the 1960s (the theory had a long history
both in national literature and psychiatric practice), they did find a novel “modo de
pensarse en el psicoanálisis.”
279
The influential critic Oscar Masotta, who from 1965
onwards wrote extensively on the work of Jacques Lacan, was instrumental in this
respect. The Lacanian reformulation of psychoanalysis, which gave primacy to the word
(la lettre) in its analyses of subjectivity and modern culture, allowed these authors to
account for the singularity of literature—unlike Marxism, which tended to explain the
literary through the social, or existentialism, which subordinated it to ethico-political

278
Ibid.
279
Noé Jitrik, “Las marcas del deseo y el modelo psicoanalítico,” in Historia crítica de la
literatura argentina, vol. 10 (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1999), 19.
121
engagement.
280
In the works of Lamborghini, García, and Gusmán, controversial scenes
of sexuality thematized by psychoanalysis (e.g. incest, cannibalism, childhood sexuality)
thus go hand in hand with formal experimentation: they are the two sides of an attempt to
radicalize literature.
This radical literary praxis culminated in Literal (1973-77), an avant-garde
journal spearheaded by García, Lamborghini, and Gusmán, where we find succinct
expressions of their approach to literature. The journal privileged the play and pleasure of
the letter (letra) over meaning and action, denouncing realism as an attempt to do away
with the polyvalence of language and Sartrean engagement as an improbable nostalgia.
“La satisfacción que produce la literatura no puede ubicarse fuera de ella, en alguna
finalidad, en la impensable teología de un sentido,” declares one of the various texts
published with the title “La flexión literal,” refusing from the outset any utility to
literature or literary meaning.
281
According to the authors, realism was precisely a crime
against the textuality of the text and the radicality of desire: “Todo realismo mata la
palabra subordinando el código al referente, pontificando sobre la supremacía de lo real,
moralizando sobre la banalidad del deseo.”
282
Literal did not situate the place of literature
in the field of action, either. The freedom Sartre defended as the basis of ethico-political
action was, according to the group, nothing but a retrospective illusion: “sólo puede
vivirse cuando se la pierde y se anuncia siempre como una condena.”
283
The journal thus

280
Ibid., 25.
281
“Flexión Literal,” in Literal, 1974-1977, ed. Héctor Libertella (Buenos Aires:
Santiago Arcos, 2002), 125 (emphasis in the original).
282
“No matar la palabra, no dejarse matar por ella,” in Literal, 1974-1977, ed. Héctor
Libertella (Buenos Aires: Santiago Arcos, 2002), 24.
283
“La historia no es todo,” in Literal, 1974-1977, ed. Héctor Libertella (Buenos Aires:
Santiago Arcos, 2002), 46.
122
defended a vision of literature where the author gave free rein to language and pleasure
(and the pleasure of language), not restraining himself by anything exterior to this
interplay, be it meaning or action.
Emerging from this ludic and libidinized perspective, Lamborghini’s stories do
not yield themselves to unitary and unequivocal readings—though they are oversaturated
with references to the political figures, institutions, and discourses of 1960s Argentina.
As César Aira notes, “las claves para una interpretación son muy visibles, casi
demasiado” in these stories.
284
If “El fiord” includes allusions to Juán and Eva Perón,
Confederación General de Trabajadores (CGT), and popular slogans like “Dos, Tres,
Vietnam!,” “El niño proletario” engages, starting from its title, with Marxist discourse
and analysis.
285
Yet difficulties emerge the minute one tries to “make sense” of these
violent orgies of language. “El fiord” does render contemporary Argentina as “an
incestuous family” as Rosana argues, yet the reader cannot confidently pinpoint who is
who, doing what, or to what effect in the story.
286
For instance, Carla Greta Terón (the
coerced partner of the Peronesque strongman El Loco Rodríguez), whose name alludes to
CGT and Evita at the same time, inexplicably plots against the sovereign after having sex
with and breastfeeding the narrator, who is referred to as a “seminarista,” a religious
conservative.
287
Or when “El niño proletario” perversely stages the Marxist analysis of

284
Aira, prologue to Novelas y cuentos, 11.
285
Osvaldo Lamborghini, “El fiord,” in Novelas y cuentos, ed. César Aira (Barcelona:
Ediciones del Serbal, 1988), 33.
286
Susana Rosano, “El arte como crueldad,” in Y todo el resto es literatura, ed. Juan
Pablo Dabove and Natalia Brizuela (Buenos Aires: Interzona Editora, 2008), 209.
287
Lamborghini, “El fiord,” 24.
123
class conflict as a sadistic orgy between schoolboys, we have no way of ascertaining
what, if anything, the acts in that orgy may mean.
288

Theories of psychoanalysis, often accepted as the “matrix productiva” of
Lamborghini’s texts, do not help us out of these hermeneutic impasses.
289
The authors of
Literal refused using “psicoanálisis como metalenguaje, como explicación de la
literatura,” which the impenetrability of their work attests for.
290
As John Kraniauskas has
shown for “El fiord,” Lamborghini juxtaposes different, at times opposed,
psychoanalytical “intertexts” in ways that can only be stabilized by compromising the
multiplicity of meanings of his works.
291
With Lamborghini we face, then, literature
produced with the express desire to give pleasure, language, and the pleasure of language
free rein, orgiastic texts that are suspended undecidably between allegory and
pornography. As despicable rest, useless waste, and inassimilable excess, abjection is at
the center of this interplay between language and sexuality, guaranteeing that the stories
do not become purely pornographic or purely allegorical.

3.2 | “El fiord”: Routes of Abjection
“El fiord,” Lamborghini’s first published work, shaped the author’s image for decades to
come, identifying him as a poète maudit with its wild experimentation with language and
lurid representations of sexual violence. Part of the fascination around “El fiord” had to
do with its scenes of abjection: the story includes a violent birth, multiple scenes of

288
Osvaldo Lamborghini, “El niño proletario,” in Novelas y cuentos, ed. César Aira
(Barcelona: Ediciones del Serbal, 1988), 63-69.
289
Rosano, “El arte como crueldad,” 204.
290
“La historia no es todo,” 44.
291
John Kraniauskas, “PORNO-REVOLUTION: ‘El fiord’ and the eva-peronist state.”
Angelaki 6, no. 1 (2011): 150.
124
defecation, and acts of mutilation and cannibalism. After taking a look at the story’s
biopolitical setup, where access to sex and food determines one’s relation to power, I will
explore the political force and functions of abjection within this constellation. “El fiord”
creates an oneiric landscape from the conflicts in the aftermath of the Revolución
Libertadora (1955), yet in a way that does not allow for coherent allegorical readings.
The abject, which in the story permeates every aspect of the digestive circle, here
acquires a force that asks us to reconsider, at once, the sexuality of politics and the
politics of sexuality.
This was a turbulent period in Argentine history. In 1955, the second government
of Juán Perón was overthrown by a military coup that came to be known as Revolución
Libertadora; the charismatic leader had to go into exile in Spain. The new head of state,
Pedro Eugenio Aramburu, banned Peronism and all of its manifestations; in the next
decade, presidents would lift the ban and reintroduce it a number of times. Neither
Aramburu nor his successors—Arturo Frondizi, José María Guido, and Juan Carlos
Onganía—could maintain political stability for a long period. “El fiord” responds to this
highly polarized political field, transforming its antagonisms into orgiastic interactions
between bodies.
“El fiord” sets up a biopolitical configuration where sex and consumption, along
with the pleasures attached to these acts, are hierarchically bestowed and denied to
subjects. Lamborghini marks the near-homophony between comer (to eat) and coger (to
fuck), weaving them into a nexus of corporeality where, beyond a “de-differentiation of
bodily orifices and the physical pleasures…associated with them” as Kraniauskas has
argued, each act sheds light on the other: sex appears as a need as vital as consumption
125
and consumption as a pleasure that only intensifies with lack, rather than sinking into the
realm of need and survival.
292

At the top of this biopolitical order is El Loco Rodríguez, the sadistic sovereign of
“El fiord” mostly interpreted as a Peronesque patriarch who “se sacia en y sobre los
cuerpos.”
293
With a fearsome whip at his hand, the Boss penetrates whomever he pleases
and sovereignly decides who is to partake in the use of bodies and who to be denied. “El
fiord” indeed begins before beginning with El Loco Rodríguez’s violation of Carla Greta
Terón—a figure that alludes to Evita Perón as well as to CGT (Confederación General de
los Trabajadores)—who, in the first pages of the story, struggles to give birth to his son
(one can even read the painful birth as an inverse and indirect penetration). During this
scene, we see the Boss vaginally penetrate the laboring mother—as if to push out the
baby—and then anally rape the narrator. El Loco Rodríguez is the only one described to
achieve orgasm in “El fiord” except the narrator, but this last act will be, precisely, an act
of rebellion against his sovereign rule.
294
Penetration, invariably an act of power and
pleasure in Lamborghini’s fiction, is the domain of the Boss, who violates his subjects to
satisfy himself and reconfirm their subjugation (Tadeys, Lamborghini’s posthumous and
incomplete novel, is the most extended exploration of this motif). The sovereign also has
absolute control over the domain of consumption. After the birth of Atilio Tancredo
Vacán, a reference to the union leader Augusto Timoteo Vandor, we see him convene a
feast of celebration, bringing some of his subjects forcefully to the table while denying
food to others. El Loco Rodríguez, then, exercises sovereign control over sex and

292
Kraniauskas, “PORNO-REVOLUTION,” 150.
293
Perlongher, “Ondas,” 200.
294
Lamborghini, “El fiord,” 19-28.
126
consumption—the two major spheres of life in “El fiord.” As such, the Boss appears as
the virile ideal of what Derrida calls “carno-phallagocentrism,” the chef d’Etat who eats
meat and is eaten in turn (in “El fiord” this takes place only after the sovereign’s
overthrow), and penetrates whomever he wills.
295

At the other end of the biopolitical spectrum is Sebas, a figure of absolute lack
that has been interpreted in contrary ways. Aira has famously suggested that the name is
an allusion to bases (masses), the crowds of Peron supporters left to their misery after the
Revolución Libertadora that deposed their charismatic leader.
296
Ludmer, on the other
hand, has concentrated on another anagram, sabes (the second-person singular of “to
know”), and thus read Sebas as “the power of knowledge without the use of the body.”
297

Considering the name’s religious connotations, she reads this intellectual as “Saint
Sebastian or the martyr of his faith, the oppressed-repressed.”
298
In the story there are
indeed clues that could identify Sebas as a Peronist intellectual: the narrator reminisces,
for instance, about their days together in the Guardia Restauradora (an ultra-Catholic and
anti-communist Peronist group led by the priest Julio Meinvielle) and about listening to a
talk about Marxism by a former suboficial (non-commisioned officer) discharged with
the Revolución Libertadora.
299
Insofar as the intellectual (sabes) ultimately desires to
identify with the masses (bases), one could say that “El fiord” merges together the
political subject with the object of his desire. Although there is an abyss between the

295
Jacques Derrida, “‘Eating Well’, or the Calculation of the Subject,” interview by Jean
Luc-Nancy, trans. Peter Connell and Avital Ronell, in Who comes after the subject?, ed.
Eduardo Cadava (New York and London: Routledge, 1991), 113-114.
296
Aira, prologue to “El fiord,” 11.
297
Ludmer, The Gaucho Genre, 152.
298
Ibid., 151.
299
Lamborghini, “El fiord,” 21-22.
127
Argentine intellectual and the masses, Lamborghini’s oneiric text is capable of
condensing these contrary figures into a single image and evoking them both at one
stroke.
Extreme lack has turned Sebas, this composite figure, into a subhuman creature in
whom “bare life” has expanded its sphere to coincide completely with subjectivity.
300
As
Ludmer notes, Sebas is “excluded from the use of the body”: the narrator playfully tells
us that he is not given anything to “eat” nor anyone to “fuck.” Indeed, when Sebas
attempts to join the orgy between El Loco Rodríguez, Alcira Fafó, and the narrator, he
will immediately receive a violent kick in the throat; when everyone is gathered for the
feast celebrating the birth of Atilio Tancredo Vacán, the starving Sebas will be chained to
the wall, made to watch the meal without being able to take part. As the homo sacer of
the group, Sebas’ relation to power is determined by this exclusion from sex and
consumption itself—he is included through exclusion. The narrator’s first description of
Sebas links his image with others that can “be killed yet not sacrificed”
301
:
(Como nunca le dábamos de comer parecía, el entrañable Sebas, un
enfermo de anemia perniciosa, una geografía del hambre, un judío de
campo de concentración—si es que alguna vez existieron los campos de
concentración—, un miserable y ventrudo infante tucumano, famélico
pero barrigón).
302

It is telling that the narrator compares Sebas, among other emaciated subjects, to a Jewish
inmate from a Nazi concentration camp, the very place where, according to Agamben,

300
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-
Roazen (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998), 151.
301
Ibid., 73.
302
Lamborghini, “El fiord,” 21.
128
bare life becomes immanent with the political sphere.
303
Deprived of sex and food, Sebas
is he is no longer a citizen entitled to political life (bios), but bare life (zoe) that is striving
for satisfaction, a subhuman conjunction of unrealized and exacerbated needs. The
famished, the sick, and the poor are all homo sacer, doubly excluded men that can be
killed with impunity yet not sacrificed. Hunger, sickness, and abject poverty create states
of lack where animal life (zoe) dictates its demands with relentless intensity; all these
limit experiences of corporeality are deemed interchangeable and equally subhuman in
“El fiord.”
Sebas and El Loco Rodríguez, then, represent opposed yet mutually constitutive
poles within the biopolitical field as the homo sacer and the sovereign. All the other
dwellers of the cellar find themselves in a vaguely defined intermediary space, where
they partake in sex and consumption to the extent that the sovereign allows them. We see,
for instance, Alcira Fafó ask and get to be penetrated by the narrator, who is in turn
penetrated by El Loco Rodríguez. Similarly, each dweller of the putrid cellar except
Sebas has a place at the table for the feast celebrating the birth of Atilio Tancredo Vacán.
Every gastronomic act (defecation, breast-feeding, eating the phallus) and affect (hunger,
taste, disgust) in “El fiord” acquires its true meaning within this biopolitical constellation.
When the narrator, for instance, secretly has sex with CGT and drinks her breast milk, his
doubly transgressive act will transform the entire political sphere.
304
This is not to
suggest, however, that Lamborghini merely translates or allegorizes Argentine politics,
understood in mostly discursive and non-corporeal terms, into the plane of libidinal
exchanges. “El fiord” at once reveals the politicity of libido and the libidinality of politics

303
Agamben, Homo Sacer, 166-181.
304
Lamborghini, “El fiord,” 20-28.
129
by weaving the two fields into a narrative that does not allow for allegorical excavations
of meaning.
Within the biopolitical configuration of “El fiord,” hunger, understood as a
pressing need for food as well as for sex, appears as a state of abjection that pushes the
subject into a subhuman existence. In Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, Kristeva
describes the abject, among other ways, as a sinister contradiction: “a terror that
dissembles, a hatred that smiles, a passion that uses the body for barter instead of
inflaming it, a debtor who sells you up, a friend who stabs you.”
305
Abjection erupts when
laws, order, and borders are not respected, and at such moments of vile deception, the
“fragility of the law” becomes particularly visible.
306
One of the effects of prolonged
hunger on Sebas is to turn him into a bearer of abject contradictions: “un miserable y
ventrudo infante tucumano, famélico pero barrigón.”
307
Of course, emaciation is not
shady or scheming in itself. And yet, the belly protrusion of emaciated subjects does
appear like a sinister joke—as if hunger, when it reaches extreme levels, somehow
violates its own law, becoming hypocritical, conceitful, and thus repulsive. The narrator
exploits this duplicitous image of hunger in his cruel portrayal of Sebas as abjection
incarnate, as the homo sacer at the threshold of the human.
Another concrete sign of Sebas’ abject existence is his incontinent mouth, which,
rather than regulating intake, leaks out putrid liquids without control. The narrator tells us
that the homo sacer’s “estómago siempre vacío segragara esa baba verde cuya fetidez
tornaba irrespirable el aire”; Sebas lives “entre vómitos de sangre…cada una de sus

305
Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 4.
306
Ibid.
307
Lamborghini, “El fiord,” 21.
130
arcadas era una especie de alarido sin fe.”
308
The starved man’s oral activity, then,
consists of violent outbursts of abjection rather than deliberate intakes of food and drinks.
The mouth, which normally enforces a sort of “border control” and thus often symbolizes
the free will, has become a sewage pipe from which waste leaks out without regulation.
In the next section, we will see how such outbursts also mark the genealogy of proletarian
life in “El niño proletario.” Their common effect is to bestialize the subject—not in the
sense of turning him into an animal, but reducing him to a state of indistinction deemed
as subhuman.
The words that come out of this mouth are, likewise, nothing but abject residues.
Writing on Verkhovensky, a character from Dostoevsky’s The Possessed, Kristeva notes
that when paternal laws collapse, a “clammy, cunning appeal to ideals that no longer
exist” becomes abject.
309
Sebas is too miserable to be cunning, yet in the wake of
Peronist law, the political slogans he babbles—e.g. “¡Viva el plan de la lucha!”—do
acquire an abject quality. These are among the “restos” (remains) that Lamborghini
makes uses of in his “mezcla de códigos,” which juxtaposes strikingly different
registers.
310
They are no longer backed by the paternal law from which they gained force,
nor do they have any performative power to articulate new alliances, or what Ernesto
Laclau and Chantal Mouffe would call “chains of equivalence.”
311
These abject wastes
spasmodically come out of Sebas’s mouth like spurts of blood and saliva. Although the
abjection of these slogans acquires their truest color in the putrid mouth of Sebas, all

308
Ibid., 22.
309
Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 19.
310
Germán García, epilogue to El fiord (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Chinatown, 1969), 45.
311
Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a
Radical Democratic Politics (New York and London: Verso, 2001), 130.
131
political discourse in “El fiord” is useless excess, waste, remains. When, at the story’s
famous ending, the inmates finally exit the cellar to join a demonstration, hackneyed
slogans—“No Seremos Nunca Carne Bolchevique. “Dios Patria Hogar”. “Dos, Tres
Vietnam”. “Perón Es Revolución”—will appear in iridescent neon lighting,
communicating their abject anachronism.
312
Lamborghini thus renders an entire political
field as a space of abjection.
Emaciation does not merely render the body abject, but also compromises
subjectivity by eradicating the possibility of all moral discrimination. In “El fiord,” this
loss is metonymized by Sebas’ lack of discrimination in taste. To use Brillat-Savarin’s
distinction in Physiologie du goût, Sebas is no longer a “man of mind” who knows how
to “eat” (manger), but a subhuman creature that merely “fills itself” (repaître) for
survival.
313
When the overthrown El Loco Rodríguez is dismembered for consumption,
the homo sacer will be content with the worst pieces, licking the “trozos irreconocibles”
in his corner like a starved dog.
314
In his state of indistinction, Sebas resembles the
“Muselmann,” concentration camp jargon for the inmate at the last stage of deprivation
before death. The Holocaust survivor Jean Améry describes the Muselmann as
…the prisoner who was giving up and was given up by his comrades, no
longer had room in his consciousness for the contrasts good or bad, noble

312
Lamborghini, “El fiord,” 33.
313
Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, The Physiology of Taste; or Transcendental
Gastronomy, trans. Fayette Robinson (Philedelphia: Lindsay and Blakiston, 1854), 25.
314
Lamborghini, “El fiord,” 33.
132
or base, intellectual or unintellectual. He was a staggering corpse, a bundle
of physical functions in its last convulsions.
315

Améry’s description captures the physiological state in which Sebas finds himself;
Craving for food to the point of absolute indiscrimination, he has almost taken the
Muselmann’s irreversible step beyond the threshold of life.
Yet Sebas differs from the Muselmann in a fundamental way, a difference that
provides a crucial insight into how Lamborghini conceives need and desire. Unlike the
dying camp inmate, Sebas still has not given up—his unfulfilled needs only make him
desire stronger. After all, the homo sacer here conspires against and helps overthrowing
the sovereign. This resilience is partly explained by the way in which Lamborghini
conflates sex and consumption. In the fictional universe of “El fiord,” sex is a need as
vital as eating and consumption is a desire that only exacerbates with lack. Let alone
losing his libido like the Muselmann, Sebas gets even hornier with prolonged lack. As we
have seen, though emaciated to the limit, Sebas still attempts to partake in the orgy to
quench his sexual desire. Conversely, hunger appears as an intensifying desire rather than
a need that, if unmet, brings death. Hunger, understood as a craving for food and sex,
only gets stronger in “El fiord,” rather than decomposing the organism into a state of
renouncement as in the case of the Muselmann.
“El fiord” represents the emaciated Sebas, and the bare life that becomes visible
in him, without any pathos.
316
As Rosano notes, there is “ninguna piedad, ninguna

315
Jean Améry, At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its
Realities, trans. Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella P. Rosenfeld (Bloomington: Indiana UP,
1980), 9.
316
As we will see soon, a similar cruelty pervades “El niño proletario,” which narrates
the violent abuse and execution of a proletarian schoolboy without any pity.
133
ternura, ninguna humanidad” in the story.
317
Lamborghini achieves this cruelty through
various narratological techniques. In works of fiction, just as in our everyday lives,
apathy is contagious. It is partly the narrator’s sadistic lack of compassion that determines
the affective tone of our reading experience. Even though he calls Sebas “entrañable”
[dear] and reminisces about their days of militancy, the narrator has no sympathy for
Sebas either as a countryman nor as a human being—in fact, these superficial displays of
affection only add to his cruelty.
318
In the description we have examined, the narrator’s
repeated use of metaphors (e.g. “una geografía del hambre,” “un miserable y ventrudo
infante tucumano”) assumes the form of a tirade where the speaker gets more callous
with each outburst of verbal abuse. The fact that this derisive portrayal takes place
between parentheses adds to its cruelty; Sebas’ starvation is given as a mere side note, as
an afterthought. The narrator also gives credit, once again in passing, to the anti-Semitic
doubt regarding the existence of concentration camps, a rhetorical move doubly resonant
in Argentina, which became a shelter to both Jewish refugees and former Nazis after
WW2. Secondly, what Juan Pablo Dabove writes about “El niño proletario” also holds
true for “El fiord”: much like ¡Estropeado!, the raped and murdered protagonist of the
story, Sebas lacks interiority.
319
In other words, the emaciated homo sacer is also as flat
as a piece of paper. As David Oubiña notes, although cruelty is minutely described in “El
fiord” much like in Lautreaumont’s Les chants de Maldoror, it is inscribed on “cuerpos

317
Rosano, “El arte como crueldad,” 211.
318
Lamborghini, “El fiord,” 21.
319
Juan Pablo Dabove, “‘La muerte la tiene con otros’: sobre El niño proletario,” in Y
todo el resto es literatura, 223.
134
impersonales.”
320
Numbed by a cruel narrator and presented with impersonal bodies, the
reader feels no pathos towards the characters, including Sebas.
It is partly this “spectacular” cruelty that critics try to account for by referring to
“pornography” or, even more vaguely, to the “pornographic” when talking about “El
fiord.” We need to clarify, however, what these loaded terms might mean in the context
of Lamborghini’s works. Pornography is often thought to gratify “scopophilia,” an
pleasure Freud first identified in Three Essays on Sexuality, where the subject watches
others as mere objects “through a curious and controlling gaze.”
321
Laura Mulvey, who
famously discussed the implications of the Freudian notion for a feminist critique of
cinematic language, notes the importance of a “sense of separation” for the operation of
voyeuristic pleasures.
322
Most pornography encourages scopophilia as the spectator
observes the suffering and pleasures of others—mostly women since heterosexual porn
still dominates the market—at a distance where nothing can disturb his controlling and
objectifying gaze. Yet “El fiord” demonstrates how scenes of abjection effectively
interrupt this voyeuristic pleasure. When we read about the green and putrid liquid
seeping from Sebas’s mouth, we are not Peeping Toms safely watching the performance
from a distance, but bodies under attack; we experience retchings and spasms, reactions
with which we try to protect ourselves from the abject.
323
The story collapses the distance

320
David Oubiña, “De la literatura entendida como delirium tremens,” in Y todo el resto
es literatura, 76.
321
Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Film Theory and Criticism
: Introductory Readings, eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford UP,
1999), 835.
322
Ibid., 836.
323
Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 2.
135
required for scopophilia and “touches” us through this evocation of disgust, forcing us to
divert our gaze, so to speak.
“El fiord,” then, sets up a biopolitical configuration where access to sex (coger)
and food (comer) determine one’s relation to sovereignty. Within this framework,
hunger—understood both literally and libidinally—is equivalent to disempowerment.
Lamborghini portrays emaciation a state of abjection that compromises subjectivity and
forces the body into contradictions. No longer capable of moral or gustatory
discrimination, the emaciated subject dwells on the uncertain border of the human. This
state of abjection in turn mirrors his position as the homo sacer, excluded from the
community yet kept in relation through the same exclusion. Lamborghini’s aesthetic
achievement in “El fiord” is to represent the emaciated subject not within a framework of
pity that would have capitalized on his suffering, but through a distinctive cruelty that at
once exposes the dynamics of power and makes us question our emotional responses as
readers.
* * *
Prolonged hunger, along with its effects on the body and the mind, are explored
with painful cruelty in “El fiord.” Yet the story also includes two meals: the feast
gathered by El Loco Rodríguez after the birth of Atilio Tancredo Vacán and the ritualistic
consumption of the ex-sovereign’s body, including his phallus, after his overthrow. Given
the importance of consumption in the story’s biopolitical configuration, both meals reveal
and perform shifts in power, or, more specifically, in what Jacques Rancièré calls “the
136
distribution of the perceptible [partage du sensible].”
324
The abject, as the purged excess
that, through its exclusion, upholds the current division of goods, becomes instrumental
in these displacements and repetitions of power and its law. While the feasts in the story
are overdetermined with the conflicts of contemporary Argentine politics, their signifying
practice cannot be stabilized into coherent narratives. “El fiord” here performs a truly
“literal” operation, establishing connections between signifiers through letters and
accents, encouraging allegorical readings without providing a secure anchor, activating
networks of signification without any possibility of closure.
The first meal, gathered to introduce a new political figure into the current
constellation of power, becomes the scene of a revolt that upends the current distribution
of the perceptible. The newly born is Atilio Tancredo Vacán, whose name alludes—
through matching initials and syllable count—to Augusto Timoteo Vandor, the director
of the Unión Obrera Metalúrgica. But the bisyllabic and accented last name also
associates the infant with Carla Greta Terón,
325
that is, with the Confederación General
del Trabajo (CGT), and with Eva and Juan Perón. Sitting ATV in his lap, El Loco
Rodríguez seems not at all troubled by the birth of a child that, like Kronos from
Hesiod’s Theogony, will eventually strive to castrate him—Augusto Timoteo Vandor,
whom Peron initially supported, was to advocate a “Peronism without Perón” about two
years before Lamborghini penned his story. He sits at the head of the table, reaffirming
his sovereign position as the pater familias. As the uncontested origin and progenitor, he
provides and distributes the food, deciding on sovereign terms who is to get which part.

324
Jacques Rancièré, “The Politics of Literature,” in The Politics of Literature, trans.
Julie Rose (Cambridge: Polity, 2011), 4.
325
Beyond “literal” play, Lamborghini’s constant alteration of names could be thought as
a ludic response to the Proscripción, where even referring to Perón was prohibited.
137
Identifying the ones who “count”—Sebas, for instance, is excluded from the table—as
well as the goods they are due, the patriarch dictates a certain “distribution of the
perceptible.”
326
He would eventually pass on this authority to his son, who would in turn
be expected to uphold and preserve his phallic law. “El fiord” seems to refer to Perón’s
initial support of Vandor, since the infant does not in any way undermine the sovereign’s
authority in the story.
Each cellar-dweller has a designated place at the table (or, in the case of Sebas,
outside it), representing their position within the hierarchy. By attesting to the feast and
eating the food provided, they are to affirm the patriarch and his sovereign division of
goods, reconfirming their subjection as well as subjectivity. The narrator, befitting his
literary function as the mediator, becomes the maître, responsible for fetching everyone
to the table. As the mother and the sovereign’s coerced partner, Carla Greta Terón has to
attest the “initiation” of her son into the political field; consequently, El Loco Rodríguez
orders the narrator to roll the new mother’s bed near the table, adding that “la rociaremos
con unas salsas” so that the peacock meat would not affect her.
327
Similarly, Alcira
Fafó—possibly an allusion to Arturo Frondizi, president of Argentina from 1958 to
1962—is coerced by the narrator to sit at the table (to the left of El Loco Rodríguez,
possibly alluding to Frondizi’s left-wing leanings). Sebas, on the other hand, is chained to
a metal ring on the wall, forced to witness the feast he is not allowed to join. The chains
materialize his condition as homo sacer: he is included only through an exclusion, he is
subjected but is less than a subject.
328
In this division of the sensible, the intellectuals are

326
Rancièré, “The Politics of Literature,” 4.
327
Lamborghini, “El fiord,” 27.
328
Ibid.
138
condemned to starvation, placed in a position to simply confirm sovereignty by attesting
to its pornographic feasts. Lamborghini, then, deploys the performativity of the family
table, where members reconfirm their subjection and subjectivity by consumption, in
order to weave allegorical threads that are not, however, ultimately decipherable into
coherent narratives.
The food to be eaten collectively—peacock served with its feathers intact—
reconfirms the symbolic nature of the feast. Given the popularity of red meat in
Argentina and the prominence of the asado (with all the symbolic associations between
meat eating and virility) in the national culture, roasted peacock is a doubly curious
choice. A bird of ornamental rather than gastronomic value, the peacock—served,
moreover, with its feathers intact—lays bare the performativity of the feast: the captives
are gathered not, or at least not principally, to enjoy the food and the drinks (even though
the narrator is exuberant about the red wine) but to affirm their subjection to the new
configuration of power.
It is within the story’s biopolitical constellation, where eating and fucking are acts
of power, and in the context of the feast, which assigns positions to subjects that are to be
subjectivated, that the narrator’s clandestine act of sex and consumption acquires its true
subversive colors. When El Loco Rodríguez asks him to bring Carla Greta Terón to the
table, the narrator uses the opportunity to seduce the new mother; after fucking twice, he
sucks her breastmilk.
329
Both having sex with the mother, the patriarch’s wife and
property, and sucking her breastmilk are inextricably libidinal and political acts that
contest the present division of the sensible. Indeed, sucking breastmilk could be

329
Ibid., 28.
139
considered the maternal counterpart of consuming the father’s phallus, which in Totem
and Taboo amounts to the overthrow of the patriarch and the internalization of his law,
and likewise incites an ambiguous rebellion.
330
The copulation-consumption is naturally
tinged with the Oedipal desire for the mother. And yet, this maternal reunion is not an
escapist fantasy but the very seed of subversion in “El fiord.” After having sex with Carla
Greta Terón and drinking her milk, the narrator takes off “his socks and scapular”—that
is, leaves behind his religious-political identification—and then conspires against El Loco
Rodríguez.
331
In a biopolitical framework where access to sex and food marks one’s
relation to power, engaging in intercourse and consumption behind the sovereign’s back
represent the true acts of subversion. The narrator clandestinely satisfies the two
pleasures that, in Lamborghini’s universe, incarnate power. Through these acts of
corporeal engagement, the narrator steps beyond the subject-position assigned to him by
the sovereign: “Y cuando entré al comedor empujando la cama, yo, yo era otro.”
332

In “El fiord,” the forceful intensity of such bodily impulses contrast sharply with
the banal impotence of revolutionary discourses. As we have seen, political slogans
appear in the story as the abject residues of ideologies that no longer signify or produce
any meaningful effect. By contrast, as Perlongher highlights, every form of resistance
“pasa por el plano de los cuerpos” in Lamborghini’s fiction.
333
It is not words, ideas, or
alliances formed through discourse that turn the table, but an outburst of abjection, an

330
Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, trans. James Strachey (Oxford: Routledge, 1999),
141-142.
331
Lamborghini, “El fiord,” 28.
332
Ibid.
333
Perlongher, “Ondas,” 200.
140
uncontrollable bodily impulse that disrupts the present constellation of power. When the
peacock is served along with red wine, the narrator begins to feel sick:
Pero no sé por qué—o lo sé de sobra—se me cerró el estómago. Peor aún.
Mis intestinos empezaron a planificar una inminente colitis. Al primer
retortijón me doblé en dos y el Trompa Amo y Señor ya me miró con mala
cara.
334

Reason, then, follows the bodily impulse—the narrator only understands why he is
feeling sick after feeling the first cramp. While bodies may and do resist power, in
Lamborghini’s fiction they are not docile tools that subjects can manipulate with
deliberation but a configuration of forces that control our entire being. Revolt is here not
a hegemonic act of volition and articulation, but a reflexive and intractable bodily
reaction to the divisions of the sensible. In this foregrounding of bodily impulses over
political slogans, it is possible to find an oblique critique of syndicate and party politics in
Argentina—or at least a commentary on their futility.
At a feast celebrating patriarchal hegemony, defecation constitutes the most
radical act of political resistance. It mobilizes the material resources of the body rather
than the rhetorical means of discourse to rise against the sovereign’s equally material
division of the sensible. Unable to comply with the threats of El Loco Rodriguez even if
he wanted to do so, the narrator begins to defecate:
E ipso facto me cagué con alma y vida. Estruendosamente, para colmo.
Una mueca de incontenible ira ensombreció el rostro del Loco, quien con
esa habilidad que sólo puede dar la costumbre, sacó de su canana una

334
Lamborghini, “El fiord,” 29.
141
puntera de acero y la añadió al extremo del Látigo. Pero el asombro lo
detuvo, porque yo, mirándolo a los ojos y con una sonrisa de oreja a oreja,
me recontracagué nuevamente.
335

The narrator’s irreverent Cheshire grin testifies to the force of his stinking act of
defiance. What can truly undermine the sovereign is not words or ideas, but a disruption
of the normalized flows of materiality. As if to emphasize the political force of the abject,
Lamborghini gives us a hyperbolic and vivid image: the narrator’s feces reaches up to the
ceiling, hanging from there “como hollado por patas de fieras, aunque era sólo
mierda.”
336
Abjection defies El Loco Rodríguez not because it is unhealthy or disgusting
but because it violates the norms of consumption, that is, because it “disturbs identity,
system, order.”
337
As the putrid matter leaves the his body, the narrator’s role as diner and
maître is compromised once and for all—and the table etiquette grossly violated. The
abject is always already political since by drawing the subject “toward the place where
meaning collapses,” it compromises the very operation of hegemonic articulation.
338
One
has to in-corporate and refrain from ex-corporation during meals—defecation turns the
table and reorders the partition of the sensible.
The partition of El Loco Rodríguez’s body performatively lays out the new
configuration of power. Although the parts are not distributed according to a strictly
allegorical logic, we glimpse the new distribution of the perceptible. Alcira gets the eyes,
Alejo Varilio Basán—the name phonetically and rhythmically resembles Atilio Tancredo
Vacán—“la pierna achicada,” Cagreta—referring to Carla Greta Terón—the entire head,

335
Ibid.
336
Ibid.
337
Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 4.
338
Ibid., 2.
142
and the narrator eats a hand.
339
These are the ones that “count” in the equilibrium
established after the overthrow of El Loco Rodríguez.
340
While Sebas, fitting to his role
in killing the sovereign does get to eat some parts, his position vis-à-vis power does not
change in any radical way. Despite the overthrow of the tyrant that had condemned him
to starvation, his misery continues. As subhuman life, he once again gets the worst parts
and licks “en su rincón,” much like a starved dog, “trozos irreconocibles.”
341
The
quartering and consumption of the sovereign’s body, then, is as politically charged as the
interrupted feast celebrating the birth of Atilio Tancredo Vacán. To implement and
reconfirm the new division of the sensible, Lamborghini’s cellar-dwellers literally divide
up and incorporate the sovereign body.
In this partition, the sacred body of the sovereign immediately turns into abjection
through a transformation that not only reveals their mutual constitution, but also
comments on the political and economic reorganization of the Argentine state after the
overthrow of Perón. We see Alcira Fafó (also referred to as Aicyrfó and Arafó) carefully
divide the bodily remains into small pieces so that “lo que quedó de la hermosa veta de
carne humana” easily finds “su destino final en nuestro pútrido inodoro.”
342
Once the
sovereign principle—a principle that unifies and organizes the parts—leaves the scene,
the sacred and “beautiful” body becomes abject waste to be flushed. If Alcira Fafó indeed
stands for Arturo Frondizi, the president is given the task of dissecting Peronism into
pieces, deciding the parts that will survive—“assimilated” within different institutions—

339
Lamborghini, “El fiord,” 32-33.
340
Jacques Rancièré, Dis-agreement, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1999), 6.
341
Lamborghini, “El fiord,” 33.
342
Ibid., 32.
143
and those that are to be discarded. The contraction “Arafó, the simile of moving “como
pez en el agua,” and later the gongs: this Orientalist caricature of Arturo Frondizi seems
to comment ironically on the speed with which the president “butchers” Perón’s
economic policies in the wake of the military coup.
343

The destiny of El Loco Rodríguez’s mutilated phallus, cooked and consumed
separately in a ritualistic manner, comments obliquely on the shifts of power after the
Revolución Libertadora. When it is time to quarter the fallen sovereign, Alcira Fafó gives
the priority to the sacred organ, which lands in the hands of Carla Greta Terón, who in
turn tosses it into a frying pan.
344
Every movement of the phallus, the incarnation of
sovereign power, is charged with political meaning in a way that, unlike the rest of “El
fiord,” allows for an allegorical reading: the exiled Perón’s authority passes on briefly to
CGT, which nonetheless allows this force to be “eaten away” by the new contenders of
the political scene.
The story culminates with the collective consumption of El Loco Rodríguez’s
phallus, which further reveals the interconnectedness of the abject and the sacred.
According to Kristeva, abjection underlies every form of the sacred and reappears at their
collapse.
345
The overthrow of El Loco Rodríguez first occasions a sacred ritual within
which, however, abjection erupts. A striking contrast exists between El Loco Rodríguez’s
celebratory feast and the incorporation of his phallus: whereas the first is cut short by an
outburst of irreverent abjection, the second is carried out in the solemnity of a sacred
ritual. Alcira Fafó sounds three gongs in ritualistic repetition, and silence reigns in the

343
Ibid.
344
Ibid.
345
Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 17.
144
room as the sacred organ is served; no words that might distract the eaters or busy their
mouths are allowed as the victorious revolutionaries devour the phallus. Nevertheless, the
sacred limb becomes a source of abjection once it is no longer attached to the body of the
sovereign. The story emphasizes the abjectness of the phallus by rendering the scene of
consumption as a multisensorial experience. First comes the smell: once the phallus is
cooked, Alcira Fafó lifts the lid to smell “el aroma con fruición.”
346
Any allusion to the
odor of a limb, whether attached to a body or not, is bound to elicit a visceral reaction
from the reader; that the odorous limb in question is a genital organ adds further
sensations linked with promiscuity. Salvador Dalí’s El gran masturbador, which evokes
a wide range of feelings from erotic fascination to disgust, is a good example of how
cultural projections of bodily odor viscerally stimulate their audience. Next comes the
taste: Alcira Fafó dips a little ball of bread crumb to taste “el ahora vitaminizado aceite”
and looks at the others “con ojos chispeantes,” like an affectionate mother about to serve
food to her family.
347
A subtle parody of the auratic institution of motherhood here
conspires with the repulsion of fatty food to create abject effects. And finally comes the
touch: holding the knife between her teeth, Alcira Fafó grabs the fried penis with both
hands. This multisensorial portrayal of the cooked phallus is designed to elicit feelings of
abjection, to make the reader retch. Lamborghini thus underlines, in unmistakable and
indelible fashion, the abject underneath the sacred, which, as Kristeva notes, forcefully
comes out once the institution bestowing its aura falls into pieces.
Much like its mutilation and preparation, the hasty consumption of the phallus
allegorizes the vicious power grab after Perón’s downfall, where each political figure

346
Lamborghini, “El fiord,” 33.
347
Ibid.
145
desires a larger share in the new division of the sensible. Although Alcira Fafó, as the
new maître, serves each an equal part of the phallus, fear and envy—rather than the
tranquility of an equitable distribution—dominate the scene. Each devours the penis with
the haste of a child afraid that a sibling might grab his share. Their murmurs—the
narrator reports a grumpy “con tu pan te lo comas”—reveal that they are envious for a
larger share from the phallic authority of the former sovereign.
348
“El fiord” thus
represents the redistribution of political power after the Revolución Libertadora as an
abject feast where each political figure anxiously strives to increase his share in the new
partition of the sensible.
While the interruption of the celebratory feast subverts the first partition, the
incorporation of the former sovereign’s phallus re-establishes it in changed form. We
temporarily witness the “collapse of paternal laws,” only to be reinstated with different
actors.
349
Kristeva describes the abject as “perverse” in that “it neither gives up nor
assumes a prohibition, a rule, or a law; but turns them aside, misleads, corrupts; uses
them, takes advantage of them, the better to deny them.”
350
Such double-dealing
perversity characterizes the revolt in “El fiord.” Lamborghini’s cellar-dwellers attack and
overthrow the patriarch El Loco Rodríguez, but do not contest the patriarchal law itself,
whose embodiment, the phallus, they are more than willing to incorporate. The narrator,
let us remember, stops Carla Greta Terón from poisoning El Loco Rodríguez with
“mortales dosis de barbitúricos,” presumably because the poison would render the
sovereign’s phallus inedible—the aim is not simply to overthrow the sovereign but to

348
Ibid.
349
Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 20.
350
Ibid., 15.
146
incorporate his patriarchal authority.
351
In “El fiord,” as Kraniauskas succinctly puts it,
“Revolution and Carnival” are quickly transformed into “Repetition and Myth.”
352
I
therefore disagree with Premat, who argues that
el parricidio no suscita la culpa y la integración retrospectiva de la ley. El
padre no se transforma en “Padre muerto” como figura de referencia para
regular la vida colectiva, su muerte no permite la emergencia de la
civilización.”
353

While “guilt” may be irrelevant to the revolution in “El fiord” and “civilization” nowhere
visible, the story does highlight the danger of incorporating and repeating the Peronist
law. The final meal in “El fiord,” then, lays bare the “perversity” of Peronist politics.
“El fiord” constructs a biopolitical framework in which consumption and sex, or
eating (comer) and fucking (coger), constitute the true axes of power. Hunger,
understood to include sexual lack, here appears as a desubjectifying force that pushes the
individual towards a zone of indistinction, where he, as the ab-ject, uneasily dwells at the
threshold of the human. Consumption (along with consummation), on the other hand, is
an act that performatively (re)affirms the divisions of the sensible. Within “El fiord”’s
regime of life, the abject appears both as the imposed condition of those who are kept
within only through an exclusion and as a force capable of subverting the current division
of the sensible.
Lamborghini’s story presents us a world where bodily acts effect, directly and
immediately, shifts in power relations. Although the story constantly makes “literal”

351
Lamborghini, “El fiord,” 28.
352
Kraniauskas, “PORNO-REVOLUTION,” 150.
353
Julio Premat, “El escritor argentino y la transgresión. La orgía delos orígenes en El
fiord de Osvaldo Lamborghini,” America. Cahiers du CRICCAL, no. 28 (2002): 121.
147
allusions to the figures and conflicts of Argentine politics, here consumption does not
represent any other sphere of action—as it does, for instance, in Lezama’s pastiche
feasts—but constitutes the political act par excellence: eating is obedience; defecation,
rebellion. Lamborghini’s fiction thus responds to the modern biopolitical order within
which, as Agamben argues, the sphere of “home” (oikos), and consequently that of bodily
life (zoe), enters the field of politics. In a world where libidinal drives have replaced the
priority of discourse and ideology in politics, only bodily acts seem capable of contesting
the current division of the sensible. The moral, of course, is not that bodily acts should
replace the traditional forms of syndicate and party politics. “El fiord” signals, however,
the libidinal nature of such clashes and alliances, whose patterns have been vehemently
denied—and thus repeated—by figures of national politics old and new. Lamborghini
thus stages, in and through literature, the libidinal dynamics of Peronism, where the
patriarchal law is only contested to be reinstated in another form. The political appears
inevitably and inextricably sexual, which, though not necessarily problematic in itself,
follows and reproduces an Oedipal logic over and over again, eclipsing the possibility of
true change, or, Revolution. On the flip side, the libidinal—which for Lamborghini
includes the entire sphere of consumption—is revealed to be inevitably and inextricably
political.

3.3 | “El niño proletario”: The Abject, Inc.
Published four years after “El fiord,” Sebregondi retrocede (1973) expands
Lamborghini’s fictional universe, where, as we have seen, the libidinal and the political
perform one another. Whereas “El fiord” stages the “incestuous” relations of Peronism in
148
the aftermath of the Revolución Libertadora, in “El niño proletario,” certainly the most
notorious piece from the author’s next book, the focus is on the conflict between social
classes and on the ways in which Marxist theory and aesthetics have approached and
represented that conflict. Revealing the sado-masochistic dynamics between classes, the
story develops a violent and cruel expression that nevertheless viscerally interpellates the
reader through scenes of abjection.
“El niño proletario” introduces its protagonist—or, more precisely, its object of
sadistic pleasure—through a genealogy where abjection appears as the inescapable
condition of proletarian life, rendering it less than human. Like “El fiord,” the story
begins a grotesque portrayal of birth, where the mother is reduced to a “parturienta” (the
term underlines the moment of “parting”), an aching gape from which the proletarian
boy, abjection incarnate, pushes out, ripping her apart.
354
Her violent screams are nothing
but further outbursts of abjection—phonic waste without any articulated sounds, which
are in turn suppressed by the father’s vomit attacks. The father vomits because of his
alcoholism, that is, because he has no control over his intake of liquids; cheap wine—
“más denso que la mugre de su miseria”—and vomit come in and out of his mouth in
sovereign outbursts that make him subject.
355
There is nothing “immaculate” about this
conception—everything is maculate, or stained. Stripped of all maternal aura, the
proletarian Mary does not “conceive” or “give birth” but “lo echa al mundo”—that is,
throws out her boy into the world as if he were piece of feces.
356
The proletarian’s birth,
then, combines all the loneliness of a Heideggerrean geworfenheit (thrownness into the

354
Osvaldo Lamborghini, “El niño proletario,” in Novelas y cuentos, ed. César Aira
(Barcelona: Ediciones del Serbal, 1988), 63.
355
Ibid.
356
Ibid.
149
world) with the abjection of taking a painful dump. The proletarian comes to life already
degraded: let alone a “miracle,” the infant is not even an object of affection—he is just
live organic waste dumped on earth. By narrating the birth of a subject through
uncontrollable outbursts of materiality, this introduction (both to life and to the story)
bestializes the proletarian boy, marking him—and through him, the proletariat—as
subhuman life.
Degradation continues as the abject infant grows to become the proletarian boy.
The parents remain drenched in abjection, as they were during his birth, and now begin to
infect the little boy. The “drunk” father—the narrator once again emphasizes his
alcoholism—regularly beats the proletarian boy and “only talks to him to inculcate his
murderous ideas,” that is, to transfer the boy his poisonous abjection.
357
The mother, on
the other hand, prostitutes herself at home to make ends meet, thus corrupting the boy
who witnesses it all. Neither is the proletarian boy is treated better at school. He is
continually humiliated by his “rich peers” and mistreated by teachers who give him
names—like ¡Estropeado!. Moreover, hunger overpowers the proletarian boy and
dwindles his intellectual capacity at school, where he is supposed to be formed
intellectually. The early life of the proletarian, then, is marked by abject degradations.
Whereas at home he is exposed to abjection by his parents, at school his status as the
abject is reinforced every day.
The final part of the genealogy, which considers the reproduction of the
proletariat, portrays the proletarian adult as a resentful agent of contagion that spreads
abjection across generations. At one point, the proletarian boy—now become “the

357
Ibid.
150
proletarian man”—contracts syphilis and feels an “irresistible impulse” to pass on the
disease in order to avenge his abject misery.
358
Rather than a rational and humane
decision to create life, uncontrollable urges—almost corporeal in their intensity—are
responsible for the reproduction of the proletariat. With feelings of ressentiment, the
proletarian makes “la bestia de dos espaldas” with his wife as many times as he can; the
Shakespearean phrase, cultivated in origin and coarse in meaning, openly bestializes the
proletarian man, reducing his sexuality to resentful fornication.
359
To underline the
irrationality of proletarian reproduction, the narrator renders it a vile mystery: “gracias a
una alquimia que aún no puedo llegar a entender (o que tal vez nunca llegaré a entender),
su semen se convierte en venéreos niños proletarios.”
360
The proletarian thus appears as
an insect that that magically propagates its species and disease. What comes to life as
abject waste ends up spreading an uncontainable disease that proliferates itself
exponentially.
For the proletariat, then, abjection is the inevitable condition of life itself. From
birth to adulthood and beyond, the proletarian lives drenched in abjection and as the
abject of the capitalist economy. Bodily, irrational, and, uncontrollable, abjection
bestializes proletarian life, marking it as subhuman. Blasmephizing Marxist theory, the
story explains—or, more precisely, intentionally fails to explain—the reproduction of the
proletariat as the outcome of a resentful desire to proliferate abjection. Nevertheless, in
“El niño proletario” abjection is not an element contained neatly within proletarian life, to
be regarded by a hygienic bourgeoisie with shock and disgust; serving a radically

358
Ibid., 64.
359
Ibid.
360
Ibid.
151
different purpose, abjection appears in abundance in the bourgeois sphere as well.
Whereas the inescapable circumstance of proletarian abjection leads to, as we have seen,
feelings of ressentiment that are then reproduced across generations in the form of a
venereal disease, bodily waste becomes the means of forming class alliances for the
bourgeois boys. Diametrically opposed to the over-optimistic plots of socialist realism, it
is not the proletariat but the bourgeoisie that develop class consciousness in
Lamborghini’s story.
“El niño proletario” represents class solidarity as a queer act of male bonding,
where eating abjection appears as a ritual that confirms brotherly love. As in children’s
blood brother rituals, the reciprocal intake of bodily matter performatively seals
fraternity. It is the narrator and Esteban that first bond over bodily waste. While watching
Gustavo rape the proletarian boy and waiting for their turn, Esteban gets overexcited and
throws up:
A Esteban se le contrajo el estómago a raíz de la ansiedad y luego de la
arcada desalojó algo del estómago, algo que cayó a mis pies. Era un
espléndido conjunto de objetos brillantes, ricamente ornamentados,
espejeantes al sol. Me agaché, lo incorporé a mi estómago, y Esteban
entendió mi hermanación. Se arrojó a mis brazos y yo me bajé los
pantalones. Por el ano desocupé. Desalojé una masa luminosa que
enceguecía con el sol. Esteban la comió y a sus brazos hermanados me
arrojé.
361

361
Ibid., 66 (my emphasis).
152
Lamborghini here “literalizes,” or follows to the letter, Bataille’s arguments concerning
the unconscious association between jewelry and excrement, that is, the ab-jected. In The
Accursed Share, Bataille argues that “in the unconscious, jewels, like excrement, are
cursed matter that flows from a wound…a part of oneself destined for open
sacrifice…sumptuous gifts charged with sexual love.”
362
Lamborghini not only describes
abjection as iridescent ornaments but also renders the mutual exchange of these sacrificial
gifts as a performance that consolidates friendship and comradery. What we have, then, is
the literal (and literary) rendition of an unconscious association. Class solidarity here
appears as an act of male bonding replete with queer libidinal energies. Lamborghini
exploits, for literary more than aleatory purposes, the libidinal potential of class relations,
which Marxist doctrine sweepingly disavows by reducing them to a constellation of
(narrowly conceived) economic and political interests.
In contrast to this reciprocal transfer of bodily matter, the second incorporation is
unilateral and, rather than consolidating brotherhood, affirms the relation between a
sovereign and his subject. Gustavo, who later becomes the leader of the bourgeois gang,
has a lower tolerance for abjection than his peers—especially when it smears his own
body. When ¡Estropeado! defecates on his penis during anal rape, Gustavo desperately
screams for a handkerchief to wipe off the waste.
363
As in “El fiord,” where involuntary
defecation disrupts the feast that would have confirmed the new configuration of power,
the abject here undermines sovereignty. In these moments, the cut and penetrated body
violently reacts to its hegemonic inscription—in its own language, with its own excesses.

362
Georges Bataille, “The Notion of Expenditure,” trans. Allan Stoekl, The Bataille
Reader, eds. Fred Botting and Scott Wilson (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1997), 170.
363
Lamborghini, “El niño proletario,” 67.
153
Rebellion, quite appears inconsequential in “El niño proletario,” is once again a forceful
yet involuntary bodily impulse rather than a conscious decision that is the expression of a
revolutionary will.
Gustavo’s repulsion is striking since disgust is not a common affective response
in Lamborghini’s universe—not, that is, on the diegetic level; like Piñera’s
“anesthetized” fiction where no one feels any pain, Lamborghini’s characters usually do
not retch or protect themselves otherwise from the abject. Gustavo’s repulsion contrasts
sharply with the overall lack of disgust in other characters; as we have seen, Esteban and
the narrator eat each other’s bodily waste without even cringing an eye. The future
sovereign, however, does not participate in such mutual exchanges; his subjects instead
show their devotion unilaterally by licking abjection off of his body. The sovereign
violates, opens up wounds, lets abjection flow from subaltern bodies, but does not want it
to stain or contaminate him in any way.
Both classes—represented somewhat ironically by their juvenile members—are
therefore drenched in abjection, which nevertheless follows different paths and produces
different effects in each case. For the proletariat, abjection is an unavoidable existential
condition as well as a modest outlet for resentment: the subject comes to the world as the
abject, leads a life in constant contact with humiliating and infectious abjection, and then
makes it his mission to proliferate abjection across generations. While abjection certainly
becomes the means of (mostly self-destructive) vengeance, it fails to give any sense of
unity or self-consciousness to the proletariat. For the bourgeoisie, on the other hand,
abjection serves as a means of confirming brotherly love and class solidarity. Far from an
154
imposed and inevitable circumstance, it takes the form of a sacrificial gift charged with
erotic love.
In this psychoanalytic “parody” of Marxist analysis, social classes are defined and
distinguished by relations of abjection rather than production—or, more precisely, by
relations of corporeal “production.” While the bourgeoisie deploys abjection as a
sacrificial gift to form itself as a class, for the proletariat abjection is a degrading and
subhuman condition spread across its own kind with vengeance. What provokes
ressentiment for one class becomes a gift of erotic love for the other. “El niño proletario”
does not give us any clues as to the interpretation of this differential value of abjection
across the classes. What remains clear, however, is that Lamborghini does not exempt
any class from abjection or attach any inherently emancipatory value to waste or excess.
Abjection appears as sexually charged matter that can be put to “political” use or
experienced as the condition of a miserable life. The bourgeois boys, with keen class
instincts, know how to use this sacred matter as a gift to solidify alliances. The
proletariat, on the other hand, disseminate abjection across generations without any form
of accumulation—either symbolic or monetary.
Besides drenching both classes in abjection, “El niño proletario” further
deconstructs the norms of modern ethics by revealing the constitutive dialectics between
the abject and the sacred. The disgusted Gustavo, for instance, immediately yearns for the
affection of his mother, a member of that sacred Argentine institution: “lívido
Gustavo…reclamaba aquel pañuelo de batista, bordado y maternal.”
364
Sewn and
embroidered by the mother, the handkerchief is an overdetermined symbol of her love

364
Ibid., 67 (my emphasis).
155
and devotion. The abject’s affront to subjectivity makes Gustavo look for the protection
of motherly love, one of the primary anchors of subjectivation. The sacred in turn
provokes a scene of horrid abjection: to help the distressed Gustavo, the narrator offers
the future sovereign his own handkerchief—sewn by his own mother and with an
embroidered image of her on top. This constitutes a sacrificial gesture by which the
narrator forgoes the aura of his own mother for the sake of the sovereign. The personal
history behind the handkerchief further reveals the co-implication of the abject and the
sacred: “tantas veces sequé mis lágrimas en ese mismo pañuelo, y sobre él volqué, años
después, mi primera y trémula eyaculación.”
365
A symbol of motherly love in times of
emotional distress, the hand-sewn cloth becomes the scene of a sacrilegious cumshot with
the arrival of puberty. The series of reversals continues as the narrator takes on the task of
cleaning the handkerchief, now soiled with blood and feces. Confirming his devotion for
the future sovereign, the narrator quickly licks off the mixture, thus allowing the “august”
face of the mother, temporarily obscured by abjection, to reappear.
366
This
interdependence of the abject and the sacred strips both terms of authenticity. Such de-
aurification is also made explicit as we read how the mother’s embroidered figure is
“rodeado por una esplendente aureola como de fingidos rayos.”
367
The narrator’s retort
after the reappearance of the mother’s embroidered figure—“el retrato con un collar de
perlas en el cuello, eh. Con un collar en el cuello. Justo ahí”—furthers this ironic gaze at
the mother as a sacred figure.
368

365
Ibid.
366
Ibid.
367
Ibid. (my emphasis).
368
Ibid.
156
Though in dialectical relation with the sacred, abjection triumphs in
Lamborghini’s world, forming queer alliances. Lamborghini links violence with pleasure
much like Sade, but adds a decidedly homosexual twist to this libidinal association.
Immediately after telling us about his adolescent ejaculation on the maternal
handkerchief, as if to explain his carefree sacrifice of motherly aura, the narrator adds:
“Porque la venganza llama al goce y el goce a la venganza pero no en cualquier vagina y
es preferible que en ninguna.”
369
The mother—and by extension every other woman—
appears as an unnecessary byway to pleasure. This misogyny is all the more striking
since, especially in traditional accounts of psychoanalysis, it is the father that represents
the law and becomes the object of hatred.
370
The mother only serves to provide comfort
and is cast out from the realm of pleasure. The incorporated abject creates a circuit of
pleasure among the boys, one that excludes the mother, or only includes her as sacred
image to be profaned. Abjection, then, forms alliances of class and pleasure when
incorporated, yet can also exclude and profane auratic figures. Queer pleasure in
Lamborghini is not, or not simply, a liberating force. It is not an escape from patriarchal
relations of power. It forms alliances, defines enmities across gender and class, creates
hierarchies—power traverses this pleasure through and through.
Through the transgressions of this savage pleasure that cuts, penetrates, and kills,
Lamborghini deconstructs the border controls of modern subjectivity. The instances of
violence to the mouth here stage the disciplinary regulation of bodies and voices with
particular intensity. Much like in “El fiord” (let us remember the graphic description of
El Loco Rodríguez hitting CGT and breaking her teeth), the mouth repeatedly becomes

369
Ibid.
370
See, for instance, Freud, Totem and Taboo, 141-142.
157
an object of attack in “El niño proletario.” While penetrating ¡Estropeado! anally,
Gustavo pushes the boy’s face into the mud: “¡Estropeado! no podía gritar, ni siquiera
gritar porque su boca era firmemente hundida en el barro por la mano fuerte militari de
Gustavo.”
371
Let alone articulating words, ¡Estropeado!—whose (nick)name, ironically,
is an exclamation—cannot even scream; let alone human speech, even an animalistic cry
of pain is denied to him. It is a “militari” force, the sovereign’s mano de hierro (iron fist),
that chokes and forcibly silences the proletarian boy. Images of blocked mouth are
powerful since the act doubly compromises the individual: it compromises subjectivity
by impeding speech, on the one hand, and compromises life itself by impeding
respiration, on the other. Lamborghini renders literal the ways in which the state regulates
and controls subaltern lives, dictating what comes in and what comes out. The bourgeois
boys exert absolute control over ¡Estropeado!’s bodily orifices: they cut, block, and
violate as they please. The scene, and the orgy it is part of, thus reads like an embodied
performance of the Argentine state’s “border control.”
¡Estropeado!’s final blowjob reveals the libidinal dynamics of this disciplinary
penetration. To reduce a subject to the condition of a near-object, to keep a body in the
zone of indistinction between life and death—is shown as deeply pleasurable. By the time
Esteban finally achieves climax, ¡Estropeado! has been reduced to a “forma…medio
sepultada en el barro”; indeed, the narrator turns him around with his foot, as if Stroppani
had already become inanimate waste.
372
And yet, because the boy is still breathing, or
more precisely, because he is capable of little other than breathing, he is capable of
providing intense pleasures to his sodomizers. Violence towards the mouth continues

371
Lamborghini, “El niño proletario,” 65-66.
372
Ibid., 67.
158
uninterrupted: pressed against the mud during anal violation, the proletarian boy’s mouth
is immediately afterwards penetrated by the narrator, who prefers “succión”—a term of
childish imprecision with “mechanical” connotations, as if the proletarian boy were a
machine to perform suction:
…le impartí la parca orden:
—Habrás de lamerlo. Succión—
¡Estropeado! se puso a lamerlo. Con escasas fuerzas, como si temiera
hacerme daño, aumentándome el placer.
373

The libertines do not allow ¡Estropeado! to breathe freely—or, more precisely, they allow
him to breathe just enough so that he does not immediately choke to death. They
deliberately keep the proletarian boy in that zone of indistinction between life and death,
that intermediary state of existence at the threshold of subjectivity. It is in that deplorable
condition, “con escasas fuerzas,” that subalternized life yields most pleasure.
The homo sacer, in his near-complete reduction to inanimate waste or abjection,
is a source of intense pleasure in Lamborghini’s fictional universe. By the time the
narrator “conecta”—another mechanical term—his penis to ¡Estropeado!’s “boca
respirante,” the latter has been reduced to an aching animal with no capacity for vision or
speech, a formless flesh with gaping holes everywhere.
374
Violence has already become a
deconstruction with death clearly visible in the horizon: after mutilating the proletarian’s
eyes “con dos y sólo dos golpes exactos,” the narrator, forming a “fusta” (riding whip)

373
Ibid., 68. On one level, this violation of the mouth, which immediately follows the
anal rape, contributes to the effect that Kraniauskas has described as “de-differentiation
of orifices”—the mouth is just another orifice of which the bourgeoisie takes control. See
“PORNO-REVOLUTION,” 150. Nevertheless, the mouth also maintains its specificity:
No other orifice features the tongue, that elastic muscle capable of caressing the penis.
374
Lamborghini, “El niño proletario,” 68.
159
with his hand, hits the boy in the face and rips apart pieces of his skin.
375
“Boca
respirante” sums up this state of utter misery: ¡Estropeado! is little more than a mouth
reduced to its most primitive function. This state of abjection, however, is no obstacle to
pleasure and, on the contrary, provokes it. That the near-dead ¡Estropeado! licks with
little force, “como si temiera hacerme daño,” gives the narrator intense pleasure. Through
a deliberate misinterpretation, he thus imagines a masochistic care for the murderous
other in a state of extreme precariousness. Whereas “El fiord” features a homo sacer with
intensified libido (Sebas is a starved body craving for gratification), bare life becomes the
very source of pleasure in “El niño proletario.” In Lamborghini’s world, pleasure
desubjectifies and preys on desubjectivation—it is located at the differential between the
human and its others.
“El niño proletario” not only turns the mouth, the locus of subjectivity and life,
into a silent wound penetrated at will, but also conceives the wound as an artificial mouth
that can neither speak nor resist penetration. The analogy is established when Gustavo
follows his vertical cut on ¡Estropeado!’s face by a lateral expansion that deepens “los
labios de la herida.”
376
By deploying this surgical expression in the space of literature,
Lamborghini activates the series of affinities between the terms. Much like the mouth, an
orifice much that allows matter in and lets matter out (e.g. when it “spits” blood or pus).
Nevertheless, the wound is an artifact: it opens up when a sharp object pierces the skin.
Furthermore, the wound cannot be opened or closed at will, which makes it freely
penetrable. Many critics have underlined the centrality of the “tajo” (cut) for
Lamborghini’s understanding of writing; this “oral” aspect of the wound, however, has

375
Ibid.
376
Ibid., 65.
160
been mostly overlooked.
377
The cut opens an artificial mouth that is, however, more
bestial than a mouth: silent and without resistance. As such, it is the expression of a
desire to silence, render penetrable, and thus desubjectify the other. The cut is
desubjectification par excellence: it is a manmade orifice that brings back the materiality
of the body, traversing the binary of nature and culture. Through acts of violence that
penetrate bodies and desubjectify lives, “El niño proletario” reminds us once again that
the modern subject is mostly conceived as a nonporous entity. Subjectivity is a form of
border control: the mind has to be in charge of his orifices, of what comes in to and what
comes out of the sovereign land that is “his” body. We can then forget about our
corporeality or at least hold on to the illusion of its subjugation, an illusion responsible
for feelings of human exceptionality. Forced penetration, which includes the cut,
desubjectifies by compromising this sovereign control.
“El niño proletario” concludes its genealogy of proletarian life with the execution
of ¡Estropeado!, in a scene that signals the affiliations between the grotesque and the
abject. The bourgeois libertines choose a form of execution that paints a particularly
grotesque image on the face: death by hanging. The open mouth, an affirmative image
that represents the individual’s union with the world in “grotesque realism,” elicits the
abject on a strangulated face. Hanging ¡Estropeado! from a tree with the help of a wire,
the libertines create a “joyesca” scene—shining like a jewel [joya] and recalling the dark
sketches of Goya [goyesca]—with the proletarian lying dead, his tongue hanging out.
378

In any instance of death by strangulation, the individual dies while grasping for air—that

377
See, for instance, Perlongher, “Ondas,” 203-204.
378
Lamborghini, “El niño proletario,” 69. Once again, the abject is described in terms of
jewelry.
161
ethereal substance he needs to take in for survival—and rigor mortis then freezes his final
attempt to incorporate the world. The mouth remains open and the tongue, hanging out,
still seems to beckon the air to get inside; the body dies open to the world, thirsty for
air.
379
The abject, then, appears as the flipside of the grotesque. Images that affirm life
and the unity of bodies on a cosmic level become scenes of abjection that make us cringe
in disgust.
The story’s overall apathy towards death intensifies the abjectness of the
execution. According to Kristeva, the corpse represents “the utmost of abjection” when it
is not seen through the comforting lens of religion or science.
380
Lamborghini’s universe
certainly lacks God or any other deity that can sublimate the abjection of a cadaver.
While science does make frequent appearances, its emotionally detached methodology
often acquires cynical overtones (e.g. Dr. Ky’s experiments on gay adolescents in
Tadeys). Adding to this overall feeling of geworfenheit (thrownness into the world) that
permeates Lamborghini’s fiction, the narrator of “El niño proletario” expresses his utter
apathy towards death immediately before the scene of execution: “La verdad nunca una
muerte logró afectarme. Los que dije querer y que murieron, y si es que alguna vez lo
dije, incluso camaradas, al irse me regalaron un claro de sentimiento de liberación.”
381

Even the loss of loved ones and “comrades”—Lamborghini is here alluding to that
sacrosanct “comradery” of revolutionary militancy—fails to affect him and results in
feelings of liberation instead. Similarly, the narrator contemplates his own eventual death
as “otro parto solitario”; scenes of birth, as we have seen in both stories, are grotesque

379
In the context of the violent orgy that precedes the execution, the image also recalls
Stroppani licking the narrator’s phallus, another grotesque image.
380
Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 4.
381
Lamborghini, “El niño proletario,” 68.
162
moments of abjection in Lamborghini’s fiction.
382
Death here appears neither as a
gateway to afterlife nor as a physiological event analyzed with the critical detachment of
science. Lamborghini instead contemplates death “desde la torre fría y de vidrio,” from
which human toil (“el trabajo de los jornaleros tendiendo las vías del nuevo ferrocarril”)
appears insignificant, making one feel “vacío y crispado.”
383
“Desde esté ángulo de
agonía,” death—especially the miserable death of a proletarian boy—constitutes nothing
but “un hecho perfectamente lógico y natural…un hecho perfecto.”
384
¡Estropeado!’s
death, as ordinary and unimportant as his already forgotten birth, ends the “agony” that
had been his life; the proletarian life, a life of abjection, is once again reduced to waste
(restos). The narrator conceives death as an empty logical form, routine and impersonal
in its application.
“El niño proletario” presents an abject genealogy that marks proletarian life as
subhuman life and proletarian body as thoroughly penetrable. The story’s references to
Marxist theory invite allegorical readings of its violent plot without, however, giving any
specific clues. I will argue that “El niño proletario” adopts a pornographic rather than an
allegorical relation to social reality, yet a pornography that does not allow for the
detached enjoyment of violence. Lamborghini’s depiction of the abject will be of key
importance in establishing the affective dynamics of this literary expression.
Lamborghini’s engagement with Marxist theory is far too explicit and distorted to
encourage straightforward allegorical readings. Traditional allegory separates the levels
of narrative between which it insinuates an equivalence; the allegorized meaning is only

382
Ibid.
383
Ibid.
384
Ibid.
163
hinted at the surface narrative, which stands on its own and is free of the terms of the
depth narrative. Modern authors refrain from such use lest their work be perceived as a
piece of propaganda. By contrast, there is a willful dogmatism to “El niño proletario,”
which engages with Marxist class terminology in overdetermined ways—starting with the
title. “El niño proletario” reaches quixotic heights in its engagement with Marxist
terminology and literature. Just as Cervantes’s protagonist looks at sixteenth-century
Spain through the distorting lens of chivalric romances, the narrator categorically divides
the society between the “bourgeoisie” and the “proletariat.”
385
This Manichean divide, a
blatant distortion of dialectical materialism—the lens itself is distorted in Lamborghini—
constitutes the very backbone of the plot. “Evidentemente, la sociedad burguesa se
complace en torturar al niño proletario,” affirms the narrator and later adds: “la
execración de los obreros también nosotros la llevamos en la sangre.”
386
Besides
identifying characters with their class identity (defined on Marxist terms) and postulating
an a priori libidinal conflict between classes, “El niño proletario” makes deliberate use of
stereotypical class imagery. ¡Estropeado!, for instance, wears pants poorly held by
suspenders and holds newspapers under his arm—a recurrent image in films and
literature. The bourgeois boys, on the other hand, flourish markers of class status.
Gustavo blocks the pavement with his blue bicycle; at one point, we also hear about their
“palacios multicolores,” which most probably refers to the TVs at their houses.
387

This overt engagement with Marxist imaginary involves parody to a certain
extent. It is as if we see the world through Don Quixote’s distorted perspective, yet there

385
In contrast to Don Quijote, however, there is no “outside” perspective—no Sancho
Panza—in the story to contest the worldview dictated by the narrator.
386
Lamborghini, “El niño proletario,” 63-64.
387
Ibid., 64.
164
is no Sancho Panza to correct our vision. And yet, the story’s engagement with Marxism
goes beyond mere parody. The tacky class references recall the cheap productions of
pornography, where unconvincing settings, costumes, and acting are used to stage
fantasies. What we have in “El niño proletario” is comparable to a drag of social class—
one, however, whose effects go beyond parody or defamiliarization. Pornography does
not parody typical power relations (e.g. between the boss and the secretary), but
mobilizes their potential for sexual aggression and excitement. If power conflicts
underpin vividly represented sexual violence in a cultural product and create tangible
visceral effects on the spectator, such scenes cannot be discarded as merely parodic—
even though the conflicts are metonymized through stereotypical props that mimic class
images. No matter how bad the acting might be, or how cheap and tacky the setting, a
scene of office sex does not merely parody the relation between a secretary and a boss,
but uses and amplifies the libidinal charge implicit in this hierarchy for the gratification
of its audience. As we have seen, “El niño proletario” is too invested in Marxist parlance,
which Lamborghini deliberately distorts, for a straightforward allegorical reading.
Nevertheless, the story’s engagement with Marxist analysis—along with the violent
social conflicts it signals through that engagement—cannot be reduced to parody either;
Lamborghini does not merely ridicule the discourses with which he dialogues. Rather
than hiding an allegorical “message” beneath its signifiers or parodying their use in
carnivalesque laughter, the story stages the conflicts and deploys them as catalysts in its
representations of sexualized violence, much like pornography.
“El niño proletario” thus resembles pornography in its mobilization of social
antagonisms in order to release libidinal energies. Pornography regularly deploys racial,
165
economic, and gender-based hierarchies as catalyst in its representations of sexual
violence. Interracial porn, for instance, is fueled by the history of slavery and race
relations, within which the black man was fashioned as virile, bestial, and violent. The
stories, pictures, and videos that feature interracial sex tap into the textual and visual
archives of race hierarchy to heighten the affective intensity of their content. “El niño
proletario” deploys the antagonisms of Argentine politics in a similar way. Of course, the
society’s fault lines do not necessarily coincide with Marxist categories, whose
hackneyed representations (e.g. in socialist realism) are parodied in the story.
Nevertheless, the story does partake in what Josefina Ludmer has called, after the H.
Bustos Domecq story, the “fiesta del monstruo,” a type of narrative where the voices of
the excluded masses become legible.
388
“El niño proletario” deploys the age-old rift
between the bourgeoisie and the masses—represented as dirty, bestial, and
promiscuous—to fire up its orgy.
The story is also pornographic in its complete lack of sympathy for the victim of
violence. Lamborghini follows a number of strategies to create this emotional
detachment. To start with, the protagonist is completely reduced to his social class. “We
had one in our school, a proletarian boy,” comments the narrator, thus referring to him as
just an example of the species with whose genealogy the story begins.
389
¡Estropeado! is
nothing but a proletarian boy, one of a faceless multitude, of a species that propagates
itself without pause. As we have seen, the genealogy itself bestializes proletarian life by
its insistent concentration on intractable outbursts of abjection; opening the story and
setting the fictional premises for the violent orgy to unfold, its importance in creating this

388
Ludmer, The Gaucho Genre, 151-52.
389
Lamborghini, “El niño proletario,” 63 (my emphasis).
166
detachment is not to be overlooked. Secondly, due to a careful narratological decision,
the reader has no access to ¡Estropeado!’s feelings or thoughts; the first-person narrative
allows us to witness only the murderous joy of the libertines. Finally, much like Piñera,
Lamborghini leaves out pain from his representations of violence. The narrator does not
even mention ¡Estropeado!’s reactions to the cuts inflicted on his body. Finally, the
subaltern does not speak in “El niño proletario.” The absolute silence of ¡Estropeado!,
whose (nick)name is ironically an exclamation, facilitates his desubjectivation. These
strategies all conspire to hinder feelings of sympathy towards the proletarian boy. Writing
on pathos in Greek tragedy, Aristotle famously argues that the fall of a noble hero—that
is, the misfortune of a respected protagonist—most forcefully evokes the affect in the
spectators. By contrast, ¡Estropeado! is represented as nothing more than a typical
proletarian boy, part of a subhuman species drenched in abjection; he is immediately
reduced, in name and concept, to what the bourgeois call him and think of him. With
little to relate with, and barred from access to the feelings, thoughts, and expression of the
proletarian, the reader does not feel any pathos as she watches an innocent boy raped,
mutilated, and hanged by his peers. Abject misery does not evoke any sympathy in and of
itself.
Despite the libidinal deployment of social antagonisms and the overall lack of
pathos for the victim, “El niño proletario” does not allow a detached and pornographic
enjoyment of violence. Such voyeuristic pleasures are interrupted by the vividly narrated
scenes of abjection that viscerally attack the reader. Hardcore pornography commonly
features varying doses of abjection. In ever-popular scenes of cumshot, for instance, the
sperm—whose viscosity evokes the abject—spills on the face and the body, and is often
167
swallowed. Yet when a certain threshold—admittedly difficult to specify with
precision—is crossed, feelings of repulsion begin to work against sexual excitement.
Consequently, mainstream porn mostly avoids images of vomiting, urination, and
defecation. By contrast, Lamborghini’s story deliberately mobilizes this repulsion to
preclude, or at the very least interrupt, the enjoyment of the murderous orgy that
constitutes its plot. For instance, we are exposed to a doubly voyeuristic scene just before
Esteban and the narrator’s mutual consumption of bodily waste: we watch the two boys
watch Gustavo as he cuts and fucks the proletarian boy. The abjection that follows this
pornographic image, however, collapses the spectatorial distance needed for the
voyeuristic enjoyment of violence. As we have seen, Lamborghini’s descriptions of
abjection are hardly realistic. And yet, they successfully capture haptic and visual details
that make us retch. While vomit may never resemble the assorted contents of a jewelry
box spilled to the ground, the excessively poetic—and almost Baroque—description
nevertheless captures the variegated and iridescent spillage of vomit. Likewise, “una
masa luminosa” somehow communicates the tactile and visual impression of a pile of
feces.
390
I argue that this excessive (Baroque, if you will) aestheticization of abjection
renders the images doubly repulsive, as if the radical difference between jewelry and
feces is added, as surplus, to the already abhorrent acts. Consequently, our voyeuristic
pleasure ceases immediately. The distance we need in order to enjoy the murder-orgy,
continually built up through the strategies of apathy outlined above, collapses as the
abject attacks our minds and bodies.

390
Ibid., 66.
168
The other scene of abject consumption (featuring the soiled handkerchief)
similarly interrupts voyeuristic pleasures. Feelings of repulsion here spoil a hyperbolic
description of the sovereign’s phallus. When Gustavo screams for a handkerchief to clean
up his soiled penis, the narrator takes the time to describe this embodiment of power on
exaggerated terms:
Era enorme y agresivo entre paréntesis el falo de Gustavo. Con entera
independencia y solo se movía, así, y así, cabezadas y embestidas.
Tensaba para colmo los labios delgados de su boca como si ya mismo y
sin tardanza fuera a aullar.
391

Yet this bestialized portrayal does not get to stimulate us erotically as it normally
would—consider another popular category of porn, “the monster cock”—because of the
abject descriptions that surround it, literally and figuratively. The reader cannot enjoy the
pornographic image of a giant cock once aware of the “arremolinada materia fecal.”
392

The voyeuristic gaze, which would have enjoyed watching the phallus move, rape, and
howl like a beast—is once again disturbed. Following this haptic description, which
forcefully evokes the abject, the reader is further disgusted when the narrator licks the
soiled handkerchief, precluding any detached enjoyment of sexual violence. In
Lamborghini’s fiction we witness the murderous pleasures of libertines much like in the
erotic novels of Sade, yet we cannot enjoy them. It is not a misguided feeling of pity for
the victim that precludes our enjoyment; as we have seen, Lamborghini destroys such
pathos through a number of narrative means. The vivid descriptions of abjection,
however, which touch and disturb us on visceral terms, do not allow us to enjoy violence.

391
Ibid., 67.
392
Ibid.
169
Pornography allows Lamborghini to transcend the ethics of bourgeois as well as
socialist literature. There are slaves in pornography, yet no “slave morality.”
393
Rather
than resenting the aggressor or pitying the victim, the spectators rejoice as the latter gets
abused and humiliated. “El niño proletario” resembles pornography in this sense.
Although we do vicariously experience the lacerations and penetrations, the text does not
evoke any pathos in us. Lamborghini thus creates a sympathy [sum pathēs]—literally,
“with-feeling”—without pathos. This “apathetic sympathy” is Kafkaesque: we similarly
do not feel any pity towards the prisoners in “the penal colony,” subhuman lives who
excitedly chew rice pudding as they await their inscription-execution, yet feel the
inscription of the Officer.
394

Lamborghini turns reading into an ethical aporia by violating the norms of literary
representation. As we have seen, the story continually pushes us towards voyeurism only
to interrupt such pleasures through scenes of abjection. While we eventually feel too
disgusted to enjoy sexual violence, the latter is described with such enthusiasm that there
are moments when we the terrifying possibility of being erotically stimulated by the
violation of a little boy. Our physiological responses, those mute yet thoroughly
ideological reactions of our bodies, enter the field of ethical inquiry and insight. Like a
sixteenth-century prisoner of cannibals who, as his fellow bandeirantes are being
barbequed, suddenly realizes the moisture in his mouth, we begin to doubt our own
bodies.

393
Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Carol Diethe (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 2007), 20.
394
Franz Kafka, “In the Penal Colony,” in Death Sentences: 34 Classic Short Stories
about the Death Penalty, trans. Ian Johnston, ed. Susan Ives (Texas: peaceCENTER,
2009), 173-201.
170
As Perlongher aptly puts it, political conflicts “pasa por” bodily exchanges in
Lamborghini’s writing.
395
Yet this political import, which of course precedes the
composition of the stories, is not construed as ontologically prior to the bodily acts that
allude to it. Even though Lamborghini’s stories make explicit (yet always oblique)
references to the terms, slogans, figures, and institutions of contemporary politics, the
fictional bodies that are cut, violated, and executed do not carry unitary meanings that can
be deciphered by attentive and informed readers. The political is at once excessively
visible and irreducibly undecidable in Lamborghini’s fiction. While the reader
immediately realizes that these are deeply political stories, the pornographic actions do
not yield a clearly demarcated meaning to be “extracted” from the bodies. Of the two
stories, “El fiord” is the more specific in its references to contemporary politics; we have
names that obliquely allude to prominent figures and institutions of Peronism. “El niño
proletario,” on the other hand, refers to the class divide through a distorted appropriation
of Marxist parlance. In neither story, however, there is cohesive message behind or
beneath the bodily acts.
“El fiord” and “El niño proletario” both present us images of dehumanization
without, however, reifying a “proper” human subject. In contrast to the other “fiestas del
monstruo,” there are no ideal subjects in Lamborghini’s stories: neither the bourgeois
boys in “El niño proletario” nor any of the characters in “El fiord” are hailed as proper
subjects outside the realm of abjection. Some, however, are decisively marked as bestial
and thus subhuman: Sebas and ¡Estropeado! are impoverished beings whose humanity
appears either always already non-existent or lost without trace. Abjection, understood

395
Perlongher, “Ondas,” 200.
171
both as bodily waste and the state of a reject, plays the central part in this
dehumanization. For both Sebas and ¡Estropeado!, abjection is an imposed and inevitable
condition of life. The abject, a moment of crisis or exception where subjectivity is
temporarily compromised, has become their generalized state of existence. As the forced
bearers of an intensified experience of bodily life, they are deemed bestial and subhuman.
In Lamborghini’s stories, the abject dehumanizes the victim yet precludes the
enjoyment of violence. Apathy, understood literally as an absence of pathos, prevails in
Lamborghini’s fiction: while certainly horrified and disgusted by the narrated events, we
do not feel any pity for the subaltern—nor do the other characters. Sebas gets the worst
hand both under the sovereignty of El Loco Rodríguez and after his downfall, yet he is
too emaciated, too miserable, too close to bare life to strike any sympathy in us. His
comrade-in-suffering ¡Estropeado! is subjected to the most vicious forms of violence and
humiliation, which likewise fail to appeal to our moral sensibilities. As we have seen,
Lamborghini deploys a number of narrative strategies to create this state of cruel
indifference. Yet the abject is, arguably, at the very center of this emotional detachment.
Once a character is portrayed in a generalized state of abjection, neither identification nor
pathos seems possible. Through the abject, Lamborghini escapes the sentimentalism that
characterizes most socialist realist literature about the subaltern.
Such detached representations of violence would make for good pornography,
where spectators have to be emotionally distanced to derive pleasure from the suffering
of bodies. Of course, stories like Lamborghini’s would not be for everyone: they narrate
radical acts of sexual violence, performed mostly by males to males—and, in the case of
“El niño proletario,” to little children. Yet one can imagine such a controversial piece of
172
gay pornography, free of any sacralization of mothers and children (or precisely twisting
that aura for sexual ends), passed around clandestinely for obscure acts of pleasure. What
prevents Lamborghini’s text from becoming snuff pornography are the scenes of
abjection that involve and implicate the reader on a visceral level (the characters are
almost always immune to repulsion). When a character smells a cooked penis or eats the
feces of another, the voyeuristic pleasure we are to derive from the text is interrupted by
retchings and spasms as we desperately protect ourselves from the abject. Lamborghini’s
violation of bourgeois ethics avoids becoming pornography through the abject, which
disturbs the reader and disallows voyeuristic pleasures. We are no longer the detached
observers of violence but are involved, as much as we can possibly be, in the story’s
corporeal-libidinal economy.
In arguing that “El fiord” and “El niño proletario” are not—or are not simply—
pornographic, my aim is not to redeem Lamborghini morally like César Aira, who
identifies a “caballero anticuado” behind the façade of autor maldito in his prologue to
Novelas y cuentos. Though unapologetically cruel, violent, and controversial,
Lamborghini’s stories disarm the affective strategies of pornography—no doubt the most
popular genre of our present day, granting daily libidinal release to multitudes and thus
guaranteeing their smooth integration into the corporeal regimes of late capitalism.
When reading Lamborghini, we do witness murderous pleasure in its purest form and for
a while tag along with the characters as they cut, penetrate, and kill. Yet Lamborghini’s
stories do not merely provide, as does pornography, uncritical catharses. What impedes
such detached enjoyment is the strategic use of the abject, which forcedly involves the
reader within the libidinal dynamics of the stories.
173
-4-
Lobster with Diet TuKola:
Cuban Art after the Special Period

How can a cultural product respond to, engage with, and comment on changes in the
national organization of the economy? In what ways are images from food production
and consumption employed in such creative interventions? In the previous chapters, we
have seen a colonial trope like cannibalism reappropriated for modern purposes, food
scarcity inspiring obliquely satirical fiction, and the entire digestive sphere charged with
political conflicts. Although production, along with the exploitation and expropriation
involved in it, has been part of my analyses, these literary and visual products do not
engage directly with this sphere; instead, our focus has been on the moment of
incorporation, whether transformed into a trope or dramatized in narrative. This final
chapter in turn considers the work of contemporary Cuban artists who creatively engage
with the destiny of two industries that have been of crucial importance for the island in
the past decades: tourism and the sugar industry. Their work allows us to explore the
capacity of cultural products to engage with consumption from a broader perspective and
the strategies artists employ in this endeavor.

4.1 | Winds of Change: More Tourists, Less Sugar
Tourism has expanded to become the major source of national income since the 1989 fall
of the Soviet Union, which brought about the end of profitable trade exchanges with the
communist superpower. The Cuban government has actively encouraged tourism by
allowing short-term rentals by private owners, initiating restoration projects, and
174
revamping the island’s global image.
396
By contrast, the Cuban sugar industry, which had
been a formative influence on every aspect of life on the island since the colonial times,
has been significantly downsized; most sugar mills now remain abandoned, a quarter of
the workforce has been dismissed, and—despite a recent attempt to revive the industry—
Cuba has lost a major part of its share in the global market.
397

This reorganization, which amounts to a wholesale economic and political
reorientation, has profoundly affected the Cuban society. Sugar mills that once used to be
overworked now lie in ruins; many citizens try to engage in one way or another with the
increased flow of tourists to get a share of their euros and dollars. While, as Jacqueline
Loss has shown, some melancholically yearn for the abundance of the Soviet years,
others question the entire ideology of the Revolution.
398
These changes in Cuban reality
find their way into the works of Cuban artists, who, faced with the challenge to respond
creatively to the decline or boom of an entire sector of the national economy, repurpose
the most emblematic images of each industry (e.g. the mill and the hotel) and insert them
in kitsch, dystopian, or improperly religious contexts. They thus provide a critical
reflection on the social changes introduced by this economic reorganization,
reconsidering the unfulfilled promises of the Cuban Revolution as well as the island’s
precarious economic and political situation in our globalized times.

396
Carmelo Mesa-Lago and Jorge Pérez-López, Cuba Under Raúl Castro: Assessing the
Reforms (London: Lynne Rienner, 2013), 91-96.
397
Ibid., 46-51.
398
Jacqueline Loss, Dreaming in Russian: The Cuban Soviet Imaginary (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 2014), 2-3.
175
4.2 | A Downsized Industry: Abandoned Mills, Underwater Farmers
As indicated by the popular saying “sin azúcar no hay país,” the sugar industry has
fundamentally shaped Cuba since the colonial period. Moreno Fraginals has shown in his
classical study Ingenio: económico social cubano del azúcar how the social, political,
and environmental demands of the industry have dictated every aspect of Cuban reality,
including relations of class and property, racial composition of the society, and even
ways of measuring and making sense of time.
399
Indeed, the anthropologist Fernando
Ortiz would famously define Cuban culture through the “contrapunctual” tension
between the sugar and tobacco industries.
400
Considering the sugar industry as the first
point of contact between the races, cultures, and religions that make up the Cuban fabric,
the author Miguel Barnet has even argued that “sugar made Cuba coalesce.”
401
After all,
the island remained the world’s largest sugar exporter until the end of the twentieth
century. When an industry that for centuries has shaped and colored every aspect of life
and cultural identity becomes defunct, profound alterations are due in the social fabric,
alterations which art in turn uses creatively to reconsider the past, the present, and the
future of the nation.
The downsizing of the sugar industry, which constituted a radical shift in state
policy and ideology, has affected the national economy in adverse ways. Castro
announced the decision in 2002, justifying the partial closure by condemning the industry

399
Manuel Moreno Fraginals, El ingenio: complejo económico social cubano del azúcar
(Barcelona: Editorial Crítica, 2001), 9-21.
400
Fernando Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar, trans. Harriet de Onís
(Durham and London: Duke UP, 1995), 97-103.
401
Miguel Barnet, “The Culture That Sugar Created,” trans. Naomi Lindstrom, Latin
American Literary Review 8, no. 16 (1980): 38.
176
as “a scourge belonging to the era of slavery.”
402
Nearly half of all mills were closed, 60
percent of sugarcane lands were repurposed for crops like malanga, and about 100,000
workers were dismissed.
403
Although the government attempted to revive the industry
when the international prices soared once again, Cuba’s sugar production did not reach
the desired levels.
404
Apart from a shortsighted change in fiscal policy, the downsizing
constituted a dramatic shift in state ideology and propaganda, which had actively
deployed the sugar industry to unite the socialist nation. Most famously, in 1969 Fidel
mobilized the island’s entire workforce—a significant portion of which had no
experience in the sugarcane industry whatsoever—to reach the goal of producing 10
million tons of sugar, marking the tenth anniversary of the revolution. The campaign,
titled Azúcar Para Crecer, clearly shows that the Cuban state did not hesitate reaping the
economic and political benefits of the sugar industry when the latter was profitable.
405

During the 1980s, Cuba sold sugar at high prices to the Soviet Union in exchange for
petroleum and other “Green Revolution” farming inputs.
406
It was only with the fall of
the Soviet Union and the decrease in international prices that Castro’s government
decided to downsize the sugar industry.
Recent Cuban art responds critically to the feelings of melancholy and
disillusionment caused by the partial closure of the sugar industry. Ricardo Elías, for
instance, photographed the ruins of dismantled mills in his black and white series Oro

402
Mesa-Lago, Cuba Under Raúl Castro, 44.
403
Ibid.
404
Ibid., 46-51.
405
Luis Martínez-Fernández, “Sugar and Revolution: Cuba, 1952-2002,” in Handbook on
Cuban History, Literature, and the Arts : New Perspectives on Historical and
Contemporary Social Change, eds. Mauricio A. Font and Araceli Tinajero (Oxford:
Routledge, 2014), 57-58.
406
Ibid., 61-63.
177
seco. In Rogelio Orizondo’s play Antigonón, un contingente épico, on the other hand, we
see a queer parody of the machetero (cane cutter) as a masculine ideal.
407
The artists I
examine in this chapter, Marcel Molina Martínez and Alejandro Saínz Alfonso, belong to
a generation directly affected by the closure in their youth. Their works offer a raw
commentary that oscillates between nostalgia and critique, engaging with the
contradictory memories of an industry that had alienated its workforce yet proven to be a
major source of national income.
* * *
The artistic output of Marcel Molina Martínez (1987-), a young artist from
Cienfuegos, reveals a continued engagement with the past, present, and future of the
sugar industry. Working with xylography, Molina creates dystopian woodcuts that
portray landscapes with disassembled sugar mills, empty houses, and farmers with
fingerprints for faces. His series offers a critical look at the downsizing of the sugar
industry, portraying the economic devastation without, however, falling prey to either
nostalgic or utopian idealizations of the days before the closure. In Molina’s
monochrome prints, the sugar industry appears, through its spectral ruins, as a mode of
labor that had alienated and commodified the lives of Cuban citizens.

407
Rogelio Orizondo, Antigonón, un contingente épico, directed by Carlos Díaz, Trianón
Theater, Havana, Cuba, October 11, 2013.
178
Figure 7: Marcel Molina Martínez, Memoria, 2009. Xylography.
Already including the themes and imagery that will become constants in his art,
Molina’s engravings from 2009 respond critically to the distinct temporalities of the
sugar industry. Memoria, which portrays a recollection from the days before the closure,
attests that Molina’s art does not yearn melancholically for an idealized past (Figure 7).
The engraving depicts a landscape that will frequently reappear in Molina’s future works:
a prominent sugar mill and dozens of identical houses circling around it. Yet Memoria
differs from the other reiterations of this dystopian image in that, this being a “memory”
from before the closure, the sugar mill remains intact. The functioning of the sugar
industry, however, does not seem to have mattered in any significant way; we do not see
an economically flourished Cuban town bursting with life, but a dead landscape where no
plants, animals, or human beings are to be found. In other words, the sugar industry here
takes the form of a “necropower” whose ultimate end is the creation of “death-
worlds…forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions
179
of life conferring upon them the status of living dead.”
408
In Molina’s monochrome print,
there are only cold and identical buildings whose tiresome repetition across the landscape
creates a lifeless image. The diagonal lines on the roofs repeat those on the roof of the
sugar mill without, however, creating any sense of harmony—the image at best suggests
an alienating monotony. The sugar industry, then, is not shown as a vital source of
economic activity but as a necropolitical force that, while guaranteeing survival, reduced
Cuban lives into interchangeable wage-labor and thus created zones of indistinction
where life and death became indistinguishable.

408
Achille J. Mbembé, “Necropolitics,” trans. Libby Meintjes, Public Culture 15, no. 1
(2003): 40.
Figure 8: Marcel Molina Martínez,
Comentario, 2009. Xylography.
180
Comentario (2009) extends Molina’s necropolitical vision by connecting this
bleak “memory” with an ominous present, where the sugar industry has been mostly
abandoned (Figure 8). Here we do have a portrayal of life in the Cuban countryside, but
one that steadily moves towards a dark and imminent end. In fact, Comentario represents
the process of economic disintegration that would in turn produce the dead landscapes
from works like Paraíso (from the same collection) and the later Elegía and Un nudo en
la garganta. The woodcut spatially traverses time from the present to the future. In the
foreground, we see a sugarcane farmer riding a traditional plow pulled by four oxen; the
animals are chased by a skeleton that personifies death, a figure that reappears in later
works like El testamento.
In the horizon, which represents the future headed by the industry, stands a
dismantled sugar mill surrounded by spectral humanoid figures; several other “ghosts”
are headed in files towards the abandoned structure. The landscape in the background,
whose horizontal lines contrast sharply with the vertical plows of the sugarcane field,
seems completely lifeless; there is not even a tree in the barren mountains. Both the
farmer and the animals, with their heads slightly bowed to the ground, seem helplessly
resigned to their fate. Molina’s “comment” is a one that does not offer easy escapes.
Although the sugar industry itself appears a form of necropower that produced
commodified “living dead,” its closure does not promise any redemption in which life
would re-emerge in the Cuban countryside; the downsizing only brings about economic
devastation, which appears as just another form of death.
181
El paraíso (2009) completes this critical look at the past and the present of the
sugar industry with a dystopian projection into the future (Figure 9). Caustically titled,
the large woodcut (123x153cm) renders sugar-producing countryside as a graveyard with
three disassembled yet still prominent mills and hundreds of graves. Although some
graves feature ornate headstones rather than a simple cross and others even have statues
attached—presumably belonging to wealthier citizens and thus providing a subtle critique
of the supposedly equitable distribution of wealth in the socialist republic—the repeated
shape and size form a pattern across the print, one that hints the organization of social
life, when the latter existed. The sugar mill closest to the spectator organizes the graves
around it in circular fashion, befitting the name “central,” by which the mills are
commonly called in Cuba. Ironically, there is no church or cathedral to be seen in this
“paradise,” which would normally dictate urban organization, and the few state buildings
Figure 9: Marcel Molina Martínez, El paraíso, 2009. Xylography.
182
and the Cuban flag—located slightly to the right of the center—fail to organize and give
unity to the city of the dead. El paraíso thus suggests, through its dead landscape and
hundreds of graves revolving around disassembled mills, that it was the sugar industry
that sustained and organized rural life. Nevertheless, the graves in El paraíso recall the
houses in Memoria—in Molina’s necropolitical vision, the life that the sugar industry had
shaped, invested, and regulated appears once again indistinguishable from death.
Confirming what Roberto González Echevarría has observed about the sugar
industry, the mill here appears as a force that shaped every aspect of social reality.
409
The
innumerable graves that dot the entire landscape attest to the all-encompassing
significance of the industry. But also crucial is the way the mill chimneys dwarf every
other figure in the engraving. We understand that these were the temples—or perhaps the
gods themselves—of this civilization, from which now only lifeless ruins remain. We
also learn about the ways in which the sugar industry affected and shaped Cuban lives,
which were reduced to units of labor as interchangeable as their rectangular graves. The
ominous shades of the chimneys, which fall over and obscure certain graves, reveal
through their shared direction—the light hits all figures from the upper right corner—how
the citizens’ destinies were tied to that of the sugar industry, which now lies dead, much
like the workers whose lives depended on it. Indeed, there is no life—no people, animals,
or even fields of sugar cane—in Molina’s post-apocalyptic engraving; we see nothing but
the material ruins of an industrial landscape. El paraíso could be read as an indictment of
the Cuban state, which gave the necropolitical industry full reign when it was profitable

409
Roberto González Echevarría, “Literature of the Hispanic Caribbean,” Latin American
Literary Review 8, no. 16 (1980): 2.
183
and downsized it without any immediate replacements when the international prices
dropped.
Two recent prints elaborate on this critical gaze at the future of the industry and of
the communities affected by the partial closure. El testamento (2012), where the
necropolitics of the sugar industry is personified into a skeletal figure, makes a dismal
conjecture about the imminent future (Figure 10). Holding the farmer by his arm,
Death—a recurrent figure in Molina’s art—writes down his testament on a tablet
suspended from its bony neck. As with the family depicted in La familia, a work from
2011, the farmer’s face has been replaced with a fingerprint (Figure 11). The height of
the sugarcane plants, which almost take up the entire background, represents their
importance for the farmer, for whom the only remaining option is to wait for death. If his
imminent death symbolizes the closure of the sugar industry, his testament raises
questions about the future of the fields and the sugar mills. Will malanga, the crop that
replaced the sugar cane in most cases, yield as much income? What will happen to the
mills that have been abandoned for more than a decade?
410
In any case, the notion of a
farmer’s testament appears bitterly ironic in a socialist economy where, despite the recent
reforms under Raúl Castro, there still exist restrictions on private property and where
villagers own very little anyway.
411
Molina thus offers a critique of the Cuban state,
which reduces citizens to identifiable yet ultimately interchangeable traces without,
however, being able to guarantee their livelihood—as a necropolitical bureaucracy
without the proper management of life.

410
Rachel Price, Planet/Cuba: Art, Culture, and the Future of the Island (London and
New York: Verso, 2015).
411
Mesa-Lago, Cuba Under Raúl Castro, 209-10.
184
Soñar no cuesta nada (2012) similarly reveals how difficult—if not altogether
impossible—it is to imagine a slightly more joyful future in present-day Cuba (Figure
12). The engraving portrays yet another disassembled sugar mill, one that has been
nevertheless turned into a theme park with several rides. Some children are riding the
“flying cars,” but, since they have fingerprint faces, they appear inert and expressionless,
utterly lacking the joy and excitement expected at a theme park. In the foreground, we
see a “sugar train” (with its characteristic circular smoke box door) that seems fully
functional and carries a few people who are only visible as silhouettes. The sugar
industry, together with the lives it shapes and affects, appears sadly defunct even in the
dream, which—as the title reminds us—does not “cost” anything. Even a flight of the
Figure 10: Marcel Molina
Martínez, El testamento, 2012.
Xylography.
Figure 11: Marcel Molina Martínez, La familia,
2011. Xylography.
185
imagination does not warrant enough optimism to picture a fully functioning sugar mill,
reduced to its metal skeleton and without any smoke coming out of its chimney. Molina’s
title might be a reference to the Venezuelan TV series of the same name and in turn to the
2007 agreement between Cuba and Venezuela, which envisioned the repair and
improvement of the island’s dilapidated rail network. Even with the Venezuelan help, it
seems, the future does not look bright.
Molina’s recent works further demonstrate that the driving force behind his
artistic project is not, or not merely, melancholy but a critical dissatisfaction with the
current state of the national economy and politics. Elegía (2013) portrays a sepia
landscape filled with nothing but sugar mills whose chimneys have started to fall down
like dominoes (Figure 14). Even though the title suggests a melancholic yearning for an
industry that had provided for thousands of Cuban families, the lifeless industrial
landscape does not allow an uncritical idealization of the past. This allegorical
Figure 12: Marcel Molina Martínez, Soñar no cuesta
nada, 2012. Xylography.
Figure 13: Marcel Molina
Martínez, Un nudo en la
garganta, 2015. Xylography.
186
representation of the closing industry is much darker than Molina’s other works; as in a
number of other woodcuts, there is no life depicted, but in Elegía there are not even
houses to be seen. By contrast, we see the—no doubt tragic—end of an industry that,
however, caused ecological damage and reduced workers to interchangeable automata.
Un nudo en la garganta (2015), another sepia engraving that plays with Molina’s
customary themes and imagery, depicts a dismantled sugar mill whose chimney has been
tied into a knot and equidistant houses of identical size and shape that circle around it
(Figure 13). The Spanish phrase, which refers to the unease that accompanies feelings of
sadness, is here literalized on the “body” of the sugar mill through an analogy between
the chimney and the human neck. Once again the dull repetition of houses belies any
feelings of nostalgia that the title and the sepia tones seem to convey.

* * *
The oscillation between nostalgia and critique also defines the artistic vision of
Alejandro Saínz Alfonso (1965-), whose works uncannily complete those of Molina:
whereas the latter, as we have seen, compulsively depicts sugar mills without life, Saínz
Figure 14: Marcel Molina Martínez, Elegía,
2013. Xylography.
Figure 14: Marcel Molina Martínez, Elegía,
2013. Xylography.
187
mainly portrays laboring macheteros without a mill in sight. These national symbols of
virility are transformed, however, into faceless and vulnerable divers clad with antiquated
diving suits in Saínz’s sci-fi vision of an underwater Cuba. The tragicomic figures, which
are seen laboring, celebrating a birthday, or simply taking a ride in a colectivo (shared
taxi), certainly evoke a sense of melancholy, but towards a time that never existed.
Engaged in the absurd enterprise of underwater sugar farming, they toil before
motivational slogans reminiscent of socialist propaganda from the 1960s and 1970s,
whose promises are put radically in question. Here, as in Molina’s dystopian woodcuts,
the history of the Revolution is rewritten and reimagined through a vision that fluctuates
between irony and nostalgia.
A good introduction to Saínz’s project is En el mar la vida es más sabrosa (2015),
which features one of his “water men,” faceless macheteros in antiquated diving gear
(Figure 15). The background consists of three layers with different color and patterns: the
Figure 15: Alejandro Saínz
Alfonso, En el mar la vida es
más sabrosa, 2015. Xylography.
Figure 16: Alejandro Saínz Alfonso,
Sobreempleado, 2015. Xylography.
188
blue water, a red surface over which we see the title, and the green ground with cropped
up stems of sugarcane plants. The poster offers an ironic take on the downsizing of the
sugar industry and, more broadly, on the unfulfilled promises of the Revolution. Irony
permeates the entire premise behind the project: the idea of a sugar plantation below
water, which would—were it at all possible—dissolve all the sugar to be extracted, is
absurd itself. Saínz does not give any clues, either in this work or another, if there has
been a natural catastrophe (like the 2008 Hurricane Ike that devastated the island) or if
the waters have always been high in this sci-fi universe. The deliberate anachronism of
the “standard diving dress,” which recalls the models from the nineteenth century,
likewise pokes fun at the level of technological development curtailed by the American
embargo and the larger international isolation. The title, which comes from a popular
song by the Afro-Cuban band Sonora Matancera, plays with and exacerbates this irony by
referring to a “tasty” life “in” the water, strategically deploying the ambiguity of the
Spanish preposition en, which can alternately mean “on,” “near,” and—as it does in this
context—inside.” It is not hard to read the recontextualized lyrics as a critique of the
partial closure, with the implication that there is neither sugar nor any sweetness to life
left in Cuba.
Yet irony is always balanced by melancholy in Saínz’s art. The sugarcane farmers
in bulky diving gear are portrayed with sympathy, triggering the spectator’s feelings of
nostalgia towards older technologies. The unwavering optimism exuded by the worker-
protagonist, who poses with a machete on one hand and a recently cut sugarcane on the
other, and the title—“life is more tasty under water” (my emphasis)—refers us back to
the early days of the Revolution, when a socialist world order seemed possible, and
189
reachable by hard work. Indeed, Saínz’s posters recall state propaganda from Cuba and
the Soviet Union featuring images of virile and confident members of the proletariat.
And yet, much like Molina, Saínz does not portray the macheteros’ faces, which remain
invisible behind the protective glass of their helmets; these are not individuals with
singular characters, but faceless members of the masses whose livelihood depends on an
industry that turns them into interchangeable wage laborers. While more melancholy in
tone, Saínz too represents the sugar industry as a form of necropolitics: the air bubbles
rising from the helmet underline the precariousness of the workers’ lives. In this poster as
elsewhere, we certainly feel a ironic gaze at the Revolution, the Cuban state’s
mobilization of the sugar trade for its ideological goals, and the eventual closure of the
industry; and yet, it is hard to hate or even laugh at these faceless yet confident laborers
who, in antiquated diving suits, put their lives at risk. Saínz thus achieves a productive
ambiguity between critique and nostalgia, a standpoint from which to look at the recent
history of the sugar industry.
From a similarly ambiguous perspective, “Sobreempleado” (Overworked, 2015)
looks at a scene of collective labor (Figure 16). Much like the poster I have just
examined, the title exploits a semantic ambiguity: the term “sobreempleado” can
alternatively refer to the long hours of work or to the state’s employment of more
workers than necessary. Both alternatives resonate in the Cuban context: the workers did
work long hours and, particularly after the closure, there was overemployment in the
second sense. Recalling the Dutch painter Pieter Bruegel’s landscapes, the engraving
depicts several workers harvesting sugar cane at an underwater field that covers most of
the background. What distinguishes this work is the portrayal of the world above water.
190
We see two sandals, in one of which a farmer sits with the tanks that through tubes
provide oxygen the workers toiling below. The farmer sitting in the sandal is one of the
few figures in Saínz’s series that does not wear a diving suit; he, however, is no high
bureaucrat holding the “strings” but just another villager, simply put in charge of the
oxygen tank. Unlike the Bruegel landscapes where we see the farmers united by their
common struggle against nature, there is no feeling of community in this sci-fi projection
from twenty-first century Cuba, nor any implication that the laborers will somehow
benefit from the products of their labor; nature does not seem conquered either—wild and
verdant sugar canes occupy the entire (underwater) background. There is a “suffocating”
quality to this image precisely because we witness to what extent the livelihood of Cuban
workers—the air they breathe—depends on the continued existence of the sugar industry;
the oxygen flow might be interrupted any minute, putting the laborers under mortal risk.
Far from the masculine ideal of the machetero, the faceless and interchangeable workers
seem completely resigned to their fate, which depends directly and immediately on the
world above water.
This image of masculinity is further deconstructed in “Mira pa’ la cámara” (Look
at the Camera, 2015), which reveals a more personal and vulnerable side to Saínz’s
underwater laborers (Figure 17). The engraving portrays a moment from the fiftieth
birthday of a water man, who is being photographed holding a slice from his cake;
several co-workers, all in diving suit, are present at the party, which takes place under
water (we see the air bubbles rising from the helmets). Below the image, we read the
common expression “¡Ahora es que empieza la fiesta!” (Now the party begins!), whose
forced enthusiasm conveys sadness more than anything. The birthday scene is surrounded
191
on the sides by icons from maritime life (e.g. a sailboat, algae, waves, fish), giving it the
appearance of a framed picture—perhaps hanging from a wall at the house of the fifty-
something water man. “Mira pa’ la cámara” subtly links the personal with the political,
the birthday with the national anniversary, deconstructing the teleological in both
celebrations.
Signed in 2015, the print makes a clear allusion to Saínz’s fiftieth birthday, and
thus provides a reflection on our ways of dealing, making sense of, and feeling good
about the passage of time. Yet the figures in heavy diving gear, who are without
exception laborers for the state (e.g. macheteros, soldiers) in Saínz’s series, allow us to
read the engraving as an uncertain gaze at the posterity of the Cuban nation, which had
celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the Revolution not too long ago in 2009. The
expression “¡Ahora es que empieza la fiesta!” divides time—and national history—into a
strenuous past characterized by toil and a blissful future redeemed, precisely, by that hard
work—the present becomes the place where the telos of all that negocio (work) is
Figure 17: Alejandro Saínz Alfonso, Mira pa’ la cámara,
2015. Xylography
192
realized and turned into ocio (free time).
412
Nevertheless, Saínz’s signature blend of irony
and melancholy does not allow us to believe in this optimism; the faceless worker is too
sad, his pose too artificial, and the saying too forced. The future, of the artist and the
nation, seem as illegible as the disjointed letters on the breastplate of the laborer.
An oscillation between critique and melancholy, then, is common to Saínz’s
underwater world and Molina’s lifeless landscapes. In representing the sugar industry as
a form of necropolitics, both artists render the laborers faceless and interchangeable. As
we have seen, Molina replaces faces with fingerprints, thus signaling the Cuban state’s
impersonal gaze at its citizens as well as the dehumanizing effects of the industry;
Saínz’s underwater laborers seem equally expendable and alienated in the uniform diving
suits that hide their faces. A further point of similarity is the stress on the precariousness
of life as a Cuban citizen. In Saínz’s under-water nation, where the lives of laborers
depend on the tubes that pump oxygen to their helmets, we remain at all moments
conscious of the risk of death by drowning. Although life continues without any drastic
changes, the ever-visible tubes make us reflect on the precariousness of labor in Cuba,
where an important industry can be downsized by a short-sighted sovereign decision. In
Molina’s woodcuts, on the other hand, the closure of the sugar industry is shown to have
brought devastation and death to the Cuban countryside; the lives that used to depend on
the industry now find themselves without sustenance. Rather than idealizing the
downsized sugar industry as a lost economic and cultural asset, both artists thus reflect on
the alienating labor in the field and the mill. And yet, a certain melancholy emanates
from the work of both artists. Sainz’s “water men” cut a nostalgically sympathetic figure

412
For a discussion of the notion of ocio (free time) and el juego (gaming) in Cuban art,
see Price, Planet/Cuba, 119-148.
193
with their hidden faces, antiquated diving gear, and resignation to precarious labor; we
neither laugh at them nor merely condemn the underwater industry. In Molina’s art,
melancholy is often in the titles—e.g. “Memoria,” “Elegía,” “Un nudo en la garganta”—
which contrast sharply with the bleak and lifeless landscapes.
Recent Cuban art critically responds to the closure of the sugar industry with
irony, nostalgia, and pessimism. Rather than pure condemnation or melancholy, we find
creative and thoughtful engagements with the past, the present, and the future of the
industry and the island. Molina and Saínz both reflect critically on the alienation of
agricultural labor in Cuba, which reduces singular lives to interchangeable civil laborers.
Molina replaces the face, the locus of subjectivity and expression, with the fingerprint—
singular traces that nonetheless all citizens possess. Representing laborers from the
perspective of the Cuban state, the artist thus turns them into identifiable yet
expressionless entities. Saínz achieves a very similar effect through his motif of the
diving suit uniform, which likewise obscures the face and renders the workers
interchangeable; the identity of the laborer, even at moments that celebrate the singularity
of his life (e.g. the birthday celebration), disappears into an anonymous darkness. The
conditions of labor, then, become an object of artistic inquiry and experimentation in the
work of these two young artists, who continue to live and produce in the socialist
republic.

4.3 | Hotels, Coca-Cola, Chesucristo: Cuba Libre?
As the Cuban sugar industry declined rapidly, tourism—a sector whose image is closely
associated with the pre-revolutionary days of the island—has boomed to an
194
unprecedented level. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1989, Cuba lost its
major trading partner, and quickly found itself in the grips of severe economic crisis that
Fidel termed “Período especial en los tiempos de paz” (Special Period in Times of
Peace). Not able to receive the hydrocarbon energy resources (e.g. gasoline, diesel,
petroleum) previously imported from the Soviet Union in exchange for sugar and its
byproducts, the country experienced a halt in agricultural and cattle industries, leading to
a scarcity in food products. Revitalizing tourism was one of the strategies with which the
Cuban government ameliorated the effects of the economic crisis. Tourism eventually has
become “the second large source of hard-currency revenue and a significant contributor
to offsetting the deficit in the goods trade.”
413
Under the leadership of Raúl Castro, the
Cuban government liberalized home-rentals to foreign tourists (casas particulares), small
private restaurants (paladares)—which provide better quality food than their state-led
rivals—and the circulation of private taxis. As a result of these reforms, the number of
foreign tourists visiting Cuba increased has seen a tenfold jump from 270,000 in 1989 to
2.7 million in 2011.
414
Only in 2011-2012, Raúl Castro’s government invested 185
million CUP to modernize hotels and airports, and reduce the landing fees by airlines.
415

Under the newly appointed Cuban president Miguel Díaz-Canel, this trend is likely to
continue.
Though economically urgent and advantageous, the decision to boost tourism has
widened income inequality and made particularly visible the economic disparity between
the average Cuban citizen and the global traveler. Food is, once again, a good indicator:

413
Mesa-Lago, Cuba Under Raúl Castro, 91.
414
Ibid.
415
Ibid.
195
for a plate of lobster tourists gladly pay $25, which constitutes the monthly salary of a
Cuban civil servant. Whereas an average Cuban cannot afford certain products or has to
scavenge several local markets to find them, tourists enjoy immediate access to tropical
abundance. Increased tourism also brought back the specters of pre-revolutionary
Havana, when the island was a popular destination for tourists. Artists like Rainier
Nande, José Toirac, and Octavio Marín respond critically and creatively to the
inequalities caused by this increased dependence on tourism. In their artworks and
installations, we see emblematic buildings like the Hotel Tryp Habana Libre turned into a
giant refrigerator full of food, Eucharist wafers pressed with the image of Che Guevara,
and Coca-Cola cans forming a red carpet towards a garbage container.
Reinier Nande Pérez (1979-), a multimedia artist from Havana whose work
explores the notions of play, work, and inequality, lays bare the contradictions
exacerbated by the tourist industry in his photography diptych Calorías por metro
cuadrado (2017) (Figures 18-19). Each panel features an emblematic Havana building
transformed into an open refrigerator through photo editing: on the left panel we see the
Hotel Tryp Habana Libre, one of the city’s most historic buildings, photoshopped into a
two-sided refrigerator full of food, drinks, and condiments; by contrast, the right panel
shows a residential apartment on the Tulipán Avenue, whose refrigerator features almost
nothing but a few bottles of water. Nande’s title invites us to contrast the “calories per
meter square” in each building, bitterly signaling the discrepancies between the
experiences—alimentary or otherwise—of the tourists and Cuban citizens on the island.
It is doubly significant that the tourist industry is metonymized by the Hotel Tryp Habana
Libre, which has a special place in the history of the Cuban Revolution. After entering
196
Havana with his armed barbudos (bearded men) in the first days of 1959, Fidel Castro
stayed in the suite 2324 of this hotel—then called the Habana Hilton—for three months,
turning the building into his headquarters. Along with the other hotels in the city, the
Habana Hilton was nationalized in 1960 and renamed as the Hotel Habana Libre, a
substitution whose message of “liberation” acquires an ironic resonance in Nande’s
diptych.
416
We see that almost three decades after the fall of the Soviet Union and hence
the beginning of the Special Period, food scarcity still marks the lives of Cuban citizens.
The diptych underlines how the attempt to revive the economy through tourism has
created more inequality, recalling the days before the Revolution when the island catered
to the pleasures of the American tourists.
José Toirac (1966-) is another artist who frequently explores the politics of
Cuba’s growing tourist industry. Looking for Happiness (2014), a collaboration with
artist and partner Meira Marrero, signals the contradictions of Cuban culture and politics
through the cuba libre, one of the rum-based cocktails most popular among the tourists
who visit the island (Figure 20). A diptych like Nande’s Calorías por metro cuadrado,

416
For a discussion of Castro government’s rejection of the Batista era, see Nicola Miller,
“The Absolution of History: Uses of the Past in Castro’s Cuba,” Journal of
Contemporary History 38, no. 1 (2003): 147-152.
Figure 18: Reinier Nande Pérez, Habana
Libre, 2017. Photography.
Figure 19: Reinier Nande Pérez, Tulipán,
2017. Photography.
197
the collage brings together a cropped photograph of Ernest “Papa” Hemingway before a
bottle of rum with a photograph of Ernesto “Che” Guevara holding a bottle of Coca-Cola.
Toirac and Marrero thus serve us the famed concoction, whose name is also inscribed in
the background in two different fonts; the “Libre” is written in white on a red
background, clearly stylized after Coca-Cola’s logo. The artists have aligned the
photographs so that the smiling Hemingway appears to be looking at a contemplative
Guevara, somehow caught off guard. Since the Special Period, Hemingway’s former
abodes in Havana (e.g. the Hotel Ambos Mundos, his mansion in the San Francisco de
Paula neighborhood) as well as the bars he frequented to drink his mojitos and daiquiris
(the author actually expressed dislike for the cuba libre in one of his novels) have
become lucrative tourist magnets.
417
It is not at all forced, then, to read his image as a
metonym of the booming sector of tourism. The cocktail itself dates from the time of
American presence in the island after the Cuban War of Independence (1895-98). Its
name (a popular slogan of the day), as well as its ingredients, foreshadows the American

417
See Florence E. Babb, “Che, Chevys, and Hemingway’s Daiquiris: Cuban Tourism in
a Time of Globalisation,” Bulletin of Latin American Research 30, no.1 (2011): 54-55.
Figure 20: José Toirac and Meira Marrero, Looking for
Happiness, 2014. Photography.
198
hegemony as well as the cultural and political contradictions of this free-but-not-free
island nation.
As Antonio Eligio has observed, Toirac’s art engages with “the rise of capitalist
corporate image and its clash with another omnipresent likeness—the socialist image of
power,” identified mostly with revolutionary figures like Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and
Camilo Cienfuegos.
418
The title itself invites us to contrast the ways in which the two
Ernestos “look for happiness”: the American writer, who famously struggled with
alcoholism, reaches for a bottle of rum whereas the Cuban revolutionary takes a moment
of refuge in a bottle of coke. There thus emerges a substitution where each searches
felicity in the emblematic beverage of the other’s nation, normally considered to be the
enemy.
419
Cuba thus appears as dependent on the United States, and by extension to the
global capital, for its “happiness.” Very much like Nande, then, Toirac and Marrero
recontextualize and resignify emblematic figures from national culture to underline how a
growing dependence on tourism jeopardizes Cuba’s economic and political autonomy. As
with the Tryp Hotel Habana Libre in the former’s diptych, the “liberty” invoked in Toirac
and Marrero’s work acquires deeply ironic connotations; stylization—modeled after the
Coca-Cola logo—here belies the constative content.
In 2017, Toirac collaborated with the choir-director Octavio Marín for an
exhibition titled Diógenes y la luz (Diogenes and the Light), which used all three floors of
the Factoría Habana art gallery. The artworks and installations that comprised the

418
Antonio Eligio, “A Tree from Many Shores: Cuban Art in Movement,” Art Journal
57, no. 4 (1998), 79.
419
The substitution is doubly suggestive since the destinies of these two Ernestos are
interlocked through the politics of their nations: Hemingway’s stay in Cuba will come to
an abrupt end thanks to the Revolution and Guevara will eventually be killed by CIA-
assisted special forces.
199
exhibition reread and resignified the past and present of Cuba through creative uses of
gastroimagery, offering a reflection on the boom in tourism, among other subjects. On the
first floor, the guests would first encounter Renaissance, an installation that through
empty cans of Coca-Cola, TuKola (the national variant), and Bucanero (a Cuban beer)
forms a red carpet towards a sofa turned into a trash bin, flanked by portraits of various
Cuban professionals photographed with the same sofa (Figure 21-22). The installation
allows us to reflect on the significance of the tourist industry, here metonymized by the
empty soda cans, for the “rebirth” of national economy after 1989. Cuba is shown to have
risen from its (thr)ashes: it is partly through the income generated by tourist consumption
that the present Cuban society, with its various professionals, continues to function (the
religious connotations of this rebirth will be fully explored on the third floor). The
exhibition, an “homage to all and every one of those who, in absolute anonymity and
with no intention to stand out nor looking for any recognition, achieve success and
Figure 21: José Toirac and Octavio
Marín, Renaissance, 2017. Empty
soda cans.
Figure 22: José Toirac and Octavio Marín,
Renaissance, 2017. Photography.
200
personal growth just by doing right,”
420
is dedicated to citizens like the photographed
professionals. And yet, the installation hints that even such “virtue” is made possible by
the income created by tourism.
The installation-portraits on the same floor, each dedicated to a “honest man”
from the Cuban society, elaborate the exhibition theme and provide a critical reflection
on the relations between tourism and cultural politics in modern Cuba. Toirac and Marín
do not distinguish between professions in their homage; we see, for instance, portraits of
a waste collector and pirated CD seller. It is the installation dedicated to the renowned
chef Carlos Cristóbal Márquez Valdés, however, that allows us to think about the
intricate nexus between tourism and consumption in the island (Figure 23). At the center
of the installation, we see a life-size painting of the Cuban chef, who stands tall with a
proud smile at his restaurant San Cristóbal, known for its quality rendition of traditional
plates. The portrait is flanked by ornaments (secular and religious) and framed
photographs of celebrities that ate at the restaurant, whose walls are decorated with
similar paraphernalia. Through references to tourism and food consumption, Toirac and
Marín’s installation inadvertently goes against the exhibition’s emphasis on moral virtue,
showing how individualized notions of honesty become problematic in a society
dependent on foreign income; although the artists present Carlos as yet another “honest
man,” his profession—a professional chef catering mainly to foreign tourists—is
diametrically opposed to “turning poverty into virtue.”
421
A modern chef, especially one
who works for the tourist industry, is expected to provide fullness to his customers by
satisfying their palate in a way that goes beyond the “virtues” of necessity; known for his

420
José Toirac and Octavio Marín, artist statement, Factoría Habana, Havana, 2017.
421
Ibid.
201
sumptuous meals that offer edible cubanidad, luxury—and neither need nor poverty—is
the realm within which Carlos operates.
Furthermore, it is tourists and wealthy bureaucrats that are the real clients of San
Cristóbal, whose luxury plates would be mostly unaffordable for the average citizen; we
are, then, looking at the portrait of a successful businessman who makes profit by selling
edible identity to those who do not form part of the Cuban populus. Carlos, appropriately
surrounded by objects old and new in the installation, reinterprets traditional cuisine and
sells a particular image of Cuba to foreign visitors. The framed photographs attest to this
commodification of the local for the pleasures of non-locals. Among the famed clients of
the restaurant, the most important place is given to the former American president Barack
Obama and his family, whose photograph is placed the above the chef’s portrait, between
a sculpture of the Virgin Mary with baby Jesus and a religious painting that depicts
Abraham and Ishmael. The former American president and his family, here epitomizing
Figure 23: José Toirac and Octavio Marín, Diógenes y la
luz, 2017. Oil painting and photography.
202
the restaurant’s select global clientele, are thus apotheosized into sacrosanct figures.
Several Coca-Cola ornaments, both in the installation and the painting, further underline
the dependence of the Cuban economy on global tourism. While put forward as an
homage to the “honest man,” Toirac and Marín’s installation thus reveals the exclusions
of a sector that caters primarily to foreign tourists.
The installations on the second floor of the gallery, dedicated to the “relics” of
Cuban citizens, continue Toirac and Marín’s ambiguous homage. Each subject is
commemorated with one or two items associated with them in one way or another; on the
display pedestal, we learn their names, dates of birth and death, and profession. As with
the portrait-installations on the first floor, the artists here give equal importance to
Cubans from different walks of life; the relics of a national hero like José Martí, a
capitalist like Dom Facundo Bacardi Masso, and a virtually unknown immigrant share
the same space of representation (Figures 24, 25). Most citizens are remembered by
artifacts that relate to the field of gastronomy in one way or another. José Martí, whose
epithet—“the apostle”—becomes his profession, is commemorated by a bottle of wine,
alluding to his famous statement in Nuestra América: “El vino, de plátano; y si sale agrio,
¡es nuestro vino!” (The wine, from plantain; but even if it turns sour, it is our own
wine!”).
422
Quite appropriately, Dom Facundo Bacardi Masso is remembered by a bottle
of Bacardi rum and several bottles of Hatuey beer, another product of the company.
Similarly, Margot Bacallao, the Afro-Cuban cook who worked with the famous TV
personality Nitza Villapol in “Cocina al minuto,” is (somewhat dismissively)
commemorated with the latter’s cookbook. While “Renaissance” focuses on how tourism

422
José Martí, Nuestra América, ed. Cintio Vitier (Guadalajara: Centro de Estudios
Martianos, 2000), 20.
203
has refueled Cuban economy, there relics offer a retrospective look at national history,
paying homage to the “little man” as well as dissidents like the Bacardi family, who left
the island a year after Castro’s revolution. But beyond elevating ordinary (or at least not
holy) people to the level of saints, the installation allows us to think perishable products
like food and beverages as relics. The displays of Martí, Bacardi, and Bacallao show
three ways in which prandial items may become iterable across generations: as metaphor,
as commodity, and as recipe.
After exploring contemporary social life on the first floor and national history on
the second, the visitors discover the ideological core of post-Revolution Cuba on the third
floor. Here the installations explore contiguities between Catholicism and Cuban
ideology by politically reimagining a ritualized form of consumption: the Eucharist. As
David Kunzle has observed in “Chesucristo: Fusions, Myths, and Realities,” recent
Figure 24: José Toirac and
Octavio Marín, Diógenes y
la luz, 2017. Installation.
Figure 25: José Toirac and
Octavio Marín, Diógenes y
la luz, 2017. Installation.
204
Cuban art frequently portrays Che as Jesus, fusing the prophet’s “attributes…and events
from his Passion with the iconic Che images.”
423
In videos and installations like Hecho
en Manila (1998) and Requiem (2005) Toirac himself has explored the contiguity
between the two symbiologies. In Diógenes y la luz, Toirac and Marín turn an old metal
press into a “wafer maker,” with four identical casts of a Christogram on the upper wing
and four corresponding casts of Alberto Díaz Korda’s iconic portrait of Guevara on the
lower one (Figure 26). On these theologico-political wafers, the cross meets the red star,
the letters of the Christogram—“I H S,” which stand for the letters of Christ’s name in
Greek, iota, eta, and sigma—meet with the nationalist slogan “Patria o muerte” and the
year “2017,” inscribed above and below the Che portrait, respectively. By juxtaposing the
self-sacrificial prophets of Christianity and Cuban socialism, Toirac and Marín signal the
perfect correspondence between the two belief systems. This suspiciously smooth
ideological mapping in turn urges us to rethink state propaganda as a form of religion,
with its divinities, holy scriptures, and etiology. This theologico-political communion
subjectivates each and every Cuban citizen, who thus become one with the Host, that is,
the socialist nation.
The Che/Christ wafers, products of a press (though an antiquated one), allow us to
also think about ideology “in the age of its mechanical reproduction.”
424
Although the
metal press of course appears anachronistic in our digital age, it does make a direct
reference to the iterability of images in the modern times. Korda’s portrait has become
easily the most emblematic image of the twentieth century, continually reproduced in

423
David Kunzle, “Chesucristo: Fusions, Myths, and Realities,” Latin American
Perspectives 35, no. 2 (2008), 97-109.
424
Walter Benjamin, “Art in the Age of its Mechanical Reproduction,” trans. Harry
Zohn, in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Shocken Books, 2007), 217-253.
205
socialist propaganda as well as in posters, t-shirts, coffee mugs, and other paraphernalia
around the world. Unlike classical objects of art whose aura depends on their

irreproducibility, products of the culture industry like Che build aura through the
reproduction of their images. Toirac and Marín’s installation thus offers a reflection on
the processes of identification involved in this auratic “consumption” of the Cuban
guerilla. In the modern times, Che’s portrait has effectively become a holy wafer, one
that allows us to identify and thus feel one with him. Especially in Cuba, the lines
between Catholicism and the Cuban state ideology have been irrevocably blurred. Much
like Jesus, Che operates in a sacrificial economy: instead of settling with the official titles
afforded by the Castro administration, the Argentine revolutionary fought for the peoples
of the Third World, which ultimately led to his gruesome end in Bolivia. Both emaciated
men, then, sacrificed themselves to redeem their people. Che is the son of God who
materialized into human form through his infinitely reproduced and immaterial image.
But if Che is Jesus, then Fidel must be God himself. Several “rhymes” between
Catholicism and Cuban ideology already suggest this analogy. Fidel, who survived
Figure 26: José Toirac and
Octavio Marín, Diógenes y
la luz, 2017. Installation.
Figure 27: José Toirac and Octavio Marín, Diógenes y la
luz, 2017. Installation.
206
Guevara and thus transcended his mortality so to speak, is the older figure with—as a
bonus—a hoary beard, recalling depictions of God as an old man. Moreover, Fidel has
always held the highest political and bureaucratic rank, relegating Guevara to (relatively)
less important offices. The exhibition reinforces this analogy by including absolutely no
images of Fidel, who thus becomes the unrepresentable—both on legal and artistic terms.
His unrepresentability contrasts sharply with the ubiquitous visibility of Guevara, hinted
by the reproducible wafers. We only see the words of Fidel about Guevara on a wall
inscription, tantamount to holy scriptures. Much like God, Fidel only presences himself
through words in the exhibition. Of course, the actual conflicts between Fidel and
Guevara are obscured by this genealogy, this familiarization.
Another installation on the same floor extends the analogy established between
Catholicism and the socialist ideology (Figure 27). At a long table, we see two dozen
metal cups filled with the Che-Christ wafers produced by the metal press; above the
table, a holy chalice with the image of Guevara sits on a traditional cloth with
embroidered figures. The cups, set in twelve sets of two, establish an analogy between
the twelve apostles of Jesus and the twenty-something guerillas who survived the first
attack by Fulgencio Batista’s forces and went on to bring about the Revolution. The
austerity of the installation itself resonates with the exhibition’s theme of “turning
poverty into virtue.” Guevara is presented as “the honest man,” a model subject who,
much like Diogenes, gave up mundane goods and searched for virtue, which for him
took the form of revolutionary struggle. Toirac and Marín’s installations thus deconstruct
the tacit analogies and mapping between Catholicism and Cuban socialism. While it is
not at all clear how much irony there is in this juxtaposition, the installations expose the
207
contiguity between the two belief systems, revealing the contradictions of a political
ideology that aimed to undo traditional hierarchies. Through ritualized forms of
consumption, then, we here find an exposition of the religiosity—more specifically, of
the Catholicity—of Cuban ideology.
On the same floor, Diogenes of Sinope (c. 412-323 BCE), whose philosophy
underpins the conceptual background of the exhibition, is commemorated through a
broken clay pot, alluding to the Greek philosopher’s alleged habit of sleeping in a
container of this kind; inside the pot, a projected inscription reads “la virtud es el
soberano bien” (Figures 28-29). In the artist statement that accompanies the installation,
Toirac and Marín argue that Diogenes, who reportedly gave up all mundane goods to live
the life of a vagabond, “convirtió la pobreza extrema en virtud.”
425
The Greek
philosopher, who during daytime wandered on the streets of Athens with a lantern
looking for “the honest man,” thus becomes a model subject whose example of is to be
followed by Cuban citizens. This praise of poverty offers yet another parallel between

425
Toirac and Marín, artist statement, Factoría Habana, Havana, 2017.
Figure 28: José Toirac and Octavio Marín,
Diógenes y la luz, 2017. Broken clay pot and
projection.
Figure 29: José Toirac and Octavio Marín,
Diógenes y la luz, 2017. Broken clay pot
and projection.
208
Catholicism and the Cuban state ideology, itself informed by socialism and shaped by
decades of scarcity after the fall of the Soviet Union.
Recent Cuban art provides a critical commentary on the costs and contradictions
of an increased dependence on tourism by repurposing the sector’s most emblematic
images. If Nande’s incisive diptych “Calorías por metro cuadrado” reveals the abyss in
economic power between the foreign tourist and the average Cuban citizen by turning the
typical abodes of each into giant refrigerators, Toirac and Marrero’s “Cuba libre”
complements this critique by highlighting the political stakes of depending heavily on
foreign income. Hemingway smiles at Che drinking coke since Cuba’s “liberty” depends
as much on foreign income as does a cuba libre on the sacchariferous American soda. By
contrast, Toirac’s collaboration with Marín to a certain extent redeems the Cuban
“renaissance” through the tourist industry. Cuban persistence and inventiveness is praised
by an analogy with the way Diogenes turned “poverty into virtue.” Yet the artists also
signal the contiguity between Catholicism and the state ideology through a Cubanized
Eucharist, where Che and Castro are turned into divine figures and citizens have “relics”
like saints. Cuban art, then, defamiliarizes naturalized ideologies and renders visible the
inequality and dependency that intensified with tourism by resignifying the industry’s
most iconic images and putting them in contiguity with those of Cuban state ideology.
Tourism and the sugar industry have been fundamental in shaping twentieth-
century Cuban economy, politics, and culture. The contemporary artists I examined
respond creatively to the problematic legacy of these industries, exposing how they are in
turn linked with the history of slavery and coloniality from which modern Cuba has
emerged. Emblematic images from food production (e.g. the sugar mill) and consumption
209
(e.g. the hotel, the Coca-Cola logo) become instrumental in this inherently ambiguous
critique, providing metonyms that, much like the trope of cannibalism in the Brazilian
context, have the symbolic force to rethink the past, present, and uncertain futures of the
nation. Responding to post-1989 realities, these artworks problematize the notions of
political liberty and autonomy as well as the practices of labor in the socialist republic.
Rather than melancholically idealizing the years of relative prosperity or celebrating
wholesale the rediscovered sector of tourism, these artists engage critically with Cuba’s
recent social and economic transformations. As a biopolitical field thoroughly invested
with national and global interests and hierarchies, consumption becomes one of the
primary means to contemplate Cuba on a macro-economic level. We thus see the sugar
industry represented as a necropolitical enterprise that has commodified laborers and,
once downsized, created an equally devastating gap in the industry. Tourism, on the other
hand, is exposed as a highly profitable yet inequitable and dependent source of income;
Cuban artists acknowledge its role in ameliorating the economic crisis after 1989, but
also signal the contradictions introduced by the sector. By editing (Nande), accumulating
(Toirac and Marín), and recontextualizing (Saínz and Molina) images from the sugar and
tourism industries, recent Cuban art engages with these problematic changes without,
however, losing its inherent ambiguity as art.

210
-5-
Epilogue

Eating obstructs discourse, blurs the limits of the body, and takes place in a
network of relations with human and nonhuman others. As such, it is an indissociably
political and libidinal act that is at once momentous and quotidian. Literature and art have
the capacity to politically resignify the sphere of consumption in each of its stages, from
the production of food to the production of waste. We have seen how, for instance,
contemporary Cuban artists provide a critical commentary on the downsizing of the sugar
industry by recontextualizing its most emblematic images, namely, the machetero and the
mill. A figural use of cannibalism like that of Antropofagia, on the other hand, imparts
new meaning to a ritualistic consumption long considered a sign of barbarity. Waste, the
inevitable byproduct of consumption, gleams with political and libidinal meaning both in
Lamborghini and Piñera’s stories. In all these instances, authors and artists deploy,
transform, and recreate an archive that is partly material—e.g. the affects and experiences
linked with consumption—and partly discursive. This archive, always already political,
affords cultural products with a force to rethink the past and the present, and to viscerally
affect their audience in ways that can be, as we have seen, ethically and politically
significant.
In this exploration of gastroimagery in Latin American literature and art, we have
seen consumption mobilized in different forms and to different ends. We have seen
scenes of eating provoke affects from pleasure to disgust, from nostalgia to resentment.
At a time when traditional forms of politics increasingly give way to populist
manipulation of affects, it is perhaps this capacity to conjure and elicit bodily responses
that is the most politically important aspect of these images.
211
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Abstract (if available)

Abstract Gastropoetics: Cultural Figurations of Eating in Modern Argentina, Brazil, and Cuba explores the politics of gastronomy in literature and art from the 1920s to the present. Examining the work of authors and artists including Oswald de Andrade, José Lezama Lima, Osvaldo Lamborghini, and José Toirac, the dissertation underscores how scenes of eating intervene in contemporary debates on biopolitics, cosmopolitanism, and globalization. The analysis engages with diverse texts and media that include stories, paintings, and installations to develop a theory of eating as act, trope, and affect in Latin American literature and culture. In dialogue with the philosophical works of Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and Giorgio Agamben, Gastropoetics argues that scenes of eating gesture towards dissident forms of expression and belonging.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Kulez, Ali (author)

Core Title Gastropoetics: Cultural figurations of eating in modern Argentina, Brazil, and Cuba

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture (Comparative Literature)

Publication Date 07/30/2018

Defense Date 06/20/2018

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag abject,Cannibalism,consumption,eating,Food,OAI-PMH Harvest

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Graff Zivin, Erin (committee chair), Díaz, Roberto Ignacio (committee member), Lippit, Akira Mizuta (committee member)

Creator Email Kulez@uchicago.edu,Kulez@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c89-41771

Unique identifier UC11670328

Identifier etd-KulezAli-6566.pdf (filename),usctheses-c89-41771 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-KulezAli-6566.pdf

Dmrecord 41771

Document Type Dissertation

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Kulez, Ali

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA