The Emancipated Spectator

Ranciere, Jacques. The Emancipated Spectator. Trans. by Gregory Elliot. London: Verso, 2009.

I cannot thank Dr. Mary Bryson enough for pointing this book at me.

Here, Jacques Ranciere engages on debates about how to understand spectatorship and spectacles. His main point being that there is no such thing as a passive spectator who is a blank receptacle of the flood of images and susceptible to ideological manipulation. Being a spectator is then not something negative on itself, as meaning is produced in an indeterminate way and thus cannot be calculated in advance. In this way, he counters Debord formula that the more a subjects contemplates (his/her own disposession), the less he/she lives. Ranciere proposes to understand viewing as an action in which spectators are also "active interpreters of the spectacle offered to them" (13), "who develop their own translation in order to appropriate the 'story' and make it their own story" (22).

Ranciere also takes issue with the left-wing irony or melancholy that anticipates any kind of social critique is already absorbed by the logics of capitalism and free market, as even acts of protests are already framed as ("youth radicalism") fashion, commodities, and spectacle. Instead, he poses an approach based on a different set of assumptions: "that the incapable are capable; that there is no hidden secret of the machine that keeps them trapped in their place...there is no fatal mechanism transforming reality into image; no monstruous beast absorbing all desires and energies into its belly; no lost community to be restored. What there is are simply scenes of dissensus, capable of surfacing at any place and at any time.(...) It means that every situation can be cracked open from the inside, reconfigured in a different regime of perception and signification." (48-49)

In this way, aesthetic experience is politically effective not so much in terms of offering a convincing rhetoric of what should be done as an agenda for emancipation, but as far as it can "change the cartography of the perceptible, the thinkable and the feasible" (72). Since there is not direct and/or transparent relation between the artist's intentions and the effects on the audiences, this poses a challenge for "political art" that seeks to have an emancipatory effect. This fundamental indetermination is useful to think of art as a way to open up new forms of political subjectivation through the multiplication of connections and disconnections between signifiers.

Gendered Spectacles of Nationalism

Taylor, Diana. Dissapearing Acts. Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina's "Dirty War." Durham: Duke University Press, 1997.


Taylor's book is key to my research about militarism and neoliberalism as gendered spectacles, as it does several things at the same time:

1. It outlines a definition of spectacle as a central component of national imaginations. Spectacles offer universal canonical narratives for interpreting specific historical situations, they present a version of the world as inevitable and natural, and they interpellate the audiences in a way that it shapes what are the viable subjectivities in that context. Spectacle, performativity and theatricality are not terms opposed here to "reality," but rather have very real effects. Who is in control of the production of national public spectacles is what matters, who holds the power to manipulate desire and control the gaze.

2. It describes the ways that masculinity is performed in the context of militarism in Argentina's "Dirty War." The Junta enacted an old script of male individuation that is carried out on and through women's bodies. The presence of the female seems to mediate both in an Oedipal drama (in the role of mother) and to guarantee that the homosocial bonding of militarism is framed as an heterosexual. However, Taylor is critical of how the left has been trapped in the same script of disputing the "true" masculinity from the military by feminizing their opponents.

3. It points at the ways that resistance is always constrained in previous already scripted plots that are available in any given specific cultural and sociohistorical context. Emblematic would be the case of the Madres, already commented here. Because women (or "good women" anyway) have available a very limited number of viable roles to play, their oppositional practices tend to end up enacting those roles. This is not a call for paralysis, but rather to acknowledge the complexities and contradictions inherent to oppositional practices. Along with this, she writes about the dilemmas when writing about violence, and calls for a politics of spectatorship: it invites us to a responsible witnessing of violence.

On the notion of spectacle, part 2

McClintock, Anne. "No Longer in a Future Heaven": Gender, Race and Nationalism in Dangerous Liaisons. Gender, Nation and Postcolonial Perspectives. University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 1997.


"All nationalisms are gendered; all are invented; and all are dangerous —" (89)

McClintock argues that nationalisms as historical practices are invariably built in the institutionalization of gender difference and that the nation is prefigured by the image of the family in order to legitimize power relations as natural. For example, when militarism and authoritarian regimes draw on notions of father's authority. Moreover, she describes how national time was domesticated under the European Enlightment, a process in which "history, especially national and imperial history, took on a character of a spectacle." (92) National time projected onto national space created national history in the shape of a spectacle. McClintock is convinced that national collective identity is experienced and transmitted through spectacle, a theatrical performance of invented community:

"...the single power of nationalism since the late nineteenth century, I suggest, has been its capacity to organize a sense of popular, collective unity through the management of mass, national commodity spectacle. " (102)

In this sense, nationalism is lived through fetishism, and a pending task is to examine how women participate and resist male fetish rituals of national spectacle.

Chilean exile women in Vancouver: "They Used to Call Us Witches"

"They Used to Call Us Witches: Chilean exiles, culture and feminism" by Julie Shayne is based on her sociological research of the Chilean exile solidarity movement, with a focus on women, and particularly on how culture and emotions played a role in triggering and sustaining this movement. The book features sometimes painful but fascinating stories of women who came together in the exile solidarity movement from different places, for different reasons, and in different points in their life. According to many of these testimonies, Chilean exile women performed their political work mostly in the shape of social services delivered to the exile community and laboring in the production of "peñas", the most emblematic activity of the solidarity movement. Moreover, aside from working full time jobs and raising kids, these women even found time to collaborate in projects that mixed feminist politics, artistic creation and a transnational agenda of solidarity.

I encounter this book partly as an insider and partly an outsider. My personal history links me to some of the stories that are told in this book: I was born in Chile a year after the coup, and went into exile between 1975 and 1980 to Colombia with my sister and my parents, who were MIR —Revolutionary Left Movement— militants by the time of the coup. In 1975 my uncle was kidnapped and taken to Villa Grimaldi, where he later died but remains disappeared until today. Soon after that, my dad was abducted from home and taken to the same detention centre, only he was released the next day. We left right after that with the help of family networks in Colombia. We returned in 1980, my parents got separated, quit their militancias, and I grew up in dictatorship Chile. I am then situated in generational terms closer to the interviewees' children than to their direct experiences of the Unidad Popular, the coup and exile. This will shape the way that I read the accounts and the analysis in this book, for example in relation to cultural practices of the Chilean left.

Other aunts and uncles involved with the MIR established in Sweden, Canada and California and in total, on my dad side we are 17 cousins who are spread in four countries, all of whom speak at least two languages, and all whom have felt both at home and foreign in the countries were they were raised and in Chile. Exile, then, is an experience that I know more from the perspectives of my cousins, who complained often about being recognized as Chileans in Sweden, and as Swedes in Chile.

Overall, I am excited to see research on Chilean women exiles with a focus on feminism. I especially agree on the relevance of recording and archiving the amazing stories of exiles, and to further a serious political and academic exploration of both the exile experience of what the "post-exile" subject can mean, in terms of memory, identity and agency. Could this be a hybrid subject, maybe what Haraway describes as a cyborg, part reality-part fiction, opening new venues for narration? Could the stories of Chilean exile women be read under the light of Chicana and queer theory to understand better the idea of inhabiting borders?

In any case, the experiences of exiles, of suffering but also of success and satisfaction, should be taken seriously and with the most academic rigor, and for sure never with the pretense of generating a univocal, totalizing account of exile that is inclusive of all experiences. Many traumatic events precisely become traumatic as they escape signification and remain stuck in the social body as unspoken symptoms. Thus, the necessity to come to terms with the fact that this story is polyphonic, contradictory, incomplete, fractured, and constantly re-imagined, as memory does not work as a repository of information. Quite the opposite, it works in a reconstructive way with the parameters of the present.

Likewise, as a task of feminist archival, I am glad to see the documentation of "Aquelarre" magazine, of the band "Cormorán" and the organization of the "Fifth Canadian Conference in Solidarity with Women of Latin America." Both the narratives around the magazine and the Conference are illustrative of the challenges of organizing around the political identity of "women." Feminist archives are key for a transgenerational feminist legacy.

I appreciate the thesis about the central place of emotions in fueling social movements, though I do not see it restricted to women, and I would add that these emotions appear as ambivalent: the sorrow of the loss of a country coexists with a sense of realization and belonging in Canada. I also agree about the place of culture in shaping the movement. However, putting together Gender-Emotions-Culture-Women sounds like a dangerous discourse to me. It is still not clear to me either why women stories demand for a special emphasis on emotions and culture, or if using a 'gendered lens' is a strategy to look for emotions in the first place, but in both cases, the underlying assumptions are dangerously essentialist and ideologically charged. I do not understand for example, why exile men's activities such as weekend soccer games —pichangas domingueras— are not gendered cultural practices; or how feelings of sorrow, guilt and embarrassment mixed with pride are not relevant in shaping male's experiences of exile. (And I find problematic that the way to deal with male's voices is for the author to speculate on what they would probably say.)

I am especially troubled by the fact that a book published in North America about so-called "Third world women," links women's political practice to emotions. Likewise, to characterize women as the "mothers" of the solidarity movement is likely to invoke and reproduce a discourse of sacrificial motherhood that is essentialist and heteronormative. For example, when women talk about the incredible pressure and amount of work that they had to deal with, I found that there was a romantic heroic tone to it, as opposed to being critical of why Chilean men were not performing house work!

Early in my life I was introduced to the term "machista-leninista" by my mom and her friends, who would mock the rigid, sexist and sometimes mysogynist gender ideologies that many left militants held. Because my own research aims to be critical of these gender ideologies that have characterized the discourse of Left in the recent decades, I felt compelled while reading this book to hear more critical analysis on the descriptions of gender relations as experienced in the solidarity's movement, for example, about how women provided free labor for the peñas —fundraisers for the solidarity movement— and did a lot of other work that was not considered important or did not even count as political. In this point I think we agree, that political practice needs to be defined in broader terms so that it includes chopping onions for peñas and not only speaking in public. For the longest time both conservative and progressive discourse in Chile have reproduced ideologically charged tropes like women's natural inclination to be caretakers, and specific ideologies of motherhood that assert women's moral superiority. The argument of linking only women to the transmission of culture, failing to see that men in exile are also socializing their children and being socialized in gender ideologies by their peers and partners, may suggest then that our 'gendered lens' need a new prescription.

Moreover, the book tends to reify Chilean culture instead of recognizing it as a site of political contestation within Chileans. This can be dangerously normative, as it enables the distinction between more and less "authentic" or loyal Chileans, or to judge one's allegiance by the performance of rigid symbols of Chilean nationalism. In this sense, I insist we ought to remain critical of our own political practice, which includes the (gendered) cultural practices of identity making in a solidarity movement. The peñas for me are the paradigmatic case, because, from the generational perspective of someone who did not experience the Unidad Popular firsthand, to reduce the whole memory of this incredibly interesting, epic, futuristic project to empanadas, vino and sad songs may not be as politically enabling, after all. Again, my contention here with the book is whether these cultural practices should be just taken 'as they came' or if we ought to be more critical of them in terms of their political effects.

I acknowledge that a white North American researcher is positioned in a complex place to be critical of cultural practices that are framed in the context of political repression in Latin America. But I think there are ways to deal with these complexities, see for example how Diana Taylor incorporates a systematic reflexivity of her position into her analysis of the political tactics of the Madres in Argentina (pages 16-27 of "Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina's 'Dirty War'").

On the other hand, even though Shayne claims central the relevance of culture in shaping the specific tactics of the Chilean solidarity movement in Vancouver, at the same time she asserts repeatedly that the Vancouver case is a "mirror image" of the experiences of Chilean exiles elsewhere and that if we ought to change the names it would be the same account in any other country where Chileans sought political asylum.

More serious however, is my disagreement with the book's explicit heteronormative assumption. I find problematic that the author assumes the authority to define other's sexuality as opposed to asking openly about one's self identification and how it relates to one's political practice. I also wonder why homoeroticism is not even contemplated as a relevant component of this love/hate story of nationalism and transnational solidarity in exile.

I was delighted during the moments when we actually "hear" the women's voices in the book. I found they were rich in representations, ideologies, imaginaries not only about gender and sexuality, but about national identity and space. For example, I found incredibly provoking the notions of a Chile with an "interior" and "exterior," or exile as the Fourteenth Region. Along the same lines, the metaphors of the military coup as natural disasters: a "horrible storm" and an "earthquake" are threads that I would have liked to see developed. Super interesting were also some women's accounts about "manipulating" their privilege and the military's gendered expectations to escape situations of possible political repression.

Earthquake in Chile: Disaster Capitalism at its best?

Image from La Segunda, March 1st 2010: "Chile faces the tragedy. The military protection is soothing."

Just some days after the huge earthquake and following tsunami in Chile, I find myself having a strange deja vu listening in the radio to narratives of dead, disappeared, toques de queda (curfews), shortages and social chaos. Many cities are currently being declared in constitutional state of exception by catastrophe, with curfews and heavy military and police presence to avoid what has been described in the media as violent and desperate looting of supermarkets. Many people from the middle and upper classes, afraid of shortages, have effectively created them by monopolizing fuel and food. But the focus in the media has been definitely on the apparent lack of control of the irrational masses who are raiding the superstores, not only for basic goods, but all kinds of electric appliances. From afar, I see the pictures of young men being arrested by the military in Concepción, face down on the ground for stealing TVs.

However, police and civil authorities in Santiago have also been denouncing a number of false alarms and the presence of people spreading rumors about armed gangs going around looting and stealing. Apparently, besides the confirmed looting, there is people systematically trying to create a sense of social chaos, which is something we have seen before in Chilean history (Campaña del Terror anybody?). People demanding more police and military presence to ensure the "security" and "safety" is another equation that we have heard before. This latifundista (landowner's) mentality that we hear so much lately believes that law enforcement forces are at the service of the ruling classes, and that the protection of private property is more important that the well being of entire communities. In my perspective, in Chile, as anywhere else, we DO NOT need more cops or military presence to be safe or solve our problems. People have reacted in many different ways, and many are already organizing the distribution of basic services and goods, sharing whatever they have, lending support to one another. Solidarity, I think, is the only thing that can make us safe. In contrast, the curfew translates into a soldier pointing his gun at a 13 year old boy who is stealing blankets from a chain store as seen yesterday.




It is undeniable that over three decades of neoliberalism in Chile have had their impact in the "social fabric" and the sense of community and solidarity among Chileans. Some of us have been bombarded for the whole length of our lives with messages of individualism, competitiveness and fear of the other. The dismantlement of social security systems based on collective savings and mutualism under Pinochet have created a sense of insecurity that translates into a general sense of fear, the UNDP Reports on Human Development reported in 1998. The progressive criminalization of poverty and state clientelism have mined traditional practices of collaboration.

And the sense of opportunity of the political actors wanting to further a neoliberal agenda is strikingly good: two weeks before taking power, the elected President Sebastián Piñera announces the several macroeconomic measures to "reconstruct" the country, and again, his focus has been rather on the punishment of looters over the safety of everybody. In this sense, this tragedy may become —yet again— the grounds of legitimation for the furthering of a neoliberal agenda and militarism, as according to Naomi Klein's analysis. OR, this could also be the disaster that awakens some of us from the mirage of ephemeral pseudo-happiness we have been living. It could make a few realize that we need to rebuild our trust on each other, that there may be a deeper sense of happiness to be found in collaboration and solidarity: a sort of a "disaster socialism." Not wanting to be extremely optimist or even naive about it, I believe then that the direction this catastrophe will take the country is not decided yet.

There are some voices in Chile and abroad saying "not to worry, Chile is not Haiti". Yes, Chile is not Haiti, but Chile is not Switzerland either as Rafael Gumucio just wrote. And Santiago is not Chile. The fact that the country has been fantasizing about being a white, modern, wealthy nation for the last decades does not mean that this wealth is shared (Chile has the 8th worst distribution of wealth in the world). While some actors have been working hard to project that image internationally, it is important to distinguish them from others who suffer and/or resist those images of prosperity. A large part of the population lives on poverty and social exclusion. And for sure, those shiny glass covered buildings aren't any indicator of modernity because they are all broken now. As somebody said on facebook, el terremoto rompió espejos y espejismos (the earthquake brought down mirrors and mirages).


Another take on the Chilean earthquake, disaster capitalism and comparisons with Haiti written by my supervising friend Jon Beasley-Murray can be find here.

Competing masculinities, homoeroticism and perverse subjectivities: a queer reading of Toy Story

So, what can a 1995 Disney-Pixar animation film tell us about Chilean post-dictatorship politics?

Here, I am trying to develop a queer feminist eye for reading materials such as films, as I am planning to include this kind of material in my actual research. As a short exercise, I do here a very exploratory and preliminary reading of Toy Story (John Lasseter, Pixar - Disney, 1995). The reason I picked this film is because it has become my toddler daughter's favorite, meaning I get to see it VERY often...and because it has very interesting narratives. I will not summarize the plot, so if you have not seen the movie, please read short summary at IMDB or Wikipedia. I welcome all kinds of suggestions and comments on how to refine this eye.



Competing Masculinities
This is mainly a story about masculinities in crisis. A cowboy toy —Woody— is in crisis when he feels he is being replaced by Buzz, the full-of-fancy-gadgets space ranger new toy, invoking a social eroticization of technology — all the other toys from Andy's room admire Buzz gadgets and are infatuated with it. Later in the film, Buzz has his own crisis when he realizes he is not the original Buzz Lightyear but only a toy "copy." These crises can be read in several ways, here are some: Woody's crisis could stand for the tensions caused by competing models of masculinities due to historical changes in the US. In this case, cultural artifacts like film help making sense of the transitions from one hegemonic model to another one. Toy Story re-stages then a pattern staged for a long time in the context of police television dramas, where often the "feds" are a threat to the masculinity of the local police, or a new cop finds himself in conflict with the senior cop style of doing things. This kind of "suturing" through differences given by generation or region I think are useful to the collective imagining of the nation.

On a different thread, Buzz falls apart when he finds out he is a toy action figure, just a copy of the (imaginary) original Buzz character. Buzz's frustration relate to the impossibility of fully embodying masculinity for any concrete men: since nobody "owns" the phallus masculinity needs to invoked through signifiers as a daily performance (Butler, 1990). However, after his crisis, Buzz seems to be liberated from the script that he was presupposed to perform by programming so we could read a rather make a positive reading of the after-crisis.



Homoeroticism
In terms of desire and sexuality, even though there is an explicit heterosexual love plot between Woody and Bo, the main love investments driving the plot seem to be male-to-male: Woody loves Andy, that is why he is so jealous about Buzz; and then through the story the main love relation at stake is actually between Woody and Buzz. What initially is a relation based on mistrust, jealousy competitiveness ends in a true loving friendship. In the sequel Toy Story 2 (where the plot revolves around Buzz going to rescue Woody) there is a scene where a sexually assertive Bo is trying to get a kiss from Woody, who complains: "Not in front of Buzz!" Going back to Buzz's super gadgets, Taylor has linked the exhibitionistic display of signs of potency like hardware and weaponry with the erotics of the military's performance of masculinity. Taylor describes how in military discourse there is an explicit heterosexual plot and yet at the same time, the eroticization of male violence suggests an undergoing homoerotic desire.



Perverse subjectivities
While Andy is the loving sweet good-to-his-toys boy, his neighbor Sid enjoys torturing toys — in his room, a group of tortured "mutant" toys, who have been torn apart and recomposed with mismatched parts, live hiding in the dark and are mistaken as cannibals by Buzz and Woody. In reality, as they find out later, these apparently scary toys are scared themselves and they are not cannibals: they help other toys not become mutants by fixing them. When the main characters decide to work together with the mutant toys, they are able to give the torturer kid a good scare, using their own "monsterhood" to regain their agency and show Sid that they are not dead passive objects, they are alive. Interestingly, Sid the torturer kid looks almost the same than Andy, only with braces and a skull t-shirt, suggesting that maybe the good and the bad character are, in fact, two parts of the same subject (I credit my partner Francisco for this observation). I am interested in this subnarrative to put it in dialogue with the notion of perverse subjectivities already discussed here. Let's remember how Frazier suggests that by embracing perverted subjectitivies as a subject position, one could resist the characterization of political practice as monstrous, and reclaim a subjectivity and agency in these terms: "...[one] who is able to look in the mirror to assemble the pieces of her memories, reconnect them with her scarred body, unpack the structure of domestic discipline and the story imposed upon her, and ultimately, by recognizing the gun, reclaiming the capacity to act". (277)

On the Chilean "transition" part 3 1/2

Nelly Richard, one of the most prominent and influential critics of the transition in Latin America, suggests too that we cannot identify a clear-cut division between the dictatorship and the transition. In consonance with Moulian, Richard sees the democratic governments as merely the new managers of the inherited political and socioeconomic order, rather than having re-found it. Moulian and Richard agree with Willy Thayer about the true "transition" that operated in the transformation from a state-centered society to a post-state economy, where the state is not the subject but the object of the economy. More broadly, Richard is embarked in the project of criticizing the pretended "transparency" and neutrality of disciplinary language because these have been the tools that have made power, bureaucracy, and technocracy converge. Her work aims then to denounce the theatrical and staged artifices that construct meaning by presenting social reality as mono-referential.

Richard argues that the experience and memory of violence cannot be inscribed in the transitional surfaces of representation or, translated into the clean, coherent official discourse of the post-dictatorship. Transitional politics have managed to subordinate the practices of memory to their official representation in the Rettig and Valech ReportsOn 2003 President Ricardo Lagos created the Commission on Political Prison and Torture under the direction of Monsignor Sergio Valech, which issued a report nicknamed as the "Valech Report." and to its monumentalization in memorials which relegate dictatorial violence as something that happened in a far away past, not something that continues to happen (poverty, discrimination, police repression, the denial of justice, etc.) now, under the legitimation of a democratic system. Thayer coincides with Richard in that the disciplinary languages are complicit in trying to introduce sense there where sense cannot be found, inscribing events that cannot be represented —such as torture— into a representational structure. As Thayer insists, the "post" in post-dictatorship does not mean "what happened in the past", is not the preterit. Torture cannot cease to happen, and "[n]ot to insist on the relationship between the Coup, torture, Dictatorship and contemporary triumphalism would be to become acolyte of the continuum of violence and progress" (39).

Richard indicates that the cultural mechanisms of consensus and the ephemeral pleasures of consumerism have acted as forms of pseudo-integration and gratification of the social body, harmed by the violence of the coup and dictatorship. At a more affective level, Richard notes that the post-dictatorship can be seen as a pathological state of mourning, where the absence of movement is compensated by a the manic exaggeration of the gestures, causing the illusion of dynamism in a paralyzed subjectivity. In the same vein, Thayer attributes the consumerist euphoria of the post-dictatorship as an equivalent to the manic phase of the loss of object. In another analysis that reinforces the idea of the transition as a static state, Moreiras reads post-dictatorship subjectivity as marked by the depression of the social body, the mourn for the loss of historicity, and for the impossibility of constructing sense.

Under the logics of the democracy of the consensus, the so-called transition has transformed political practice —formerly understood as antagonistic— into a series of exchanges and transactions. A forceful unanimity around the need to "tone down" and moderate the discourses, and to be "realistic" (as in Correa's discourse) transformed the political field into a predictable, programmable field of mechanical procedures. Moreiras also claims that the violent processes of "modernization" sustained in Latin America in general, have relied on the refoundation of the symbolic order at the cultural level by insisting on establishing and policing a totalizing single meaning of history. Politics then, have ceased to be the field where historical meanings and sense are constructed and contested. This in turn, has affected the possibilities of resistance, restricting the possible subject positions to one-or-the-other side and to a suffering victimized subjectivity.

Furthering Thayer's interpretation of the transition, Bret Levinson postulates that the 1973 coup not only never ceased to happen, but moreover, it actually stroke with all its horror in the post-dictatorship. Here, the possibilities for articulating different political projects was radically closed as the ideology of the free market was imposed as a consensus, and precisely, presented not as an ideology anymore, but just as what is, or "goes without saying." In this new scenario, to challenge the reality of the market economy means actually not to make any sense. The coup really just hit with all its strength now, when the victims of state violence find that there is no possible discourse available to account for their experiences. When violence does get recognized, is under the paradigm of measurability and trade, the exchange of crimes for compensations in the market of forgiveness and forgetfulness of the transition. In contrast to Moulian, who sustains that forgetfulness is necessary for the transition, Levinson argues that the order of the transition is not based on the complete suppression of the memory of the horrors of the dictatorship, but rather on the accurate remembering that "this" (free market) is better than "that" (state violence). What is radically suppressed is the relationship between the dictatorship and the transition, the continuities.

Also concerned with the more subjective effects of the transition, Gareth Williams notes that Moulian gestures towards a residual affective world that cannot find itself representable in the clean, transparent surfaces of the Chilean post-dictatorship official national narrative. This affective excess unsettles the image of a smooth transition: "an affective world of signification that remains senseless (for democratic hegemony), and ungraspable for the order of disciplinary reason and for institutional knowledge as a whole," "a world of residual affects that has been included into democracy as democracy's zone of (necessary) exclusion." (286, 288).

This affective surplus that cannot be contained in discourse and can be found in cultural expressions such as art and literature, could also be interpreted as what causes different sectors to 'act out.' In September of 1998, at the twenty-fifth anniversary of the military coup, commemorations from supporters, and protests, barricades and marches across the country from detractors of Pinochet left behind a toll over two hundred arrested, thirty one wounded, and two dead. A remarkable point, the majority of the arrested in street protests were under twenty-five years old, meaning they had grown up in dictatorship but were not born when the coup itself happened. Were they protesting then for the coup as a present fact, not as something of the past? As these issues continue to irrupt in such violent ways, as this affective excess manifests at the slightest provocation, it is unavoidable to ask what can reconciliation possibly mean in Chile's post-dictatorship? Who are to be forgiven and by whom, if the bodies of the disappeared are still missing and the names of their torturers and assassins still unknown, under the democratic governments legitimation?

Of course, the cases mentioned above that challenge the notion that there is a “transition” or a democratization process in place, and of a national reconciliation, seem to wane in the face of Pinochet's later detention in London in October 1998. Here, performative or expressive politics reached their peak. On the one hand, the event performed on the international stage the idea that the crimes committed under Pinochet's rule were not only against a nation, but against humanity. A Spanish judge, Baltasar Garzón, was asking extradition to Spain from England, where Pinochet had traveled for medical reasons. Pinochet's supporters immediately took the opportunity to exploit the fact that it was a Spanish judge, invoking the idea that colonial powers were questioning Chile's status as a sovereign state, interfering with domestic issues that had already been dealt with. Frei's administration also went along with this kind of nationalist discourse, adopting a strategy of defending Pinochet's immunity (a central part of the transition 'pact') to bring him back to the country. Frei himself met with top military officers to ease their anxieties and to reassure the economic and corporate elites that the stability of the transitional order was not in danger. At a social level, this event prompted everyday confrontations, and media debates over the interpretation of the Unidad Popular, the military coup, the dictatorship, and the nature of the transition.

On the side of the right, performative politics included Pinochet supporters staging regular demonstrations in the streets, raging upper-class women calling for the British Embassy to be burned down, right-wing leaders paralyzing the congress for two weeks, and Major Labbé refusing to collect the garbage of the Spanish and British Embassy for several weeks. Actors from both sides became polarized and re-adopted the rhetoric characteristic of dictatorial times, in a general scenario of clear social unrest. Anxieties about how to give a definite closure to the "divisive issues" that threaten the transition's discourse of reconciliation and social peace re-emerged in the Concertación circles. Alliances and alignments that had been carefully built were shaken at the base.

If the "renovated socialists" had distanced themselves from Allende a while ago, a "renovated right", represented by political leaders like Joaquín Lavín had also worked hard to clean their image distancing themselves from the figure of Pinochet. And now, here they were again in 1998, vehemently —and some, hysterically— defending him on the grounds of nationalism and also, of the logics of the transition itself, making implicit and explicit threats about democracy's stability, while many detractors of Pinochet within the Concertación could not hide their joy. But for many, it was the image of the democratic government of the Concertación, with many state representatives who had been themselves victimized by the dictatorship, defending Pinochet from International Courts was close to surreal.