Pablo Oyarzun - Doing Justice

Marx and Freud, Foucault said, founded discursivities; we might say that they were world making. As is Benjamin. A work, as well as the novel interpretation of a work or of a significant body of work, can make a world other, break it, unfound the discourse that composes it, and reconfigure it around the displacement of what was already assimilated and around all the emplacements that emerge now , in light of the new. The world of Walter Benjamin’s work has its rhythms, its crystallizations on different focal terms: violence; mysticism; law; allegory; history. These terms set values in different academic and non-academic markets and travel with greater or less ease from one language to another. Gewalt offers a sort of value, and offers it differently in the French academic context from how it offers it in the American or the Italian one; “violence” offers another, and differently in Santiago from in New York. And so on, at different times, with consequences that change and reconfigure past worlds, as well as what we imagine to be the case and what will come.

I say that the interpretation of a significant body of work makes a world other. This is hardly news. Any number of examples will come to mind; to choose a single one, or even a number, is to configure a world in which that sort of example has a normative weight. I’ll be offering the name “Benjamin,” for instance, as a sort of metonym: his name stands for other names, which stand for works that also make worlds new and make new worlds, when read out of place and against their time. This is familiar ground, well covered by subaltern studies and articulated recently in the languages of the so-called decolonial option. Yes, when Benjamin’s body of work passes through the South, through peripheral readings, through the capitals of the twenty-first century rather than of the nineteenth, or even twentieth, when it takes shape in the languages of the South, then the focal terms that arrange its values change sense, and the worlds they configure change too. Both suffer translations. What terms and worlds suffer will make up other worlds than those in which Walter Benjamin was first read and valued and received. The North (my caricature, of course) will be reading Benjamin through, and in, contexts for which his work was not explicitly intended. The South will no longer read Walter Benjamin as the bearer of European legitimacy. Like that famous word-laden suitcase that he carried to Port Bou, Benjamin will now have been lost—lost to the fantasy that his work bears to Europe, for Europe, the last illumination of European enlightenment (and that it bears to those it is not for, to the colony, just its shadows or reflections); and lost to the fantasy that his work, always already estranged from its original habitat, finds itself at home—or less unhoused—somewhere at the periphery, in Buenos Aires or in Santiago or in Johannesburg. Now, the boulevards and parks of Paris are distressed by, mapped on, the grandes alamedas , the great shaded avenues of (say) Santiago de Chile—and vice-versa.

But Walter Benjamin’s work, read in and from the South, seems to me particularly addressed to this moment, just for what escapes its representativeness, its metonymy; just for what makes that, vice versa, spurious. (Here is Benjamin’s difference: I have to say what “this moment” is, or what I take it to be; to whom his work sets on “offer” what escapes representativeness; I am responsible for addressing its address. This, I think, is what Jetztzeit entails.) 6Take this example. It’s phrase that recalls a moment like the one we are living now , when one world was unmade, and another announced—abortively, incompletely. Pablo Oyarzun opens Doing Justice by remarking: “An experience always overflows its context.” He is thinking about experiences we—he, history—seek to foreclose: “never again,” we say, for instance (it is not just any example), regarding los desaparecidos , “the disappeared.” For Oyarzun, the circumstance that gives rise to the injunction “never again” is not single. He recalls Salvador Allende’s words on September 11, 1973— Sigan ustedes sabiendo que, mucho más temprano que tarde, de nuevo [ se ] abrirán las grandes alamedas por donde pase el hombre libre para construir una sociedad mejor —the conventional translation of which would be “Do not stop knowing that, much sooner than later, the great shaded avenues will open again, down which free men will walk to build a better society.” Oyarzun tells us that it took him forty years to understand that Allende’s sentence did not lack the reflexive pronoun se , as in my conventional translation—[ se ] abrirán , “the great shaded avenues will reopen, will open themselves, will be opened”—but rather that the sentence embedded a promise and an injunction: the people of Chile, to whom the sentence is addressed, are enjoined into political subjectivity: Sigan ustedes sabiendo , “Continue to know,” or perhaps “Continue, progress, move forward, and do so knowing that sooner or later you will open for yourselves the great avenues,” or even “Press on in and by means of the knowledge that one day you will open for yourselves the great avenues…”

Forty years, Oyarzun tells us, separate the experience from his understanding. That period installed in Chile what he calls el régimen más despiadado del “se” and la equivocidad aciaga del “se” —which English can only render, rather poorly, as something like “the pitiless regime of the impersonal reflexive passive se ” or “the fateful equivocity of the passive voice.” The impersonal reflexive passive erased Allende’s addressee. Where his call to the people of Chile beat implicitly, the regime installed the hegemonizing braid of political coercion, consensus, and (self-)knowledge that the homonymy of se carries. Poetically, with the vertiginous speed of the pun rather than the forty-year delay, the forty years of waiting with which it reaches Pablo Oyarzun (and us): an overdetermined number, Moses’s number, the number of waiting in the desert, the number of exile—poetically, the impersonal reflexive passive particle se tells us se sabe , “it’s generally known” (the coercion of consensus); it says the verbal form s é , “I know” (the unassailable assertion: I know what I know); and it speaks the imperative sé , “be!” (In Castilian Spanish we say ¡ Sé bueno !, “Be good!”; and we translate דוֹא יִהְי or sit lux [ Vetus Latina ] and fiat lux [ Vulgata ] as “¡ Que se haga la luz! or !Sea la luz! ”) Like a call he now hears ringing under the “fateful equivocity” of se , against the hegemonizing coupling of political coercion and (self-)knowledge that anchored Pinochet’s regime, Oyarzun offers what he and others should have heard in 1973, what all Chile should have heard: Allende’s proper audience, the political subject that Allende sought to call into being by promising the collective addressee its future. Here Benjamin is Oyarzun’s—and Latin America’s—guide.

Benjamin se esforzó por echar luz sobre lo que aquí llamo la equivocidad aciaga del “se,” discernir en él todo vestigio de lo demónico—esa otra impersonalidad revestida de figuras vengativas, caprichosas y violentas, presta a retornar en todo momento con la parafernalia o la insidia del “siempre, una y otra vez”—discernir, digo, lo demónico de una violencia radicalmente distinta, que se borra a sí misma en el instante mismo en que se desencadena, porque emancipa. Las huellas de este afán siguen presentes en toda su obra.