Estudios de Teoría Literaria (Jul 2021)
The obtuse prehistoric vegetable On the dialectic of history and nature in La mujer de los perros
Abstract
This paper examines the film La mujer de los perros by Laura Citarella and Verónica Llinás (2015) and the critical readings written about it. Such interpretations agree that the main merit of the film is to show the possibility of a natural and sovereign utopia, which would be a viable way out of the main harms of contemporary society. Our purpose is to discuss these readings from the perspective of Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer's Critical Theory. To do this, we offer a new reading of the central categories of “Excourse I: Odysseus, or myth and illustration” of the Dialectic of Enlightenment. The deployment of these categories will allow us to arrive to ethical-political consequences from which the utopian conception of an immediate relationship with nature becomes problematic. That is why we will point out that the notions of "nature" and "animality" –which the critics use– belong to a fetishized vision, that it becomes necessary to review taking into account their historicity and the mediated nature of such concepts.
