Estudios de Teoría Literaria (Mar 2021)
Remain's becomings: some scenes in contemporary culture
Abstract
There are two inflections regarding the remains –in close connection with the ground or soil as storage or as one of the places in which the rests lie, are deposited, and are found– that will be explored in order to show certain journeys and transformations of the matter when it is introduced to fixed stages. The first one perceives them as the remains of the skeleton, what is left of a body when the inclement weather, conditions, and other external factors have taken their course on it: the bones that insist to endure until their subsequent transformation in fossils. The publication Aparecida (2015) by Marta Dillon narrates the story of the author’s mother, an activist murdered in the ’70s, based on the finding of her bones, which were buried for over twenty years, and emphasizes the importance of the remains as something that perseveres and gathers multiple senses and knowledge. The second inflection will try to unravel the remains not as human but as material of what once were cultural products. The book Biblioteca roja. Brevísima relación de la destrucción de los libros by Gabriela Halac and others (2017) recollects the collective experience of the disinterment, thirty years later, of a family library, hidden during the Argentinian dictatorship, in the backyard of a house. Each of these experiences poses questions such as: What transformations do these remains undergo when they come into contact with other matters, substances and times? What ways of existing do these material rests or traces acquire in the present? What type of memories are compromised?
