Broken Filiations: Bodies, Language and Mourning in Twentieth-Century Mexico

Abstract

This dissertation examines the limits of the patriarchal structure of the nation in the context of modern Mexico. Set against a background of violence, it considers the production of discourses of mourning through a series of cultural texts that that include literature and art. Through its examination of narrative, poetry, photography and art, it engages in a conversation with notions of filiation and crisis, sacrificial logics and the production of alternative discursivities. In engaging with the bodies that appear in these texts, and in dialogue with the psychoanalytic concepts of sexual difference, this dissertation points to the tensions and limits of filiative discourses of mourning that structure ideas about patriarchy and the state central to modern Mexican culture. The first chapter works out from the performance of mourning in the 2010 Celebrations commemorating the birth of the Mexican nation. It puts this event in dialogue with an image of Enrique Metinides in order to develop the conceptual architecture that informs the dissertation’s overarching argument. Chapter Two considers Juan Rulfos’s canonical novel Pedro Páramo, an essential literary work in the imagination of the Mexican nation. The chapter engages analyzes the filial politics that shape the novel’s narrative around mourning. Rulfo’s work illustrates a politics of filiation through the creation of masculine genealogies, but also exposes moments of break with these logics of patrilineal filiation. Chapter Three considers the work of Teresa Margolles (1969). This chapter describes recent intellectual debates regarding Margolles’s work, placing them in dialogue with the classical figure of Antigone to show that Margolles’s controversial art installations perform a gesture similar to Antigone’s insistence on death. I read Margolles, at the center of heated debates about the ethics of using human matter in art, as an artist who places her work within discourses of mourning. Chapter Four examines the writing of Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003). It pays particular attention to two of his novels: 2666 (2003) and Amuleto (1998). Both novels are analyzed as interrogations into the production of language around bodies/corpses of and in the aftermath of violence in relation to sexual difference. The chapter examines Bolaño’s creation of filitative links as crisis, opening the possibility of different modes of inheritance in relation to the production of language and the nation. The texts, images, and installations explored in these pages look beyond death as statistical fact and seek to interrogate moments where life (as natality), even in the visceral mourning of death, appears.