In the Wake of Tragedy: Citation, Gesture and Theatricality in Griselda Gambaro’s Antígona furiosa

Abstract

In recent decades there has been a surge of interest in memory and history in Southern Cone cultural production. This interest can be understood in the context of two transitions taking place in the 1980s and 1990s: from political violence and repressive military dictatorship during the 1970s to representative democracy on the one hand; and from state to market, or from the modern state form in its various manifestations (liberal, populist, national security) to the neoliberal state of privatization and financial speculation on the other hand. The rise of memory politics in the decades following dictatorship is propelled by conflicts left unresolved by these transitions. To the extent that Francis Fukuyama’s characterization of the market as the overarching telos that guides all of modern history has been accepted as the obligatory point of departure for post-dictatorship political reason, then a fully accomplished transition—one in which the market has been inscribed as the sine qua non for any participation in the political—would mean the disappearance of any traces of historicity from the social landscape of postdictatorship Southern Cone societies. Memory politics aims to forestall the erasures that accompany this reinscription by looking to the past for material that would revitalize our sense of history today. Its strategies are myriad and include both the goal of salvaging old libidinal investments and that of shattering the post-historical mirror of the present.