Bodies that do (not) matter: On the abject in Chilean litterature

Abstract

During the first decades of the 20th Century a series of discourses articulate a social and political critique in relation to the Chilean national community, denouncing its elitism and exclusion, always generating an inadmissible rest of poor and sick. The aim of this article is to study the approach with which a series of texts from the beginning of the 20th Century shape their social demands, promoting a discussion around the concept of community with bio-political images. Starting with the Greek notions of bíos and zoé, which are picked up by contemporary bio political debates, this article explores the ways in which some texts raise the necessity of revising the bio political incisions upon the body. At the same time, the contradictions and tensions of these changes in the conception of human, national, and civil community show the difficult ways of assuming modernity in the Latin American context.