Biopolitical writings and rewritings of the argentinian literary canon

Abstract

In order to understand the effects of modernity in nation-state organizations through XIX century, we consider biopolitics –as a Foucauldian category– a thoroughly productive tool for the analysis of the discourses that constitute such territories. The nineteenth-century literary speeches, in our opinion, respond to the biopolitical debates on how to order the bodies, their functioning and the subjectivities that derive from them. The state policies of the nineteenth century and the subsidiary literary discourses will consequently lead to pose lifestyles but, above all, foreign measures for the establishment of the national territory. Throughout texts such as those of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Esteban Echeverría and Eugenio Cambaceres, we can realize the articulation of who constitute we and who constitutes the others. These nineteenth-century discourses will resort to the notion of barbarity, affirmed as another excluded figure, to sediment the category of civilization as living lives. Julio Cortázar and Osvaldo Lamborghini will help to demonstrate the persistence or decline of the biopolitical civilizing model in the following century. For such analysis, we will take the Foucauldian proposal and theories that stem from it from theorists such as G. Agamben, G. Giorgi, among others.