Seeing politics otherwise

This dissertation analyzes the triangular nexus binding literature, vision and politics in twentieth-century Iberian and Latin American fictional texts that thematize abuses of political power. The project focuses on three key works among these: Brazilian writer Graciliano Ramos's autobiography Memórias do Cárcere , Chilean author Ariel Dorfman's play Death and the Maiden and Portuguese novelist José Saramago's Ensaio sobre a Cegueira . Despite their multifarious aesthetic options, the theme of vision or, more precisely, of a concrete or figurative inability to see, is woven into both into the structure and the imagery of these texts. I interpret the portrayal of sight deprivation in these works as characterized by ambiguity. On the one hand, the main characters are disempowered by their lack of vision, which starkly contrasts with the panoptical view of the authorities. On the other hand, the limiting condition of blindness becomes a productive moment for re-imagining politics.

Light has been, ever since Plato, a synonym for truth. In the texts analyzed in this dissertation, however, it appears as a noxious excess. Brightness no longer connotes enlightenment but is associated with the dehumanized over-rationalization of totalitarian politics. Further, darkness and blindness are not depicted solely under the negative aegis of deprivation. They become a metaphor for the opacity of the I and for its limitations, the acknowledgment of which separates the oppressed from their henchmen. I contend that both shadows and blindness can be read as the site of a pivotal shift in this power relation, in that absence of vision turns into the possibility to withstand the stifling view of the rulers. The blindfold prevents victims from seeing but it equally becomes a sign of the inaccessibility of their interiority to the torturers, and it is in the obscurity of blind degradation that prisoners find the will to regain a political voice. I thus claim that these texts muddle the neat distinction between the positive connotations of light and the shadows of darkness. Lack of vision turns into a locus of resistance and constitutes the condition of possibility for a reflection conducive to the founding a polity based on ethics.