sobre testimonio y castellanos moya

8/11/2019 Sobre Testimonio y Castellanos Moya

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The Novel After Terrorism: On Rethinking The

Testimonio, Solidarity, and Democracy in Horacio

Castellanos MoyasEl arma en el hombre1

w i l l ia m h. castro

u n i v e r si t y o f i l l i n o i s a t u r b a n a-c ha mpa ig n

. . . since September 11 [2001], terrorism has become another majorumbrella concept that now subsumes a wide array of real threats,ordinary crimes, and societal annoyances.

What we are experiencing is a hijacking of criminal justice, as wellas of wider governmental and financial institutions, to meet politicaland strategic ends.Margaret E. Beare, Introduction

In The Aura ofTestimonio, Alberto Moreiras seeks to put an end, once andfor all, and yet again, to the desire to see in thetestimoniogenre a recuperationof the real in the face of fiction or the literary-as-such. Moreirass persistenttarget in that chapter is, of course, John Beverley, whose work on the testimonioraises the most important challenges to post-structuralist critical perspectivesskeptical of truth-claims, and who discovered for the testimonioa daring theoret-ical language that challenges literary critics (poststructuralist and otherwise) toreformulate their own critical apparatuses, even to reformulate their own posi-tionality within Literature. In the chapter, Moreiras takes specific aim at Bever-leys idea that the revolutionary or popular-democratic potential of thetestimonioresides in its capacity to elicit and/or produce a feeling or space ofsolidarity between the reader and the testimonial subject, a feeling that is largelybased on, and therefore indexical of, the realityor realitiesof marginalization,pain, and/or physical exploitation suffered by the testimonial subject him/her-self.

For Moreiras, who takes aim at all types of tenuous fetishization[s] of differ-ence intestimoniocriticism, the idea of solidarity, itself in perpetual risk of beingturned into [if not already or always-already] a rhetorical tropology (215), mayultimately reproduce the hegemonic stratifications that have marked the rela-tions (diachronic and synchronic) between U.S. academics and the testimonialsubject or, mutatis mutandis, between the U.S. and Latin America. As Moreirasstates,

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Dedicated, humbly, to Jacques Derrida, in memoriam.


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castro, The Novel After Terrorism 123

built from the articulation of the frontier that ties, but also potentially marks theend of, or mourns, the two critical enterprises (187).

The pages that follow are written in implicit agreement with such a project,and may be read as an attempt at a contribution. Moreover, I believe that in

the context of todays global war on terror, the project has taken on addedimportance, strategic and scientific (for lack of a better term), and may be saidto represent at once an embodiment and an instrument of what I will identify asradical democracy, while reflecting onEl arma en el hombrea testimonialesquenovel of recent publication by the Honduras-born, Salvadoran exilic author, Ho-racio Castellanos Moya.2 As I argue, reconstructing solidarity, or to be moreexact, the solidarity trope, is an indispensable facilitator for such a project.

After all, solidarity, as a practice of cojoining that is also a rift, constitutesan effective deconstructive praxis that takes on added importance in the currentcontext of globalizing National Security. This added importance stems fromthe fact, as we shall see, that the radical democracy to which the solidarity

trope is inextricably interconnectedactively opposesthe hegemonic instantiationof a now global criminal capitalism, as Julio Sevares has perceptibly dubbed it,now in its terrorist phase.

Radical democracy is akin to what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri referto as absolute democracy. In Multitude(2004), which followed upon the well-receivedEmpire(2001), the theoreticians of the biopolitical Empire postulatethat one of the functions of the multitude is precisely to render possible abso-lute democracy. As Hardt and Negri explain, [t]his democracy in whichall ofus through our biopolitical production collaboratively create and maintain societyis what we call absolute (351, emphases mine). Absolute democracy is an

absolutely differentiated spacewhose only common denominator is that its ele-ments are engaged in biopolitical production of all sorts, that is, the production(or reproduction) of life in all its (political) dimensions. To return to mymain argument, such a space, which is always already existentand not merelypotentially, can only become a factual reality, a new political assemblage, asHardt and Negri intend, through the practice of a radically reconceptualizedsolidarity.

In El arma, by no means a traditional testimonioand not merely because it iscompletely fictional, such practice begins or is realized byapparentlyinvertingsome of the fundamental characteristics (or perhaps I should saypremises, sincecharacteristics already presumes too much) of the genre. Perhaps the most

important of these seeming inversions, and not merely because it is the moststriking or immediately remarkable, is the fact that the subaltern subject (astraditionally defined) has been replaced by a problematic subject that is onlysuperficially its opposite, but who is also a subaltern, as we shall see below.Specifically, the narrative voice or subject is that of an ex-army soldier of theSalvadoran military, part of an elite troop, as he tells us, who is now (i.e., inthe post-Peace Accords period) demobilized, and who finds employment, soto speak, as a paramilitary. The choice of such a figure, I argue, represents a

2 From now on, I will refer to our author simply as Moya, the name by which he is mostly

known, and which he apparently prefers.


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124 Revista Hispanica Moderna63.2 (2010)

direct challenge to testimoniocriticism (academic, Latin Americanist, and oth-erwise), since it confronts such criticism with what would be (one of) its abjectsubjects and, mutatis mutandis, with testimonio criticisms abjection; that is, withthat which it necessarily rejects or represses as part of its self-instantiation or

functioning. The novel confronts testimoniocriticism (and all of us as [U.S.]academics) with our very complicity or connectedness tosince that is what weabject the mostthe very processes of subalternization our novel politicalproject is meant to counter or eradicate.

Returning to the project of the novel, I claim that by incorporating the radi-cally differentiated Otherin a word, the abjectother oftestimonio criticism,the novel instantiates solidarityin itself, thereby redefining the democratic bloc,or, to be more precise, redefining democracy as a fractured bloc.3 At the veryleast, the novel thereby calls forth a model for politically incorporating elementsthat have been, and that will remain,abjectedas part of our own discursive strate-gies, thus opening our discursive production to rearticulatory strategies unimag-

ined and/or unimaginable up to now. More generally, this strategy insists onsolidarity as an instrument ofradical inclusion, of unification across difference,and not merely across sameness or political affinity. This insistence or instantia-tion ofradical inclusionultimately and actively opposes the spiral logic of the so-called war on terrorism, which has globalized terrorism and imposed a crim-inal globalization at the trans-national, trans-local level.

El armaappears at the beginning of the now indefinitely protractible war onterrorism, and it anticipates or echoes many of its critiques. In this vein, Moyasnovel will forcefully denude what Jean Baudrillard calls the uncontrollable [ . . .] reversibility of the discourse of terrorism. To quote Baudrillard:

The repression of terrorism spirals around as unpredictably as theterrorist act itself. No one knows where it will stop, or what turnaboutsthere may yet be. There is no possible distinction, at the level ofimages and information, between the spectacular and the symbolic,no possible distinction between the crime and the crackdown. Andit is this uncontrollable unleashing of reversibility that is terrorismstrue victory. (31)

Like Baudrillard, Moyas text will show that in order to resist the terrorism thatis the discourse of terrorism, we cannot simply engage in contradiction, a formof reversibility that is, after all, inherent to or consonant with the logic of sucha discourse. Rather, we must find ways of disrupting the very spiral dynamicthat grounds it. Otherwise, we run the risk of entrapment within a liberal glob-alization [that] is coming about in precisely the opposite forma police-stateglobalization, a total control, a terror based on law-and-order measures. Dereg-ulation ends up in a maximum of constraints and restrictions, akin to those of afundamentalist society (Baudrillard 32). So then the real questions are: How

3Vid. Jacques Derrida,Rogues: Two Essays on Reason(2005), for arecentattempt to redefinedemocracy as an essentially incompletingproject that resists any and all attempts at a compre-

hensible epistemological and structural, or material, totality.


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do we resist? Are there ways of resisting that we should rethink? These are ques-tions that El arma en el hombre internalizes and deploys as the rhetorical scaf-folding of its textuality.

In the century that only recently ended, the image of the terrorist was used

for violently repressive purposes by military dictatorships in Argentina, Peru, Nica-ragua, Guatemala, and Chile, to name only a few. In all these cases, the image ofthe terrorist was used to incarcerate, torture, and even disappear opposingpolitical forces typically associated with communists and, to a lesser extent,anarchists. In El Salvador, the context to which Moya himself responds and outof which he emerges, the label (or others which became synonymous with it) wasused to similar effects, leading to the indiscriminate death and disappearance ofthousands of people, some of them leftists, some not at all, the great majorityof them people of working class background and with limited to non-existent(political) resources. Such atrocities occurred during the period euphemisticallycalled the Civil War, in which approximately 30,000 peoplemostly Indians

and political opponentswere murdered, imprisoned, or exiled, and whichlasted officially from roughly 1979 to 1992.

In the period following this uncivil Civil War, and largely as a consequence ofit, a criminal globalization establishes itself in El Salvador, emerging preciselythrough the dissemination of the specters of crime, or as my colleague EllenMoodie calls them, crime stories, which appear at both the popular level ofthe fear of rampant crime, or rather, the rampant fear of crime, and at the eliteor elitist level of media representations. Such crime stories have facilitated themano dura and super mano dura campaigns of the recent Elas AntonioSaca administrations, as well as the importation or adoption of the U.S.

sponsored war on terrorism, all of these instruments for fortifyingone mightsay literallycriminal globalization. In this context, the traditional forces ofthe left are variously contained, and in fact, only barely tolerated. In part, theybecome integrated into the political system as a traditional party in the formof the now-anachronistically named, and recently victorious4, Frente FarabundoMart para la Liberacion Nacional, or FMLN. In this way, some of the formerleftists became part of the neo-liberal government. Yet others are consequentlyassassinated, execution-style, in events that the neoliberal Saca government willdecry as examples of rampant street crime. In the context of this criminal global-ization, oligarchic forces manipulate the fear of crime to maintain their strong-hold on political and economic power.

The above described is precisely the context that Moya depicts in El armathrough the narrative of the main character, Juan Alberto Garca, who is knownthroughout simply as Robocop. As he himself tells us, Robocop was part ofthe cuerpo de elite, los mas temibles, quienes habamos detenido y hecho retro-ceder a los terroristas en donde quiera que los enfrentabamos [elite corps, themost feared, the ones who had stopped and made retreat the terrorists wherever

we happened to confront them] (910). As this self-description makes clear, theprotagonist ofEl arma is in fact the complete opposite of the typical testimonioprotagonist, a fact that will carry enormous significance in constructing a

4

Mauricio Funes, of the FMLN, was elected president of El Salvador in 2010.


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counter-discourse to the discourse of terrorism: the discourse of radical democ-racy. At this point, however, I want to stress that radical democracy is neithera discourse nor a reality, buta fictive assemblageor(im)material configuration, a typeofcoming-into-beingthat can only be, properly speaking, a state of emergence that

the novel itself will attempt to actualize outside itself, but only by integratingit as part of its unfoldingthat is, by enfolding it within its self-instantiation. Inthis sense, we can say that the testimonio, as reformulated by Moya in his text,opens itself onto a future, rather than an existentorder of experienceonethat fails to be non-representational, even when it is radically indexical orsomehow real.

Significantly, as we will see, through the figure of Robocop the novel willsuture the traditional subject of testimoniodiscourse to the terrorist subjectormore broadly, the terrorismof the discourse of terrorism. Through the figureof its protagonist, the novel will fictionalize both of these subjects (terrorist/testimonio) only to build with their fictional remains a larger tapestry that both

exceeds and contains them, or to be more mathematical, that de-singularizesand conjoins each to the other, making each a supplementary (in the derrideansense) of the other. This larger tapestryconstitutes the very fabricof the comingradical democracy that the novel will attempt to realize.

What we must first note is that the figure of Robocop unearths an irrevocablehistory; that of U.S. involvement in El Salvador, particularly U.S. funding of thedirty war that caused the death and disappearance of thousands of Salvadoransdeemed terrorists or communists by their countrys military regimes. Thisreference to the U.S., and to its involvement in internal Salvadoran affairs, is inaccord with the authors own pronouncements about the role of the U.S. in the

international sphere. As Moya avers in an interview with Enzia Verducchi, theUnited States is responsible for spreading maquinas criminales [criminalmachines], as he calls them, throughout the Americas, and El Salvador specifi-cally. In this sense, the protagonist ofEl armadramatizes the fact that, at least inpresent-day El Salvador, there can be no terrorism without the United States, muchlike Mahmood Mandami has shown for the case of the so-called Middle East.Moreover, by representing this connection through the figure of Robocop, Moyaarticulates the causal continuities between the terrorist violence of the Salva-doran state apparatus during the Civil War period and the imposition or impor-tation of a law and order regime that would desire to differentiate scientifically,mathematically, or unequivocally between the criminal and the citizen,

between the terrorist and the non-terrorist. (In the filmRobocop, the specta-tors sometimes see through Robocops visor as he brings up a targets criminalrecord, as well as advise him of the laws he or she is breaking, and of his or herhabeas corpusrights, thus suturing onto the spectator a scientific law and ordergaze). In El arma en el hombre[literally, the weapon inthe man], the effect ofthe imposition or adaptation of this law and order regime, as we shall see, is, toreturn to Baudrillard, to unleash an uncontrollable order of reversibility, onein which there can be no possible distinction between the crime and thecrackdown (31).

Such a zone of uncontrollable reversibility that is terrorisms true victory is

most vividly dramatized in the episodes in the novel in which Robocop, now a


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hired assassin for paramilitary groups in post-Civil War, post-Peace Treaty El Sal-vador, coldly and willingly exterminates terrorists, following the orders of thepaternalistically-named To Pepe. In one episode, for example, Robocop elim-inates el comandante Milton, a pseudonym, as Robocop informs us, for David

Celis, a terrorist who was a commander in various zones [during the war],and who lead the urban commandos, and is now a diputado suplente[standing Congressman]. After trailing Celis for some time, Robocop decides tocarry out the execution one day as Celis takes his three-year-old daughter to daycare:

El tipo saliodel Datsun, luego abrio la puerta derecha para sacar a lanina, la tomode la mano y se encaminohacia el porton de la guar-dera. Yo avancecon la pistola escondida dentro del periodico, me leacerquepor la espalda, le puse el canon en el cerebelo y lo despache.(38)

[The guy emerged from his Datsun, and then opened the passengerdoor to retrieve his daughter, took her by the hand and then headedfor the door of the day care center. I proceeded with my gun hiddeninside the newspaper, approached him from the back, placed thebarrel on his cerebellum, and I took care of him (the verb form usedhere is despachar, an untranslatable term that refers to an economictransactionit is to attend to a customerbut which can be usedpopularly to dismiss someone as unworthy of attention, as when ananimal is slaughtered)].

In such episodes, the distinction between the terrorist and the non-terrorist,between the crime and the crackdown, becomes evidently unclear, evidencingthe indiscernibility between regimes of law and order and the creation, or recre-ation, of zones of uncontrollable reversibility in the age of terrorism.

Moreover, through his participation in, or reactivation of, this zone of revers-ibility, Robocop becomes linked in the narrative both to transnational criminalstructures (and though them to the U.S.) as well as to the Salvadoran State itself,as to other State apparatuses. After the murder of Celis, for example, our protag-onist is forced to flee to Guatemala, where he becomes involved with anotherparamilitary organization whose members form part of the elite social sectors,

La banda de Don Tono. After his involvement with these groups, he will even-tually land in the hospital of the San Isidro jail in Texas, wherethe U.S. government

will recruit him to participate in the so-called war on drugs. Similarly, thebandas or paramilitary groups that he works for while in El Salvador are bothclearly connected, although it is never exactly clear how, to high-ranking ele-ments within the contemporaneous Salvadoran government.In all of these cases,the novel dramatizes the indistinction between the crime and the crack-down, as Robocops connections to the underworld of criminal activity linkhim, if obscurely, to the structures of hegemonic governance that direct theapplication of law and order regimes, which have attained nearly universal (or

trans-national or global) applicability.


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Through the figure of Robocop, then, the novel denudes the identity of thediscourse of terrorism with its object, namely, terrorism itself. Hence, it isprecisely because he believes in cracking down on terrorists, on huntingthem down (to echo George W. Bush), that Robocop becomes a terrorist. At

this point in the analysis, the novel would seem a contradiction: it would seem,then, that terrorists do indeed exist, in this case, at the level of State agency.However, this contradiction is resolved if we consider the fictionality of Robocop.In fact, our terrorist protagonist is ultimately nothing but a fiction, even if thatfiction sets in motion a terroristic apparatus of uncontrollable reversibility atboth the national and transnational levels. Therefore, that fiction has real effectsof which we must beware, opening a passage from textuality to exteriority thatbecomes an indispensable foundation for rethinking the testimonioand/or soli-darity.

The episode with Celis is a direct reference to the murder of Francisco VelisCastellanos, who was part of the Consejo Nacional del Frente Farabundo Mart

during the 1980s, and who participated in the armed opposition to the militaryjunta during the Civil War. At the time of his violent murder by an unknownassailant, Velis was an FMLN candidate for deputy to the National Assembly inthe presidential and legislative elections to be held in March 1994. Moreover, asin the novel, Velis/Celis was taking his daughter to a day-care center when he

was assaulted and killed. Such politically-motivated crimes continue to this day.(In fact, when I began writing this essay, a group of Guatemalan policemenkidnapped and killed three Salvadoran representatives traveling through Guate-mala, only to be executed themselvesafter being arrestedby paramilitaryforces within the Guatemalan government5). Returning now to our text, much

like the (traditionally-defined)testimonio,El armaincorporates the outside world,or the extraliterary, as part of its referential body, in this case, not as outsidebut as inside of the text. Significantly, by appropriating the testimonios capacityto elicit or even contain the real world/history (or whatever other name wemay conjure for the putatively non-referential), the text addresses or unveils howthe spiral logic of the war on terrorism ends up blindly or even blithelyduplicating and spreading its so-called object: terrorism itself. At the sametime, we might say that by assuming its own terrorismby constructing itselfthrough the very terrorist gaze or spiral logic it denounces, the text eschewssuch logic and instead appropriates it and rearticulates it, in order to craft a discur-sive space of radical democratic inclusion.

As it denudes, appropriates, and restructures the terrorism of the war onterrorism, and as part of the very same objective, the text simultaneously restruc-tures the traditional testimonio itself. Such restructuring is ultimately directedat testimoniocriticism itself; more specifically, at testimonio criticisms privilegingof subalternity as the primary locus for conceptualizing reality-as-such. I havealready mentioned, if implicitly, one way in whichEl armaperforms this (double)restructuring: by rendering inoperative or simply blurring the (strict) divisionbetween the novel and thetestimonio, thereby rendering inoperative the (equallystrict) division between real and representational subalternity as supposedly

5

See report by McKinley Jr. and Palumbo in The New York Times, May 3, 2007.


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embodied in the testimonio(in the first instance) and the novel (in the second).I forego an extended discussion of the inoperativeness of such division/s in partbecause Elzbieta Sklodowska has already provided most of the rudiments forsuch a critique.

This blurring of the contours of the testimoniovis-a-vis the novel is part of amore general strategy: that of underscoring theunspecificityor non-groundednessof the genre. It is ultimately this unspecificity that will lend the testimonio itspotential to function as a vehicle of radical democracy, especially since this

veryunspecificityopposes directly the recanonizing function that Moreiras soeloquently deconstructs in his chapter, a function that, as Moreirass (and Levin-sons) critique elucidates, founders upon the romanticized (can it be other thanromanticized?) figure of the subaltern. By highlighting the unspecificityof thetestimonio, El armaopenly challenges the complicity of testimoniocriticism in thehegemonic processes it would itself denounce or wish to undermine.

Moyas novel exposes this unspecificityof the testimonio from the very begin-

ningeven before its opening pagesby revealing (some of) the testimoniosfoundations in the Western culture to which it is typically opposed. Beverleyhimself had already identified the multiple roots of the genre to be foundthroughout various cultural traditions.6 Similarly, as Sklodowska remarks in herbook-length study of the testimonio, la aproximacion genealogica al testimoniono es muy promisoria y esto ocurre porque [ . . . ] la supuesta originalidad deltestimonio contemporaneo se va desvaneciendo [the genealogical approach tothe testimonio is not very promissory and this is because ( . . . ) the supposedoriginality of the contemporary testimonio dissipates more and more] (64). Forhis part, Moya frameshis ownproduction of a testimonial novel with a quote from

Archilochus of Paros, a near contemporary of Homer who would presumably be(at) the origins of the testimonio. The language of the cited poem is structurallysimilar to the presumably prosaic, anti-ornate language of the testimonio: En lalanza tengo mi pan negro, / en la lanza mi vino de Ismaro, / y bebo apoyado enmi lanza [On my spear I have my black bread, / on the spear my wine fromIsmare / and I drink leaning on my spear (n.p.; translation mine). Archilo-chuss poetry was anti-Homeric (or anti-literary) in ways that are consistent withthe ways in which the testimoniois against Literature (Beverley). Besides theapparent simplicity of the language, Archilochuss texts also addressed the expe-riences of the un-lionized soldier, of the everyday footman (Archilochus himself)

whose name was not a recognizable commodity in a pantheon of heroic or hero-

ized figures. Finally, Archilochus is recognized as the first poet in antiquity towrite about his own, personal, experiences, much like testimonial subjects.Focusing on mere soldiers, rather than heroic leaders, Archilochuss was bydefinition a subaltern poetry.

Thus framing El armathrough Archilochus, Moya places his text in a longerlineage that ties his own production of a testimonio to the larger history of

Western culture, thereby decentering his testimoniofrom the cultural peripherythat shackles it and unmooring the testimoniofrom a recognizable position out-

6vid. esp. The Margin at the Center: On Testimonio in Against Literature, in which Bev-

erley surveys the multifarious roots of the genre.


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side or against anything. It is critically important to note, however, that as anidentified root in Moyas novel, Archilochuss text also exposes the impossi-bility of detachment from the literary or the literary-as-such, a characteristicthat is inherent to and even characterizesthe testimonioitself. The epigraph itself

reminds us of the contradictions inherent in the definition of the testimonio,which is only too apparent: Archilochus writes against Homer,yethe does sothrough the dominant genre of the time, poetry, even to the point of becomingan innovator of iambic verse.7 In this sense, Archilochus-as-root exposes thefoundational hybridity8 of the testimonio, its ultimately thoroughly contradictorynature as both fiction and index; materiality, groundedness, and mere desire.

Significantly, this ambivalent usage of Archilochus-as-root in Moyas text isconsistent with the scholarship on the poet from Paros. As H.D. Rankin states,[t]he nature and content of [Archilochuss] poetry make it difficult to separatethe poet from the man with any sharpness of focus. Both are independentlyinteresting topics, but they have to be considered together for either of them to

be discerned (1). The epigraph thus exposes the fact that the testimonio wasnever completely or specifically extra-literary, since its roots lie in the entangle-mentof the literary and the extra-literary rather than in any particular pole inthe putative division between the two, as Beverleys thesis would hold. In thissense, the essence of the testimonioshould be conceptualized, as I aim here, andas Moya does in his text, as existing in ahybrid dimension, one that simultaneouslycomprises and deconstructs both the literary and the non-literary into amixed assemblage of material and non-material elements. This is thedimension that I am attempting to configure through this essay, and which Ihave named radical democracy, since this dimension is ultimately a political

space.Moreiras himself comes close to reaching this hybridor higher planein his owndefinition of thetestimonio:

Nevertheless, the cultural significance oftestimonioincludes an extra-literary dimension that is just as irreducible. That extraliterary dimen-sion is certainly tenuous, and perhaps it would be best defined in thenegative, as a mere insistence on the referential limits of the literaryand thus, as an insistence against the globalizing elements of themodernist literary apparatus . . . I am not suggesting thattestimoniocan exist outside the literary; only that the specificityof testimonio, and

its particular position in the current cultural configuration, dependson an extraliterary stanceor moment, which we could also understandas a moment of arrest of all symbolization in a direct appeal to thenonexemplary but still singular pain beyond any possibility ofrepresentation. . . . Testimonio is testimoniobecause it suspends the

7 Carles Miralles and Jaume Portulos characterize Archilochus in their book about him asan iambographer (11).

8 Here, as everywhere else in this text, I will use the term hybrid or its variants in thesense given to the term by Nestor Garca Canclini. That is, as a conceptused to refer to culturalproductions characterized by their capacity to contain and even to be constituted by contra-

dictory or putatively mutually exclusive elements (Culturas hbridas).


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extraliterary at the same time that it constitutes itself as a literary act:as literature, it is a liminal event opening onto a nonrepresentational,drastically indexicalorder of experience. (212; emphases added)

I question Moreirass putative division between the literary and the indexical,even as heuristic device, for understanding testimonio, and seek to produce adefinition based rather on an assemblage that contains these two elements.Ultimately, as I argue, thetestimoniodoes not open onto but ratherenfoldsthereal or materiality or the extraliterary (which does not somehow lie outsideits literariness) within its self-instantiation. In this sense, the extraliteraryshould also be conceivedpositively, as the groundedness that, though admittedlyhidden from our (academic) view, and by definition inaccessible to (the) dis-course-as-such, is neverthelessrealized, eveninevitably realized, in the very momentin which we engage in testimonio criticism. In this sense, the testimoniodoesindeed perform a powerful political function, not because it is reducible to

either the real or the literary, but rather because it is able to traverse andsuture these two domains into its own hybrid essence, opening the possibility ofan alternative sphere of political contestation: radical democracy.

By thus archaelogizing9 the roots of thetestimonio, Moya inEl arma, the author-function, exposes the traversibility of the genre, its capacity to contain and sutureto each other putatively incompatible (epistemological) categories: (i.e. the lit-erary and the extraliterary). Armed with this hybrid understanding of thetestimonio, which problematizes any attempt to allocate the genre an a prioriorultimate specificityexcept of course as consensus constructed by literaryscholars situated in diverse academic contexts, Moyas own text resituates or

reformulates (what I will later call, deconstructively, dis-places) the figure ofthe testimonial subject by converting it into an alias. Criticism of some of thecore testimonial texts, such as MenchusMe llamo Rigoberta Menchuy asme naciola conciencia(1992), has already demonstrated, if inadvertently, the impossibilityor difficulty of locating the testimonial subject, or what we might call thenon-author-function in the text itself.10 Menchuherself plays with this unde-cidibility in her text, especially through the trope of the secret, which I read

vis-a-vis Doris Sommer, not so much as an affirmation of her difference fromus, but of our non-differencefrom a colonialist imaginary that will not let us fullyor exhaustivelyunderstand difference as a necessary projection (in the psycho-logical sense) of our own ineluctable situatedness in or complicity with power.

Moyas text begins by dramatizing the constructedness or fictionality of thetestimonial subject, one that exists even before the mediation of the transcriber,and that remains as more than just a trace in the eventual product itself. Thus,in El arma the testimonial subject is merely a narrator, and the transcriber (inthis case Moya) is a mere author-function, thus dramatizing the inevitable reli-teraturization (to echo Moreiras) of the speaking subject that happens in testi-

9 Here, as below, I am using the term archaeology in the sense given to it by MichelFoucault in The Archaeology of Knowledge, that is to say as epistemological substratum thatgrounds the functionality of discursive structures.

10 In the words of Levinson, Menchus text performs a novel politics of subalternity

(175).


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moniocriticism. Reflecting or exemplifying this process of reliteraturization,the narrator of El arma becomes a mere alias. Los del peloton me decanRobocop [My troop mates used to call me Robocop] (9), El arma en el hombresnarrator/testimonial subject begins by telling us. Only much later in the narra-

tive will we discover that the narrator does indeed have a proper name, but itis significant that this name remains buried in the narrative.Returning to Robocops own introduction, it is important to note that the real

subject of the sentence (as Beverley himself has postulated in relation to thetestimonio) is not the testimonial subject itself, but a collectivity (los del pe-loton), one that determines the veryaliasthrough which the subject of thetestimoniowill be identified. The alias is in fact indicative only of a realm ofcon-sensus, of a social sphere where determinations are structured around collectivefictions, functions, and relations. For my own discussion, the importance of thisrecognition is that it opens the possibility of recuperating and rearticulating acrucial social and fictive sphere in or through which the coming democracy

Jacques Derrida would likely say that democracy is always to comebecomesarticulable. It is in this sphere that we may begin to recognize the extent of ourconnectedness to the Other, the abjected Other, preciselythrough(ala Morei-ras and Sklodowska), rather than away from (ala Beverley), processes of reli-teraturization. It is precisely this space that the novel will ultimately attempt toopen and reshapeto re-appropriatein its effort to craft a different solidarity,a solidarity of the alias, and of the collective and catachrestic becoming of thedemocratically fractured bloc.

But first, and as a way of recuperating that same terrain of freeing some of itsintensities and infrastructures, the novel will proceed by doing away with, and

reconfiguring the subaltern as a category for building a plane of solidarity.One strategy for doing so is byliteralizing the term subalterno. In Spanish,subalterno is used mainly as a relative term in the military that could apply toa captain as well as to a private, as long as they occupy a lower rankin respect to ahigher authoritye.g., a general. In the novel, Robocop is a perpetual subalterndespite the fact that, as he tells us, he was part of an elite troop during theCivil War. His subalternity is evident both in the fact, after the Civil War, anddespite his loyal service, he is one of the first to be demobilized. Furthermore,once demobilized, he receives an insufficient pension check and, despite joininga collective of demobilized soldiers, is unable to pressure the government toincrease his pension. Robocop is thus forced to work as a paramilitary soldier,

where he continues to occupy a subaltern position vis-a-vis the paramilitaryleaders. By literalizing subalternity in the figure of Robocop, the soldier-for-hire, the novel refashions the idea of subalternity as a category through whichthe testimonio is built, disconnecting from its association with leftist politicalagendas. In a certain sense, the novel exposes the radical discontinuity that mayexist or that exists between subalternityor even the condition of subal-ternityand a progressive politics aimed at constructing a popular-democraticsphere. Thus, like Gayatri C. Spivak before him, Moya rearticulates subal-ternity as a (potentially, structurally) conservative discourse that reaffirms the

very differences and structures of differential access the discourse is supposed to

denounce and challenge.


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However, despite this rearticulation, or in fact reflecting or furthering it, thenovel will also reformulate the discourse of terrorism through which this specificsubaltern, Robocop, substantiates his own subjective position. In the space of radical democracy, no specter, not even the specter of the terroristand I must insist

that the terrorist is only a specterwill be exorcised, but all will be dis-placed. I havealready mentioned the most obvious example of such a displacement in Moyasnovel; namely, the displacement of the traditional testimonial subjectwhether

we are talking here about the subaltern (as famously exemplified by RigobertaMenchuTum) or by the revolutionary (such as Omar Cabezas in La montana esalgo mas que una inmensa estepa verde). In another episode, which takes placeduring a confrontation with a rival paramilitary group, for example, Robocop

yells out que se rinda tu madre [let your mother surrender], a phrase thatreferences directly the Nicaraguan poet and revolutionary Leonel Rugama, who

was famously heard uttering the phrase moments before being overwhelmed bythe Somoza dictatorships National Guard. Thus, the subaltern or revolutionary

subject of testimonio is not entirely absent from this narrative. Rather, he is dis-placed; re-placed withinthe figure of Robocop; more important, interwovenwithit.

Through this fusion of the subaltern and the terrorist, the novel performs atleast two significant operations upon the figure of the subject oftestimonio, opera-tions that are themselves key ingredients in the assembling of a space of radicaldemocracy. The first such operation, already mentioned, is to fictionalize sucha subject. If Robocop is fundamentally a fiction that dis-places the testimonialsubject, then the testimonial subject can also be said to emerge in this work as afictional artifact, a fabrication also situated at the border between textuality and

referentiality, or between discourse and its object. This operation represents nonew insight. Criticism of the testimoniohas repeatedly shown that the subject ofthe genre is fundamentally a construction. To return to El arma, the fictionaliza-tion of the dis-placed testimonial subject has the obvious effect of further dis-placing that subjectfurther dis-placed, but not removed. In fact, the oppo-site is true. Let us not forget that Robocop is the gravitational center of thereferential world of the text. Thus, even as dis-placed fictionas Robocopthetraditional subject of testimoniois bothan absence and the very centerof the novel.

However, the fact that the testimonial subject should be, however spectrally, atthe center of the novel, is not in itself a happy circumstance. After all, thatcenter, Robocop, is itself a prosopopeia of the uncontrollable unleashing of

reversibility that is terrorisms true victory. To cut directly to the chase, thesecond operation that the novel performs on the testimonial subject is to figura-tively terrorize it; that is, to associate it, by implication, with the very terrorism it

would seemingly denounce. Even as absent center, then, or even yet as con-struction, the subject oftestimoniocontinues to exert a form ofagency, even anegative one, connected, as it were, to forms of terrorism. Some conjecturingas to why the testimonial subject is associated with terrorism or the figure ofthe terrorist/anti-terrorist may be in order here: mine would be that the con-nection between terrorism and testimoniality resides at the level of their sharedessentialism since both are ultimately predicated on the idea of an exteriority

that is blind to the ineluctable interconnectivity or mutual inextricability of out-


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side (as fictional self-projection) and inside (as assemblage or emergence ofpower, or, to use a deconstructive Marxist discourse, as material arrangementorfiguration). However, the novel itself provides a more banal connection:insofar as the roots of thetestimonioare to be found in the figure of a mercenary

(in this case, Archilochus, the poet-mercenary), then we can logically concludethat they arearchaeologicallylinked.

Through the figure of Robocop, then, the novel actualizes for us yet anotherstrategy ofradical inclusion, not only by including and notrejecting the figure ofthe spectral terrorist within its plot, but also by literarily including the figure ofthe subaltern subject within the terrorist figure, and vice versa. Through thefigure of Robocop, then, El arma en el hombreultimately unveils, and even setsinto motion unacknowledged, yet archaeological continuities between these twoseemingly opposing subjects (terrorist/subaltern), thus extending the field oftheir respective discourses as part of its own discursive strategy. The novel weavesthese two antagonistic discursive domains, grafting both onto the greater surfacearea that I have been calling radical democracy. The narrative thereby craftsa new space, a wider field onto which we can map the emergent geography ofmore inclusivedemos. Granted, this greater surface area is not directly textual-ized, so to speak, in this novel, as I have already stressed. Rather, it is congealedin the boundless density of Robocop, which literally singularizes or compressesthis larger field.

In the space of radical democracy no specter shall be exorcised, although all will be dis-

placed. This is the incantation that the text will ultimately produce as part ofits rescripting and restructuring of democracy as a fractured bloc. This is theincantation that Robocop, and by extension the terrorist/subaltern subject, will

embody in the fullest extent of its textuality. It is through the crafting of thisfigurehistorical and real, imagined and figuralthat the novel will produce,or even simply open onto a counter-logic to the uncontrollable [ . . . ] revers-ibility of (the discourse of) terrorism. It is through this strategy that the novel

will attempt to produce a counter-spacethe space of radical democracy

opposed to the terrorist space of a now global war on terrorism. We may thusconclude that the testimonio does indeed engender or sustain forms of soli-

darity constitutive of new democratic forms, which will never be reducible, if

they ever were, to the so-called real.

w o r k s c i t e d

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