Approaches: towards a politics of alterity in the work of Juan L. Ortiz

Abstract

In a very schematic way, the critical readings of the poetic work of Juan Laurentino Ortiz are divided into two groups: one, whose nucleus is the representation of nature, attends to the fusion or mystical relationship between the subject and the landscape; the other one, whose nucleus is social reality, considers the historical and political dimensions. Our hypothesis is that the Ortiz’s work claim for a reconsideration of the political categories that underlie his different readings, based on an inquiry into the problem of otherness as a radical alterity. In this way, the problem of animality allows us to consider a dimension that escapes the critical alternative. Animals (as well as other non-human entities) request an ethical consideration, because they place the problem of the relation between the subject and the landscape as an unsolvable tension that can not lead to any harmonic synthesis. Reconsidering the political problem in the light of ethics implies shake the nature/culture dichotomy and, consequently, rethinking the terms for another political reading of this work that was removed from the dialectic.