For a «materialism of the relation». A reading of Pájaros en la boca by Samanta Schweblin

Abstract

In this paper we propose an approach to the writing of the Argentine writer Samanta Schweblin. We consider that it is possible to read in her narrative bet a way of understanding what we will call a «materialism of the relation», a materialism that arises from the encounter of the Althusserian and Derridian proposals around the question for non-dialectical materialism. In articulation with the book Pájaros en la boca (2018) as a «textual space» -that is, as a territorial cut, not a theoretical direction, but ideological, historical and genealogical- we pretend to produce a symptomatic but also deconstructive reading that works from this relational materialism in the question of articulation between art and politics. From this materialist reading, we think, the mode of articulation between art and politics is sustained in the particular work with the literary letter. This is, in the ways that the plot conjures against the codes and its representations around a Sense (moral, time, of the figurations of the conscience of the characters). But also, and correlatively, it is sustained in its effect, in what the structure of the literary piece mobilizes, as resonance, in its refusal to be a specular and mystifying comment on the world.