Kidnapped Language: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Politics in Sergio Chejfec's

Los planetas

Erin Graff Zivin

Journal of Jewish Identities, Issue 5, Number 1, January 2012, pp. 77-87 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/jji.2012.0015

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/462480

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 Journal of Jewish Identities 2012, 5(1)

Kidnapped Language: Aesthetics, Ethics, and

Politics in Sergio Chejfecs Los planetas1

Erin Graff Zivin, University of Southern California

This essay takes as its point of departure the idea that one of the central
preoccupations of post-dictatorship literature is the question of representa-
tion. If, following the disaster of dictatorship and disappearance, literature
seeks to find a new language commensurate not only with the political, but
with the impossible yet necessary task of saying the unsayable, Sergio Che-
jfecs subtle language in his 1999 novel Los planetas acknowledges the void of
the disaster without seeking to repair, reconstitute, or fill it.2 My essay focuses
on how Chejfec signals the limits of literary discourse by teasing out the rela-
tionship between identity and difference. As a novel that seeks to represent the
kidnapped other through figurative language, Los planetas is concerned with
the problem of exteriority, and its connection to the interiority of the subject, as
well as of the text that narrates this subject. Chejfec draws upon the image of
the voidan absent center around which all meaning is structuredtogether
with the idea of Jewishness as an empty signifier to address the problem of
the other and the same, or the other within the same. In dialogue with Alain
Badious notion of absence (vide) in Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of
Evil and Slavoj ieks discussion of plenitude and lack in The Sublime Object
of Ideology, I aim to unpack the motif of el vaco, or lack, in Chejfec. I argue that
the void that stands at the heart of Los planetas serves as the condition of pos-
sibilityand impossibilityfor the articulation through the literary of the role
of the literary in the wake of disaster.
Chejfecs sixth novel approximates the dire political reality of the second
half of the twentieth century without expressing an explicit ideological posi-
tion, choosing instead to occupy the complicated terrain of figurative repre-
sentation. Los planetas is set several decades after tens of thousands of Argen-
tines were disappeared, and is narrated primarily from the perspective of S,
a forty-year-old writer living in Buenos Aires, who recalls his childhood friend
M, kidnapped and likely murdered during the early years of the Dirty War.
Organized around a series of anecdotes and fragmented recollections of M,
the novel addresses questions of violence and history, memory and mourn-
ing. The narratives central tension concerns the identification of S with Man

77
 Kidnapped Language: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Politics in Sergio Chejfecs
Los planetas

identification that, in its extreme form, risks the complete appropriation of Ms

identity by S, as we shall see below.
Los planetas is structured around a central relationship: the poignant child-
hood friendship between the narrator and M. The two are alternately referred
to as Miguel and Sergio, M and S, M and the other, and M and
I (in the last example, the narrator speaks in the first person.) The narrator
recounts the history of the boyhood pair both as a way to signal the radical sin-
gularity of the other and to subvert the division between same and other. The
rapport between identity and alterity becomes a crucial theme in this novel be-
cause, as we will see, it structures the conditions of possibility and impossibil-
ity of representation. By approximating the otherthe narrator contends that
M was the real writerS acquires the authority necessary to relate the story
of his friends disappearance. Yet the extreme form of this identificationpub-
lishing a novel under Ms name, an option proposed to him by a bureaucrat
when S tries to legally change his name to his disappeared companions
would eliminate the possibility of memory, because there would no longer be
an S to remember M (nor would there be an external M to be remembered.)
The authors unapologetic autobiographical referencesS is occasionally
called Sergio, he is from Buenos Aires, is a writer, nearing forty, Jewish, etcetera
seem gratuitous, as if Chejfec were giving the reader a freebie, while at the same
time depriving her of the ability to interpret the text. Reading a novel, particularly
one rooted in the historical and political specificity of the state-sponsored terror
of 1970s and 80s Argentina, one is tempted to say, I wonder if this is the au-
thor revealing his true feelings/experience/history, et cetera. Yes! S must re-
ally be Sergio, and this story must really be true. Thus by giving multiple
and, ultimately, extremely quotidian clues, Chejfec simplifies the authornar-
rator relationship. He robs the reader of the right to take credit for discovering
any kind of autobiographical connection, only to immediately call this rela-
tionship into question. The narrators explanation of the initial M compli-
cates the link between signifier and signified: M for Miguel, or Mauricio; it
could also be M for Daniel, since we know that behind letters there can be any
name.3 As Isabel Quintana has persuasively argued, M also signifies death
(muerte) and, I would add, it could also stand for martyr or mark.4 Indeed, S
explains that Ms disappearance was a defining force in the lives and identities
of his surviving friends: M was the martyr, but not because his sacrifice was
directed toward our salvation, but because his disappearance was our mark.5
The letters S and M, then, ultimately prove to be arbitrary signs, linked but not
married to their referents.
The ambiguous relationship between name and identity, signifier and sig-
nified, is further developed in the section Primera historia de M [First Story
of M], which recounts a practical joke that M and S played on their parents.
One day at school, they decide to each return to the home of the other, assum-
ing the name of the other and pretending to be the other. While they antici-
pate a good laugh, knowing that their parents will see through their efforts
at deception, they are horrified when the adults respond unfazed. Of course,
there is already something a bit eerie about their actions, which the narrator

78 Journal of Jewish Identities

 Erin Graff Zivin

compares to the experience of attending ones own funeral; that is, seeing the
world absent oneself. The trick becomes increasingly frightening, however,
when their parents call them by the name of the other as if nothing were out
of the ordinary. In addition to the parents unexpected behavior is the haunt-
ing feeling that the others house strangely resembles his own: everything
seemed at once familiar and strange.6 If, as the narrator suggests, one nor-
mally associates terror with the unknown, what frightens here is the sense that
the unknown appears embedded in the familiar: a reminder, perhaps, of what
the world would be like if difference ceased to exist altogether, if substitution
were to vanquish singularity. This feeling of unease increases as the night goes
on, as each boy approaches what should be the most intimate point of the
daybedtime, sleep, solitudebut whose singularity is instead hijacked by
the parents refusal to acknowledge the difference between the two boys.
The disquiet portrayed here brings to mind Freuds discussion of the un-
canny, which derives its terror not from something external, alien, or un-
known buton the contraryfrom something strangely familiar which
defeats our efforts to separate ourselves from it.7 The scene of the practical
joke, then, simultaneously explores two aspects of the uncanny: the dreadful,
anxiety-producing power of elusive difference masquerading as the same, as
well as the dystopic prospect of the complete elimination of difference (the
ultimate aim of totalitarianism.) What begins as boyhood play quickly spirals
downward into the nightmarish possibilities of fascism, and it is from this
potential void that the narrator must rescue Ms memory.
The problem of identity and difference is again revisited through the motif
of Jewishness, specifically, through the figures of the Orthodox Jews that M
and the other observe while riding on a city bus. They argue whether these
ultra-religious men and boys represent the authentic face of Judaism:

M said, pointing with his finger, that those Jews were real, authentic.
They are genuine, he murmured.
Who? asked the other.
Them, the orthodox ones, arent they more authentic? M answered.8

Ms affirmation, followed by the positing of a question, revisits the tension

between identity and alterity, and the complicated interdependence of the two
categories. The insistence upon the authenticity of the religious Jews, M clari-
fies, does not mean that they are more Jewish, but that their Jewish nature is
expressed through more tangible qualities, in contrast to the secular, assimilated
M and the other: Our nature is marked by abandonment, absence, the rem-
nants of a fullness slowly becoming more remote and somewhat exoticthey,
on the other hand, with every step marked a confirmation, reaffirmed a continu-
ity.9 Eliciting the notion of abandonment or absence, this scene is vital to
the novels broader preoccupations: the tension between identity and difference,
the difficulty of naming that which eludes the domain of the (writing) subject,
and finally the possibility that absence itself can be constitutive of subjectivity.
The dynamic of the religious and secular Jews in Chejfecthe seeming
opposition between plenitude and lackrecalls ieks analysis of modern

January 2012, 5(1) 79

 Kidnapped Language: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Politics in Sergio Chejfecs
Los planetas

European anti-Semitism in The Sublime Object of Ideology. iek describes the

modern incarnation of anti-Semitismwhich, in contrast to its pre-modern,
religious roots, reacts to a secular, pseudoscientific, racialized concept of Jew-
ishnessby drawing upon the example of the Invasion of the Body Snatch-
ers. In this horror film, what frightens is not that which is easily identifiable
as otherpure difference perceived as Identitybut rather the other that
approximates the same. Once again, Freuds notion of the uncanny is opera-
tive: They look like human beings, they have all their properties, but in some
sense this makes them all the more uncannily strange.10 This is the same dy-
namic at work in modern anti-Semitism, iek claims: Jews are like us; it is
difficult to recognize them, to determine at the level of positive reality that sur-
plus, that evasive feature, which differentiates them from all other people.11
M and the other exemplify this secularized concept of Jewishness in their
abandonment of tradition, or in the absence in them of any easily definable
trait. iek describes this absence as lackperceived as a point of supreme
plenitude.12 This absence of positive essence is present in the Orthodox Jews
as well; it is simply more apparent in the figure of the secular Jews, whose
outward appearance is often confused with a lack of identity in general. The
Orthodox Jews, then, serve as a reminder of the lack of positive identity in the
secular, while the secular Jews signal a (hidden) lack in the Orthodox.
The narrator elaborates upon the strange overlapping of the categories Jew-
ish and non-Jewish when he describes the strange location of Ms family home:

Despite being in a generically Jewish neighborhood, the house did not belong
in an area considered to be so. This proximity, as commonly occurs, made
boundaries more evident, contrary to what otherwise might be the case, such
as that of my family, who did not live in a zone considered Jewish, a circum-
stance that did not, however, draw anyones attention.13

While Ms house is oddly located, due to its simultaneous belonging and non-
belonging to an easily identifiable Jewish space, Ss familyalso Jewish
lives in a non-Jewish neighborhood, which does not appear as bizarre since it
does not juxtapose identity and alterity in the same unsettling way. The archi-
tectural then reproduces the geographical: the family home is structured such
that Ms room extends over the house of the next-door neighbors, infusing his
room with the odors of the other family rather than his own.14 The uncomfort-
able overlap between the realm of the same and that of the other, Jewishness
and non-Jewishness, is vital to the narratives broader problematic, which
attempts to enter the realm of the other through language and memory, in the
end intentionally fails.
The narrators description, finally, of Jewishness as a void or hole while
relating the lack of foreignness in the accent of Ms parents, rehearses the im-
age of the void central to the novels preoccupation with the representation
of the disappeared:

If the Jewish condition were an emptiness or void that must be filled by dif-
ferentiated attributes, during those years I understood the defective speech

80 Journal of Jewish Identities

 Erin Graff Zivin

[of my parents] as a fundamental ingredient in the mix. We have always been

taught to mark that place with an empty space, and it is generally known that
the rest of the world did so as well. And in the lack of accent in Ms family I
perceived the sign of a diffuse dangerthe abolition of all differences.15

In this passage, the idea of Jewishness as an empty signifier is threatening

due to its ability to erase all difference: failing the presence of the plenitude ex-
emplified by the Orthodox, we are faced with the unsettling possibility of infi-
nite sameness. In what way does the signifier Jewas a symbolic container
always embedded in the historical and the ideologicalenter into this nego-
tiation between presence and absence? To dialogue with iek: In what way
does the idea of Jewishness become invested with our unconscious desire?
Why is it that the Jew periodically enters the framework of fantasy struc-
turing our enjoyment?16 Is it because, as iek claims, this fantasy shields the
subject from the void, from the nothingness that is the Real? We would then
have to distinguish between what iek calls the objectification of [the] void
and Badious naming of [the] absence, the former referring to a thematiza-
tion of absence, with the latter emphasizing its unrepresentability.17 Through
the construction of a symbolic order around the lack in the other, the subject
constitutes itself by protecting itself from this excessive lack, as well as its own
immanent failure. Yet the tension between ieks objectification and Badious
naming is presentin fact, productivein Los planetas. The plenitude of the
Orthodox Jews necessarily accompanies the lack in the secular Jews to expose
the nuanced and contradictory process inherent in identity formation.
The centrality of the idea of the void is evident from the novels very begin-
ning. Los planetas opens as the narrator, sitting in caf, witnesses an explosion
that evokes the memory of an earlier, foundational disaster, the disappearance
of M. This event, which is to be understood as a secondary event metonymi-
cally linked to the original disaster, announces a double problem: the writ-
ing of the event, and the constitution of the subject who is to write this event. If
the explosion serves as the pretext or catalyst for the narrative, the kidnapping
sets off a sequence of episodes that culminates in the formation of the writing
subject. It is for this reason that the initial description of Ms kidnapping is ac-
companied by the question of its broadcasting:

Between the kidnapping and the news there was several days lapse, a lapse
that I do not dare calculate now, partly because I am not sure I can do it. Those
days were not days, they were an unending mass of time, insubstantial and
capable of reproducing itself endlessly; and because of destinys cruel jokes,
as it is sometimes said, I would find precisely in that afternoons newspaper
the possibility of finishingif not reaching completion, then at least stopping,
acquiring some shape, and in this way remain, awaiting an after.18

The relation between the event (Ms kidnapping) and its codification (the
news) is characterized here not merely as a conflict or problem, but more spe-
cifically as a lapse, underscoring the void at the heart of the act of repre-
sentation. Here, the notion of a lapse is mentioned in relation to timeun

January 2012, 5(1) 81

 Kidnapped Language: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Politics in Sergio Chejfecs Los
planetas

lapso de varios dasbut it also describes a period during which the prop-
er limits of time, whatever they might be, are exploded, in which events,
reality, truth, exceed the limits that traditionally bound them, or at least their
comprehension. It is in this sense, then, that the narrator confesses that he
wouldnt dare to calculate the amount of time that passed, as if to signal
that the act of calculationmeasurement or quantificationwould represent
a transgression of the enormity of the event.
Rather than try to close this gap, the novel instead opts to respect and
meditate upon it through the motif of the void, which appears and reappears
throughout the novel. In addition to the lack within the secular Jews, it is
the emptiness within Ms mourning parents (The absence of the son created
a void), the well uncovered by Ss own traumatic memory of his friend (The
well opened by the memory of M was covered only little by littlethe days,
then the weeks and yearsby the despair left behind by barbarism), as well
as the glaring absence of Ms name on the list of the disappeared (The names
of many of the missing are unknown; however, it is only their absence from
public lists that speaks to us, who knew him, of an emptiness that puts in
doubt existence itself.)19 The excessive repetition of the idea of emptiness
obsessively rehearses the act of representation while at the same time it ex-
poses its limits: the void cannot be approached, but the unapproachable void
can be signaled again and again and again.
It is this type of signification to which Badiou refers in his discussion of
the event in Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, in which he outlines
a theory of ethics as fidelity to a truth-process. The situation, he explains, is
structured around an absence or void, so that the eventthe locus of ethical
experiencewould entail a naming of this absence [vide].20 To support his
argument that the event names the void inasmuch as it names the not-known
of the situation, Badiou offers the example of Marx-as-event: Marx is an
event for political thought because he designates, under the name proletariat,
the central void of early bourgeois societiesabsent from the political stage.21
If ethical subjectivity, in this context, refers to fidelity to an event, might not
ethical language be understood as that which is faithful to the sign of the void?
Moreover (and I will return to this question below), given that Badiou seems
to be interested in the ethical insofar as it can provide the conditions of pos-
sibility for revolution, how can we infer the political implications of a poet-
ics that engages alterity by announcing its impossible presence? That is, how
does the void of the ethical become infused with the content of the political?
It is in this sense that the void proves crucial to a meta-narrative like Chejfecs
that strives to expose its own limits as it bears witness to that which it cannot
name. The act of writing itself enters the text both thematically and performa-
tively to meditate upon the problem of plenitude and lack, self and other. The
ambiguous line dividing S (the would-be writer) and M (the real writer)
throughout the narrative culminates in a scene toward the novels end in which
the narrator decides to change his name to Ms, an act that would completely
collapse the boundary between the two. S believes that this radical act is the only
way to preserve the memory of his friend, and he visits the civil registry to com-

82 Journal of Jewish Identities

 Erin Graff Zivin

plete the procedure that will assure Ms survival. Of course, this proves easier
said than done, as S encounters a series of bureaucratic obstacles characterized
as a Kafkaesque inaccessible code, including having to sleep with the homely
woman who works behind the desk to achieve his objective.22 His unlikely lover
proposes an idea, a loophole that will allow him to reach his goal: she suggests
that he write and publish a book using Ms name. Ultimately, however, the nar-
rator explains that he cannot carry out his plan, that Ms absence would then
come to signify, beyond a loss, a threat. By successfully becoming M, S would
fail to keep his friends memory: It all might seem very paradoxical, but faced
with the real possibility of changing my name I felt afraid, not of what could
happen to mebut of what could happen to my memory of M, to him within
me.23 A distinction is drawn here between consuming the other through com-
plete identification and preserving the other within the same. Instead of writing
as M, he must remain S in order to become a writer so that, through his own
writing, he may bear witness to Ms disappearance.
It is the approximation tobut ultimate refusal to assimilate (and there-
fore annihilate)the other, then, that fuels the writing of Los planetas. As the
narrator explains earlier in the novel, [u]na fidelidad a su recuerdo me lleva
a escribir [a fidelity to his memory brings me to write.]24 The catastrophe of
Ms disappearance functions as a sort of foundational violence, a violence that
becomesthrough the act of writingconstitutive of something previously
nonexistent. In remaining faithful to the event of the kidnapping, S-as-writ-
er is induced as a subject in the sense described by Badiou: I call subject
the bearer [le support] of a fidelity, the one who bears a process of truth. The
subject, therefore, in no way pre-exists the process. He is absolutely nonexis-
tent in the situation before the event. We might say that the process of truth
induces a subject.25
Badiou argues that Evilwhich he defines in contrast to the truth-pro-
cess, or Goodhas three names: simulacrum, or terror (to believe that an
event convokes not the void of the earlier situation, but its plenitude), betrayal
(to fail to live up to a fidelity), and disaster (to identify a truth with total
power).26 Referring to the Nazi appropriation of terms such as revolution
or socialism, Badiou argues that Nazism represents an example of the simu-
lacrum, in the sense that it functions as a break with a situation, but cannot
be considered an event due to its vocabulary of plenitude rather than lack.
Nazism, not unlike the military governments in the Southern Cone, represents
a simulacrum of an event, and can thus be understood as Evil. Badiou goes
on to argue that Evil is to want, at all costs and under condition of a truth, to
force the naming of the unnameable.27 It is here that we can begin to detect
the contours of an ethicopolitical understanding of signification, the role of
language in fidelity to an event as well as in its simulacrum.
In order for the writing of the disaster to remain faithful to the void of the
situation, the void must be enacted performatively as well as thematically. If,
as I have described, Chejfecs novel repeatedly returns to the motif of the lack
or the void, it also must point to that which remains external to or refuses
language:

January 2012, 5(1) 83

 Kidnapped Language: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Politics in Sergio Chejfecs
Los planetas

We know many types of breaths, in general recognizable; the sigh of fatigue,

of impatience, of pleasure, of boredom, of laziness, the gasp of surprise, even
of terror, but never of excess (in that case what is produced is silence: people
remain quiet before excess; it is a silence of excess.) Surprise may leave us with-
out a voice, fear too, but excess robs us of speech: we dont want to yell, we
want to become invisible, disappear, die. Neither Sito nor Iwas prepared
to learn Ms destiny; the events left a thick and lasting wake, resistant to as-
similation.28

Silence, then, is the void properor improperto language (here, literary

language.) Facing the excess of the disaster, the only (im)proper response is to
remain quiet, to disappear, to die. And yet we cannot forget the narrators ear-
lier statement that [u]na fidelidad a su recuerdo me lleva a escribir. To what,
then, does the narrator remain faithful? If, as Badiou explains, [t]o be faithful
to an event is to move within the situation that this event has supplemented,
by thinking the situation according to the event, can we affirm that the
narrator remains silent?29 What does it mean to narrate ones own silence, to
speak of the disappearance of ones voice? The tenuous position of the writer-
subject as witness is articulated through the motif of the tightrope walker in
Ricardo Piglias Respiracin artificial:

What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence, Wittgenstein said.
How to speak of the unspeakable? That is the question that Kafkas work tries
over and over again to answer. Or better still, he said, his work is the only
one that in a refined and subtle manner dares to speak of the unspeakable, of
that which cannot be named. What would we say is the unspeakable today?
The world of Auschwitz. That world is beyond language, it is a frontier filled
with the barbed wire of language. Barbed wire: the tightrope walker walks,
barefoot, alone up there, and tries to see if it is possible to say anything about
what is on the other side.30

The aporetic relationship between narrating and remaining silenthablar y

callaris characterized by both Chejfec and Piglia as a necessary and irresolv-
able conflict in the complicated act of bearing witness to the unsayable.
By way of conclusion, I would like to turn to one final scene in Los planetas,
another childhood memory in which Ms father discovers that his car has been
stolen. Because he cannot work without his car (he is a traveling salesman
of sorts), Ms father spends his days tracing the perimeter of the scene of the
crime. Together with M and S, he methodically circles the blocks surround-
ing the theft, in an irrational attempt to discover his missing automobile, an
act described as like looking for a needle in a haystack.31 For the narrator,
these repetitive, obsessive walks form a crucial part of his childhood: through
them he not only solidifies his relationship with M, but also with the streets of
suburban Buenos Aires itself: I didnt regret it, on the contrary, I longed for
more and more blocks to walk, I felt happy to have the opportunity to wander
without borders, as if Gran Buenos Aires were a territory of vastness.32 He
describes the boys as planets orbiting around the gravitational pull of the sun:
The constellations that M and I believed ourselves to create through the

84 Journal of Jewish Identities

 Erin Graff Zivin

course of the day connecting our itineraries, necessarily relied upon the space
of the city in order to be conceived as such; like the orbit of the planets, in
whose outline intervenes the relative incidence of thrusts, masses, forces of
gravity and other such things, that define the breadth and depth of its influ-
ence in virtue of complicated equivalences and reciprocal equilibrium, in that
way we both seemed to sustain the city upon transparent lines that connected
our bodies in motion.33

If the event of the stolen car both metonymically represents and foreshadows
the disappearance of M, I understand the walks around the empty parking
space from which the car has been stolen as representative of the act of writ-
ing. Narrating the disaster in the wake of dictatorship and disappearance can
be read as a sort of compulsive orbiting, circling, approximating the truth of
the event without ever arriving.
It is here that we can begin to conceive of a relationship between ethics,
aesthetics, and politics. Badious conception of the event is explained as struc-
turally similar to Evil, as I have discussed above, in its interruption of or
break from a situation. The difference between the event as irreducible sin-
gularity and its simulacrumbetween Good and Evilit seems, resides
in the subjective response to the break. From the perspective of the literary,
we can understand this as a distinction between the employment of a vo-
cabulary of plenitude and that of a vocabulary of lack.34 Not unlike Borgess
writing, which Annick Louis has described as a performance of the political
in its deconstruction of the truth of the other (lack) rather than the articulation
of an explicitly ideological position (plenitude), Chejfecs does not directly en-
gage with the political but opts instead to approach the political obliquely.35
By remaining faithful to the void of the situation, rather than infusing it with
the content of the ideological, Los planetas treads carefully, dangerously and
finally, affirmatively upon the ground of the ethical, approaching the political
by way of the literary. In this way, we can say that Chejfecs narrative signals
the limits of the literarywhat literature simply cannot saywhile in the very
same breath insisting that it is only through the literary that one can narrate
the unsayable.

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 Kidnapped Language: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Politics in Sergio Chejfecs
Los planetas

Endnotes

1 The present essay is a substantially revised and expanded version of a section of Chapter V
in Erin Graff Zivin, The Wandering Signifier: Rhetoric of Jewishness in the Latin American Imagi-
nary (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), an earlier version of which was published as
Writing the Absent Face: Jewishness and the Limits of Representation in Borges, Piglia,
and Chejfec, Modern Language Notes 122.2 (2007): 350370.
2 Los planetas is not the only of Chejfecs novels to draw upon the motif of void or loss. Jona-
than Dettman describes the absences and gaps that stand at the center of his 1990 semi-
autobiographical Lenta biografa in Epic, Novel, and Subjectivity in Sergio Chejfecs Lenta
biografa, A Contra corriente: A Journal on Social History and Literature in Latin America 6.2
(2009): 48; while Luz Horne refers to Chejfecs preoccupation with loss in his 1992 El aire
in A Portrait of the Present: Sergio Chejfecs Photographic Realism, Hispanic Review 78.2
(2010): 241. Dianna Niebylski, for her part, details a grammar of lack in Chejfecs 2000 Boca
de lobo in her article Gramtica y geografa de la carencia: Boca de lobo de Sergio Chejfec, in
Dale noms! Dale que va! Ensayos testimoniales para la Argentina del siglo XXI: Voces, ciudades y
lenguajes, eds. Cristin Ricci and Gustavo Geirola (Buenos Aires: Nueva Generacin, 2006),
211229.
3 Sergio Chejfec, Los planetas (Buenos Aires: Alfaguara, 1999): 18.
4 Isabel Quintana, Ciudad y memoria en Los planetas, Latin American Literary Review 32. 63
(2004): 27.
5 Ibid., 22 (emphasis added).
6 Ibid., 48.
7 David Morris, Gothic Sublimity, New Literary History 16 (1985): 307.
8 Chejfec, 4546.
9 Ibid., 46.
10 Chejfec, 99, 89.
11 Ibid., 89.
12 Ibid., 99.
13 Ibid., 27.
14 Smell has been described as an affective experience that disrupts or exceeds the limits of
the same, a phenomenon discussed by Julin Daniel Gutirrez-Albilla in his analysis of Pe-
dro Almodvars Volver, in which the scent of the protagonists allegedly deceased, flatulent
mother fills the air, subverting the division between past and present. See Returning to and
from the Maternal Rural Space: Traumatic Memory, Late Modernity and Nostalgic Utopia in
Almodovars Volver, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 88 (2011): 324325.
15 Chejfec, 28.
16 Slavoj iek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London and New York: Verso, 1989), 126.
17 Ibid., 95; Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward
(London and New York: Verso, 2002), 68.
18 Chejfec, 18.
19 Ibid., 21, 19, 43 (emphasis added).
20 Badiou, 68.
21 Ibid., 69.
22 Chejfec, 215.
23 Ibid., 225.
24 Ibid., 104.
25 Badiou, 43.
26 Ibid., 71.
27 Ibid., 86.
28 Chejfec, 125126.
29 Badiou, 41.
30 Ricardo Piglia, Respiracin artificial, trans. Daniel Balderston (Durham: Duke University
Press, 1994), 212213.
31 Chejfec, 143.
32 Ibid.
33 Ibid., 147.

86 Journal of Jewish Identities

 Erin Graff Zivin

34 Badiou, 72.
35 Louis argues that Borges does not intend to defend the validity of his position, but rather
reveal the logical incoherence of the argument of the other: No intenta, entonces, demostrar
la validez de su posicin, simplemente expone la incoherencia argumentativa de la de los
otros, las similitudes entre sistemas de pensamiento, la historia de ciertos conceptos. See
Besando a Judas. Notas alrededor de Deutsches Requiem, in Jorge Luis Borges: Intervencio-
nes sobre pensamiento y literatura, eds. William Rowe, Claudio Canaparo, Annick Louis (Bue-
nos Aires, Barcelona: Paids, 2000), 62.

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