Professional Documents
Culture Documents
of
Jean
Franco,
Cruel
Modernity
(Durham,
NC:
Duke
University
Press,
2013)
Jean
Franco's
formidable
new
book
offers
a
sobering
reflection
on
forms
of
extreme
cruelty
in Latin America. For reasons that may be worth pondering, this place name does not
appear in the title, nor did the author add a subtitle to account for the site-‐specificity of the
book, as I am sure she felt tempted or maybe even pressured to do. Immediately, the
laudable decision not to give in to this temptation or pressure has two salutary effects.
First, through its curt title the book presents itself as a historically based account of the
close connection between cruelty and modernity, without having to resort to any notions of
on Latin America, I do not intend to suggest that cruelty is uniquely exercised here; rather, I
examine under what conditions it became the instrument of armies, governments, and
rogue groups and how such conditions might be different in these case than in the often-‐
discussed European cases" (2). Modernity here is referred back not to the eighteenth-‐
century European Enlightenment or to the French and American Revolutions but to the
crucial event of the conquest of the New World. But, unlike the Argentine philosopher and
liberation theologist Enrique Dussel whose work on the birth of modernity in colonial
violence she dutifully references, Jean Franco does not indulge in the kneejerk rejection of
Eurocentrism. Instead, she calmly and persuasively moves on to document a history and
gradually builds a theory of the cruelty of modernity as such, without particularizing
attributes, in the understanding that even the unprepared reader will have to adapt to the
idea that the supposed universalism of modern civilization, first called European and then
Western
so
as
to
include
the
United
States,
is
inherently
based
on
the
violent
exclusion
of
2
the primitive, the underdeveloped, the backward, the atavistic or whatever is otherwise
considered alien to modernity. If this history and theory had announced itself from the very
title or subtitle of the book as pertaining specifically to the area of Latin American studies,
such insights could easily have been marginalized yet again as being relevant only to
specialists interested in the goings-‐on south of the Río Grande. But Jean Franco simply
refuses to shoulder the burden of particularism, which I admittedly am imposing on her all
over again by making this claim; and instead as a generalist, if not a humanist, tackles the
The second effect involves a similar displacement of the focus of studies of cruelty
and violence, this time away from the unique event of the Holocaust. "Because the
Holocaust is generally depicted as unique in its horror, other environments in which
cruelty was practiced have received less attention," Jean Franco writes (4). And, expanding
upon Achille Mbembe's argument for including not only the concentration camp but also
slavery and apartheid in any consideration of modern biopolitics, she allows her field of
specialty further to broaden the horizon: "To consider the exercise of cruelty in Latin
America moves the debate into a different and complex terrain that links conquest to
feminicide, the war on communism to genocide and neoliberalism to casual violence" (5).
This is why Cruel Modernity, on a par with the work of Hannah Arendt, Giorgio Agamben,
Jacques Derrida, Elaine Scarry, Judith Butler or Etienne Balibar, should be required reading
material for anyone concerned about the fate of democracy in an age in which students in
places such as Mexico can be massacred and burned deep down in a remote garbage dump
or have their skin pulled off their face, with likely impunity for the perpetrators and almost
certain
complicity
of
the
federal
army
and
other
agents
of
the
state.
3
In the dark light shed by Cruel Modernity, the recent case of the 43 disappeared
normalistas in Ayotzinapa turns out to be only one among countless incidents of
forced disappearance and, after the fact, attempts to banish the last traces of memory of the
nameless and faceless victims from the earth. Setting apart what has now become the land
of the Zetas instead of Zapata is only the fact that in recent years it has taken up the baton
from the 1970s and 1980s military dictatorships in Central America and the Southern Cone
as being the paragon of senseless cruelty: "Mexico, a country that avoided the extreme
consequences of the war on communism, has become the showcase of contemporary
atrocity" (21). But the phenomenon itself is by no means isolated or limited to Mexico: "In
many countries of Central America and parts of Latin America, the positive aspects of
globalization-‐-‐the transnational alliances of social groups, the multiplication of cultural
styles, the forging of new urban identities, the resources of technology, and unprecedented
mobility-‐-‐have erected a glossy façade on societies, but beneath this façade, cruelty
formerly exercised by military governments is now exercised by powerful gangs
responsible for a culture of fear and intimidation" (216). How we have become almost
immune to this state of everyday violence and terror is what Jean Franco wants to
understand: "If Cruel Modernity lingers on this dark side, it is because I believe that unless
there is a better understanding of the social vacuum that allows cruel acts, political
solutions and ethical principles will remain in the realm of the abstract" (22). This also
means that, without diminishing the importance of criminal or juridical accountability,
including at the level of international human rights commissions, this book is concerned
above
all
with
the
difficult
task
of
understanding
the
nature
and
function
of
cruelty,
in
4
order to lay the grounds for concrete ethical and political answers. The point is not facile
Beginning with the six-‐day massacre ordered by President Trujillo that killed an
estimated twenty thousand Haitians on the Dominican side of the border, in October 1937,
and ending with the case of the more than 2000 murdered women of Ciudad Juárez near
the Mexican border with the United States, Cruel Modernity tells one harrowing story after
another of humanity's sinister and seemingly irrepressible capacity for unchecked brutality
and senseless aggression. Without ever becoming overbearing or splitting off from the
numerous cases under discussion, two recurrent arguments throughout this history give
First, as I already mentioned above, there is a repeated suggestion that the atrocities
of contemporary Latin America point back to the racially motivated violence perpetrated
upon the indigenous peoples of the New World by the conquering Spaniards. With regard
to the use of rape as a genocidal weapon during the civil wars in Guatemala and Peru, for
example, Jean Franco asks out loud: "To rape and then kill suggests more than an act of
warrior triumph. Is it too exaggerated to suggest that it is a reenactment of the Conquest
itself?" (79). What is specifically modern about cruelty, then, is not its factual presence but
the vanishing of ideological taboos about its indiscriminate use. Even as she raises doubts
about the validity of arguments for the modernity of bureaucratic uses of torture, Jean
Franco still sends the reader back to sixteenth-‐century Spain: "I am not altogether
convinced by claims that contemporary torture practices are modern and bureaucratic, for
what was more bureaucratic than the Inquisition, with its detailed accounts of
interrogation?"
(99).
One
might
wonder,
though,
about
the
interpretive
advantages
of
this
5
recurrent argument that places the roots of modern cruelty in the Conquest. In particular,
there exists a risk that we fall back on a scheme familiar from the mostly male authors of
the "Boom" generation for whom modern violence would but be the outcome of the eternal
return of a primitive unconscious. Jean Franco is nowhere sharper in her condemnation of
the pitfalls of such schematic explanations than in the case of Mario Vargas Llosa. But at
times the Spain of the Inquisition seems to play a similar role in Cruel Modernity as the
sacrificial pyramid of the Aztecs for Octavio Paz or the archaic utopia of Arguedas for
Vargas Llosa. The author is certainly aware of this risk: ""Like Mexico's heart of darkness,
according to which there was an Aztec in every Mexican, this notion of buried violence
offers an alibi that absolves modernity, attributing violence instead to primitive elements
as if the entire region, its mountains and avalanches and its inhabitants, are not only alien
to modernity but also in danger of contaminating the rest of Peru" (69).
The second recurrent argument concerns the heavily gendered nature of cruelty.
Indigenous populations but women in particular constitute the overwhelming majority
among victims of rape, desecration, abjection, and physical or ideological debasement in
Latin America. Jean Franco proposes to elucidate this fact by interrogating the possibility of
speaking in terms of "hypermasculinist" violence. Shared by ideologues of the military
dictatorships as well as fervent admirers of the "new man" of revolutionary guerrillas, the
attempt to strengthen one's manhood by purging it of all traces of weakness frequently
takes the form of a violent acting out against all perceived threats to the "band of brothers,"
to use the words of Freud's Totem and Taboo: from the uncontrollable "hysteria" of women,
transvestites and prostitutes, to the dangerously "effeminate" homosexuality of fellow
militants.
This
was
true
even
in
organizations
such
as
Sendero
Luminoso:
"This
tutelary
6
and charismatic party, 40 percent of whose members were women, made it a condition
that women militants should act like men. Indeed, they rivaled the men in their implacable
dedication, their discipline, and their acceptance of probable death" (143). As in the Juárez
killings, which may be the most publicized but are certainly not unique, masculine
subjectivity requires repeated confirmation in expressive crimes against women. "What
massacres, rape, and desecration suggest is a meltdown of the fundamental core that
makes humans recognize their own vulnerability and hence acknowledge that of the other,"
Jean Franco claims in her introduction. And, before admitting to having attributed cruel
practices to "rogue males" in an earlier version, a term she now finds misleading ("'Rogue'
suggests aberration from a norm, but the 'normative' is not a stable or universal category
because we are dealing with the complex question of subjectification" [19]), she settles for
"extreme masculinity" instead, "for I do not believe that all men are necessarily prone to
violence or that women do not torture" (15). However, what makes some men more prone
to violence than others, or what drives even certain women militants to pick up arms, is left
in the dark, or phrased only in rhetorical questions: "What did it take to turn them into
executioners who used machetes, knives, and stones to smash bodies? Were the victims
regarded merely as physical obstacles on the path to the future?" (147). Even though this
enigma is left unanswered in the book, Cruel Modernity does suggest ways to address the
underlying question, particularly in its recourse to literature and art.
Jean Franco's sources indeed are not limited to human rights reports, eyewitness
sociologists. As a long-‐time specialist in Latin American literature whose first monograph
was
a
superb
study
of
the
Peruvian
poet
César
Vallejo
and
whose
award-‐winning
books
7
include Plotting Women: Gender and Representation in Mexico as well as The Decline and
Fall of the Lettered City: Latin America in the Cold War, she also frequently turns to literary
writings in conjunction with photography and fictional or documentary film. Alejo
Carpentier, Roque Dalton, Diamela Eltit, Horacio Castellanos Moya, Pedro Lemebel,
Santiago Roncagliolo and Roberto Bolaño are some of the better-‐known authors whose
work she turns to, but not without at the same time raising the very issue of what it means
to bring up literature in the context of a reflection about violence and cruelty. In fact, what
strikes me in this context is the recurrence of references to "the human," to "humanism"
and "the humanities," as though the principal factor in explaining the ubiquity of gratuitous
cruelty involved an abandonment of the value of humanity as such. Thus, in a passage on
Roberto Bolaño in which the author's voice seems to merge with that of her literary
subject, we read: "Once we strip humanity of transcendental destiny, once the utopian has
been discredited, once we take away the ethical imperatives of either religious belief or
humanism, there is nothing to rein in our infamous desires. What freedom has brought
about is self-‐destruction through the quest for pleasure that leads to boredom or worse"
(235). But on a number of other occasions, too, one comes away from reading Cruel
Modernity with a sense that in the absence of democratically administered justice and given
the impossibility of the victims themselves to bear witness to their suffering, the
impossible task of mourning is left to literature or photography. "There is no creative relief
here from the collective trauma of massacre," Jean Franco writes about the massacre in the
Dominican Republic. "It is left to the reader to wonder whether such private relief can ever
be productive or whether the avenue to the social is blocked, making literature the unique
place
for
vindication"
(43).
And,
about
the
disappeared
in
the
Southern
Cone,
she
similarly
8
observes that "although testimony and memoir are the genres in which stories of atrocity
are usually narrated, the disappeared cannot testify, and we can only imagine their agony
from the accounts of survivors. In the absence of their narratives, photographs, films, and
art installations are ghostly hauntings. The silence of the disappeared is absolute" (195).
In questioning the link between literature and the human, I am not trying to
pinpoint a contradiction of the kind that reviewers are always eager to find, as if the
authors under discussion were caught unawares. Few literary critics are more attuned to
the problematic of humanist justifications for the reading of literature than Jean Franco,
especially in the context of the lettered city in Latin America. Indeed, as she herself writes:
"It also raises questions about the ethical status of literature and the authoritarian nature
of the lettered city" (58). In her discussion of the victim-‐turned-‐collaborator-‐and-‐writer,
the Chilean Mariana Callejas, Jean Franco talks about "the complicity of the literary
institution in atrocity, shattering the notion that literature was, by its very nature,
uncontaminated by the dirty work of the state" (114); and, drawing on Bolaño, she finds
that the author "sees himself as tacitly complicit in the degeneration of the human (and
perhaps of literature), a process that, far from coming to an end with the military regime,
And yet, even without the association with literature or art, it is the value of "the
human" that is perhaps the most intriguing presupposition in Cruel Modernity. "Those of us
brought up in the humanities, which rest on a certain concept of the human, find it difficult
to confront such a divestment of humanity," we read about the act of devouring the flesh of
the enemy (55); and about a fictional killing machine in the work of Castellanos Moya: "His
survival
in
the
deadly
war
games
has
been
achieved
at
the
price
of
surrendering
every
last
9
trace of what is usually regarded as the human-‐-‐that is to say, he has stripped himself of
empathy, joy, tenderness, and love in order to become a killing machine. The price of
survival has been the death of the self" (114). Surely for a book that sets out from Sigmund
Freud's insights into the seemingly inevitable degree of aggression that alone might
account for the violence of the First World War, the notion that "the human" can be defined
in terms of "empathy, joy, tenderness, and love" is nothing short of surprising. After all, for
Freud, civilization will not be able to avoid generating more and more discontent if we do
not first acknowledge the fact that humanity is defined as much by the death drive as by
love. Such an acknowledgement, however, runs the risk of giving way to a suprahistorical
and quasi-‐metaphysical theory about the inevitability of violence as such, justified if need
be with the "just-‐so story" of the killing of the primordial father, whereas the purpose and
strength of this book in particular lies in historicizing the links between cruelty, modernity,
In conclusion, then, perhaps we need to redefine the shifting boundaries around the
notion of "the human" in the first place. Speaking about the almost routine nature of rape
during the civil war in Guatemala, Jean Franco admits: "Attempting to account for such
atrocities confronts one with a harsh truth-‐-‐the truth that humans greatly outdo the animal
in acts of cruelty that we then describe as 'bestial'" (83). But no sooner does she turn to
Agamben's notion of the state of exception in order to account for why "all men do not
participate in atrocities and torture, and all women are not innocent spectators" than she
has to ask herself-‐-‐and this is a question that is asked of us, too, as readers of literature or
scholars in the humanities: "But is 'bestiality' proper to the beast, or is it human, all too
human?"
(94).
10
Bruno Bosteels
Cornell University