Witnessing Beyond the Human: Addressing the Alterity of the Other in Post-Coup Chile and Argentina

This book rethinks the nature of testimony beyond the ground of the human in works produced in Chile and Argentina from the 1970s to the present. Focusing on literature by Juan Gelman, Sergio Chejfec, and Roberto Bola o, as well as art by Eugenio Dittborn, Kate Jenckes argues that these works represent life, death, and the relation between self and other "beyond the human," that is beyond the sense that we can know and represent ourselves and others, with powerful implications for our understanding of history, community, and politics. Jenckes engages with the work of Jacques Derrida together with the intellectually rigorous field of Chilean aesthetic theory to explore issues related to the nature of testimony.

Kate Jenckes is Associate Professor of Spanish in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan and the author of Reading Borges after Benjamin: Allegory, Afterlife, and the Writing of History, also published by SUNY Press.