Anatomy Lesion: Diamela Eltit or the Author Overexposed in Writing as a Critic of the Real

This essay focuses on two unclassifiable books by the Chilean storyteller Diamela Eltit: El Padre Mío (1989) and El infarto del alma (1994). From the overexposure of the author that manifests itself in the first person as overturned towards the unavoidable outside of an encounter with difference, embodied in the madness and the helplessness of the bodies of “vagabundage” and psychiatric isolation, respectively, as well as the responsibility that emerges as a position of discourse before the problematic act of shaping the materiality of its recovered presence, I go through the ways in which the other writing of a critique of the Real is outlined in them. Knotted around the subjective shiver of who is willing to account for the “other” in writing, in both atypical texts within the writer’s fictional-theoretical productivity, and atopic within the framework of what could be thought of as a work of non-fiction, literature and art become powerful reading spaces for the deployment of cultural criticism dislocated and politically engaged in the visibility of a Real inscribed in the Letter through the effects of its concern.