INRI: ECO-PO-ETHIC SONG FOR A ZURITAN CHILE

Abstract

Thanks to the invaluable contribution of Michel Foucault we now know that the shift of the act of torture from a public and open space to a closed and secret one had a set of quite complex philosophical, political and physical consequences. However, it is worth outlining that, within the context of the military dictatorships of the south area of South America, the act of torture -however faithful to its closed, inaccessible and secret nature- suffered a return to spaces which, without being necessarily public, were open: the registers of men and women who after being sedated, hit and brutally blinded were thrown into the sea, mountains, volcanos and the Chilean desert, confirm such a statement. Because of that, the physical features of the Chilean geography ended up being constituted by the anonymous bodies of all these people. Thus, in his effort to re-build both the body of the State of Chile and the bodies of those who were tortured, Raúl Zurita turns to a philosophical and physical reversal of the Chilean geography in his work INRI. However truth that such a cosmogonic reversal confirms that redemption is denied to these souls, the clever use of the figure of metalepsis as a metonymical linking (which already is) ironically allows these previously whipped bodies, which are always considered to be foreign to the country, to end up structuring the very physiognomy of a Zuritan Chile in which the words "democracy" and "death" are linked in an unbreakable way.