Abstract

This article gives a philosophical and psychoanalytic analysis of the specific case of moral injury and failed efforts at moral repair described in Francisco Cantú’s memoir, “The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border.” Although reviewers have noted Cantú’s description of his moral devolution in the role of officer in the U.S. Border Control, less remarked upon is his voluntary, self-inflicted moral injury and the literary reparative gestures that ultimately must fail at moral repair toward himself and migrant others harmed. With the use of philosophical and psychoanalytic theoretical assumptions, I show how the memoir dramatically foregrounds the constitution of moral injury by Cantú’s complicity in interpersonal, institutional, and global violence. I argue that the memoir’s vivid portrayal of this situation attempts moral repair through its performative gestures of reparation. In this case of injustice toward migrant communities, there is an institutional and global void of acknowledgment of the harms done. Cantú’s performative gesture disintegrates into that void. Only the readers are left to acknowledge and mourn the memoir’s remorseful address to the migrant communities who are institutionally and socially marginalized to liminal existence at the borders of the nation-state.