Fourteenth International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

Abstract

This paper is a theoretical discussion based on the close-reading of one scene in Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, in which a philosophy professor Óscar Amalfitano reenacts Marcel Duchamp’s Unhappy Readymade. By means of warping the space, this scene discloses a different reality than our real life, featured by the innate instrumentalizing violence in Amalfitano’s reenactment, a post-modern subversion of modern solipsism and subjectivity. I propose that Duchamp’s work is a Hegelian movement that supplements Euclidean geometry as an unhappy readymade that subjectively measures the abstract space, with the non-readymade natural space. However its goal is to produce a concept that sublates nature, instead of representing nature faithfully. Amalfitano, however, reverses the relationship between Duchamp’s determined intention and the haphazardness of nature as a means to negate geometry’s rigorous measurement, replacing authorial intention with chance, playfulness, and instrumentalization. If Duchamp’s Unhappy Readymade creates a de facto happy readymade by sublation and conceptualization, Amalfitano’s experiment makes the Unhappy Readymade unhappy again, and reads the presupposed shape of the nature on a pre-established ground of pseudo-objectivity. Therefore, nature revolts against this imposed violence, and the traditional Euclidean geometry counters the physical existence which it is supposed to measure by curving itself and becomes non-Euclidean. These failures backfires against Amalfitano’s subjectivity and results in new violence—Amalfitano starts to hear voices in his head and becomes insane. I argue that in this way, Amalfitano’s inherited Hegelian/avant-garde model links itself directly to the mass murders of the female maquiladora workers in the fictional Mexican city Santa Teresa.