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Living Labour, History and The Signifier: Bare Life and

Sovereignty in Eltit's Mano De Obra
Patrick Dove
Online Publication Date: 01 March 2006
To cite this Article: Dove, Patrick (2006) 'Living Labour, History and The Signifier:
Bare Life and Sovereignty in Eltit's Mano De Obra', Journal of Latin American
Cultural Studies, 15:1, 77 - 91
To link to this article: DOI: 10.1080/13569320600597023
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13569320600597023

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Patrick Dove
LIVING LABOUR, HISTORY AND THE
SIGNIFIER: BARE LIFE AND SOVEREIGNTY
IN ELTITS MANO DE OBRA

The word wounds and pierces me, opening a breach in my kidney. (Eltit, 2002, p. 23)
This paper is part of a work in progress that examines literary aesthetics in the
Southern Cone today, both in the wake of military dictatorship and in view of the
tendential triumph of neoliberalism throughout the hemisphere. This project asks what is
left of the literary and what becomes of it if and when culture ceases to represent a
pedagogical instrument of the state. This question in turn necessitates a re-examination
of the status of the political concept of sovereignty today. In the time of tendentially
accomplished globalization, does the market come to provide the fundamental coordinates
for the political task of decision-making, substituting its own criteria (debtor/creditor)
for the old political distinctions proper to the relation between states (friend/enemy)?
Or would a situation in which the market constitutes the sine qua non for any politics
in fact require an even more profound rethinking of the very concept of sovereignty?
In the first part of this paper I develop some connections between Giorgio
Agambens notion of bare life as it appears it in Homo Sacer: sovereign power and bare life
(1998) and Marxs discussion of labour and commodity exchange in the first volume of
Capital. In the second part, I turn to Diamela Eltits Mano de obra (2002), a literary
reflection on Chilean post-dictatorship. In bringing together these disparate texts and
perspectives, I am interested in considering two ways of approaching the problem of
sovereignty. One approach calls attention to the ongoing destabilization of traditional
distinctions between the political and the economic spheres, and suggests that the
concept of the sovereign decision which Carl Schmitt described as the essence
of the political must more than ever take into account what used to be regarded
as non-political forces. The other strategy, meanwhile, approaches the question
of sovereignty from an entirely different perspective, exploring the double role of
language as that which secures the sovereign order, and as causing it to tremble. In
treating sovereignty as a literary problem, Eltit sheds new light on ethical and political
problems arising in post-dictatorship Chile. At the same time, the translation of a
political concern into literary terms exposes the contingent status of what we ordinarily
regard as the stable and natural ground of the social order. In touching on a thought
of groundlessness at the heart of the state, Eltits text also opens onto a different
thought of the political: as the uncertain and incalculable possibility of something
unprecedented happening in the world.
Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Vol. 15, No. 1 March 2006, pp. 77-91
ISSN 1356-9325/print 1469-9575 online q 2006 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/13569320600597023

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This two-sided approach to the question of sovereignty does not manage to free
itself entirely from complications. While these two perspectives are equally necessary
today, they nonetheless fail to form a single, consistent narrative thread. This
dialogue between the economic, the political and the literary remains fraught with
tension, mistrust and the risk of misunderstanding. This may be both its weakness and
its greatest strength that is, its refusal to become part of any new consensus.

Bare life, the political and the crisis of sovereignty

In Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Giorgio Agamben argues that the origin
of the political in the Western tradition is found in the separation of what the Greeks
called bios, or determinate forms of human life, from zoe, or the simple fact of life that
is common to humans, animals and gods. For the classical tradition, politics receives its
bearings from the sovereign decision understood as the absolute basis of all political
designations and distinctions. As unmediated origin, the sovereign decision is
ontologically prior to the emergence of political and legal order, which is to say that it
cannot be held accountable according to the terms of the order to which it gives rise.
The seeming contradiction of a sovereign who transgresses his or her own law, doing
precisely what others are barred from doing, is in fact not a contradiction at all but
rather the very essence of sovereignty. The sovereign decision cannot be grounded
(justified, legitimized or rationalized) through recourse to some higher order of
intelligibility. Paradoxically, it both suspends the law and institutes it at the same time.
The temporality of any given order thus presupposes a time before the time of legality,
an instant when both inclusion and exclusion, or institution and suspension, are
rigorously indistinguishable.
In contrast to the classical concept of sovereignty, Agamben argues that the past
two centuries have been characterized by a profound techno-scientifically driven
transformation of the role of the state, and that today it is no longer possible to say that
the political defines itself in relation to what it is not (the old bios/zoe distinction).
Beginning in the nineteenth century, political power no longer treats bare life as
something alien to its domain, but increasingly regards it as a surplus whose
appropriation serves to revitalize the political.1
Agambens analysis of this transformation owes a good deal to Foucaults notion of
biopolitics, and to his corresponding account of the new configurations of power that
emerge with the transition from the old territorial state of the monarch to the
modern state of population. For Foucault, the political relations that attain with the
modern state cannot be understood as a function of any single source (e.g.
governmental institutions, officials, etc.), but instead represent a diffuse proliferation
through daily and unremarkable practices. Via disciplinary practices, state power
construes, addresses and tends to its subjects as both living beings (zoe) and as members
of a population. Whereas monarchical power expressed itself in the sovereigns right to
decide over the life or death of a subject and it thereby made no lasting claim on
everyday life as such biopolitical power is configured by the myriad of inconspicuous
ways in which the state assumes the task of caring for biological life itself, administering
over the conduct of living and of the living.

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For the past two centuries, Agamben argues, the modern state form has been
sustained by repeated instances of redrawing the line between what is and what is not
political, and by new encroachments on domains previously considered to lie beyond
its purview. But since any redrawing of the boundaries between the political and bare
life necessarily entails the suspension of the order one is seeking to define, this
tendency cannot leave unaffected the conceptual status of sovereignty. If Agamben is
correct in asserting that the infringement of the political on bare life is increasingly
ubiquitous today if in our time the sovereign exception or state of emergency is
more and more becoming the rule this can only mean that the concept of sovereignty
has itself entered into crisis. And so, while he follows Foucaults analysis of biopolitics
up to a certain point, Agamben also asserts that this modern reconfiguration
necessitates a radical rethinking of the foundational concept of sovereignty.2
In so far as modern emancipatory projects work to expand and secure the rights of
individuals and groups in the eyes of the state, these endeavours share more than they
would care to acknowledge with new forms of subjugation and domination. To the
degree that a political demand for rights presupposes sovereignty and political
representation as necessary conditions for democratic politics, the signifiers freedom
and liberty remain potential conduits for state power. Agamben characterizes this
paradoxical crossing between emancipation and domination as the continual redrawing
of the distinction between the political and bare life. No border could ever be sufficient
to guarantee and satisfy modern political order: on the contrary, sovereign power can
only sustain itself through infinite expansion, by repeatedly suspending and redrawing
the line. Apart from its existence at the limit, sovereignty is nothing.
One of the essential characteristics of modern biopolitics . . . is its constant need to
redefine the threshold in life that distinguishes and separates what is inside from
what is outside. Once it crosses over the walls of the oikos and penetrates more and
more deeply into the city, the foundation of sovereignty nonpolitical life is
immediately transformed into a line that must be constantly redrawn. Once zoe is
politicized by declarations of rights, the distinctions and thresholds that make it
possible to isolate a sacred life must be newly defined. And when natural life is
wholly included in the polis and this much has, by now, already happened
these thresholds pass . . . beyond the dark boundaries separating life from death in
order to identify a new dead man, a new sacred man. (Agamben, 1998: 131)
To the extent that Agamben actually theorizes the notion of bare life in Homo Sacer, its
conceptual status proves to be paradoxical. On one hand, Agamben offers a dialectical
approach to bare life: the biopolitical body is produced by the sovereign decision; it is
constituted and identified as that which is to be cared for and administered by the state.
We therefore miss the point if we imagine bare life or the non-political as an
unmediated presence that precedes political power and only subsequently suffers its
incursions. Bare life is never simply outside the political; it has always already been
mapped and calculated by the sovereign decision. At the same time, however,
Agamben also describes bare life as the secret source that animates political power and
gives it sense. From this second perspective, which positions itself at the limit of the
dialectic, bare life would seem to name an unrepresentable excess in relation to the
sovereign decision, a part that escapes the delineation of the whole (into that which is

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and that which is not political). In what follows, I will suggest that this paradoxical
sense in which bare life is both the product of sovereign power and its excess is
strikingly similar to the way in which Marx describes living labor as both a
consequence of separation and as resistance to separation.

Production of the subject: labour, exchange and value

Marxs discussion of commodity production and exchange in the first volume of Capital
has a good deal in common with Agambens account of the simultaneous exclusion and
capture of bare life. But if Agambens thesis announces both the omnipresence of
sovereignty and its imminent end as a political concept, it could be argued that the
exposure of this concept to another sphere such as the economic might well
represent a necessary interpretive step. In what follows, I will focus on the
Commodity chapter of Capital. I will not delve into all of the problems that Marxs
text points out with regard to commodity exchange, but will limit myself to
summarizing what leads Marx to the notion of abstract human labour, from which I will
draw some links to Agambens argument. If Capital has something to say in the context
of Agambens argument, it is because Marxs analysis of economic relations is
fundamentally concerned with the role played by production in the organization of
social relations.
The Commodity chapter begins by clarifying the strictly formal nature of its object.
A commodity is defined as any object that satisfies human needs of whatever kind, which
is to say that it is indifferent to the objects characteristics (colour, texture, taste, etc.), the
need which the consumer seeks to satisfy, as well as to the particular form that satisfaction
takes (Marx, 1977, Vol. I: 125). Exchange value cannot depend on anything immanent to
the object, since value determinations require the total abstraction of the particulars
involved (as Marx reminds us, only unlike things can be exchanged). Nonetheless,
exchange does require that we establish an equivalence between the objects to be
exchanged, and this as with any relation means introducing a third term that must be
postulated as equally present in each. The third term of exchange, the like that two
unlikes will be said to share, can only reflect the specific quantity of labour required for
the production of a specific commodity form:
If we disregard the use-value of commodities, only one property remains, that of
being products of labor. But even the product of labor has already been transformed in our
hands. If we make abstraction from its use-value, we abstract also from the material
constituents and forms which make it a use-value. It is no longer a table, a house,
a piece of yarn or any other useful thing. All its sensuous characteristics are
extinguished. Nor is it any longer the product of the labor of the joiner, the mason
or the spinner, or of any other particular kind of productive labor. . .. [The]
different concrete forms of labor . . . can no longer be distinguished, but are all
together reduced to the same kind of labor, human labor in the abstract. (Marx,
1977: 128, emphasis in the original)
Through exchange, the commodity is stripped of its proper qualities, including both its
use-value and the concrete forms of labour involved in producing it. What is left is

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a congealed residue which Marx calls human labor in the abstract. A similar
dispropriation occurs with labour: as a strictly formal determination, abstract labor
remains entirely indifferent to the content of labour itself. It is irrelevant whether a
given commodity was produced through craft skill or mechanized production, through
the work of a master, an apprentice, or a machine. Abstract labour is simply a
representation of the socially necessary labour time that prevails in a given place and
time for the production of a specific commodity.
Marxs analysis strips these concepts of their self-evidence. It demonstrates how
universal terms, seemingly applicable anywhere and any time, in fact only become
thinkable within the historical time of capitalist production. Abstract labour can only
emerge as a theoretical object in a capitalist society where the commodity form has
already asserted itself as the dominant mode of production and valuation. To confirm
this, Marx turns to Aristotles discussion of value and exchange in the Nicomachean
ethics, focusing on his view that exchange represents a theoretical impossibility.
According to Marx, what prevented Aristotle from thinking the exchange relation was
that Greek society had no concept of value:
Greek society was founded on the labor of slaves, hence had as its natural basis the
inequality of men and of their labor-powers. The secret of the expression of value,
namely the equality and equivalence of all kinds of labor because and in so far as
they are human labor in general, could not be deciphered until the concept of
human equality had already acquired the permanence of a fixed popular opinion.
This however becomes possible only in a society where the commodity-form is the
universal form of the product of labor, hence the dominant social relation is the
relation between men as possessors of commodities. (Marx, 1977: 152)
At first Marx seems to be suggesting that it is only once the general idea of human
equality has established itself that one can begin to see discrete forms of human labour
for what they are essentially alike. But then he quickly pulls the rug out from under
this Enlightenment perspective: the notion of human equality is not a universal concept
that was merely awaiting its proper historical moment; it is a particular that owes its
emergence to the practice of commodity exchange. The argument threatens to lead us
into a vicious circle: the theoretical possibility of exchange requires that we first
establish a common measure of value between A and B, and such a measure can only be
derived from an abstraction of actual labour in favour of the prevailing socially
necessary labor time. The naming of an equivalency between discrete forms of labour
in turn finds its condition of possibility in the idea of a general equality between human
beings. But the ideals of liberty and equality in the relations between humans finally
prove to be a consequence of what Marx set out to explain in the first place: the
practice of commodity exchange.
The circular structure of this argument is by no means a flaw. The discussion of
commodity production and exchange in Capital is fundamentally concerned with the
way in which these practices give rise to and reinforce specific social relations, which in
turn come to be seen as natural and self-evident rather than as products of a particular
regime of accumulation, inscription and production. The analysis underscores
an important distinction concerning what we understand by ideology. For much of
the Marxist tradition, ideology presupposes a split between knowledge and truth: at

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the level of truth, the subject of ideology knows not what he or she is truly doing.
For instance, in capitalism one blinds oneself to the true nature of the commodity, or
to the fact that the valuation of things is based on unequal relations between human
beings, between capitalist and labourer. In the Commodity chapter, however, things
are not quite so simple. Here it is practice and not knowledge that accomplishes the
work of ideology. The hand teaches the heart, circumventing the mind altogether. At
the level of knowledge, then, there need be no ideological deception: even if we know
that value determinations reflect the human labour and exploitation required to
produce the commodity, and that consequently no commodity is really worth this or
that price, we still continue to act as if values belonged to the nature of things. Where,
then, does this tendency to essentialize values come from? Marxs answer is that it is
the practice of commodity exchange that sustains our belief in values as immanent to
things themselves. In the words of Slavoj Zizek, we know very well what [we] are
doing, but still, we are doing it anyway (Zizek, 1989: 33).
This discussion helps shed light on Agambens account of the potential slippage
between newly won political emancipation and new forms of domination. Akin to bare
life in Agambens analysis, living labour embodies a fundamental paradox in Marxs
text. Its status suggests that the so-called contradictions inherent to the capitalist
mode of production are not the reef on which the system will one day founder. On the
contrary, they are precisely the driving force of capitalist expansion. The historical
appearance of the concept of humanity, signifier of equality and freedom from
tyranny, is the reverse side of a process through which what the Grundrisse calls living
labor is produced and put to work. The separation of the worker and living labor
from the means of production or what Marx calls dead labor marks the creation
of a new class whose members, in Marxs words, have nothing to sell except their own
skins (Marx, 1977, Vol. I: 873). Living labour thus names a condition of absolute
poverty. The nominal freedom to sell ones labour as one pleases merely signals that
the labourer has been stripped of the means of production and reduced to a
commodity. But Marx also speaks of living labor as activity. For one thing, it is the
living source of all value as opposed to the lifeless source that is capital itself. But even
more importantly, living labour names the vitality with which the working class
struggles to articulate its needs and give voice to new demands. Living labor both
arises through the experience of separation and gives form to the desire for
emancipation from it (Marx, 1973: 295). It marks a conflict between irreconcilable
attunements: between dispropriation and abjection on the one hand, and selfaffirmation and desire for emancipation on the other. This conflict appears irresolvable:
living labour is the source of self-affirming speech because it has always already been
stripped of the means of production.

Of the living and the dead: history and language in Diamela

Eltits Mano de obra
I now turn to Diamela Eltits novel Mano de obra, a literary treatment of postdictatorship Chile. First, a clarification is in order concerning the relation between this
literary work and what I am calling post-dictatorship. The novel is a commentary on
present-day socioeconomics, and particularly on labour in an environment that

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resembles what Gilles Deleuze termed a society of control. The text reflects on a
profound rift in the sociopolitical landscape of post-dictatorship society: the way of life
of one class or, more precisely, the prevailing logic of the socioeconomic system
itself threatens the existence of other sectors, and yet under current conditions there
would seem to be no effective way in which to symbolize this threat. Given the
seeming inability to provide this conflict with a name or, in the terms of Ernesto
Laclau, the impossibility of linking particular conflicts with the state into a chain of
equivalencies post-dictatorship can be described as an order founded on dislocation.3
In exploring this situation, Eltits text marks the limit of the political and sociological
concept of transition in so far as it presupposes a permanent ground such as
national history against which change could be measured. The present order has its
origin in the annihilation of any link to the past, the blocking of any possibility of
recounting or rewriting the recent past as history. And thus the texts silence with
regard to the experience and memories of dictatorship reflects the foreclosure of the
past as history or memory as an integral component of the post-dictatorship state
of consensus.
Before proceeding further, a word about the organization and tone of the work
will help to put the commentary that is to follow in perspective. The novel is divided
into two halves, each of which corresponds to a specific locale in present-day Chile.
The first part is set in the super, a colossal supermarket in which the narrator is
employed. It is divided into multiple chapters, each of which is headed by a proper
name, the name of a city, and a date from the first decades of the twentieth century
(more on these headings in a moment). The second half of the novel, entitled Puro
Chile, 1973, is an account of the narrators domestic life in an apartment shared with a
group of fellow employees. The tonalities of the respective sections differ significantly.
The first part is a lyrical account in which we find interwoven schizoid fantasies of the
narrator together with accounts of his dealings with demanding customers and sinister
supervisors. The Puro Chile pages, meanwhile, portray in a somewhat more sober
tone the desire for the popular as well as its inaccessibility in the time of postdictatorship. The personal relations between housemates display a broad spectrum of
attitudes, including the solidarity of the exploited as well as the petty jealousies and
conflicts that are symptomatic of dislocatedness. The underlying impetus of the second
half is this collectives unspoken search for a leader who would deliver them from their
abjection. The saga ends on a highly ambiguous note, as it becomes increasingly clear
that this group is guided by the same social imaginary that has dominated cultural
politics in the region for the past two centuries. The unifying image they seek would
seem to be nothing more than a reflection of the same dominant signifiers
(masculinity, whiteness, and so on) that have sustained the fiction of national
identity in Latin America since colonial times. The final lines of the second part
Caminamos. Demos vuelta la pagina allow for two ways of hearing: if these words
hold open the hope of a new way or opening that would break away from the false
totality of post-dictatorship, they can also be read as announcing the full reinscription
of this shared yearning for the popular into the market-fuelled fiction of wholeness.
It is the relation between history and language that provides the point of departure
for this literary interrogation of post-dictatorship. In order to flesh out what is at stake
in this relation, let us begin by turning to the chapter headings and the stark contrast
they establish with the content or action of the novel. Although no contextualization is

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offered for these proper names, it is not difficult to discern that those of the first half
were names of radical labour journals dating from the early twentieth century, while
the title of the second half was that of a leftist daily in Santiago from the early 1970s.
The array of proper names, place names and dates creates the impression that we have
to do with a register of Chilean labour politics in the twentieth century, albeit one that
also bears witness to the effacements and reinscriptions that mark that history as notall. If the chapter titles allude to a certain history of popular struggle whose primary
locus was the conflict between labour and capital, the narrative itself portrays an
entirely different historical moment in which the political force of the name the
people would seem to have been entirely neutralized. In other words, in the time of
post-dictatorship the possibility of politicizing the conflict between labour and capital
has effectively been suspended. The novel thus offers a (literary) representation of the
impossibility of (political) representation. It portrays a social order founded on the
foreclosure of history as such: not only have all remnants and reminders of the struggles
and conflicts alluded to in the chapter headings been voided and forgotten, this
disappearance has itself been rendered mute and invisible. The true violence of
reinscription lies in its capacity to wipe out its own traces.
If these proper names can still be said to signify anything, it would be an absent
absence: these calcified signifiers call attention to the silent withdrawal of any
possibility of a labour movement and thus the non-existence of a working class as
such in present-day Chile. In his essay From Class Struggle to Classless Struggle,
Etienne Balibar argues that the notion of class consciousness cannot be derived from the
mere fact of sharing similar social and economic conditions with others. The
emergence of a working class presupposes the work of naming: it requires the impetus
of a labour movement that would facilitate the formulation of desires, needs and
demands specific to this class. What Balibar calls labour movement must be rigorously
distinguished from the institutional structure of the labour organizations of civil
society, in so far as the interaction between these domains entails the possibility of
conflict, misunderstanding and betrayal as well as solidarity and cooperation. In
Balibars words:
. . . not only have the workers organizations never represented the totality of the
labour movement, but they have periodically been forced into conflict with it, partly
because their representativity was founded on the idealization of certain fractions of
the collective labourer that occupied a central position at a given stage in the
industrial revolution, and partly because [this representative function] corresponded
to a form of political compromise with the state. As a result, there has always been a
moment when the labour movement has needed to reconstitute itself in opposition to
existing practices and forms of organization (Balibar, 1991: 170).
The question of a labour movement, which is also the question of the political as such,
is inextricably related to language. Rather than clarifying the relation between the
political and language, however, Balibars essay complicates it. On one hand, there can
be no class consciousness and no politics without language, no new initiatives or
collective movement that does not act in the name of something. But at the same time,
as the passage just cited reminds us, the act of naming is fraught with risk: to represent
or to be represented is to expose oneself to the possibility of misunderstanding and

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betrayal.4 We would do well to recall this inherent tension, for it helps to guard against
a particular misreading of Eltits text: i.e. that the denunciation of consensus is
premised on an idealized view of the history of the labour politics in Chile.
Balibars essay provides us with another way of looking at the double question of
history and inscription and/or writing. Specifically, this approach marks the limit of the
idealist view of language as it relates to history and the political. Representation can
never fully capture the truth of history or the political; there is always something that
escapes the economy of signification. But at the same time, Balibar also avoids the trap
of conflating this limit with a nominalist position (i.e. representation falls short because
there is something positive in every particular that universal concepts are unable to
represent). The limit that short-circuits signification is, like the moment of
reconstitution described by Balibar, an excess that emerges from within
representation itself. If the present order of consensus coincides with the calculated
exclusion of certain histories and their particular, material contents, then the very
epistemological practice of history which the Western tradition has always
understood from the perspective of a transcendent subject: as causality, progress,
emergence of the Idea, etc. is itself a form of inscription based on effacement. The
object of exclusion here is something other than those specific, determinate identities
deemed not to fit within a given order. Indeed, exclusion is already in effect as soon
as we have to do with the naming of identity itself (the identity of a labour movement
within the organizational structure of civil society, for instance).
More than one reader has interpreted Eltits novel as a commentary on what
Raquel Olea calls the dissolution of the social, and as lending support to the view that
neoliberalism threatens the destruction of collectives while eroding the foundation that
sustained them in an earlier era. The neoliberal ideology of consensus marks the
emergence of a new order in which social relations have lost their relative autonomy
and find themselves increasingly subject to the logic of economic exchange and
consumption. The tendential subsumption of the social by the market is seen as
hastening a decline in sociality as such: the logos of civil society, grounded in the
principles of universal recognition and inalienable rights, gives way to the nihilism of
the market, where it is everyone for themselves and the other only interests me in so
far as she or he has something I wish to buy. By the same token, this interpretive
position also finds in Eltits novel a testament to the urgency of establishing new moral
and cultural values as jetties that would protect against the erosion of values. Such a
position is at least implicit in Oleas reading of the novel as a condemnation of the
consumerist devastation of social space and language: The loss of public discourse
finds its expression in rudeness, the sign of a social immolation that is signified by the
speaking of a language emptied out of all meaning (Olea, n.d.: n.p.).5 Accordingly,
the story told in Mano de obra would be that of the decline of the highest values together
with a call for revaluation. The linking of this language that has been voided of meaning
with the nihilism of the market implies that an alternative order might serve as a
conduit to meaningful or full language.
However much one sympathizes with such a position, in my view it is precisely the
difference between empty and full language that Eltits text puts into question.
What is more, by placing this metaphysical distinction in doubt, the text unavoidably
approaches the limit of valuation as such. In this light, any moralist or culturalist
attempt to recuperate the conceptual force of value against the corrosive effects of the

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market would stumble in so far as it has blinded itself to the shared metaphysical origin
of values thinking and nihilism.6 The recourse to values as an antidote to nihilism is a
fetish which, by sustaining the fictive loss of something it never possessed to begin
with, thereby turns a blind eye to the true status of the name (more on this in a
moment). What remains to be determined, then, is what this limit has to say to us:
does devaluation merely threaten to lead us into the desert of unchecked nihilism, or
does this vanishing point in fact harbour an opening where something other than the
reproduction of the same might become thinkable? While this question is crucial, I do
not wish to suggest that it is simply a matter of taking sides when it comes to reading,
since this would be to miss a fundamental point: that literature always finds itself
speaking on both sides of this limit at the same time, and that these voices can never be
brought together and reconciled as if they were part of a single tendency or idea. By the
same token, while my intention is to read Eltits text against the grain of the
culturalist position just outlined, my own interpretation will nevertheless prove unable
to free itself completely from the referential framework upon which that position
depends.
A brief discussion of the linguistic concepts of the signifier and the signified will
help to situate the counter-reading I am proposing. While the notion of the signified is
often equated with referent or idea, it is also more or less synonymous with value
as it has been presented both in the section on Marx and in the preceding discussion of
culture and nihilism. The question I wish to pursue here concerns the status of the
name or the signifier as it relates to the use of language and the production of meaning.
As Saussure showed, languages are comprised of differences rather than positive or
determinate contents. Meaning does not depend on natural, permanent links between
word and idea or word and thing, but is a function of the difference between one word
and another. No signifier is able to account for its meaning by itself, but must instead
defer to another signifier, and that signifier to another, and so on. The total picture of
language can thus be described by the metaphor of a chain in which meaning circulates
or is deferred from one signifier to another. From these well-known principles we
can conclude that it is of the very nature of the signifier that it have no necessary link
with any signified. The essence of the signifier is its lack of any essence. The
ontological void or lack at the heart of the signifier distinguishes language from code,
for which each symbol does in fact refer to one idea alone.
Values thinking, on the other hand, aligns itself with the perceived necessity of the
signified. It presupposes values and their recognition as a condition of possibility for
social relations as such. In the absence of these stable points of reference, sociality
would be overwhelmed by the self-affirming drive of the individual will and quickly
regress into a Hobbesian war of all against all. But the discourse of values becomes
problematic in so far as it neglects to consider the historicity of its own ground, the
contingency that both sustains and delimits it. It has convinced itself that value or the
signified is all there truly is, and that everything else is mere appearance. As part of the
metaphysical tradition, values thinking can only think being as transcendence of form
(the form of value as such, as opposed to particular values).
In light of what has just been said about the signifier, let us now turn again to the
chapter titles, dead letters that have been torn from their sociopolitical context and
left to refer only to themselves. What first grabs our attention is their being out-ofplace, the sense in which these names stick out and refuse to blend in with their

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surroundings. The inclusion of specific dates and place names, instead of conferring
depth and richness, only intensifies the prevailing sense of interruption and oblivion.
If one can be certain that these proper names once referred to something concrete and
living in another time and place, this specificity is akin to that of a Benjaminian ruin
whose mute presence attests not to a lost plenitude but rather to the void within it. The
point is not that these names once enjoyed a proper meaning, only to be deprived of it
at a later point in time; nor, by the same token, did they once refer to a plenitude that
was subsequently emptied out. The dislocatedness they display in Eltits text only
renders visible what was always already there: the material lack of the signifier, its
inability to speak for itself on the one hand and to secure a permanent relation with
some external source of meaning on the other hand. This nothingness, if we can call it
that, is not something that can be rectified or overcome through addition: no
recuperation or reinstitution of values could surpass this negativity, since the lack is in
fact the condition of possibility for any act of naming whatsoever.
Several tropological figures in the text appear to establish a clear referential key for
reading the novel as an allegory of post-dictatorship Chile. To the extent that they do
so, the text would support the decline and revaluation of values position outlined
above. As previously noted, the first half of Mano de obra takes place in a colossal
supermarket, which the narrator refers to as el super. The ubiquitous use of the term
super signals a myriad of substitutions, displacements and reinscriptions in the time of
post-dictatorship. For one, it marks the end of the factory as paradigm for capitalist
production, and its replacement by the service industry and its increasing disregard for
specialization. In this new setting, alienation is not only or even primarily a function of
the separation of the worker from the means of production. It names the labourers
inability to find his or her own particular mark reflected in the object, since the
product of labour shows only its absolute indifference to the question of who made it
and how. Whereas the Fordist model still allowed space for subjectivity in the
workplace despite the reality of mass-production the labourer can always find this
mark of pride when purchasing a car she or he helped assemble in the post-Fordist
workplace of Mano de obra corporate control is predicated on extending and deepening
the workers dependent abjection, to such a degree that one is now content to be able
to say that one is exploited because that means one still has a job. The super reflects
the relentless elimination of the rights of the labourer; at the same time, it attests to the
implementation of new, increasingly sinister technologies of supervision and control.
The customers . . . meet in the supermarket only in order to talk (Eltit, 2002:
14). The customers take over the supermarket as a venue [sede ] (a mere infrastructure)
for their meetings (2002: 15). These two passages comment tropologically on the
substitution of the market for that former gathering place, the public and civic space
of the town square. The division between spheres of life (the public and the private;
the economic, the political, and the cultural; etc.), once regarded as a fundamental
principle of modernity, has now become unstable. As a reflection of production and its
shaping of social relations, the first passage suggests without even a hint of parody
the extent to which the subjectivity of the narrator, a low-level employee, is bound to
an identification with the discourse of the master. The remark, which might easily have
come from the mouth of a manager or owner, is drawn from the rationale of the
market, classifying customers on the basis of their purchasing tendencies (e.g. the highvolume buenos clientes, the slow-moving viejos del super who buy little and

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belabour others with their endless questions, and so on). The bad clients are those who
come to look, fraternize and complain rather than to buy, and who block the aisles and
impede the circulation of other shoppers. To use a linguistic analogy, they are akin to a
heavy accent, a stutter or slip of the tongue (all well-known phenomena in Eltits
writing) excesses of speech, devoid of any meaningful content, which interfere in the
exchange of information and prevent language itself from silently retreating from the
scene.
The second phrase, which substitutes sede for super, repeats the socioeconomic
process of condensation and displacement at the level of the signifier (metaphor and
metonymy). In general usage, the Spanish sede would be translated as the venue for
an event. But it also has the more specific institutional meanings of the headquarters
of an organization and the seat of a government. The polysemy itself provides a
tropological figure for the increasing indistinction between public and private, as well
as the corresponding intensification of the markets grip on the real. The old division
between civil society (the headquarters of an organization) and state (the seat of a
government) has been collapsed into the super as the new and false totality of the
social. If we read this second phrase literally, it is as if the super had become the only site
at which anything could happen today. Or, more bleakly, it is as if the market had
displaced history as the domain of events and suspended the possibility of anything
(real or different) happening at all.
The super would thus seem to receive tropological confirmation as the part that
stands for the new whole, el mercado. The metonymic link lends support to the
perception of the market as the sine qua non of all social organization; or, in the words
of Francis Fukuyama, that free-market capitalism has finally triumphed over its
adversaries and emerged as the coherent and directional [historical force] that will
eventually lead the greater part of humanity to liberal democracy (Fukuyama, 1992:
xii). But perhaps things are not quite so simple literarily or historically speaking.
If the market in fact comprises the new horizon for thinking today as this scenario
would seem to imply, it is therefore necessarily beyond referentiality since, as horizon,
it is what allows for the possibility of questioning or representing in the first place. If
we assert that the market is all there is today, then we are also saying whether we
know it or not that the essence of the market has yet to be thought. The text would
thus perform neither a metonymy nor an allegory but the impossibility of metonymy
and allegory. Or, better yet, it would allegorize the inability of literary language to
establish a secure referential link with its object. Things are thus a good deal less clear
than first meets the eye. Already at the threshold, the text initiates two irreconcilable
gestures: while it bears witness critically to the subsumption of the social by the
market, at the same time it plants a seed of doubt concerning the possibility of
rendering a reliable representation of history and the social totalities to which it gives
shape.7
The rhetorical gestures can be understood as part of a larger strategy of
confronting a certain crisis of representation. This crisis has two distinct but related
senses, both of which can be linked to the discussion of history and inscription. First,
this notion implicates representation as a literary term. The conceptual stability of
literature enters into crisis in so far as traditional views of its nature and purpose no
longer coincide with the conditions in which literary works are produced and read
today. Partially as a consequence of the profound social, political and economic

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transformations we have been discussing, the literary aesthetic can no longer be said to
occupy the privileged position it held in the Western tradition for much of the previous
two centuries, when, through the influence of Friedrich Schiller, Matthew Arnold and
others, both the great works of the Western tradition and national literatures came,
each in its own way, to be seen as indispensable for the shaping of citizens who
identified themselves as members of a nation. If it is the case today that the nation no
longer orients our identity as social actors (providing the framework for our tastes, our
desires, our moral codes, and so on), then literature can no longer be seen as the
mimesis of a people, as bringing into view the essential traits of, for example, Chileanness.
The other sense of crisis is closely related, and stems from the suspicion that the
current reordering of the social, economic and political spheres is in the process of
calling into question what modern theories of democracy have always taken for
granted: the possibility and the necessity of political representation or hegemony. If the
concept of political representation presupposes that the state mediates social
interactions between different groups and individual citizens, and that civil society in
turn constitutes a more or less stable locus for addressing demands to the state, then
the emergence of the neoliberal state characterized by the subsumption of civil
society by the market would seem to announce the beginning of the end of
representational politics as such.
By way of conclusion, I return to the question of sovereignty with which this paper
began. Taken together, the two possible readings of Eltits text I have been discussing
provide a framework through which a literary thought of sovereignty can be discerned.
As Maurice Blanchot has shown, literature asserts that the true sovereign is language
itself. At the same time, however, literature ruins the concept of sovereignty by
exposing the non-ground or constitutive limit of any order instituted by sovereign
decision. We can clarify this first statement by turning to Agambens assertion that
language is the sovereign who, in a permanent state of exception, declares that there is
nothing outside language and that language is always beyond itself (Agamben, 1998:
20). After Hegel, the notion that nothing is outside language cannot be written off as
idealist delusion: what it says, among other things, is that the distinction between
language and its other (non-language, nature, the real, etc.) is itself a linguistic
operation that is, this difference can only be posited from within language and
through language. Paraphrasing Hegels critique of Kant, the prelinguistic real is a
noumenal shadow cast by the phenomenon of language. And thus, whenever we fault
representation for its failure to reveal the thing as it truly is, we forget that we are
already standing well within representation as we posit the distinction between
representation and truth.
In what way, then, does the literary show or enact the two irreconcilable sides of
sovereignty? To speak of literature is always to say too much and too little: it is to
attempt to name and categorize what cannot be assigned a single, unified intention.
Literature never ceases to trace the primordial wound that separates thinking and
speaking from being. It reminds us repeatedly of the aporias and instabilities that haunt
the meanings and values we habitually attribute to the nature of things themselves. But
when we attempt to define literatures attitude toward this rift we encounter a
problem. On one hand, literatures desire is to heal the wound and return to things
what is rightfully theirs. It longs to recover or establish a direct, unmediated relation to

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the real. At the same time, however, literature also points out the impossibility of this
task by showing us that it is in fact the hand of language itself that severs thinking and
words from being. Literature, then, both exemplifies the logic of sovereignty and
marks the limit of the sovereign state as a natural, self-sustaining order. It bears witness
to the very fact that language takes place, which is to say that it communicates the sense
of an emerging world. In the words of Agambens Language and Death, the sphere of
the utterance includes that which, in every speech act, refers exclusively to its taking
place, to its instance, independently and prior to what is said and meant in it. Pronouns
and other indicators of the utterance, before they designate real objects, indicate
precisely that language takes place (Agamben, 1991: 25).

Notes
1 In Agambens words, this reversibility of exclusion and inclusion takes the form of the
inscription within the body of the nomos of the exteriority that animates it and gives it
meaning (Agamben, 1998: 26).
2 In fact, Agamben goes a good deal further than this, asserting that only a complete
abandonment of the concept of sovereignty could enable us to put an end to the
seemingly limitless encroachment of the state on bare life, and in so doing to begin to
think a truly emancipatory politics. I will not comment any further on Agambens claim
except to say that it would appear to signal the true and problematic intention of
Homo Sacer: to write a total history of sovereignty.
3 On the difference between antagonism and dislocation, see Laclau and Mouffe
(1985).
4 This can also be formulated as a tension between the constative and performative
dimensions of language: to name something (or to act in the name of it) is to assert its a
priori existence, but it is also necessarily to alter the context in which one acts. The
emergence of a political movement exemplifies this double register: if on one hand the
hypothetical movement calls attention to inequalities and injustices that have previously
been ignored by the state, on the other hand there can be no movement no gathering
and no action prior to the act of naming.
5 This and all subsequent translations from the Spanish are my own.
6 See Martin Heidegger (1998).
7 In concrete terms, this uncertainty can be expressed as a question concerning the status
of what we can call, for the sake of convenience, globalization. One standard view on
globalization sees it as more or less synonymous with the tendential dominance of
neoliberalism and the US throughout the world, and thus takes a decidedly dim view of
its course: globalization is ushering in a new time of increasing homogenization and
destruction of collectivities in favour of consumer-driven individualism, intensification
of the disparities between rich and poor, and so on. While these dangers are real and
must not be overlooked, it seems to me that this prognosis only acknowledges one side
of the process or event called globalization, and that it fails to take into consideration
the possibility that what appears now as decline or devaluation may one day show
itself as having been the emergence of a new sense in the world. What historical
moment, after all, has not been seen by some as the decline of truth (civilization,
culture, values, our way of life, etc.) and as the onset of a nihilistic age in which the
only stable value is that of the self-affirming will to power?

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References
Agamben, Giorgio. 1991. Language and Death: the Place of Negativity. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford
University Press.
Balibar, Etienne. 1991. From Class Struggle to Classless Struggle. In Race, Nation, Class:
Ambiguous Identities, edited by Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein. London:
Verso.
Eltit, Diamela. 2002. Mano de obra. Santiago: Planeta.
Fukuyama, Francis. 1992. The End of History and the Last Man. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Heidegger, Martin. 1998. On the Question of Being. In Pathmarks. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantall Mouffe. 1985. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Toward a
Radical Democratic Politics. London: Verso.
Marx, Karl. 1977. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. I. New York: Vintage.
Marx, Karl. 1973. Grundrisse. Baltimore, MD: Penguin.
Olea, Raquel. N.d. La disolucion de lo social: acerca de la novela Mano de Obra de Diamela
Eltit. crtica.cl. Available at: http://www.critica.cl/; INTERNET.
Zizek, Slavoj. 1989. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso.

Patrick Dove is Assistant Professor at Indiana University. His recent publications include
The Catastrophe of Modernity: Tragedy and the Nation in Latin American Literature
(Bucknell University Press, 2004) as well as articles on literature, testimonio and nihilism.
His current project undertakes a re-examination of literary aesthetics in the context of
post-dictatorship and neoliberalism.

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