The Work of Fear: About 2666, by Roberto Bolaño

Abstract

Pierced by the crises of the regime of neoliberal governments in Latin America, 2666 by Roberto Bolaño (2004) shows how in our turn of the century the power over lifethe power to create and control populations. The reproduction of capital gets mixed up with the mass production of populations of economic refugees, abandoned in a permanent state of exception within a biopolitical territory where the rule of law has been suspended. The landfills, vacant lots, urbanizations, the outlying districts of Santa Teresa in 2666, with the maquiladoras rising up in the background from the Sonora Desert make up an ecosystem of fear, an eminently biopolitical space from which the neoliberal State has withdrawn its control, abandoned to the forces of the free market and of organized crime. They are unmapped black hales where the living dead of global capitalism vegetate. Violence as a condition of the workings of a power exasperated by the market is fundamentally continuous violence upan a feminine body, puts the novel in line with the same forces that configure the present -the desert of the market, where the creation and reproduction of capital are confused and intermixed with the traditionally feminine role of the creation and reproduction of life.