Fuerzas especiales by Diamela Eltit: the epic of vulnerability

Abstract

A young woman from a slum tells in first person her existence between her block and the cybercafé where she prostitutes herself for a handful of pesos. Outside only an agglutinating, paralyzing and extensive fear. Fuerzas especiales, the tenth novel by Diamela Eltit (2015), in its narrative plot reproduces a series of typical elements of the author’s poetics (the female body as a system for registering political violence, the disintegration of the family unit, the questioning of the human and the community in relation to the technologies of power, the processes of reification of the citizen in the era of hypercapitalism). At the same time, it opens up new interpretative tracks, especially focused on the analysis of the effects of globalization on urban life and the pathologies of contemporaneity. On the basis of these premises, this paper aims to analyse the ways of evasion and escape from certain politics of fear and the role of the paradigms of vulnerability and contamination in the technoscience era.