Imagining the Afterlife: Chilean Writings from the Confines

Abstract

The essay investigates the ways in which some Chilean writings of the last decade have produced the limit scene of the end of times, the end of the world, and its afterlife. It is interesting to inquire how these fictions imagine the current crisis from the disruptive, shifting and also “exceptionalized” spaces of the boundaries of the end (confines, in Spanish), and how they produce, through the apocalyptic genre “masked, encrypted” (Derrida), another imagination of the present. A political critique that, revealing the current crisis as a crisis of the imagination of future, could re-guides our gaze on the limits of our time and the conditions for its overcoming. The essay also tries to think about these writings in a situated way, from an enunciation also in crisis, which assumes the contemporary in a trance of fall and transformation.