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Return of Fogwill, Kind Thought Executioner

2021-09-23T01:15:02.039Z


The publishing house Blatt & Ríos publishes 'Estados altered', an unpublished essay by the most irreverent writer of the Argentine canon


The legend that accompanies him more than a decade after his death says that, in a couple of sleepless nights and dispensing 12 grams of cocaine, Rodolfo Enrique Fogwill glimpsed the result of the Malvinas war with a story he wrote in a trance while Argentina's surrender was unraveling.

But

the pichiciegos

, the novel that elevated him in 1983 by imagining the miserable survival of a hiding battalion, did not arise out of political unease. The writer imagined it as a voracious response to the patriotic discourse with which the military dictatorship sought to justify the conflict with the United Kingdom. "We sank another ship!", He heard his mother scream, as he told this newspaper in one of his last interviews, and the rest is the novel that began that afternoon. Without national pride, with defeat made hungry, he was not obsessed with the fight, but how a group of adolescents could trade food in exchange for information for the enemy ranks.

Fogwill's writing (Buenos Aires, 1941-2010) was a trench that fired friendly fire against the Argentine cultural hegemony.

If in the throes of the military process his narrative focused on the irony of the nationalist narrative, democracy found in his essay work a critical voice against the forces that claimed victory after the fall of the military regime.

Altered States

, an unpublished essay published this month by the Blatt & Ríos publishing house, gives an account of his latest reflections on the National Reorganization Process - as the military junta that took power in his country after the 1976 coup d'état called itself - and the tragic economic turn that, in the writer's vision, began with the dictatorship and was perpetuated in the three democratic governments that followed until the outbreak of the crisis in 2001.

More information

  • Fogwill: "Ethics is not doing or not doing, but deciding"

  • 'A materialistic narrator', by Ignacio Echevarría

Written in 2000, the book is formed from a series of columns commissioned for the return of the magazine

El Porteño

, born in 1982 as one of the bastions of culture against the regime and dissolved in 1993. A decade earlier, a bomb had exploded in his newsroom after the publication of a report on the theft of babies during the dictatorship.

On his return as a columnist for the 2000 edition, Fogwill warns about writing in a “context” where what is published is ascribed to the prevailing thought, “in the turn of good policemen and bad criminals, during which nobody is going to take the job. to do something to him ”.

Sociologist and marketing expert before being an award-winning storyteller and cursed poet, Fogwill, who signed his books with the surname dry conscious of the creation of his character, made his fortune as a publicist until he lost everything in 1981. He was imprisoned for six months for “ ideological subversion ”and came out of jail ruined, as Leila Guerriero told the chronicler. Later he accepted the direction of the agency from the son of General Roberto Viola, de facto president at the time.

Assuming the irony of knowing that he is a "collaborator", of having played with economic power and knowing it from the inside, Fogwill criticizes a cultural context that imposes a story, but loses deep down. "The political-cultural victory of this Process is the crowning, as well as the disguise, of the economic victory of the powerful, of those who, to continue doing business, remain silent," he writes in

Altered States

.

The transition to democracy brought human rights violations to the fore, but underneath was hidden what the author defines as a "process of regressive redistribution of wealth", in which the dictatorship took Argentina with a 4, 6% poor and it exploded with democratic governments that maintained their economic formulas and left the figure at 40%.

"Those theses that between 1980 and 2000 were disruptive, are now taken by intellectuals and by a certain left," explains Damián Ríos, one of the directors of the publishing house that recovered the text.

"Fogwill did not speak from the left, but his theses on the recent economic history of Argentina are quickly stolen by the left and even by Kirchnerism," he sums up.

Editorial Blatt & Ríos

“Because it is never, neither in the dictatorship nor in the democracy, on the side of the majority opinion, it is that Fogwill uses, against the majority intellectual left, everything that she, in her culturalist becoming a democracy, considers unpresentable of historical materialism , starting with economism ”, writes in the foreword Silvia Schwarzböck, PhD in Philosophy, who, from the analysis of her interventions in the press, identifies the writer as an essential thinker of the country's modernity. "Faced with a culture industry converted, between 1984 and 2000, into the interpretation industry, Fogwill wants to continue being the executioner of kind thought, the Marxist of the liberal right, the ruthless liberal."

The book closes a line of political thought developed by Fogwill between 1982 and 1984, when he began to collaborate with

El Porteño

, but as the author constantly recalls, these "are notes on literature." In 20 columns that read like an essay, the writer identifies poets "under twenty-something years" who were about to mark a new era, such as Martín Gambarotta or Santiago Llach, praising storytellers such as Hebe Uhart, who would live almost 20 years later a

late

boom

, and praises the children's composer María Elena Walsh or the writer Juan José Saer as pillars of the Argentine twentieth century yet to be understood.

“The book completes the journalistic interventions of a more mature Fogwill. He is not the petardist, but a sharper one, more aware of the place he occupies ”, sums up Damián Ríos, who with the publication of

Altered States

continues to rescue part of the“ orphan work ”of the writer that began in 2018 with unpublished stories by

Memoria Romana

and will continue next year with the novel

Urbana

, unpublished in Argentina.

“There is no better myth than demystification,” Fogwill writes while reproaching himself for not understanding literary workshops or defending prejudice and enmity: “Literature, like any commercial sphere, would need an injection of prejudices, superstitions, capricious preferences, arbitrary hostilities. .

Because without prejudice, you can hardly think.

And without enemies, you can't think ”.

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Source: elparis

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