10th. Biennial Conference of IAGS, Siena. The ... - Ana Arzoumanian

10th. Biennial Conference of IAGS, Siena.The Aftermath of Genocide. Victims and Perpetrators, Representatios and InterpretationsThe Body as Waste. Effect of Emptiness of Law in Post- Genocidal Instances.Ana ArzoumanianThe novel ends with the same song it is opened with; “Lord, have mercy!” TheChristian myth is revisited by the surplus when the surplus is the dead, under the patrioticArmenian adagio, “Unconscious death is death. Conscious death is immortality.”Immortality in death. An unceasing death does not support trauma.From fragmentation to waste, the writer-character as the garbage collectorThe main character in the novel Vidures, Gam’, is a writer who walks among thedispossessed leading a dispossessed dance. The writer is between the guard of the cemeteryand the administrator of the national dump, in the middle of an “ocean of filth”, wherewomen are aroused by impotent men. A writer that —more than writing— submerges hishands in the dump looking for “empty bottles.” The dump is his exile, the “most rottencorner of our lands.”An identity that becomes “anti-identity 22 ” against the rules of the systems of social,press and political representation; a writer of this time (Denis Donikian making Gam’ say)describes the process of dis-embodiment. Art shows a disfigured work, a cruel writing thatderives from the complicity of soma-sema (meaning-sign). Crude words. The political bodybeyond the notions of sovereignty believed in the fiction of ‘incarnation’ by the prince ofthe power of the people, a modern version of the Christian Interpretation of the body and itsgreat in-carnating powers 23 .In a state of war against terrorism stated by the great powers and the condition ofState capture of the so called transitional economies, the concept of “State capture” wherecorrupted transactions are above the law, this political moment is similar to post-genocidalstages where no ruling puts an end to the chronicity of time; the artist stands for theinsurgent. There is no resurrection. “The verification of our own collapse, because it’swhere we start,” as fixed by the collective Tiqqn 24 .22 Grossman, Evelyne. La défiguration. Les Éditions de Minuit. Paris, 200423 “de-corporization, the power ceases to manifest the generative principle and the organization of a socialbody,” Claude Lefort, quoted by Grossman, op.cit24 Deleuze-Tiqqun. Contribution to war. [Contribución a la Guerra en curso. Errata naturae. Madrid, 2012]12