The Cultural Politics of the Singular and the Specific: Chile, Avant-Garde Art, and The Body

This chapter continues with Chile as the geographical frame but moves into the postdictatorship era, analyzing a seminal debate between two crucial theorists of the post-Pinochet era: Nelly Richard and Willy Thayer. I argue that this debate is best understood, not as a debate cast in a traditional critique of neoliberalism versus leftism, but rather as a philosophical interrogation on the relationship between cultural practice as protest and individuation as the creation of critical community. Richard’s position, which emerges from her involvement with CADA, attests to the need to challenge dictatorship and the regime of censorship from the position of the specific, from the point of view of a unified movement that does not assert a rigid identity, but nonetheless, collective suffering imposed by dictatorship. And despite this counterintuitive formation, Richard asserts that a specific ethic is a fertile ground that unifies the collective, while simultaneously allowing for individual expression.