Relics of life. Biopolitical imaginations in Argentina. (Holmberg, Lugones, Quiroga)

This dissertation explores the dialogues between fiction, natural science and politics in the first manifestations of fantastic literature in Argentina. Specifically, it argues that the narratives of Eduardo Holmberg, Leopoldo Lugones and Horacio Quiroga absorb the new questions that had arisen in the natural sciences by the end of the nineteenth century, and return them translated into inquiries about the political. This permutation is observed in a series of figures that probe the limits between the animal and the human, the organic and the monstrous, the spontaneous and the automatic. This is the case with the beasts, automata, ghosts, spirits and forces that populate these texts.The main thesis of Relics of Life is that, through these figures, the works of Holmberg, Lugones and Quiroga formulate commentaries on modern biopolitics. This means that they interrogate a historical process by which biological life has become the main task of politics. The increasing prestige of natural sciences between 1870 and 1930 is one of the historical evidences of the emergence of a biologically defined notion of life. Simultaneously, in Europe and Latin America those decades are characterized by the advent of liberal democracies, followed by the advent of totalitarian regimes. Relics of Life analyzes these two events as inherently related. Its argument is that the fictions of Holmberg, Lugones and Quiroga explore the paradoxes of the modern State, and that they do so through their interrogation of the limits that separate and unite humans and animals. The author analyzes how such reflections point to---and sometimes question---the foundations of the political, as an instance of separation from or supplement over biological life via the constitution of a symbolic order. Thus, in the case of Holmberg, the author examines how his narrative appropriates topics of Darwinian evolutionism to reflect on the limits of democracy in the case of Lugones, she analyzes how his fantastic fiction anticipates the arguments of his vitalist fascist positions later in his life and in the case of Quiroga, she studies how his short stories explore the mastery of Nature as foundation of the modern State.