Papers by Geoffrey Kantaris
Designis Publicacion De La Federacion Latinoamericana De Semiotica, 2006
This article examines three Argentine films from the 1990s, which can be seen in retrospect to ha... more This article examines three Argentine films from the 1990s, which can be seen in retrospect to have initiated a set of powerful new responses to the social and economic crises of neo-liberal Argentina. The films delve into the decaying social fabric of Buenos Aires at a time of rising poverty and social desintegration, and they expose the links between the urban interstices and wider systemic and geopolitical restructurings. As these films explore the fabric of the megalopolis, they also reveal global, financial, media, and information flows, which are agents of the deterritorializing processes at work. As they attempt to renew our vision of the polis, can these avoid complicity with the globalization of visual culture, of which they are by their nature a part
Descubrir el cuerpo, 2017
Diseño de nuevas geografías en la novela y el cine negro de Argentina y Chile, 2013
Was ist ein Einbruch in eine Bank gegen die Gründung einer Bank? [¿ Q ué es el robo de un banco e... more Was ist ein Einbruch in eine Bank gegen die Gründung einer Bank? [¿ Q ué es el robo de un banco en comparación con fun dar uno? ] Bertolt Brecht Jorge Luís Borges, en uno de los cuentos suyos que juegan con el género poli-, cial, evoca la implicación de una nueva temporalidad en la maleabilidad del es pacio urbano en tanto representación de la memoria: "La imagen que tenemos de la ciudad siempre es algo anacrónica. El café ha degenerado en bar; el zaguán que nos dejaba entrever los patíos y la parra es ahora un borroso corredor con un ascensor en el fondo" (1990: 27). Aquí los espacios espectrales de la ciudad, atrapados entre los recuerdos y los flujos, se vinculan íntimamente a las nociones de repetición y anacronía (re gistradas en el topos de la "degeneración") que se reproducen inevitablemente en todo concepto de género, patrón y arquetipo. La temporalidad humana, de la memoria humana y de sus mapas cognitivos, no alcanza la velocidad de los cambios espaciales de la metrópoli, la rapidez con que se van transformando tiendas, locales y modas, lo cual se convierte en la nueva manera de registrar el paso del tiempo, un registro espacial del tiempo. E l cuento se llama "E l indigno" y es uno de los relatos de traición de Bor ges que apareció en la colección E l informe de Brodie (1970). Trata del dueño de una librería, Santiago Fischbein, judío, que le cuenta al narrador el gran se
The article reads Pablo Trapero's film _Elefante Blanco_ (2012) in tandem with Ernesto La... more The article reads Pablo Trapero's film _Elefante Blanco_ (2012) in tandem with Ernesto Laclau's _On Populist Reason_ (2005). I argue, in line with Marxist philosopher Jacques Rancière, that the film portrays the uncountable/uncounted population of the slum at the centre of the film (Ciudad oculta) as a final term, a hard nucleus of the "real", that blocks the equivalential and repeating chain of empty signifiers that for Laclau constitutes the (Lacanian) logic of populist reason. The abandoned hospital, the "Elefante Blanco", comes to symbolize that which remains, and that which exceeds all the political processes that have attempted to address the "problem" of the villas. This is a PDF of a book chapter published as: Kantaris, Geoffrey. “Pablo Trapero y el elefante blanco de la razón populista”. In Bernhard Chappuzeau and Christian von Tschilschke, eds, Cine argentine contemporáneo: visiones y discursos (Frankfurt: Iberoamericana-Vervuert. 2016), 83-106.
“Waste Not Want Not: Garbage and the Philosopher of the Dump (Waste Land and Estamira)”. In Chris... more “Waste Not Want Not: Garbage and the Philosopher of the Dump (Waste Land and Estamira)”. In Christoph Lindner and Miriam Meissner, eds, Global Garbage: Urban Imaginaries of Waste, Excess and Abandonment (London: Routledge, 2016), 52-67.
This chapter works through the formal and philosophical tension embedded in Luisa Valenzuela’s un... more This chapter works through the formal and philosophical tension embedded in Luisa Valenzuela’s under-explored novel, Como en la guerra. Skillfully picking up on themes of Sophocles’ Antigone in Como en la guerra, Kantaris uses Lacanian psychoanalysis to address the recurring analogy of the fatherless child. This useful revisit to the Oedipal paradigm, for the Generation of ’72 qua the exilic experience, adds to the formal and sociological analysis of Valenzuela’s navigation of the post-Boom publishing marketplace. Always already “half-buried,” this is a group that seeks epistemological anchors while the in-rush of novel global signifiers reifies national and regional experience.
It no longer seems possible to provide a predominantly historical account of “Latin American” bei... more It no longer seems possible to provide a predominantly historical account of “Latin American” being or becoming, let alone of the national structures and identities that emerged from the ruins of the Spanish and Portuguese Empires. This is partly because the nation-state in Latin America—from the start a precarious and, more often than not, rapacious administrator of an identitarian community that was always “yet to come”—is everywhere losing control of the economic, cultural, and biopolitical arenas over which it claimed to hold sway. It is also partly a result of our contemporary eschatology—i.e. the “end” of modernity’s grand narratives of social transformation, whether these be (in Latin America) broadly statist, national-popular, or the last remnants of Marxist and Maoist insurgencies. Whereas for Hegel the end of history would come with the full realization of reason in the form of the state, overwhelming time through repetition and circularity, in the aftermath of the state i...
Guaraguao, 2004
... La narrativa de Lola es deliberadamente antidramatica, al en focarse en las relaciones rotas,... more ... La narrativa de Lola es deliberadamente antidramatica, al en focarse en las relaciones rotas, las dificultades cotidianas para hacer llegar el dinero, y enla ciudad vivida como espaciocarcelario. ... el baile; todos, por lo que quieren decir con sus tatuajes. [... Casi to ...
Cinema was born with modernity and contains all the contradictions of the modern. As a technologi... more Cinema was born with modernity and contains all the contradictions of the modern. As a technological apparatus, the moving image offered the promise of both heightened verisimilitude and totality of representation, such that for its early practitioners it was a virtual canvas capable of fusing intense realism with the representational promises of cubism, Dadaism, futurism and, of course, surrealism. This is why Walter Benjamin was able, still in the 1930s, to laud film not for its fetishism of the spectacle, but precisely for its ability to defetishize the everyday, to embody the hitherto separated realms of science and art, and to liberate us from our routine imprisonment in space‐time:
The Modern Language Review, 1999
Latin American Cyberculture and Cyberliterature
Cuadernos del Centro de Estudios de Diseño y Comunicación
Este artículo investiga /examina los vínculos entre el alza sorprendente en la producción de cine... more Este artículo investiga /examina los vínculos entre el alza sorprendente en la producción de cine urbano enAmérica Latina y el fenómeno denominado la geometría del poder del capitalismo global. Sostengo quelas representaciones de la violencia en tal producción cinematográfica son, a cierto nivel, sintomáticas deuna violencia sistémica, aunque disimulada. Se cuestionan los modelos reflexivos de la representación(mass)mediática para sostener que el cine latinoamericano se encuentra en una relación ambiguamenteconstitutiva y disruptiva para con las fuerzas desencajadoras de la globalización y la desterritorialización.Se ilustran estos argumentos con referencia a algunos ejemplos de la producción cinematográfica urbanade Colombia, México y Argentina.
Visual Synergies in Fiction and Documentary Film from Latin America, 2009
Memory Culture and the Contemporary City, 2009
Forum For Modern Language Studies, 1989
... This rich dieme in Traba's work needs now to be looked at in more detail ... attack on d... more ... This rich dieme in Traba's work needs now to be looked at in more detail ... attack on dieir actual modierhood - for instance, Irene's anguish at not knowing die fate of her son who is trapped in Chile, and her friend Elena's grief at die "disappearance" of her daughter Victoria, who is ...
Forum For Modern Language Studies, 1989
... This rich dieme in Traba's work needs now to be looked at in more detail ... attack on d... more ... This rich dieme in Traba's work needs now to be looked at in more detail ... attack on dieir actual modierhood - for instance, Irene's anguish at not knowing die fate of her son who is trapped in Chile, and her friend Elena's grief at die "disappearance" of her daughter Victoria, who is ...
Creative Spaces: Urban Culture and Marginality in Latin America, 2019
This paper is an Afterword to the volume Creative Spaces, edited by Adriana Massidda and Niall Ge... more This paper is an Afterword to the volume Creative Spaces, edited by Adriana Massidda and Niall Geraghty. As well as reviewing the main lines of argument of the book, this chapter examines what "creativity" may mean in an urban context, in its imaginary, material and political dimensions. It engages with recent concepts elaborated by urban theorist AbdouMaliq Simone, from which the word "uninhabiting" of the title is taken.
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Papers by Geoffrey Kantaris