Interregnum and Pharmacology: Hernán Ronsino's Pampas Trilogy

Abstract

ABSTRACT:Recent work in Latin American literary and cultural studies argues that politics has undergone a fundamental shift under globalization and now consists of a prolonged suspension of sovereignty or interregnum. This article examines periods of interregnum in twentieth and twenty-first century Argentina as portrayed in Hernán Ronsino's Pampas Trilogy of La descomposición (2007), Glaxo (2009), and Lumbre (2013). I analyze how Glaxo connects revolution and counter-revolution to pharmaceutical industrialization, amplifying and literalizing a widespread metaphor of health and disease in the political body. I link political poisons and cures to the pharmakon of writing, following Jacques Derrida, and the pharmacology of contemporary capitalism, following Bernard Stiegler. Throughout the trilogy, Ronsino's pharmakon appears in different moments of interregnum as he disarticulates narrative conventions, constructs an afterlife for canonical literature, and participates in the paradoxical preservation and corruption of collective memory during periods of political crisis. The trilogy shows that figures of disease and immunity have long permeated the relationship between literature and community. In Lumbre, the 2001 political and economic crisis exposes this relationship as one of simultaneous disclosure and concealment, exemplary of literature's role in the contemporary interregnum. For Ronsino, pharmacological mechanisms are at the core of political interregna, amplified in the pharmacology of transnational capitalism and framed in writing and photography.