La forma de la falta: Archivando y leyendo el trauma

Abstract

This article explores the concept of “indexing” and “affective archive” with a view to articulating the ways in which absence asas affect has been constituted in the poetry of the NN generation in Chile. This feminist and anti-authoritarian poetic archive is constituted within specific material conditions and intersectional discrimination. Expanding on the concept of “affect” that Lauren Berlant develops in “Cruel Optimism,” my analysis is situated at the historical node where philosophy, poetry, and feminism converge in Chile to account for the work of memory after 1973 in poetry. My analysis proposes a historical understanding of this affective archive in poetry based on affect theory, this concept’s phenomenological features, and Freud’s trauma, a key concept to understand the space, historicity, and form of this archive. My analysis is inscribed in a tradition of Chilean theoretical and philosophical production, which began in the period after the coup d’état and has continued to the present, contributing, in this way, to the development of memory studies in Chile.