The expropriated body: Bernardo Kucinski - Diary of a Loss

Abstract

The "impossible" task that part of the most recent Brazilian literature has assigned itself can be summarized in the desire to witness, through writing, the wounds and bloody marks that the military dictatorship left behind and which the new authoritarian regime attempts yet again to erase, repeating the past erasure gesture enacted by the Amnesty Law. In this context of "exception," in which institutional power tries to impose a new (and yet tragically experienced) discursive order, literature plays a fundamental role, placing itself in a peripheral position, in an "exceptional" space-time in order to give voice and flesh to the victims of the past. To exemplify this attempt to recover personal and collective memory, this article analyzes the works of Bernardo Kucinski, focusing in particular on Os visitantes.