ABSTRACT
In the wake of the coup d’état that unseated the democratically elected socialist president of Chile Salvador Allende in 1973, writers Gabriel García Márquez and Julio Cortázar collaborated with the Second Russell Tribunal (Russell II, hereafter). The citizens’ tribunal considered testimonial evidence and passed judgment on the intervention of big powers in Latin America, which the writers concluded to be a direct consequence of the one-dimensional globalization of multinational capital’s interests. Their insight was that traumatic events such as those in Chile had a continuous effect on social practices and institutions. Specifi cally, in the form of unjust gains by multinationals that continue to appreciate in time and would continue to do so even after the evil of direct perpetrators such as dictators were recognized in verdicts of tribunals such as Russell II. Radicalizing the critique of permanent colonialism and genocide initiated by Jean-Paul Sartre, Bertrand Russell and the members of Russell I, Cortázar and others at Russell II focused on multinationals’ plundering and violence, corruption, and the geopolitics of ‘our fi ngers everywhere, our fi ngerprints nowhere’ inaugurated by the Nixon-Kissinger duet in the Americas. The latter aimed at making radical politics and ethics historically impossible. On the one hand by considering them as separate spheres. On the other by alleging that the passage of time confi ned losses to the past and the backward regions of the world in a way that made the radical political claims of the latter non-negotiable and unethical (or vindictive). Separating politics from ethics and declaring radical claims non-negotiable and unethical would be the key to establishing a ‘One World’ form of globally integrated capitalism, whose disastrous consequences we witness today. In their writings and interviews during and after their experience at Russell II, writers like Cortázar defended the opposite thesis: the inseparability of ethics and politics, exemplifi ed by the performance of witnesses in and out of the tribunal. They engaged the ethical and the politicalnormative critically, via a mixture of radical denunciation and utopia that made the latter attainable. This chapter presents and elaborates Julio Cortázar’s defence of this thesis in the wake of Russell II in relation to other critical voices emerging at the time, more relevant today than ever insofar as they may provide a ‘speculative’ outline for radical movements and governments that in Europe and the Americas try to reconnect the normative and the political.
