ABSTRACT
Every evening, as the day ends and darkness falls upon Argentina there is a transcendental crossing of the borders of the capital city of Buenos Aires. Your heart must fill up if, from your window you observe mysterious shadows starting to move in silence, ghostly silhouettes crossing the street to stoop at your door. Within minutes there are thousands of shadows trespassing, transcending one by one every border of the complex geographies of class, race, private property, and gender of Buenos Aires. The trespassers are the excluded, the people whom global Capitalism intends to make invisible, as they earn their meagre living by looking into the rubbish bins for something to sell, to exchange or to eat. The cartoneros 2 (scavengers) are the untouchables of the expansion of Capitalist society, living and
dying by touching the untouchable rubbish of the city, as marginalization reduces them to death by hunger or tetanus. Some, like Héctor, may cover their faces while working because of the shame of the miserable living into which they have been forced.3 Like Moses covering his face in the presence of God, the excluded cover their faces in the presence of economic horror that brings another dimension (or the dimension of the Other) to the Sinai theophany. The untouchables, as did Moses, have seen the god of horror and survived. They have seen what Nancy calls the transcendental in touch, that is “the obscure, impure, untouchable touch.”4 The garbage sites outside the city are their sacred mountain-and their Golgotha.
