ABSTRACT
The overriding bestseller status of the various narco-genres that typify the last twenty years reveal an investment in the representation of death production, but only on the rarest of occasions does the contemporary novel dwell on the question of mortality itself as a fundamental conceptual limit for rethinking the relation between force, existence, and the possibility of challenging the political order. The publication of Eduardo Ruiz Sosa's Cuántos de los tuyos han muerto (2019) highlights the contours of a literary project claimed not by Being itself, but by its very question (which is only ever infrapolitical). “El dolor los vuelve ciegos” [“Grief Makes Them Blind”], in which the structural repetition of the phrase “Él no es” [“It is not him / He does not exist”] predominates, allows that the singularity of being say its matter. It is this infrapolitical gesture in Ruiz Sosa's Cuántos de los tuyos han muerto that challenges all claims to analogous social experience, a circumvention of experiential equivalence that unveils the singularity of the literary itself, against the ordering calculations of the political, and with a view to the ongoing experience of tragedy.
