ABSTRACT
This chapter considers a series of texts about Buenos Aires that illuminates a special relationship among time, space, and visuality. What more compellingly links the texts consider here is their combination of holographic techniques with attempts to imagine ways in which the material city might figure the trans-temporal 'political mind' of a community indelibly marked in the present by a past that threatens disappearance. The film Alejandro Agresti poignantly expresses the desire to both see and not see the past in Buenos Aires. Here Aira adds to the ghostly theme by discussing the role of dreams in shaping waking reality: For something to be no-construido, it has to exist already, at least as an image or dream, although without having taken solid physical form. Whereas Buenos Aires vice versa links memory, embodiment, and visuality in the city, Los fantasmas focuses on relativity and the ghostly presence of certain kinds of people in the city.
