ABSTRACT
The Grand Narratives, or the authoritative discourses which sustain everyday life, which Gramsci spoke of when writing about the common sense or common order of things which are ideologically constructed yet have assumed a natural and almost biological presence in our life (Gramsci 1971: 33), collapsed in Latin America over the course of a few years. Cultural, religious, socio-political discourses, economy and science, and philosophical cosmovisions which defined identity, meaning and patterns of social organisation and sexual constructions were obliterated from the earth. Even language was erased. Tongues’ were lost; mother tongues were buried while human tongues were cut from mouths. Women's tongues were silenced for centuries. What survived entered into a covenant of silence, and since then it has never fully spoken again. Following Jacques Lacan, we may say that it was a silence of the magnitude of planets, silenced as if by a set of Newtonian laws, replaced by unified field theory and leaving behind anything outside the new cosmovision. ‘We will never know what can happen to a reality till the moment that this reality has been definitively reduced by inscribing it in a language’ (Lacan, in Miller 1990: 357–60). Unified field theories resolve perplexity, avoid relationalism and install laws assigned to points of space or space-time as particulars. Precisely, the resolution of perplexity (plurality) in Latin America was done in material ways. ‘From some people the buttocks were cut, to others the thighs, or the arms … cutting hands, noses, tongues and other pieces from the body, eaten alive by animals and (cutting) women's breasts’ (Todorov 1987: 151). These mutilation rituals, paraphrasing Lacan, could be compared to the cutting off of the breasts of truth, the reductionism into a new bodily order, that is, humanity reduced to one formula, one law of union and compulsion. This required a massive mutilation. The need for Grand Narratives always takes with it some cuttings and mutilations in itself. Latin American theology comes from that, a mutilation of symbolic knowledge such as theology, politics, economics, science and sexuality It was the time of enforced martial law on perplexity, 12 but not an end of authoritative discourse followed by deconstruction. A deconstructive path would have submitted responses ‘to endless interrogations … overthrowing power, to preserve the opening’ as Jabès says (Harvey 1986: 94). We have nothing to fear in deconstruction if this process carries with itself a problematisation of reality which opens to new questionings and visions. Instead of that, what happened after the Conquista was an authoritarian process, and the imposition of the Great European Meta-narratives on people's lives. That was more a process of asset-stripping than deconstruction. The Latin American Grand Narratives became redundant, empty (in Spanish the name given to asset-stripping is vaciamiento, emptying) perhaps due to the fact that every Grand Narrative carries in itself an objectification of a Lebenswelt or ‘World of Life’. Let us consider this point in detail. The production of Grand Narratives is in itself a way of commodifying life. These are no innocent paper moons. These are concrete intentional discourses growing from relations of production and capital appropriation. The end of the Grand Narratives of the Original Nations was an undressing process, and the native's new nakedness was then available to be re-dressed with a different (European) Grand Narrative, yet one which fulfilled the same objective as the first. Therefore, I am not claiming that the Grand Narratives of the Original Nations were better or worse than the European. No, I am only saying that the natural processes of deconstruction never happened and people were brutalised into Christian Grand Narratives and economic discourses by criminal forces. Narratives of people's exploitation and women's submission in Latin America did not change, at least not substantially. Only the masters who gave names to the planets, still following Lacan, and determined their reduced vocabulary, changed. A more brutal regime and a genocide without magnitude happened in the continent, but as a woman I cannot say that the situation of women after the Conquista was substantially different from before. However, as I will argue later, deconstruction is unavoidable even if forcefully obstructed. Deconstruction can be traced in Latin America in multiple forms of political, cultural and religious mistrust throughout centuries. The sexual mutilation still needs to be theologically addressed.
