RESIDUOS CORPORALES EN LA NOVELA "ULTIMES DÉCHETS" (2015) DE ITXARO BORDA
HUMAN WASTE IN THE NOVEL ULTIMES DÉCHETS (2015) BY ITXARO BORDA

GARBAGE AND THE LIMITS OF THE HUMAN

Author(s): Iratxe Retolaza Gutierrez
Subject(s): Cultural history, Studies of Literature, Philology
Published by: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego
Keywords: detective fiction; environmental; writer-activist; slow violence; environmentalism; embodied subjectivity
Summary/Abstract: In the novel Ultimes déchets, rural detective Amaia Ezpeldoi investigates a landfill case. This novel generates various discourses on generated on waste, which are intertwined in these three axes: waste management and environmentalism; garbage collection and the social model; the discourses that connect the imaginary of the garbage with the imaginary about the human. From that perspective, the novel deals with the otherness and / or the marginality that is generated by imaginaries about garbage and the residual. Neoliberal thinking puts some bodies out of humanity: it considers them useless, because they are not indispensable in time or space of production. Therefore, imaginaries about the residual function as expressions of the boundaries of the system, and in the social discourses the representations of people connected to the imaginary of the waste are becoming more common. Detective Amaia Ezpeldoi in this novel embodies the affection for those residues of human bodies, to question the thinking and limits of the current neo-liberal economic and political system.

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