The disaster and the rest. Testimony and reproductive order in Señor del vértigo, by David Preiss

Abstract

This study examines the Chilean poet David Preiss’ first book, entitled Señor del vertigo (Lord of Dizziness; Santiago, 1973), in order to present the ways in which subjectivity is constituted, arising from the possibility of witnessing the disaster that Shoah means for the Jewish people, and in what discursive ways the possibilities of meaning and representation of “the poetic” and “the human” in this context articulate. It also explains how the subject takes over the divine/paternal command presiding personal and collective memory, as well as the incidences of negativity and individuation that produce particular forms of leakage from these requirements. At the same time, this paper attempts to draw a parallel between the forms that masculinity acquires facing the paternal constitutive mandate of the carnal, linguistic and symbolic reproduction.