3 - Our Man in Chile, or Victor Jara’s Posthumous Life in Soviet Media and Popular Culture

Summary

When General Pinochet's junta took over the government of Chile in September 1973 and detained thousands of people in a concentration camp at the National Stadium in Santiago on suspicion of resistance, Victor Jara, the folk singer, theater director, and Communist, was among the victims. He was murdered in a particularly gruesome and symbolically suggestive way: before being shot to death, he was tortured, and his hands were broken, so as to separate the bard from his guitar. The Chilean martyr for Communism, whose media cult Leonid Parfenov mentions in Namedni as a crucial cultural phenomenon of the decade, comes to occupy the sacrificial space in the Soviet press of the 1970s and 1980s, when his image strengthened and legitimized the regime. In Homo Sacer, Giorgio Agamben demonstrates how the state's power has always been connected to and expressed through this figure, whose biological life is subject to the king's state of exception, that is, his ability to suspend the law in order to apply capital punishment. On the other hand, in Discipline and Punish, Foucault shows that, in the seventeenth century, public displays of execution and torture reasserted the state's power on the off ender's body. Similarly, public and graphic descriptions of Jara's death and suff ering affirmed the Soviet state's power before its frightened citizens. Foucault argues that discourse hides the attributes of power while making the objects of its disciplining gaze all the more visible through surveillance: “the exercise of discipline presupposes a mechanism that coerces by means of observation; an apparatus in which the techniques that make it possible to see induce effects of power, in which, conversely, the means of coercion make those on whom they are applied clearly visible.” Soviet discourse demonstrates Jara's injured body by placing it at the center of its narrative while “revealing” the power at this site. I will specifically explore how these narratives establish the agency of the state as the authoritative and punishing subject outside of the culprit/pain causality through the exhibition of Victor Jara's body. In Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, Judith Butler discusses a retroactive invention of a subject to be held accountable for the consequences of a hurtful action, and argues that there must be another subject who makes that judgment. I propose that this positing of the authoritative subject is the goal of such discourse.