Testimony, Ethics, and the Aesthetic in Diamela Eltit

Two works by the Chilean writer Diamela Eltit, El Padre Mío (1989) and El infarto del alma (1994; produced in collaboration with Paz Errázuriz), contain an undeniable testimonial impulse that aligns them with testimonio, a genre of subaltern personal narrative that has emerged with new force in Latin America in recent decades. Yet these texts, which present subjects who are mentally ill, incoherent, or lacking identities, call into question some of the key assumptions about testimonial practice and its reception, disrupting the usual responses of identification with and empathy for the narrator. By reading and writing testimonial discourse through a postmodern aesthetic, Eltit advocates the recognition of testimonial subjects as producers and agents of culture rather than as victims in need of compassion. Her project, with its particular merging of the aesthetic and the ethical, constitutes a local yet politically urgent attempt at rethinking the predominant conceptualizations of marginal culture, refusing the notion that the aesthetic is the exclusive privilege of elite culture.