The agonist rhetoric in “Las cosas que perdimos en el fuego” by Mariana Enriquez

Abstract

Departing from Laclau and Mouffe, I propose that “Things we lost in the fire” of Enriquez opens a way for the political transformation of women, not linked to representation, but to rhetorical mechanisms that affect the interrelationship between the signifiers that organize the social space in hegemony. Through the analysis of the descriptive configurations of the story, first, I trace the dichotomization of the social space in the antagonism “they (men)-we (woman)” and the reproduction of the "woman-object" analogy in different characters. Later, I argue that there is metonymic iterability which is reintroduced in the metaphor-support of this identity because the fire is transformed from a control device into a counter-hegemonic practice. However, there are signs that it becomes hegemonic once the "monster" metaphor has become affectively overdetermined and consolidated into a mythical identity as an effect of repetition. Faced with this budding alternative hegemony, the story confronts an agonistic rhetoric that introduces aesthetic dissent and radical heterogeneity in the antagonistic discourse, problematizing the territorialization of singular affections in hegemonic social formations. This agonistic rhetoric suggests the possibility of a dissensus of women where the condition becomes a political power of reinvention.