Latin American Literature and Criticism of Universal Humanism

Latin American Literature and Criticism of Universal Humanism[1]
The Case of Cortázar’s “House Taken Over”
Pablo Lazo

1. “House Taken Over” and the surreptitious violence of the Other

Latin American literature is potentially subversive. The stylistic recourses of Latin American literature can disrupt hegemonic political power by dislocating humanistic ideology that sustains it. This claim is evidenced when examining ways Gabriel García Márquez’s or Reinaldo Arenas’ magical realism, Ernesto Sábato’s or Vargas Llosa’s brutal narratives, and of course Julio Cortázar’s auto-reflexive and intertextual style, create subversive literary fantasies. My aim is to discuss one such instance of subversive Latin American literature by using the example of a single Latin American author, Julio Cortázar, examining how Cortázar deploys critical literary tools in his story, “House Taken Over.”I posit that interpreting his story in this vein, elicits a critical framework that assaults ideological humanism.

To begin with a brief summary of Julio Cortázar’s “House Taken Over,” a brother and a sister live peacefully in their large home. They live off the house’s rent and so have ample time for leisure: while she knits passionately, he reads books endlessly. One unfortunate day, they hear strange sounds—murmurs and footsteps—coming from the back section of the house. Scared, the brother locks the intermediary door between their living quarters (located in the front) and the back section of the house. He declares: “I had to shut the door to the passage. They’ve taken over the back part.” (Cortázar 12) Without making any attempt to confront them, the siblings isolate themselves away from their captors. Soon, they find themselves used to living in the safe and available section of their home, eating cold meals while concocting activities to kill away time.

Initially, they live happily with the restrictions of their predicament. Cortázar writes: “We were fine, and little by little we stopped thinking. You can live without thinking.” (13) Sometime afterwards and under the illusion of safety, they are startled by the sound of blunt and intimate footsteps, followed by the sound of whispers that seem to come from the immediate vicinity. Panicked, and certain that they have lost everything, they run towards the exit (they had split seconds to flee the house so they left their essential belongings behind). On the street and with a sad look in his eyes, the brother locks the exit door and throws away the key.

Cortázar’s story elicits concern regarding surreptitious modes of violence. We examine the invisible and general form of violence that is represented in his story, particularly in the description of the unseen captors’ intrusion, which subsequently and insidiously expels the residents. Through this optic, we interpret daily violence as something which enters our home silently and invisibly, and as something which continues to occupy our lives until it has taken from us what is most personal and distinctly ours. Therefore, Cortázar’s house metaphor indicates the loss incurred by an ample specter of things, from goods and properties to traditions and cultures. In short, we are dealing with a particular metaphor: the violent invasion of strangeness into our home.

Ignoring the details offered by Cortázar regarding the residents of the house may incite us to this hurried analysis. Inasmuch as the they live off the house’s rent (the house is properly too big for them), and insofar as they dedicate their time to innocuous activities, it seems that Cortázar is representing the Argentinian privileged class that, during Juan Domingo Perón’s reign in 1946, left the working class—particularly agricultural and manual workers—under conditions of poverty. Upon the onset of Peron’s reign, the working class regained political force, and slowly, this subjugated class of people became a menace to the bourgeoisie because they turned into a force that could penetrate the home of the privileged, and therefore, recuperate what was initially despoiled.

In sum, Julio Cortázar is an author with enormous political commitment. This argument can be validated by recalling his expulsion from Argentina in the ’70s, and his decision to adopt French nationality in 1981 as a form of protest against the military regime in Argentina; by remembering his commitment to the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua which produced his important text, Nicaragua, tan violentamente dulce; by highlighting his sympathy for the Cuban left, evidenced by his friendship to José Lezama Lima, and; by noting his support of Salvador Allende’s government in Chile: his literature is the manifestation of a politically subversive stance.

About the menace presented by the strangers that usurp the house, and alluding to the city’s dirt and the difficulty of keeping it clean, Cortázar asserts: “It may be Buenos Aires is a clean city, but she owe it to her population and nothing else. There’s too much dust in the air […]”(11). The city’s “residents”—the legitimate residents according to the perspective of the accommodated landowner—know how to “clean” the city. Dirt and dust comes from “others”, others that unrightfully invaded the clean city, they are “intruders” and not “residents”—intruders that pullulate and swarm everything, like “dust in air”, or like invisible specters which cannot be seen but are nevertheless felt. They reminisce Derrida’s allegory of the “other”, the specter of “otherness”—it elicits our fear because it poses the menace of invading us.

This political context (the 1940’s Peronist Argentina) is the key that unlocks Derrida’s allegory in Cortázar’s story. It begs the following questions: is the house the legitimate property of the siblings? Are they not usurping goods that should belong to others, or belong as well to others? For example, the brother asserts: “We didn´t have to earn our living, there was plenty coming in from the farms each month, even piling up.”(10)

In this sense, the traditional interpretation of this story is inverted: when the “others” are thought legitimate occupants, the siblings’ expulsion (the climax of the narrative) becomes a gesture of true justice in Cortázar’s story. This is exemplified in the author’s long response to one of Joaquín Soler Serrano’s questions, during an interview the latter conducted in 1977 in the show, A fondo:

For example, there is that thing about the siblings that got expelled from their home in Casa Tomada. There was a time in which it was said that that story… was a story that wanted to be like an allegory of Peronism and the Argentinian situation. Is this true or is this just an attribution from the street? (Soler)

Cortázar responds without hesitation:

No, no, this is absolutely true, yes; and it was my surprise to find out that that version existed. It was perhaps the first time that I discovered something very beautiful in its core and that it could be read through the multiple readings of a text, that is; it was my surprise to discover that there are readers that follow you as a writer, that are interested in what you do, and that at the same time, read your short stories or your novels from a perspective totally different to your own [my own when I wrote the story], and that have a second or third interpretation. I can tell you my interpretation of that story, and I have said it in other interviews. That [the story] is the result of a nightmare. I dreamt that story, but the brothers were not there [in the dream], there was only one person, me; and something displaced me… Something that I could not identify displaced me little by little throughout the rooms of a house that wanted to throw me into the street. That is, there was a sensation that you get in nightmares which is total fear when nothing is being defined. It is simply fear in its pure state. Something horrible that will happen a second later, and, sometimes, by luck you wake up before it happens. Ok, in that sense it was the same: there was a horrible indefinable thing that moved forward, that translated into noise, a menacing sensation that moved like that; and so I would go creating barricades, closing doors, until the final door was the door to the street. And in that moment I woke up, before I left to the street, I woke up; and I remember very well that immediately I went to the typing machine and wrote the story in one sitting. This is my reading of the story. Now, the interpretation that suggests that I was perhaps translating my reaction as an Argentinian in front of what was happening politically cannot be excluded because it is perfectly possible that I already had that sensation [of menacing fear] that translated itself in a fantastical manner, in a symbolic manner, inside the nightmare. Therefore, it seems to me plausible as a possible explanation [of the story]. (Soler)

In Cortázar’s response we find the argumentative framework I want to raise in this essay: literature places us on the symbolic plane of representation of a reality that is said obliquely through narrated imagery: it is in these images that we find the penetrating forces of socio-political transformation. Literature is not a form of entertainment which operates through the logics of evasion (by its appeal to fictitious realities, as is generally said about literature), but rather, a game which is necessarily represented obliquely—through metaphors and allegories—and which produces a particular and unique impact on its readers, who would not feel this very impact if literature was presented in another way.[2] Cortázar refers to this framework when he insists that the Argentinian social reality of the ’40s (described in his story) was inspired, initially, by the oneiric language of his own dreams (in Serrano’s interview, Cortázar references psychoanalytic interpretation of oneiric symbolism and art as a platform that transfigures and obliquely presents social phenomena), and subsequently, written in literary form—a language that extends and refines the former.

Therefore, I argue that locating Cortázar’s distinction between a culturally acceptable “individual” and a culturally unacceptable “other” in his story, allows my interpretation to articulate an intertextual space in which his stylistic recourses operate as subversive critical tools of political and social realities. For example, I examine how his distinction evokes “pure fear”: the “feeling of nightmarish dread” stemming from the anxiety elicited by the overarching tonality of his story in the form of a metaphorical slogan, “something terrible is going to happen.” That is, I explore how this idea is an interesting corollary of the political “other” that infiltrates Cortázar’s fictional home, an idea discovered by following the story’s core theme, namely, that his protagonists never attempt to face their invaders out of fear of the unknown. I carry out this analysis by referring to Slavoj Žižek’s philosophical lens of violence.

In Cortázar’s story, we find a brother and a sister that believe they can cohabit with their invaders by dividing the house’s territory between both groups: the lower section—living room, and kitchen—for the brothers, whereas the upper section of the house—living quarters—for their invaders. However, as the story reaches its climax, Cortázar describes how his protagonists become paralysed with fear as they realise how they—the insidious, spectral others, their invaders—are quickly coming closer, and closer to them. That is, Cortázar’s narrative suggests that his protagonists are plagued by a spectral menace, a menace that is insidiously catching up to them, thus forcing their inevitable escape from home. This overall theme is sustained throughout the story: that they, the intruders, are indefinable. Cortázar plays with the political metaphor that I identified in the opening paragraph of this article: that they are the unnamable, incomprehensible, feared neighbours, that albeit intimately proximal to us—in terms of a shared, communitarian space—they nevertheless subject us to their pure, symbolic, spectral menace.

Furthermore, by concealing themselves inside their own home, and by not attempting to investigate their invaders, the brothers can be interpreted as symbolic walls, raised to stop the dangerous other from stepping foot into their dominion. According to Žižek, the other projects itself as a dangerous spectral entity, as an entity that must be stigmatised and be run from, albeit such hurried escape implies leaving something behind. By tracing Cortázar’s metaphor in the key of the Slovenian philosopher, the liberal tolerance of domestic humanism, that is, any form of political tolerance that favors parliamentary multicultural democracy, becomes supportive of the innocuous image of the “other”, and never of the objective reality of the menacing Other:

“Liberal ‘tolerance’ condones the folklorist Other deprived of its substance –like the multitude of ‘ethnic cuisines’ in contemporary megalopolis; however, any ‘real’ Other is instantly denounced for its ‘fundamentalism’, because the kernel of Otherness resides in the regulation of its jouissance: the ‘real Other’ is by definition ‘patriarchal’, ‘violent’, never the Other of ethereal wisdom and charming customs.” (Žižek, “Multiculturalism”, 162)

Therefore, with eyes to Žižek’s analysis, I posit that Cortázar’s story suggests that the background ideology that sustains political relationships of domination and exploitation in societal realities is ideological humanism, that is, ideological humanism masked by politically correct forms of liberal humanism that present themselves as universally applicable political system. So formulated, ideological humanism justifies the metaphorical defense of the symbolic home—our home—, thus persuading the reader—and any interpreter for that matter—to interpret Cortázar’s protagonists as unjustifiably despoiled from their rightful dominion, that is, ideological humanism posits that the real violent act committed in Cortázar’s textual space comes from the spectral invasion of the other. In this critical vein, we discover that liberal ideology, while formally defending humanistic “tolerance” of the other, is reduced into a form of social perversion which “accepts” the other so long as the other does not disrupt, invade, that is, come close to us in practice. This concept can be summed up by the following axiom: “we”—us, politically acceptable us—socially tolerate otherness, if and only if, otherness does not alter our lifestyles.

However, it is important to point out that liberal humanistic ideology possesses the recourses to console those who have become despoiled from what is theirs. For example, the brother laments that he was forced to leave behind his books and his smoking pipe; the sister, her folders and slippers. Nevertheless, they are quickly consoled by what remains of their territory: clean spaces and more time for leisure. They move on by concocting new activities: albeit they lack some things, they find new forms of entertainment. For example, the brother revisits the stamps his father left behind—clearly a metaphor of bourgeois heredity—, whereas the sister spends her time knitting increasingly more complex designs—another metaphor of bourgeois idleness. Still, the feared neighbour (neighbours?) continues his relentless advance: he—it—imposes incomprehensible, spectral fear into their home, while usurping what is symbolically theirs. The other is latent fear. The climax arrives when the brother and sister flee their home: the sister tightly runs out of the front door gripping her embroidery designs, while the brother holding strongly his book and wristwatch with his hands: these are their remaining possessions, the only possessions they could salvage from their escape. Everything else was left behind to be usurped by their invaders: by otherness.

It is in this sense that I argue that the menacing “other” operating in the political background of “House Taken Over” is explained by Žižek’s analysis of violence: while the protagonists, the reader and the interpreter see a single dimension of violence being represented by the home’s occupation, they lack insight to account for the second dimension of violence stemming from the structural parameters of society and liberal humanistic ideology, parameters that explain the objective reasons why the intrusion happened.

The Slovenian thinker argues that it is possible to distinguish evident violence, from structural violence: the former is brutally and cynically evident, easily identifiable violence connected by the status quo to “social aggressors", such as, revolutionary movements interpreted as terrorist attempts, or politically conscious marches translated into police riots. This form of violence is recognizable when it is clearly identified as a tool for particular agents: he calls it “subjective violence.” (Žižek 9) However, subjective violence occurs in the visible dimension of social reality, hiding in its stead background violence that, Žižek thinks, is far more radical and blunt: he calls it “objective violence”: the structural/symbolic intrusion of strangers into our homes.

Objective violence so formulated, is present in the development of our institutions and humanistic rights, and, more generally, in our languages as regulations and standardizations of meaning policed by the administration of political totalities:

[…] there is a more fundamental form of violence still that pertains to language as such, to its imposition of a certain universe of meaning […] there is what I call ‘systemic’ violence, or the often catastrophic consequences of the smooth functioning of our economic and political systems. (Žižek, Violence, 2)

Therefore, Cortázar’s short story, by means of its stylistic recourses, invites us to make this reflection on the humanistic background ideology of subjective violence. As a matter of fact, Žižek introduces the book’s opening chapter with an introductory case which is analogous to Cortázar’s story: in 1992, he says, the government of the former Soviet Union exiled intellectual members of oppositional parties in a vessel called “Philosophy.” Among these exiled intellectuals, Žižek narrates, there was a well-off bourgeois intellectual, Nikolai Lossky. Albeit conscious of Russia’s precariousness, and albeit an avid pundit of social justice, Lossky was unaware of the background “systemic violence” that enabled his luxurious lifestyle to flourish, so much so that Lossky’s family—owing to this form of structural violence, objective violence—became victims of the proletariat, and like Cortázar’s protagonists, victims of the spectral menace of the other. The Lossky family came to interpret their fear as an unjustly elicited form of violence carried out by strangers, as Žižek says:

In their benevolent-gentle innocence, the Losskys perceived such signs of the forthcoming catastrophe as emerging out of nowhere, as signals of an incomprehensibly malevolent new spirit. What they did not understand was that in the guise of this irrational subjective violence, they were getting back the message they themselves sent out in its inverted true form. (Violence 10)

The message seems to be the one sent by the siblings described in Cortázar’s story: what causes evident social violence is non-evident violence. This non-evident form of violence stems from complete lifestyles, from ideologies that determine social operations, from a framework of processes located in “the metaphysics of capitalism” (12) (Slavoj Žižek’s term), which is considered abstract but it proves its concreteness in social life all the time, a concreteness with spectrality, that isperfectly yet diffusely incarnated by said processes.

To examine this twofold plain of violence, Žižek articulates a careful analysis of the classical text written by Walter Benjamin, “Towards the Critique of Violence.” The true contribution of Benjamin’s text, suggests Žižek, is the way it interprets this particular violence and the way it discovers its hidden part, which (he says) is generally rigged as political and economic systems that portray themselves in democratic, parliamentary and humanistic fashion. Benjamin examines the backdrop of violence, as intimated by the political allegory we examined in Cortázar’s story. By unveiling their violent beginnings and posterior operations, these systems are discovered for what they are: failing systems. This form of subtle “objective” or “systemic” violence, then, can also be denominated “spectral” or “anonymous” by connecting it to capitalism and to its power to penetrate society:

Therein resides the fundamental systemic violence of capitalism, much more uncanny than the direct precapitalist socio-ideological violence: this violence is no longer attributable to concrete individuals and their “evil” intentions, but is purely “objective,” systemic, anonymous. Here we encounter the Lacanian difference between reality and the Real: reality is the social reality of the actual people involved in interaction and in the productive processes, whereas the Real is the inexorable “abstract” spectral logic of capital that determines what occurs in social reality. (Violence 12-13)

Žižek posits that Benjamin opens a central question in his text by querying whether something can be done regarding the conditions of surreptitious violence, insofar as they are circumscribed to the totality of society and State, and inasmuch as they have penetrated political, mediatic and legal forms of language, and more generally, humanistic cultural language—what in Lacanian-Althusserian terms he calls ideology (which is confused with the unconscious character of the Real). The “Benjaminian” question raised by Žižek is formulated with eyes to the saturation of exhortations to combat “subjective” violence, that is, the saturation of so-called “humanists” who struggle against famine in African countries, and support ecological campaigns and campaigns that help victims of violence: women, children, war refugees and other vulnerable groups.

Žižek thinks that this humanistic “false urgency” against violence hides more subtle forms of exploitation and domination implicated in the systems that house the concrete, explicit portrayals of violence. The point is that this so-called urgency of activism against violence is the recourse that distracts our attention from the real problem, a problem implied by the questions that Žižek raise inspired in the reflection of Benjamin:

Is there not something suspicious, indeed symptomatic, about this focus on subjective violence—that violence which is enacted by social agents, evil individuals, disciplined repressive apparatuses, fanatic crowds? Does it not desperately try to distract our attention from the true locus of trouble, by obliterating from view other forms of violence and thus actively participating in them? (10-11)

Žižek’s answer—á la Benjamin—is openly affirmative: yes, participating in mainstream culture that opposes violence is in fact, becoming involved with it, consciously or unconsciously. And therefore, he posits, we should stop “doing anything” about these urgent calls to action, because giving in to these forms of humanitarian “temptations” against violence—protected by codes of recognition and by snob acceptance—is in fact participating in their systemic structuring of State power—which founds and conserves its legal and political recourses (Benjamin), and (Žižek) its mediatic, economic, cultural—and more amply—ideological recourses. What can be done, suggests Žižek, is to place reflective distance between ourselves and the urgency of action against violence, inasmuch as “there are situations where the only truly ‘practical’ thing to do is to resist the temptation to engage immediately and to ‘wait and see’ by means of patient and critical analysis […]” (7)

Defeating the temptation of fighting against violence, resisting the vertigo of the “false urgency” to act, and adopting a reflective position of “careful and critical analysis,” does not involve falling under any type of distanced passivity or conformity. This sort of reflection asks for our distance, but in the form of intermediary implication, which does not take party to action or inaction. It involves the difficult place of thought that is conjured by the image of the specter in Cortázar’s story: the intruders never appear as faces or defined voices, they only project signals of their immediacy—powerful yet anonymous signals. These signals correspond to the spectral logic of capitalism, which, as Žižek posits, determine social life. Let us take a final look at the daunting face of spectral violence to think about the difficult place of reflection that it incites.

2. “House Taken Over” and Derrida´s Spectrology

“House Taken Over” conjures the spectral “other” that invalidates the house sustained by capitalism’s systemic violence, particularly, its ideological humanistic forms of exploitation which operate through the backdrop of acts of violence. This perspective shows that Cortázar’s story can be seen under the light of a complementary interpretation, namely, under the light of “spectrology” or “phantomology” (hauntologie) in Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx. One may ask by examining the possibilities present in Cortázar’s story: what happens when the siblings leave the house? The ghosts that have taken the house, these “spectral others”, have they reordered the house, have they returned it to its legitimate owners (the popular, working masses that Cortázar’s political metaphor names the authentic residents of the house)? Does their violent intrusion end when the siblings leave, or does their intrusion continue in other forms? That is, are there other struggles that continue their occupation, other resistances (analogous to movements like occupy Wall Street) that reproduce their prerogative in other cultural and financial centers around the world? Derrida answers:

The question is indeed whither? Not only whence comes the ghost but first of all is it going to come back? Is it not already beginning to arrive and where is it going? What of the future? The future can only be for ghosts. And the past. (Derrida 45)

Examining Derrida’s spectrality prompts the positive sense of the term “specter,” conceived through the (non-binary) logic of what-is-to-come, which is always open to the possibilities of dislocated (out of joint, insists Derrida) temporality: of what can reappear, unconstrained of the teleology of what is assumed given in the future (this is Derrida’s criticism of Fukuyama’s position about the end of history and other messianic, eschatological, teleological explanations that close the possibilities of the future). Therefore, Derrida indicates the “other” as promise: the “other’ that can reappear time and time again.

To understand this indication, let us return to the deconstructionist steps taken in this essay, the steps of spectrology: Derrida’s wager is to dislocate discourses that pretend to be ultimate and fundamental options of history’s end. By examining “the specters of Marx,” Derrida faces unilateral discourse that operates with the pretension of finalising the political and economic neoliberalism that defends a supposed and absolute closure of historicity. This neoliberal discourse and its predominant cultural form (which Derrida calls the predominance of the “tele-techno spectral media’’ or virtual space), does everything to conjure the ghosts of leftist Marxist discourse, i.e. to exorcise or expel them as “malefic spirits.” (61) Insofar as Communism is the “ghost” that disorganizes the “liberal democratic order” of capitalist globalization, of the “International new,” Communism (or any other specter from the family of concepts that might endanger the new order) must be feared and expelled:

A time of the world, today, in these times, a new “world order” seeks to stabilize a new, necessarily new disturbance by installing an unprecedented form of hegemony. It is a matter, then, but as always, of a novel form of war. It at least resembles a great ‘conjuration’ against Marxism, a ‘conjurement’ of Marxism: once again, another attempt, a new, always new mobilization to struggle against it, against that which and those whom it represents and will continue to represent (the idea of a new International), and to combat an International by exorcising it. (62)

But ghosts return as motives of social and political criticism aimed at the system filter through gaps like “dust” that dirts the city. In “House Taken Over,”it is precisely this “spectral other” that haunts through “tele-techno spectral media’’ and disarranges it, endangers it, reclaims its rights to stay in front of the membership of those that inhabit the house (in Marxist speak: the little bourgeois men that live off their rent). The spectral “other” does all of the above by following the specters of Marx, the specters that Derrida elicits.

This dislocation of predominant discourse can be explained as the game scenario of the power of the “other” as specter, of its surreptitious and subtle violence, which dislocates and lays siege all the time, which does not desist in its power to disseminate a sense (or pretension) of the ultimate. Under the light of this Derridean interpretation, the intruders that take the house do so by conjuration, but now in the sense of invoking the Marxist spirit of equality, of justice, of the reversal of hegemonic and dehumanizing forms of capitalism. By means of the inspiration elicited by the other’s “taking of the house,” we can follow a Derridean deconstructionist plan of the “onto-teleological” and “arche-teleological” concept of history, precisely to win the difficult place of reflection, yet to be defined, of spectral. This reflective space is not the “negation” of the system of capitalism, as if by invoking the specters of Marx can deconstruct all things that support it, all the judicial and institutional models of bourgeois customs and of undeserved benefits of the bourgeois, of a type of hegemony that protects the idea and ideology of history’s end. For Derrida, what is opened by the spectral “other” is the new historicity that decomposes and re-composes the accountability of the state of things in which we are immersed, and which promises something we not yet entertain. This is how he explains the birth of deconstruction:

It was then a matter of thinking another historicity—not a new history or still less a “new historicism”, but another opening of event-ness as historicity that permitted one not to renounce, but on the contrary to open up access to an affirmative thinking of the messianic and emancipatory promise as promise: as promise and not as onto-theological or telex-eschatological program or design. (94)

This new historicity that includes the other’s promise, the future, is perhaps the condition of a “re-politicization” of the political. This is really what interests us when facing the question that we made earlier: do the intruders keep the house in the form of resistance, as forms of justified occupation? The specters of Marx would indicate that maybe so, for this is the condition of another concept of the political that does not defend the institutions and modus operandi of neoliberalism’s “tele-techno spectral media” and of humanistic ideology.

Furthermore, because it does not openly oppose “tele-techno spectral media” it is therefore not easily absorbable by the system of oppositions that compose the humanistic logic of that discourse. This other concept of the political is the spectral struggle of the “others” under siege everywhere, operating within a genre of resistance that is indefinable and evanescent in the multitude of intermediary positions and at the margins of the hegemony they dislocate by means of their interstitial actions of resistance. Cortázar’s short story gives us the tools to reflect on a resistance like this.

Notes:

1. Translated from Spanish by Fernando Villalovs Mariscal. ↩

2. In my book (Lazo 176-184), I explore the capacity of literature to commit the reader to a genre of action elicited by literary imagery that, thanks to its stylistic density, provokes and pushes the reader to act, but never to fall asleep under the spell of the supposed literary fantasy of passive entertainment that is evasive of its reality. ↩

Works Cited:

Cortázar, Julio. “House Taken Over.” In Blow-up and Other Stories. Trans. Paul Blackburn, New York: Random House, 1963, 9-15. Print.

Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf, New York: Routledge, 1994. Print.

Lazo, Pablo. La Frágil Frontera de las Palabras. Ensayo Sobre los (Débiles) Márgenes Entre Filosofía y Literatura. Mexico City: Siglo XXI/UIA, 2006. Print.

Soler Serrano, Joaquín. Entrevista Completa a Julio Cortázar - Programa A Fondo YouTube. YouTube, 2014. Web. 03 June 2016.

Žižek, Slavoj. “Multiculturalism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism.” In The Universal Exception: Selected Writings, Volume Two. London: Continuum, 2006. Print.

Žižek, Slavoj. Violence: Six Sideways Reflections, London: Profile Books, 2008. Print.