Beyond Transgression: Representations of Violence and Politics in La técnica del hombre blanco

The fourteenth fragment of La técnica del hombre blanco [‘The White Man’s Technique’], a play written by Victor Viviescas between 1998 and 2001, and produced by the Bogota-based company Teatro Vreve, presents, toward its conclusion, an image that condenses the expressive violence of the play, and the way it utilizes transgression as an aesthetic strategy. The protagonist Korvan, a middle-aged white man who has ‘hunted’, kidnapped, and tortured a black man (whom he names Nirvana) in the basement of his house, turns on a chainsaw with which, we know, he is going to exterminate his ‘prey’ and disappear his body. As is usual in aesthetic practices in which transgression is the dominant representational strategy, this singular moment amounts to a sensible proof of the metaphorical and analogical links that constitute the discursive structure of the piece. This teratological image crystallizes the architectural layout of the drama and shows how the reverse side of institutions, laws and historical projects is the irresolvable violence of the social bond. That violent exhibition of violence, that extreme representation of cruelty, is precisely the sensible vehicle through which the transgressive form carries out a radical investigation of both the limits of human experience, and the contingency of its historical formations. Even though this critique effectively takes place, it is not all that happens, because beyond this logic of transgression the work suggests another way of understanding the link between violence, politics and representation. At the end of fragment 14, at the moment when the play seems to close in on itself and on the autonomy of its terrible or sublime forms, the play points us to a metamorphosis of cruelty and its political sense, suggesting in fragment 15 a singular ethical response to the problem of the disappearance of bodies, and letting us glimpse in the play’s short epilogue the possible limits, both aesthetic and political, of dramatic practice itself.