Military Public Sphere. Leftist Legacy?

Abstract

Seduced by words and images, current cultural studies classify the opening of a “bourgeois public sphere” under military regime as anti-hegemonic discourse. The first section —“Public Sphere or Lettered City”— describes how this freedom of speech corresponds to a dialogue between civic society and State, which sponsors most artistic activities. The second segment —“New Anti-hegemonic Discourse”— sketches how renovation in the military repeats this unity between State and Public Sphere, judged as revolutionary. Finally, the third section —“Conjunction of Opposites”— concludes how the same radical images and statement serve to legitimize both sides of the political spectrum. The Specters (-Kujkul, Gespenst) of the past rule the writing of cultural history, that is to say, poetics or po- Ethics: the debt that living humans warrants to Dead Ancestors. The cultural legacy of the Right wing needs to be recycled on behalf of the Left, by its fear to be at the Sinister shield of the national Past. By this appropriation the living present is invested as an exemplary teacher of the deceased past, by showing Death the true content of its experience