Naming the future, a proposal

Abstract

This essay unravels how and if literature responds to the political awakening in Chile. In other words, what does it mean to be woke with language? The response is a deep reflection of how literatures have a fundamental role in writing the blueprints of the future and giving shape to communities that are waiting (for justice and to be constituted). In the revolt, these communities emerged from the underground of the neoliberal order, enabling the simultaneous enactment of goce and sacrificio. The proposal is that the literary language that is not a potentiality, but a potentia, a language that enacts the present of the collective to give a name to the emancipatory spaces that exist in the shadows of the State and the market. Using critical methodologies from cultural studies, theories of the other utopianism and calibrations of the desiring power of poetic language, neoliberal literature and its extractivist practices are criticized to propose other aesthetic methodologies that open spaces for breathing with the other.