Sumar by Diamela Eltit: Fiction’s radical excess

Abstract

Reflecting on Diamela Eltit’s novel, Sumar (2018), Julio Ramos revisits the netting that binds life, literature and politics. In his lecture, Ramos interrogates the forms and categories that make up the bodies of a political unit, within the framework of speculative fiction and scopic environments, as well as the transformations of work and life under contemporary cybernetic and pharmacological regimes. Ramos observes that Eltit’s novel distances itself from the more recognizable practices of contemporary meta-fiction, and rather revitalizes fiction writing as a “craft of language through the relay of voices as the very matter of the act of novelizing”. In particular, Ramos’ reading highlights the danger of the extinction of an entire guild, that of street vendors: the last guardians of a certain for