Acceso usuarios
Scott Weintraub
Zurita’s extensive body of work explores the Chilean landscapes of the desert, mountains, sea, and sky, the violent repression of Pinochet’s dictatorship, as well as the tension between vision and blindness. The link between vision, (not) seeing, and violence is particularly salient in Zurita’s first book, Purgatorio (1979), and reveals a complex exploration of mystical, phenomenological, and scientific inquiries in a highly original book of poetic and visual texts. In this article, I propose to interrogate the Bataillean “sovereign closure of the eyes” that Zurita’s text embodies, especially in the context of the mixed-media electroencephalograms with which Purgatorio finalizes its experimental textuality. What results is a different understanding of the conditions of possibility of poetic vision in Zurita’s hermetic literary project.
