Biopoetic Approaches to the Representation of the Vegetal in Cristian Alarcón’s El tercer paraíso

Abstract

The studia humanitatis that emerged in the 14th century developed an idea of the exceptionalism of the human that has continued to permeate cultural and literary analysis until just a few decades ago. In this configuration, the human is distinguished from the non-human through a series of characteristics that lead it to establish a relationship of domination and exploitation with the rest of the living world. The vegetal world, due to its cognitive and emotional distance from human rationality, has occupied this subordinate position for a long time; however, the rise of the critical posthumanism theoretical movement has brought with it a reconsideration of the spectrum of the living world as a subject of knowledge in its own right. Critical posthumanism advocates for eliminating the radical separation between nature and culture. The following article will analyze the novel El tercer paraíso by Chilean writer Cristian Alarcón with the support of a posthumanist approach, particularly its biopoetic modulation coined by Julieta Yelin. The paper will examine how Alarcón’s text works on different narrative levels to suggest the constant interweaving between the human and the vegetal. In this way, Alarcón finds an alternative to the idea of the human as the sole subject of enunciation by employing the strategy of finding in the vegetal world the traces of a system of extraction and exploitation whose historical roots run through the protagonist’s family and bodily history.