To Begin Writing: Bellatin, Reunited

Animality, Sexuality and the Politics of Death in Mario Bellatin's Salón de belleza

“…Critics have made important arguments about how Salón de belleza relates to, and frustrates, allegories pertaining to the nation. For instance, Steinberg has argued that the fish of Salón de belleza ultimately distract the narrator from completing an allegory about the historical AIDS pandemic or neoliberal violence in general, and contends that if Bellatin's writing allegorises anything it is the ‘withdrawal of the literary’ from its ‘annexation’ to politics, the very ‘groundlessness of writing and the arts in the face of the consensual neoliberal project that threatens to become the horizon of the world as such’ (Steinberg, : 112–115). Similarly, Sharon Larisch observes that the fish become part of the hyper‐allegorical movements underway in the novella, which displace the reader from their usual ‘interpretative’ role (because the text seems to contain its own interpretations) (Larisch, : 512–513).…”

“…My analysis proceeds in the theoretical register of these works, but my engagement with posthumanism and Esposito's affirmative biopolitics open the way towards more positive readings of the text as well. Other readers have made nuanced observations about the ways in which Bellatin's novella employs the exotic fish to invoke – and frustrate – allegory, representation and literary or artistic traditions (such as Steinberg, ; Epplin, ; Larisch, ). I dialogue with these readings in the final section of this article in order to argue that the impersonal dis identification thematised in Bellatin's text also extends to the text's at once resonant and refractive relationship with its own (imagined) context.…”