A dated and situated reading

The commentary opens on a taxi scene. Some twenty days earlier, on the way to a meeting, Denise Najmanovich handed Elina Dabas the first copy of her book, just out: she wanted her to be the first to have it. Neither of them managed, at that moment, to put into words what this carried of affection, of stories exchanged, of conversations held and conversations promised. When the author asks her, two weeks later, to write a commentary, Dabas begins by taking the measure of the difficulty: putting the images and associations the book raises into order would amount to taking away their savour and their polyvocity.

She then agrees to hold, provisionally, the role of “the commentator”, knowing that the pleasure as much as the anxiety comes from letting oneself be flooded by the work. And she chooses to retrace the itinerary of their encounter rather than to summarise theses.

The next day the book leaves in her suitcase for Tucumán. Three days and three nights, a hundred and thirty people come from that province and from Jujuy, to speak about the children and the families of their localities and about what favours their growth. People far removed from the words “subjectivity”, “paradigm”, “complexity”, “embodied body”, but very close to their own lives and their own silences. Many had travelled for hours; for several of them it was the first time they had left their community and their family.

Rosalía, or efficiency as a blind spot

On the first evening, in the hotel’s large dining room, Dabas notices a woman with Inca features, her head lowered, the plate untouched in front of her. She thinks her unwell, comes closer, introduces herself, asks her name, then what is wrong. The answer comes in a very low voice, without her raising her eyes: “it’s that I couldn’t finish talking with my son”. Dabas first understands a telephone call that was cut off. Then comes the explanation: they had been called to dinner. It takes her a few moments to grasp it, and she reacts with shame at her own organisational efficiency — timetables and dynamics devised in Buenos Aires, in a language conceived as universal. All she offers is to go with her to call her son back after the meal. Rosalía raises her head, barely smiles, murmurs a thank you and pulls her chair up to the table.

That evening, Dabas opens the book. From the prologue on, a sentence seizes her: the game of bonds would consist in creating forms without freezing them, in bringing into existence. Then the first chapter challenges her by asking what we are talking about when we talk about the body — and she sees again Rosalía’s bent body while her own moved confidently through the space of a carefully thought-out organisation. She did not only help: it was Rosalía who helped her with one of her blind spots.

The commentator then measures the number of forks she could have taken: not seeing Rosalía; seeing her without coming closer; coming closer, questioning her, and putting her reaction down to an ancestral submissiveness. What she did instead was to rethink the “efficient” organisation of a meeting that was producing discords with the singular attachments of each person.

What the book commits one to

A reading conducted in this way brings out the inaugural gesture of the book: it demands, as a starting point, that one specify the place from which one speaks. From there, three dimensions run through all of Najmanovich’s writing, as Dabas picks them out: an ethical dimension, in the decision of the one who speaks to assume their discourse; an aesthetic dimension, which recognises the importance of the content of the form and of the bonds that form creates; a political dimension, because that discourse claims a place in the contemporary relational fabric.

From this follows a thesis on translation, which Dabas retains because it throws light on her mishap in Tucumán: languages are incommensurable with one another, and one never passes mechanically from one to the other, but through a partial, metaphorical and creative translation — including between verbal language and bodily experience.

The section devoted to the “body of modernity” is the one that provokes in the commentator the most surprise and admiration: she sees described there the subtle and deep inoculations we have received and of which it is difficult to rid oneself. The chapter closes, she recalls, on the idea that the embodied subject enjoys the power to create and to choose, but that it falls to them to assume the world they have co-created.

Red Sistémica publishes only a fragment of this commentary; the full text by Elina Dabas appeared in Perspectivas Sistémicas no. 88. The passages of the book that the review quotes at length are not reproduced here: their substance has been restored instead.