| This study offers an in-depth philosophical and social-psychoanalytical interdisciplinary construction that attempts to explain the ever-recurring national and post-colonial question: what is an Argentine? Based on the theories of the subject of Jacques Lacan, Sigmund Freud, and G. W. F. Hegel, this text takes up the death of the character el unitario , in Esteban Echeverria's foundational text "El matadero" (1871), as the cause of Argentine cultural modernity. This traumatic event became the kernel of Argentine collective unconscious. By analyzing a number of selected discourses of the 19th and 20 th Century such as: (a) narrative [Piglia's Respiracion artificial, Borges and Bioy Casares' "La fiesta del monstruo"], (b) film [Doria's Darse cuenta, Agresti's Buenos Aires vice versa], (c) essay [Sarmiento's Facundo, Mallea's La pasion de los argentinos], and (d) poetry [Hernandez's Martin Fierro, Lussich's Los tres gauchos orientales], this analysis suggests that all past and future cultural manifestations are established in relation to the last passage of Echeverria's short story. In specific terms, the unitario's public pseudo-execution left an empty imprint which the rest of Argentine myths will try to fill in order to give consistency to national identity. As a result, the persistent pattern of the death of the Argentine mythical hero is the uncanny resurfacing into consciousness of the recturn of the repressed, originally ossified in Argentine collective unconscious under the event of the disintegration of the unitario's body.;However, the repetition of the unitario's bloody primordial scene not only has given birth to several national martyrs, but---paradoxically---it has also come to signify the demise of "Argentine utopia", conceived in 1837 by intellectuals such as Echeverria. This synchronic interconnection between distant events, in turn, could explain, for example, why the feeling of nostalgia is so embedded in Argentine culture: it is the projection of a "will have been" into the future. The incompleteness of the 1837 Argentine project incarnated in the death of the myth, is therefore the nostalgic anticipation of its achievement carried out by a future myth. This never-ending expectation has kept Argentine man/woman imprisoned in the psychic labyrinth of an imaginary glorious past. |
