Tormented body and necropolitics in Purgatorio (1979) by Raúl Zurita

Abstract

Starting from Purgatorio (1979), the first collection of poems by Raúl Zurita (Santiago de Chile, 1950), the work proposes a reading of the relationship between the body of the individual tortured in the dictatorship and the consolidation of an authoritarian and criminal order. In this way, based on the category of necropolitics, the expression of bodily suffering is addressed from the use of poetic language that appeals to mythical evocations, the intervention of documents, the incorporation of graphic, logical and mathematical resources and the recomposition of the syntax to try to convey the unfathomable nature of the (self-)inflicted punishment within the framework of a dictatorial regime.