Posthuman Worlds

Cacheiro runs with the sci-fi spirit that haunts Roberto Bola?o's 2666, producing a genuinely surprising critical intervention. Equal parts fabulation and analysis, Posthuman Worlds convincingly reads novelistic episodes, both famous and under-examined, as philosophical vignettes. The end result is a tour de force from simulation to revolution.

Posthuman Worlds is a daring and refined philosophical theorizing of/on Roberto Bola?o?s bestsellers. Virtual reality is analyzed as a livable political real to deem "the impact of transnational European politics and ideology" (civilization). Cacheiro?s imaginative close readings creatively engage with Lacanian psychoanalysis vis-?-vis Borges? s short stories. Through conversations with a diverse range of philosophers and literary critics, the author plots a labyrinthine journey of Bola?o?s geographical displacements (from Mexico to Chile and, finally, Spain) to provide answers to what kind of world can make a life worth living.

Whereas critics have argued that the leitmotiv connecting Bola?o's oeuvre is friendship, violence and evil, marginal, obsessive writers and writing itself, or failure of the revolutionary project of the 1960s and 70s in Latin American, Cacheiro proposes an alternative cornerstone for Bola?o's fragmented narrative: he contends that, echoing the author's personal displacement from Latin America to Europe, as his characters travel from Latin America to Europe and vice versa, the Latin America represented in his writing must be understood as contrasted, in a phenomenological divide, with Europe. Applying theories by Lacan, Zizek and Badiou, Posthuman Worlds offers an original and insightful reading of the political message in Bola?o's literature, which proposes, as a model for Latin America, the European renewal of the modernist project and of the progressive ideals of social justice that failed in the Americas. Along the way, claims Cacheiro, uncanny forces that cause anxiety to Bola?o's characters end up having socioeconomic effects. They feel manipulated by external forces, as if they were posthumans being played as part of the entertainment for the director of a virtual reality computer simulation.