Nostalgic Allegory of a Defeat. Notes on "Escuela" by Guillermo Calderón

Abstract

In "Escuela", Guillermo Calderón centers the action on the paramilitary education received in a clandestine revolutionary cell by a group of militants who oppose the Chilean Dictatorship. For this, the dramaturgy builds bridges of historical affiliation that combine the past tradition of the events that took place during the Dictatorship with the present occurrence of the immediate Chilean reality. The authorship presents an approach based on the logic of affects, which tries to differentiate and categorize the differents acts of armed violence considering whether they are moved by hatred or love. This way, "Escuela" emerges as an agent that works in the rediscovery and redefinition of the concept of State under the consequences of the last Dictatorship. Its dramaturgical and performative construction are, therefore, focused on the fragmentation and dissolution of a headless and dysfunctional social referent, as well as on the way in which it –consequently– criminalizes the violence of those who fought to recover democracy. Thus, Calderón establishes underground relations between the archival nature of his text and the political events of the country, through the encrypted reconstruction of an act of memory regarding the political actions of civic military resistance in the Dictatorship.