2022/01/17 by Béatrice Schuchardt, Schuchardt, Beatrice
Arts and Humanities · #Cinema History and Criticism #Dante #Italian Literature and Culture #burnout #performance-subject #post-detective-novel #topography of hell. #topology of violence
paper · doi:10.23692/imex.21.7
openalex publication_date 2022/01/17 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/01
pp. 84-98. This article analyzes the novel El decimo infierno (1997) by the Argentine writer and theorist of crime novels Mempo Giardinelli as a ‘post-detective’ novel, a subgenre of Spanish-American crime fiction that emerged in the late nineties of the twentieth century in which criminals instead of the detective or private investigator act as protagonists. The present article suggests examining the topoi of hell and heat from a new angle, which is Byung-Chul Han’s philosophical essay on the Topology of Violence (2018) (Topologie der Gewalt, 2011) as a theoretical basis. Within this topology, Han locates the performance subject, victim of a modern form of violence less visible and spectacular than the premodern one, and which, instead of afflicting the subject from the outside, resides in the individual him-/herself and makes him/her exploit him-/herself to the point of being scorched, leaving him/her with a disposition for psychic illnesses. Taking that the protagonists of the novel, Alfredo and Griselda, represent two gendered types of the performance subject, and historically relating their being so to Menemism, this study investigates the ‘dialectic of violence’ staged by Giardinelli, vacillating between the centripetal, i.e., self-destructive violence, and the centrifugal, a notion that refers to an explosive form of violence. This dialectic is analyzed with regard to its location within a Dantesque topography of hell, an imagery which forms a counterpoint to the real-historical references the novel offers.