The malon as a paradigm: circulations, drifs and actualizations of the work of Ángel Della Valle.

Abstract

Paradigmatic figure of indigenous barbarism and, therefore, of civilized, white, european and patriarchal Argentina at the end of the nineteenth-century, Ángel Della Valle’s The return of the malon has been actualized in recent decades by a vast amount of cultural productions, generating —in words of Jacques Rancière— dissensiones with this nineteenth-century distribution of the sensible. Therefore, this work aims to adress, starting from the paradigmatology developed by Giorgio Agamben, some of these contemporary actualizations, focusing on the works of the artists Francisco Revelli, Alberto Passolini and Daniel Santoro. And this is because, as it is finally demonstrated, they actualize The return of the malon but they do so within the framework of configurations that not only provoke disagreements with aforementioned distribution, but also open up new semantic horizonts that illuminate, in a singular way, both the past and the present of the country.