A Nightmare or benevolent dream: global violence and the libidinal economy in Latin American literature

This thesis examines three novels by Latin American writers: Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Senselessness, and Evelio Rosero’s The Armies. These novels look at actual instances of violence in Mexico, Guatemala, and Colombia, contributing to a social critique of historical and ongoing inequality and injustice in Latin America and the global South. Using Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theories of subjectivity, this thesis argues that the novels express the human potential in desire for and to create excess. This has the effect of universalising guilt against the tendency to contextualise or localise events of violence in Mexico, Central, and South America