In the 1980's and 1990's, in Argentina and outside it, Artificial Respiration was analyzed in relation to the horrors of the terrorist State's "panopticom" (1976-1983). To revisit Artificial Respiration at the beginning of the 21st century implies to situate our reading no longer as a coded reply to the Proceso, but rather as a particular aesthetic response of national literature to a new historical context, characterized by the continuation, consolidation and crisis of the democratic process, under the hegemony of neoliberalism. This new situation affects the development of local democracies and their literatures in very specific ways. Within this timeframe the presence of the 19th century in Artificial Respiration inscribes and connects the present of its context of enunciation - end of the 1970's - with the origins of the modern state as a critique of modern peripheral rationality.
Argentinean literature; Modern State; Literature and politics