Rhetoric/spectral politics in Rodolfo Walsh

Abstract

This article argues that certain rhetoric/politics considered as discursive forces are constantly visible in the history of our societies. For this purpose, Rodolfo Walsh's "Dos montones de tierra" is analyzed. The specters that appear in the story of the Argentine writer construct a hidden rhetoric that speaks of a force that is not that of deductive logic (as opposed to that of detective stories) but one that haunts from the bones of a dead man and disturbs the figure of power. Thus, this figuration of the specter makes us think of a complex movement that unites text and experience in an "inverse" way than usual. Rodolfo Walsh was disappeared by the military dictatorship in 1977 and, in the form of legal and political denunciations, his ghost and those of so many thousands of disappeared in Latin America manifest themselves in the form of legal denunciations to harass and demand justice from the State.