Three deaths of the persona: Borges, Giannuzzi, Vignoli

Abstract

This paper proposes a journey through some Argentine poetic avant-gardes based on three poems that are read, in their singularity, as three acts of death of the poetic subject: “La noche que en el sur lo velaron” by Jorge Luis Borges (Cuaderno San Martín, 1929), “Comensales eternos” by Joaquín Giannuzzi (Nuestros días mortales, 1958), and “Función de la lírica” by Beatriz Vignoli (Viernes, 2001). In spite of the three or four decades that separate one poem from the other, and without ignoring the historical, political and cultural plots that cross them, the proposal is to establish a journey following the thread that runs between the three texts: death. The semiotic work we carry out aims not so much to analyze this cliched lyrical motif rather than thinking to what extent the death that figures in each of the poems seals the dissolution –and by dissolution we mean, along with Monteleone (2016), a phantasmagoric existence or, along with Agamben (2013), a gesture that persists– of a certain conception of the poetic subject.