Acceso usuarios
Claudio Aguayo Bórquez
The present paper explores the romanticism of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento. While pertaining to the organic intellectuality of the emergent Latin American bourgeoisie in the nineteenth century, Sarmiento represents, at the same time, the romantic and populist tendencies regarding plebeian otherness in Latin American thought. By revising some of the extensive literature on Sarmiento’s Facundo, this article maintains that this canonical work entails a highly ambivalent relation with otherness. A new interpretation of the 1842 polemic with Andrés Bello demonstrates the impossibility of merely subsuming Sarmiento’s prose in the positivistic and modernizing discourse since romantic conceptions regarding nature, language, and popular otherness also influenced Sarmiento’s work. In Facundo, however, he creates another kind of otherness: the “monster of the Pampas.” Sarmiento’s fantasy, in other words, is driven by a romantic literaturization of otherness, to the point of transforming it into an enigma. Regarding Sarmiento’s Orientalism, this paper emphasizes the double character of Sarmiento’s barbarie as absolute jouissance and absolute authority and repression. Consequently, Sarmiento not only excludes or incorporates the other, as pointed out by critical works (Ramos 2001; Scavino 1997) but produces this otherness to sustain his polemic division between civilization and barbarism, as well as his own ideas regarding capitalist accumulation, impregnated by the romantic ideal of spontaneity.
