Drunk, crazy, animal: drifts of life and body in Manuel T. Podestá's Irresponsible

Abstract

Within the historical and cultural processes experienced by Argentina in the late nineteenth century, it is possible to detect a significant transformation around the ways of thinking, studying and representing the human body the human body in its biological facet. Favored by the hegemony of a philosophical current of positivist orientation, the early dissemination and high acceptance of scientific or supposedly scientific discourses about this subject will invite to extrapolate the biologicist perspective to the social field, in synchrony with the initiatives of a national Estate in the process of consolidation that seeks to incorporate the biological life of a growing and diversified population under its sphere of influence. This paper analyzes the ways in which Irresponsable (1889), naturalist novel by the higyenistic physician Manuel Podestá, sets diseased bodies that open dialogue between literary fiction and topics, dilemmas and rhetorical turns of the imaginary of that time, while they give cohesion to a plot that chains institutional spaces where diverse forms of knowledge and power are folded over the life. If the programmatic and propagandistic vein of the novel exalts the medical-scientific credo of the author, the narrative development of his first literary text will allow to glimpse the crises and tensions within the so-called scientific culture.