Positive Violence and the Neoliberal Imperative of Performance in Isaac Rosa's The Dark Room

Abstract

The Dark Room (2013) by Isaac Rosa warns, through discursive techniques such as analepsis and prolepsis, ascending enumerations, borrowing from cinematographic techniques, among others, that the freedom promised by the neoliberal system is an illusion that aims to create in the individual the idea of ​​labor independence when in fact it inoculates in them the need to constantly produce, meet self-imposed demands and, in this way, maintain their status or advance to another. The self-exploitation of the protagonists of the novel is one of the representations of positive violence, which is imperceptible and, therefore, more harmful and dangerous because the subjects do not realize the self-inflicted damage until it is too late. In this sense, the dark room that a group of friends share for fifteen years is transformed into the space to get away from the vertigo, hustle and bustle and the obligations that transform the person into a prisoner of their own mandates and the implicit demands of the neoliberal system.