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Abstract / Resumen

In his essay, “On Nietzsche’s Side,” Maurice Blanchot says of Nietzsche, “Transcendence obsesses him, as that which he must endlessly surmount to be free.” The same can be said of Roberto Arlt – himself a reader and a student of Nietzsche – and his own obsession with order. These obsessions with transcendence and order take on peculiar and contradictory modes of expression in both thinkers, as they often contort what might otherwise be common notions. Under the influence of Nietzsche, Arlt’s delirious yet methodically contradictory thought thus deforms and even does violence unto that which it treats and unto itself. Consequently, when critiquing Arlt’s novels, Los siete locos and Los lanzallamas, it is impossible to ascertain which side Arlt, Arlt’s most Nietzschean character, the Astrólogo, and Arlt’s most Nietzschean literary invention, la sociedad socreta, are on when it comes to notions of order and disorder. This impossibility makes it all the more necessary that critical readings of Arlt and Nietzsche be resistant, that is, creative, in turn and in kind. What results is a polifacetic assemblage of variable and shifting sides which offer an Arltian prismatic of Nietzsche’s thought that is as opaque as it is transparent, as colorful as it is dark.

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