INHERITED EXILES: POST-FICTION, TRAUMA, AND TRANSMISSION IN A RESISTÊNCIAAbstract
This essay analyzes A Resistência [Resistance], Julián Fuks’ 2015 novel, taking it as an aesthetic laboratory of inherited exile. The literary form operates as a technical device in the transgenerational transmission of trauma, shaping both individual and collective identities. A methodological distinction is established between structural, social, and collective trauma, situating suffering within its sociopolitical genesis and avoiding psychopathologizing reductions. Recognition is configured as a fundamental technical operator of mourning in the face of state-inflicted harm. Post-fiction is defined as an ethical-formal pact distinct from autofiction, characterized by the non-confessional publicization of the intimate. The category “literature of refuge” is proposed for aesthetic forms derived from compulsory migrations, functioning as “memory operators” in scenarios of profound damage. The analysis demonstrates that the post-fictional ethic summons public scenes of recognition, operating as institutional third parties of mourning, thereby facilitating the transition from compulsive traumatic repetition to integrative psychic working-through.
Keywords:
Post-fiction; Psychoanalysis; Social trauma; Transgenerational transmission; Psychic elaboration
Resumo
Neste ensaio, é analisado A Resistência, livro de Julián Fuks publicado em 2015, tomando-o como laboratório estético do exílio herdado. A forma literária atua como dispositivo técnico na transmissão transgeracional traumática, moldando identidades individuais e coletivas. Estabelece-se distinção metodológica entre trauma estrutural, social e coletivo, localizando o sofrimento em sua gênese sociopolítica, evitando reduções psicopatologizantes. O reconhecimento configura-se como operador técnico fundamental do luto ante danos estatais. A pós-ficção delimita-se como pacto ético-formal distinto da autoficção, caracterizado pela publicização não-confessional do íntimo. Propõe-se a categoria “literatura de refúgio” para formas estéticas derivadas de migrações compulsórias, funcionando como “operadores de memória” em cenários de dano profundo. A análise demonstra que a ética pós-ficcional convoca cenas públicas de reconhecimento, operando como terceiros institucionais do luto, facilitando a transição da repetição compulsiva traumática para elaboração psíquica integrativa.
Palavras-chave:
Pós-ficção; Psicanálise; Trauma social; Transmissão transgeracional; Elaboração psíquica
Resumen
Se analiza A Resistência (2015), de Julián Fuks, como laboratorio estético del exilio heredado. Se argumenta que la forma literaria opera como dispositivo técnico de transmisión transgeneracional del trauma, modelando identidades individuales y colectivas. Se distingue entre trauma estructural, social y colectivo, situando el sufrimiento en su génesis sociopolítica y evitando reducciones psicopatologizantes. El reconocimiento se presenta como operador técnico del duelo ante daños infligidos por el Estado. La posficción se delimita como pacto ético-formal, distinto de la autoficción, centrado en la publicización no confesional de lo íntimo. Se introduce la categoría “literatura de refugio” para estéticas derivadas de migraciones forzadas, que actúan como “operadores de memoria” en contextos de daño profundo. Se demuestra que la ética posficcional convoca escenas públicas de reconocimiento-terceros institucionales del duelo-y facilita el pasaje de la repetición traumática compulsiva hacia una elaboración psíquica integradora.
Palabras clave:
Posficción; Psicoanálisis; Trauma social; Transmisión transgeneracional; Elaboración psíquica
1 INTRODUCTION
Between 1976 and 1983, the Argentine civil-military dictatorship-self-designated Proceso de Reorganización Nacional [National Reorganization Process]-operated a repressive machinery that combined clandestine detention centers, enforced disappearances, and the systematic appropriation of children (infants born in captivity or the sons and daughters of disappeared militants), removed from their families, registered under false identities, and handed over to irregular adoptions. In counterpoint, the Mothers and later the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo [Plaza de Mayo] transformed the square, archives, and public rituals into devices of memory and search, articulating civic mobilization, documentation, and genetic forensics to restore filiation. With the democratic transition, CONADEP [National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons] and the Nunca Más [Never Again] report institutionalized public denunciation, and subsequent trials consolidated the abduction of children as a crime against humanity. It is within this horizon that Julián Fuks’s A Resistência (2015) [Resistance] follows the narrator’s investigation into the origin of the brother adopted by a family of Argentine exiles in Brazil, preserving a productive distance between novel and document and literary working-through of the impasses of naming, shame, and belonging that are proper to inherited exiles.
Against this historical backdrop-in which filiation, name, and origin became public and juridical questions-this essay takes Fuks’s A Resistência (2015) as an aesthetic laboratory of rare singularity. Here, literary form exceeds a merely representative function to operate technically within the intricate weave of the psychic inheritance of exile. This study proceeds from an expanded understanding of exile, not as a punctual event of geographical displacement, but as a multifaceted, complex process that involves the transgenerational transmission of traumatic remains. These “remains,” often neither verbalized nor understood, circulate within family relations-among siblings and between parents and children-and, in doing so, demand the construction of symbolic borders and the establishment of public recognition so that they may become, in fact, treatable and available to working-through.
Within this scenario, literary writing emerges as a potent, transformative operator. It converts oppressive silence into a shareable narrative, and the shame transmitted across generations-often expressed as symptoms or enactments-into a proper name, enabling the subject to claim their own history. This process unfolds under the frame of post-fiction, which institutes a fundamental disidentification between author and narrator. Such disidentification is not a trivial stylistic device; it performs a crucial ethical function, protecting third parties implicated in intimate narratives while simultaneously holding literary form itself accountable for the construction and conveyance of meaning. Literature, therefore, not only narrates but also grants access to working-through, creating a space in which the unsayable can be voiced under a new grammar. As Freud (1914) perceptively notes in his essay Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through, these three verbs constitute the essential moments of analytic work. Working-through is the dynamic and complex process whereby the subject, in dialogic interaction with culture and the symbolic, rewrites their own history, assigning new meanings to it and enabling the integration of what was previously fragmented or unintelligible.
For this analysis I assume a rigorous conceptual grammar, distinguishing with precision three modalities of trauma, each with its etiological specificities and implications for subjectivity and collectivity. First, structural trauma is understood as the inherent dimension of loss and castration that accompanies the subject’s entry into language and the symbolic order-a constitutive element of the human condition according to psychoanalytic formulations. Second, social trauma is understood as acute and enduring suffering deriving not from a natural catastrophe or individual misfortune but from deliberate-or negligent-actions or omissions by the State or other power structures. This trauma falls upon delimited groups, often minoritized, producing a systematic precarization of their lives and resulting in forms of violence whose legitimacy is incessantly negotiated in the public sphere. Its origin is therefore political and social, not merely psychological. Finally, collective trauma represents a modality of suffering that achieves broad legitimation and recognition, giving rise to stable dispositives of memory and symbolic working-through-as exemplified by the Shoah-whose horror and impact were universally acknowledged, leading to museums, memorials, scholarly programs, and specific legislation seeking to prevent recurrence and guarantee its inscription in history. The importance of this distinction lies in avoiding the individualizing pathologization of suffering whose causes are rooted in political and social contexts, reallocating responsibility and the need for intervention to the public and institutional spheres.
In analyzing the dimension of recognition, Rosa (2018) underscores that when violence is perpetrated by the State, public recognition becomes a condition for working-through. This claim is central to the argument advanced here, for it positions recognition not as a mere act of compassion or empathy, but as a technical operator indispensable to overcoming social trauma. I therefore define recognition as the concrete, performative mechanism by which a loss that would otherwise remain in the register of silence or shame acquires materiality and becomes real through the presence and legitimation of an “Other”-be it an individual, an institution, or society itself-who attests to it, validates it, and inscribes it within the social and historical fabric. This act of inscription is what enables the passage from the somatic and symptomatic to the symbolic, conferring intelligibility upon suffering.
Still within the conceptual scope, I delimit post-fiction as a specific ethical-formal pact, fundamentally distinct from autofiction. Whereas the latter often plays on the ambiguity between the real and the fictional, centering the authorial figure, post-fiction-as observed in Fuks-publicizes the intimate without lapsing into confessionality, operating through deliberate disidentification to protect those involved and to foreground form as the vehicle of meaning. Finally, I propose the category “literature of refuge” to designate and analyze those aesthetic forms that, in contexts of social and political harm arising from migratory/diasporic movements, function as memory machines. These “machines” not only preserve the past but also reconfigure and process it, offering a symbolic shelter that enables the rearticulation of identities and the construction of futures in the face of a past that insists on haunting.
Fuks’s novel, with its notable sensitivity and complexity, resonates with Latin America’s intricate history-especially the sequelae of civil-military dictatorships-without, however, conflating itself with that history in a merely documentary register. The work maintains a crucial analytic distance, avoiding the collapse between the adoption of the brother within the narrative and the criminal appropriations of children perpetrated by authoritarian regimes. It is precisely this distance that authorizes a rigorous clinic-literary reading, anchored in the text’s formal status, allowing one to explore the resonances of transgenerational trauma without falling into historical generalizations or psychological simplifications. As Cabrera and Tesche (2017) observe, the clinic of witnessing operates at the interface of the singular and the collective, transforming private losses into losses recognizable in the public sphere. It is precisely at this interface that A Resistência situates itself, building a bridge between the intimacy of familial suffering and the breadth of historical and political repercussions.
2 GRAMMAR OF RECOGNITION: POST-FICTION AND LITERATURE OF REFUGE
Deepening the concept of recognition, it does not amount to mere assent; rather, it names a fundamental psychic and social operation by which a loss that would otherwise remain silenced, unnameable, or encapsulated in an individual symptom becomes real and validated. This occurs through the action of an “Other” who attests to the existence of the loss and inscribes it within a symbolic and historical register. When the violence in question has a social and political origin-especially when perpetrated or legitimated by the State-this indispensable “Other” takes body in concrete institutional and social diapositives. Emblematic examples include museums of memory, truth commissions, public archives, memorials, collective rituals of mourning, and civic-state rituals of recognition and reparation that formalize, in a public act, official apologies. Such instances are not mere repositories of facts, but active agents that confer name, meaning, and dignity upon what would otherwise return as overwhelming shame, inexplicable blushing, or the compulsive acting out of an unworked-through trauma. Recognition, in this sense, is the pathway by which individual suffering acquires a collective and legitimate dimension. As Penna (2015) argues, recognition functions as a symbolic border external to the individual, validating the transfer from the somatic to the signifier. That is, it offers an external structure that enables the subject to symbolize and work through what previously manifested bodily or through repetition.
The post-fiction practiced in A Resistência is not merely a stylistic choice but a veritable ethical engineering for exposing a theme as delicate as exile and inherited trauma. By stating explicitly in the paratext that “os personagens e as situações desta obra são reais apenas no universo da ficção” [“the characters and situations in this work are real only within the universe of fiction”] (Fuks, 2015, p. 123), the author is not merely shielding himself legally; he is prescribing a specific mode of reading and establishing a pact with the reader. This pact aims to publicize the intimate and the sensitive without yielding to confessionalism or voyeuristic exploitation. Fuks’s (2015) idea-eschewing the unveiling of secrets in favor of creating borders for the unsayable-condenses the essence of this post-fictional ethic. Borders function as symbolic markers that, while delimiting the space of trauma, render it accessible to working-through without unduly exposing the singularity of third parties’ experiences. This strategy allows the novel to operate as a device for metabolizing the past without turning it into mere biography or direct denunciation, but rather into material for aesthetic and ethical reflection. Post-fiction, unlike autofiction, which plays on the fusion between author and character, here disidentifies them, allowing the “truth” of the experience to anchor itself in form rather than in the literality of biography.
It is important to emphasize that this grammar of recognition does not operate solely at the thematic or structural level; it materializes in specific linguistic marks constitutive of the discursive fabric of Fuks’s prose. The systematic oscillation between first-person singular and third-person narration-the narrator alternately assuming the position of “I” and referring to the brother, the father, or the mother in the third person-enacts in enunciative terms the tension between identification and disidentification that lies at the heart of post-fiction. As Benveniste (1966) demonstrates, personal pronouns are “empty signs” that acquire referential value only in the act of enunciation, functioning as indices of the subject’s shifting position within discourse. In A Resistência, this pronominal instability performs the very precariousness of inherited identity: the narrator cannot stably occupy the position of “I” without simultaneously summoning the Other whose history constitutes him. Furthermore, the recurrent interrogative structures-the narrator’s insistent questioning of the brother’s filiation and his inquiry into the very possibility of inheriting an exile-function not merely as rhetorical devices but as performative utterances in the Austinian sense (Austin, 1962): they do not simply ask; they enact, in the very act of questioning, the destabilization of certainties and the opening of a discursive space where recognition becomes possible. The predominance of conditional and subjunctive moods throughout the narrative further reinforces this linguistic staging of epistemic and affective suspension, situating the text itself as a discursive site where certainty yields to the labor of working-through.
Within this context, the category literature of refuge attains its full meaning. It does not designate any literary form whatsoever, but those aesthetic productions by authors with migratory backgrounds which, in scenarios of systemic and prolonged social harm within contexts of forced displacement, explicitly or implicitly assume a post-fiction pact. In so doing, such works activate institutional or symbolic third parties, converting transmitted shames -often manifest as family silences, secrets, or inarticulate symptoms-into shareable narratives. Literature of refuge thus provides a space of holding and working-through, functioning as a memory machine that not only records but processes and reconfigures the past. Costa Braga (2023) argues that post-memorial fiction operates as a device of working-through without reducing testimony to confession. This distinction is crucial, for literature of refuge seeks the truth of trauma without falling into the trap of the literal authenticity of testimony, thereby enabling the transmutation of experience into a universal resonance through art. It is in the engineering of form that its capacity to work through-rather than merely report-resides.
Latin America’s historicity provides an eloquent backdrop for the urgency of these ethical-formal arrangements. The civil-military dictatorships that devastated the continent in the twentieth century-with their brutal repressions, forced exiles, disappearances, and torture-compose a genealogy of harm that traverses generational and national borders. This legacy predisposes exiles and traumas to return not as clear, articulated memories but as transmitted shame-a nebulous affect manifesting in silences, secrets, and repetitive acts. Mbembe (2019) formulates necropolitics as a rationality that administers differential exposure to death, legalizing illegitimate uses of force. This conceptualization is fundamental to understanding that, even after the formal end of an authoritarian regime, the economy of harm does not dissolve. Its effects may persist in individual subjectivity and in the social fabric, demanding a collective inscription and a work of mourning that the very State that perpetrated the violence often refuses to offer. Literature, in this vacuum, assumes a vital function.
In Fuks’s novel, this persistence of harm is staged poignantly, especially in the fraternal scene, which becomes the privileged locus of psychic transmission. The narrator, in his search, insists on the searing question: “filho de quem?” [“whose son?”] (Fuks, 2015, p. 6). This inquiry is not merely biological; it condenses the demand to name an excess, a void of origin that marks not only the adopted brother but also the family itself and, by extension, society. Siblinghood, in this context, renders visible the circulation of the “remains” of trauma-the said and the unsaid, projective identifications, silenced shames. It is within the intimate space, yet one laden with historical echoes, that traumatic inheritance manifests. By addressing these dynamics, literature of refuge can illuminate such processes. As Vince (2022) and Davoliūtė (2022) demonstrate in their studies on Shoah and diasporic memories, returns to the place of origin and visits to museums and memorials constitute arenas in which locality operates as a technique of mourning. These “techniques” displace factual recollection toward the staging of shareable scenes wherein the individual may rediscover and resignify their collective history. A Resistência, by exploring the geography of trauma-visits to Argentina, the search for information-echoes this dynamic, transforming landscapes into sites of memory that promote working-through.
3 SIBLINGHOOD, SITES OF MEMORY, AND THE DIRECTION OF THE TREATMENT
Drawing from the formal and ethical operations identified in Julián Fuks’s novel, we can transpose their implications into the clinical field, conceiving the work as a valuable map for the direction of treatment when the signature of suffering is indisputably of social and political origin. The first and most immediate consequence of this transposition is operative de-pathologization. This entails categorically rejecting the simplistic equivalence between migration, exile, or any form of displacement and an inherent traumatism in the individual. The causality of suffering is thereby relocated to the social, political, and historical sphere. This does not mean denying individual pain, but understanding it as the manifestation of a structural, collective harm whose roots lie outside individual psychopathology. The second central consequence is to conceive recognition not as an extrinsic or secondary event but as an integral and indispensable part of the expanded therapeutic setting. Beyond listening in the consulting room, the healing process requires the subject’s insertion into social dispositives that validate their traumatic experience.
Freud (1914), in discussing working-through, allows us to affirm that it depends on frames which, being social in nature, must be socially instituted when the damage itself is social. This assertion acquires particular resonance in the context of social trauma. The shame transmitted across generations, so forcefully manifested in A Resistência, demands a public name, a collective recognition that removes it from isolation and secrecy. The novel illustrates this vividly in the scene where the narrator visits the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires. He describes “um calor a inundar-lhes os rostos […] súbita vergonha” [“a heat flooding their faces […] sudden shame”] (Fuks, 2015, p. 77-79) upon observing the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. This sudden shame is not merely individual; it is shared shame, an affective response to the public dimension of trauma. The square, the mothers, the white scarves, the names of the disappeared-all of these constitute a social frame that names, symbolizes, and legitimates an immense loss, previously perhaps only sensed or enacted by the narrator. It is a moment of collective recognition that impacts subjectivity.
The Latin American specificity, with its painful genealogy extending from historical caudillismo to the brutal dictatorships of the twentieth century-with reverberations to this day-engenders a grammar of political kinship. This grammar predisposes traumatic inheritances to return not as clear, articulated memories, but as silences, family secrets, and symptomatic identifications. As Rosa (2018) observes, by reinscribing this grammar into history, literature redraws the field of intelligibility, relocating collective responsibility where individual culpabilization once reigned. Literature, in giving form to these silences and retrieving erased voices, plays a crucial role in reconfiguring the intelligibility of the past, shifting the burden of individual guilt into the sphere of social and political responsibility, enabling a broader, less self-punitive elaboration.
A Lacanian emphasis on shame and the Third is equally pertinent here. Shame, from the Lacanian perspective, erupts in the subject when they perceive themselves as seen from the place of the Other, a symbolic instance that interpellates them in their imaginary constitution. In contexts of social and political trauma, sites of memory-whether monuments, museums, truth commissions, or squares-embody precisely this symbolic Other. The Plaza de Mayo thus functions as an operator introducing a fundamental Third into the narrator’s psychic scene. It provides a naming for the unsayable, for what was previously only a mute affect or a meaningless repetition. What was once a secret or an individual blush gains a place in public and collective discourse, allowing shame to be shared and transformed.
This naming reorders the fraternal topology and, by extension, the narrator’s position. He moves from an initial stance of identification with the problem (referring to the adoptive brother and his traumatic origin) to a crucial ethical and subjective turn: “Pode um exílio ser herdado?” [“Can an exile be inherited?”] (Fuks, 2015, p. 13). This transformation is not merely a shift in perspective; clinically, it translates the passage from accusation, projection, or denial to the enunciation and assumption of a shared inheritance. When such an assumption occurs under the shelter and validation of sites of memory, it inscribes itself within a chain of names and meanings that reopens the temporality of historicization. The past, previously petrified in trauma, becomes once again accessible to interpretation and re-elaboration. Gobodo-Madikizela (2023) proposes a triadic temporality of trauma that integrates past, present, and future. She demonstrates how the “afterlife” of traumatic harm requires arenas of recognition that go far beyond the traditional psychoanalytic consulting room. Literature, historical archives, museums, and public memory policies are thus not mere supplements or moral adornments, but essential technical operators. They confer a public reality upon loss, enabling mourning to unfold in its complex stages, in constant dialogue between the individual and the collective.
4 OPERATIONS OF THE LITERATURE OF REFUGE
Azoulay (2019) proposes reading and practicing history as potential history: not a posterior adjustment to harm, but a gesture of “rewinding” time to before the violent closure that naturalized imperial hierarchies-an exercise in unlearning habits of seeing, classifying, and archiving that made us complicit in injustices. In this key, the archive ceases to be a repository of the past and becomes a common-a field of co-belonging and claim-making -where reading, writing, and image rehearse ethical-political reversibilities: they reconstitute bonds, restore speech to those rendered illegible, and reopen world possibilities. Within this horizon, literature of refuge does not represent trauma but, in an analogous movement to psychoanalytic treatment, reorganizes it as a shared practice of rights, instituting counter-temporalities that resist the triumphant narrative of catastrophe consummated.
Literature of refuge acquires its true depth and relevance when observed closely within the textual economy of the work. Its efficacy does not reside in a particular style or specific theme, but in its capacity to stage a scene where the intimate-often linked to trauma and shame-becomes legible, accessible, and above all, workable, through an ethical pact that categorically prevents spectacularization. This pact ensures that the exposure of pain does not turn into a sensationalist spectacle but into an invitation to reflection and working-through. The invitation to the reader, therefore, is not merely rhetorical; it updates the function of the symbolic “Third”. It is within shareable reading that shame, once imprisoned within the individual or the family, finds a name, a place in the collective narrative that reinscribes it into history and the social, breaking its isolation.
The narrative of A Resistência engenders a crucial inversion in the process of elaborating traumatic inheritance. Initially, the explanatory fantasy and the weight of inheritance are in the adoptive brother, as if he were the exclusive bearer of the problem, of uncertain origin, of silenced memory. However, over the course of the novel, this inheritance is reintegrated by the narrator himself, who recognizes himself also as heir. Fuks (2015) makes this turn explicit in a striking phrase: “minha memória é feita de sua memória, e minha história haverá sempre de conter a sua história” [“my memory is made of your memory, and my story will always contain your story”] (p. 89). This declaration is not merely a statement; it is a performative act of recognition and appropriation. By displacing the explanatory fantasy and assuming the complexity of inheritance, literary writing accomplishes a profound work of working-through. It transforms the mute acting of trauma, the symptomatic repetitions, and the deafening silences into material for reading, interpretation, and meaning. In this sense, literature of refuge is not merely a mirror of trauma but a device that processes and transforms it.
When Mbembe (2019) describes necropolitics as the sovereign exercise over life and death, granting the State the power to define who may live and who must die, he provides a key to understanding why the “post” of a traumatic event-such as the formal end of dictatorships-is often an illusory or false “after.” Formally concluded, dictatorships and regimes of violence leave a trail of silencing, symbolic violences, and unworked-through traumas that continue to operate long into people’s lives and societies. The persistence of blushing affect, nameless shame, or symptomatic repetition in the novel signals precisely that something has not found its scene of recognition, its symbolic border. Necropolitics, therefore, does not end with the cessation of explicit violence, but prolongs itself in the capacity of unrecognized trauma to continue cutting down lives, symbolically, in subsequent generations.
Fuks’s novel shifts its lens toward the micropolitics of hostility in societies that, even after the end of authoritarian and/or paramilitary regimes, remain deeply polarized and fractured. Birman and Fortes (2018) call this environment a state of war that penetrates the capillarity of the social bond. It is in this fertile ground for symbolic violence and mistrust that the text positions siblinghood and filiation as points of friction, of conflict, but also of possible elaboration. The family, as a microcosm of society, reflects the larger tensions. Literature of refuge, in staging these intimate dynamics, offers a psychic and social grammar in which bodily reaction (blushing, unease), once a mute symptom, can be converted into shareable history, into narrative that permits the metabolization of violence.
Metidji and Caron (2023) demonstrate in their studies that defects of symbolic transmission in contexts of exile and postwar can produce complex symptomatic formations in descendants. This “defect” occurs when previous generations, due to trauma, shame, or impossibility, cannot adequately symbolize and transmit their experiences, leaving to future generations an incomprehensible burden. This points, therefore, to a pressing need for symbolic repairs. Van der Heiden (2023) complements this idea by affirming that suffering that comes from elsewhere demands an expanded setting lest it crystallize as destiny. Literature of refuge, by creating narratives that articulate the inarticulable, give voice to what was silenced, and insert suffering into a broader context of recognition, acts as part of this expanded setting. It offers a path so that trauma may not become an ineluctable destiny but rather a point of departure for elaboration and the construction of new narratives.
5 POST-FICTION AS METHOD AND ETHIC
The technical efficacy of post-fiction in A Resistência lies precisely in its capacity to operate a fundamental and non-negotiable distinction between testimony-which aims to remain faithful to the event and to biography-and confession-which may be autofictional but is still bound to the authenticity of the authorial voice. By categorically declaring that his characters are fictional, Julián Fuks does not merely adopt a legal safeguard; he stages a literary scene where form assumes primary responsibility for the truth of what is narrated, while the real subjects inspiring the work are protected. The disidentification between author and narrator is therefore not an aesthetic artifice but a porous and ethical barrier. It is through this barrier that the intimate, the sensitive, the traumatic may pass into the public domain without being commodified, without turning into spectacle or the undue exposure of private life. Post-fiction, in this sense, is a method that guarantees the dignity of those involved, redirecting the focus toward the elaborative potency of language itself and of narrative structure.
Cabrera and Tesche (2017) underline the idea that loss only becomes real when recognized by another, even when that Other is institutional. This claim is crucial for understanding the role of A Resistência and of post-fiction. In the novel, the Plaza de Mayo transcends its role as mere setting or example of historical resistance; it acquires the stature of method. By participating in the rites and the collective memory of the square, the narrator not only observes but inserts himself into a scene of public recognition that transforms the ontological status of his shame and inherited trauma. What was once an individual, diffuse, unnamed burden becomes, in the square, validated suffering, a legitimate mourning inscribed into the history of a people. The institutional Other-the square, with its mothers and their demands-confers materiality upon the loss, enabling it to be shared and worked through.
The literature of post-memory, as a field of intergenerational studies, has extensively documented how descendants of victims of great historical traumas deal with an inheritance they did not directly live but that nonetheless haunts them. This dealing often occurs through “agonistic returns” to family and collective pasts. Faúndez, Cornejo, and Brackelaire (2014) demonstrate that the manipulation of objects and public rituals dignifies lived experience and installs the possibility of mourning. In Fuks’s novel, the search for information, the contact with artifacts, and the spaces of memory function as such objects and rituals. They not only connect the narrator to the past but enable him to grant a dignified place to inherited suffering, opening the path to a mourning that once seemed impossible or blocked. Post-fiction, by creating a safe arena for such symbolic manipulation, becomes a powerful tool in this process.
It is important to delineate clearly the difference between post-fiction and autofiction. Although both categories explore the boundary between the real and the fictional, their ethics and methods diverge significantly. Autofiction, in its essence, insists upon the authorial figure as the main operator of ambiguity, inviting the reader to speculate about the identity of the narrative “I” and the biographical “I”. Post-fiction, on the other hand, operates inversely: it withdraws the identity of author and narrator in order to protect third parties. In A Resistência, the paratextual clause already cited is unequivocal and programmatic: disidentification is established as an ethical sine qua non condition for the responsible publicization of sensitive material. It does not aim at fusion but at productive separation, ensuring that the power of the story resides in its form rather than in its biographical literality.
Costa Braga (2023) clarifies that post-fiction fabricates symbolic borders commensurate with the scale of social harm. This capacity to construct borders is what enables working-through to not be synonymous with pacification, with a harmonious end to trauma, but rather with a transformation of the economy of excess. Trauma, in its compulsive repetition, is an excess erupting without meaning. When a symbolic border is established-whether through post-fictional writing, institutional recognition, or the intervention of third parties-the regime of repetition changes. What once repeated itself blindly as act, symptom, or silence now offers itself to reading, interpretation, and symbolization. This is the true potency of post-fiction: not to heal trauma in the sense of making it disappear, but to transform it into something that can be worked through, understood, and finally inscribed into history, enabling a future different from the mere repetition of the past.
6 CLINICAL AND POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS
The reading of A Resistência has the potency to generate a decisive consequence with profound impact both for the clinic and for politics: when the origin of the harm suffered by an individual or group is unequivocally social, political, or historical, the subjective working-through of trauma cannot be conceived as a purely intrapsychic process. On the contrary, it becomes intrinsically dependent on the existence and functioning of collective frameworks of recognition. These frameworks are not mere accessories or secondary supports; they are, in fact, fundamental technical operators of mourning and elaboration. If the source of traumatic excess is social and institutional in nature, then the symbolic borders that will allow its metabolization must, imperatively, be socially instituted and validated.
Penna (2015) reinforces this perspective by affirming that memory policies function as institutional third parties that expand the therapeutic setting. The clinic of testimony, which emerged in contexts of large-scale social violence, represents precisely a methodological and ethical invention calibrated to the scale of harm. Operating in group frameworks or through the mediation of memory devices, it renders visible the complex collective psychic transmissions circulating within families and communities. This clinic confirms, in practice, the premise that a loss only becomes real and workable when it is witnessed and recognized by an Other -whether a therapist, a support group, an institution, or society. Collective testimony, in this sense, has a transformative power that transcends individual alienation.
Rosa (2018) develops this idea by arguing that without the presence of this public third, pain remains circumscribed to the body, and the clinic finds itself condemned to managing crises without symbolic grounding. This observation is crucial for understanding the limitations of a clinic focused exclusively on the individual when the etiology of suffering is social. A Resistência does not merely illustrate theoretical categories; it enacts them. By articulating so vividly the scenes that unfold in museums and in the Plaza de Mayo, the novel demonstrates how these spaces and public rituals act as a public third, displacing silenced shames from the individual body or family secret into the sphere of shareable history and collective mourning.
From this analysis, specific clinical implications emerge that reorient both the practice and theory of psychic care in contexts of social trauma:
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a) Operational despathologization: To categorically refuse the equivalence between migration, exile, or descent from victims of state violence and an inherent traumatism or individual pathology. Causality is repositioned within the social and political.
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b) Recognition as expanded setting: The therapeutic process must integrate and value the role of third parties and social devices such as archives, museums, memorials, and public rituals, which complement and enhance the individual clinical listening.
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c) Transmitted shame requires public naming: Shame and silence, symptoms of unworked-through social trauma, demand naming and inscription into a public and collective discourse so that they may be symbolized and transformed.
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d) Literature as technical device: Literature, especially literature of refuge and post-fiction, operates as a technical device of working-through, providing symbolic supplements where official narratives or family memories fail. It constructs the necessary borders for elaboration.
Cabrera Sánchez (2023) documents, among grandchildren of victims of the Chilean dictatorship, post-memorial strategies that enable mourning through narrative appropriation. This reinforces the central argument that intersubjective validation and cultural memory are technical conditions and fundamental prerequisites for traumatic losses to be recognized, symbolized, and finally rendered workable. Fuks’s novel, in staging these dynamics, shows how art can be a crucial motor in this process.
7 CONCLUDING REMARKS
The analytical reading of A Resistência transcends mere literary interpretation, offering a potent and necessary reformulation of the concept of inherited exile. This work allows us to preserve the Freudian primacy of working-through while simultaneously adjusting and calibrating it to the social and political causality of trauma. The work with psychic inheritance is not restricted to the consulting room; it takes place wherever suffering encounters a symbolic border and a third capable of witnessing and recognizing it, thereby producing measurable and transformative clinical effects. The conceptual distinction between structural, social, and collective trauma proposed here is not merely academic; it organizes responsibilities, preventing the clinic from inadvertently becoming a mere distributor of cases that are, in essence, state and collective, displacing the weight of trauma onto the individual without questioning its roots.
Recognition thus emerges not as an abstract ethical value but as a concrete technical operator, an indispensable tool in the process of mourning and working-through. The city, with its monuments, its squares, and its museums, actively participates in the treatment of trauma, assuming its historical responsibility. It prevents shame, silence, and suffering from remaining captive within the individual body or family secret, nameless and placeless within the social fabric. The category of literature of refuge, in turn, offers a valuable analytical tool to identify and understand the aesthetic operations that render literary form a device of inscription and elaboration of social harm. It allows us to see literature not only as representation but also as intervention.
By displacing inherited shame and pain from the intimate sphere into public devices, one witnesses what Nora (1984) describes as the passage from milieux of lived experience to lieux de mémoire: faced with historical acceleration and the loosening of organic ties to the past, memory ceases to be a “breath” of daily life and is re-enacted in material-symbolic supports that ritualize, patrimonialize, and render shareable what would otherwise be lost. These places, by condensing layers of meaning (architectural, affective, political), function as institutional third parties that provisionally stabilize the tension between history-distanced analysis-and memory-embodied life-favoring public namings of suffering and circuits of recognition capable of reconfiguring the temporality of trauma and identities.
Radstone (2011) synthesizes this idea by affirming that sites of memory accumulate symbolic density that transforms biographical contingency into historical inscription. Julián Fuks’s novel teaches us, indelibly, that when violence and trauma bear a public signature and a state origin, literature, invested with a post-fictional ethic and functioning as literature of refuge, assumes a crucial technical and political role in the restoration of the social bond and the reconstruction of subjectivity. It fabricates the symbolic borders that enable the subject to emerge from muteness and compulsive repetition, rewriting his history in constant dialogue with collective history.
An important research agenda remains to be pursued. First, it is imperative to broaden the comparative analysis of works addressing inherited exile and social trauma in the Southern Cone, exploring the specificities and cultural resonances of each context. Second, it would be valuable to empirically test the clinical effects of visits to sites of memory on individuals experiencing transgenerational trauma, quantifying and qualifying the impact of such institutional thirds. Third, it is necessary to refine even further the theoretical and practical distinction between post-fiction and autofiction, exploring their ethical and aesthetic implications across different literary contexts. As Fuks (2015, p. 94) concludes in his own novel: “dizê-lo é também uma ação” [“to say it is also an action”]. This formulation resonates directly with J. L. Austin’s (1962) theory of performative utterances, according to which certain statements do not merely describe reality but constitute acts in themselves-they perform what they enunciate. In the horizon of post-fiction, the act of saying becomes inseparable from the act of recognizing: to name inherited exile is already to intervene in its symbolic economy, transforming silence into inscription and muteness into meaning. As Searle (1969) further elaborates, the illocutionary force of an utterance-its capacity to commit, declare, or institute-depends on shared conventions and institutional conditions of felicity. Literature of refuge, by constructing precisely such conditions through its ethical-formal pact, endows narrative utterance with the illocutionary force necessary to operate as a technique of mourning. This phrase encapsulates the essence of this essay’s proposal: writing, when ethically and formally structured as post-fiction and literature of refuge, becomes a powerful technique of mourning, intrinsically articulated to public recognition and to an ethic of responsible disidentification, capable of transforming suffering into meaning and repetition into working-through. Literature thus reveals itself not merely as a mirror of the world but as an active agent in its transformation.
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