El desierto como posibilidad: Raúl Zurita y Hugo Mujica después del nihilismo

“The deserts grow” says Nietzsche, but, where is the desert? Beyond Chile or Argentina the landscape of sands has gained a negative ethical and philosophical sense at the behest of late modernity. Öde (desert) in German means void, nothingness, nihilism. Nevertheless, behind the ruins of modernity we can find other possibilities of the desert. Contrary to the exegetical tradition, desertification is proposed no longer as a metaphor for nihilism but, instead, as a configuration of the possible tending toward life, hope and writing.The present analysis means to study the process of desertification in the poetry of Raúl Zurita and Hugo Mujica as a key to an aesthetic recommence. With the poetic intervention in Atacama (“Ni pena ni miedo”, 1993), Zurita puts into dialogue the landscape with the writing of recent memory in Chile. On the other hand, the desert presents in Hugo Mujica's poetics the possibility of exile, of the hermit, that only there, in the sands of time, finds silence. Because of this, in Zurita’s and Mujica’s poetry it is not enough the image of a desert as an ending, as dusk or night. It is rather a recommence from the ruins, a dawn of the desert.