Funciones de la antropofagia en la Verdadera historia de Hans Staden y en El entenado de Juan José Saer

Abstract

In Hans Staden’s “Wahrhaftige Geschichte” (edited 1557 in Marburg) we can observe a tactical appropriation of the cannibal’s otherness in an adventure story that would be later integrated into an editorial project with strategic purposes, in a specifically protestant German context. Juan José Saer’s novel El entenado is not a simple return to a colonial past and its phantasies of cannibalism, but a very complex “Umschrift” of this past in Freudian terms. Saer’s vision of cannibalism veers away from that of Staden precisely because the figure of the cannibal has now acquired a new anthropological function introduced by psychoanalysis. Instead of being the figure of an external other, the cannibalnow becomes the internal otherness situated in everybody’s own psyche as a human condition