The Suicidal Archive: From Di Benedetto’s Los suicidas to Guerriero’s Los suicidas del fin del mundo

Abstract

This essay offers a comparative reading of Antonio Di Benedetto’s Los suicidas and Leila Guerriero’s Los suicidas del fin del mundo through the lens of the “suicidal archive.” Drawing on literary criticism, trauma studies, and biopolitical theory, it explores how both works transform suicide into a problem of representation, where writing functions as an aesthetic mediation against the chaos of reality. In dialogue with the ideas of Mbembe, De Martelaere, and Caruth, I argue that Di Benedetto and Guerriero move beyond the rational frameworks of scientific or journalistic discourse to probe the ethical and affective dimensions of suicidal acts. While Di Benedetto’s text renders repetition as a metaphysical and introspective structure, Guerriero’s transforms it into a collective, polyphonic archive of trauma. In both cases, literature emerges as a symbolic space of containment that, rather than closing off meaning, keeps the wound open. Ultimately, the essay concludes that the suicidal archive does not seek to explain or domesticate death but to inhabit its enigma—affirming writing as an act of resistance against silence and disappearance.

1. Introduction: The Suicidal Archive

Any attempt to think about suicide through the notion of the archive entails an epistemological tension: how to give form to an event that, by its very nature, destabilizes every claim to record and meaning. It is within this threshold that the concept of the suicidal archive emerges—a notion that refers to the drive to record, classify, and narrate that which, by definition, resists all explanation: voluntary death. More than a simple repository of data or testimonies, this archive—as suggested by contemporary literature—functions as a space of mediation between the sayable and the unsayable, between the desire to understand and the recognition of its impossibility. In the tradition that extends from Blanchot (1969) to Foucault (1969) and Derrida (1995), the archive is not a form of closure but a practice that exposes its own limits: the tension between memory and disappearance, between the impulse to preserve and the risk of being engulfed by what one attempts to name. In this sense, the suicidal archive is built upon a paradox: it seeks to contain the void left by suicide, and in doing so, it becomes itself a form of mourning, persistence, and exposure to the abyss.

Both Los suicidas (1969) by Antonio Di Benedetto and Los suicidas del fin del mundo (2005) by Leila Guerriero articulate, from different genres and contexts, a meditation on the limits of meaning in the face of the suicidal act. In both cases, writing becomes a form of resistance against the void—a way of producing knowledge where reason and narration dissolve. Yet while Di Benedetto constructs a text suspended between scientific rationality and metaphysical drift, in which the investigating subject gradually becomes the object of his own archive, Guerriero approaches collective suicide through the ethics of testimony and observation, revealing how journalistic discourse oscillates between empathy and the recognition that one can never fully understand another’s pain. In this regard, both texts can be read as archival devices that attempt to domesticate the unspeakable: Di Benedetto records suicide as inheritance, destiny, and symbolic contagion; in contrast, Guerriero documents it as a social phenomenon—a symptom of uprootedness or even an imitative practice—but also as an individual act. However, the archive fails in both cases—and it is in that failure that its critical force lies—for what emerges is not an explanation but the awareness of an epistemological and affective limit before voluntary death. Thus, both works dialogue as two ways of writing from the border between life and disappearance, where literature and journalism become spaces of mourning, inquiry, and insubordination before silence.

Published in 1969, Antonio Di Benedetto’s novel Los suicidas is far more than a text about a character contemplating taking his own life or a journalistic investigation into several suicides. As many of the contributors to Suicide in Modern Literature (Ros Velasco 2021) point out, the presence of suicide in certain literary works goes beyond a mere narrative device designed to capture the reader’s attention. In many cases, it becomes a symbolic and existential mechanism through which to explore the limits of subjectivity, the crisis of meaning, or the tension between the individual and their environment. Los suicidas, in particular, offers a striking example of such complexity, situating the self-destructive gesture at the heart of a broader reflection on the human condition and its contradictions. Alongside the narrator’s personal considerations and his investigation, a philosophical and ethical meditation on suicide takes shape, as well as the construction of a suicidal archive composed of quotations on suicide, remarkable cases, and a historical survey of how self-inflicted death has been regarded in different societies. Considered psychoanalytically, this archival drive is perhaps the one most deeply entangled with the death drive, as Derrida—reading Freud—conceives it. This staging of the archive of the modes and ways in which the subject erases himself bears within it the impulse of destruction (the drive of aggression, the drive of loss) that the French philosopher perceives in what he calls the mal d’archive or archive fever (Derrida 1995). Paradoxically, this very staging will ultimately save the protagonist-narrator from the definitive erasure to which everything seemed to point he was destined.

In turn, Leila Guerriero’s journalistic chronicle Los suicidas del fin del mundo explores the suicide of a group of young people in the late 1990s in the Argentine town of Las Heras, in the province of Santa Cruz—an area deeply scarred by social disintegration and marginalization. Through testimonies, data, and personal reflections, the author constructs a choral portrait that oscillates between the sociological explanation of social anomie and the intimate incomprehension of each individual case. Cautious of sociological determinism, the text exposes the indeterminacy of any attempt to identify a single and definitive cause for all these deaths, revealing that neither the moral nor the social disintegration of the community can categorically explain the enigma of each suicidal gesture. By compiling and incorporating multiple voices, documents, testimonies, and narratives—journalistic, familial, and literary—that seek to make sense of the phenomenon without resolving it completely, Guerriero’s suicidal archive not only records the events but also exposes the inscrutability of suicide, turning the chronicle into a space of memory, doubt, and collective reflection.

2. Archiving the Void: Form, Obsession, and Metaphysical Inquiry in Los suicidas

From the very beginning of Los suicidas (The Suicides), both the hereditary nature of suicide and its condition as self-imposed sacrifice are brought to the fore, yet always in relation to an entity superior to the subject, from whose designs it seems unlikely to escape: “Mi padre se quitó la vida un viernes por la tarde. Tenía 33 años. El cuarto viernes del mes próximo yo tendré la misma edad” (Di Benedetto 2016, p. 11; “My father took his life on a Friday afternoon. He was thirty-three. I’ll be thirty-three the last Friday of next month”1). This presumed suicidal fatum will be subverted by the protagonist, whose suicide takes place vicariously through the character of Marcela, who in some way redeems him from death by taking her own life first and begging him not to kill himself as they had agreed. Marcela’s death appears as the awaited sign—not by chance, the second part of the book is titled “Las ordalías y el pacto” (“Trials by Ordeal and the Pact”)—that spares the condemned man: “Y si todo en mí se dirige a matarme, sólo puedo tener curiosidad por un signo que me diga no te ejecutes” (ibid., p. 183; “And if everything inside me is driving me to kill myself, I can only be curious about a sign that tells me not to take my life”). At the end of the novel, the character is born—or reborn—or even resurrected—from that self-inflicted death to which he seemed condemned, absolved in this peculiar trial by God. Indeed, one possible reading of the novel is that of a character facing a destiny imposed upon him, over which he would seemingly have little say, yet from which writing itself appears to deliver him. In this respect, Los suicidas coincides with the narrative practice of the Uruguayan writer Juan Carlos Onetti, whose narrators rarely commit suicide (Quesada Gómez 2009, p. 42). In both Onetti and Di Benedetto, suicide is presented neither as a moral nor as a clinical fact but as a means of narratively exploring the limits of existence and representation; in both, writing functions, in one way or another, can be seen as a substitute or refuge against suicide.

As George Minois had previously performed in his monumental Histoire du suicide (1995), Lisa Lieberman, in Leaving You: The Cultural Meaning of Suicide (2003), analyzes the historical tensions between society’s desire to restrict the disruptive power of the suicide and the individual’s freedom to confer meaning upon his or her own death (Lieberman 2003, p. xii). She also examines the tendency, emerging between the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to reduce or minimize individual responsibility in suicide in favor of explanations grounded in illness (as in psychiatry) or statistics (as in sociology). Whereas Christianity initially regarded the suicide of martyrs as a heroic act and an undeniable sign of integrity, this acceptance of self-inflicted death soon gave way to its condemnation as an intolerable act of rebellion against divine authority and, following the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas and its Aristotelian framework, as a crime against society. This view, in its various iterations, persisted throughout the Middle Ages, as also pointed out by Ramón Andrés in Historia del suicidio en Occidente (Andrés 2003), beginning to shift only with the advent of the Modern Age—though initially without absolving the subject of responsibility for the decision to take one’s own life.

The exception was the interpretation of suicide as an act of demonic possession, a belief that spread in the mid-sixteenth century, for in such cases the will of the subject was considered compromised. Yet in the centuries that followed, both its defenders—who sometimes viewed suicide as the ultimate expression of individual freedom, at other times as a legitimate rebellion against abusive authority or even as a heroic act—and its detractors—who considered it an abuse of freedom, a seditious act, or a threat to public order—agreed in assigning responsibility for the act to the suicide, regardless of whether they demanded punishment. Paradoxically, it would be the emergence of science—particularly psychiatry—that declared the will of the person who dies by suicide compromised by illness, thereby denying the subject’s freedom:

On the surface, the shift from the harsh ancien régime prohibitions against suicide to the therapeutic understanding of self-destruction that gained currency over the course of the nineteenth century was a sign of progress. No longer ostracized by the church and subject to legal punishment, individuals who attempted to end their own lives were not considered evil. They were simply sick. Sick people deserved compassion, not blame; with treatment, they could be cured. But the consequence of removing morality from the equation was that it also removed volition.

(Lieberman 2003, pp. 27–28)

Similarly, though without entirely denying individual freedom, sociology absorbed the individual’s particular circumstances into a broader social framework that would determine his or her suicidal tendencies. Both discourses—nineteenth-century psychiatry and sociology—appear in Los suicidas, through the references to Esquirol (1838) and Alexandre Brierre de Boismont (1856) on one hand, and Émile Durkheim (1897) on the other. Although the protagonist generally refrains from judging the excerpts that the character Bibi gives him to read, he does react to a passage from Brierre de Boismont in which a patient confesses his growing obsession with a relative’s suicide as he approaches the same age at which that relative took his life. Both Esquirol’s and Brierre de Boismont’s fragments point to a hypothetical hereditary condition of suicide—an idea that does not escape the protagonist’s attention, since it constitutes one of his enduring fixations throughout the novel, and one he ultimately manages to overcome. Unlike the patients described by the French psychiatrists, our protagonist does not kill himself, thus demonstrating that, beyond suicidal monomania, the individual can freely choose whether or not to die by his own hand—as Brierre de Boismont himself conceded in certain cases—regardless of family history, and that suicide and madness, as Esquirol claimed, do not necessarily go hand in hand. Along the same lines, Durkheim’s reflections on the supposed contagious (though not hereditary) nature of suicide among members of a single family—as the product of obsession rather than of genetics—provoke both discomfort and ironic relief in the protagonist, who, while aware of his own attraction to the suicidal abyss, intuits that no one but himself holds the final word.

Beyond the outcome of the story, what proves most significant in Los suicidas is the parallel archive that takes shape alongside the narration, in constant interaction with it. This archive serves to situate the individual within a suicidal cultural context, revealing that the act of taking one’s own life transcends the individual or private gesture (Lieberman 2003, p. xi), even if most suicides’ own perceptions point to “the total and unmistakable singularity of their situation” (Améry 1999, p. 9). The novel thus stages something emphasized in many studies on suicide: the insufficiency of suicidology, focused exclusively on pathological and neurobiological issues affecting the individual, to account for a phenomenon that in fact possesses wide-ranging cultural ramifications (Colucci and Lester 2013). Indeed, the novel is rich in quotations, though these are not always accompanied by active interpretation on the part of the suicidal narrator (Green 2023). Yet in this accumulation of citations and reflections on voluntary death lies the interest of a text conceived as an archive. This polyphonic archive—combining philosophical, psychiatric, sociological, literary, and statistical discourse with the anecdotal, the unusual, and the unheard of—is far from organized; it collapses toward chaos, distinguishing neither between genres nor privileging certain discourses over others. This becomes evident near the end of the novel, when the three characters—Bibi, Marcela, and the unnamed narrator—read excerpts from literary texts featuring suicides, and a metafictional projection appears as suicide is equated with the end of the narrative: “Si en una película o en una novela, el protagonista se mata, termina el relato. Si se mata al principio es porque se irá atrás, la historia será contada como un salto al pasado” (Di Benedetto, p. 170; “In a film or novel, if the protagonist kills himself, the story ends. If he kills himself at the start, it’s because we’ll go backward, and the story will be told after a leap into the past”).

The scene not only enacts the notion of suicide as a dramatic performance (Lester and Stack 2015) but also introduces—anticipating Patricia De Martelaere’s perspective—the idea of the aesthetic condition of suicide as a voluntary, conscious, and precise act of bringing life to a close, thereby preventing it from being interrupted by death when least expected. For the narrator, ending one’s life at the age of thirty-three, as his father did—and, needless to say, in emulation of Christ’s sacrifice—means taking control of both life and death, fulfilling thereby a desire for fullness, for rounding out one’s own life (De Martelaere 1997, p. 118), by placing the period at the exact moment, leaving nothing to chance. The projection of himself into literary texts undoubtedly reinforces this aesthetic dimension of suicide and the identification of the suicide with the artist, while also illustrating how the biological factors leading to the decision to take one’s life can be—and often are—culturally inflected. In the Argentine tradition, the paradigmatic example of this condition is Alejandra Pizarnik, with whom Di Benedetto shares a suicidal fixation. With her suicide in 1972, Pizarnik not only put an end to her life but also to a body of work that would be resemanticized in light of her death (Quesada Gómez 2012b, p. 47), her death serving as “autenticación retrospectiva de su obra suicida” (Piña 1994, p. 186; “retrospective authentication of her suicidal work”). Although Di Benedetto and Pizarnik—who, notably, turned thirty-three in 1969, the year Los suicidas was published—did not share biographical space or intellectual circles, their projects converge in a shared sensibility of the time: that of the Latin American writer who, in the second half of the twentieth century, confronts the impossibility of reconciling word and experience, life and art, and makes of suicide a limit figure of representation.

However, just as Los suicidas subverts the detective plot to focus instead on the story of the suicidal subject—a metaphysical narrative that explores the past, present, and future of this figure—it also disrupts the expected horizon of the exploration of suicide as the literary ending. The protagonist, though fully aware of the absurdity of life, chooses to be reborn after a suicide that occurs only on the symbolic plane. The novel thus invokes existentialist premises: while self-inflicted death is relegated, at least for the protagonist, to the mere condition of possibility, his identity throughout the novel has nevertheless been defined in relation to it, making him a being imbued with a suicidal aura—a being for suicide. The story of the baby who is said to have stopped feeding by his own will introduces a variation of the from cradle to grave motif, turning the cradle itself into a tomb and giving rise to a discussion of whether “nacemos con la muerte adentro” (“we’re born with death inside us”), as Marcela suggests, or whether death “nos espera fuera” (“Death waits outside us”), as the protagonist argues (Di Benedetto 2016, p. 32).

Both the creation of the archive and the recurring focus on suicide throughout the text respond to—and invert—the social refusal to accept voluntary death without alarm. They also seem to be the natural consequence of what appears to be one of the author’s own obsessions, as Di Benedetto reportedly fantasized about the supposed suicide of his father—an event that was never clarified but around which he always speculated (Correas 2017, pp. 166–68). In the novel, the police refuse to cooperate with journalistic investigations of suicides or to disclose information about them for fear of contagion, equating them with other morally or legally problematic cases: “La agencia tendrá toda la colaboración que precise a menos que se trate de causas pendientes de decisión judicial, delitos en investigación reservada, abusos morales contra menores y suicidios” (Di Benedetto 2016, p. 19; “The agency can have all the information it wants, unless it has to do with a case a judge is about to rule on, a crime under special investigation, pedophilia, or suicide”). Against this background, the narrator’s insistence on the subject constitutes a rebellious gesture against the taboo—a kind of indulgence that seeks to compensate for the imposed silence surrounding suicide, which even extends to having schoolchildren write about death: “yo opino que el tema de la muerte es un tema prohibido, por alguna falla cultural, y que en el fondo se trata del miedo a la muerte” (ibid., p. 131; “I share my opinion that because of some lapse in the culture, the subject of death is off-limits, which has to do, ultimately, with the fear of death”).

Di Benedetto’s fascination not only with suicide but with death in a broader sense becomes evident not just in this semi-autobiographical novel but also in the interviews he gave—particularly the one conducted by Joaquín Soler for A fondo (In Depth) in 1978—where he begins by emphasizing how death has marked and determined his life since birth, having been born on 2 November, the Day of the Dead (Soler Serrano 1978). The literary impulse to endow every detail with meaning spills over into the author’s own life, just as it does in his aesthetic treatment of suicide as a deliberately placed ending: “¿Hay que esperar la muerte, como un jubilado, o hay que hacerlo, como hizo papá?” (ibid., p. 30; “Do you have to wait for death, like an elderly retiree, or do you have to do it, the way Papá did?”).

To the notion of suicide as an ending is superimposed, through the idea of the archive, that of suicide as erasure—something Jorge Luis Borges would revisit in “El suicida” (“The Suicide”), included in La rosa profunda (1975; The Deep Rose). If, in Borges’s poem, history and even the universe vanish with the subject’s death—“No quedará en la noche una estrella./No quedará la noche./Moriré y conmigo la suma/del intolerable universo./Borraré las pirámides, las medallas,/los continentes y las caras./Borraré la acumulación del pasado” (Borges 1989, p. 86; “Not a single star will be left in the night./The night will not be left./I will die and, with me,/the weight of the intolerable universe./I shall erase the pyramids, the medallions,/the continents and faces./I shall erase the accumulated past”)—the personification of the archive in Bibi Fichero renders her unerasable unless she dies: “Es la traductora de la agencia, y por eso y por su memoria indeleble y ordenada la llamamos Fichero” (Di Benedetto 2016, p. 22; “She is the agency translator and for that reason, as well as for her unfailing and perfectly ordered memory, we call her Fichero—Card Catalogue”). This human archive—composed of Bibi’s memory as well as her notes—gradually gives way to the printed archive, the novel itself, which, while chaotic in form, becomes the new repository of memory. Its eradication would require mechanisms other than the subject’s death. Yet the notion of silencing or erasure as a mode of disappearance permeates the novel and is ultimately equated with suicide. Both the archive and suicide thus emerge as mechanisms for controlling the persistence or disappearance of what has been lived and recorded. The death of the subject or the destruction of the archive become distinct ways of confronting the (im)possibility of erasing the trace of existence, tracing a dialogue among memory, literature, and disappearance.

The novel also includes the idea of the suicidal subject as a misanthrope—and, in a sense, as Ricardo Piglia would later suggest, the suicidal person as a “timid murderer”—who eliminates himself in order not to eliminate others: “¿Mi inclinación a la muerte es también una inclinación a matar a los otros? No puedo matarlos, por lo menos no a todos. Pero puedo suprimir a todos: si yo me suprimo, ya, para mí, no existirán” (ibid., p. 170; “My death wish is also a wish to kill others. I can’t kill them, at least not all of them. But I can do away with all of them: If I do away with myself, they’ll no longer exist for me”). The human archive—total in scope (“estoy convencido de que Bibi, si asume para mí su personalidad de Fichero, me ahorrará bibliotecas, entrevistas, encuestas, postergaciones, desinteligencias, cretinadas” [ibid., p. 82; “I am convinced that if she puts on her Card Catalogue persona for me again, Bibi will save me from innumerable research rooms, interviews, inquiries, postponements, incomprehensions, inanities”])—also exerts a hypnotic power over the protagonist, prompting him to produce new materials about suicidal stories: “Realmente, nada de esto ha sucedido, lo he soñado. Bibi me hipnotiza con su fichero y tengo pesadillas” (ibid., p. 71; “None of that actually happened. I dreamed the whole thing. Bibi is hypnotizing me with her card catalogue and now I’m having nightmares”). The archive that the novel itself becomes thus transcends what Bibi provides, acquiring at times a dreamlike quality, over which are superimposed, without clear boundaries, elements of statistics, sociology, and medicine. Through its fragmentation, disorder, and heterogeneity, it achieves a complex and multifaceted form of totality far richer than that of the fichero. The inclusion of excerpts from plays and historical texts—performed by Bibi, Marcela, and the narrator in one of the final scenes—further enriches an archive that already includes reflections on suicide and madness, suicide as inheritance or contagion, animal suicide versus its supposedly human exclusivity, and suicidal paradoxes: suicides who desist when threatened with death, or suicide as the only way to end the inclination toward death.

As suggested above, the comparison between Di Benedetto’s representation of suicide and that of Piglia is illuminating. Whereas in Piglia, suicide takes shape as a form of thought rather than an act—a question about the limits of narration, authorship, and experience—in Los suicidas, Di Benedetto turns the death drive into the narrative’s structuring logic: narration itself becomes an attempt to make sense of a chain of deaths that nevertheless resist explanation. Suicide, here, is not a conclusion but a question that reproduces itself in the very act of narration. Piglia, by contrast, associates suicide with a critical practice: it marks the point where writing confronts its own limit, where lucidity merges with self-destruction. As I have argued elsewhere, Piglia turns suicide into a kind of theory—a way of thinking literature from its edge—whereas Di Benedetto conceives it as the impossibility of closure, as a narrative archive of emptiness. In both, writing about suicide paradoxically becomes a gesture of survival. In Piglia, suicide also functions as a metaphor for the dissolution of the modern subject and for the violence of the State against memory, while revealing the extreme difficulty of closing meaning within a narrative or of separating oneself from history: it becomes a way of reflecting on the relationship between the individual and the narrative apparatuses of power. In Respiración artificial (1980; Artificial Respiration), suicide appears as an extreme reading of Argentine history, a response to the collapse of political narratives and to the unattainability of inscribing experience within any coherent framework of meaning. The suicidal gesture thus operates as an allegory of the interruption of historical discourse: the figure of the intellectual who, faced with interpretive excess or the violence of the state archive, chooses to disappear (Quesada Gómez 2012a, pp. 234–37). In this sense, suicide in Piglia is not so much an act of closure as a means of exposing the fracture between history and narration, between individual memory and the machinery of the national archive. Di Benedetto, by contrast, detaches himself from historical frameworks to portray the pure experience of isolation. In Los suicidas, voluntary death is not interpreted as a symptom of its time but as an existential echo that corrodes the very sense of narrative: the failure of communication, the closure of transcendence. Both writers, however, conceive suicide as an obsession structuring the very act of writing: in Piglia, this obsession crystallizes into a paranoid fiction, where the thought of suicide intertwines with surveillance, conspiracy, and interpretive excess; in Di Benedetto, it becomes the center of a metaphysical obsession—a sustained meditation on emptiness, incommunicability, and the inscrutability of meaning—that at times acquires a hypnotic quality. In both cases, suicide not only thematizes the dissolution of the subject but also functions as the secret engine of narration, the force that drives it and, at the same time, threatens it with extinction.

Although the protagonist of Los suicidas never resolves, as his boss urges him to do through the faces of a pair of suicides, “el misterio de los que se matan” (Di Benedetto 2016, p. 163; “The mystery of those who kill themselves”), and the journalistic investigation, like the police one, remains stalled for lack of a publication willing to buy the report, the suicidal archive that the novel itself becomes delves into the issue in the only feasible way: by creating a fresco suicida (“a panoramic depiction of suicide”) that displays a spectrum of possibilities and, without taking a stance for or against self-inflicted death, explores it without privileging any discourse, with a certain detachment that stems from the protagonist’s own apathy. The text does not attempt to answer the question that, according to Foucault, is the only one that cannot be posed in the face of suicide—why?—but rather inverts it: “la cuestión no es por qué me mataré, sino por qué no matarme” (ibid., p. 52; “The question isn’t why I would kill myself. It’s why I wouldn’t kill myself”). By situating its protagonist within this cultural context of suicide woven by the archive, the novel suggests that, even though taking one’s life may constitute an intimate and private act, it remains haunted by a long tradition of thought that has considered suicide in the most varied terms. Ultimately, however, the subject retains the possibility of choosing his destiny, for it is always possible to refute the amalgam of precepts and ideas that history has presented as absolute—revealing, instead, their inevitable relativity.

3. Archiving the Margins: Literary Mediation and the Ethics of Witnessing Suicide in Los suicidas del fin del mundo

In a different way, we can also find the notion of a suicidal archive in Leila Guerriero’s chronicle Los suicidas del fin del mundo (2005; The Suicides at the End of the World), which, in this case, is tied to the journalistic account of the suicides of several young people between the ages of eighteen and twenty-eight that took place in Las Heras (Argentina) at the end of the 1990s. In keeping with the genre of the crónica, the text adheres to the narration of real events, which does not prevent its author from invoking literary references and, at the same time, constructing an archive of data about suicide that lends consistency to her narrative (Tejero Yosovitch 2019). Obviously, the presence of these flesh-and-blood suicides introduces a radically different dimension from that of the fictional characters in Di Benedetto’s work. Even though in fiction suicide can acquire a symbolic, aesthetic, or even philosophical value, in reality it must confront the weight of social and moral judgment. As Minois aptly observes, the twentieth century did not differ much from previous ones in its tendency to maintain a double standard toward the act: “an admiration for suicides in literature […], and, at the same time, a condemnation of all the ordinary suicides of unhappy people whose motives do not seem noble enough” (Minois 1999, p. 323). Thus, modern society continues to reserve admiration for the “noble” or literary suicides—those that can be interpreted as gestures of lucidity, heroism, or rebellion—while condemning or rendering invisible the real acts of those who, driven by suffering or despair, fail to attain the status of myth or metaphor.

That tension between fascination and condemnation, however, is not the perspective Guerriero adopts. Her gaze resists the temptation to aestheticize or moralize the event, situating itself instead on an ethical and narrative plane where what matters is not the evaluation of the act but the understanding of the human and social context that surrounds it. Although these suicides presumably share social causes—they are all presented as connected to the marginalization of the region—the author also displays them as enigmas to be deciphered and, through the use of literary techniques (Arteaga Díaz (2025) even identifies in the text the structure of a novela Negra), endows them with an aura of mystery: “los datos dicen, pero nunca explican” (Guerriero 2005, p. 61; “the data tell, but never explain”). For this reason, sociological explanations, even if present, do not exhaust all possibilities, nor are they presented as definitive. Rather, the journalistic I acknowledges its doubts, the limits it cannot cross, and its own failure to fully comprehend what is conceived as an undeniably complex phenomenon. It is therefore the reader’s task to endow the narrative with meaning—a story that is partly presented as an enigma.

Indeed, Guerriero turns the succession of suicides into a profound reflection on the social and moral disintegration of a community left outside progress—“un sitio fuera del mundo, un lugar perdido” (ibid., p. 30; “a place out of this world, a lost place”)—and even on the sociopolitical features of Argentine cultural identity (Valcheff García 2020, p. 66). The suicides that plague the town of Las Heras respond mainly to an anomic logic, arising from the loss of collective meaning following the economic crisis and the rupture of the social fabric, where the absence of horizons, unemployment, and moral emptiness configure a scenario in which individuals are stripped of rules and belonging. In some cases, the feeling of suffocation and of an unchangeable fate brings these deaths closer to fatalistic suicide, whereas the loneliness and emotional isolation of certain young people reveal egoistic traits. But far from adhering to the sociological determinism once attributed to Durkheim, Guerriero constructs a choral portrait that, beyond the sociological explanations grounded in a social context presumed to motivate the repetition of the suicidal act, focuses on the psychological aspects and particularities of each individual, while also endowing the narrative with a literary dimension that enriches the perception of these suicides and gives them shape. That is, rather than interpreting the suicidal epidemic in Las Heras solely as the extreme symptom of a collective crisis of meaning, Guerriero lingers on each of these suicides as an individual gesture endowed with meaning in itself, even as she simultaneously questions simplistic explanations.

Porque sí, porque no había nada para hacer, porque estaban aburridos, porque no se llevaban bien con sus padres, porque no tenían padres o porque tenían demasiados, porque les pegaban, porque los hacían abortar, porque tomaban tanto alcohol y tantas drogas, porque les habían hecho un daño, porque salían de noche, porque robaban, porque salían con mujeres, porque salían con mujeres de la noche, porque tenían traumas de infancia, traumas de adolescencia, traumas de primera juventud, porque hubieran querido nacer en otro lado, porque no los dejaban ver al padre, porque la madre los había abandonado, porque hubieran preferido que la madre los hubiera abandonado, porque los habían violado, porque eran solteros, porque tenían amores pero desgraciados, porque habían dejado de ir a misa, porque eran católicos, satánicos, evangelistas, aficionados al dibujo, punks, sentimentales, raros, estudiosos, coquetos, vagos, petroleros, porque tenían problemas, porque no los tenían en absoluto.

Teorías. Y las cosas, que se empeñaban en no tener respuesta.

(Guerriero 2005, p. 207)

Because yes, because there was nothing to do, because they were bored, because they didn’t get along with their parents, because they had no parents or too many, because they were beaten, because they were forced to have abortions, because they drank so much alcohol and took so many drugs, because they had been hurt, because they went out at night, because they stole, because they went out with women, because they went out with women of the night, because they had childhood traumas, adolescent traumas, early-adulthood traumas, because they would have liked to be born somewhere else, because they weren’t allowed to see their father, because their mother had abandoned them, because they would have preferred that their mother had abandoned them, because they had been raped, because they were single, because they had loves but unhappy ones, because they had stopped going to Mass, because they were Catholics, Satanists, Evangelicals, drawing enthusiasts, punks, sentimental, odd, studious, flirtatious, lazy, oil workers, because they had problems, because they had none at all.

Theories. And things that stubbornly refused to have an answer.

In this way, Los suicidas del fin del mundo shifts the focus from sociological causality to an ethics of attention: each death is inscribed not as the effect of a theory but as a singular narrative that questions the limits of all explanation. By listing and dismantling the “theories” of suicide, Guerriero turns meaninglessness itself into narrative material, showing that the true interpretive gesture does not consist in explaining death but in listening to its multiple resonances within the human and symbolic fabric of Las Heras. The testimony of those who surrounded the people who took their own lives, however, points precisely to the lack of meaning—at least from their perspective—behind such acts of self-annihilation, and to the elaboration of narratives interwoven with the survivors’ desire to make sense of what happened, their guilt, and even delirious or superstitious interpretations: “La ola de suicidios acá fue medio sobrenatural. En un corto tiempo se mataron todas esas personas muy cercanas a todos nosotros. Fueron muertes que nos tocaron a todos. Ya no sabías qué creer. Si hasta el día de hoy se dice de todo. Porque acá hay brujerías, mucha droga, y la gente enseguida trata de ponerle un nombre y encontrar un culpable” (ibid., pp. 127–28; “The wave of suicides here was kind of supernatural. In a short time, all those people very close to us killed themselves. They were deaths that affected all of us. You no longer knew what to believe. Even today, people say all kinds of things. Because here there’s witchcraft, lots of drugs, and people immediately try to put a name to it and find someone to blame”), as Darío Sánchez tells the journalist.

Indeed, the chronicle constantly oscillates between two poles: the journalistic or official discourse—echoed in the chronicle—which reproduces and reiterates common tropes about suicide and tends to homogenize the behavior of those who die by it according to sociological discourse; and the personal one, that of the relatives, who not only endow each death with individuality but also project onto them rumors and magical thinking to explain the suicides. Positioned midway between these two discourses is that of the journalist herself, who, using the tools of literature—including prolepsis, anticipation, and various alterations of the chronological order, as well as poetic focalizations on the hostility of the Patagonian steppe—and sustained by skepticism toward ready-made explanations, seeks to shape the account of what happened without necessarily aligning with one or the other version. Thus, even though the suicides took place within a deeply fragmented community (composed of “los solos, los dolientes, los rotos en pedazos,” ibid., p. 20; “the lonely, the grieving, the broken to pieces”), Guerriero restores the focus to the individual, emphasizing the impact of these voluntary deaths on society and showing them as private gestures that ultimately further erode the scant social cohesion and already fragile family structures. Although this idea is not foreign to Durkheimian thought, Guerriero is careful to avoid univocal or moralizing explanations, presenting cases such as those of Laura Quevedo (ibid., p. 107) and Jéssica Ortiz (ibid., p. 139), which reveal that, despite external constraints, individual psychology plays a crucial role in such decisions.

At the same time, through testimonies such as that of Roberto Mansilla—known as Rulo—and through the journalist’s own descriptions of the landscape, the horizon of despair expands into a broader sense of vital exhaustion, the fatigue of existing contra viento y marea (“against all odds”) in a hostile environment where even the natural elements offer no respite. Thus, following Guerriero’s reflection on the barrenness of the land—“Afuera los árboles grises parecían hechos de plumas, de alas muertas, arañados por una fuerza con malas intenciones. Es raro este empeño, pensé. Allí donde la naturaleza renuncia y pone arbustos y unas piedras, el bicho humano se empeña en poner casas, escuelas, una plaza, e insiste en tener cría” (ibid., p. 119; “Outside, the gray trees seemed made of feathers, of dead wings, scratched by a force with ill intentions. Strange, this insistence, I thought. There, where nature gives up and leaves only shrubs and some stones, the human creature insists on putting up houses, schools, a square, and persists in raising offspring”)—comes Rulo’s testimony, which closes the sixth chapter and incorporates the Patagonian wind as yet another actant in the text:

—Acá, si no sos muy fuerte, si no tenés mucho empuje, se te van apagando las ilusiones. A veces, no te creas… yo creo que esa idea de quitarse la vida la ha tenido todo el mundo. Es que te cansa. Esto te cansa.

Señaló la puerta.

El viento pateaba para poder entrar. (ibid., p. 126)

—Here, if you’re not very strong, if you don’t have much drive, your hopes slowly fade away. Sometimes—don’t think otherwise—I believe that everyone has had the idea of taking their own life at some point. It wears you down. This wears you down.

He pointed toward the door.

The wind was kicking at it, trying to get in.

As we can see, the chronicler does not merely compile testimonies or reproduce facts: she reworks the material of this suicidal archive and transforms it into a form of narrative knowledge. Without straying, in a strict sense, from the truth, Guerriero draws on the resources of literature to endow the deaths in Las Heras with symbolic coherence—that is, with a web of meanings that allows the fragmentary to be read as shared experience. This cohesion does not erase the singularity of each case; rather, it connects them within a constellation of meaning where the landscape, exposure, and vital exhaustion act as signs of a common human condition. In that gesture, Guerriero turns the crónica into a space of mediation between memory and fiction, between document and writing, where narrative itself emerges as a form of mourning and resistance against the erosion of life and the threat of oblivion.

4. Narrating the Wound: Silence, Necropower, and Trauma in the Suicidal Archive

Even though they are extremely different works, the similarities between Los suicidas and Los suicidas del fin del mundo are striking. First, both coincide in asserting that there is no single truth about suicide, only a series of fragmented discourses—a fact underscored by the polyphonic structure of both. In neither case does the narrator’s voice—whether fictional or journalistic—have the final word; instead, it mediates among fragments of discourse that contradict or silence one another. Closely related to this, both texts occupy a liminal space between literature and journalism, questioning the very notions of truth, evidence, and narrative, simultaneously acknowledging that narrating suicide is always an ethical dilemma. To write about suicide is to confront what is ineffable, intimate, and socially silenced, while also engaging in a symbolic construction that grants meaning to what does not necessarily have it—since no archive is ever neutral or purely documentary but rather an instrument of power, control, and the shaping of memory. As theorists of the archive—from Foucault to Derrida and Mbembe—have argued, every archival practice entails a form of power, a will to organize memory and, consequently, to exclude or silence certain voices. The archive, thus understood not as a mere accumulation of data but as a system of meaning and selection, acquires a revelatory dimension in both works. Both authors expose the fact that every archive necessarily implies an exclusion: that which lies beyond its frame of legibility, the unnameable, or what the community cannot—or will not—explain.

In Los suicidas, Di Benedetto approaches the archive from its periphery: newspaper reports, statistics, or institutional records appear only as a backdrop that, instead of consolidating objective knowledge, dissolve into the narrator’s subjectivity, who ultimately absorbs and reinterprets the data through his inner experience. By contrast, in Los suicidas del fin del mundo, Guerriero shifts the archive toward the sphere of orality: a significant part of her archive is built from rumor, from fragmentary and contradictory voices that struggle to define the truth of a collective tragedy. This passage from a documentary to a testimonial archive opens a reflective space around the tension between the official archive—grounded in reports, news, or statistical data—and the affective archive, composed of intimate memories, community narratives, and shared silences. It is within that tension that the possibility of rewriting history from the margins emerges—of restoring visibility and meaning to what the institutional archive tends to dismiss or erase. As Foucault suggests, the archive not only organizes what can be said but also delineates the thresholds of the thinkable; and, following Derrida, its power lies not so much in the preservation of memory as in the authority of its inscription. From this perspective, both Di Benedetto and Guerriero dismantle the archive as a structure of power and reinscribe it as a space of symbolic and affective contestation, where truth is not preserved but constructed and fractured in the very act of narration.

Thus, as suicidal archives, both works make visible and give voice to what is normally left unsaid—not only because of the taboo surrounding suicide but also, in the case of Los suicidas del fin del mundo, because of the social and geographical marginalization that the region suffers, “un sitio lejano del que los diarios seguían sin hablar” (Guerriero 2005, p. 229; “a distant place that the newspapers still didn’t write about”). After clinically enumerating the three new hangings that seem to inaugurate a new suicidal wave in Las Heras in 2005, Guerriero closes her crónica by denouncing the silence of the Buenos Aires press regarding these deaths:

Pero ahora, en Buenos Aires los diarios finalmente hablaban de suicidios: de nueve asfixiados con gas carbónico que el sábado 5 de febrero de 2005 habían sido encontrados en una hacienda de Hihashi Izu, cien kilómetros al sudoeste de Tokio, Japón.

Nada decían de los muertos del Sur.

Y ese, ahora sí, fue el fin de todo. (ibid., p. 230)

But now, in Buenos Aires, the newspapers were finally talking about suicides: about nine people asphyxiated by carbon monoxide who, on Saturday, February 5, 2005, had been found on a ranch in Higashi Izu, one hundred kilometers southwest of Tokyo, Japan.

They said nothing about the dead of the South.

And that—now, yes—was the end of everything.

Guerriero thus underscores the dynamics of exclusion implicit in the notion of “second-class suicides,” doubly marginalized within the national landscape, whose very existence is relegated to the background precisely because they are not publicly spoken of. Di Benedetto, too, evokes that atmosphere of police and journalistic silence—against which both the fictional investigation of Los suicidas and the novel itself take a stand: “Hay que averiguar, pesquisa propia. La policía no colaborará. Se puede probar. No colaborará, no informa sobre suicidios. La publicación provoca el contagio. Suicidios por imitación, epidemia de suicidios, peste de suicidios” (Di Benedetto 2016, p. 13; “It will have to be investigated. Our own inquiry. The police won’t work with us. We can try, but they won’t. They don’t release information on suicides. Publication can lead to contagion. Copycat suicides, an epidemic of suicides, a plague of suicides”). Both archives reverse this invisibilizing dynamic by exposing—already from their very titles—the reality they seek to problematize, while dissecting within their pages the suicidal condition, one profoundly uncomfortable for society.

However, whereas Di Benedetto’s archive emphasizes the philosophical dimension of the phenomenon and the redemptive symbolism of the protagonist’s potential self-sacrifice at the age of thirty-three, Guerriero’s focuses on individual cases without neglecting the collective dimension of suicide, and incorporates into her text the necropolitical question—that is, the way in which certain Argentine state policies have led the region into such profound exclusion and marginalization that these very conditions affect the mental health of Las Heras’s inhabitants, constituting a determining, though not exclusive, factor in the successive waves of suicides.

The situation Guerriero depicts in the north of Santa Cruz—where Las Heras is located—can be read as a variation of spaces traversed by necropower, as defined by Achille Mbembe in “Necropolitics” (Mbembe 2003). Without having suffered a direct attack aimed at exterminating its population or being an active war zone, the neoliberal privatization policies initiated under the government of Carlos S. Menem in the early 1990s eventually condemned the region to the marginality that would characterize it by the end of that decade, following the brief prosperity brought about by YPF’s oil extraction boom and its subsequent decline after privatization.

Las Heras atravesó los años ochenta y los primeros años noventa en esa prosperidad de petroleras, bares, burdeles, y hombres con dinero para gastar.

Pero en 1991 comenzó el proceso de privatización de YPF en manos de Repsol y el paraíso empezó a tener algunas fallas.

Desde ese año gobernaba la ciudad un hombre del peronismo—Francisco Vázquez—que permaneció en la intendencia hasta 1999. Durante su mandato, YPF redujo personal, tercerizó procesos y, de tener aproximadamente 50.000 empleados en todo el país, pasó a tener 5.000.

No hubo como evitar el impacto.

De a poco, con más ímpetu desde 1993, la crisis hizo furor en la ciudad. En 1995 el desempleo trepó al 20% y 7.000 personas se fueron de Las Heras.

Quedaron los que estaban cuando fui.

No todos, pero sí muchos, eran los solos y los dolientes, los rotos en pedazos.

De algunos—no de todos—habla esta historia.

(Guerriero 2005, p. 20)

Las Heras went through the 1980s and the early 1990s in that prosperity of oil companies, bars, brothels, and men with money to spend.

But in 1991, the process of privatizing YPF under Repsol began, and paradise started to show some cracks.

From that year, the city was governed by a Peronist—Francisco Vázquez—who remained in office until 1999. During his term, YPF reduced its workforce, outsourced processes, and went from having roughly 50,000 employees across the country to 5,000.

The impact could not be avoided.

Gradually, with greater intensity from 1993 onward, the crisis swept through the city. By 1995, unemployment had climbed to 20%, and 7,000 people had left Las Heras.

Those who remained were the ones I found there.

Not all of them, but many were the lonely, the grieving, the broken to pieces.

This story speaks of some of them—not all.

Ultimately, Guerriero’s work reveals how necropower operates not only through physical death, but also through the unequal administration of life and the precarization of existence. Her text shows that the structural violence derived from extractivist and privatizing policies produces forms of life marked by hopelessness, where suicide emerges as the extreme symptom of an eroded social subjectivity. From this perspective, Los suicidas del fin del mundo does not merely document a series of individual tragedies; it constructs an archive of contemporary dispossession—a testimony to how neoliberalism, in its Argentine version of the 1990s, turned certain territories and bodies into zones of waste, reaffirming the relevance of Mbembe’s diagnosis of new regimes of death in the global world (Mbembe 2019).

At the same time, insofar as they function as literary archives, both texts endow the suicidal phenomenon with a symbolic form, shaping it as a field of meaning where writing acts as an aesthetic mediation in the face of the chaos of the real. Through this gesture, the works of Di Benedetto and Guerriero expand Patricia De Martelaere’s notion of the aesthetic condition of suicide: while, for the philosopher, the suicidal act embodies an aspiration toward form—an attempt to confer unity and closure upon a fragmented existence—in these texts that aspiration is projected onto literature itself, which assumes the task of giving structure and legibility to what in lived experience appears as unrepresentable. Writing thus becomes a space of symbolic containment, capable of articulating a narrative order where life offers none. In Los suicidas, this search for form manifests itself in the introspective tone and obsessive organization of the discourse—almost musical in its rhythm—which transforms the subject’s dissolution into an act of aesthetic composition; whereas in Los suicidas del fin del mundo, Guerriero’s journalistic and polyphonic reconstruction provides narrative coherence to a dispersed collective tragedy, restoring voice and plot to a set of deaths that, in social reality, remain as loose signs of meaninglessness. In both cases, literature arises as the site where suicide acquires a symbolic morphology, where the textual archive replaces the void of explanation and turns disappearance into form.

Another constant shared by these two works is that in them the archive becomes a space through which society—or the subject—processes the trauma of suicidal repetition. In Los suicidas, the reiteration of deaths appears as an obsessive structure that the narrator gathers and recomposes without being able to bring to closure. Newspaper reports, statistical data, and even literary suicides emerge as an external archive infiltrating the protagonist’s consciousness and projected onto the reader, until they transform into an existential reflection on the meaninglessness of life and the impossibility of breaking the cycle of self-destruction. Guerriero, in turn, translates that repetition into the collective realm: the archive is no longer introspective but choral, built from voices that repeat, reformulate, or contradict the facts, composing a mosaic of versions in which trauma is reactivated in each account. While in Di Benedetto repetition acquires a metaphysical tone—an individual obsession with the void—in Guerriero it becomes a communal process of symbolic elaboration, a way of narrating the unbearable. In both cases, the archive does not stabilize memory but keeps it in motion: it is the space where the wound persists and where writing attempts, without ever fully succeeding, to give form to rupture. From Cathy Caruth (1996)’s perspective, this dynamic enacts the way trauma manifests as an inevitable return: it cannot be fully assimilated but reappears within narration, compelling the texts to confront what remains beyond comprehension and to inscribe it in an archive that, rather than containing it, renders it present and resistant to closure.

Both Di Benedetto’s Los suicidas and Guerriero’s Los suicidas del fin del mundo reveal that every attempt to archive suicide is bound to confront its own inscrutability. Yet this failure does not entail an absence of meaning but rather the emergence of another kind of knowledge—a knowledge that does not explain but accompanies, that acknowledges the impossibility of saying and, nevertheless, insists on saying. In both texts, the suicidal archive stands as a form of thought that overflows Enlightenment rationality—the kind that seeks causes, genealogies, patterns—to enter a territory where writing becomes a limit experience. In Di Benedetto, the investigation folds in on itself until the scientific discourse turns into an existential monologue; in Guerriero, the journalistic method dissolves in the face of the opacity of collective tragedy. Both authors write from the fissure between knowledge and affect, between the drive to understand and the recognition of the incomprehensible. The archive, then, does not order—it exposes; it does not clarify—it sustains. Hence, what unites Los suicidas and Los suicidas del fin del mundo is not so much their shared object as their ethical gesture: that of assuming writing as an act of resistance against silence, a form of mourning that does not close but keeps the wound open. In this obstinate effort to record the unrepresentable, both texts affirm that to archive suicide is not to domesticate it but to inhabit its enigma and accept that every attempt at meaning—like every life—is always potentially on the verge of its own disappearance.