Juliana Burgos, an intruder among men’s things

Abstract

The article analyzes the fate of the body of Juliana Burgos, a character in the short story “La intrusa”, published in 1970 in the collection El informe de Brodie by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), from the theoretical perspectives of philosophers René Girard (1923-2015) and Judith Butler (1956-). In the fictional account, Juliana is bought, used, sold, murdered and finally has her body discarded by the Nilsen brothers on the outskirts of Greater Buenos Aires around 1890. She is a “vulnerable body” (Butler, 2019, p. 6), and of little relevance to the job market, an invisible life, without the right to justice and to constitute oneself as a subject; an “expiatory victim” (Girard, 2008, p. 126), a body that fell by the wayside in the process of territorial expansion and consolidation of the Argentine National State at the end of the 19th century.