Abstract
This project aims at problematizing the apparent recognition of a particular relation between subject and spectator imbricated in the reading act of Arundhati Roy’s Walking with the Comrades and Óscar Martínez’s The Beast, each an intellectual project with a humanizing impulse in their respective narrations of particular conditions of systemic injustice. By developing a critique of Judith Butler’s Frames of War, which initially appears a generative framework from which to query the apparent encounter between subject and spectator, I argue that, while Roy and Martínez’s humanizing narrations initially seem to facilitate authentic moments of recognition and consequential proximity to the subject, actually commodify, isolate and distance the spectator from subject, suggesting the extent to which each of these texts is ensnared in the process of reification and cannot ultimately transcend the inherent mystification of the political economy in which they operate.