In this interdisciplinary thesis, I explore the work of Chilean experimental poet and visual artist Juan Luis Martínez (1942-1993). I present an in-depth analysis of a number of Martínez works, informed by philosophical, literary and visual arts perspectives, as well as the socialpolitical context of Pinochet’s dictatorship. Utilizing the concept of assemblage
[agencement] proposed by Deleuze and Guattari, I argue that Martínez’s works could be read as an artistic-ontological assemblage of appropriations. I begin by analysing the strategies employed by Martínez throughout his work to ‘deterritorialize’ the notion of modern authorship and original genius. I propose that Martínez reformulates the notion of the author as an ‘assembler of appropriations’. I then analyse Martínez’s The Chilean Poetry [La Poesía Chilena] (1978) as an assemblage of appropriations of Marcel Duchamp’s works that problematizes the notion of authenticity of the artwork (drawing on Benjamin´s aura) and the fascist notion of authentic national identity imposed by the Chilean dictatorship. Finally, I analyse La Nueva Novela as a labyrinth-house assemblage. I develop the different ‘images’ constituting the ‘house’ (informed by and appropriated from Bachelard, Mallarmé and the
Encyclopedic project) and the labyrinth (informed by and appropriated from Borges, Fresán, and Eco). I analyse the materiality, objecthood and visuality of the labyrinth-house, as well as the three main concepts or ‘circles’ of interiority composing La Nueva Novela: Childhood, the family and the book. I demonstrate the ways in which the rhizomatic-labyrinth disrupts these circles and opens them towards the ‘outside’ or, in Deleuze terms, the plane of immanence. Through my analysis I demonstrate the aesthetic, metaphysical and political tcapacity of Juan Luis Martínez’s ‘poetics of assemblage’.