Bolaño may justifiably be considered among the least religious writers in the Spanish language, although not necessarily an antireligious one. Simultaneously, his areligious stance made it possible, even necesssary, for him to write works in which links between religion, literature, and Latin American culture are exposed and subjected to scathing critique. His narrative foregoes the use of religion as an artifice, as a “partial magic” to sacralize both the novel and the nation and endow them with a transcendent aura. However, Bolaño’s “romantic anarchism,” with its cynicism about politics and society in general, is counterbalanced by ethics. Bolaño’s reflections on religion and politics explore the worldly aspect of religion and the role of belief and credulity in politics, but also reflect on the dual religiopolitical aspect of literature itself, which is made particularly visible in and by the profession of literary criticism. In our postmodern age, Bolaño suggests, even as art and religion merge in their discourses, there is a further merger of both art and religion with politics. Contemporary art (including literature, of course) is for Bolaño a potentially perverse fusion of religion’s invocation of belief, politics’s thirst for power, and art’s own inherent powers of deceit and manipulation.

The emerging society of networks is no longer tied to territorial differentiation. The network form causes a rupture with established models of liability (individual or organisational liability), undermines the public/private liability divide, and also their regulation, now beyond the state. This third rupture in the knowledge base of society creates profound challenges for tort law. So far, the response in tort law has largely been deferential to definitions of acceptable risk that emerge from governance networks beyond territorial borders. This is explained by the uneven de-territorialisation of functional systems (economy vs law, and politics), and in particular by the failure of tort law to develop a convincing model of ascription for network failures. The chapter has two main tasks; first, it locates these problems within EU law because it is considered an avant-garde experiment in governing a society of networks. It is claimed that its product liability law offers novel solutions to problems of risk-responsibility under conditions of uncertainty. It also deepens our understanding of tort law as a venue for providing contestory, discursive spaces when systems discourses collide.