Final Report Summary - NOT (Narratives of Terror and Disappearance. Fantastic Dimensions of Argentina' s Collective Memory since the Military Dictatorship)
The social difficulties that emerge along with the figure of the 'disappeared' can be observed in religious family rituals of grief (research project Feierstein). As long as the corpses are not provided, no burial can take place. The concerned families struggle with the problem that mourning, in Freud’s understanding of ‘Trauerarbeit’, is not possible in the face of disappearance, but highly necessary in order to heal the wound and to give sense to life again. A comparative approach to Jewish and Catholic practices confirms that grief and (infinite) mourning is the kernel (Abraham/Torok 1994) of the phantasmagoric intergenerational inheritance, which oscillates between the demand for justice (Derrida 1993) and the impossibility to let live.
The spatial dimension of terror (research project Estela Schindel) is locally reflected by more than 500 former clandestine detention centers on the Argentinean territory. Embedded in the urban structure, they provoked paradoxical, destabilizing effects: the disappeared were 'nowhere' and at the same time 'physically close'. The clues of horrible crimes like torture and murder that were committed right next door without really knowing it created an atmosphere in which extraordinary and inconceivable horror stories dislocated the perception and practices of daily life in the urban centers.
In Buenos Aires the ex-detention centers have been reclaimed by civic actors who deal with and counteract these effects through coherent narratives and practices that allow the neighbors and visitors to reintegrate the spatial presence of terror into a political and historical context. We have observed that, despite the indelible persistence of the void, these counter-narratives provide effects of social transformation through activity. In the majority of the current public trials against perpetrators (research project Rosario Figari), disappearances are treated as a homicide. The naming of the crime, its date, and those responsible initiates the transformation of the liminal, indeterminate terror to a narrative of horror which denominates, concretizes and humanizes the atrocities of the acts. While terror presents itself as inalterable, horror can be resisted and confronted (Punter 1996: 240). The juridical discourse aims to defy terror not only through the testimony of the victims, but also through the historical and political contextualization of the verdicts. The court acts like a social transformer: it exposes publicly the certainty of a horror whose principal creator and executor is man.
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