Between Documentality and Imagination: Five Theses on Curating the Violent Past

This article considers the notion that to document or inscribe our lives not only leaves a trace of our creaturely presence, but may also become a form of juris-writing, a writing that concerns and aims at Justice. Employing an expanded notion of Justice that takes it beyond the institutions of law, therefore, it asks about forms of documentality (Ferraris) that put us ‘before memory’ in Derrida’s sense. How is it possible to think curation in relation to a violent past in such a way that neither attempts to deny the lacunae nor surrenders in the face of the difficulties of such attempts? How should we consider the relation between the delimited encounter with an ‘invitation to imagine’ (Didi-Huberman) and processes of institutionalisation that build a society? What about those things that it is not possible to show, including relations of power, that arise analytically? Reflecting on current memory spaces, especially within ex-clandestine centres for detention, torture and extermination (ex-ccdtyes) in Argentina, the article offers five theses in order to consider what is at stake in the encounters staged at these sites

From la guerra sucia to 'A Gentleman's Fight': war, disappearance and nation in the 1976–1983 Argentine dictatorship

Analysing the last Argentine dictatorship in the light of contemporary re-examinations of war, this article argues that the 1976–1983 dictatorship can be understood as a shift in war(s), from la guerra sucia to the Falklands/Malvinas conflict, from a limitless and unsustainable internal war to a bracketed external war. That external war is shown to be an attempt to re-found a nation imploding through disappearance. Drawing on the history of disappearance in Argentina reveals that, despite obvious differences, there are many continuities between the dictatorship and other regimes, emphasising the dangers of a politics that encourages a nation 're-malvinizada'