Event overview
The third in the spring series of the Research Seminar on the Theory, Practice and History of Performance.
Wine is served. All are welcome.
Abstract
The past returns and is re-turned. That is, when its recall is requested by a present configuration, it is called back not in general but for present purposes, in order to settle questions and relations in the present. This paper discusses this process of returning the past within a criminal court, and contrasts the process of recall for legal ends with those of the tours that one can now make of the most infamous of Argentina's ex-centre of detention, the ESMA. Based on my own observations and those of lawyers involved in the prosecutions, this chapter begins with scenes from the mega-causa (trial) of those repressors involved in the capture, torture and murder of thousands at ESMA, exploring the obliged recall of survivors who become witnesses obliged to remember in order that the legal process can proceed (and never to read, since as one incident shows, the law disciplines those who attempt to use mnemonic devices such as lists). On October 26th 2011, the long-awaited trial of eighteen defendants involved in the crimes against humanity committed at ESMA concluded. Sixteen were found guilty, among them important figures such as Jorge “Tigre” Acosta, chief of intelligence and of the Grupo de Tareas 3.3.2 which co-ordinated many of the disappearances from within ESMA, and Alfredo Astiz, well known for his infiltration of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo and murder of the two French nuns, Leonie Duquet and Alice Domon, for which he was found guilty in absentia by a French court in 1990. The court (Tribunal Oral Federal No. 5) handed down sentence of between 18 years and life imprisonment (without parole) for 86 separate crimes of illegitimate deprivation of liberty, torture and murder. The trial had involved an oral stage of over two years in which more than 200 witnesses, over 80 of these survivors of ESMA, testified. These testimonies made the trial a theatrical, performative site of what Guiliano has called ‘public intimacy’. The law demands that this is so, because it requires that facts, especially identities and dates, are confirmed in the oral stage. Compelled by the law, the past is returned in the court, as the witness-survivors and relatives speak to both the immediate horizon of the trial (the verdict and sentencing) as well as to the horizon that an archive of such accounts might open onto as their ‘historical outcry’ is set down for future generations. The paper shows how the trial cannot respond to these embodied testimonies, as Felman argued in a different context, even if it demands them. It produces and then reduces them, and this is law’s task; we cannot expect or request that it attend to all that it returns. Much that fills the courtroom cannot become the object of law’s reflection, including the affective climate, even as it is noted. Law is a ‘reduction achievement’ and we can only ask that it respond in terms of law (Christodoulidis, 2001). And while it was painful for many to hear the justifications for State violence reiterated by the defendents, this was necessary because the law must show its responsibility before Memory, as Derrida argued. Indeed, the court is obliged to listen, to consider the justice of its actions. Judges must not only apply the law but consider it, confirm its value as they assume and approve it. As they waited for the verdict and sentence to be announced, the suspense of the law of which Derrida wrote, was keenly felt, and not only in the crowds waiting outside the courts in Buenos Aires, but also around the world. Sociologically, the paper argues that the moments of suspense the society beyond the court imagines and pledges are commitments to alternative modes of being-with-others, as they do whenever and wherever they act in concert, discuss and create, accept and reject propositions about the past and the possible future. The paper ends by returning to the site of these crimes, to the building of ESMA, which is now an Espacio para la Memoria, an official Site of Memory where through pedagogic, artistic and activist participation, people come together to make sense of the past, or else just to simply reclaim the site of horror in different cultural activities including music and cinema. However, that part of the site where the desaparecidos were held has been left empty, and tours can be taken of it. The paper considers how this strategy has achieved its intended aims, arguing that as one moves through the real architecture of past events, one is invited to adopt Benjamin’s collector’s spirit, picking up fragments. The reading of fragments, clues and traces is a lonely experience of space – an ‘affective architecture’ of sorts - that may throw one back upon the conditions of possibility in a mode of ethico-political contemplation that the emptiness was intended to provoke. This is a strategy also adopted by the documentary film ‘El Predio’ by Perel. Yet this strategy is open to dangers, the paper concludes, with reference to subsequent experiences of taking the tour of ESMA.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 6 Mar 2013 | 4:30pm - 6:00pm |
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