D ERECHOS DEL HOMBRE /

‘So many people died and disappeared. That’s truly awful. From my point of view, I wanted them not to have been nameless and faceless.’

Jean Coleman

‘La figura del desaparecido es muy fuerte’ Elbio Ferrario

In the Parque de la Memoria there is a memorial in the form of a contemporary art installation that I particularly like. To get to it, you have to pass through the wall of names that comprise the Monument to the Victims of State Terrorism. The installation hugs the top of the hill. At the beginning it is not even clear that it is a memorial at all, but a series of wooden pikes that have been pierced into the ground at regular intervals. Only when you approach it from a certain angle do you notice the appearance of a face. The face, etched in black, is composed across the white wooden poles. It is imperfectly composed; its features are not seamless but jar a little, the poles not quite producing a perfect fit, a perfect smoothness to the image. The image’s lack of wholeness lets the background seep into focus. Through some of the poles you can see the river plate behind, framing as well as interrupting the scene. Still, you get the impression of the face, and the representation of a person. It is the face of a man. The man’s hair, all in black, is waspish and slightly unkempt. He appears to be wearing a tie, and a strict black line downwards is suggestive of a shirt collar, but the tie is bedraggled. His eyes are sad, and his mouth pulls this sadness downwards across his face. And then you walk around the memorial. As you do so, the face fades. It flickers at first, before disappearing again. So that all that you see now as you resume your journey back through the wall of names to the river down the slope on the opposite side is a series of poles all lined up in perfect order once more. It’s as if the image had never happened, the man’s face had never (re)appeared, never been conjured in our mind’s eye. Who is this person with whom we struggle so? We presume it is someone who was disappeared in the park that calls us to remember the disappeared. But the name of the sculpture doesn’t tell us. The name of the memorial is 30,000. What does 30,000 have to do with (the memory of) this man’s face?

In order to understand the politics of transition in Argentina, we need to understand the way that this politics is shaped and underpinned by a politics of memory. We can use the park of memory as a prism to refine the complex cultural constellations and reconstruct the expanded field of memory through which human rights organisations have sought to delineate the memory of the recent past violence and the parameters of this future politics. This means that

we need to go beyond trying to interpret the memorials of the park in isolation and seek to insert them in their temporally and spatially-inflected field of meaning (see chapter four). In this chapter, I propose to (re)construct the first part of a cultural biography of the

representation of the disappeared in the cultural frames of memory (see chapter three). This is intended as the first part of a conversation between the different ways the disappeared are represented in the memorials in the park and the ways that they have been represented and reconstructed over time in a diverse range of cultural, political and social frames since the disappearances began. This will be followed by a study of the way they are represented in the park in the next chapter.

My argument in this chapter is that the representation of the disappeared in Argentine collective memory has operated historically according to two logics, as a means of advancing two competing ways of doing politics in the wake of the enduring absences of the disappeared. I call these the political logics of memory. By a political logic of memory I take to mean the set of internal organising principles that govern the set of representations, discourses and practices through which meaning is attributed to the recent violent past and a project for a future politics is delineated. On the one hand, I will demonstrate how human rights groups have sought to delineate the frames of the memory of violence and reconfigure the field in order to construct the disappeared in collective memory as unique and irreplaceable persons, and grievable lives. In doing so, they have sought to elicit a moral and ethical response in mourning to the disappearances among a wider interpellated Argentine public. On the other hand, I will show how human rights groups – including potentially the same or different actors using the same or different frames – have fought to re-configure the frames of collective memory in such a way as to re-construct the disappeared as an anonymous and homogenous population of nameless and faceless figures. In representing the disappeared as ungrievable lives, these actors have sought to forestall the possibility of a social grieving and hold open instead the possibility of a politics of grievance.

I proceed in three parts. In the first two sections, I select from three frames each to show how the disappeared were represented by human rights activists as ‘persons-as-such’ (Edkins 2011) with a name, a face and an identity uniquely their own, or a population of nameless and faceless figures. I conclude in the third part by comparing the representation of the

disappeared as persons and figures, victims and martyrs, seeing these as emblematic of two political logics of memory within the same struggle to achieve truth and justice for the disappeared in which memory can be seen to have played a crucial role.