P ENA DE MUERTE /

‘After burial and commemoration, the disappeared no longer exist in a powerfully liminal state.’

Zoë Crossland

‘Suffering and losses are necessary but not sufficient conditions for victimhood. Innocence is needed too.’

Antoine Prost

Following the terrorist attacks on the twin towers, the contorted dust and debris of Ground Zero was carted off to be unceremoniously dumped at the nearby Fresh Kills facility where it could be sorted. Bodily remains along with other personal artefacts were painstakingly sifted from the non-sentient debris and taken to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner to be identified using forensics. Not all remains could be positively matched. There was post-mortem destruction of DNA from the heat, fire and water of the atrocity and the subsequent recovery operation. Those that could not be identified were stored next to the offices of the OCME and a makeshift chapel constructed. The purpose of the chapel was to provide family members with a space in which they could reflect and mourn their loss, and give those who didn’t have anything to bury ‘their mausoleum, their cemetery, their sacred space’ (Edkins 2011:129). These remains were due to be transferred to the new 9/11 Memorial Museum. There is talk of a memorial being erected at Fresh Kills. As with the Park of Memory, the idea of a memorial to the victims is controversial. The mother of one victim, Diane Horning, was particularly upset with the idea that this memorial would act as a kind of symbolic cemetery. ‘Only if my son is symbolically dead’ would she accept such an idea, she said, ‘but if he’s really dead then I really want him buried’ (2011:128).

In this chapter, I wish to make the case for the Park of Memory to be thought of as a symbolic cemetery. This idea is controversial to relatives of the victims. There are three parts to my argument. Firstly, the Memory Park provides a space in which family members and others are able to perform the affective and embodied memory of the desaparecidos as the disembodied dead (Sion 2015). The material bodies of visitors and the body of the monument stand in as a ‘surrogate’ (Sion 2015:74) for the missing bodies of the disappeared to allow the rituals of mourning and memory to take place. Indeed, the names etched on the monumental wall form a synecdoche that stands in symbolico-materially for the lives that were extinguished in such a way as to create suspicion as to whether they had been lived at all. The names are proof of life

for their families. Secondly, through the performance of rituals of memory and mourning in the park, family members can be thought to bring about what Diane Horning referred to as the symbolic deaths of the disappeared. By offering flowers or touching the name on the

monument as if it were the headstone on a grave, relatives not only ‘give body’ (Sion 2015:74) but performatively “give death” to those whose forced disappearances had previously

suspended them along the impossible ontological threshold and liminality of a living death. As a symbolic exchange between one who is left and one who is lost (Winter and Sivan 1999:38), such rituals instantiate the fluid – though no longer liminal – boundary between the living and the dead in the act of transcending it. Thirdly, if we can think of this as a kind of symbolic death, performed through rituals that take place in a symbolic cemetery, then it is a death performed and performatively enacted at a symbolic cemetery of the innocents. The

performance of these rites by a broader constituency than merely the family members of the disappeared is conditional upon the construction of the innocence of the victims in the same cultural rituals and representations, without which social recognition as a means to social mourning would not take place (Winter 2014, Winter and Sivan 1999, Butler 2006, 2010). Though the events being remembered are often described as the loss of innocence of a nation (Sturken 2007), the representation of the disappeared through the vehicle of their names and faces on the monumental walls and other memorials is not innocent but rather a deliberate depoliticisation that makes their mourning possible.

My argument in this chapter then, as I look to close this thesis, is that the park’s invitation to visitors to mourn the disappeared through its creative use of architecture and space is not an apolitical process but rather a powerful and paradoxical political depoliticisation that is designed to stimulate an affective response among an interpellated audience in order to keep politics at bay. Through the symbolically-charged practices of embodied memory and affective mourning, the disappeared as the disembodied dead are re-signified and socially re-

constructed; de-discursivised from any notion of their being subversives or terrorists they are at the same time re-discursivised as innocent victims who are re-codified in collective memory through these act of mourning as persons who happened to be caught up in a violence they played no part in. The performing of mourning and innocence combine to strip the conflict of any political hues or historical complexity it may have had. By reconfiguring the disappeared to “fit” the existing frames of (the memory of) war and norms of recognisability (Butler 2006, 2010) rather than reconfiguring the frames and norms themselves, mourning works to keep everything as it finds it. In so doing, it makes it less likely that the violence that culminated in the disappearances might “never again” re-appear in its different guises in the future.

I proceed in three stages. I begin by surveying the range of social practices that situate in the park. I read these practices through Brigitte Sion’s (2015) notion of affective architecture and embodied memory in order to arrive at an understanding of the monument and the somatic bodies of its visitors as ‘surrogates’ which stand in symbolically for the bodies of the

disappeared in the mourning rituals they allow to take place. I deepen this interpretation slightly by considering the names on the monumental wall as a deeply humane response and form of synecdoche in the wake of the destruction of the bodies and lives of the disappeared. I then consider the idea of the park as a form of cemetery in more detail, borrowing from the scholarship on the history of death in order to problematize the rejections of key stakeholders. In the final section, I tease out the significance of the monumental naming of the disappeared. Drawing from Marita Sturken’s (2007) work on the tourism of history, I show that the

membrane between disembodiment and embodiment is politics. I argue that this membrane can only be negotiated and the circle of remembrance squared through the simultaneous performance of the innocence of victims in the performances of their memory and mourning. I support my reflections throughout with first-hand interviews with some of the key

stakeholders in the Argentine human rights community, beginning with Madre de Plaza de Mayo Taty Almeida.