The Banality of Evil, Nunca Más and the Implicated Subject in Argentine Memory Spaces

ABSTRACT

The ambiguous relations and subjectivities associated with the banality of evil are peripheral to a dominant human rights discourse oriented around the binary logics of perpetrators and victims and dictatorship and democracy. The absence of non-binary subjectivities reflects a conceptual gap relating to questions of shared responsibility posed by Hannah Arendt more than half a century ago. Despite its ongoing relevance for reflecting on the production of systematic suffering, the banality of evil remains an incomplete theoretical project. Here, I bring recent elaborations on Arendt’s notion of the banality of evil, particularly Michael Rothberg’s Implicated Subjects, to bear on Argentine memory politics. I highlight the potential for the notion of the implicated subject to expand Argentine memory studies beyond the perpetrator-victim binary of the Nunca Más human rights discourse. Conceptual art and artistic approaches to memory may provide fruitful avenues for future exploration of implicated subjectivities and horizons of responsibility.

KEYWORDS:

• Banality of evil
• implicated subject
• Nunca Más
• Argentina
• memory

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Michael Rothberg, The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2019); Simona Forti, New Demons: Rethinking Power and Evil Today, trans. Z. Hanafi (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2015); Elizabeth Minnich, The Evil of Banality: On the Life and Death Importance of Thinking (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017); Iris Marion Young, Responsibility for Justice (New York: Oxford, 2011).

2. Rubén Chababo, “Una discusión pendiente: los breves segundos que dura el video basta para incriminar a cualquiera,” Perfil, January 21, 2017. http://www.perfil.com/columnistas/una-discusion-pendiente.phtml (accessed April 5, 2020).

3. CONADEP [Comisión Nacional sobre la Desaparición de Personas], Nunca más (Buenos Aires: Editorial Universitaria de Buenos Aires, 2013).

4. Emilio Crenzel, La historia política del Nunca Más: la memoria de las desapariciones en la Argentina (Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno, 2008); Emilio Crenzel, “Genesis, Uses, and Significations of the Nunca Más Report in Argentina,” Latin American Perspectives 42, no. 3 (2015): 20–38; Elizabeth Jelin, La lucha por el pasado: cómo construimos la memoria social (Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno, 2017).

5. Kensija Bilbija and Leigh Payne, “Time is Money: The Memory Market in Latin America,” in Accounting for Violence: Marketing memory in Latin America, ed. Kensija Bilbija and Leigh Payne (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2011), 1–40.

6. Robert Meister, After Evil: A Politics of Human Rights (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2012); Andrew Rajca, Dissensual Subjects: Memory, Human Rights, and Postdictatorship in Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay (Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press, 2018); Amy Sodaro, Exhibiting Atrocity: Memorial Museums and the Politics of Past Violence (New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ. Press, 2018).

7. Sodaro, 4.

8. Sebastien Carassai, The Argentine Silent Majority: Middle Classes, Politics, Violence, and Memory in the Seventies (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2014).

9. Carassai, 3.

10. Pablo Sirvén, Perón y los medios de comunicación. La conflictiva relación de los gobiernos justicialistas con la prensa, 1948–2011 (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 2011), 97.

11. Federico Finchelstein, The Ideological Origins of the Dirty War: Fascism, Populism, and Dictatorship in Twentieth Century Argentina (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2014), 160.

12. Diana Taylor, Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s “Dirty War” (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1997).

13. Juan Carlos Kusnetzoff, “Renegación, desmentida, desaparición y percepticidio como técnicas psicopáticas de la salvación de la Patria (Una visión psicoanalítica del informe de la Conadep),” in Argentina, psicoanálisis, represión política, ed. Abudara, Oscar, Comisión de Investigación Psicoanalítica sobre las consecuencias de la Represión Política (Buenos Aires: Kargieman, 1986), 95–114.

14. David Sheinin, Consent of the Damned: Ordinary Argentinians in the Dirty War (Gainesville: Univ. of Florida Press, 2012), 3.

15. Sheinin, 10.

16. Ana Soledad Montero, “Memoria discursiva e identidades políticas. Huellas y relatos del pasado reciente en el discurso político contemporáneo.” Paper given at “Problemas de investigación interdisciplinaria II: Violencias y memorias del pasado reciente,” Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata, Mar del Plata, Argentina, November 2013.

17. Silvia Schwarzböck, Los espantos: estética y posdictadura (Buenos Aires, Editorial Las Cuarenta, 2018), 23.

18. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1991), xii–xiii.

19. Rajca, 5.

20. Elizabeth Jelin, “Memoria y democracia: una relación incierta,” Revista Mexicana de Ciencias Políticas y Sociales 59, no. 221 (2014): 207–220.

21. Rubén Chababo, La piedra y el fusil: apuntes en torno al heroísmo y los lugares de memoria (Rosario: Casagrande, 2017).

22. Jean-Paul Sartre, “Paris bajo la ocupación,” in La república del silencio. Situations III, ed. Jean-Paul Sartre (Losada, Buenos Aires, 1968).

23. Theodor Adorno, “Education after Auschwitz,” in Education to Maturity, ed. Adorno, T. & Becker, Hellmut (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1971), 88–104.

24. Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Shocken Books, 2003); Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (NY: Penguin, 2006 [1963]); Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017).

25. Jonathan Dunnage, “Perpetrator Memory and Memories about Perpetrators,” Memory Studies 3, no. 2 (2010): 91–94; Mark Osiel, Mass Atrocity, Ordinary Evil, and Hannah Arendt: Criminal Consciousness in Argentina’s Dirty War (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2001).

26. CONADEP.

27. Bilbija and Payne, 19.

28. Valentina Salvi, De vencedores a víctimas: memorias militares sobre el pasado reciente en la Argentina (Buenos Aires: Editores Biblos Latitud Sur, 2012).

29. Rothberg, Implicated, 57.

30. Forti; Minnich; Rothberg, Implicated, 2019; Young, 2011.

31. Arendt, Eichmann, 135. Italics in original.

32. ———, Responsibility, 41.

33. Ibid., 44.

34. Ibid., 189.

35. Ibid., 111.

36. For example, see: Sheldon Wolin, “The Liberal/Democratic Divide: On Rawls’s Political Liberalism,” Political Theory 24, no. 1 (1996): 97–119.

37. Arendt, Responsibility, 124.

38. Ibid., 125.

39. Arendt, Eichmann, 288.

40. Ibid.

41. Forti, New Demons, 310.

42. Fredric Lordon, Willing Slaves of Capital: Spinoza & Marx on Desire (London: Verso, 2014); Steven Lukes, Power: A Radical View (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005 [1974]).

43. Forti, 227.

44. Ibid., 179.

45. Ibid., 9.

46. Minnich, 105.

47. Ibid., 95.

48. Ibid., 88.

49. Slavoj Žižek, On Violence (London: Verso, 2008).

50. Forti, 310.

51. Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2009).

52. Rothberg, Implicated, 1.

53. Ibid., 13.

54. Ibid., 199.

55. Ibid., 1.

56. Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/complicity#synonyms (accessed September 6, 2021).

57. Rothberg, Implicated, 13.

58. Ibid., 14.

59. Ibid., 9.

60. Ibid., 11.

61. Ibid., 1.

62. Ibid., 12.

63. Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2007), 23–24.

64. Young, 75.

65. Ibid., 76.

66. Ibid., 92. Italics in original.

67. Ibid., 182.

68. Manuel Cruz, On the Difficulty of Living Together: Memory, Politics, and History (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2016).

69. Nancy Fraser, “Reframing Justice in a Globalizing World,” New Left Review 36 (2005): 69–88.

70. Nora Hochbaum, “1. Memory,” in Parque de la memoria: monumento a las víctimas del terrorismo del estado, ed. Nora Hochbaum (Buenos Aires: Gobierno de Ciudad de Buenos Aires, 2017), 170–72, 170.

71. Rothberg, 199.

72. Lucas Massuco, “Dilemas y disputas al interior de una política de memoria: el caso del Museo de la Memoria de Rosario,” Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research 27, no. 2 (2021): 302–19; Vikki Bell, The Art of Post-dictatorship: Ethics and Aesthetics in Transitional Argentina (London: Routledge, 2014); Katherine Hite, Politics and the Art of Commemoration: Memorials to Struggle in Latin America and Spain (London: Routledge, 2012); Fernando Rosenberg, After Human Rights: Literature, Visual Arts and Film in Latin America, 1990–2010 (Pittsburgh: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 2016).

73. Florencia Battiti, “3. Art. The Itineraries of a Curatorial Project,” in Parque de la memoria: monumento a las víctimas del terrorismo del estado, ed. Nora Hochbaum (Buenos Aires: Gobierno de Ciudad de Buenos Aires, 2017), 179–84, 179.

74. Battiti, 180.

75. Ibid.

76. Luis Camnitzer, Didáctica de la liberación: arte conceptualista latinoamericano (Montevideo: Casa Editorial Hum, 2008); Diana Taylor, Performance (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2019).

77. Mari Carmen Ramírez, “Tactics for Thriving on Adversity: Conceptualism in Latin America, 1960–80,” in Inverted Utopias: Avant-garde Art in Latin America, ed. Mari Carmen Ramírez and Hector Olea (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2008), 425–439, 435.

78. Chantal Mouffe, Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically (London: Verso, 2013), 77, 93.

79. Hal Foster, Bad New Days: Art, Criticism, Emergency (London: Verso, 2015); Santiago Zabala, Why Only Art Can Save Us: Aesthetics and the Absence of Emergency (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2017).

80. Foster, 4.