Identification, atonement and the moral psychology of violation: on Patricio Guzman’s Nostalgia for the Light^*

* This essay was presented as a plenary lecture at IACR 2018, held at Lillehammer, Norway in August 2018, and then at a seminar on Law and Violence at the Pontifical Catholic University, Valparaiso, Chile in January 2019. I am grateful to participants on both occasions for comments, and especially to Dr Daniela Jara for responding to the paper at PCU. Thanks also to Alison Ribeiro de Menezes and John King at Warwick for their comments.

ABSTRACT

This essay considers the nature of mourning and melancholia in light of Patrizio Guzman’s film, Nostalgia for the Light. It examines the position of three women dealing with the aftermath of Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile, in which their close family members were disappeared and murdered. It views their experiences through the lens of a moral psychology that is at once ethical and psychoanalytical. A key concept in both fields is loving identification, and this is linked to a desire to atone, in the original meaning of making whole or being ‘at one’ with another. It is argued that such a conception lies at the core of a moral psychology of guilt, and the analysis is then developed into an understanding of mourning and melancholia. The women in the film are understood as involved in a dual struggle: to mourn their lost loved ones, and to resist efforts to make them see themselves in melancholic terms.

KEYWORDS:

• Nostalgia for the Light
• identification
• atonement
• guilt
• mourning
• melancholia

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Alan Norrie writes on critical realism and legal and moral theory from a critical realist perspective. He is the author of Dialectic and Difference: Dialectical Critical Realism and the Grounds of Justice (Routledge 2010), Crime, Reason and History (3rd ed., Cambridge 2014) and Justice and the Slaughter Bench (Routledge 2017).

Notes

* This essay was presented as a plenary lecture at IACR 2018, held at Lillehammer, Norway in August 2018, and then at a seminar on Law and Violence at the Pontifical Catholic University, Valparaiso, Chile in January 2019. I am grateful to participants on both occasions for comments, and especially to Dr Daniela Jara for responding to the paper at PCU. Thanks also to Alison Ribeiro de Menezes and John King at Warwick for their comments.

1. For example, victimisation is real and needs to be addressed according to the violations that have occurred, but justice processes may construct victims according to political perceptions of who is the ‘good’ victim. See McEvoy and McConnachie (2012, 2013) and for a specific illustration, Hearty (2016).

2. Williams’s call for a naturalistic moral psychology in which ethical claims are compatible with naturalistic psychological explanation resonates with critical realism’s positions on ethical naturalism and moral realism. For critical realism, ethical naturalism is explicated in terms of the necessary transition between fact and value, while moral realism holds that morality is an objective property of the world, involving universal free flourishing in nature (Bhaskar 2016, 139). Williams’s naturalism is undeveloped, but concerns the necessary relationship between psychological being and ethical thinking, implying that the best ethics would be most compatible with how human beings are psychologically constituted. If the psychological and the ethical are connected, this suggests a link to critical realism’s argument for the existence of ‘the moral real’ developed out of the ontology of human species being in nature (Bhaskar 2016, 139). At the same time, it points to an underdeveloped element in critical realism, that of the psychological. This is what is described by Bhaskar as the ‘stratified character of the embodied personality’, one level in what he called ‘four planar social being’ (Bhaskar 2016, 53). In his early writing, Bhaskar (1979, 123, 140, 143; and see the discussion in Collier 1994) drew on Freud’s metapsychology, using his understanding of the unconscious to explicate certain aspects of human agency. Williams’s idea for a naturalistic moral psychology could be seen as inviting a convergence with this side of critical realist thought.

3. ‘In this way, psychoanalysis can be seen as an attempt to resume the ancient project of an ethics and politics grounded in and explained by a robust conception of human flourishing. This is the project the ancient Greek philosophers could not themselves complete.’ (Lear 2015, 17)

4. In describing the two accounts of guilt in Freud as ‘persecutory’ and ‘restorative’ or ‘reconciliatory’, I align Freud with Melanie Klein’s work on the two positions she describes as the ‘paranoid-schizoid’ and the ‘depressive’, while recognising the different approaches involved (Norrie 2020; on Klein, see Reeves 2018).

5. It is of course an open question for empirical investigation whether individual persons do or not.

6. On Valentina’s situation, see also Jessica Benjamin (2018, 233), who writes of her burden of feeling chosen to be saved by her grandparents at the cost of her parents’ lives, and of the role appearing in Nostalgia For The Light played in permitting her to break through her sense of dissociation.

7. Mourning is the reaction to the loss of a loved person, ‘or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as one’s country, liberty, an ideal, and so on’ (Freud 1984, 252).

8. For a brief overview of Guzman’s work prior to Nostalgia, and an interview with the director, see White (2012). In contrast to the view expressed here, White sees Nostalgia as an exercise in melancholia, since he sees it as communicating how ‘abuses of power are gradually, numbingly accepted’. He considers Valentina’s words (quoted above) about her children as ‘an even sadder expression of the national tragedy than silence and stony faces’ (how her grandparents are portrayed in the film) (White, 2012, 3–4). Yet, White’s interview with Guzman reveals a man committed to working with memory and against its denial, and to engagement with a new generation of Chileans who want to learn about a suppressed past history. For them, Guzman says, ‘I’m not old and there’s a meeting point and a rapport’. Melancholia is the fate of the previous ’lost’ generation, who grew up in the coup’s shadow, ‘many of whom detest me’ (White, 2012, 6).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Leverhulme Trust [grant number MRF-2014-122].