Abstract
To consider how individual memory may be structurally transformed by trauma is to make space for the ideas of repetition compulsion, entrapment, re-enactment, embodied memories and trauma’s own temporal regimes. This is precisely what I intend to do in this chapter. Drawing extensively on Charlotte Delbo’s notion of “deep memory”, I will consider those mnemonic layers that are inaccessible to consciousness or control, inexpressible and uncontainable in language, lodged deeply within a survivor’s body, prone to involuntary eruptions. How may the discussion of Argentina’s politics of memory be altered if you choose to incorporate such memories into the conversation about remembering and forgetting of the violent pasts?
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Notes
- 1.
The human rights movement and certain academic and judicial circles in Argentina compare disappearances that occurred under military rule with the Holocaust. These groups advocate that genocide also occurred in Argentina (Robben 2012).
- 2.
Grunebaum and Henri (2003) highlight how survivors of traumatic violence can experience further disembodiment when their personal memories of violence are silenced and edited out of public memory in the name of nation-building. Their discussion reveals how commissioners of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) would interrupt survivors’ oral testimonies in response to their own feelings of personal discomfort at hearing the details of extreme violence especially that inflicted on women. They investigate how the narrative structure of the TRC process covered over “problematised” personal memory by constructing a public memory based on heroism, sacrifice and redemption (Grunebaum and Henri 2003).
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Stockwell, J. (2014). Deep Memory. In: Reframing the Transitional Justice Paradigm. Springer Series in Transitional Justice, vol 10. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-03853-7_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-03853-7_5
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