Abstract
This chapter is an unprecedented investigation into the testimony of Adolfo Scilingo, a Navy lieutenant during the Argentine dictatorship and official state murderer of over 30 political prisoners, and de facto leader of the junta, General Jorge Videla. I first take on the famous text of his confession to journalist Horacio Verbitsky, El vuelo and argue for the necessary understanding of his confession as a failure of the strength of dictatorship and state terrorism to maintain its commitment to the specified logic of individuation. I then take Videla’s confession to illustrate the movement of the specified as the formation of a bellic subjectivity.
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Notes
- 1.
Hallward argues against this point, saying instead that “to accept a specific configuration is to drop the notion of an intrinsic orientation or automatic prescription—say, an inherently ethical responsibility for others” (333). Instead, he argues that the specific must remain as part of the realm of decision, as the point of departure for individuation and community signification:
All we can say is that only a specific configuration provides for decision as such, as opposed to specified automation on the one hand and singular inherence on the other. The question of how any given relation is to be valued will always remain a matter of active valuing, with all the properly subjective responsibility that it implies.
I suggest that Hallward here falls into an aporia, as the “active valuing” of the specific requires a form of valuation that incorporates the radical possibility of indifference to the contingencies of the subject and his community. Valuation must be a decision against a type of difference that reduces communitarian possibility. Although as Hallward suggests, “any specific process is value-neutral,” I argue that only the possibility of a radically pluralistic and subjectively neutral configuration can satisfy the specific—in other words, a radical democracy that unites all subjects in the decision-making process of their specific possibilities.
- 2.
The literature on the development and definition of the Proceso de Reorganización Nacional is extensive and continues growing nearly 30 years after the fall of the dictatorship. Two of the most widely cited and discussed works are Hugo Quiroga’s El tiempo del “proceso”: Conflictos y coincidencias entre políticos y militares, 1976–1983 (2004), and Guillermo O’Donnell’s Las Fuerzas armadas y el estado autoritario del Cono Sur de América Latina (1985).
- 3.
La Prensa June 31, 1976, n.p.
- 4.
José Luis Romero, Breve historia de la Argentina (1998).
- 5.
There is still notable discrepancy around the numbers of disappeared victims. The CONADEP report numbered approximately 9000 dead, while as recently as in 2009, former Argentine president and current Secretary of Human Rights has supported the current number of 30,000 murdered (La Nación, August 4, 2009 Online edition) as a credible figure. Nonetheless, the question of counting the victims of the dictatorship is still part of a fractious political and historical debate.
- 6.
Paul H. Lewis, Guerrillas and Generals: The “Dirty War” in Argentina (2002).
- 7.
The seminal document on the victimization of the era is certainly that of the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons: Nunca Más: informe de la Comisión Nacional Sobre la Desaparición de Personas (1984).
- 8.
For a representation of this situation, see http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/3673470/Argentinas-dirty-war-the-museum-of-horrors.html (accessed March 17, 2012).
- 9.
His own military chaplain, the well-known Father Alberto Ángel Zanchetta, director of the Military Bishopric of Argentina absolved Scilingo’s sins during a confession and labeled the death flights “una forma cristiana de la muerte” (Verbitsky 22).
- 10.
Paul Lewis’ text Guerrillas and Generals: The “Dirty War” in Argentina (2002) is one of the most detailed histories specifically treating the relationship between insurgency and the attitudes of the military dictatorship. Lewis’ central thesis is that the Dirty War’s violence was a legacy of the fundamental antagonism against civil society, ubiquitous since the earliest manifestation of democracy in the 1920s.
- 11.
Marguerite Feitlowitz’s chapter “The Scilingo Effect: The Past is a Predator,” from her book A Lexicon of Terror (2011), serves as the historical substrate for this chapter. There are a wide number of sophisticated and powerful histories on this era, several of which are included in the bibliography of this current project.
- 12.
For a detailed account of Alfonsín’s capitulation to military pressure, please see Jonathan Brown’s A Brief History of Argentina (2011).
- 13.
This moment in history is narrated in elegant and near exhaustive detail in Rodolfo Walsh’s book on the José León Suárez killings, Operación Masacre (2006 [1957]). Walsh, a Montonero himself, was one of the most renowned victims of the Proceso junta, died defending himself against Navy soldiers attempting to extrajudicially arrest him.
- 14.
There is an extensive bibliography of histories on the Dirty War period that help substantiate the overall powerlessness of Argentina’s subversives to effect radical regime change. Some of the most interesting and detailed, concerning the strength of the insurgency are: María de los Ángeles Yannuzzi’s Los años oscuros del proceso (1991), Marcelo Larraquy’s De Perón a Montoneros: La violencia política en la historia Argentina (2010), and Patricia M. Marshak’s God’s Assassins: State Terrorism in Argentina in the 1970s (1999).
- 15.
Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (1996).
- 16.
For a deeper development of Videla’s public pronouncements and vacillations concerning the Dirty War, please see María Seoane and Vicente Muleiro’s, El Dictador: La historica secreta y pública de Jorge Rafael Videla (2001).
- 17.
The seminal text on the issue of testimony in Latin America is John Beverley’s, Testimonio: On The Politics of Truth (2004).
- 18.
Immediately after the publication of El vuelo, a series of texts emerged from former torturers such as Miguel Etchecolatz, Alfredo Astiz, and others.
- 19.
Here I am referring to two seminal works in the Levinasian tradition of subjectivity studies, Gabriela Basterra’s Seductions of Fate, Tragic Subjectivity, Ethics, and Politics, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004, Print; and Erin Graff Zivin’s Figurative Inquisitions: Conversion, Torture, and Truth in the Luso-Hispanic World, Chicago, Northwestern University Press, 2015, Print. I address these notions influenced by Levinasian phenomenology and Derridean deconstruction in order to deconstruct the notion of an unstable core to subjectivity by illustrating the immutability of force in the interpellation of a subject.
- 20.
Reato p. 44.
- 21.
Hallward, 22.
References
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Verbitsky, Horacio. El vuelo. Buenos Aires: Planeta, 1995. Print.
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Yannuzzi, María de los Ángeles. Los años oscuros del proceso. Buenos Aires, Argentina: UNR Editora, 1991. Print.
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Amador, C.M. (2016). The Scilingo Effect and the Specified. In: Ethics and Literature in Chile, Argentina, and Paraguay, 1970-2000. Literatures of the Americas. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54633-3_5
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