Abstract
Chilean identity has gone through some profound changes since 1973, which have been driven by the changing relationship between the Chilean people and their own history. For many, the disruption of national narratives has had a profoundly unsettling effect. The sixteen years of military rule in Chile and its aftermath has had a deep impact on the country’s identity and this in turn has affected the conduct of both the country’s domestic and foreign policies. This chapter will argue that the Pinochet administration had a destabilizing effect on Chilean national narratives. Furthermore, it is argued that the policy adopted by the Concertación governments compounded the problem by attempting to move the country away from the past in order to achieve an elusive reconciliation. Theoretically, this chapter draws on philosophical insights on the nature of identity from post-Freudian psychology, primarily from the work of Jacques Lacan, who stresses both the centrality and the fragility of the process of identity formation. The role of history and historical narratives are also given prominence and in particular there is an acceptance of Walter Benjamin’s ideas on the intimate relationship between the past and the present.
A man is affected by the image of a past or future thing with the same emotion of joy or sorrow as that with which he is affected by the image of the present thing.
—Proposition XVIII. The Ethics, Spinoza
El problema es que, como no tenemos historia no tenemos … no somos … no tenemos identificación propia.
—Mujer, grupo de edad mixto, urbana, GSE alto1
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Notes
Gregory Weeks, “The ‘Lessons’ of Dictatorship: Political Learning and the Dictatorship in Chile,” Bulletin of Latin American Research 21: 3 (2002), p. 411.
Elizabeth Lira and Brian Loveman, Las ardientes cenizas de olvido (Santiago: Lom Ediciones, 2000), p. 520.
Jeffrey Puryear, Thinking Politics: Intellectuals in Democracy in Chile (Baltimore, MA; London: John Hopkins University Press, 1994).
Tomas Moulian concludes his Chile Actual (Santiago: Lom Arcis, 1997), with the words, “We have given up our hope of a new world,” p. 320.
Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, Essays and Reflections (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970);
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1962);
Benedict de Spinoza, Ethics (New York: Hafner, 1949).
Clifford Geertz, Towards an Interpretative Theory of Culture (New York: Basic Books, 1973).
See Erik H. Erikson, Childhood and Society (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1963);
Melanie Klein, The Psycho -Analysis of Children (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1973);
and Hernan Vidal, Política Cultural de la Memoria Histórica, Derechos Humanos y Discursos Cultural en Chile (Santiago: Mosquito Editores, 1997).
Jacques Lacan, The Language of the Self. The Function of Language in Psychoanalysis (Baltimore, London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1968), p. 18.
Jacques Lacan quoted in Malcolm Bowie, Lacan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 92.
Slavoj Zizek, “Fantasy as a Political Category,” in Wright, E. and Wright, E. (eds.), The Zizek Reader (Oxford, UK; Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1999), p. 99.
Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book 1, Freud’s Papers on Technique 1953–1954 (trans. by J. Forrester; ed. by J.-A. Miller) (New York: Norton, 1975), p. 167.
Francisco Orrego Vicuña, La Participación de Chile en el Sistema Internacional (Santiago: Editorial Nacional Gabriela Mistral, 1974), p. 85.
Slavoj Zizek, Tarrying with the Negative. Kant Hegel and the Critique of Ideology (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), p. 43.
E.J. Hobsbawn, Nations and Nationalism Since 1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990);
Anthony D. Smith, The Nation Invented, Imagined, and Reconstructed (Reno: University of Nevada, 1991);
and Wilbur Zelinsky, The Shifting Symbolic Foundations of American Nationalism (Chapel Hill: North Carolina Press, 1988).
See Anika Lemair, Jacques Lacan (London: Routledge and Kegan, 1977).
See Peter Kornbluh, The Pinochet File. A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability (New York: The New Press, 2003).
Hannah Arrendt, On Violence (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World 1969), p. 55.
Francisco Orrego Vicuña, “Trayectoria y orientaciones de la política exterior de Chile,” Seguridad Nacional (Santiago) 2 (September–October 1976), pp. 73–82.
Verónica Valdivia Ortiz de Zárate, “Estatismo y Neoliberalismo: Un Contrapunto Militar, Chile 1973–1979,” Historia (Santiago) 34 (2001), pp. 167–226.
See Leslie W. Hepple, “Metaphor, Geopolitical Discourse and the Military in South America,” in Barnes, T.J. and Duncan, J.S. (eds.), Writing Worlds: Discourse, Text and Metaphor in the Representation of Landscape (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 136–154.
See UNDP, Desarrollo Humano. Las Paradojas de la Modernización (New York: United Nations, 1998) and Desarrollo Humano. Nosotros los Chilenos.
This idea of “folding” is developed by Deleuze and Guattari. See Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London: Athlone Press, 1983), p. 19.
Giles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (trans. by Paul Patton) (London: Athlone Press, 1994), p. 80.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (trans. by Peter Winch) (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 76.
David Lowental, The Past is A Foreign Country (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 41.
Anthony Giddens writes of the “Prevalence of Historicity as a Mobilizing Force of Social Organization.” Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984), p. 245.
Manfred Wilhelmy and Cristián Fuentes, “De la reinserción a la diplomacia para el desarrollo: Política exterior de Chile 1992–1994,” in Van Klaveren, A. (ed.), América Latina en el mundo (Santiago: Propel Editorial los Andes, 1997), p. 233.
Cited in James Derian, On Diplomacy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), p. 38.
Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection (London: Tavistock Publications, 1977), p. 58.
Joaquín Fermandios, “De una Inserción a Otra: Política Exterior de Chile, 1966–1990,” in Estudios Internacionales 24:96 (October–December 1991), p. 454.
José Miguel Insulza, Ensayos sobre política exterior de Chile (Santiago: Editorial Los Andes, 1998), p. 53.
A reference to Pamela Constable and Arturo Valenzuela, A Nation of Enemies (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991).
See Lira and Loveman, Las ardientes cenizas de olvido; Ascanio Cavallo, Manuel Salazar, and Oscar Sepulveda, La Historia Oculta del Régimen Militar (Santiago: Editorial Grijalbo, 1997);
and Patricia Verdugo, Chile, Pinochet and the Caravan of Death (Miami: North–South Centre Press, 2001).
Brian Loveman, The Legacy of Hispanic Capitalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 316.
Alexander Wilde, “Irruptions of Memory: Expressive Politics in Chile’s Transition to Democracy,” Journal of Latin American Studies 31: 2 (1999), p. 486.
Norbert Lechner and Pedro Güell, “Chile: La política de la memoria,” in Menéndez, A. (ed.), La Caja de Pandora (Santiago: Planeta, 1999), p. 193.
Mark Ensalaco, Chile Bajo Pinochet. La Recuperación de la Verdad. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000). The phrase may be translated as “how economical.”
Zymunt Bauman, Life in Fragments. Essays in Post Modern Morality (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), p. 185.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), p. 40.
Lucia Dammert and Mary Fran T. Malone, “Fear of Crime or Fear of Life? Public Insecurities in Chile,” Bulletin of Latin American Research 22: 1 (2003), pp. 79–101.
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Mullins, M. (2006). The Effects of State Violence on National Identity: The Fate of Chilean Historical Narratives Post 1973. In: Fowler, W., Lambert, P. (eds) Political Violence and the Construction of National Identity in Latin America. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230601727_10
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