Memory and justice in Argentina's dirty war, reading the limits of national reconciliation

grantor: University of TorontoThe thesis considers the limits of the legal representational strategy in post-dictatorship Argentina. It sketches the ethical consequences of the seemingly benign suggestion, that the retelling of a traumatic event through the protocols of the law can provide a lesson that fosters national reconciliation. The apparent pedagogical "soundness" of transmitting the traumatic event, through legal commemoration, will be complicated by considering how the law is employed as a mechanism for bounding knowledge. Hence, the thesis will explore how in its desire to limit its own loss of legitimacy, the nation attempts to transcribe the traumatic event into a contained and exemplary legal narrative that privileges national reconciliation over all other concerns. A fundamental concern for the thesis is with how to pay attention to what remains on the way to reconciliation. This concern with what has been excluded, or repressed by the legal-narrative of the event, points to an ethical reading practice which is able to read the limits of representation. The thesis will unfold how this reading of the limits introduces a notion of "justice" which always exceeds and exposes the lack in any present norms or laws. Consequently, the thesis will ask what does this reading of the limits imply for the writing and transmission of history.M.A