Hauntological Pasts in Comparative Perspective: Exploring Literature and Cinema in Spain and Argentina as Salvaging Endangered Democracies

MAURO GRECO

Conferencia; Rethinking Latin America: New Journeys Across Film and Literature Conference; 2024

University of Warwick

In this paper conference, I propose the first public communication of a research project I have been undertaking alongside the University of Compostela’s Professor César Dominguez since July 2023—the comparative and transdisciplinary analysis of both Argentine and Galician aesthetics depictions of Argentina’s (1976-1983) and Spain (1936-1975) recent pasts, to scrutinise the far-right resurgence in both countries (and in the case of Argentina, already at office.) My underlying hypothesis is that by analysing certain films and novels written from 2002, in the Spanish and Galician case, and from 2015, in Argentina following its worldwide recognised feminist wave, we can auscultate the persistent patterns of practices, structures of feelings, and social imaginaries stemming from both past dictatorships. In this sense, these dictatorships do not remain strictly or exclusively in the past but rather they hold a phantasmatic presence in the present. This is why my main theoretical informant will be Jacques Derrida’s contributions about the ghostly stubborn persistence of certain supposed past anachronisms (the figure of Marx, the idea of communism, etc.), only that in this the phantasmatic insistence hinges around two main questions I would like to pose. First, regarding the Argentine case, how can we take the manyfold juridical processes towards repressors as a worldwide distinction element, while the last dictatorship’s social and economic effects are still at work in everyday life? Second, regarding Spain, my research question proposes to critically interrogate who would resign economic stability, comfort, and prosperity by reopening the unresolved past wounds that divided and still divide Spanish society?