Historical Time, Memory Time: the Political Heart of History

MUDROVCIC, MARÍA INÉS

Ghent, Bélgica

Congreso; European Social Science History Conference; 2010

International Institute of Social History

Historical Time, Memory Time: the Political Heart of History In Sublime Historical Experience (Stanford University Press, 2005), F. Ankersmit distinguishes four types of forgettings, two of them are named trauma 1 and trauma 2 (321-7). The first two decades after World War II are an example of forgetting of what Ankersmit has named “trauma 1”. In this type of trauma the terrible painful experience is “forgotten”, “repressed”. But a reconciliation of experience and identity can be achieved as soon as the traumatic experience can be successfully subsumed in a “right story”. For Ankersmit, those “are changes in and not of our identities” (330) or to say it metaphorically “the building of new cities or highways are changes within the borders of our country, changes that leave these borders themselves unaffected”. However, Ankersmit recognizes that there are other variants of historical events which caused what he named the fourth type of forgetting or trauma 2. The French Revolution is an example of this second type of trauma that, unlike the Holocaust, provokes a definite rupture with a former identity. The previous world is lost for ever by the acquisition of a new identity. For Ankersmit, the Revolution is an ineluctable barrier between a pre-revolutionary world and a post-revolutionary world. The main difference between this type of trauma and trauma 1 is that the present is so utterly apart from the past that no story could restore the same identity. This past only can be the object of historical knowledge. The fracture is complete: “We have been ejected, expelled or exiled from the past, or rather, because of some terrible event (such as the French Revolution) a world in which we used to live naively fell apart into a past and a present” (328). If it is possible to restore the identity in trauma 1, this will be impossible in trauma 2. Until this point, we have stated Ankersmit´s viewpoint. This paper intends to deal with a question that underlies Ankersmit´s thesis but he does not posit: Why do some events bring out pasts as different worlds? Why do some events (like the French Revolution) and not others (like the Holocaust and Latin-American´s state terrorisms) provoke such a rupture with the present that they originate pasts that only can be objects of knowledge? How do those pasts arise? (pasts about which historians can write without challenging moral, political and juridical concerns of the present). When can an event “turn over the page” of history? Why would anybody say the same from the Holocaust or Latin-American state’s terrorism? Why do some events create historical regimes and others live under memory ones? This paper intends to deal with these questions specially focusing on Latin-American’s experience.