Collective responsibility and small resistances: Aesthetic representations and ethnographic analysis of the neighbours of clandestine detention centres during the last Argentine dictatorship

MAURO GRECO

Conferencia; Navigating the Grey Zone: Complicity, Resistance and Solidarity; 2018

University of Edinburgh

In my doctoral thesis (Greco, 2016), I studied collective responsibility and ?small resistances? during the last civil-military dictatorship in Argentina (1976-1983). The first methodological problem I encountered was that ?collective? can easily be an abstraction. Thus, I concentrated on a particular social-geographical sector: the neighbours and neighbourhoods of Argentine clandestine detentions centres (CDC), where those kidnapped by the State were tortured and executed. This is where one of the key inventions of Argentine political philosophy was born: ?los desaparecidos? (?the disappeared?). Focusing on the neighbours of the CDC, I analysed the ways that postdictatorial literature and cinematography represented collective responsibility and small resistances in Argentine society from 1983 to 2013. Nonetheless, since I was interested in dimensions that went beyond artistic representation, I compared these images with the self-representations of the neighbours and the(ir) past using personal interviews. One of many conclusions I came to was the following: the issue of collective responsibility, similar to Sartre?s writings about the ?Jewish problem?, is not so much a problem among the collectives responsible, but rather among a political and academic minority, which is also responsible, interested in those years and objects of study. This latter group aims to always remember, aware of the danger ?in the classical and problematic formula? that those who forget the past are bound to repeat it. Better said, I found the importance of the category ?ordinary men and women? during my study of this topic. Perhaps it is time for a clarification of my understanding of the concepts of ?collective responsibility? and ?little resistances?. Regarding the first, it is worth noting that the conceptual frame is mainly philosophical and German: the works of Karl Jaspers and Hanna Arendt, even those of Hans Jonas and ?including a French reference? Emmanuel Levinas, are the principal authors on the issue of collective responsibility of a society for the radical events that occur within it. To compensate, at least in my past doctoral research and in my current postdoctoral grant, the references in regards to the idea of ?small resistances? come from France: Foucault and his concept of ?microphysical resistances?, Certeau and his notion of the ?tactics of the weak? in opposition to the ?strategy of the strong?, and, finally, the classic work of Debord on the ?spectacle?. These concepts were useful in considering a certain type of resistance: small resistance, in first-person, the neighbour ?who is always responsible, according to Arendt? who decided, in a particular moment and in the context of his neighbourhood, not to collaborate directly with the military just across the street.