Hunt, hell, martyrdom... doubles? The limits of representation and historical massacres

KWIATKOWSKI, NICOLÁS

París

Conferencia; Seminario EHESS; 2020

EHESS

The last military dictatorship in Argentina was responsible for the violent, systematic and clandestine murder of thousands of citizens between 1976 and 1983, a unique event in my country?s history. These facts have created a social need to better comprehend what really happened during those years, to search for the causes and conditions that made horror possible. For ten years, between 2004 and 2014, I was part of a group of researchers that have tried to trace the links of textual and visual representations to the possibility of an understanding of this traumatic past. But the Argentine case is a recent example of a more general phenomenon, the historical massacre, which has troubled historians since classical antiquity, because of the difficulty inherent to its narration. Today, I will first define what a historical massacre is. Then, I will explain the theoretical grounds for my research, which attempts to find representational formulae that have been used to portray historical massacres. Thirdly, I will briefly show the three formulae that we have found so far. The fourth and longest portion of my lecture will be devoted to the findings José Burucúa and I published in a book a few years ago, which point to the possibility of the emergence of a new formula: the multiplication of the Doppelgänger.