Memories, Representations and Working through Genocides

DANIEL FEIERSTEIN

The Humanities and Healing

Korean National Commission for UNESCO

Lugar: Seúl; Año: 2014; p. 127 - 150

This paper analyzes the consequences of terror on the identities of genocide survivors. It starts from the assumption that genocide in the modern world seeks to transform and reorganize the social fabric. Massive state violence is thus seen as instrumental and serving a broader objective: the breakdown, destruction, and transformation of the identity of the survivors. This approach is rooted in Raphael Lemkin´s pioneering definition of genocide, but also in a careful analysis of the socio-political outcomes of Nazism and Stalinism, as well as those of the National Security doctrine, a counterinsurgency strategy developed by the CIA in the 1950s and 1960s and later implemented throughout Latin America. Although the focus of this paper is on the genocide carried out by Argentina?s last military government between 1976 and 1983, the example chosen can equally serve as an historical analogy for other cases of modern genocide. Of particular importance for comparative genocide studies, the paper examines how different legal definitions of social conflict, war, genocide, and crimes against humanity give rise to different narratives and different types of collective memory. In particular, it considers the impact these definitions have had or may have in the future on the collective working through of the traumatic experience in terms of memory, representation, and identity. It shows how each narrative mode of representation (war, genocide, crimes against humanity) defines and constructs the victims and the perpetrators in different ways. It also shows how each of these modes leads to analogies with different historical events, suggesting different causal explanations for what occurred and stimulating very different modes of intergenerational transmission and ways of relating to the present and to others.