Centro Cultural de la Memoria Haroldo Conti
In this international conference we propose to address the problem of memory from a critical perspective across different geopolitical contexts: post-dictatorial, post-colonial, post-war and civil conflict, and with respect to ongoing forms of discrimination and state violence. How, we ask, do differing contexts set the stage for various political formulations of memory? We take as our point of departure the articulation among truth, justice, and human rights as it bears upon a politics of the state and responds to the insistent demand to provide an ethical safeguard against the erasure of the violent past and to resist the neoliberal condensation of a time void of historicity and morality.
This occasion for shared reflection will strive to examine the different aesthetics and politics of remembrance, distinguishing, on the one hand, those which, in the name of reconciliation, suture the conflicted character of unfulfilled memory and those which, on the other, focus on insubordinate scenes— theoretical, poetic, and aesthetic—that track the convulsions of the past as well as the non-integrated fragments of residual memory. We seek to develop a critique of memory with the power to de-center the monumental and totalizing narratives of the past and to expose the latent promise of their fractures. The past persists in the present not only as traumatic imprint but also as an active demand for justice and reparation. The aim of critical memory studies is to safeguard the endurance of the past in all that has been achieved—the archives, the centers, the social movements and activism, the campaigns for public awareness—in the aftermath of violence. These achievements provide guiding principles for the expansion of the field of human rights into contemporary struggles for emancipation.
At stake is the task of expanding the contours of democracy, taking into account the effects of neoliberalism on subjectivities and memory—social precarity as well as ideologies of risk, insecurity, and self entrepreneurship. This critical approach to memory requires taking up debates concerning the state and the public sphere, the transformations of the university and the reconfiguration of current intellectual concerns in relation to new political constellations. This project in critical memory will also take up the critical and performative dimensions of art, the new arrangements by which subjectivity and gender are deconstructed and re-invented, as well as those issues mobilizing women’s collectives and the multiple activisms of sexual dissidence.
If all memory is embodied in the present and leaves its mark on our time, a time of great uncertainty, the greatest challenge is perhaps to think together the singularity and proximity of dissimilar experiences, a precondition for imagining any possible future of memory and of critique.
La memoria en la encrucijada del presente. El problema de la justicia
10-12 de Abril 2019
Centro Cultural de la Memoria Haroldo Conti
Buenos Aires, Argentina
En este encuentro internacional nos proponemos abordar la problemática de la memoria desde una perspectiva crítica, en su candente actualidad en diferentes contextos -post-dictaduras, guerras, enfrentamientos, discriminación, violencias de Estado- y en la diversidad de sus políticas, a partir de la articulación entre verdad, justicia y derechos humanos en tanto política de Estado, como resguardo ético frente a la borradura del pasado y la conformación neoliberal de un tiempo sin historicidad ni moral.
Esta reflexión compartida tenderá a examinar las distintas retóricas y políticas del recuerdo, a distinguir, por un lado, las que, en nombre de la reconciliación, suturan la conflictividad de la memoria insatisfecha y, por el otro, aquellas escenas insumisas -teóricas, poéticas, estéticas- que rastrean lo convulso del pasado desde las partículas no-integradas de memorias residuales. Tal crítica de la memoria es indispensable para descentrar las narrativas monumentales y totalizadoras, mostrando sus fracturas, la persistencia del pasado en el presente no solo como huella traumática sino como reclamo activo de justicia, reparación, salvaguarda de lo conseguido -ni un paso atrás- y experiencia rectora para la ampliación del campo de los derechos humanos a formas diversas de emancipación.
Se trataría entonces de ampliar los contornos de la democracia atendiendo a los efectos que el neoliberalismo produce en las subjetividades –precarización social, ideologías del riesgo, inseguridad, empresariado de sí- pero incluyendo también, junto a los reclamos de justicia social y equidad retributiva, los debates en torno a lo estatal y lo público, las transformaciones de la universidad y la reconfiguración de activos focos de intelectualidad crítica, la performatividad del arte y los nuevos agenciamientos de deconstrucción-reinvención de la subjetividad y del género, movilizados por colectivos de mujeres y activismos de la disidencia sexual.
Pero si toda memoria se plasma en el presente y deja su impronta en la actualidad, el mayor desafío es quizá el de pensar juntos la singularidad y la cercanía de experiencias disímiles, para imaginar, en tiempos de incertezas, los futuros posibles de la memoria y de la crítica.
Conveners
Leonor Arfuch
University of Buenos Aires
Natalia Brizuela
University of California, Berkeley
Gisela Catanzaro
National Council of Scientific and Technical Research of Argentina (CONICET)
University of Buenos Aires
Nelly Richard
Cultural Critic, Chile
Leticia Sabsay
London School of Economics