Mourners who can not mourn: Argentina's Parque de la Memoria as a spatial threshold of memory

Abstract

In this paper I explore the subtle regulation of cultural practice in Argentina's Parque de la Memoria. I interpret the Parque de la Memoria, or memory park, as a spatial threshold. When family members of the desaparecidos enter the park they enter the memory of the spatial threshold as what remains (of what remained) of the violent attempt by the Argentine military regime to spatialise political order. The desaparecidos, or disappeared, were to be captured and performatively constituted in the space of exception as the embodiment of a terrorist subversion that threatened Argentina's re-founding as a Western, Christian civilisation. To resist the temptation to leave a flower at the monument as the memory of the spatial threshold between the sacred and profane, life and death, the city and the river, is to hold open the possibility for an alternative politics by maintaining potentiality's link to impotentiality as the ability to not-mourn. It is in this potentiality, not-yet-actualised and thus not exhausted, that space is opened for a post-dictatorship politics in Argentina that would reach beyond the exhausted notions of the need for reconciliation with, or the redemption of, the disappearances of the disappeared.