Anotações de aula e excertos. Haunting pasts. Bevernage e Aerts

Universidade de Brasília - UnB

Centro de Desenvolvimento Sustentável - CDS

Programa de Pós-Graduação em Desenvolvimento Sustentável - Doutorado

Disciplina: Tópicos Especiais (Transição democrática)

Professores: Cristiano Paixão e José Otávio

Discente: Juliana Capra Maia

Anotações de aula e excertos

Referência:

BEVERNAGE, Berber; AERTS, Koen. Haunting pasts: time and historicity as constructed by the Argentine Madres de Plaza de Mayo and radical Flemish nationalists. Social History. Volume 34, n. 04, novembro de 2009.

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ANOTAÇÕES DE AULA

Estrutura do texto >>> Questão meta-histórica, experimento e provocação.

(1) Questão meta-histórica 

-- Irreversível versus Irrevogável (Vladimir Jankélévitch). O irreversível é aquilo que se deu. E algo só se dá, quando algo novo se deu. O irrevogável é o passado que teima, o passado que não passa. 

"The irreversible is a having-taken-place (avoir-eu-lieu) that should primarily be deciphered as a having-been (avoir-e´te´) and refers to a transient or fleetin past. The irrevocable past is a having-taken-place most often associated with the having-done/having-been-done-to (avoir-fait) and, in contrast, is stubborn, tough and stuck in the present. Human beings experience the past as irreversible if they experience it as highly fragile and as immediately dissolving from the present. They experience the past as irrevocable if they experience it as a persistent, enduring and massive depository that is vitally present. The irreversible and the irrevocable experience of time share a recognition of the inalterability of the past, but in contrast to the former, the latter rejects the notion of a temporal ‘distance’ separating past and present". Pp. 394.     

-- O regime moderno de historicidade está assentado na iversibilidade. O passado tem um estatuto ontológico. Trabalha em um tempo linear. Cronosofia moderna. 

-- No regime não-moderno de historicidade, o passado se recusa a passar. O passado sobrevive. Ele torna um ausente presente. 

-- Nos últimos anos, os historiadores ficaram alheios a um problema central: o problema da distância entre o historiador e o seu objeto clássico de estudos. Incapacidade de lidar com os espectros. O regime moderno de historicidade abomina espectros.   

-- A mais importante diferença entre Flamengos e Mães da Praça de Maio é a posição a respeito da Anistia.   

(2) Experimento: Mães da Praça de Maio e Flamengos  >>> 

** Papel de duas subculturas, em duas nações muito diferentes (Argentina e Bélgica), que criam e vivem em um regime de historicidade diverso daquele da modernidade. Ambos movimentos concedem privilégio ao presente em detrimento do futuro (presentismo). 

-- Regime de historicidade: Conceito desenvolvido pelo historiador francês, François Hartog. Consiste "specific manner in which a culture relates to time and the temporal dimensions of past, present and future". Pp. 393.

-- Ponto de convergência entre os radicais belgas de direita e as Mães da Praça de Maio >> Criação de um regime de historicidade paralelo e durável. "[...] the Madres and the radical Flemish nationalists succeed in keeping their burdened pasts an ‘actuality’ by contesting the dominant regime of historicity and by developing a competing regime of historicity of their own". Pp. 393. 

Para ambos os grupos, ser passado não significa ser ausente. 

    

** Mães da Praça de Maio >>> invocam o passado que não passa. 

-- Movimento de esquerda. Mulheres idosas. 

-- Luta, por décadas a fio, pelo reconhecimento dos crimes de Estado (homicídio, tortura, lesões corporais, estupros, desaparecimento forçado, entre muitos outros) em relação a 30 mil "desaparecidos" do regime militar argentino. Demandas inicial pela "verdade" e pelo "direito de enterrar os seus mortos". 

-- "Desaparecimento forçado" >> técnica típica do terror de Estado praticado pelos regimes autocráticos latino-americanos. Pessoas eram sequestradas e mortas. Para evitar indícios de crime, entretanto, seus corpos eram incinerados, atirados ao mar ou enterrados em grandes covas coletivas clandestinas.  

-- Lema: "Ausentes para sempre". A causa das Mães da Praça de Maio, por longos anos, não foi reconhecida. Entretanto, com a ascensão do Governo Kirchner, em 2003, ocorreram decretações de nulidade contra as anistias concedidas aos militares. Os crimes do período, então, começaram a ser finalmente investigados e punidos.   

-- Vários argentinos consideram as Mães da Praça de Maio como mulheres "irracionais", portadoras de severas psicopatologias decorrentes de um luto mal-feito. As Mães, entretanto, entendem que os mortos durante a ditadura militar jamais serão enterrados, até porque eles não estão enterráveis. Desaparecidos não morreram completamente. Eles estão em algum lugar entre a vida e a morte, entre a presença e o esquecimento.  

-- Resistência das Mães da Praça de Maio às investigações forenses, aos rituais funerários. Querem saber a verdade, mas a verdade não servirá para deixar o passado para trás. Recusam-se a terminar o luto. 

-- O costume das mães, de andar em em círculos, seria uma metáfora para um tempo que avança em círculo, não linearmente. 

 ** Flamengos >>>  

-- Movimento de nacionalista de ultra-direita. Predomínio de homens idosos. 

-- Defesa dos flamengos que lutaram a favor dos países do Eixo, em território belga, em nome de alegado "idealismo". Após a Guerra, esses flamengos foram julgados como traidores, situação que é considerada como manifestação de "revanchismo" pelos integrantes do movimento. 

-- Movimento heroicizante no sentido grego. Os flamengos querem cantar os mortos, para que eles permaneçam como heróis na história dos homens. Resgatam os corpos dos flamengos mortos durante a Primeira ou a Segunda Guerra Mundial e os enterram em solo belga. 

-- O movimento tem alcançado sucesso em manter acesa, na esfera pública, a discussão a respeito da Segunda Guerra Mundial, do Holocausto, do colaboracionismo e do Nazismo. 

-- A partir de 2001, passaram a encampar a bandeira da constituição de uma Comissão da Verdade na Bélgica, aos mesmos moldes sul-africanos, com a pretensão de "reconciliar" o país.  Pretensão de obter anistia para os colaboracionistas considerados "traidores". Caso de Irma Laplasse (repetição do julgamento de uma mulher condenada à morte como traidora logo depois da retomada da Bélgica pelos Aliados).

(3) Provocação dos autores >>>

** Os historiadores são incapazes de sair do tempo linear. Eles têm deixado de lado os regimes de historicidade dos sujeitos pesquisados.

** Surgimento e Supervalorização da História do Tempo Presente >> Efeito do regime moderno de historicidade?

** As anistias buscaram pacificação por meio do esquecimento. A justiça de transição busca a pacificação por meio da exposição dos conflitos?

EXCERTOS

1. INTRODUÇÃO

"The Madres de Plaza de Mayo are a group of elderly women who decided to organize after their sons and daughters disappeared without a trace during the military dictatorship and period of state terror in Argentina from 1976 to 1983". Pp. 391.

"[...] the most important difference between the two movements, however, can be found in their opposing stances on the issue of amnesty: while the radical Flemish nationalists are lobbying for a (posthumous) blanket amnesty or rehabilitation for Flemish people who were convicted and punished for collaboration, the Madres are struggling precisely to void the blanket amnesties which prevented the punishment or even conviction ofmost of the military officer who are responsible for severe crimes against humanity".Pp. 392. 

"[...] both the Madres and the radical Flemish nationalists, despite their politically marginal position and often against the will ofthe broader society, were remarkably successful in keeping a burdened past ‘open’ or ‘alive’ over a period spanning several decennia". Pp. 392. 

" [...] how minorities succeed in keeping alive a painful fragment of an increasingly less recent past, despite the pressure coming from the majority of the nation to ‘let the wounds heal’ or simply to ‘bury’ the past". Pp. 393.  

"[...] Hartog perceives a clear evolution within western history itself: he discerns three successive regimes of historicity for which he takes the symbolic dates of 1789 and 1989 as break points. During the ancien régime, societies primarily focused on the past for their norms and values: history was seen as the great teacher of life (historia magistra vitae). After the French Revolution, a new regime of historicity came into existence in which people broke with the past and expected all good to come from the future. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, this modern regime of historicity, with its typical belief in progress, according to Hartog, in its turn has had to make way for a novel (post-modern) attitude that pays almost no attention to past or future but instead privileges the present [...]. Dominant regimes of historicity (such as those of modern nation-states) in our view never remain uncontested. Instead, they are always challenged by subcultures or minorities and their divergent political strategies". Pp. 393.

2. CONJURING UP GHOSTS: THE MADRES DE PLAZA DE MAYO AND THEIR DESAPARECIDOS   

"Even after [...] several bodies had been washed ashore on the coasts of the Atlantic, and after secret mass burials had been discovered in Argentina, the Madres maintained that the desaparecidos are not like ‘ordinary’ dead but are somehow between life and death". Pp. 395.  

"Once the military dictatorship was over, the persistent refusal to mourn (as opposed to grieve) and to recognize the death of the desaparecidos, therefore, did not make the Madres very popular in wider Argentinian society where their stance was renounced by a majority who wanted to move on and who thought that the mothers should mourn privately and keep silent.15 It is, however, exactly in relation to this urge to ‘move on’, expressed by both the military juntas and the democratic successor governments, that the Madres’ peculiar denial of death and stress on the spectral status of the desaparecidos must be understood". Pp. 395.  

"The sinister figure ofthe desaparecido was not [...] ‘invented’ by the Madres. Rather, it resulted directly from the specific technique of terror used by the military. Disappearance had several advantages for the military juntas: first, it made the terror total; second, the absence of visible victims strongly reduced international media attention; and third, the perpetrators could hardly be prosecuted for murder as long as no bodies appeared. It was only relatively late that the military realized that their technique of terror produced an unanticipated side-effect: because disappearance, in contrast to ‘ordinary’ death, can never be closed off, and thus never ‘passes’, the terror had produced a legion of ghosts that could potentially haunt the country for a very long time. Once they fully grasped the danger, the junta leaders attempted to reduce the damage by denying the existence of the desaparecidos and by instead speaking about the dead". Pp. 396. 

"The refusal to mourn and the stress on the ghostlike presence of the desaparecidos are clearly reflecte in several of the Madres’ activist stances. In a document that lists a number of their principles, for example, the firs sentences assert that the desaparecidos ‘are not dead’ and demand punishment for the perpetrators of the ‘genocide". The principles that are listed further in the document faithfully build on the firs two: the Madres, for example, radically reject forensic exhumations or reburials – ‘because our children are no corpses’ – and refuse all economic reparations – for ‘what has to be repaired with justice, one cannot repair with money’. [...]. The Madres reject posthumous honouring: ‘We reject nameplates and monuments because they signify the burying of the dead". Pp. 397.

"[...] the Madres also fiercely opposed the work of the CONADEP truth commission and its internationally celebrated report entitled Nunca Ma´s – ‘Never Again’. Although they recognized that this report undoubtedly contained a lot of truth, the Madres complained that this was only a ‘truth of the graveyards’ (‘verdad de los cementerios’), and they feared that its conclusions on the lugubrious fate of the desaparecidos would function as a declaration of death or as an act of closure". Pp. 398.

3. THE FLEMISH NATIONALIST MOVEMENT AND THE ‘FLEMISH DEAD'    

"In strong contrast to the Madres’ denial of death, the radical Flemish nationalists, like most nationalist movements, maintain a strong tradition of commemorating, celebrating and honouring their dead, especially the prominent or illustrious among them". Pp. 399.  

"Ironically the nominally pacifis organizers of the Yser pilgrimage during the years of the Second World War mostly followed the route taken by Verschaeve, firs radicalizing their nationalism and developing a rabid anti-Belgian position, and then, soon after the Belgian capitulation, actively supporting the New Order and turning the Ijzertoren into a much-hated symbol of the collaboration. [...]. By the end ofthe war the enraged population directed its anger at the graves of prominent or less prominent collaborators". Pp. 401. 

"In the mid-1990s, the quest to ‘resurrect’ the ‘Flemish dead’ took on a new shape when Flemish nationalists started to request the reopening of several court cases in order to rehabilitate posthumously some Flemish who had been condemned to death after the Second World War. [...]. More success was achieved in the case of Irma Laplasse, whose trial was actually reopened after more than half a century.54 She had been found guilty of collaboration with the enemy on the ground oftreason with grave consequences and had been executed on 30 May 1945". Pp. 402.   

"The juridical revision fitte well into the context of reconciliatory measures for which King Albert II had launched an urgent call the year before. Indeed, the reopening ofthe trial could be perceived as one ofthe rare attempts by the Belgian state to engage indirectly in a dialogue with the ‘Flemish dead’ and the war past in the hope of provoking closure". Pp. 403.

4. ANIMATED PASTS 

"In past years, diverging views on the status of the dead resulted in a series of conflict between archaeologists, who believe ancient human remains primarily to be part of world heritage or a source of scientifi knowledge, and ethnic groups, who see themselves as guardians of the dead and strongly resist each desecration of their grave". Pp. 404. 

"The extraordinarily powerful influence of the dead in claiming the past can be accounted for by conceiving this influence as a symbolic variant on a very old tradition that attaches the dead and graves to territorial claims. [...]. The symbolic appropriation and imagination of the past through the dead thus closely resembles the way in which territories are created and appropriated by the burying of the dead. [...]. A similar interpretation of graves as a means to claim both territory and history reverberated in an oration of a prominent radical Flemish nationalist in 1937: ‘Only graves make a land into a fatherland.’Robert Pogue Harrison also speaks about the ‘foundational power of the sepulcher’". Pp. 404.

"For academic historiography and the dominant modern regime of historicity in which it is embedded, (biological) death functions as a master-metaphor for the past. The strict juxtaposition of the ‘present’ present and the ‘absent’ or ‘distant’ past that is so central to both the modern regime of historicity and modern historiography is essentially a reflectio of the separation between life and death that has been presumed to be absolute since the Enlightenment". Pp. 404 e 405.

"Fearing that the ontologically inferior status ascribed to the ‘dead past’ (in comparison to the ‘living present’) could facilitate the neglect of historical injustice and indirectly legitimate the reign of impunity, the Madres for more than thirty years made resistance against the metaphor of death one of their main strategic objectives. As their president puts it rhetorically: ‘[Why do] they like the dead? Because death is final Capitalism has two options that go together. Money to pay death, and death itself as the end of a struggle. Both things that we reject from the deepest [sic] of our heart." Pp. 405.

"A resistance to this death of the Enlightenment, born from another perspective on death, can therefore affect the very core ofmodern historiography and the modern regime of historicity. And this is precisely what is at hand in radical Flemish nationalism. The ‘Flemish dead’ do not remain mute; they shout loudly, taunt both the Belgian enemy and moderate sister factions, and threaten to curse all those who do not respect their legacy. The dead form an essential part ofthe community, and the living have to serve their interest. Therefore, there is no such thing as a strict separation of past and present in the radical Flemish movement. By violating the Flemish graves, the Belgian government has violated the community, and the continuing presence of ‘Flemish dead’ in unconsecrated or non-Flemish soil remains a great problem. The ‘Flemish dead’ remain restless: ‘For centuries thou could’st not close thy graves.’ The denial of death as an absolute end constitutes a leitmotiv in the radical Flemish movement." Pp. 405. 

"In sum, we can state that, just like the Madres do with their desaparecidos, the radical Flemish nationalists let their dead haunt the present, so the painful past cannot be closed off and stays liminal. The ritual or spectral resistance of the Madres and the radical Flemish nationalists yields an animated or spirited past that is nigh on immune to closure and has nearly no connection with the ‘dead’ past of the dominant modern regime of historicity". Pp. 406.

"In both of the cases we have discussed, the tensions around the question of how to deal with the past thus cannot be reduced to an antagonism between advocates of remembrance and advocates of forgetting, or to a quarrel over historical facts or even their meaning. Instead, it also includes a conflic over the perceived (temporal) ‘distance’ that is to be situated between past and present. The conflict can therefore be analysed as a ‘politics of time’, in which two radically different chronosophies diametrically oppose each other [...]. In the radical Flemish movement, resistance against the dominant ‘Belgian’ regime of historicity even takes the shape ofa far-reaching symbolic refusal to be contemporaneous with the rest of the nation. This ‘refusal of contemporaneity’ can be found, for example, in the organization of an alternative calendar with specifi holidays and days of remembrance, but it is most evident in the instrumental use of anachronisms: from medieval iconographies, over banner-festivals, to the use of an archaic idiom and the wearing of costumes inspired by trends of the 1930s". Pp. 407.

5. THOU ART A SCHOLAR; SPEAK TO IT, HORATIO . . .

"[...] the junta leaders in Argentina, and some of their democratic successors, mistakenly believed that a combination of (self-)amnesty, imposed amnesia and the passage of time would solve the problem automatically. For a long time, the Belgian government, too, believed that amnesia was the best solution, and it asked its ‘good citizens’ simply to forget. This position connects to a long tradition that closely associates citizenship and amnesia [...]. Large parts of European history, according to Timothy Garton Ash, have been founded on a base of amnesia and amnesty". Pp. 407.

"In recent decades, in contrast, governments and policy-makers all over the world have come to understand that the simple recourse to amnesia and amnesty is no match for the great strength of spectral past. The intellectual tide has turned completely: no longer forgetting but precisely the meticulous revelation and chronicling of the historical truth must solve the problem now. This new position is clearly reflected in the international tendency to defend the idea of a ‘right to truth’ and to erect truth commissions after violent internal conflic in the hope that they will bring about reconciliation". Pp. 407.

"Scholars [...] do not believe in ghosts. Historians are no exception [...]. Despite their growing interest in all kinds of ‘enchanted’ popular beliefs and the wealth of work that has been done on the ‘ghosts of memory’, the problem of the haunting past almost always remains that of a mere subject of research, while its potential implications for the practice (and conceptual foundations) of historiography itself are rarely ever taken into consideration. [...]. This is not primarily due to a lack of interest or will by individual historians, but, as we have tried to argue, in the firs place relates to a structural feature of modern historiography itself. Modern historical discourse presumes an absolute break between past and present, and therefore leaves no space for a spectral or irrevocable past that hovers in between. Modern historiography has no notion of a liminal phase in the transition between present and past, and the very simple but fundamental question of how exactly social phenomena turn from being present into being past is never explicitly raised". Pp. 408.