Migratory Psychoanalysis

Abstract

In September 2004 I participated in a conference in La Plata, Argentina, on the topic of "The State and the Politics of Memory: Archives, Museums, and Education." [1] The conference was convened by the Comisión Provincial por la Memoria, an authority commissioned in 2000 by the provincial government of Buenos Aires (whose capital is La Plata) with the task of developing a public and comparative discourse of Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung, or coming to terms with the past. The Argentine past in question is the military regime that held power between 1976 and 1983, unleashing a campaign of state terrorism responsible for the murder of 30,000 citizens, with a severe overrepresentation, in increasing order, of youth, secondary school and university students, and Jews. The city of La Plata boasts an important university; as a result the violence there was especially severe. The Comisión por la Memoria is housed in a former police headquarters known to the citizens of La Plata as a site of torture and other horrors. Its task includes the preservation and dissemination of the archive of the state security forces (DIPBA), containing 3,800,000 files as well as other materials, including, for example, 160 recordings of bugged telephone conversations. [2] To my surprise and, I must confess, to my relief, the large public audience proved quite interested in the topic of my own contribution: discourses and sites of public memory and history in Berlin. As it turns out, a delegation from the Comisión por la Memoria was about to travel to Berlin to consult with analogous scholars and archivists there, specifically with the archivists of the Stasi files.