The land of forgetting: silence and resonance in Chile’s histories of political violence

ABSTRACT

In this paper I explore two approaches to what lies ‘unearthed’ in Chile’s recent violent histories. In the first instance, I explore the effort towards the obfuscation or intertitialization of knowledge by the Chilean state, regarding the Pinochet dictatorship years. The argument in the first half of the paper underlines the need to understand recent Chilean history in relation to explicit efforts at ‘disappearing’ history – at the purposeful obfuscation of deathly experiences and the limbo these generate. In the second half, I explore the idea that in the ‘negative’ space afforded by the circumstantial and historical possibilities of locales of political interest, where traumatic history is only partially understood, or not recognized, paranormal investigators expand, rather than contract, possibilities within this negative. I use negative theology, a medieval counter-orthodox current of writing about the unspeakable, to explore how, in contrast to the Chilean state from 1973 to 1990, which receded into the darkness of negation, paranormal investigators take impetus from this darkness and transform it into a version of history proper, ontologizing the negative as they proceed. Their endeavours thus become quasi-cosmogonic, in theological terms.

KEYWORDS:

• Alternative histories
• not-knowing
• paranormal
• Pinochet’s dictatorship
• silence

Acknowledgments

The author wish to thank all the interlocutors of this project, especially Patrimonio Vivo and its tour guides, particularly César Parra. The research project was approved by the ethics committee at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, number 150714023.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The research behind the paranormal end of this article was funded by Chile’s Fondecyt Regular (2016–2019), grant 1160046.