Introduced by Lawrence Weschler

During the months of its initial upsurge, Polish theorists used to characterize Solidarity as an expression of the subjectivity of the Polish nation, by which they meant its capacity at long last to start acting once again as the subject of its own history, instead of the object of other people’s. That seminal transformation—in its essence a grammatical one, in which an entity that had been content to receive the actions of other people’s sentences now insisted on initiating its own—lies at the root of all revolutionary democratic upsurges. Of course, such upsurges usually get met by countervailing pressure, for in its essence Repression consists in taking people who’ve suddenly taken to acting like subjects, pithing them of that subjectivity, and turning them back into good little objects once again. Resistance, in turn, consists in the struggle to evade that dismal fate.

During the Dirty Wars that characterized much of Latin American history over the past thirty years, one of the most pervasive and effective tactics of Repression consisted in the simple disappearing of opponents to the regime. Such opponents (student activists, labor leaders, peasant advocates, crusading teachers, and so forth) didn’t just disappear: they were disappeared (talk about grammatical innovations!). Rendered into objects of the most radical sort—which is to say, corpses—they were, terrifyingly, further transubstantiated into nonobjects. Disappeared, as it were, into thin air—it was as if they (and their now manifestly futile subjectivity) had never existed at all. The regime could claim ignorance and deny responsibility as to their fates while all the while spreading further terror among the population at large and demobilizing the families and friends of the specific disappeared activists in question, who now drained energies they might otherwise have channeled into opposition into a frantic, futile, and demoralizing quest for information regarding the fates of their vanished loved ones. A neat trick.

From the Fall 2005 Issue

“Project for a Memorial” is part of the Fall 2005 issue of Virginia Quarterly Review, which also features essays, fiction, poetry, book reviews, and humor. Subscribe today for just $32.

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