Preliminary Programme

The dead seem to play a key role in the fight for memory and justice during and after political transitions. Revisiting and then ‘burying’ the past is seen in dominant transitional justice discourse as the way to move forward (Teitel). For self-evident reasons, dead (bodies), (re)burials and exhumations typically figure much more prominently in periods of transition after violent conflict or historical injustice than they do so in times where people die a ‘normal’ death.
In this paper, however, we will argue that more than merely gaining prominence, phenomena such as exhumations, (re)burials, spiritism and the portrayal or displaying of bones actively influence and shape these transitions. One way in which they do so is by changing or resisting dominant ‘regimes of historicity’ (a concept coined by Hartog) and hegemonic ways of representing and imagining the temporal relations between past, present and future.
Several prominent thinkers have already hinted at the idea of a close relation between approaches to death on the one hand and approaches to history and historicity on the other – for example claiming that ‘the relationship to the past can be compared to the relationship to deceased persons’ (Rüsen) or that ‘historical discourse [...] originates from the contemplation of dead body’ and that ‘history begins in the grave’ (Domanska). We agree with the above claims but argue that death and historicity can relate in many complex and sometimes paradoxical ways and that a good understanding of these relations has to proceed from the study of concrete cases. In order to map some of the different ways in which corpses, spirits, exhumations and (re)burials can become the stake of conflicting regimes of historicity and in order to show how these mechanisms can relate to different conceptualizations of justice we draw from cases as Spain, Rwanda, Zimbabwe, and Argentina. (Show less)

The aim of our paper is to compare two ways of conceptualizing historical time that express different modalities of understanding politics in terms of the role given to collective agency. We focus on two key dates that hit –and define- Argentine historical consciousness: 1985 and 2004, concerning, respectively, with the trial to the Argentine Juntas and the current trials.The Trials to the three Argentine Juntas that ruled the country during the dictatorship period that started in 1976 and finished in December 1983 took place in 1985 expressing a voluntaristic understanding of politics together with a defense of progress as a way to conceptualize the link between past, present and future. The sentence “nunca más” –never again- that closed the speech of the general prosecutor Juan Carlos Strassera expresses the certainty that future generations will learn from the past, and that the disruption of time caused by the genocide was surmounted by a new moral consciousness. As in all transitions the present was conceptualized as a continuity and as a dislocation from the past (Ruti Teitel): if in 1985 the Argentine State admitted responsibility over the crimes committed by the dictatorship, that is because it recognized itself to be, in some way, the same State of 1976; but, simultaneously this newly renovated State pretended to establish a disruption over the past and define a new political legitimacy for future generations. We face here a conception of the temporality of progress that expresses an homogeneity of time, and, as in many progressive conceptions of history, a role paid to disruption either as revolutions or genocides. This faith in progress that supports the certitude that, under this new framework, the future will be better than the past is linked to a political agency that is empowered by the disruption of the past and, given some specific actions, the certainty of a better future.
On the other hand, the trials that started in 2007 pursuant to the derogation of the pardon granted to the military chiefs condemned in 1985 through the “Full Stop” and “Due Obedience” laws –issued between 1986 and 1990 and known as the “Impunity Laws”- reflect a completely different approach to the topic and a discontinuous and contingent conception of historical consciousness. Indeed, in this case –trials currently taking place in Argentina - the confidence in progress vanishes. Instead, most of the prosecutors refer, not to a certitude that the future will be better than the past thanks to the trials themselves, but to a deep doubt on the certitudes of the progress: prosecutors prefer to claim a local justice to specific crimes committed by individuals -that, of course, conducted and executed an extermination plan-. No reference to the future appears to play a role in their arguments. This new way of understanding temporality is close to the queer temporality as defined by Judith Halberstam and Elizabeth Freeman: where “queer subcultures produce alternatives temporalities by allowing their participants to believe that their futures can be imagined according to logics that lie outside of those paradigmatic markers of life experience” (Halberstam). Even if, legally, the State admits responsibility –and this is why the trials take place-, the sense of continuity is here dissolved, either in relation to the past or to the future. The speeches do not refer either to the faith in the future, or to the pedagogic power of the trials. However, political agency is hereby reinforced: not as in the previous trials based on the power of collective will, but in the capability to define new frames for temporality beyond the strict matrix of progress.
Our work will be focused then on analyzing the verdict of the prosecutors as discourses that refer to different modes of temporality. These key differences express alternative strategies to understand political agency that define the way politics is incarnated. (Show less)

In different ways, transitional justice mechanisms set boundaries in time. A transition to democracy is essentially the construction of a division of time into two separate parts: the past and the present/future. In addition, the transitional stage, as the boundary itself, is a temporal category in its own right. These are not, however, chronological categories. They are primarily legal and political categories that serve to distinguish – and physically separate – groups of people, and hence provide them with entrenched identities. (The same mechanism is found in states of exception, e.g. Carl Schmitt’s friend/enemy distinction.)
‘Past’ is a label pinned on undesirable behaviour and undesirable attitudes associated with the ousted regime; ‘future’ or ‘present’ are labels used for the desired state of affairs that has been or will be established after the transition period. ‘Transitional’ is perhaps the most interesting category, because it is also. Transitional instruments or mechanisms mark the line between ‘past’ and ‘present/future’. Most of them legal institutions, they are not only ‘marginal’ or ‘liminal’ (Agamben) in the sense that they find themselves between past and future state forms, they are also ambiguous because they cannot be fully democratic yet, and thus retain some characteristics of undemocratic legal/political institutions.

In this paper, I will present two lines of argument. First, the way transitional justice construes and uses history will be explained in the light of Nietzsche’s concept of critical history as Weltgericht (world tribunal) and his characterization of life or being or (historical) truth, as Gerechtigkeit (justice). The fact that Nietzsche characterizes this specific way of coping with history by using the language of law and justice, makes it possible to interpret law’s essence as historical. Not only is ‘doing history’ distinctly legal, legality is also essentially historical. The conceptual interdependency of legality and historiography in transitional justice periods explains the call for sharp dichotomies between ‘past’, ‘present’, and the shady transitional margin in between.
Secondly, the way time-categories function in transitional justice can show us a glimpse of a time, different from the traditional chronological sequence of ‘now-points’: time as datiert (offering dates), deutsam (referring), geweitet (expanded), öffentlich (public) (Heidegger). It explains how in transitional justice past, transition, present and future can be constructed simultaneously and function at the same time as well.

These two lines of argument will be supported by various examples of transitional justice mechanisms as well as by two cases in point: the transition of the Netherlands from democracy to Nazi-dictatorship (starting 1940) and its transition back to democracy (starting in 1945). The benefits of comparing these cases is that they have contradictory political directions, thus widening the traditional scope of the field of transitional justice, and that the second reacts to the first only a few years later. This will provide a test for my explanatory framework in some detail and in closely related opposite transitions. (Show less)