In an almost throw-away line towards the end of his letter published in the December issue of La Intemperie, Oscar del Barco says, ‘this is not a reasoned argument’. What does he mean by it not being a reasoned argument? What is it if it is not a reasoned argument? This question seems to me to be central to knowing what we are dealing with. If we suddenly found ourselves in front of the inverted urinal, signed on the base, with which in 1917 Marcel Duchamp left one of the decisive marks in the history of art, it would be out of place to urinate in it, since what this object is saying is precisely ‘this is not a urinal’. I have the impression that Oscar del Barco’s letter is an inverted urinal in which, disconcertingly, all one can see is a place to urinate.
‘This is not a reasoned argument.’ Perhaps, in this very statement, it withdraws from the usual dynamics of intellectual life like debate, discussion and critique – which nevertheless, as is obvious from the last issue of LI, it has had the virtue of furthering. To my way of thinking, it is a text that lends itself to a dialogue – like Luis Rodeiro,iI also understand that this is the best, indeed the only way to approach certain things that can only be said stammeringly and sotto voce. Because thought cannot be reduced to argument, or to communication, not even to intelligence, debate, by that very fact, is not its best format. In the sense that confirms our condition as human beings, thought is not exclusively reserved for those who are eloquent, to the intelligent, the experts or the intellectuals: anyone can think. I propose that we light a fire and continue the conversation around it, as if it were a matter of an archetypical scene in which a group of human beings out in the elements attempt to disentangle the meaning of things and produce a sort of lucidity that would help to face up to what shocks us.
For 30 years, a decisive minority of Argentines has continued to repeat: ‘Bring them back alive’.
Three and a half years ago, a majority of Argentines gave voice to the slogan: ‘Out with the lot of them’.
Last year, at the same time as the Argentine state acknowledged for the first time its terrorist past – and this coincidence, or better this opportunity, is not insignificant – Oscar Del Barco threw the sentence ‘Thou shalt not kill’ into a left-wing journal like a stone into a pond that was too placid. It is not a matter of forcing connections or of maintaining differences. But a first piece of evidence: ‘Bring them back alive’, ‘Out with the lot of them’, ‘Thou shalt not kill’ are not arguments. This doesn’t mean they are reductive (as Herna´n Tejerinaii mistakenly says in his letter) but rather they are expressive of what is impossible, inexpressible and inaccessible for a social-scientific vocabulary, journalistic phrasemaking or debates. They are for that very reason sentences that resist literality: whoever submits them to it simply does not have them in focus. In their impossibility, in their pure counterfactuality, in their simplicity, ‘Bring them back alive’ and ‘Thou shalt not kill’, to my way of thinking, say the same thing: not only are they not reductive utterances, rather they do manage to present the unpresentable, to designate the residue of a common pain which cannot be denied. Even more, ‘Thou shalt not kill’ exactly denotes the ultimate meaning of all those fragile features protected by human rights organizations in Argentina and in the world at large in the last decades.
It seems curious that the most important problem posed by Oscar Del Barco’s letter has been almost passed over in the replies to him – I’m thinking of the problem of responsibility: to leave behind the alibi of History, assume the first person and speak in the first person. The discussion has concentrated almost exclusively on the commandment not to kill and its relevance, or lack of. The kernel – I insist: beyond all literality – to which the expression ‘Thou shalt not kill’ points, is not perhaps empirically or politically apprehensible, nor in fact is it to be verified in the real – although it nevertheless perhaps illuminates the facts, the politics and the reality that it does intervene in. Is it then a ‘fundamentalist’, ‘mystical’ or ‘hysterical’ position, as some of the responses to it insistently repeat? Does this terminology help us to understand anything? To my way of thinking, the appropriate question to ask when faced with the letter is: does it help us to think or does it close things down? Does it produce thought – which does not mean agreement – or does it only have a will to effect, expressing a private interest? Does it cancel the desire for equality and freedom or does it sit comfortably with that desire? Does it block understanding or does it enrich it, adding a further, necessary dimension?
As I understand it, and surely this is also the meaning of Oscar’s letter, it is not a question of an anachronistic condemnation of those people in the 1960s and ’70s who saw themselves caught up in the logic of violence or who thought that the armed struggle was best, but rather a contribution that would make sure that the story we forge about all of that does not succumb to lies, dishonesty, complacency, (self-)deception or simple ingenuousness. I don’t think that Che was a ‘serial killer’, although it does seem to me that Guevarism as a way of understanding politics and political action has had disastrous effects which have still not been adequately gone over by the Left. For many reasons I do not share the ‘theory of the two demons’ – nor do I hold with the position that has angels on one side and devils on the other.
There will come a time, perhaps, when the urgent and necessary claim for justice (or better for punishment, since what could signify the act of justice?) will give way to the possibility of thinking outside this urgency. Probably the only thing that could produce such a moment of liberation is precisely punishment. And then, perhaps, we can begin to pose new sorts of questions. Is it possible to withdraw from the war of interpretations, which is potentially infinite, even though as in any war there are victors and vanquished? Is there a way out of war? On the answer to this question – which is not an epistemological one, or even a solely theoretical one – hangs the possibility of an understanding, both more extensive and more intensive, of the ways in which we act with and against others – of what we call politics. Perhaps this transition has already begun to take place, if only very slowly. If I am not mistaken, Oscar del Barco’s letter, whether or not we agree with it, points in this direction. Other questions, perhaps undecidable in their deepest aspects, are brought together here. Is the transmission of experience possible in politics? Are experience and the accumulation of experience possible? Is the will of those who once again want to change the world affected by the disenchanted testimony of those who failed to do so – or who were let down by history – and who have only their lucidity left? The answers aren’t obvious. What is at issue is the problem of what constitutes a legacy and whether such a legacy is possible. If bequest were possible, it would have to be at the level of the desire for, and the experience and defeat of, what was perhaps the greatest and most extraordinary will to justice experienced in history.
Perhaps the expression ‘Thou shalt not kill’ is the paradoxical legacy from this lost
treasure.
Note
1 First published in Sobre la Responsabilidad – No Matar – (Ediciones del Ciclope/La
Intemperie, Cordoba, Argentina, 2007).
Translator’s notes
i One of the editors of La Intemperie.
ii Another of the respondents in the debate in La Intemperie.
Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Vol. 16, No. 2 August 2007, pp. 141-143
ISSN 1356-9325/print 1469-9575 online q 2007 Ediciones del Ciclope/La Intemperie
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