Activists of Meaning: Bringing Order to Ruins, Remaking Archives, and Undoing Traumas

Abstract

Forced disappearance of persons destroyed the meaning we give to identity, by tearing the unions that we, as moderns, believed unbreakable. It tore our interpretation of the ontological unity of the human being, the stable union between a body and a name. It tore a subject’s ties with its history: what links us to a lineage, a legacy, a family, a line of filiation that projects us backward and forward in time. It also tore that subject’s connection to a space of social relations, a community. A multiple tearing that separated what normally goes together. It is frightening to see the rupturing of the equations that make us who we are, the equations that are naturalized as universal …