Description
"The Limits of Measure" studies the role played by violence and trauma in the transition from dictatorship to civil society in Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay (the Latin American Southern Cone). The text discusses the manner in which the violence inflicted by the dictatorships led to a national melancholy which blocked the flow of history, leaving the nations paralyzed, unable to move towards the future. The work addresses a wide range of texts: testimonies of victims, legal documents, newspaper articles, films, political science studies, novels, and poetry. Its basic thesis is that trauma is initiated when a wronged or violated individual is exposed to the terrible fact that suffering is valueless or invaluable: it cannot be evaluated (much less cured), priced, exchanged, balanced, or substituted for. Thus, for the traumatized subject, justice can grant no restitution for the injustices endured, and language no means to represent, remember (thus to mark as passed), or mourn the agony or the losses. Likewise, cultural analyses offer no aid in understanding the pain, and theories of globalization and capital supply no economic paradigms which might account for the destitution. Indeed, trauma exposes culture, politics, justice, and language, to their limits; it is a socio-political "topos" beyond all accounts. But while this incommensurability opens up the devastating wound which has impeded transition in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, it is also beginning to open onto new political, literary, artistic, and intellectual movements, novel articulations and testimonies which are coming to terms with the past not by (re)evaluating it, but by exposing culture and politics to the limit or end of value.
