Mario Di Paolantonio

Tracking the Transitional Demand for Legal Recall: The Foreclosing and Promise of Law in Argentina

The article tracks the symbolic role that law plays in the varying phases of the transition to democracy in Argentina. It offers a descriptive and conceptual account of how the struggle for legal recall was structured against the force of containment wielded by the state. Focusing on the social demand that comes before Judge Cavallo’s 2001 ruling, which overturned the amnesty laws protecting the military from being prosecuted for past rights violations, the article concerns itself with how the resolve and desire for law are sustained. It thus reflects on how the unfulfilled promises for justice helped to shape a legacy, a pedagogical resource, which was utilized to contest the conciliatory politics and settlements brokered by the state.

Interrupting Commemoration: Thinking with Art, Thinking through the Strictures of Argentina's "Espacio para la memoria".

Recently, a few buildings within the Espacio para la memoria in Buenos Aires have been designated as a UNESCO Centre where, amongst other educational activities, evidentiary materials of the past repression are to be stored and displayed. Another building in the complex houses a Community Centre operated by the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, where the mandate is to learn about and continue the revolutionary ideals of those disappeared during the repression. Amid these commemorative projects, designating a space for exhibiting art presents a significant opportunity for posing difficult questions, which go beyond the terms of information and idealization. Through a close reading of Diana Doweks art exhibit, ‘A Long March’, the paper invites us to consider how art can draw out a particular haunting temporality that holds the present open to provocative questions that are difficult to pose and sustain amid the strictures of this commemorative site.

The Cruel Optimism of Education and Education's Implication with "Passing-on".

In this article I draw on Lauren Berlants notion of ‘cruel optimism’ to identify and untangle how the prevailing sense of ‘optimism’ in education works against our common hope or collective striving for what is educational in education. In particular, I discuss how the ‘cruel optimism’ that invites individuals to constantly innovate and improve themselves through ever more learning leads ultimately to a sense of ‘presentism’, ‘privation’ and ‘loneliness’, which comes to threaten the role that education plays (or should play) in sustaining and forging a common world. Proposing that education is where the concern with ‘passing-on’ (in all senses of the word) properly takes place, I discuss how education can tend to and pine towards something larger and more durable (the world) than the individual acquisition of knowledge and skills that serve immediate transient interests. As an exemplar of a place of ‘passing-on’, I ask us to consider how education invites us to affirm the ‘living-on’ of the question of what it might mean to live together after all: to forge, sustain and pledge something of significance in common (and across generations) amidst what is constantly passing away. In this sense, I seek to gesture to the possibility of hope (as opposed to a mere optimism) within education: a sensibility and affirmation for ‘passing-on’ and ‘sur-vivance’. Such a hope might help to address the cruel depravity and isolation affecting our time that is caught up in the ‘learnification of education’.

A Memory of Justice as a Democratic Pedagogical Force

Read through the strictures of realpolitik, the decision to conciliate the transition to democracy in Argentina via the public educational display of Trial of the Military (in 1985) can be deemed a failure. In light of the dire social divisions and conflicts that the educative trial brought to the fore, Samuel Huntington appears to offer the conclusive lesson when he states that ‘‘a general amnesty for all provides a far stronger base for democracy than efforts to prosecute one side or the other, or both’’ (1991, 214). The case of Argentina seems to illustrate why domestically prosecuting perpetrators of a prior regime in order to teach and cultivate the merits of democracy is fraught with conflict, no clear benefits, and should be avoided. For rather than showcasing a salubrious public lesson on the virtues and objectivity of the rule of law, the twists and turns of the trials in Argentina (so the reasoning goes) reveals that the law’s autonomy was actually an ephemeral extravagance. The semblance of the law’s independence, the notion of a nation based on the rule of law, endures only so long as those with power wish to indulge it. Having cited the failures, the move is to point to more inventive or productive methods for dealing with the divisive context vexing a democracy established on the grounds of past state abuses: truthcommissions, lustration laws, reparations, or negotiated amnesties. My contention in this article is that there is something more to this failure. Rather than dismissing the Trial of the Military in Argentina as an inevitably flawed enterprise that should gesture us to seek a better technology for negotiating transitions in general, I seek to uncover—amid a situation presumed least likely to afford it—a pedagogical resource for justice, for fostering a normative sense of democracy during the transition. My concern is not so much with

Wonder, Guarding Against Thoughtlessness in Education

Hannah Arendt has a particular notion of thinking that both is and is not (in her sense of the term) philosophical. While not guided by the search for meta principles, nor concerned with establishing logical systems, her notion of thinking as the examination of “whatever happens to come to pass,” and its significance for saving our world from thoughtlessness, retains and is motivated by the fundamental pathos at the heart of philosophy—wonder. In this paper, I consider the limiting and enabling sense in which Arendt invokes “wonder” for the possibility of thinking. I do so, in turn, to explore what the pathos of wonderment might offer education—an institution charged with cultivating “thinking” and, yet, constantly susceptible to the thoughtless trappings of technocratic jargon and the mechanical logic of assessment, learning processes and social reproduction. Can wonder—the very pathos of philosophy—cultivate a thinking that helps us retain an “unclouded attentiveness” to what is educational in education? Might wonder help us to overcome the thoughtlessness that dulls our attention to what we do to each other through education?

Presenting the (Dictatorial) Past in Contemporary Argentina: Truth Forums and Arts of Dramatisation

Drawing upon Isabelle Stengers’ notion of an ‘ecology of practices’ this article explores some of the divergent ways in which truths about the violence of Argentina’s last dictatorship period emerge in different forums. We consider how these forums deploy ‘arts of dramatization’, which is to say, the ways they stage questions about the violence of the last dictatorship period in order to propose, explore, confirm and sometimes refute ‘candidates for truth’. Following Stengers’ provocations, we argue that the various modes of staging the past conjure up its violence in distinct ways, placing different constraints on how it can appear, using different material apparatus and probing it according to different values under different obligations. Based on interviews and observational research with key personnel – including lawyers, artists, forensic anthropologists and psychologists – we suggest that while each of the forums within this ecology is concerned with truth, how and what emerges as truth necessarily differs. What counts as evidence, what is understood as ‘successful’, what is dismissed as irrelevant are all dependent upon the concerns of the forum, such that truths about Argentina’s dictatorship are not only ‘situated’ but also necessarily ‘partial’ forms of world-making. In an attempt to propose a shift from over-determined and usually binary lines of debate, we suggest that these truths exist within an ‘ecology of practices’, to use Stengers’ term, insofar as these forums are not closed off from each other, but are becoming a web of often highly interdependent connections, wherein personnel, practices, audiences and resultant ‘truths’ travel.

Forging a Constellation, Recovering a Space of Memory Beyond Reconciliation and Consternation

In this chapter, “Forging a Constellation, Re-covering a Space of Memory Beyond Reconciliation and Consternation”, Mario Di Paolantonio examines how psychoanalytic and sociopolitical perspectives of trauma and emotion can work as a pedagogical resource for developing critical insights into teaching and learning about trauma and reconciliation in schools. A major challenge for critical educators in traumatised societies which struggle for reconciliation is that emotions of trauma are often appropriated by social and political institutions, including schools, to justify particular collective narratives and ideologies. For this purpose, Di Paolantonio analyses a detailed example of the political appropriation of one emotion—fear—as it stems from a particular context, and shows how reconciliation possibilities are essentially “undone” by the restrictive engagement with trauma narratives. To this end, Di Paolantonio proposes critical emotional praxis as a pedagogical tool that could potentially invent new interpretive approaches and practices of relating with “others”—pedagogies that do not fossilise emotional injury but move forwards.

Recalling the Legacy of the 1985 Trial of the Military in Argentina

As Argentina moved toward democracy in 1983, a legal process was also set in motion to account for the dictatorship’s repressive strategy and to symbolically mark the turn to democracy. In 1985, this process led to the socalled “Trial of the Military,” which remarkably brought before the law the nine junta leaders deemed responsible for violations committed during the 1976–1983 military regime, which were discussed in Chapter 2. In light of the social divisions and conflicts that the Trial of the Military brought to the fore, igniting various military rebellions, the trial appears to illustrate why domestically prosecuting perpetrators of a prior regime is fraught with conflict, provides no clear benefits, and should be avoided. However, rather than dismiss the trial as an inevitably flawed enterprise, I want to propose that the legacy of the trials is both instructive and formative. In this chapter, I consider how the very failure and betrayed hopes of the 1985 Trial of the Military in Argentina provided civil society with the impetus for the ongoing work of righting past wrongs and restructuring the normative dimension of democracy in Argentina.