Hacia una reconstrucción de los conflictos de la memoria. El caso del Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos en Chile

Abstract

The article asserts that memory plays an intermediary role between political present and history. As political present is intrinsically a matter of dispute, memory transfers this dispute into history by politically attributing cognitive or normative significance to selected events and periods. I argue that four different and potentially controversial forms of memory emerge from this, namely, a positive and a negative cognitive form of memory, on the one hand, and a negative and a positive socio-integrative form, on the other hand. The conflictive link between these forms of memory defines what I call controversies or disputes of memory. By elaborating on different theoretical reflections about the relation between politics, history, and memory, I firstly construe an original framework to analyze disputes of memory and subsequently I apply this to the public controversy between 2007 and 2016 regarding the installation and functioning of the Chilean Museum of Memory and Human Rights. The article concludes that criticisms of political positions concerning the relation between politics and history produce different and colliding forms of cognitive or socio-integrative memory, which creates a fluctuating time trajectory for memory.