The Banality of Evil, Nunca Más and the Implicated Subject in Argentine Memory Spaces

Abstract

ABSTRACT The ambiguous relations and subjectivities associated with the banality of evil are peripheral to a dominant human rights discourse oriented around the binary logics of perpetrators and victims and dictatorship and democracy. The absence of non-binary subjectivities reflects a conceptual gap relating to questions of shared responsibility posed by Hannah Arendt more than half a century ago. Despite its ongoing relevance for reflecting on the production of systematic suffering, the banality of evil remains an incomplete theoretical project. Here, I bring recent elaborations on Arendt’s notion of the banality of evil, particularly Michael Rothberg’s Implicated Subjects, to bear on Argentine memory politics. I highlight the potential for the notion of the implicated subject to expand Argentine memory studies beyond the perpetrator-victim binary of the Nunca Más human rights discourse. Conceptual art and artistic approaches to memory may provide fruitful avenues for future exploration of implicated subjectivities and horizons of responsibility.