1. Resisting bio-power: ‘laughter’, ‘fraternity’ and ‘imagination’ under dictatorship and the Malvinas–Falklands War

María José Bruña Bragado

Bio-power, the normalisation of violence and fortunate ethics

Bio-power

In his ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ Walter Benjamin declares that our concept of history must be grounded in a key idea that is difficult to grasp: that we live in a perpetual ‘state of exception’. Decades later, in a formulation indebted to Benjamin, Michel Foucault coined a concept that would become fundamental to thought about the frightening 20th century – so violent, just as the centuries that preceded and will follow it, as Arendt would say, since violence is intrinsic to being and to society and always makes an appearance where power staggers. This notion was further developed by philosophers such as Giorgio Agamben and Peter Sloterdijk, among others, into the concept of ‘bio-politics’. In the modern era, ‘bio-politics’ means the absolute instrumentalisation of natural life by political power (Foucault, 1978, p. 173). ‘Bio-politics’ can thus be defined as the absolute political administration of life, the intervention or calculated intrusion by power-knowledge into every aspect of human life. In this regard, in the first volume of his trilogy Homo Sacer. Il potere sovrano e la nuda vita (1995), Agamben argues that the current paradigm of global expansion is the extreme application of ‘bio-politics’, namely, the concentration camp. At the centre of Quel che resta di Auschwitz. L’archivio e il testimone. Homo sacer III (1998) Agamben posits man not as a subject but as a living body and delivers a study of the space where this living body exists, which is simultaneously outside and within the juridical. In Archive and Witness (1995), the third volume of his work, he argues that the extreme situation undergone by human beings in concentration camps implies the inevitable revision of all ethical referents and parameters that are valid until the moment in which the extreme situation occurs; it also includes an interrogation of one’s own moral compass. Along the lines of Agamben, both Tzvetan Todorov and Sloterdijk, distance themselves from Jürgen Habermas’s utopian approach, embodied by his ‘discursive ethics’, while they underscore the importance of interrogating one’s own moral ethics as they are understood at the moment in which the extreme situation happens. Moreover, from a philosophical point of view they posit the evident failure of post-war humanism and, from a political point of view, of contemporary neoliberal democracies.

According to Todorov, in the case of concentration camps and war conflicts, or even in instances of the genocidal wars that keep tearing up our present – for example, in Iraq or Syria – testimony, which at this juncture would replace art and imagination, can help in the task of remembering horror, speaking out against barbarity, pondering the grounds for evil. Obtaining answers would be a whole other matter; and yet testimony has proven to fail in avoiding its historical repetition:

Furthermore, Jaume Peris Blanes, in his essential essay about the repressive logics of the 20th century, La imposible voz. Memoria y representación de los campos de concentración en Chile: la posición del testigo [The Impossible Voice. Memory and Representation in Chile’s Concentration Camps: The Witness’s Position] (2005), begins by laying out the concepts of ‘state of exception’, ‘bio-politics’, ‘sovereignty’ and ‘concentration camp’ in order to consider and to interrogate the notion of the ‘ethics of the witness’ as a legitimate and true strategy for resisting bio-power under military dictatorships in the Southern Cone, specifically, in Pinochet’s Chile. Walter Benjamin, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida (and, later on, also Beatriz Sarlo) would note that the holes and gaps inherent in testimonial in the first person, which is an ethical discourse from a powerless position (also noted by Todorov), constitute the sole possibility of reconstructing social memory, although in every case testimony has proven to be unable to eradicate the recurrent presence of evil in history. Thus, Levi’s (1947) or Semprún’s (1963) testimonies about National Socialism’s concentration camps and, more recently, testimonials by Hernán Valdés (1974) or Pilar Calveiro (1998) about Chilean or Argentine concentration camps are remarkable exercises in trauma recovery through writing and enunciation; and in some instances demonstrate the impotence of being unable to utter speech, of unsayability.² In the case of Calveiro, her testimony is a theoretically illuminating exercise in contestation addressed to bio-power:

Thus memory, as Reyes Mate (2012) affirms, is one of the most decisive categories of our time; and yet it is also amongst the most slippery, because in contrast to concepts such as ‘citizenship’, ‘democracy’, ‘freedom’ or ‘equality’ memory it is still in the making, being configured and built. A critical gaze on a totalitarian past may be, aside from healing, subversive, but we have only come to learn this.

The normalisation of violence

Traditional Christian or Enlightenment humanism does not constitute a solution to the violence intrinsic to totalitarian projects and to the western liberal democracies which allegedly oppose them and which have subjected us to living under a disquieting and permanent state of exception. Moreover, as Sloterdijk attests, it is hopeless to hold on to humanism as a civilising, ‘taming’, ‘appeasing’, ‘domesticating’ tool in the face of brutality and violence: ‘Concentration camp and society belong to each other, as they are inexplicable one without the other. They reflect and reproduce one another’ (Calveiro, 1998, p. 159).

In this regard, a reflection upon how the rhetoric of the necessity of violence was shamelessly wielded by the military dictatorships in the Southern Cone in order to impose the neoliberal model sheds light on how its excesses were carefully separated from the political and ethical domains:

Only after accepting that there is no malignant potential or ‘radical evil’ (Kant) as such, but rather a ‘bureaucratised and official barbarism’ (Adorno) as well as an intolerable, ubiquitous, trans-historical and universal ‘banal evil’ (Arendt) at the heart of bio-power, can and must we tell, narrate it in a complex, polyhedral way that is neither Manichean nor naïve. The ‘terrorising normality’, the mediocrity and banality intrinsic to evil, the ‘inhuman’ within the ‘human’ (Todorov, 2004) displayed in the Nazi concentration camps and under the Southern Cone dictatorships are difficult to assimilate. This is also the case in the Malvinas–Falkland Islands War, which is one of the most revealing examples of bio-political control in recent history:

In sum, to restore humanism implies confessing its impotence in the face of the violent acts of ‘bio-political’ power;⁴ and only by understanding its complex internal dynamics shall we be able, first, to narrate the conditions and circumstances that allow the degradation of human beings. Second, through narration – in which we could have played the part of either the victim or the victimiser – we shall be empowered to find personal atonement and a certain ethical space. Only at the moment in which we are able to accept violence as an atrocious yet inevitable component of our societies shall we be able to activate resistance. Only? As we shall see, confronting the multiple tentacles of bio-power, one of which is the normalisation of horror, can only take place from consciousness and by exercising an ‘ethics of testimony’.⁵

‘An ethics of fortune’

In the face of everyday horror there is another indispensable notion that can be rescued from Reyes Mate’s articles: the ‘ethics of fortune’, whose essence and projection escape all means of control, whose arbitrariness and hazardous gestures situate us, without even taking action, on one side or the other. In the extermination camps some were lucky enough not only to live but, more importantly, to catch a glimpse of humanity in atrocious conditions. As a matter of fact, this is why they lived: they lived to attest to the ‘remote possibility of goodness’ beyond ‘fear and hatred’, which Primo Levi evokes when he refers to Lorenzo in the opening quotation of this essay, a passage also mentioned by Jorge Semprún when he refers to his Muslim Doppelgänger whose place he will be taking, or when he discusses how an unknown young Russian man saved his life out of sheer goodness, without expecting anything in return:

What interests me in that capacity to feel, to attest through the other a certain degree of what has been deemed human, pure or good in the midst of desolation, violence and horror, is to rescue ‘fraternity’ in death or ‘fraternal death’. The latter, according to Semprún, is that solidarity within powerlessness which is erected in the form of resistance that exhales a breath full of life. He who witnesses a gratuitous gesture of pure giving, generosity, empathy and charity from his fellow prisoner is enabled to believe in humanity afterwards and to survive. By contrast, those spared from the illusion of believing in the other, lacking ethical relief, frequently succumb to bio-power. Solidarity or rather ‘care’ within ‘everyday virtues’, as Todorov put it (2004), is a powerful means of resisting and surviving in the extreme conditions of adversity in bare life:

In what follows, I shall carry out a risky theoretical displacement – one I consider necessary in order to be able to observe the ‘everyday virtues’ that make up life in concentration camps – onto another significant example of recent bio-political rule which is frequently ignored due to the relative degree of identity dispossession and de-subjectivisation: the Malvinas–Falkland Islands War. In this conflict, as we shall see, innumerable gestures of fraternity or ‘care’ amongst the soldiers took place in order that they might protect themselves from total internal violence upon the body, the mind and the spirit.

Malvinas–Falklands and ‘everyday virtues’

Argentina’s defeat in the Malvinas–Falklands War on 14 June 1982 closed a long cycle of violence in that country – although it inaugurated another cycle of violence of the socio-economic kind⁷ – and contributed to the demise of the dictatorship. In other words, it opened up the possibility of democracy. Thus, at a moment at which continental economic recession was imminent, the military regime, facing growing popular obliviousness, made a last, desperate attempt to keep authority through going to war, but this ended in the call for elections. During the months prior to the invasion, there was no talk of illegal repression, disappearances or human rights abuses but of inflation, dollar and interest rates and the growth in the external debt.

To wage the Malvinas–Falklands War was a conscious decision taken by two governments, the British and the Argentine, who knew that they were sending hundreds of young men to a likely death; in that regard, it was a ‘biopolitical’ strategy designed to hold onto power. In the case of Argentina it failed. Power was inevitably subsumed into even more violence; and it was inevitably made to disappear by the violence itself.

What is particular to the Malvinas–Falklands conflict is that it is still in a ‘grey zone’ of interpretation, since, although ‘la Guerra fue llevada a cabo por un gobierno dictatorial, represivo y genocida, ningún evento de la historia moderna argentina dio lugar a semejante consenso cívico-militar basado en la pertenencia nacional’ (Vitullo, 2012, p. 12).⁸ Furthermore, consensus was not only national but continental, as the sovereigntist cause was embraced throughout Latin America – except by Pinochet’s Chile. As Verbitsky points out (2002), both military and montonero discourses started from opposing analyses but coincided in their conclusion that the war was legitimate, be it from the point of view of a spurious nationalism or from an anti-colonialist perspective; and always counted on decisive support from the Argentine elite. This controversial moment although stemming from diverging motivations and opposed ideological compasses, made possible unanimous support for the Malvinas–Falklands War, its ultimate invisibilisation or interested banishment and, finally, an opportunistic sovereigntist instrumentalisation in external commemorations and official homages. Even decades later, in a very different world from the world which made possible this bellicose scenario, it is still contended that it was a ‘just war’, supported by nationalist arguments.⁹ When the time comes to adduce the ‘just cause’ as a consensual argument, the indissoluble link between war and dictatorial repression is subtly erased, while the thorny question of placing the war in the context of anti-imperialism or sovereigntism is avoided.

A second interesting aspect of the shameful and ‘minor’ character of the war when compared to the previous systematic disappearances and massive torture in concentration camps arises from the barbarity and military repression of the ‘dirty war’ that the conflict itself brought to light. The Malvinas–Falklands War draws a complex panorama because its fighters – those who died as well as the survivors – are subject to a double theoretical marginality; in this sense, they do not cease to be subalterns of subalternity, the latter being the victims of the Argentine military dictatorship.

This tension can be explained by the fact that, at the beginning of the 1980s, Argentine society had been rendered insensitive to human rights abuses, to notions such as ‘violence’, ‘disappearance’, or ‘death’ articulated around young people. It was a society that was anaesthetised and could hardly feel any more pain, although it slowly came to recognise continuity between the crimes committed by the military – the theft of new-borns, murders, kidnapping and torture – and the Falkland Islands War. However, this fact neither exculpates nor redeems Argentine society of a certain responsibility, through either action or omission.¹⁰ The gravity of the occurrences in recent Argentine history would then provoke the omnipresence of the first subalterns and would shadow ‘los chicos de la guerra’ [the war kids], reducing them to ‘second category subalterns’ in a first moment of information saturation. Their experience was not considered a priority. Afterwards, in the final phase of the explosion of memorials, ex-combatants would remain in the testimonial back rooms due to lack of homogeneity in their discourse, by the amalgamation of partial memories, politicised and struggling amongst themselves.

These two specific paradoxes – consensus about the need for war; relegation of the victims – traverse the Malvinas–Falkland Islands War. In this context, the ‘ethics of the witness’ provide relief at the individual level. However, this is not enough because, as stated above, there is great confusion amongst the survivors, who, in most cases, are incapable of distancing themselves theoretically or embarking upon critical reflection and have thus succumbed to official versions and an easy nationalism. Bio-power has dispossessed them of their identity, experience, discourse and sometimes of their lives until they have been transformed from subjects into ambivalent bodies that may discern but are unable to explain the reasons for their suffering. Agamben describes the specific modality of bio-power in the 20th century in terms of forcing to survive: separating the verbal from lived experience, living from speaking beings, bio-power allows the living to survive as the remnant of the speaker: ‘What constitutes the decisive contribution of bio-power to our times is neither life nor death, but the production of malleable and virtually infinite survival’ (Agamben, 1998, p. 163).

Catharsis implies verbalising horror and speaking out extreme evil by bearing witness. It presupposes a subjective locutionary act, at least, by the remnants of that subjectivity. This act is, however, always incomplete, precarious and bordering on stammering. Different modalities, lines of flight and gazes are incorporated into the experience of the past from which the speaker can heal by repulsing them, resisting bio-power. Parting from Lévinas’s assertion that we do not live in the singular, ‘solidarity’ – mentioned above as ‘fraternity’ or ‘care’ – and a sense of humour remind us that, at a juncture of extreme violence, purity and goodness are also inherent in human beings, that evasion through aesthetics is possible. In what Todorov calls ‘activities of the spirit’, we are also reminded that we are something more than ‘bare bodies’.¹¹

Indeed, in Facing the Extreme. Moral Life in the Concentration Camps (1996) Todorov highlights a series of concepts with which he works and which are partly recuperated by Calveiro as social typologies built upon the reconstruction of everyday life that is present in the testimonials. He begins by classifying virtues as either ‘heroic’ or ‘quotidian’. ‘Heroic virtues’ belong to the order of exception as they are produced at specific historical moments and are part of public life. ‘Quotidian virtues’, in turn, are imperceptible and invisibilised by their everyday occurrence in the midst of barbarity. Todorov points out three kinds of virtue which are present in the everyday lives and extreme experiences of concentration camps: ‘dignity’, ‘care’ and ‘aesthetics or activities of the spirit’. We believe that holding onto subjectivity, fraternity and imagination, or to the aesthetic of bodies which are rendered transparent by evil, appears also, with overwhelming frequency, in testimonials and narratives about the war in the Falkland Islands. The three virtues were a means of resistance and survival in a bellicose conflict that shut down military dictatorship in Argentina. In what follows I shall examine how this plays out in Iluminados por el fuego [Illuminated by Fire], one of the best-known testimonies of the Malvinas–Falklands War.

Laughter, fraternity and imagination in Iluminados por el fuego

As is evident, thus far I have been interested in highlighting, from the point of view of bio-politics, the inextricability of the Argentine military dictatorship from the Malvinas–Falkland Islands War that ended it. As I have pointed out, the similarities between the procedures of extermination, silencing and the long subsequent mourning – not in vain were the military officials the same and the Malvinas–Falklands War was an exercise in state violence that remains unpunished, and the war is either the corollary or the end of the disappearances and systemic torture in Argentina. Moreover, thoughtlessness towards and the abandonment of the disappeared, survivors and their families had been neglected until recently from legal and also socio-political and ethical perspectives. This abandonment is identical to that suffered by the victims of war who lost their lives and to the ex-combatants who survived – or ‘overdied’, as former combatant Caso Rosendi put it in poetic and Gelmanian terms in 2009.¹² Bio-political techniques towards what Calveiro calls the ‘threatened subject’ are the same: ‘But were we not / Were we not born in the country / Where electric shock devices / Were placed over pregnant bellies?’ (Caso Rosendi, 2009, p. 39). Life was not lost in all cases in concentration camps or in the Malvinas–Falklands, but that remnant which stays is often an ambiguous voiceless remnant which borders on suicide and madness, which carries a trauma which it is almost impossible to leave behind. In that sense, survivors had the privilege of catching a glimpse of the ‘human’, that hidden goodness mentioned by Levi or Semprún which emerges in the midst of pain, hunger and fear – be it in the form of care, fraternity or imagination – boldly resisting, thanks to that ethical fortune, the de-humanising and de-subjectivising strategies of bio-power.¹³

For Todorov, dignity ‘does not mean anything other than an individual’s capacity to maintain himself as a subject with will. This simple fact keeps him at the heart of the human species’ (Todorov, 1997, p. 24). The ‘threatened subject’ may voluntarily choose, for example, laughter as a means to escape the most adverse conditions. Humour brings about illusion, energy and optimism – sometimes bleeding mockery of the other oppressor – in the midst of death; it enables the welding of a strengthening and protecting shield against the victimiser. Many of the survivors’ testimonies gathered by Pilar Calveiro attest to this; humour is also continuously present in narratives about the Malvinas– Falklands War: ‘Happily without a worry / I trotted towards the trench / The helmet was dancing / A fox-trot above my head’ (Caso Rosendi, 2009, p. 49). When one reads the testimonies, it is surprising how life is always stronger than death: ‘Because most of the dead in the concentration camps […] died of exhaustion, of the sudden impossibility of overcoming an increased tiredness of living, they died from dejection, from the slow destruction of all their energy and reserves of hope’ (Semprún, 2001, p. 157).

Laughter is closely tied to vitality and intelligence and is thus one of the antidotes against dejection, loss of hope, standardisation and the extermination of the subject’s spirits; it is a line of flight to resist horror and violence inscribed in the body; and, finally, it helps to retain life and individuality. It is one of the will’s most important resources, in order not to become de-subjectified or to die.

Besides ‘dignity’, within which I have highlighted laughter as one of the most efficient ways to show the will to live, Todorov mentions a second everyday virtue: ‘care’. ‘Care’ is notably different from ‘solidarity’ because ‘care’ is not practised within a group, nor is it a communal act but rather a gesture of voluntary love or empathy towards another individual, towards a loved one, what I have designated the ‘ethics of fortune’. The other is thus remembered by its remnants of goodness:

However, following Semprún, and re-echoing Lévinas, I prefer to use the term ‘fraternity’ as opposed to ‘care’ because its semantics feel more luminous, affective and balanced, in the sense that such a gesture may always be reciprocal: ‘Il est banal de dire que nous n’existons jamais au singulier. Nous sommes entourés d’êtres et de choses avec lesquels nous entretenons des relations. Par la vue, par le toucher, par la sympathie, par le travail en commun, nous sommes avec les autres. Toutes ces relations sont transitives. Je touche un objet, je vois l’autre, mais je ne suis pas l’autre’ (Lévinas, 2001, p. 21).

The last of Todorov’s ‘everyday virtues’ is what he calls ‘activities of the spirit’ and is related to fleeing by means of the imagination, dreaming, knowledge or aesthetic experience (this is reflected accurately in the quotation from Semprún at the beginning of this section). To sum up: in order to survive bare life, the extreme experience, Todorov sketches an ethics of the I with the I, of the I with the you, and of the I with the them.

The soldier Edgardo Esteban’s testimony entitled Iluminados por el fuego. Confesiones de un soldado que combatió en Malvinas [Illuminated by fire. Confessions of a soldier who fought the Malvinas–Falkland Islands War] was first published in 1993 and was filmed by Tristan Bauer in 2005. Both works contributed to making visible the neglect and forgetfulness to which the combatants in the Malvinas–Falkland Islands War had been subjected. Beyond problematic ideological, textual and epic interpretations of the text that render this subject matter extremely delicate due to concessions bestowed on historical and nationalist (especially the latter) conceptions of the Islands within such interpretations, I am interested in highlighting the function that laughter, fraternity and imagination fulfil as forms of resistance. In this regard, Esteban’s testimony offers innumerable paradigmatic examples.

Laughter

Humour, that release of tension by means of laughter, joke, play or song, appears in various forms in Esteban’s narrative in various instances. For the reader, it feels anticlimactic, as I find myself before a scene, in the midst of the urgency of a war conflict, in which a radio is either broken or transmits false news; and yet a ludic atmosphere predominates that relaxes, releases, relieves for an instant:

Another humorous instance, in this case scatological, appears when Esteban describes recovering a piece of dirty underwear which another soldier had stolen from him during the war. The theft also supposes recovering dignity – and identity – which are implicit in the care of the self, through hygiene. Moreover, the tone in which the anecdote is told again vindicates a certain human background, smiling in the middle of hardship, in the midst of showers that are compared to Nazi torture chambers:

Indeed, even in the most tragic circumstances human beings are capable of smiling, laughing, especially in fraternity. In her essay, Calveiro recovers the voice of Geuna, a tortured woman from one of the concentration camps during the dictatorship. Geuna is absolutely astonished by her own resilience, by her own unknown, intimate capacity to oppose mechanical violence and horror with laughter. I find her words especially revealing in this regard:

Of course, this capacity to recover is, up to a certain point, willed by the threatened subject and yet this attitude appears more often than we expect it or are able to admit – perhaps we feel that a certain solemnity is a more politically correct attitude in the face of evil and yet perhaps it is less effective. In that sense, canonical works about the Malvinas–Falklands such as Fogwill’s Los pichiciegos [The Armadillos] (1983) or Carlos Gamerro’s Las islas [The Islands] (1998) and, more recently, Federico Lorenz’s Montoneros o la ballena blanca [Montoneros or the White Whale] (2012) operate as meta-fictions that carry out the humorous critical ‘historicisation of spectacle’ of the Malvinas–Falklands War by means of pastiche, parody and laughter, which in many cases border on black humour, the absurd and delirious. The narratives constitute montonero counteroffensives narrated with a touch of humour: Montoneros o la ballena blanca; conversational joking from inside the pichicera [a kind of subterranean cave] – Los pichiciegos; fantastic science-fiction narratives grounded on historical facts –Las islas. These three novels, along with Rodrigo Fresán’s two splendid short stories ‘La soberanía nacional’ [National sovereignty] and ‘El aprendiz de brujo’ [The witch apprentice] which are included in his Historia argentina [Argentinian History] (1992), collections of poems such as Soldados (2009) by Caso Rosendi and other testimonies such as Esteban’s or even Historia de los años sin piel [History of the Skinless Years] (2010) by veteran García Quiroga – the analysis of which I leave for another essay – show laughter as a survival strategy. In fact, all literary genres may use humour; and they do so in order to influence the maintenance of dignity, to survive and to enable the narration of the experience afterwards.

But to return to Iluminados por el fuego [Illuminated by Fire], there is another eloquent episode when, just as the war has come to an end, soldiers enthusiastically begin a soccer game as if nothing had happened. The two teams reproduce and rewrite the conflict they have just lost with humour and agree on two ideas: on the one hand, defeat has not eliminated the nationalist impulse although it has become demystified and degraded: having been defeated only reaffirms the idea that also within a democracy we live in a permanent state of exception (Esteban, 2004, p. 70). On the other hand, the first person, that is, the soldier Esteban, humorously affirms when offered Kelpers’¹⁶ food scraps while the others are playing soccer: ‘Let’s see if I could still die poisoned, just now when I have saved myself from the Gurkhas’ (Esteban, 2004, p. 71).

Thus, notions and concepts that are allegedly straight, solemn and indisputable, such as ‘national identity’, ‘life’ or ‘sovereignty’, or the idea that it is legitimate to occupy the Islands, are questioned and deeply degraded and exaggerated through parody, albeit temporarily, This occurs in Iluminados por el fuego [Illuminated by fire] when the author, in a final twist in his text, affirms that the Islands will one day be Argentine again. When fear, cold, hunger and the pain undergone are sieved through laughter, their sense changes and they thus acquire a new dimension. Laughter is a means of resistance. In short, laughter is a demystifying tool – nuanced towards either parody or irony – which questions the establishment and emancipates. In that sense, laughter is revolutionary: ‘We had not yet completely lined up when Lieutenant-Colonel Quevedo showed up, followed by the big guns; and without ceremony told us about the surrender. […] We kept on fucking around and making our usual jokes as if nothing had happened, as if not wanting to acknowledge that truth, that sad truth’ (Esteban, 2004, p. 58).

Fraternity

With regards to fraternity there is also much to say about Iluminados por el fuego [Illuminated by Fire]. Julieta Vitullo has written an indispensable work about fictional representations of the Malvinas–Falklands War;¹⁷ and in a chapter in this volume¹⁸ she mentions two figures or symbolic representations from the Malvinas–Falkland Islands War: the cowardly commander and the soldier who dies in the arms of his fellow soldier: that is, the cruel officer who abuses his subalterns and the loyal comrade who resists, embraces and accompanies the other in his death. The validation of that fraternity or comradeship, that humanity beyond the supposed heroism inherent in the gesture or in the idealisation with which memory adorns the gesture – such validation ends up being inevitable, in the same way arrogance, fear and cruelty are validated. The two faces of the human show themselves in extreme circumstances.

In that regard, we must consider the unity and solidarity demonstrated by the main characters in Iluminados por el fuego in the face of the aberrations and perverse military authorities. Second Lieutenant Gilbert humiliates them and shows an extreme degree of inhumanity, arrogance towards his subalterns. Let us remember that the officers who governed Argentina during the dictatorship were the same as those who led the Malvinas–Falklands War; and thus they translated the tactics they had used in the concentration camps and other counter-insurgent techniques to the war, but with the same soldiers: there are innumerable ex-combatant testimonies that narrate torture practices such as estaqueamiento and other humiliation by high-ranking officers during the war. Before bio-political control of the body and the spirit, the means to resist can be empathy, unity, fraternal friendship, beyond voluntary maintenance of one’s own dignity:

Another representative moment of mutual help, of that capacity to place oneself before the other and resist, takes place, like an explosion and instinctively, in the midst of battle:

Further in the text, there is a lucid conversation amongst soldiers that reveals that need to resist with those flashes of humanity, dignity and fraternity. Sergio, outraged by the number of soldiers fallen in combat, manifests his intention to visit every home to tell parents how their sons had died. This wish or will to leave a trace of each victim is a sublime gesture of fraternity:

One of the scenes in the conflict that leaves a deep impression on the soldier Esteban has to do with ethical fortune and with chance, as his life was saved because he did not occupy his post one night. The soldier who did, Vallejos, died in his place:

With Vallejos, there was no chance of fraternity, care or solidarity. On the contrary, Esteban’s life is saved by a fortuitous act of fraternity – one associated with caprice or intuition – which keeps him alive but feeling guilty, traumatised:

Fear, hunger, thirst, cold, sexual desire, pain: the soldiers in the Malvinas– Falklands are reduced to bare life and only have humour and fraternity to combat these sensations,²⁰ but this is not always possible: ‘If in order to win a war a “bullet proof ” group spirit is needed, along with great reserves of energy, I was sure that we, at this point, were lacking all of that. We had reached the limits of our strength. We had given away everything we had, and there we were, tired, broken and hungry’ (Esteban, 2004, p. 34).

Imagination

In Iluminados por el fuego [Illuminated by Fire] there is a moment in which we can observe how humour in resisting the hardships of war co-exists with the third line of ‘everyday virtues’ that Todorov mentions: ‘aesthetics’ or ‘spiritual activities’. This becomes evident in the passage in which the soldier Esteban reads a fragment of Carlos Castañeda’s Las enseñanzas de Don Juan [Don Juan’s Teachings]. In a nocturnal and cathartic communal reading, his mates display two attitudes: attentive listening to what constitutes fear and how it can help to endure violence and identity dispossession during a war – personified in Sergio the soldier, a friend of the protagonist; and, second, making fun or escaping through humour – represented by the soldier Reta. Let us look at both positions as captured in this extract:

Todorov’s ‘spiritual activities’ can be evasion or flight through literature or art, also observed clearly in Semprún, as according to Calveiro memorising Federico Gárcia Lorca’s Romancero gitano [The Gypsy Ballad] poems allowed him to go beyond the camps in his mind through reading and hallucination. Therefore, imagination may be erected and it can constitute, without the aid of aesthetics, a means of holding on: memories become an inexhaustible resource with which to face annihilation and the loss of subjectivity: ‘The watches were of course taken in pairs, but that night, due to a tactical issue, they left me to my own devices; so I stayed again with my cold, with my fear, but also with my memories, which never abandoned me: they could accompany me ceaselessly to any possible end’ (Esteban, 2004, p. 63).²¹

These strategies, although neither always successful nor fruitful nor possible – it is not only the will that appropriate them, as we have seen – are definitely indispensable lines of flight in the face of the dimensions of absolute power: both in concentration camps during the Argentine military dictatorship and in the Malvinas–Falklands War. Thus, in all of those world narratives, pain, violence and forgetting are accompanied by humour, fraternity and dreaming. They constitute those everyday dichotomies, that of life and death; and in the last instance, they are a way of vindicating the needs of a multi-focal, polyhedral, complex, precarious and fragile memory. Together, they make up unexpected ‘everyday virtues’ in the remnants of beauty in the midst of the inhospitable, cruel and arbitrary embedded in human horror.

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1 All translations from the Spanish and the French are the author’s own.

2 To the point that the relationship between the living and the speaking is characterised by being incomparable. The same goes for the processes of subjectivisation and de-subjectivisation, which can never coincide (Peris Blanes, 2005, p. 119).

3 In the same sense, Rodolfo Fogwill affirms in his essay ‘El doctor Cormillot y la gran máquina de adelgazar conciencias’ [Doctor Cormillot and the great machine for thinning-out consciences], first published in El Porteño in February 1984: ‘We were human: human just like the torturers. Because amongst the torturers there were kind, educated, order-loving, peace-loving people, people who were able to appreciate the beauty of the bodies of race horses. There were even remorseful torturers! Human! Because torturers are as human as collaborationists, and like them, they also have access to the human gifts of happiness, of the smile, sadness and regret. And yet, what kind of regret? The only valid regret is that which binds them not to carry out the same faults ever again’ (Fogwill, 2008, p. 60).

4 ‘Let God decide according to his will, I told myself. I am going to read the Greeks’, affirms Urrutia-Lacroix, the sinister and erudite main character in Roberto Bolaño’s novel Nocturno de Chile [ Chile by Night (2000)] at a moment of extreme historical urgency, at the moment in which bio-power will show itself with all its might in Chile. A masterly passage that mingles high culture and barbarity follows this statement: ‘I also read Demosthenes and Menander and Aristotle and Plato (who is always fruitful), there were strikes and a colonel in an armoured regiment that tried to stage a coup and a cameraman died filming his own death and then Allende’s naval aide was killed; and there were turmoil and bad words, Chileans cursed, painted on the walls and then almost half a million people marched in support of Allende; and then came the putsch, the uprising, the military coup, La Moneda was bombarded; and when the bombing stopped, the president killed himself and then it was all over. I stood still, with a finger on the page I was reading, and I thought: It is peaceful now’ (Bolaño, 2000, pp. 97–9). Complicity between culture and horror is manifest; and this is how we can observe the failure of any humanist attempt to mould violence.

5 Calveiro recalls that the tortured drank together with the torturers in Argentine concentration camps, that they listened to soccer games side by side on the radio, and that they played cards with them after having been subjected to rape and other unimaginable abuses. This is an example of an instance of the normalisation of violence, as horror is rendered quotidian. The last part of Roberto Bolaño’s novel Chile by Night (2000) shows this with clairvoyance when guests to María Canales’ literary soirées discover that the cellar is, in fact, a torture site: ‘I asked the following question: Why was it that one of the guests, as he got lost, came across that poor man? The answer was simple: because habit relaxes precautions, as routine shades all horror’ (Bolaño, 2000, p. 142).

6 ‘Si existe una dignidad del hombre que merezca ser articulada en palabras con conciencia filosófica, ello es debido a que los hombres no sólo son sostenidos en los parques temáticos políticos, sino que se autosostienen ellos mismos ahí dentro. Los hombres son seres que se cuidan y se protegen por sí mismos y, vivan donde vivan, generan alrededor suyo el entorno de un parque’ (Sloterdijk, 2009, p. 25).

7 For a detailed conceptualisation about the role of violence in Argentine politics of the second half of the 20th century, see Mira Delli-Zotti (2009).

8 ‘The war was waged by a dictatorial, repressive and criminal government, no event in the history of Argentina gave place to such civic-military consensus based on national belonging […] In Argentina, all members of the political class, from the right to the left, supported the war and enthusiastically buttressed the armed forces’ performance in defence of national sovereignty. […] in the Falklands adventure, not only military men were burned, but also a greater part of the political leaders’ credibility was consumed’ (Mira Delli-Zotti, 2009, p. 6).

9 See, for example, the last section of the soldier Edgardo Esteban’s testimonial Iluminados por el fuego [Illuminated by Fire] (2012, [1993]): ‘I think that this war placed us even further from our dream: that the Islands be Argentinian again. We know that they belong to us, but we must understand that there are people like us with whom we must learn to share. […] I feel that the soldiers who fought, we have, above anyone else, a right and a sentiment: that these Islands are ours’ (p. 279).

10 In Chile by Night, Bolaño demands an explanation from the whole country; he asks for answers and accountability from the Church, intellectuals and civil society for Pinochet’s crimes. We cannot simply cover up horror, as happens to Urrutia-Lacroix, the main character in the novel: ‘Chile, Chile. How could you have changed so much? Who would?, perched on his open window, looking at the faraway glare in Santiago. What have they done to you? Have Chileans gone mad? Are you going to become something else? Are you a monster that nobody will recognise?’ (p. 96).

11 Calveiro considers that suicide, hallucination that borders on madness, literal escape or deception are all legitimate mechanisms for escaping total power (1998). These options are present in several moments and repeated continuously in this book.

12 ‘We have come to learn this / We who have overdied / We know very well that behind silence / Comes another, atoning silence / It will always be like that’ (‘Después del horror’ [After the Horror], in Caso Rosendi, 2009, p. 105).

13 ‘Everyday life, friendships forged before the imminence of death are not arbitrary, transcendental choices and the possibility of laughter, even under such conditions, the impressions left by a countryside and an inhospitable landscape, beautiful and yet transformed by war, just like when the Sea Harriers discharge their bombs from the sky, or when the remains of bleeding seagulls are mixed up with a crushed Pucará’ (Mesa Gancedo, 2009, p. 12).

14 In the same vein, there is Caso Rosendi’s poem ‘Moment’: ‘Lying on a great rock / We drink scotch ale / I have no idea where he got it / Soldier Villanueva / It is dusk and the only radio / In the Islands is playing Let it be / We drink and laugh / because while on the continent / The only thing exploding is national rock / And Charly asks that Buenos Aires not be bombarded / Here the military plays the Beatles!’ (2009, p. 29).

15 Examples of scatological humour are innumerable in this testimony. Let us look at another one: ‘We have not won the war, but we shat over the whole island […] Although on second thoughts – Sergio went on – we Argentinians are such forros [ass holes] that we fertilised the island so that they can take advantage of it. Well, if this were the case I hope that they at least invite us to come on vacation. – ‘On vacation?’, I asked him. – I am never coming back even if they give me the ticket and the lodgings for free, even if they brought a British blonde for me to keep me company at night’ (Esteban, 2004, p. 72).

16 ‘Kelper’ is the name given to people from the Malvinas–Falkland Islands.

17 Islas imaginadas. La Guerra de Malvinas en la literature y cine argentinos [Imagined islands. The Malvinas/Falkland Islands War in Argentinian literature and film] (2012).

18 See J. Vitullo, ‘The Malvinas journey: harsh landscapes, rough writing, raw footage’, in this volume.

19 Another fragment about friendship is the following: ‘Even though we were not together all the time, because we held different posts and carried out different missions, every time we got together we had a lot of fun, in spite of the bad times every one of us was undergoing. We were friends and we were relieved to realise that all four us were still alive’ (Esteban, 2004, p. 33).

20 ‘Climbing hills up and down / until reaching soldier Sañisky / He embraced him / Put between his hands / My Marlboro packet / This is yours – he told him – / This is all I have / And we committed ourselves to smoking’ (‘Brindis’ [Toast], in Caso Rosendi, 2009, p. 103).

21 The poem by Caso Rosendi whose title corresponds to the Gaelic etymology of Malvinas– Falklands – ‘Maol-Mhin’ – is along these lines, as it posits beauty as a flight from death: ‘It was terribly beautiful / Looking in the middle of bombardment / The softness with which they fell / The snowflakes’ (Caso Rosendi, 2009, p. 47).