It goes without saying


Levinson, Brett. “Dictatorship and Overexposure: Does Latin America Testify to More than One Market?” Discourse - 25.1&2, Winter & Spring 2003, pp. 98-118.

Levinson argues the 1973 coup never ceased happening, it actually stroke with all its horror in the post-dictatorship, when the possibilities for articulating different political projects was radically closed, as the ideology of the free market was imposed as a consensus, and precisely, presented not as an ideology anymore, but as what just is, or "it goes without saying". To challenge this is actually not to make any sense. The coup really just hits with all its strength now, when the victims of state violence find there is no possible discourse available to account for the experiences. When violence is recognized, is done under the paradigm of measurability and trade, the exchange of crimes of one side in the market of forgiveness and forgetfulness of the transition.

"Transition consequently commands a poetics (the language of analogy, of tropes), the invention of a language that does not belong to dictatorship or democracy but to their relation, one that neither of these fields can offer." (108)

The order of the transition is not based on the complete suppression of the memory of the horrors of the dictatorship, but rather on remembering that "this" (free market) is better than "that" (the memory of state violence). What is radically suppressed is the relationship between the dictatorship and the transition, the continuities.

The multiplication of information about the dictatorship is of information that does not mean anything because it cannot be used to testify for justice given the amnesty laws that were not reverted in the post-dictatorship:

"Overexposure of the Same (story), within the news or within all public testimony, today replaces underexposure (suppression) of the Other." (117)

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