Abstract

ORTEGA, Francisco A. Social Violence and History: The Level of the Event. univ.humanist. [online]. 2008, n.66, pp.31-56. ISSN 0120-4807.

In this article I will demonstrate how in the fields of history and social sciences, event, narrative and the political have been reconfigured since the 1980s. First, I show the moment of the initial shock, that historical experience that produces the trauma of the victim. This desctructuralizing experience produces an emotional texture associated to the intense suffering and the social fragmentation. Second, I highlight the various moments of narrative construction of the event, from the initial intent of assimilating its meaning to the later compulsive repetitions. Narrative - from the testimony of victims, passing through the news media and international agencies, to academic history - will be the modality of discourse that will try to assign coherence and meaning to traumatic experiences. Third and last, I am interested in emphasizing the compulsive condition of repetition; the enigmatic insistence that structures the field of possible actions and available answers to the collectives that offer keys to the processes of group identification and rejection, the force of memories, their silencing and complaints: the political plot. Although analytically they have been susceptible to independent analysis, these three records coexist, and their current place in contemporary social theory suggests that they form part of a plot that should be looked at as a whole. In this text I will again present some of the debates around these three concepts, and later illustrate the ways in which these debates inform the theoretical discussions around the field of convergence, which we shall call studies about or around social trauma.

Keywords : violence; event; trauma; narrative; the political.

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