Dissensual Subjects: Memory, Human Rights, and Postdictatorship in Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay by Andrew C. Rajca (review)

Andrew C. Rajca's Dissensual Subjects advances the "ethical fusion" of memory and human rights and the "non-subject of nunca más/nunca mais" to grapple with contemporary debates about liberal humanitarianism and political subjectivity in Latin America. Through a close reading of the nunca más/nunca mais reports, as well as analyses of numerous works by Latin American artists, this book illustrates how memory and human rights function as modes of representation that suture the subject of rights to hegemonic political subjectivities (the heroes and victims of the dictatorships—desaparecidos and militants), eliding the economic and social rights of historically marginalized populations in Latin America.

The book is comprised of four chapters and an introduction. In the introduction, Rajca outlines and discusses key debates on human rights and memory in Latin America and advances a theoretical elaboration of what he calls the "ethical fusion" of memory and human rights in post-dictatorship contexts in order to propose the notion of the non-subject of human rights. Chapter one advances a close reading of the nunca más/nunca mais reports from Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay, reflecting upon the foundational relationship between the concept of the subject of rights and liberal humanitarianism. Chapters two through four analyze Brazil's "Memorial da resistência," Uruguay's "Centro cultural y museo de la memoria," and Argentina's "Espacio para la memoria y la promoción y defensa de los derechos humanos," arguing, on the one hand, that the permanent installations in all three sites reproduce hegemonic political subjectivities (heroes and victims) and, on the other, that some of the temporary installations in all three sites offer the potential to think beyond the "ethical fusion" between memory and human rights, making visible the exclusion of historically marginalized populations from the discourses of liberal humanitarianism and opening the field of signification to non-hegemonic political subjectivities.

This book's key contribution is the elaboration of dissensual political subjectivations at work within and through the tensions between politics and aesthetics at sites of memory throughout Latin America's southern cone. Departing from a humanitarian notion of ethics, Rajca emphasizes the crucial significance of engaging in a critique of liberal humanitarianism discourse in order to "recuperate a space of political subjectivation in postdictatorship studies in ways that move beyond the ethical demand of … never again" (20). Rajca here enlists the work of Jacques Rancière as the means to fashion a notion of dissensus that foregrounds moments of political subjectivation "where uncounted subjects of human rights and memory can rearticulate unqualified notions of victim, justice, and inequality in postdictatorship" (ibid). Given this more compelling notion of the (non)subject of rights, Rajca then advances the tension between politics and aesthetics as a means to critically engage with sites of memory as spaces that offer the possibility "to explore the heterogeneous relationship between politics and art to trace previously invisible processes of political subjectivation in contemporary social discourse" (29).

Rajca, for instance, argues that it is through temporary photography installations—such as the work of Sub (coperativa de fotógrafos)—that we can begin to challenge the ethical fusion between memory and human rights in order to open spaces for subjectivation for the "nonheroes and nonvictims" of the dictatorships. For Rajca, the aesthetic intervention of Sub's work, specifically its photography series on the "Villas Miseria" in Argentina, allows us to understand "The discourses of memory and human rights [as] complementary, not coextensive," this, in turn, opens the possibility of "making visible a claim for social equality and economic justice by subjects excluded from consensual notions of rights" (193). In this sense, the tension between politics and aesthetics in artistic projects such as Sub's is indexed as the primary movement to "reopen the processes of political subjectivation as practiced thought, exceeding the institutionalized sites into which they are inscribed, thus creating a dissensual cut where anonymous, nonethical human rights subjectivities become visible...