Naming Argentina: The Subject of Torture and the Ethics of Psychoanalysis

Abstract: The concurrent diffusion of Lacanian psychoanalysis in Argentina and the state’s deployment of torture and disappearance during the most recent military dictatorship have led many critics to interpret the turn to Lacan as a cerebral substitute for political protest after the coup d’état. This essay examines how the ruling junta’s specific forms of violence provoked a crisis in the relationship between psychoanalysis and humanism, erupting in the literary field through the figure of the desaparecida . In tension with human rights discourses prevailing in the 1980s, Luisa Valenzuela’s experimental fiction explores the subject’s fragmentation under conditions of state terror and the ethical ambivalence of humanitarian efforts to repair the ego in the wake of torture.