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While the dominant human rights discourse on transitional justice constitutes a mix of reinforcing aims that seek to “make peace with” a violent past, this article complicates this notion by exploring how affective memories can prevent individuals from envisioning a future for themselves in which their individual and their nation's past is safely left behind. In the context of ongoing debates over whether to remember or forget a country's traumatic past, the article will show how affective memories of violence and disappearance prevail and disrupt the reconciliation paradigm, and need to be taken into account in transitional justice processes.

It’s been more than 33 years since the military took power, and still Argentina continues to grapple with how to remember the period of political violence and state terrorism of the 1970s and 1980s. This is not new. Over the last few decades, moral and political claims about how this past should be collectively remembered by the nation have caused deep political and societal divisions. It is impossible to understand fully why such deep ruptures continue to persist in Argentine society without acknowledging the role played by individual emotions in generating and shaping collective emotions and affects, thereby helping to produce new forms of antagonism and solidarity within memorial cultures. In this article I explore what happens when divergent narratives of the past confront each other in the public sphere, and what kinds of ideas and conditions can enable a shift away from the politics of antagonism and competition towards one of mutual recognition.

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