‘I do not care to remember’

In a thrilling and passionate text published in 2017 in IJP issue number 3 and presented in a plenary session at the IPA conference in Buenos Aires in July 2017, Harris (2017) reminds us that sexuality and intimacy are shot through with the forces of power and history.

The very site of the IPA conference, the Hilton Hotel in Puerto Madero, was a good example: until the 1990s, this area of the port was under military control—an immense, gated space that could only be entered by passing through an identification checkpoint guarded by armed soldiers.

What is more, a mere 10-minute walk away is the pyramid in the Plaza de Mayo (May Square), which the mothers and grandmothers of the young people tortured, killed, and disappeared by the dictatorship have been marching around every Thursday afternoon since 1977, demanding that their loved ones appear alive. It is an impossible demand, made with unprecedented courage, that has cost many of them their lives. Like in a classical tragedy, demands and courage go together. They were called “the madwomen” of the Plaza de Mayo. You had to be pretty crazy to dare to challenge military power directly. Gómez Mango (1992) has called them the “new Antigones.”

In the Argentina of the dictatorship, tanks in the bedroom were not necessary: military power was a difficult reality to ignore.

In the same spot where political prisoners were once held in Punta Carretas in Montevideo, Uruguay, just across the River Plate, a large and luxurious shopping mall now stands. Similarly, the site of the conference, former military land, is now one of Buenos Aires’ most chic areas.

As we know, victors build temples to their gods atop the temples of the vanquished. “Hilton” is one of the names of the gods of our era.

“Somewhere in La Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember”† are the first words of the founding text of Spanish literature, Don Quixote (Cervantes 2003). This “not caring to remember” (for Freud, “not wanting to know”) is not exclusi