The Voice of the Spectres Image and politics in fin-de-siècle Argentina

Abstract

This paper attempts to account for certain political images that appear on the public stage, based on the relationship of presence/absence; and which mark a particularity in principle, that of not being current events; however, they always return, and are always installed, generating diverse and antagonistic reactions, ranging from adhesion to rejection.

In this article, we will try to explain this modality, using certain images of Argentine politics as a starting point. To do so, we will cite two examples: the image of Eva Perón and the image of the disappeared during the last military dictatorship in 1976.

We will begin by describing the origin of the imagos, since their function was to immortalise power. And this category of immortality was possible through the consecration of bodies.

We can infer that the image of Eva Perón is constituted in the way that religious images unite the community of believers and maintain a relationship with their image that transcends devotion to install it on a miraculous plane. Meanwhile, the image of the disappeared returns in a phantasmagorical way, in the same way that ghosts return demanding justice.

We will conclude that to understand the meaning of these images, from the spectral and from the sinister that they contain, is to take them out of the simple hallucinogenic idea that they may be to us; fundamentally because the stage of Argentine politics continues to receive the message of the ghosts, which sectors of power refuse to listen to, precisely because it is a claim that questions the established "order".