The Private Life of Marked Money. Reparation, Affects, and the Cultural Production after State Terrorism in Argentina

02. November

18:00 - 19:30 Uhr

Veranstalter:
Erich Auerbach-Institut for Advanced Studies

Ort:
Bibliothek Erich Auerbach-Institut / Weyertal 59 (Rückgebäude 3. OG)
Weyertal 59
50937 Köln

Information:

Wir laden herzlich zu unserer ersten Aurbach Lecture des Wintersemesters 2026/27 ein. Den Auftakt macht Maria Eva Perez, Literatur- und Politikwissenschaftlerin aus Buenos Aires. Der Vortrag wird auf Englisch sein.

Since the mid-1980s, Argentine governments have established economic reparation policies for victims of state terrorism, only partially recognising children among those affected. These policies are a public form of recognition: through legislation, administrative procedures and civil litigation, the state assigns an economic value to the harms of state violence. Yet once granted, reparations become individualised: their acceptance, management and use are displaced into private and family life, and public debate about their meanings and consequences remains scarce. The subject is also barely addressed in the academic literature on post-dictatorship Argentina. It emerges, however, in cultural productions by child survivors of state terrorism, both as an explicit theme and as a material condition of their making.

This lecture approaches this tension through the notion of "marked money", drawing on the sociology of money and, in particular, Viviana Zelizer’s work on the social meanings attached to monetary forms. It asks what happens when public recognition of violence is materialised as money or public debt instruments, whether as inheritance or as compensation for one's own harm, and what cultural production can reveal about aspects of reparation that public discourses of memory leave obscured.

It offers a first exploration through literary works by second-generation writers. Whereas public discourse is largely silent on economic reparations, these works expose the material and affective tensions surrounding their reception and how different forms of reparation are experienced, appropriated and given meaning.The next stage turns to cinema, examining a wider corpus of Argentine films and the material conditions through which reparative money may itself fund art-making. Cultural production thus becomes a space where an individualised, silenced experience of public policy can return to public discourse.

Further information