Reflections on the law after the genocide: forty years since the “night of the ties”

Abstract

The work is developed from a punctual fact, but of great symbolic power, succeeded during the last Argentine military dictatorship (1976-1983), regarding the role of Law and lawyers, based on distinctions such as state of law and state of exception, following the category proposed by Agamben. This article emphasizes that reverting the formula of Clausewitz (war is the continuation of politics by other means), shifts the legal / illegal logic in Law, and replaces it with the logic of war, friend / foe, in which what disappears is the very concept of citizenship, leaving bodies, nuda vita, subjected to “guardians”, with the purpose of disciplining society. The episode known as the “night of the ties”, when many labor lawyers were kidnapped, tortured, some of them dead and others disappeared, shows how the conscious work of defensive lawyers implies, for the logic of the state of exception, an intolerable irritation that must be quickly eliminated. The study concludes by reflecting on the role of memory, advocacy, Law, and, based on the essay by Ricoeur, on the possibility of preventing facts like Auschwitz, or something analogous to the state of exception, from returning.