Today's blogpost is by María Berta López Ríos, Chris McCarroll, and Paloma Muñoz Gómez on their recently published paper Memory, Mourning, and the Chilean Constitution (RHV), published in a special issue of on memory and trauma.
“I confess that I am in mourning”. So writes the novelist Ariel Dorfman. This is an interesting statement, however. For it is not the loss of a loved one that Dorfman grieves. The loss he is mourning is political. He is in mourning because of the result of a political referendum held in Chile in 2022. The grief Dorfman, and many others, experienced is a form of political grief. This may seem strange, but the phenomenon may be more common than we think.
We recently wrote a paper exploring this kind of experience of political grief, which arose out of our shared interest in the philosophy of emotions and the political situation in Chile. Our paper focuses on the expressions of mourning (like Dorfman’s) that followed the Chilean referendum of September 2022, which sought to change the country’s constitution and leave behind the one written by Augusto Pinochet’s government more than 40 years ago. The project of change proposed in the 2022 referendum failed, however. This leads us to ask why so many Chileans expressed a feeling of grief after the 2022 election results were announced. To answer this question, we believe that it is necessary (1) to examine the normative nature of grief and (2) determine whether and how this emotion can be linked to an intergenerational trauma.
Grief is an emotional process that has been expressed, we suggest, in many ways, by many members of Chilean society. We believe that the past military dictatorship and the many cases of abuse, disappearances and deaths left a legacy of trauma that continues to affect the population and is constantly revived and collectivised through shared and vicarious memories. We believe that the feeling of mourning has been shared by many Chileans through different generations, and has been triggered and updated in different ways.
Regarding the nature of grief, our first theoretical proposition is that the feeling of grief, commonly understood as deep sadness associated with the loss of our loved ones, is rather a process with many stages that is strongly related to a sense of ‘loss of life possibilities’ or ‘loss of opportunities’. In our work, we link the feeling of grief—as a progressive response to the loss of life possibilities—to a reflection on ‘the disruption of one’s own practical identity’. We believe that the disruption of practical identity undermines a normative principle. In other words, this disruption undermines the values we have chosen and with which we identify, those values that guide our actions as if they were at the same time a reflection of ourselves or of what we want to be. We believe that this disruption of value-identity, this loss of possibilities of being ourselves through the practical application of our values, is central to the experience of bereavement.
On our reading, the Chilean referendum was the culmination of a prolonged social movement for change, in which many Chileans had invested their practical identities, such as in the fight for gender equality that they hoped would be enshrined in the new constitution. When the plebiscite to approve the constitution was rejected, many Chileans experienced this loss as one that impacted their practical identities and resulted in a loss of life possibilities. This loss was experienced not just as an ephemeral one, however, but one that stretches back in shared and vicarious memories of the (traumatic) past combined with the hope for change and a better future. The draft constitution was embedded in the fabric of the (often traumatic) story of Chilean history and was viewed, at least by some, as a key way to realise the commitments, values etc., that go to make up their practical identities. The rejection of the constitution was a loss of life possibilities for some sectors of Chilean society, and is the reason why Dorfman and many others mourned it.
“I confess that I am in mourning”. So writes the novelist Ariel Dorfman. This is an interesting statement, however. For it is not the loss of a loved one that Dorfman grieves. The loss he is mourning is political. He is in mourning because of the result of a political referendum held in Chile in 2022. The grief Dorfman, and many others, experienced is a form of political grief. This may seem strange, but the phenomenon may be more common than we think.
María Berta López Ríos
We recently wrote a paper exploring this kind of experience of political grief, which arose out of our shared interest in the philosophy of emotions and the political situation in Chile. Our paper focuses on the expressions of mourning (like Dorfman’s) that followed the Chilean referendum of September 2022, which sought to change the country’s constitution and leave behind the one written by Augusto Pinochet’s government more than 40 years ago. The project of change proposed in the 2022 referendum failed, however. This leads us to ask why so many Chileans expressed a feeling of grief after the 2022 election results were announced. To answer this question, we believe that it is necessary (1) to examine the normative nature of grief and (2) determine whether and how this emotion can be linked to an intergenerational trauma.
Christopher Jude McCarroll
Grief is an emotional process that has been expressed, we suggest, in many ways, by many members of Chilean society. We believe that the past military dictatorship and the many cases of abuse, disappearances and deaths left a legacy of trauma that continues to affect the population and is constantly revived and collectivised through shared and vicarious memories. We believe that the feeling of mourning has been shared by many Chileans through different generations, and has been triggered and updated in different ways.
Paloma Muñoz Gómez
Regarding the nature of grief, our first theoretical proposition is that the feeling of grief, commonly understood as deep sadness associated with the loss of our loved ones, is rather a process with many stages that is strongly related to a sense of ‘loss of life possibilities’ or ‘loss of opportunities’. In our work, we link the feeling of grief—as a progressive response to the loss of life possibilities—to a reflection on ‘the disruption of one’s own practical identity’. We believe that the disruption of practical identity undermines a normative principle. In other words, this disruption undermines the values we have chosen and with which we identify, those values that guide our actions as if they were at the same time a reflection of ourselves or of what we want to be. We believe that this disruption of value-identity, this loss of possibilities of being ourselves through the practical application of our values, is central to the experience of bereavement.
On our reading, the Chilean referendum was the culmination of a prolonged social movement for change, in which many Chileans had invested their practical identities, such as in the fight for gender equality that they hoped would be enshrined in the new constitution. When the plebiscite to approve the constitution was rejected, many Chileans experienced this loss as one that impacted their practical identities and resulted in a loss of life possibilities. This loss was experienced not just as an ephemeral one, however, but one that stretches back in shared and vicarious memories of the (traumatic) past combined with the hope for change and a better future. The draft constitution was embedded in the fabric of the (often traumatic) story of Chilean history and was viewed, at least by some, as a key way to realise the commitments, values etc., that go to make up their practical identities. The rejection of the constitution was a loss of life possibilities for some sectors of Chilean society, and is the reason why Dorfman and many others mourned it.