What explains the fact that, 50 years after the coup, the discord between Chileans appears to still be alive and that the winds of time have not dispersed them but inflamed them?
A lot has happened after 50 years. These included a process of material modernization that transformed daily life; a democratic practice that has enabled movement between left and right; and a very relevant generational shift in the political elites. And yet disagreements about the past and its meaning appear to have deepened. Why do political forces behave like boats against the current, sailing endlessly into the past?
The answer lies in the future. The future is what changes or modifies the past, and for the same reason, if there is no common horizon in political culture, the future remains unchanged.
And that is the problem in Chile. As the constitutional debate, which has so far been threatened with failure, shows, no agreement can be reached on the most fundamental aspect of the future, namely the rules of coexistence. And under these conditions, when nothing can be seen ahead, the view returns.
It is not that the past divides Chileans and that they therefore cannot agree on a constitutional text. The truth is the opposite. They fail to build a shared memory because they fail to agree on the future.
Historical time – the expression is obviously a pleonasm – is a relaxed time that brings together in one point, this now, what has already been and what is expected. The past is time stretched backwards, and the future is at the same time time stretched forwards. If the latter changes, then the past also changes. Of course, this does not mean that the events that occurred before disappear or are different; but its meaning changes. It’s like watching an arrow shooting into space that suddenly changes its aim and trajectory. Then the act of firing would take on a new meaning in retrospect. This is what Borges says when he states that “every writer creates his predecessors.” The appearance of a literary genius makes us read earlier literature differently than before. The same is true in politics and history. A change in the future changes the meaning of what happened. That is why St. Augustine, in the Confessions, notes with astonishment that he can remember without sadness that he once experienced sad moments, and that he can remember without fear when fear overcame him. Thrown into the future, fear remains; but not because it goes out or is replaced by enthusiasm, but because it takes on new meaning in the light of the vital project.
In other words: the future changes the past.
It is not the case that events that occur later change the facticity of the event; but they are capable of changing their meaning or meaning. That’s why you can say that politics – with a capital letter – is time management. In Louis Bonaparte’s 18th Brumaire, Marx points out that when politics is powerless, it always puts on the clothes of the ancients and repeats their speeches, their motives and their phrases. “The ghosts of the past call terribly to their aid,” writes Marx, “they borrow their names, their war slogans, their clothes, in order to represent the new scene with this disguise of venerable age and this borrowed language.” And that is more or less what is happening in Chile half a century after the coup. Everyone repeated old gestures and repeated sentences that had already been said.
And this is – it is worth repeating – the result of the impossibility of thinking about the future, the most obvious symptom of which is the failure of the first constitutional process and the numerous setbacks of the current constitutional process.
This is the hitherto unsuccessful connection that mediates between the constitutional debate, marked by difficulties and discord, on the one hand, and the memory of the events of fifty years ago, on the other.
And that is why, paradoxically, Chile’s problem is not the past but the future; not the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the coup, but the constitutional question, which so far blatantly shows that Chileans are unable to think fluently about a common future.
And that is why the past is there intact, like an arrow whose trajectory could not be changed.
Carlos Pena He is UDP rector and author of The Time of Memory (Taurus, 2019).