El no-lugar: Novela policial y justicia en las postdictaduras de Espana y del cono sur (Spanish text, Argentina, Spain, Chile)

In this study I analyze the relationship between memory and justice through the reading of a collection of detective novels published during the post-dictatorship period in Argentina, Spain, and Chile. The main conclusion arising from the reading of these detective novels is that neither the nation-State nor the transnational market can account for the traumatic memories of the victims of State terror. Thus, the Non-place emerges as a necessary third space of critical reflection whose function is to account for the complex relationship between memory and justice from a transatlantic/transnational perspective. In order to articulate this concept of the Non-place I mainly rely on three theoretical sources: Marxism, psychoanalysis, and post-structuralism.; In the first chapter, I establish the main elements of a transatlantic history of the post-dictatorship period through a critical reading of Galindez, a novel by Manuel Vazquez Montalban The second chapter is an analysis of the detective as a melancholic character in three paradigmatic hardboiled detective novels: Nadie sabe mas que los muertos by Ramon Diaz Eterovic, Los mares del sur by Manuel Vazquez Montalban, and Una sombra ya pronto seras by Osvaldo Soriano. I argue that melancholy negates the new democratic regimes in the name of the memory of victims of State terror.; The third chapter returns to the question of history through the analysis of three hybrid detective novels: Respiracion artificial by Ricardo Piglia, Soldados de Salamina by Javier Cercas, and Estrella distante by Roberto Bolano. In these texts, a fictional writer investigates a historical enigma that it is impossible to resolve. As opposed to the hardboiled fiction examined in the second chapter, the subject of these novels is history i.e. the (im)possibility of narrating the lost history of dictatorship.; Finally, in the conclusion I examine El caso Pinochet, a documentary by Patricio Guzman. This documentary shows the failure of both national and international laws to establish a global concept of justice. Thus, the return of Pinochet to Chile calls for the theoretical emergence of the Non-place as a space of hospitality for the victims of State terror in Spain and the Southern Cone.