The previous chapter introduced the core of my theoretical framework. Inspired by Foucault's concept of objectification, I proposed to read the scholarship and practice of transitional justice as a form of discipline: a body of knowledge, a set of technologies (practices) and a group of institutions that both produce, and are produced by, the historical emergence of their own object of study. From a critical historical perspective, I suggested that the emergence of a body of knowledge specialised in post-conflict or post-authoritarian justice was the by-product and the coproducer of a post-conflictual economy of signification characteristic of the late twentieth century. The discipline of transitional justice has been continuously criticised for the ‘mistake’ of seeing violence merely in terms of violations of civil and political rights. I argued that this narrow understanding of violence was not a mistake, but the logical hardcore of such post-conflictual economy of signification. The central argument was that the end of violence (e.g., civil war, terrorism, authoritarianism) was not a sufficient condition for the emergence of the post-conflict, as an object of study and political intervention. This new political reality called the post-conflict also required the emergence of a new discipline that defined violence as an intentional, cyclical and exceptional phenomenon.

In this chapter I turn to the history of political violence in Brazil from the early 1960s to the late 1970s. The events narrated here serve two main purposes. First, they are meant to introduce the uninitiated reader, providing the background knowledge required by my analysis of the CNV. Aside from this introductory function, the chapter serves another important function: it completes the theoretical argument of the previous chapter with an empirical example. The contemporary history of political violence in Brazil illustrates what I call the constitutive absence of the post-conflictual economy of signification: the practices and ideas that cannot be incorporated by its narrow representation of violence. The question this chapter seeks to answer is very simple. Which practices and ideas needed to ‘disappear’ in order to pave the way for a post-conflictual reality?

The choice of the word ‘disappear’ is not arbitrary.