Entre reconnaissance et possibilité de faire mal: l’expérience de l’altérité dans le cas d’une ancienne prisonnière politique de la dictature chilienne

According to a qualitative methodology of a biographical type, in 'the unique case' mode, this article analyses the life story of a 73-year-old woman who was a political prisoner and tortured during the Chilean civil and military dictatorship. We seek to determine the sense that the other takes on as alterity in her subjective experience. In the first place, it is the figure of the other who appears in the account of prison, torture and political violence. In this case, alterity is lived in the passage between places of comfort and support, as in political camaraderie, and others characterized by the violence and brutality the role of the torturer and the armed forces incarnated. A particular situation occurs when the aggressor is paradoxically perceived as a good being. In the second place, the alterity presents itself a posteriori, downstream from the situation of political violence, in the transmission of that experience. It assumes a form in the role of witness, as a reparative experience associated with the acknowledgement it implies but at the same time dreaded because of the risk of "harming" he who the account is aimed at. Thirdly, the research context is presented as a particular instance showing the encounter between the participant and another, a researcher, who, as occurred in the previous case, in addition to his role of researcher, serves as witness.