Lusting for Memory, Romancing with Phantoms

This debate is spread out before the reader in all its details and is really too complex to be summarized here. The conclusion however is susceptible to a synopsis. Nissim arbitrates a middle path between the two rival postures and contends that a/the communist future should never ignore past-struggles including its own follies, for it is the ‘apathy towards tradition that has thus far resulted in the failure of many socialist projects’. He concludes that the Marxists’ rupture with memory is (an avoidable) step by which they seek liberation from tradition, a consequence of the Enlightenment trajectory. If our reading is valid, the book then takes us directly to memory.

Ever since the 1980s—with the spotlight on the works of Yosef Yerushalmi, Pierre Nora, Jacques LeGoff et al.—the sub-discipline of memory studies (or the location of memory in a critical conjunction with the human sciences) has remained a complicated one. This situation is unlike the days of Hugh von Hofmannsthal and Maurice Halbwachs at the beginning of the 20th century, when memory emerged as roughly contemporaneous with the crisis of historicism in Germany. In the following paragraph, we need not risk entering the labyrinth of definitions nor preoccupy ourselves with a literature review on the state of the discipline. Such tasks have been done with sure and certain rigour elsewhere. Rather, we shall merely highlight a set of questions in the relationship between history and memory within the scope of secular thinking.

Why would historical consciousness, an offspring of reason, threaten memory? Is it because such a consciousness (and/or its bearer, the historian) cannot be reduced to an ethno-racial substance? If memory is practised not as a verifiable act of reason but as tradition and ritual, what are its consequences? These issues merely form the proverbial tip of the iceberg, but it should be more than clear by now that we are certainly not at the gates of a benign subject-matter. And it would be at this juncture, as the debate opens up, that one would begin walking towards LeGoff’s corner. This French historian had once declared that ‘it is incumbent upon the professional specialists of memory to make the struggle for the democratization of social memory one of the primary imperatives of their scientific objectivity.’ Kerwin Lee Klein is another with whom I tend to agree. On memory and historical discourse, he is far too clear and not to deserve a verbatim quote.

If it were a simple matter of a handful of progressive and predominantly secular academics reclaiming ‘piety’ as an epistemic concept, we might … make a case for sacralizing portions of the past out of respect to the worldviews and experiences of colonized peoples, or victims of child abuse, or the survivors of the Holocaust. But that is hardly the case … Aura, jetztzeit, messianic, trauma, mourning, sublime, apocalypse, fragment, identity, redemption, healing, catharsis, cure, witnessing, testimony, ritual, piety, soul: This is not the vocabulary of a secular, critical practice. That such a vocabulary should emerge from the most theoretically engaged texts, and that it should advertise itself as a critique of metaphysics, is all the more remarkable. … Whatever its intentions, Memory will not deconstruct neoconservatism. … It is no accident that our sudden fascination with memory goes hand in hand with post-modern reckonings of history as the marching black boot and of historical consciousness as an oppressive fiction.

Nissim Mannathukkaren’s work is a reasoned article of faith of an ardent Marxist, of one who questions the dogma of his own religion before the dizzying logic of post-Heideggerian European philosophy. If texts are tejidos, the warps and wefts of this book extend beyond the illusorily brief chapters (which lie between Paul Klee’s painting on the cover and the synopsis on the blurb) to a long reading list in aesthetics and sociology, and every other subject that comes by and in between. A reader like me of his generation would enviously wonder at the academic craftsmanship of this author, his capacity to explain precisely and concisely a vast number of readings, and the manner in which he postulates the shifting foci of many important Euro-American theoretical debates since the mid-twentieth century in spotlessly clear yet cascading English. Nonetheless, there awaits a kehre for the consummation of his yearning for incorporating elements from terrains far beyond the scope of the Western tradition—academic or otherwise.

Talking about form, the book makes for quick reading but the argument is tediously crafted both in its style and use of references. It is not a divagation à la Montaigne, and brevity makes it tight but never dense. There are a number of phrases within ‘…’ and plenty of verbatim quotes, where the author echoes through his sources. Thus, his own lucubration is very distilled and kept to a minimum. One would have loved to hear more from the horse’s mouth but am sure that we will do so in the immediate future. Nonetheless, one must add to be fair to the author that Mannathukkaren’s trajectory of thought appears more interesting to be engaged with rather than be observed from the sidelines. There is very little punning unlike the usual run of the mill Anglo-American theoretical work, but it seems that Nissim relishes the thought of sending the reader scurrying for sources. The masticated product of the author’s pen is evidently more than empathetic to the oeuvre of one, who was until recently the last-man-standing in the long list of 20th century’s great Franco-German philosophers. Their history of engagement or non-engagement with Marxists goes back, at least, to Georg Lukacs. If this guess is right, then, those contemporary Marxist scholars, who have been less than empathetic with Derrida and his Specters, are neither irremediably prejudiced nor are they bloodthirsty inquisitors.

After having reiterated the invitation to engage with Mannathukkaren’s book, I would now permit myself to ramble a bit through two or three sets of topics that unsettled me, as I initially waded into The Rupture with Memory. Firstly, and most importantly, why is thought captive to the tug-of-war, between the rhetoric of logos and telos and the messianic and apocalyptic faiths? Is this struggle, then, responsible for ‘signifying’ the ‘Structure’ of the Occident ‘playing’ off and against the Orient? Has a decentring really taken place or has the centre merely shifted back and forth across the Atlantic over the last 500 years? If any of these interrogatives are worth a thought, perhaps then, the suspicion of those who have swum along with the current of secularization since the 17th century against the rhetoric of theology and religion is neither naïve nor unjustified.

Secondly, it is true that those who find Derrida intellectually hard to bear have too often quarantined him as a suspicious textual-terrorist. The Marxists are at worst not even remotely culpable for that. But this has little to do with another nagging problem—the fetish to predicate Derrida per se with deconstruction. Deconstruction is neither pedagogical nor textual-hermeneutic nor is it prescriptive; as Derrida would show, without attempting to define, in his letter to Professor Izutsu. The idea that deconstruction is a pedagogy too has a non-Marxist origin. It has sprung up from the well-known theatrum philosophorum, where Michel Foucault mischievously reversed and disarmed Derrida’s own master-disciple rhetoric. As for the myth of deconstruction as textual-hermeneutic, it began to evaporate in the other interesting exchange that took place in April 1981 with Hans-Georg Gadamer. Derrida’s unwillingness to concede a meeting of horizons in reading texts and in colloquio was accepted by Gadamer, despite initial reluctance. The grand-old man of German philosophy speculated in an interview many years later that Derrida probably saw a transcendental signified in such cases. While Derrida opted to use writing to bring about a laceration of the metaphysical elements in language, ethics does not receive a similar treatment despite being eminently metaphysical. The possible transcendental-signified, which is the third-party that haunts the relationship with the other, is only quasi, quasi-transcendental, for it does not prescribe. This non-prescriptive element explains why Derrida cannot trouble himself with the nitty-gritty of the democracy-to come.

Lastly, the END syndrome is truly Christian as Derrida states and yet, the gospel is an agape message pregnant with the possibility of individual realization in the present-perfect-continuous-tense. My treacherous translation of the extremely complex thought of Jean-Luc Nancy reads ‘(…)The structure of the origin of Christianity is the news of the end. (…)More precisely, Christianity is (in) the end as a foretelling, the end foretold, as Evaggelion, ‘good-news’. (…)Christianity is not a predetermined announcement of the end, in one way or the other; in it is the end itself that is valuable in the announcement, as announcement, because the end that is foretold is always an infinite finale.(…)’

Hari Nair is at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico City.