on the difficulty of living together: memory, politics, and history

New Directions in Critical Theory

on the difficulty of living together

NEW DIRECTIONS IN CRITICAL THEORY

AMY ALLEN, GENERAL EDITOR

New Directions in Critical Theory presents outstanding classic and contemporary texts in the tradition of critical social theory, broadly construed. The series aims to renew and advance the program of critical social theory, with a particular focus on theorizing contemporary struggles around gender, race, sexuality, class, and globalization and their complex interconnections.

For a complete list of books in the series, see page 157.

c o l u m b i a u n i v e r s i t y p r e s s — — n e w y o r k


memory, politics, and history

Manuel CruzTranslated by Richard Jacques

columbia university press

Publishers Since 1893

new york chichester, west sussex

cup.columbia.edu

Copyright © 2016 Columbia University Press

All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Cruz, Manuel, 1951- author.

Title: On the difficulty of living together : memory, politics, and history /

Manuel Cruz ; Translated by Richard Jacques.

Other titles: Acerca de la dificultad de vivir juntos. English

Description: New York : Columbia University Press, 2016. | Series: New directions

in critical theory | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015039842 | ISBN 9780231164009 (cloth : alk. paper) |

ISBN 9780231541398 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Memory (Philosophy) | Memory—Social aspects. |

Memory—Political aspects. | Political science—Philosophy. | History—Philosophy.

Classification: LCC BD181.7 .C77713 2016 | DDC 128/.3—dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015039842

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper.

This book is printed on paper with recycled content.

Printed in the United States of America

c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Cover design: Faceout Studio

References to websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing.

Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs

that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

Preface to the English Edition vii

chapter 1 Of Memory and Time

1

chapter 2 The Present Breathes Through History

11

chapter 3 For an Urgent Typology of Memory

43

chapter 4We Need to Start Defending Ourselves from the Past

75

chapter 5More About Traumas, Calamities, and Catastrophes

97

By Way of an Epilogue: A Future with Not Much Future (or About How the Perplexity of the Will Is Possible)

111

Notes 123

Index 147

contents

I have thought a good deal about which statements I should empha-size in these opening pages. I acknowledge that I was worried that the context this book was written in (its interpretive horizon, as Gadamer would probably have said), so different from the one the potential reader of this English edition inhabits, could hamper a proper understanding. After all, my words were written in a particu-lar reality and were trying to provide an answer to some of the ques-tions it was raising for me. By categorizing that answer, by trying to give it a certain abstract and general shape, I was actually putting its universality, the value of any truth it might contain, to the test. That is why I resisted the temptation to retouch the statements, to try to adapt them to the different reality from which my new readers will interpret them: there would have been something deeply dishonest about succumbing to such a temptation. Because the best service a text can render the person reading it is precisely to question some of the basic, unarguable, obvious convictions that have guided him. If, in order to protect myself from the reproach that what might have been valid for my context is not so for my new readers, I had written the things I supposed they were expecting, I would have deprived them of the opportunity not so much to criticize me as to benefit from a different look at their reality, to see it, albeit just for a second, in a different light.

That last expectation is legitimate. Above and beyond the quite different ways the same problems are posed in different realities,

preface to the english edition

viii—preface to the english edition

the persistence of certain concerns leads us to suspect that we are looking at constituent dimensions of what, using the title of one of Arendt’s greatest works, we might well call the human condition. Because the impulse that leads us to confront our past, to measure ourselves against it, to try to draw from the story of what has hap-pened lessons that will help us to go on our way freed from the worst of ourselves is human, incorruptibly human. And hopeful of living together in a different way, as far as they will allow us.

The question of from where the past is of interest to us is there-fore fundamental. As a historian of philosophy concentrating on the study of contemporary ideas, I have been gladly obliged on numer-ous occasions to reflect on that peculiar object of thought we call the present. An object constructed of many different elements. The present cannot be confused with the here and now: it is the result of a process in which, as well as our desires and expectations (which make our reality the raw material for what does not yet exist, its future substance), both the objectively received inheritance and the treatment we have submitted it to occupy a central, primordial place. It seems timely to paraphrase Sartre: the important thing is not what they have done with us, but what we do with what they have done with us.

That is a principle that should shed light on another paraphrase, which provides the title of a section of chapter 3. Just as the Ameri-can philosopher Richard Rorty was able to muster good arguments to defend what he called “the priority of democracy to philosophy,” I have ventured in the pages that follow to try to give good reasons for the idea that, in relation to history, the primacy always belongs to politics. Let us try to bring an initial line of argument that will make the idea minimally intelligible so that the reader is in a position to enter into its development.

Not a day goes by in newspapers, magazines, or the media in gen-eral without some reference to the issue of memory. A short while ago I read a newspaper interview with John Berger containing the following noteworthy phrase: “We live under enormous pressure to forget, to select memories.” In fact, the first thing that drew my attention was the comment by the interviewer that prompted it:

preface to the english edition—ix

“Your book seems to be an invitation to remember, now that memory seems to be flagging and another, poorer south is coming towards us” (my emphasis, M. C.).1 I acknowledge that I was surprised by the casual way in which the statement was taken for granted. Is it actually true that memory is flagging?

We can accept that there are commonplaces, but unanimous ones are frankly tedious. If the former are clichés, the latter are banalities, false proofs that have been incorporated into ordinary discourse to the point of automatism, that have become incrusted in our language until they come to be imperceptible, making our statements sound right in some obscure way, slipping into them a meaning that always remains veiled. And so for some time a posi-tive valuation of memory has been one of those undisputed, not to say universally accepted, commonplaces. We can always argue about whether recollection of the past is paid the attention it deserves in practice, but what seems clear is that it is unusual today to find someone who says he is decidedly against memory or, the other way around, admits to being a fervent supporter of forgetting at any price.

However, the rigid opposition between remembering and forget-ting, in which each of the pair is allotted the positive or the nega-tive value (with no intermediate possibilities), has not helped reach a critical clarification of the matter. In the face of that flat opposi-tion, we should, as in this book, introduce a more shaded perspec-tive from which it is possible to distinguish different forms of both remembering and forgetting in order to draw the relevant conclu-sions. For example, that there can be healthy variants of forgetting, as well as decidedly unhealthy (if not pathological) forms of remem-bering. Remembering is not—cannot be—an end in itself, nor is it a supreme, ultimate value that cannot be impugned on any grounds. The mere exercise of memory still guarantees us nothing, however much some people persist in arguing that it is an unambiguously progressive activity on the sole grounds that it guarantees that we shall not fall again into the errors of the past. As the French histo-rian Jacques Le Goff has pointed out in his book Histoire et mémoire, the commemoration of the past is something that also occurs under

x—preface to the english edition

authoritarian and even dictatorial regimes, and so it is indispensable to introduce some criteria of another kind.

In his book En busca del futuro perdido,2 Andreas Huyssen, professor of comparative literature at Columbia University and editor of the journal New German Critique, has pointed out two central moments in twentieth-century Western culture when new and different dis-courses of memory emerged. The first can be located in the sixties and was a consequence of national liberation movements and decol-onization processes. Its characteristics were a search for alternative historiographies and lost traditions and the recovery of the point of view of the vanquished. The second, activated by the debate about the Holocaust, the appearance of new testimonies, and a profusion of anniversaries and commemorations, began in the early eighties, and its main feature was a fascination with the subject of memory or, rather, the very act of remembering.

To be ignorant of that origin, and especially to make no distinc-tions between the specific nature of each moment, may well be at the root of many of the confusions and misunderstandings that have arisen around the issue. For the moment we could say that those two ways of defending memory are different, if not openly opposed. For while beneath the first there may still be a certain progressive hope for the possibility of final emancipation, what underlies the second is a conviction that the project of the Enlightenment has failed. But that is not all. To complicate the issue further, we can add the fact that those defenses of memory have occurred in different countries for reasons that are by no means the same. Argentina’s need to settle accounts with its past under the military dictatorship seems to have little to do with the situation in South Africa after apartheid or the tardy way in which Europe and the United States have tackled the issue of the Holocaust.

Most of all, as we have already said, we must include the essen-tially political dimension in reflections about memory. Berger rightly referred to it in the same interview. He said: “We live in a culture which says that the market rules, that if you do not buy you do not count, that the poor are dispensable. If you live in a country that says that, and this is a new phenomenon, there is enormous pressure to forget

preface to the english edition—xi

things. The time when we were poor, for example” (my emphasis, M. C.).3 The point, therefore, is not to lapse for the umpteenth time into the sterile opposition between remembering and forgetting. Which is to say that if we were asked the question: “So, do we remember too little or too much?,” in my opinion we could only give one answer: we remember badly and, I would add, to correct that distortion of memory itself we should apply our most strenuous efforts.

Efforts that would obviously have to be equal to the specific dif-ficulties of the issue today. There was a time in Spain (when the late and sorely missed Manuel Vázquez Montalban published his Crónica sentimental de España) in which it seemed that personal memories were still the only territory that was safe from the land-grabbing of power, the raw material with which we could strive and struggle to recon-struct a true, shared image of our past. In that sense Unamuno’s intra-history, which Vázquez used to allude to, was a space of resistance, a field that could not be violated by the official stories. That situation seems to have changed radically. What we are facing now is a full-blown nostalgia industry systematically engaged in the production of memories, the generation of a personal memory to replace the real memory of individuals. By way of illustration of its efficacy we might say that it is increasingly frequent to find people who handle mem-ories that do not correspond to their authentic experiences (some claim to have taken part in episodes—for instance, related to the Franco regime—at which chronologically they could not have even been present). It is important to emphasize that these are not cases of imposture: had they been there would have been nothing new about the phenomenon. The striking thing is that those people have come to assume the memories as their own, to the point that recol-lecting them generates in them what Arjun Appadurai has called an imagined nostalgia.4

This is beginning to be disturbingly like Blade Runner (with its rep-licants who can only discover whether that past they thought they remembered really belongs to them by means of a scientific test). Hence my conviction: if we should demand anything, it is not larger doses of memory (which may already be overdoses), but something more precise and undoubtedly far more necessary: the autonomy of

xii—preface to the english edition

memory. Which is to say: allow us to remember for ourselves just for once.

Let us go back to the beginning in order to end, really end this time. Although I deeply respect and admire the Spanish poet Ángel González, I have my doubts about whether—as he argues in his poem “Glosas a Heráclito”—the only two things that endure are History and the black sausage of his homeland. I would like to think that there is something, related to the spirit, that also shares that will to permanence, that almost desperate determination not to let itself be swept away by the current of forgetting.5 We might call it curiosity, eagerness, unease, or any other similar term that alludes to a reaction to the world that seems to constitute us, to make us who we are. Or to make us be someone, at least. I would like to think that such a thing exists and that, moreover, the most forceful proof of its existence is happening at this very moment. It is the fact that two people are converging, at a distance and out of time: the one who wrote these lines one pleasant spring morning in the Mediterranean city where I live and who now—perhaps standing at the display of new books in the bookshop or, too late, sprawling on the sofa at home—is reading these lines, with a hint of a smile, like someone who feels cited or discovered. That second person need not worry. In the end, it is an open secret: thinking about what is happening is a requisite not just of the philosopher (though some love to believe it) but of anyone who aspires to a minimally intense existence. The essence of the philosopher may be another trait, which can be expressed in at least two ways. Sometimes he is the one who can see something where others see nothing, and at others the one who recognizes the void, the perfect hole, the absolute lack of foundation of what there is. The one who is aware of the widespread absurdity that surrounds us and that—sarcasms of coexistence in this strange world that has fallen to our lot—other mortals tend to live as happiness or, worse still, as fulfillment. Since the train of lucidity has already passed us by—definitively, it seems—let us at least keep the dignity of not being ridiculous. Welcome to the text.

Barcelona, 1 January 2010

In the beginning was the body. At one end of the arc we find man as a species, at the other the self, the person, the social role, society now definitively stratified: the history of humanity is the history of that journey. In animal species the self only exists, at most, as sexual preening. What they have is a primitive sympathetic reaction, which sometimes occurs in man too, but only episodically. In animals, how-ever, it is a way of being, a deep empathy through which an individual communicates with another member of his species, and maybe even with members of other species. It is a sympathetic communication, a monstrous solidarity that does not exist in man. Nevertheless, some-thing of it lives on in him insofar as he is endowed with a body. But any return to that animality is banned by society, because it would mean a return to the disappearance of any self, as in certain ani-mal species. Prohibition here is not equivalent to coercion (although there may have been confinement in some periods), but to social-ization of a certain kind, which culminated in the invention of the self. The process is irreversible to a large extent, according to the quality of the entities that intervene. That means, therefore, that a

chapter one

Of Memory and Time

2—of memory and time

proposition in terms of an alternative, self or madness (identified with animality), is, with a few exceptions, mistaken because it overlooks the existence and characteristics of the process. Madness is far more bad sociality than return to animality. “Bad” in a broad sense, which would come under Jean-Paul Sartre’s maxim that hell is other people. In any case, they can be. Or is there no ingredient of madness in that useless administration of the affections and intensities that go to make up the “normal” everyday life of the majority of people? Is that ingredient not the one that bursts out as soon as that everydayness is tensed? There is a good deal of unsatisfied identity about madness.

But it is not enough to point out that the ruin of identity is the core of insanity. With that alone we would seem to be insinuating that identity is something given (albeit historically), almost natu-ral, whose social life always poses a threat. That idea corresponds to the clichéd view of childhood as the only age of fulfillment. But identity is not a gift from anybody; it is a product, largely manufac-tured by ourselves from preexisting materials and according to par-ticular rules. And identity supposes memory,1 in a sense that goes beyond the first organization of sensation that Aristotle speaks of at the beginning of Metaphysics (common to men and animals). The memory of the subject refers fundamentally to itself: it is the first expression of self-awareness. An absolutely diverse world, in which nothing was the same as anything else, would be tantamount in its effects to a totally homogeneous one: it would be as impossible as it would be uninhabitable. The play between same and different—or difference and repetition, as others would say—begins in the subject itself, which in that way begins to shape itself as such. For if recogni-tion is the operation through which the subject is instituted, as we said at the beginning, memory, we should add now, represents the exercise of original (self-)recognition, the movement that founds the possibility of the subject and the whole social world.2

Of course, memory is neither a faithful mirror nor a neutral recep-tacle. On the contrary, it is active, partial, distorting, biased. That is exactly why it intervenes in the constitution of the subject. A mirror memory would create nothing; at most it would ratify what exists. The passive image of memory seems to hide a will to ignorance of

of memory and time—3

one’s own identity.3 For the same reason, the essence of memory does not begin and end in its instrumental function, however important that may be. It is true that the uses of memory are what enable us to move forward, not to have to start from scratch every time, to col-lect the inheritance we have been bequeathed. From this point of view, the entire history of the human spirit could be compared to the deployment of a great memory, the memory of the species. But it is no use settling into the perspective of results. The question is not so much where we are as how we got here: only in that way can we decide whether at some moment we took a wrong turn.

Memory is a human gaze at the world. And just as the eye does not see itself, memory cannot take itself as object. Memory is applied: it refers to the subject itself, first of all, and the beings in the world who are related to it, second. It only imposes one condition on its objects, and that is that they belong to the past. Memory represents a par-ticular mechanism for activating and updating the past. A way, if you like, of fighting against one of its effects, forgetting, “that black cav-ern with open jaws that lurks at the bend of every road,” which the Spanish writer Juan Goytisolo talks about.4 The objects of memory are made of time, so much so that we might formulate as a concep-tual limit that the pure object of memory is none other than time. Memory rages against the limits of time, we might say after Lud-wig Wittgenstein, in the ultimate perspective of shaping a subject. Memory is an active power, which is founded on an ontological con-ception in terms of continuity. It glides smoothly through coherent biography, travels that space without difficulty. In fact, that coher-ence has been created by memory, the whole continuity of reality is an effect of it. Perhaps the most specific effect: to standardize, to put on an equal footing what is not equal in itself, because it is in a differ-ent way (what still is and what is not yet are not equally real). Memory offers us a past that comes to die tamely at out feet.

But that is only one possible use of memory. It would be a mis-take to think of it as a docile instrument at the service of the indi-vidual, whose only alternative were forgetting or some kind of presentism.5 It has even been said, to paraphrase Louis Althusser, that the present is the new theoretical continent, as if the discovery


were a far-reaching one. Indeed, if neither past nor future exist, if the only thing that does is the here and now, the condition of pos-sibility of a great many personal anxieties disappears. Responsibility, for example, as a particular way of taking charge of one’s own past,6 has no place. Presentism, there can be no doubt, can be an effec-tive remedy—surgical in the end—for someone who functions with a fatalistic or deterministic conception of time and history, such that it leads him to think that for each moment, for each situation, there is (“it is written”?) an optimal response. Naturally, not finding it can lead to bad temper, bad conscience, despair, or any other variant of unease of the spirit. But if we decide to wipe out time, everything is overcome in a single gesture. David Hume providing the gnoseo-logical foundations for Friedrich Nietzsche and both reinterpreting Benedetto Croce: there is no danger of making a mistake because all ties have disappeared, is the conclusion. The problem is whether making the ties disappear is not tantamount to making everything disappear, starting with thought. If that is so, what is left as content of those emphatic appeals to live the here and now?

If reality is only what there is and not what there is plus the possible, as was agreed, even though that possible has a different existence, then there is very little. Behind its dizzying appearance, beyond its supposed rhetoric of seizing the day, presentism turns out to be a dictatorship of what exists, a kind of submission to what is given. The price it pays to free itself from the hypothetical scourge of the past is to prevent itself from thinking about that possible that dwells in the future. But it is not just that the idea is useless because it is so disproportionate, it is also that it is ignorant of the authen-tic character of what it claims to criticize. Memory is not defined by its consoling function, which is quite inessential. Its essence con-sists of being a condition of possibility for the existence of the past: setting the scene in which the subject has to act. In that sense, the subject is a product of memory. In the other sense, the one conse-crated by ordinary language: memory as nostalgia or recollection; it is a tamed force used by the subject once it has been constituted to ratify itself in its being. Let us pause at the first. Herbert Mar-cuse said it many years ago in the language of the time, and he was


right: “Remembrance of the past may give rise to dangerous insights, and the established society seems to be apprehensive of the subver-sive contents of memory. Remembrance is a form of dissociation from the given facts, a mode of ‘meditation’ which breaks, for short moments, the omnipresent power of the given facts.”7 Marcuse was pointing to the idea that memory preserves history. What matters now is to see how it achieves that objective.

Something has been said: it does so by shaping the subject, prac-ticing as the active power it is. A power that goes far beyond the minute scale of the subject. Not only for what Arthur Schopenhauer said: “My own experience of many years has led me to conjecture that madness occurs in most frequent proportion among actors. But what an abuse these men make of their memory!” (my italics, M. C.), and which seems to obliquely express a certain fear of it.8 That fear can also be fear of the opposite kind. When Miguel de Unamuno says that “absolute, complete, true solitude consists of not even being with oneself,” he is pointing to the opposite end of dissolution, what hap-pens when the individual loses his memory and with it his identity.9 Losing one’s memory means total disaffection: nobody remembers one, not even oneself. There is nobody left to exist for, to exist to. At the limit it is death. The counterpart to that annihilation would be, together with what Schopenhauer says, our tenacious resistance to forgetting. If we did not forget, would we be like gods? Perhaps, but could we bear it? Of course not. We are not only what we tell ourselves about ourselves but also what we remember, what we dare to recall. Memory confronts us with the continuity, with the perma-nence of reality. But accepting it and accepting ourselves is up to us. In any case, the result of acceptance is not prejudged from anywhere. The past is also resolved in what we are capable of doing with it. The exercise of that capacity could be regarded as an ethical proposal: we need to be worthy of memory.

Memory is in solidarity with time, but not with a linear concept of it. Time is not the same as calendar, just as identity is not the same as curriculum. Time, according to Plato’s maxim, is “eternity in motion.” Age is not time, but a way of trying to capture it with the body (if not with the number). History, for its part, is a time with memory, a


time knowing itself, a time with awareness. A history without a sub-ject thus designates the unthinkable: empty time, dead time. Only for the subject is history intelligible, just as only a history with a sub-ject is intelligible. But, we should make it clear, memory does not impose a particular figure of time. What happens is that the idea of time is usually overloaded with determinations that are alien to it. There is no contradiction—more than that, it may be the only thing that is eventually possible—between accepting the challenge of memory and thinking of oneself as ageless. Age is at most a form of social administration of temporality, which takes the body as a pre-text, a false support of objectivity to structure certain contents of consciousness. Like that of youth as the absolute representation of the optimal, whose most characteristic effect is the pathologization of the body itself. A pathologization, moreover, that is absolutely abstract. The sickness of the body consists of an inexorable distanc-ing from the socially accepted (or imposed) canons. To think of one-self in terms of age is an obstacle both for relating freely to one’s own body and for taking charge of the temporal dimension of identity.

Only memory can account for the time of the subject, and it does so with the instrument that is most proper to it: language. Language is the code of memory. Its objects—the subject itself and the beings in the world related to it—acquire identity as they rise to the surface of language. The exercise of memory is not the writer’s decision, it is his destiny. A good writer is one who is capable of ordering the emotional labyrinths of childhood and adolescence around certain primary sensations, emotions, truths, and realities. That is the way identity takes shape: acknowledging its products, objectifying itself thanks to memory. Later, when that identity ceases to be an object of the story and accedes to language, i.e., becomes a point of view, it will be free to face up to its condition. In Tractatus 6.4311 it says: “Eternal life belongs to those who live in the present”10 (understand-ing by eternity, as explained in the Diary dated 8-7-16, “not infinite temporal duration but timelessness”).11 Wittgenstein removes the self from the course of time. The self is the center of life not because it is in life, but because it is that vantage point from which everyone sees life. This is a way of fighting against time on the basis of trying


to escape from it (not to deny it). But a way, in the end, that a sub-ject bent on the particular goal of being happy bestows upon itself. Nothing changes in our idea, because that subject prefers to remain in the shadows. The aspiration to nonidentity identifies just as much as any other.

The only way of deciding between options is to consider the importance of what they exclude or the value of what they are in no position to think. Death, in Wittgenstein’s case. “For life in the present there is no death” or “Death is not an event in life. It is not a fact of the world” are some of his statements with an ingenuous Epicurean resonance.12 But we have known since Hegel that death lives a human life. The death of others lives in us, leaves the painful trace of their absence. And our own death, which we cannot help anticipating. In that sense it is the threshold of anticipatory con-sciousness. We are a web of memories and anticipations, “mixing / Memory and desire,” as T. S. Eliot said of life, recalled by Emilio Lledó in another context: the present is that crossroads.13 Perhaps we should not respect it so much. Perhaps we should not recoil so quickly from fear of pain (“pain gives its curative virtue where we least expect it,” Martin Heidegger).14 The freeze frame of the pres-ent makes us unthinkable. We should take other models, like that of the poet Jaime Gil de Biedma, who saved himself one day and then wrote about his feigned death.15 Since we are an opening to the future, we dare to think of our own death as a determination of that future. To go beyond the idea of death as a negative limit, as mere no longer, and integrate it into life. To seize death from nature and turn it into a human determination.16 To take charge of it, in short (sui-cide is as bad as the yearning for posterity).

Something similar could be said about the displeasure that recol-lection of the past can sometimes arouse. The rejection of nostal-gia, as an extreme form of that movement, may merely tell of our incapacity to face the memory of what has happened. It is true that nostalgia has a bad name, to a large extent justified. For example, insofar as it means the glorification of an imaginary moment, distant in time. It is tantamount to accepting that the most important, the most significant part of one’s own existence, has already taken place.


It is common to locate that moment or moments in adolescence or early adulthood, and so the operation takes on a strangely fatalistic note. Because those events that now return in the shape of recollec-tion were not fundamentally free actions, but new experiences that overwhelmed us in their intensity. And so that is what seems to be recollected (because it is desired?): a time when the world was full of new meanings. It matters little whether things really happened in the way one misses them. Memory is an active power and nostalgia an agitation of the present moment. Those things at the time were imperfect, bittersweet, if not actually disagreeable. Recollection is the act through which we decide to be a project or a mere epigone of that now distant original experience.

However, not everything about nostalgia is bad. It is a way, per-haps shot through with sadness (“the metaphysical matter of nostal-gia is comparable to the echo of the fall, of the loss of paradise”),17 Emil Cioran of putting the past to work, of mobilizing it, of breath-ing new life into it. An activity that easily sends us back disturbing images of ourselves, a way into knowledge of our own identity, nos-talgia is an effective antidote against the alternative danger to the glorification of the past, the glorification of the present. The sup-posed ontological dignity of the present, which it could only acquire by the fact that it is the only thing that really exists, is untenable for the reasons I have mentioned. Of many presents we would have to say that it would have been better if they had never existed, just as the great advantage of the past is to be definitively sheltered from the evils of the present. The question cannot be posed in terms of decid-ing which moment has primacy: past, present, or future. That would also mean lapsing into the clichéd figure of linear time. The virtue of nostalgia, as a specific affection of memory, consists of standing before the evidence of our temporal condition.18

Therefore, when someone argues that the only reality is the pres-ent, they are making a partially true statement, but at all events an irrelevant one. The present is not a value in itself, that is the mis-take. Its wealth is only revealed when it is interpreted from the wis-dom of the past or the hopes of the future. Without that temporal dimension, any reality appears flat, without relief. The child whom


the adult tells “now you are happy” pulls a disbelieving face, and quite rightly.

The discourse about any moment, its effective spiritual apprehen-sion, is always made from outside it, especially by mobilizing that whole store of recollections that make up memory. A mere appeal to living the present turns out to be an empty slogan. The present is also made of time. What remains when the temporal dimen-sion is extracted from that present is tedium. It is no accident that lately people are talking about it so much again. First, the environ-ment is showing a growing degree of resistance. The given seems to be weaving a cordon around us that we cannot cross with our proj-ects. What there is is seen as a sentence. Moreover, the exercise of memory is risky. We might not be able to bear the spectacle of the sacrifices, failures, and disillusions we have uncovered. Tedium is thus resolved in disaffection, in the impossibility of being involved in anything. A point of distance from the world, but an insurmount-able one. Tedium is an extraordinary awareness of the solitude—the isolation—of the individual. It is not only that the present becomes unthinkable: it is, in itself, unbearable.

We should not stray into demagogy at this point. Tedium is no longer identified with having everything resolved, with an incapacity to record new experiences (for “having tried everything,” as people used to say), with emptiness. Although, paradoxically, there is some-thing of that about it. There should be a class reading of tedium today. Mass exclusion from the sphere of work, the inevitable end for many men is to be hostages to work (Michel Foucault), forces us to it. It is no longer enough to allude, with no other determination, to the exteriority of the subject, the persistence of the world or his powerlessness to change it. What prevails as fact, as matter in itself, as nonmalleable resistance, is that hostile district, the particular fam-ily aggression, the horrible home environment.19 That tedium would be close to satiety, insofar as satiety has a component of hatred, of sickened rejection, of desperation, in short. To talk of leisure in this context would seem like sarcasm. Nevertheless, we should not for-get that that was how things were expressed not so long ago. No to work, yes to holidays, was the widespread slogan. Now we see that


individuals dragged outside work live their situation as distressing (even when what is left of the welfare state can protect them). A total availability that has nothing to apply itself to: pure percep-tion of the instant that is resolved in nothing. How can we assess all that? As an effective way of linking the subject ideologically to his productive activity, so that it ends up appearing to him as the basic—absent—constituent of his identity? Some reservations about the notion of ideology have already been expressed. Is it not rather that events are confirming the Marxist thesis of human history as the history of the different forms of the organization of work, a thesis that could be taken up here insofar as it is an interpretation of time as a process whose punctuation marks are human acts? The segments of time that are not punctuated by the meaning derived from human activity, its memories and, most of all, its projects (and we should not forget here that work in the broad sense is the supreme projective activity), are quite impossible to bear.

When we look at this display of passions, and the consequences of their violence; the Unrea-son which is associated not only with them, but even (rather we might say especially) with good designs and righteous aims; when we see the evil, the vice, the ruin that has befallen the most flourishing kingdoms which the mind of man ever created, we can scarce avoid being filled with sorrow at this universal taint of corruption: and, since this decay is not the work of mere Nature, but of the Human Will—a moral embitterment—a revolt of the Good Spirit (if it have a place within us) may well be the result of our reflections . . . a simply truthful combi-nation of the miseries that have overwhelmed the noblest of nations and polities, and the finest exemplars of private virtue,—forms a picture of most fearful aspect, and excites emotions of the profoundest and most hopeless sadness, counter-balanced by no consolatory result. We endure in beholding it a mental torture, allowing no defense or escape but the consideration that what has happened could not be otherwise; that it is a fatality which no intervention could alter. . . . But even regarding History as the slaughterbench at which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of States, and the virtue of individuals have been victimized—the question involuntarily arises—

to what principle, to what final aim these enormous sacrifices have been offered?—G. W. F. Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of History

chapter two

The Present Breathes Through History

The twentieth century tried to live bereft of the ideas that had accompanied humanity for a long time. God is dead, man is dead, matter has disappeared. It still seemed possible to continue to think. That roll call of absences was joined in the last years of the century by another, long known but silenced: history has ended. Perhaps now the question Ernest Renan posed in his Philosophical Dialogues and Frag-ments over a century ago has reached full meaning: “What will those who come after us live on?”

To more than one person that will sound like a terminal ques-tion and therefore an exaggeration. He might argue that the age of the question and our obvious presence disqualify it. But that would

12—the present breathes through history

be like saying that the death of man is refuted by the acts of indi-viduals or that history has not ended because things are still hap-pening. Before asking the question, Renan himself had said that “we live through the shadow of a shadow,” and Karl Löwith, who refers to it in his preface to From Hegel to Nietzsche, is bold enough to provide an answer: “the final, honest word of our generation, born before 1900 and come to maturity during the First World War, would be a resolute resignation.”1 Deaths and disappearances in this context are always those of ideas, but of ideas that we live with and, in some cases, ideas that we live through.

I have related the postmodern diagnosis of the end of history with the fate of the other concepts because I understand that, beyond any Hegelian-Kojèvian affiliation of the idea (a matter for the specialists, probably), the ultimate reason why the diagnosis is so up to date has far more to do with disappointment than fulfillment.2 Except for the odd salaried defender of Enlightenment, nobody today thinks they are seeing the enactment of reason and freedom. Quite the reverse, the dominant sensibility seems to be tending toward realizing that we are an epigone, the twilight of a period that is languishing with-out quite showing what new reality it will give way to. If there is an end, it is in the sense of a finish, not of a purpose.

The liquidation of hope—of expectation, if you prefer—had been brewing for several years. We must not forget that the “crisis of the great narratives” proclaimed by Jean-François Lyotard was a crisis of the great narratives of emancipation, which seemed to lead us inexora-bly to where we are now, i.e., at the dilemma between the discourse that legitimizes what exists and the renunciation of any form of his-torical knowledge. A certain Nietzsche, the one who replaces history with the myth of the eternal return, would exemplify that second option: history lacks all regulatory value; nothing can nor should be learned from experience. To put it the other way around: “In the case of the smallest or of the greatest happiness, it is always the same thing that makes happiness: the ability to forget or, expressed in more scholarly fashion, the capacity to feel unhistorically during its duration. He who cannot sink down on the threshold of the moment and for-get all the past . . . will never know what happiness is.”3 Needless to

the present breathes through history—13

say, the two options are the two sides of the same coin. But there is a perfectly valid question: if nothing new could occur in history, would it be worth bothering to keep studying it?

If it does nothing more, the question has the virtue of confront-ing us with the evidence of our expectations. Or rather, any answer, whatever it may be, takes the lid off the box of our suppositions. And so, for anyone who regards history as that discipline exclusively concerned with discovering the past, apparently nothing should change. The past is always there, unchangeable because it is irre-versible, an impassive object awaiting knowledge. A conception of the past of this kind, understood as a real process completely alien to any variations that might occur in the historian’s present, would need a specific image of the right knowledge. The historian would be interested in the past with the same disposition and for the same reasons that any scientist would be interested in his own sector of reality. In that way there would be no difference between him and an entomologist, to make a comparison that will certainly irritate historians. Perhaps the clearest representative of this attitude was the historian Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886), with his theoretical proposition for history “to show what really happened.” There is no need to dwell on what we already know: that project ended in failure. It is usually said that by not linking the inclusion of new testimo-nies and a rigorous criticism of them (its two great contributions) with an explanatory framework that would account for the relation between the events themselves and their meaning, history would have become an arid heap of facts and figures, and the historian a mere reproducer of archives.

And so we have to wonder whether, beyond the particular case, this was not an inexorable consequence. To confine the past in the past means making it a useless object, the supreme useless object. With what has definitely been—which is the same as saying what has definitively gone—there seems to be no way of dealing with it other than the acknowledgment, the realization of its preterit existence. But such a consideration of the past implies certain suppositions about its nature. To point out the most important one in this context: so that the past does not overflow its own bounds in any way at all, it


has to be judged, in general and in each of its particular episodes, as unique and unrepeatable. This is a very frequent view, often a well-intentioned one. We might say that the most widespread tendency is to believe that the qualification of any event as unrepeatable defines it as being part of a higher category.4 We are not obliged to enter into a discussion of this. For our purposes here an indication, by way of a mental experiment, will suffice: when someone states that an event in his present is unrepeatable, is he not also stating in the same ges-ture the impossibility of its being rationally known by the historians (or by the people, if it comes to that) of the future? In other words, what can be done with a rigorously unique model?

Of course, every object in the world exists in a particular and irreplaceable singularity. And what is valid for objects is valid for situations. All there is and has been has existed in a particular space-time intersection. But if we transform that realization (which is frankly quite obvious) into a principle, knowledge sets out on the road to its dissolution. Because, to put the matter in Hegelian terms, we can talk of knowledge when the singular is connected to the various abstract items (general concepts, laws, etc.) that sur-round it. Knowledge of the specific—or the specific as such, since it is always in a certain sense a specificity of thought—springs from the correct structuring of both levels. If you prefer to put it the other way around: the plain and free-standing singular leaves no room for intelligibility of any kind.

But that idea is not only the one that leads to the conception, defended by Lukács, of practice as the consummation of theory; it also seems to be at the base of the most elemental affirmation of the theoretical function of any discourse. If history, to focus on what matters most to us, sets out to explain the earlier movement of society, it needs the existence of regularities of behaviors that can be cap-tured with legal-type instruments. This is an absolutely elemental condition. Indeed, if at each instant everything can be otherwise, there is no possible science. However, by meeting the requirement we have mentioned and other similar ones, we approach the char-acterization of history as science, but it is not certain that we are helping to locate its specificity. Which is tantamount to saying that


the meaning of history is not limited to the gnoseological function or (there is no contradiction or dilemma) that if history is a science it is not a science like the others. That is why we had no difficulty under-standing the question whether, on the assumption that everything had finished, it would be worth continuing to study it.

History as a science records the existence of a past that reaches, and can even penetrate, our today. Nothing prevents the regularities it studies from continuing to occur. In that way, the reproach leveled at its object—that of being a useless one—would begin to dissolve. History would have more or less interest—at most it would be history or archaeology—according to whether the past it refers to is more or less current. The issue now is whether, beyond any logical recon-struction of the arguments, the reasons that have led men to be con-cerned with what happened long ago have been of the kind we have mentioned. For we know that systematic scientific reflection about the whys and wherefores of historical events, based on techniques and procedures created and directed in answer to that question, is something recent, hardly begun in the nineteenth century.5 But it is no less true that long before that we were able to talk about a histori-cal knowledge, an awareness of the historical and of different ways of trying to account for the future, both of them spheres in which we might find a better key to the specificity we are searching for. If not: what main motif is the one that seems to repeat itself in the dif-ferent characterizations of the value of history made much earlier? What does Léon Brunschvicg’s warning “If men know history, his-tory will not repeat itself” have in common with Niccolò Machia-velli’s description, “Historians refer to certain events in detail so that posterity can take advantage of them in identical circumstances,” or what we read in the first pages of Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War, “The absence of romance in my history will, I fear, detract somewhat from its interest; but if it be judged useful by those inquirers who desire an exact knowledge of the past as an aid to the interpretation of the future, which in the course of human things must resemble if it does not reflect it, I shall be content. In fine, I have written my work, not as an essay which is to win the applause of the moment, but as a pos-session for all time,” or with Fernand Braudel’s argument, “History is


a dialectic of duration; because of that, thanks to that, it is the study of the social, of everything social, and of the past; and, therefore, of the present, the two being inseparable”? We can find the answer in what Cicero expressed in what may be the most classic formulation: “History is the teacher of life.” In our own language: what is being stated for historical discourse in all these cases is the existence of a privileged link with the present.

“Privileged” in this context means that history does not conform to Francis Bacon’s knowledge is power when it comes to explaining its meaning. Perhaps, paradoxically, Lucien Febvre’s words are more precise. History, he says, allows us to know the present and helps us to live it. Before commenting on the second part of his statement, we should point out something concerning the first, among other rea-sons because the postulate of the privileged link is already operating here. In the end, not all the pasts which the different varieties of knowledge deal with affect the present in the same way. To argue on this occasion that history enables an understanding of the present means supposing that the origin of the current state of affairs is to be found there. We can make a genealogical reading of that suppo-sition. The striving to locate a past to connect our present with, so that it loses its initially gratuitous, meaningless character, is shared by myth and history. Among primitive peoples it often has a genetic sense, just as in developed societies one tends to think that anteced-ents are the necessary conditions for what one is trying to explain. But it is evident that the explanation is not limited to knowledge of the origins. Perhaps the original misunderstanding, what Marc Bloch has called the “obsession with origins” and may well have given rise to the birth of history, revolves around the ambivalence of the Latin word principium, an ambivalence that has led many people to believe that by finding the temporal antecedents of something they are also discovering the foundations that explain it.

But, in turn, the content of the aforementioned supposition is not confined to this genealogical reading. The conviction that it is only possible to find one’s way through the complications of the contem-porary period from the broadest possible knowledge of the process that brought the world to be what it is today can look for foundations


of another kind, doubtless sounder ones. So, more than the gallery of ancestors we refer to, history offers the global framework, the total-ity, in which we can be intelligible to ourselves. It is that integration and not the mythical recourse to origins that enables us to validly avert the gratuitous, apparently meaningless, character of mere exis-tence. Or the other way round and in particular: any event takes on meaning when it is understood as an element that fulfills a function in a whole that embraces it. As soon as that whole also embraces the temporal antecedents, it introduces the idea that our present is this end of a single segment, which includes all the episodes of previous history with no possibility of introducing any kind of sudden break or leap into that past. Any reservation with retroactive effects about the continuity of what has gone before would threaten the intelligi-bility of what there is now. To give an extreme example: if that sud-den break or leap were very close to us, into what whole would we integrate the present so that it did not lack meaning? Also (I do not know whether to add: most of all) what sense would it make to turn our gaze to a past we no longer had anything to do with? The ques-tion is not the same as the initial one, just slightly modified. What we are saying this time is: what could we understand about a past that we had already declared completely strange?

The assumption of continuity is thus revealed as one of the major assumptions of historiographic activity. Not only because it is a con-dition of its possibility but also because it determines the quality of the knowledge to be developed. Obviously continuism need not be equivalent to subjectivism. We must interpret the whole of history in terms that are very close to those of any scientific discipline. It should be clear that there is no objection to the general aspiration to approach historical reality as a dynamic whole endowed with inner coherence, in which each of its parts conditions and transforms the others, just as each part is conditioned and transformed by the whole. Nor is there any objection to the practice of those historians who are determined to unravel the why of social change and are system-atically engaged in an assault on the problem of the transition from one economic system or means of production to another. The ques-tion is whether such a perspective and such a practice sufficiently


explain the problems posed by the idea of the totality/the assump-tion of continuity. For, to mention only the difficulty that will allow us to continue, it is evident that that terminology does not thematize the matter of the theoretical place of the speaker, which seems to have surreptitiously become an absolute place, though not declared as such. But it is not a matter of the historians, but of history. Or, to be more exact, of the question: is there any place from which the totality can be mastered?

Everything we have said so far seems to have been preparing the answer. The present would be that place among other reasons because, in a sense, it is the only place that really exists. But in addi-tion to its ontological superiority, the present can aspire to that mastery because of its heuristic capacity in relation to knowledge, since the past—yes, that past which we said a moment ago gives the reason for the present—is discovered precisely from what it explains. The pres-ent provides the historian not just with a starting point but also with the materials with which to begin his journey, i.e., those questions whose answers he trusts he will find in the past. “The past is intel-ligible to us in the light of the present” is E. H. Carr’s way of saying that one knows better how to investigate the past if one has a precise point of view about the situation one is living in. History would per-form a retrodiction, inferring what happened from what is happening at the moment. This was the very idea Marx was proposing with his famous affirmation that the anatomical structure of man is the key to the organic structure of the monkey (and not the other way around).

But it would be quite deceitful to suggest that the theoretical object “present” is fully comparable to the theoretical object “ana-tomical structure of man.” If that were so, it would be impossible to understand how opposing definitions of its past can coexist in any society, as very often happens. Nor could we understand the irregularities in its interpretation: figures outlawed yesterday, reha-bilitated today, old heroes of the fatherland found guilty of crimes against humanity, great gestures reduced to incidents, etc.6 When a moment ago we discarded the protagonism of historians in posing the problem, if we can call it that, of the opacity of the totality, this is what we were basically stating. For the requirements of present life that


drive them to investigate historical antecedents are not an individual matter. The historian’s time speaks through his mouth, but it is by no means clear that all his time does so. To that partiality we can add a variable degree of unawareness. Few historians are accustomed to acknowledging that their questions are sectarian because they are partial. Most of them state their firm will to universality. No one is saying that they are lying when they do so. But it is a fact that the specific reality in which the historian carries out his activity echoes in the discourse he produces. The diverging interpretations of the past or its vicissitudes would thus be expressing more the circumstances in which the historian drafts his work than the real process of his-torical development.

But, although it might seem that way, there is no intention to point to anything like a sociology of historians. That is not what should follow from what we are discovering. By simply transfer-ring to the past the questions and perplexities of their present, his-torians are really omitting to tackle an analysis of the conditions of production in which they carry out their activity. Those condi-tions—which are, of course, social conditions—determine the sub-jects to be studied, the means by which the investigation is to be carried out, and the available analytical procedures. In some cases, as Jean Chesneaux has pointed out,7 the way in which the state con-trols the past and the collective memory takes on the character of an authentic “tax deducted at source.” There is therefore no difficulty in sharing Michel de Certeau’s idea, according to which the refer-ence to this framework,8 which predates the historian, is indispens-able for explaining the social nature of historical investigation and for making a coherent analysis of the historical work as a scientific or ideological product. To pay attention to the social determination of knowledge (in this case, of historical knowledge) can only have clarifying consequences. Provided that, we must add immediately that attention does not try to replace or overlook the specificity of historical discourse. All knowledge is socially determined, but not in the same way and for the same reasons. More than that: some knowledge, like the kind that matters to us, is not only socially but also historically determined.


To say with Raymond Aron that “man bears within himself the history he explores,” i.e., to say that knowledge of history is itself his-torical, is not a simple play on words of the kind analysts denounce when they point out that the word red is not red or the kind expressed in the Sephardic proverb that the Spanish writer Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio occasionally quotes: “By saying flame one does not burn one’s mouth.” (These are by no means trivial reminders: think of the number of people whose mouth heats up and even fills up when they utter words like reality, practice, facts, etc., as if they were anything other than words or, at least, something more than words, words that are more “practical” or “real” than others). Nor is it a mere declaration of relativism. There is no reason to suppose that our reflection will end in agnosticism (in theory) or in skepticism (in practice). The expression “historicity of historical discourse” designates a particu-lar modality of its own of determination of knowledge. And this is where, at last, that function referred to by Febvre, introduced but not developed, comes in. For the expectation that history helps us to live the present is loaded with consequences.

But the formula “help to live” is undoubtedly an ambiguous one. It may be understood in the sense that, insofar as its task consists, as we have said, of situating events and people in their correspond-ing totality, history informs the individual of where he is, which in this context comes to the same thing as saying that it informs him of who he is. In this way, the individual understands the ties that bind him to the community, an understanding that tends to promote posi-tive attitudes toward it, helping to consolidate it. Seen in this way, history would be a formidable device for the creation of collective identity. There is no need to add anything new—we only need delve deeper into what we have said—to find the fundamental objection to this approach: can we believe in the existence of a collective iden-tity above specific interests? How can we prevent that pretended all-embracing account from becoming a legitimization of what exists?

The proven plurality of accounts of the same past already included the answer to these questions. For a long time, history has served to help to live . . . those who wielded power.9 Which mate-rialized in a historiographic practice that justified the given state


of things—which in fact was not given, but made. For them the two-fold function referred to by Febvre took the following shape: tak-ing from the past whatever sanctioned their power and imposing on the present, and if possible on future generations, the cult of that memory. Not many years ago, in a language that has fallen into dis-use, that operation was called ideology. One of its tasks was this: to present the historical and contingent as eternal and necessary. We shall quickly see the intimate contradiction underlying that pre-tension. What was presented as eternal had in fact had an origin, and a known one at that. The political social forces that modified historical development, which became, to keep the same terminol-ogy, the ruling class, also established their own version of the past, tried to generalize it, and often turned it into the dominant historical explanation: the new (and as partial as the previous one) proposal of universality, which offered itself as identity for everyone, above any differences, although in fact it was only valid for some. The longed-for eternity was proclaimed by a familiar decree: henceforth there will be no more history.

But “help to live” can—must—be understood in another way for those who are out of power and subject to it. Whereas history has been systematically used by the powerful as one of the most effective instruments for creating the ideological and cultural conditions that make it easy to maintain the domination relations, for the oppressed and the persecuted—“and there are many,” one sometimes feels tempted to add—the past has served as a memory of their identity and an emotive force that keeps their aspirations to emancipation alive. For them help to live’ is a synonym for resist, survive,’or, perhaps, so as not to abandon the old jargon yet, struggle. To understand the origins of the links that hold a community together leads in this case to a different result from the previous one: instead of justifying them, it calls them into question. They then show their authentic condition as historical and contingent constructions. This necessary emancipation is most of all from a past that is imposed on us as our own, but that we reject as alien to us. That is why Goethe said what he said (“Writing history is a way of getting rid of the past”) and Denis Diderot lamented: “If from earliest times historiography had


seized civil and religious tyrants by the hair and dragged them along, I do not believe they would have learned to be better, but they would have been more detested and their wretched subjects would perhaps have learned to be less patient.”

And so a raw nerve has been touched. The reiterated specificity of history is rooted in that peculiar twofold function or twofold inter-est. Which, after all we have said, must not be posed in terms of mere juxtaposition. Understanding and justifying are two sides of a coin called the present. Hence also the talk of interest: the justification is of our situation and our projects, but knowledge of reality—for history: past reality—is destined to provide the foundation for our action. No one would dispute the logical possibility of thinking about the two dimensions separately: they would say that history does not spring from the separation. Voltaire’s thesis that we can never suf-ficiently remember the crimes and misfortunes of other times sums up that idea to perfection. There is a sphere, it is said, where indig-nation is one with curiosity, and it is that sphere where knowledge aspires to be the knowledge of our equals.

For that reason—precisely for that reason—judging in history is not an obsession, far less a weakness. More than that, it may even be its profound reason for being, in a sense. Jan Patocka is right when he says: “History is not comprehensible without free responsibil-ity.”10 With apologies for the repetition, we might add. Through value judgments, historical discourse confines itself to taking charge of that reality. Judging may be a fault when, for instance, it is done without looking for a proper connection with the descriptive and explanatory dimensions of knowledge. With a simplistic, but effec-tive formulation: it is not right to set out to identify those respon-sible, whether heroes or villains, for the way of things without knowing for an absolute certainty what happened.11 But obviously, that is a formulation of minimums (hence the simplification). The historian’s first problem is not so much to determine whether or not he should judge as to decide at what moment to do so.12 Aside from the by no means negligible danger pointed out by Bloch (“By judging, one almost inevitably ends up losing the taste for recounting”), the most worrying thing is the opacity effect that a hasty assessment may have.


The inevitable preliminary critical cutback that all knowledge performs on reality may mutate into an unacceptable exclusion of a part of what exists if complexity—necessary for thinking about the move-ment of history—is not reflected in the discourse. Another variant of the same effect occurs when the approaches that assume their condi-tion as partial and interested, because they defend a class point of view, hasten a discussion of ends. Acting in that way, they work as authentic obstacles to knowledge. The exhortation to move on to action can also represent a kind of flight from reality.

This last formulation, as simplistic as the previous one, is included to allow us to state the historian’s second problem. For the cliché of the ambiguity of the term history, which refers both to the knowledge and its object and which we shall be discussing later, can have a spu-rious use: to suggest that there is an exterior referent, which can be identified without problems and handled without difficulty, called the things that have happened themselves. After all we have said, such an objectivist expectation should be regarded as definitively discarded. The difficult balance between justification and knowledge seems to indicate a peculiar fragility on the part of the historical discourse. A fragility that, as we have hinted, has mostly to do with the place the historian speaks from. That so often reiterated present can no longer be the ultimate category. Its nature must be made explicit, its con-stituent elements scrutinized, even if only because to a large extent we have made our apprehension of the past depend on its incita-tions. The question, therefore, is not only whether that apprehen-sion contains a variable ingredient of assessment, but, and perhaps especially, whether such judgments are not made from the present in general but from a particular region of it. It sometimes seems as if people talked of the present to avoid talking about identity, about subject, or, beyond that, about meaning.

And so—I cannot think of any other way—it is possible to under-stand that apparently paradoxical phenomenon through which the closest past, the one we have most information about, is incompre-hensible to us. Much of the current debate about Europe between the wars and the attitudes of its most eminent figures seems to take place in the shadow of that rare effect. The mists that swathe that


period would be precisely the result of our excess of news. In the end, the thesis is Nietzschean in inspiration: the result of too much historical knowledge is the annihilation of creativity, as Nitetzsche argued in the second Untimely Meditation. Now we are told: the greater the volume our knowledge reaches, the smaller the capacity we feel we have to interpret what we know. What makes that historical experience ungraspable is the absence of the key element for bring-ing forth understanding. We are talking about a past that belongs to us (it is our parents’ or our grandparents’ past). The gap between the possibility of information and the capacity for identification is resolved on the basis of an affirmation (which I tend to regard as blind) of the speaker’s present.13 Something like: let us assume the unknowable condition of that past, so irritatingly close, and apply ourselves to what is given to us to understand with all certainty (i.e., with the certainty provided by sensibility).

As we can see, great leaps forward can take on many forms (or perhaps there are many forwards). The point, of course, is not to reject that order of considerations entirely. They contain a kind of element that clarifies what we are looking at, consisting of highlighting the relative or accessory character of the value information. Faced with so many historiographic clichés that link the development and vicis-situdes of historical discourse to the presence and reliability of the informative element—a link underlying which is a particular con-ception of knowledge, in a positivist mold, according to which there would be historical facts that can be located and expressed—what is being claimed now is that we must start by asking the person asking, lest irreversible original defects creep into the foundational ques-tions. Indeed, once we have realized that we know too much, so as not to change the example, about Europe between the wars, what would the pertinent question be? The one that is interested in the way to have access to the essence of that period, an essence buried like a treasure beneath layers and layers of knowledge? If the coher-ence of discourse is still a value, we have no choice but to answer no. Excess of historical knowledge is not a fault in itself. When it is thus considered, we cannot go beyond imputing to it, as a paradoxical effect, our incomprehension of what is too well known. Let us say this


now: the way that excess intervenes is through the sense of rootless-ness and the loss of identity that has come about in modern man. So the question should be a different one. Perhaps this one: might it not be that what we know too much about is ourselves, and that that confuses and disturbs us?

If anything seems to have been irreversibly damaged by the sus-tained debacle of all expectations that occurred over the twentieth century, it has been the assertion, in the traditional manner, of the theoretical place present, which has turned out to be an old carcass no longer capable of dealing with the enormous burst of intensity it has been our lot to live through. Put in a more prudent way that will prevent us, in what follows, from seeming contradictory: the crisis has been a crisis of the category as foundation, reference, or starting point of the discourse. Asking the person who is asking therefore means: who are we, the inhabitants of that present, in the end? What defines us? Whom do we consider our equals in history (or a slight variation: From whom can we learn?). By loading the responsibility for our incomprehension of a period onto it or even onto knowledge, in the end we are decreeing the impossibility of historical knowledge as such. For if that happens to us with the most recent, what about when we set out to study the remote? How can we believe the his-torian who claims to have captured the meaning of a preterit human action? Impossible. We are obliged to regard that declaration as a mere illusion, a mirage at the service of other causes (legitimization of the past, etc.). But, even more important, such a renunciation is made by hiding the key point. For the responsibility foisted off onto third parties is all our own, which, in the light of the premises we have set out, offers a fundamental consequence for historical discourse. We cannot continue to think of history in neatly objective terms, as a referent of an exteriority without fissures. We have to assume its part as construction or, better still perhaps, a product of our action (real and spiritual: of what we have done and what we have dreamed). It is, with regard to us, effect and responsibility at the same time. To des-ignate that old and untenable idea of history, the category past may well be enough. And so the pleonasm makes perfect sense: the past, past. History, however, does not tolerate the participle.


Although it might seem that way to some, we are not far from the beginning. If we have put things properly, we should be able to return to the first issues from this point. And so the more or less prophetic announcement of the end of history (which in some people becomes the chronicle of the first steps of posthistory) has shown its relation-ship with other concepts or, in other words, its dependence on ideas that are not made explicit (unavowed suppositions, we might call them, raising the tone a little). Today the use of statements like “the future has already arrived,” “the long-awaited event is behind us,” has become common. Statements that, in the end, use to their advantage schemas and models accepted by what we might call the dominant commonsense, introducing a pinch of perversion that grants them a salutary appearance. This is a criticism, not a declaration of intent. The very intelligibility of the statements supposes the existence of the presumed entities that have at last been surmounted. But who guaranteed that existence? What do we actually know about the nature of what we were expecting?

No one and hardly anything, the twofold answer would have to be. In the face of that desolation, the deep-rootedness of our old trust is striking. Such deep-rootedness makes us think of the influ-ence of inspirations of another kind. That disposition no doubt recalls that of those who believe in a Revealed (or revealable) Truth, in the Great Holy Book in which we are told—that is, we are guar-anteed—not only that there will be a future but even what it will be like. From that point of view it is inconceivable that we might pass it by, that it might happen without our realizing. Obviously, as that schema is secularized, its efficacy tends inexorably to diminish. In the name of what or of whom, for instance, should we accept that we are already at the end of history? But we have to take one more step and pose the alternative question: in the name of what or of whom should we accept that the end of history will come, but a little later? To argue about the precise location of the moment it closes down is to move within a single conceptual framework. To say “end, yes, but not yet” in no way implies thinking differently. It may be that deep coincidence that explains the rapid assimilation—however contro-versial it may be—of the message of today’s right-wing Hegelians.


The vast majority of critics have disagreed with the content; just a few have said that they do not understand what we are being told. It is never quite clear, I know, what events actually prove: which part of our discourse they confirm and which they invalidate.14 But in any case it is difficult not to have a certain feeling of abuse when they use the defeat of certain historical experiences as an argument that makes our reality okay. Its survival only speaks of its fortitude, but tells us nothing of its other qualities, which, if necessary, will have to be analyzed from another theoretical place.

That what we have turns out to be what has been pursued through-out history causes a certain stupor in us, a reaction that is significant in itself. It is certainly the case that we find it hard to understand our condition as an object of someone else’s desire. In a broad sense, of course: soon this society—so long awaiting transformation—has become other people’s utopia. The question goes beyond the cliché “not appreciating what you’ve got” (equally unsatisfactory if you consider it in isolation: the mere realization is not enough; the discourse must progress in the direction of pointing out the structural mechanisms of that dissatisfaction which seems inevitably to accompany reality). It is rather, if we wish to continue in these terms, appreciating what we do not have, in other words, desiring—because we miss it—what we lack. Hence the fact that we discover nothing new by claiming that utopias tell us, rather than of the paradises of tomorrow, of the deficiencies of today. That is precisely why they are there: to help us get out of them. Hence too the deep falsehood usually contained in disillusion, the breaking of the old revolutionary hopes. Utopias are neither awaited nor do they appear: they are constructed and pur-sued. What happens when they are achieved? An achieved utopia is no longer a utopia and can no longer be judged with the same criteria as when it was one. There is usually a good deal of settling scores in any analysis of the achieved utopia. However, lack of interest in what has been achieved does not have to involve a mad race toward noth-ing. It can also express a clear awareness of what we still have to do—which is like saying of what we still have to be.15

But the attitude of the person who is always ready to be disillu-sioned about everything that happens (whatever it might be) may


have an equally undesirable antagonist, the person who, worried because history could decide it had ended without consulting him, tends to consider what lies ahead (whatever it might be) in the same way. Nor, of course, is it a matter of indefinitely postponing intel-ligibility by describing the failure of what until not long ago was called real socialism as “too big an event for us.” Such a description has no more value than the acknowledgment of the transcendence, the scope of certain events, but contributes no specific element for understanding them. To think otherwise, if that is eventually what we agree should be the aim, we must first reject that figure of the end of history which has been proposed to us. To apply its own tale to it: what has reached the end is the end of history. That is not a pure tautology, though it might seem so. We should set its content along-side that other claim of Vattimo’s, identical in appearance: “If history must have some meaning, we have to look for it in the loss of mean-ing.”16 The obsolescence of the old machines for producing meaning has allowed us to discover our persistent need for it. Once the ideas of progress, salvation, or emancipation and the metahistories (Lyotard) that housed them have been discarded, we find ourselves alone, face to face with our incapacity to dispense with a unitary conception of history in which we can project the future and take decisions.

As we will observe, the new foundation, as provisional as you wish (perhaps our incapacity is merely transitory, but beware, because that could once again mean historical), rests openly on our subjectivity as agents. Therefore there is nothing to prevent us accepting the crisis or the weakening of the great narratives of the theology and philoso-phy of history inherited from the past centuries. More than that, we could take it to mean that the idea enables us to explain the crisis of the metahistories. Their mistake would have been to strive to find an objective, exterior foundation for hope or expectation, for the positive sense of the development, in short. At the first onslaught of the facts themselves, they would all have revealed their true condition as ideals: the ideal of the proletarian revolution, the ideal of indefi-nite economic development, the ideal of bourgeois democracy . . . incapable of surviving the refutation. A paradoxical effect, certainly, because at first glance anyone would say that that is the virtue of


ideals, their superiority over conceptions of stronger gnoseological pretension: to remain safe from the setbacks of events. But that is so provided a twofold requirement is fulfilled. First, a clear awareness of their condition as ideals and, second, transparency in relation to the categories that give them support. We have probably already said enough about the second (in a sense, it was our starting point). Per-haps somewhat less about its relation with the first.

Let us put it this way: often what seems to be questioning the sur-vival of certain ideals is not so much a possible loss of their attraction as the difficulty of locating the ones that could replace them. Let us take a scarcely debatable commonplace. What has most affected the validity of the idea of progress has been the impossibility of identify-ing it with the development of a particular ideal of man. Access to the discourse by new social groups and the fact that many cultures have spoken up have made that old expectation relative. Today the critical retort that any defender of progress almost automatically has to deal with is: “Progress, whose progress?” This not an ad hominem argument, nor a vulgar sociologism. One dimension of the retort is impossible to omit: the pretension to universality of the ideal is seri-ously damaged from the moment we declare ourselves incapable of finding a subject that fits it. But it is by no means clear that the most suitable term for this disparity between ideal and subject is refuta-tion, as has been happening recently. The label that probably suits it best is criticism. To try to free oneself from an idea by considering it refuted, aside from its being logically inadmissible, leads to a greater difficulty than the one that is being resolved. And, once again, it can be put in the form of a question: do ideas expire?

That, of course, is an impossible question for those who strive to avoid the category of subject or historical agent. Indeed, which ideas can we say have expired irreversibly? Some or all of the ones mentioned earlier? Whichever one it may be, it will always be easy to find some anachronistic representative of it. And if we move on from the scale of the ideas to the scale of ideology in general, the difficulty seems to grow in proportion. For example, it is common to find comments about the unrepeatableness of the National Social-ist phenomenon. As if its defeat—military, in short—were a flagrant


example of the termination of a model of society. Would we dare to claim that the outcome of a war serves to refute something? In other cases, we must say, we do not draw the same conclusion from an identical outcome. So the lesson is that a battle has been lost, but not the war. Of course, this last argument is frequently only looking for consoling effects, but the mere fact that it is thinkable and plausible ruffles, if only for an instant, the still waters of our convictions. To identify defeats with refutations or, which comes to the same thing, to accept that ideas expire by themselves prevents what happens in history from being intelligible. The termination or survival of an idea or an ideology is not a bilateral issue between it and the world. If we put it that way, we shall never understand their fate. Nor, incidentally, shall we ever understand their emergence. One of the most striking, and curiously least emphasized, expressions of Francis Fukuyama’s self-defense is the one he uses when talking about the different sources of ideological opposition to modern liberalism.17 He mentions communism, Islamic fundamentalism, nationalism, and, what I wanted to highlight now, “some new ideology of which we are not yet aware.”18

I do not intend to wander off, but to keep to the path. What has been said applies easily to all those statements, so much on the agenda, aluding to the ultimate destiny of history. By robbing the main figures of their actions, they try to hide their true condition. Which is none other than that of performative statements,19 or, as might be said in another sphere, (shameful) prophecies that aspire to self-fulfillment. The nuance we must not overlook is that the prophecy is fulfilled if, and only if, it is accepted (assumed or pursued, with resignation or enthusiasm: these are not the differences to be fore-grounded now) by those to whom it is made. It would indeed be sad, as well as indicative of the present situation of the collective con-sciousness, that statements like those presented, so ostentatiously weak, so openly minimal, could be interpreted as a variant, or reintro-duction, of optimism in the philosophy of history. We could even go farther if necessary in making things explicit and admit the retreat (i.e., the loss of its capacity for influence) of emancipatory thought in the whole world. But none of that justifies some people’s theoretical


pirouettes. Once they settled for going down in history; lately they are determined to put an end to it.

I am using an ambiguous expression deliberately. For those apparently triumphal, or at least positive, statements may well be the civilized face of a very uncivilized threat. In 1945, in the language of the time, Sartre said things like this: “It was necessary for humanity to possess its own death one day” or “After the death of God, here is an announcement of the death of man.” He was referring to the bomb, the possibility of the suicide of humanity it opened up, and to the historically novel fact that humanity would be doomed for-ever to live side by side with its death. That doom, in a certain sense, was the measure of its freedom. Just as we can say someone is free because he can die when he wants and as long as he does not do so. But it is also such reasoning that leads us to define the death penalty as the greatest conceivable attack on human freedom. It might be legitimate, or even an expression of a “purer freedom,” in Sartrean terminology, for humanity to come to consider its suicide, but that it might be threatened is absolutely not so. When political and social forces, which were once in favor of a radical transformation of exis-tence, say today that any other contradictions must be subordinate to our survival as a species, one has the impression that they are try-ing to accommodate an insufferable violence to theoretical language, that they have succumbed to the pressure of that updated your money or your life of history’s new highwaymen.

Ecological disaster or the disappearance of our species, matters that conservative thought prefers not to mention, are not a destiny but an option, that is, the result of an intervention of a particular kind. Just as the end of history is not the necessary consequence of the evolution of human thought about the fundamental principles that govern sociopolitical organization, but a label to designate a strongly delaying action at the heart of reality. It will be clear that we are not making a merely illustrative comparison. The two dimen-sions we have mentioned are complementary or, if you like, two dimensions led along by a single historical subject (however much he strives to blur his existence behind the universal category “human-ity” or tries to remain in the shadows). The message, in a nutshell, is


diaphanous: there is nothing to be done and nothing to be thought. So the presumed clarification that the end of history does not mean the end of events in the world does not provide any new element. Not only because there is something pharisaic about the apparent concession that some societies are still in History: still, we should rather say they are in it but with its expiration date printed on the back. When they reach a certain degree of political development, whether through their own conviction or pressure from outside, they will be given nothing else to hope for. The aspect that, however great or transcendental the events locked in the future might be, we should not advance alternative ideas to liberalism to interpret them, matters more. In other words: the power—whoever might have had it—to determine the meaning of history has ended.20 Tedium or death, that is the ultimate dilemma, rather parodic but almost explicit, such theoreticians reach.

In the face of that, it is useless to persist in opposing such strong convictions. To express it in the same way as the character from the film The Decline of the American Empire: “There is nothing we can point to while we are saying: ‘this is how we want to live.’” Nor would we get off the hook by searching inside ourselves. We know both too much and too little about ourselves to set ourselves up as a secure reference point for what there is (and for what there was: in our time, as we have already said, that is the main problem of historical discourse). We scarcely have, either individually or at the various lev-els of supraindividuality, an insinuated, imprecise, confused identity and, what is more serious, we do not know where to turn to know ourselves better either once all criteria have lost their absolute char-acter, i.e., we have been left without a rule for judging ourselves and demanding of ourselves.

We should begin by determining whether we decide to affirm our-selves, whether we try to retrieve an imaginary innocence of history with which to face that lethal, or perhaps posthumous, “every day is one more day.” And if innocence means youth, we must recall Schil-ler’s dictum “What has never happened never grows old.” It is still there for those who are capable of perceiving it and activating it, for those who possess the passion of possibility (“that eternally young


and eternally ardent eye that sees possibilities on every side,” Søren Kierkegaard). The booty of identity is certainly sparse: memory, desire to be, some tension towards what is not. . . . Minimal riches that do not manage to found difference.21 Not should they try to do so. In the hands of the individual alone, memory is a useless net that memories slip through. Remembering something at the moment we want does not depend on us. Nor is the success of that tension most often up to us either. But in any case, and aside from their fragility, what is true is that these are the elements that constitute us, that make us who we are and what we are. I say that in the plural since that, in a way, would be their virtue. For, if identity is the same as individuality, there is no problem admitting its emptiness, its condi-tion as an artifice, incapable of covering up the lack of substance that runs through us. Identity proper, understood in that way, would be no more than an ingenious verbal construction. But understood as a set of shared faculties, as a territory where much of what happens takes place (and nothing more), it is a key piece in the reconstruction of the idea of meaning.

Old ways of building it seem to have expired definitively. Today we can appreciate that image, perhaps also of Judaeo-Christian origin, of humanity on the road to somewhere, always to be decided, as the mirage of a period. Now we see how much it depended on a belief in a Holy Book that would guarantee its existence and possibly its location. How closely linked it was to a conception of the historical account understood as the history of power, an account written from the point of view of those who have finally made their project real.22 But alongside them there were others, no doubt the majority, who abandoned us before we could see what they were dreaming, who left us as their only legacy an immense world of what might have been and never was. Someone should reclaim that legacy, unless the aim is to turn historical discourse into a docile and applied management of forgetting or a solvent of memory. But that would be like persist-ing in wanting to open the door backward (even if, as a Nietzschean might say, it was a revolving door). What never became real hovers over us like a kind of transcendence, present at every moment. Per-haps like a regulatory idea for the more aware. I am thinking of the


definition of life itself given by Paul Valéry in Moralités, according to which it is not so much all the things that happened to us or that we did (which would mean a strange, listable, descriptive, concluded life) as the things we did not succeed in doing or that have disap-pointed us. If the notion of identity can serve to structure a reflec-tion on history and a reflection on action, it is because, inexorably, the moment comes when we have to decide who our own people are.

Thus teleology obtains a more modest foundation, but also a more constant and profound one. Which is not to be confused with moral commitment or the necessary answer, although obviously it does not exclude them. The statement is, clearly as I understand it, another. That men do not act only because they are committed to a situation that has become unbearable or intolerable, but spurred by a certain vision of the possible, of what is not yet. Or if you prefer to put it in the shape of a principle: what has not yet been lived often mobilizes more forces than obligations do.23 But, behind its simple appear-ance, that idea barely manages to conceal its difficulty in explicating a global proposition that is an alternative to what exists, capable of serving as a common universal object. To put it in the terminology of a moment ago, we do not all have the same time left to live, if that has to be our stimulus. Our difficulty in understanding the behavior (collective too) of others often has to do with a complementary stu-por to the one pointed out a few pages ago. If there we said that we find it hard to understand our condition as the object of someone else’s desire, now we should add that it is not easy to have an idea of how others live (i.e., perceive, internalize) their own shortcomings either, especially when they do not coincide with ours.

And so certain categories help us to recognize our perplexity, to identify it, not to resolve it. But that is no longer a theoretical problem; it is a practical one. And, as the now distant Marx said repeatedly, we only surmount what we replace. Or, which comes to the same thing, we should only think about what we are in a position to resolve. So that it does not seem as if we have moved on to something else: to the difficulties we have pointed out we need to add the one involved in knowing our own shortcomings, when nothing in reality shows them as such (but as the only given). To translate it into a more descriptive


language: not only are we confused by the fact that citizens of soci-eties different from our own take ours as a model; we do not even know if it makes sense to think in terms of something other than what there already is here. Lately some people have tried to thematize that possibility by turning to the ideals of the Enlightenment. Then, according to them, there was the seed of a possible or intelligible transformation (or, rather, intelligible because it was possible) inso-far as those ideals are inscribed, though not developed, in the very structure of the project of the society we live in. There is no doubt that for those who come from elsewhere the mere fact of having a plausible and civilized method like democracy to sort out conflicts of interest is an enviable desideratum. But for those of us who are in it, what stands out most is that democracy does not automatically imply liberty, equality, and fraternity. However, it is more than doubtful that this more or less widespread reservation about the boundaries of democracy can turn the proposal for a new enlightenment into the mobilizing goal for these times.24 Among the most serious ques-tions that urgently need asking today concerning the hypothetical validity of the enlightened alternative is the one about the relation between that totally secular and progressive state idealized by it and those two monstrous creatures called fascism and Stalinism.

We need to remember these things because, with suspicious fre-quency, criticisms of the possibility of knowing history scientifically, and therefore of predicting the future, pause before a certain kind of anticipation. If history is indeed unforeseeable, that will also logi-cally have to affect the prediction of its end, which will be imme-diately emptied of meaning. The failure of socialism, for its part, exemplifies that unpredictability almost perfectly, but we should proceed with caution and not be satisfied with the simple realiza-tion. It is of little use to allude to the countless errors of predictions that existed in the past, because no one is safe from them. The fight between conserving and transforming did not include the agnostic option. The interest in knowing the future is shared: what varies is the nature one wishes to attribute to it. It is not that some were more mistaken than others; it is that some have lost much more than oth-ers from the mistake. But what matters here is that such mistakes


did not occur in a void or just because; they have been caused mistakes. That, then, is the rectification: the future is not predicted, it is produced.

The preceding considerations do not invalidate the enlightened program, but they do make its efficacy as a governing ideal extraor-dinarily relative. Understanding unpredictability makes it obliga-tory to let the agents, those subjects who intervene on the course of history through their action, into the schema. And not because their behavior is irrational or outside any project or plan. The fact is that an unevenly harmonious or conflictive coincidence of the many ends gives rise to a result that is often different from, and cannot be reduced to, the mere sum of particular goals. But to this well-known fact we need to add, as a more specific lesson of the events that have transformed the world and our image of it, a complementary per-plexity of another order. Now we see that agreement over an idea guarantees very little in history. What we once called “the process of formation of awareness” has revealed a strange nature, different, in any case, from the one we attributed to it. The resources that, people believed, should configure the basic structural elements of concep-tions of the world and life have shown a surprising inefficacy. We had signs for suspecting that the approaches of some post-Frankfurtians to the enormous importance of the mass media in what was then called manipulation omitted something essential. But very few could imagine that societies entirely committed to the construction of the new man would fail in their endeavor as they have. The radically qualitative character of the failure bars refuge in arguments such as in the human sciences the number of variables is so infinitely greater than the number of constants that the capacity for prediction is extremely hypothetical. It is not a mistake in prediction, but the emergence of another reality than the one supposed by the discourses referring to it.

From that qualitative difference, and not from neutral complexity, the surprise ceases to be absurd, although it is still awaiting knowl-edge. It is true that what is unleashed by us takes on an autonomy that invites us to think about it in terms of the sorcerer’s apprentice. But the validity of the image, the part of it that is a description of the process of becoming independent of our own products and the


resulting constitution of a global tendency—a current with direc-tion, if you prefer—outside the desire or premeditation of any single individual, or group of individuals, should not lead us into error. And not only because the nature of the exchange between people moved by the pursuit of their own interest is something open: for optimists those unintended consequences are of reciprocal utility, while for pessimists they are the origin of conflicts (conflicts that in turn can be a motor: here is one of the interpretations of “they do not know it, but they do it”). To a large extent, what remains to be understood is not the action’s consequences but the action itself, not the efficacy of the agent but the agent as such. I do not intend so much to claim that everyone had, until now, forgotten about the former and the lat-ter as that probably (that is, in view of the little we understand) they had been badly approached. For example, in strict coherence with what we have been saying, the expectation of explaining the agent as a person is untenable. Aside from that fact that the very expression “explaining a person” is of dubious intelligibility, the most important thing is that the quality of his or her place in time is difficult to grasp with explanatory parameters. What to do, from a gnoseologically hard point of view, with what never even happened? How to incor-porate into that discourse the question that, through the heterony-mous Álvaro de Campos, was posed by Fernando Pessoa: “Who will write the history of what could have been?”, and the answer: “Will that, if someone writes it, be the true History of Humanity / I am who I missed being”? Indeed, for those who are (live, in fact) in that perspective, the idea that everything could have been otherwise is a rare, and almost certainly useless, conviction.

But there are those for whom that is precisely the only possible place from which to keep thinking (and—why not?—living). They believe that only such a conviction can safeguard our hopes or, at least, our capacity to generate them. To put it the other way round: real disillusion occurs when all hope is shattered. The meaning of life and history must be sought in the future, not in the past. That, at most, can provide an impulse or a certain kind of inertia. An oppor-tunity, in short. There is nothing triumphal about the claim accord-ing to which history is not shaped essentially by what we are obliged


to do (which we had no choice other than to do) but by what we did freely, if it is understood as the condition of possibility for our mis-takes. The exercise of freedom—an exercise, of course, subject to a thousand pressures—does not necessarily lead to a reality of a certain kind. For example, to link the crisis of progress to the misfortunes of freedom may sometimes be a way of dodging responsibility.

The great historical breaks, the huge leaps in the processes—all those experiences, in short, that we usually call events—are unthink-able without reference to human will. For a start, the prior and inescapable condition for an event acquiring that category is that it cannot be explained as a mere effect or consequence of the situation it emerges from. The new, by definition, has to be improbable. But, however inescapable it may be, that condition is only necessary. The plus that makes something into a historical event is the fact that it is a bearer of meaning, and new coherences can be created from it. In the words of a moment ago: on it must be inscribed its condition as a result, albeit mediated, of the will of the men of the past, and it must allow us to bring our own to bear. That is why the adjective historic, which accompanies event, is not a simple pleonasm: it deserves it because it is a product of history and the bearer of new possibilities of history, that is, of alternatives to what exists.

We shall observe that if there has been a defense it has been of will, not of awareness. Which means, among other things, that nothing guarantees that those possibilities will be properly developed (even modestly understanding “properly” as equivalent to “according to their own interests”) or, still less, that what we receive from the past is the right development of the possibilities at its disposal (our people were wrong too: to confuse the irreversible with the necessary is the source of many errors). Such opacity, which should not be regarded in the old way as ideological, is a burden, not a destiny. Nobody is talking about unknowables or insoluble enigmas. On the contrary: we are trying, to use other people’s words, to urbanize the province of historical discourse. History, it is true, finds it difficult to pro-duce novelties, but what matters more now is that when they finally are produced their recognition, their identification, as such, usually requires long periods of time. Things and more things happen, and


of most of them we receive occasional news—or we could receive it or we could know how to acquire it. But, from that cluster of infor-mation, meaning does not spring as an inevitable product. We could even say that the more ostentatious the transcendence of what hap-pens, the more it seems to remain hidden. It is not an inevitable or incomprehensible design.

The apparent paradox that we know too little and too much about ourselves is resolved from here. When something bursts into what exists, moving us to anticipate enormous transformations in the future, it shows not only the inadequacy of the schemas with which we had interpreted our reality so far but also, I think especially, its condition as a product of human action, with all the indeterminacy, openness, or ambiguity that implies and that it is up to us to try to reduce. The effort, made by some, to transform the failure of the countries of real socialism into a refutation seems to be related to their desire to present that failure as a destiny or, still better, as a neces-sity. Probably because they consider that a refutation of the one is tantamount to a confirmation of the other. In other words, to a guar-antee of its continuation. It is true that the defeat of the traditional historical enemy makes their task much easier, but that is a question which should not be confused with a theoretical analysis of the event. Instead of hastening to announce resounding surmountings or refu-tations—according to whether they belong to the liberal-Hegelian or liberal-Popperian faction of the cause—they would do better to dare to give a sensible answer to the question, is the world still essen-tially as Marx described it? Or, which comes to the same thing, is it really the case that we understand it better without his help? I do not intend to exemplify one of those exercises, so well known in the methodology of science, in the protection of the theory from any fal-sifying element. The exercise, indeed, would be perfectly viable here: we need only recall the cliché of “the revenge of Marx” and consider everything that happened in the Eastern block countries as its last and definitive episode for the falsification to be incorporated into the doctrine itself.

A sensible answer would include the recognition, which the more intelligent conservatives have no problem with, of the contribution


made by Marxism to knowledge of the world of capitalist produc-tion. More than that, the accuracy of his analysis has made it pos-sible for the battle for the maintenance of what exists to be waged with a solid foundation. The equally clichéd distinction between the descriptive, judgmental, and prescriptive elements of Marxism is applied here with no difficulty and leads us to the next step: what is, in a crisis, the goal set, the end proposed. There has not been refutation, there has been rejection. An act of will applied to alter-ing the planned course of events. The standard that must be used is not the resistance of the theory to falsifications, but the resistance of individuals to situations. Aron was right when he complained of the injustice of judging capitalism for its lacks or inadequacies and socialism for its ultimate intention.25 The complaint needs some substantial touching up today to avoid falling mechanically into the opposite injustice. Real socialism must be countered, as its corre-late, by real capitalism.26 And if that could be transformed as a result of collective human action, there is no reason not to think that it can also intervene in the supremely antagonistic societies. Writing “think” and referring solely to a capacity for intervention, I have tried to forestall the reproach of ingenuity and/or voluntarism that some might level at what I have written. In fact, I have done little more than argue in favor of possibility, understood as the space for the materialization of the ends, as the sphere that makes human action intelligible (in this case because it is believable), preventing it from lapsing into meaninglessness or despair. Considerations of other kinds, for example, referring to the effective probabilities of a specific programmatic proposal for the transformation of certain social formations, have no place here, because they are not the com-petence of historical discourse.

It is not up to historical discourse to set goals or to sanction what has happened (the past needs no patching up). Its task, announced before in other words, must be to show the human condition of his-torical products, that is, to point out in what particular way that ori-gin is responsible for the relative obscurity with which history often appears to us. Understanding must begin with an analysis of the dif-ferent ways in which individuals are set in the situations it has been


their lot to live: reducing the indeterminacy of human action can have no other starting point. But obviously we cannot settle for that. To return to an expression we have used before: historical discourse has little chance of accomplishing the mission assigned to it by Feb-vre of “helping us to live” if it is not capable of telling us, even mini-mally, where the acts of the past are leading us. Or: if we accept that human actions develop consequences for the infinite and include a large number of effects that were not envisaged (or expected or wanted) by the agent or agents, which prevents anticipation through an analysis of intentions, reasons, and so forth (as R. G. Collingwood proposes), and that from the disparity between what happened and what was unleashed, the event, the historical novelty, emerges, we must conclude that historical discourse, insofar as it sets out to tackle the intelligibility of human action, must strive to make visible what the event does not show of itself once and for all.

History, then, helps us to live the present in the only way it can: by helping us to understand it. Understanding the present—or learning from it, as you prefer—is undoubtedly one of the most arduous tasks imaginable. It sums up the set of answers to the initial questions that have gradually appeared. Knowledge of the present, obviously, is the way to our programs for the future. And the way to news of the past. The idea that each present asks its own questions of the past could perhaps be better expressed by trying to avoid the unnecessarily rel-ativist connotations of the formulation. The virtue of a present is measured by its capacity to free a particular quality and quantity of past. So, to give an example on an individual scale, the proof that someone has a mistaken image of himself is his incapacity to inte-grate into his assumed identity a large number of experiences from the past (gnoseological effects of identity, we might call it). That, we need hardly stress, is not presentism, understood as an affirmation of the exclusive reality or the exclusive goodness of the present. Nor does it suppose a reintroduction of experience or empathetic understand-ing. When someone says that there is no way to fulfill the historio-graphic ideal of “putting oneself in the other’s place,” because that place either does not exist or is already occupied (by the other, pre-cisely), they are arguing against the imperialism of the here and now,


against the all-embracing power of today. On the contrary, the sup-position operating beneath all this is that of the incompleteness of the present from the point of view of both knowledge and practice.

There is not a great deal to what there is, to our particular here and now. It does not, for example, allow us to travel to what was with the merry sufficiency with which so many people do. That children’s playground we visited yesterday did not look enormous because of delirium or delusion. It really was enormous to us, just as the fact is that it has shrunk in our eyes.27 It is more than dubious that we can recapture the lost scale. But what is not even in doubt is that the function of historical discourse must be another, completely dif-ferent from the occupation of the past. If what matters is knowledge, and not mere reaffirmation, we have to measure ourselves against the past just as we have to project ourselves into the future. Both can thus be regarded as domains where the present stretches out, as its ultimate confines, and that in turn as the specific object of historical discourse. An evidently open, incomplete, problematic object: in no case an unambiguous referent (this last perspective has been criti-cized). For that very reason, it makes sense to take it as an object of knowledge, that is, as an object awaiting being known, and for that rea-son too we are authorized to interpret historical discourse as a theory of the present. Whether that theory is capable of equipping itself with content will depend on whether Renan’s question can be answered.

B Y W AY O F A P R E A M B L E

The past has returned. And according to present indications, it looks as if it is back to stay. Following the postmodern apotheosis that criticized all of philosophy in its effort to turn any kind of history into pure metaphysical patter (that is, a sort of academic bullshit),1 we seem to have arrived at a theoretical space of quite a different sort. Our present represents itself according to certain parameters that are undoubtedly quite different from those that exercised their hegemony just a few years ago.

Of all those parameters, one may deserve special attention in the present context thanks to its capacity to indicate the nature of our reality or, better yet, the particular manner in which we tend, lately, to relate to it. I am referring to the increased importance—not to mention the central role—acquired precisely by the ques-tion of memory. Owing to factors we will have occasion to analyze, it has become a true test of our own veracity. This shift in perspec-tive is certainly radical and can in no way be explained by resorting

chapter three

For an Urgent Typology of Memory

44—for an urgent typology of memory

to presumed pendulum movements, which are nothing more than metaphors offering scant gnoseological rewards. As is almost always the case, this supposedly new situation is the sum, or articulation, of a group of factors. In other words, a confluence of diverse consider-ations of history’s value is probably responsible for this apparently unified clamor to reappraise memory, leading to the return of the past we mentioned at the beginning of this text.

If this hypothesis is true, it will be useful to begin by separately analyzing items that tend to appear together, confident that this separate treatment will allow us to delve into the authentic char-acteristics of that phenomenon and adequately evaluate it in equal measure. One last and practically obvious warning: the various argu-ments in favor of memory are not all rooted in the same ideologies. Therefore, they cannot be associated with the same sort of world-views either. One of the factors that most confuses this debate may well be that very difficulty of identifying the different ideologies underlying proposals that appear, at first, to coincide. That is why it would be wise to try to draw up a small typology of memory, with the necessary modesty and accepting its merely tentative condition. Nor will we hide the critical nature of this typology, in which each of the indicated positions is accompanied by comments that seek to reveal the principle limitation of that viewpoint.

T H E R E A R E M A NY W AY S T O S AY M E M O RY

The first group of defenders of memory consists of those who consider memory to be a valuable end unto itself whose exercise can only gen-erate beneficial effects (these are generally progressive people, though not necessarily). This group could include all classical arguments about history, including Cicero’s famous dictum, “History is the master of life,” as well as George Santayana’s oft-repeated “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” And, with a mini-mum of effort, we could find many other affirmations of the same sort.2 Without fear that simplification might generate gross misunderstand-ings, we can say that this group believes that memory is always good.

for an urgent typology of memory—45

This sort of belief does not stand up very well when confronted with facts. It is far from evident that we might be able to auto-matically extract positive lessons from our recollection of the past. Reason—with which we need not concern ourselves right now—is related to the nature of the very recollection of history that, as is well known, materializes in the course of a narration. A narration, by its very nature, not only implies a determined reduction of the evoked realities—in other words, a selection—but also, and most of all, a pre-vious evaluation of them. On some occasions, I have referred to the use of an event that involves an entire generation, a use that might well serve as an example of what we are trying to point out here.

Strongly criticized by certain politicians (especially on the right) in recent times, May ’68 was, for many years, a touchstone for a broad sector of the population of a certain age in developed Western soci-eties. That sector believed the events defined by that term, and most of all their consequences (transformations in the areas of customs, political culture, and so on),3 constituted their generation’s particu-lar founding moment. There may be little more to be said about that famous May itself (because too much has already been said), but it is worthwhile to point out something about the manner in which so many have rallied around it. Given the immense number of words that have been written about the events themselves, it is striking how few texts brave the radical self-criticism involved in considering the possibility that it might have all been a gross error, a significant mis-take, a rather unwise political proposition (notice the prudent choice of terms here)—especially in light of the outcome of mechanical efforts to apply it in other societies, such as those in Latin America, for example. From the perspective of four decades, it can be said without undue inaccuracy that the referent constituted by May ’68 has turned into a symbolic pilgrimage site for those in their sixties and that its reiterated invocation by some has hardly generated any useful lessons for our time.

The second group encompasses those who believe that the past holds the keys not only for understanding the present, but also for legitimizing it. Put this way, such a characterization may seem openly pejorative, so that no one in particular would want to see himself


in that role (although they may well attribute it to others), but it is worth emphasizing the degree to which this is one of the most widespread beliefs. Moreover, if it were possible to draw a distinc-tion between this concept of history as a source of legitimacy for the present and that of history as a tale spun by the winners, we would be able to see how much this is one of the most generalized concepts of history (in order to assume this conception without difficulties, it is sufficient for its defender to introduce a victimizing premise that alters the narrator’s status and thus protects his narration from Ben-jamin’s well-known reproach).4

Actually, there is nothing strange about such a generalization, In fact, since history’s very origins as a science, especially since its consolidation as higher learning, it has been linked to a determined political-social transformation. Today the direct connection between the rise and growth of the study of history and the development of European nation-states constitutes a barely argued commonplace. And historians played a very concrete role in that connection, con-verting their discipline into a means of manufacturing national iden-tity.5 But beyond the question of whether defenders of this position manage to recognize the totality of its theoretical suppositions, it can be affirmed that one of its most identifiable traits is its tendency to engage in commemorativist historical practices. This is done when such practices offer the greatest symbolic-political benefits, that is, when commemorating serves to cast the present as the necessary outcome of a specific past.

It would probably be a strategic error to base our critical argu-ment against this viewpoint on the mentioned reproach that all that can come from it is a history written by (and for) the winners, a history that therefore ignores the quest for true knowledge in order to more directly serve the interests of power. Perhaps we should take one step further, questioning the very characterization that underlies this discourse, lest a failure to do so might draw us into gross confusion. Let us recall, for example, the reiterated argu-mentative rhetoric that continually uses approaches very loosely based on Walter Benjamin to establish a demarcation line (as if that line could ever be clearly drawn) between winners and losers,


demanding that the former answer for their obvious responsibility in the barbarities they have wrought.

In this problem, which finally leads to an eschatologically inspired philosophy of history, about which much could be said, it frequently happens that those who were once winners have since been defeated and become losers, while the former losers have become winners. And that is just the tip of the iceberg. Of course those ex-losers become very peculiar winners, for they continue to speak as if they were still losers, attributing to the new losers a sort of permanent, unalter-able, and transhistorical status as winners. This defect is probably the result of having transformed victory and defeat into ultimate values that determine the condition of each person to a degree that tests the limits of ontology. In reality, they can only be considered adjective or mediate values whose quality (positive or negative, to put it simply) derives from how they are used by winners or losers. If we were to put this in other terms, we would say that, as long as the practical task in which “victory” and “defeat” received their definitive valence is not specified, they represent merely formal criteria.

At any rate, there seems to be more than mere categorical confu-sion or careless nuance at the root of this fallacy. We know where a dis-course of the sort we are criticizing leads: “the victim is always right” and other similar affirmations that actually obscure and obstruct knowledge. It is as though winning automatically and irremediably placed one on the bad side. The bad side from a political and moral stand-point and, most of all, with regard to the present discussion, from a historical one. Such premises make it easy to understand the urgency (and sometimes the contortions) of certain parties to always appear, in one way or another, on the losing side. From there, they do not have to justify anything, as everything is owed to them. Such is the profound logic of this argument,6 which we will return to further on.

A third group of defenders of memory consists of those who link memory and justice. That is frequently the case of those awaiting restitution, whether material (for example, seized property) or spir-itual (honor or reputation).7 From a certain viewpoint—let us say, a strictly doctrinaire one—this group would appear to be the least problematic, although we must add that this appearance is largely an


illusion. It is enough to recall the context of Spain’s so-called transi-tional justice, which sought to address a host of problems concern-ing not only the due recompense of victims but also the assignment of guilt, the need to make the truth known, and the institutional reforms (some of which were extremely complex) involved in pro-cesses carried out when replacing an autocratic regime.8 That is so much the case that, as Pablo de Greiff pointed out, no nation on earth has managed to fully meet all the requirements of transitional justice in terms of its three fundamental rights: justice, truth, and recompense.9

Still it is worth adding that even from a purely theoretical-doc-trinal standpoint, this conception of memory seems to pose more problems than first meet the casual observer’s eye. With regard to the present text, the most relevant of these problems may well be that certain gestures are all too often presented as symbolic recom-pense when they are actually nothing of the sort. While it is little more than a simple anecdote, the following story is certainly reveal-ing in that sense. When the authorities at the Spanish Ministry of Culture first considered the possibility of exhuming the remains of Federico García Lorca, their argument was that historical memory is a duty that transcends personal positions and that the exhumation should thus be carried out by public authorities. The poet’s family answered this argument with the affirmation: “We know this his-torical memory, and it is not in bones or ashes.” And when later, in October 2009, the compulsory exhumation of the remains was offi-cially decided, they expressed their wish that they should be left in a mass grave in Víznar—together with other people who had been shot by Franco’s troops during the Spanish Civil War—and expressly reserved the right to identify those remains.

What underlies the Lorca family’s rejection of the exhuma-tion fully affects the question we are considering. For them, by its very principle, the ministerial initiative could not contribute “any-thing new except the exact location of the remains.” In other words, their rejection of the exhumation of the remains of this poet from Granada had nothing to do with historical memory. Furthermore, that exhumation would contribute to neither greater nor more


widespread knowledge of the truth. That being the case, they con-cluded that “there is no reason to violate the general principle that what is done with the remains of a person is a strictly private mat-ter of concern only to his or her relatives.”10 At any rate, it seems clear that regardless of whether a general principle allows multiple variations (or even exceptions), the arguments have the virtue of unmasking the fallacy of certain received ideas (more rhetorical than truly theoretical). We will return to this quite soon.

The fourth group would include those who associate the exercise of memory—especially the most painful sort—with mourning. Intu-itively, that analogy seems evident: just as a person must undergo a period of suffering that allows them to accept the true dimensions of their loss, so too, society must not move on too soon, lest the presum-ably forgotten event reappear at the least expected (and perhaps the least opportune) moment. This somehow pragmatic or utilitarian sense of memory seems to include an underlying therapeutic view of the question, in which a greater or lesser presence of the capacity to remember—the greater or lesser intensity with which a society decides to recall the past—is related to a not always explicit idea of social health.

Critical observations regarding such a perspective can adopt dif-ferent theoretical shapes and degrees of intensity. One could point out, for example, that mourning is not a way of forgetting, but instead a different type of relation to the past. A step further in the same direction would allow us to add that the language of control or mastery of that process is deceptive and equivocal in equal measure. The decision to consider an episode from the past finished and done with (with the confidence of one who decides his mourning is over because he has completed the socially preestablished period for it) can unquestionably come back to haunt one. Among innumerable examples, one of the most illustrative is certainly that of the presum-ably idyllic Yugoslavia, with Sarajevo presented as the world capi-tal of peaceful coexistence. Overnight, it became the setting for one of the greatest horrors Europe has experienced in recent decades. Those who suffered its consequences would have been better off with a less self-complacent, confident attitude toward the presumed


overcoming of conflicts inherited from earlier times. Muzzled for centuries, they reappeared with all their accumulated virulence, as though they dated from just yesterday.

L O N G I M PA S S E F O R A S P E C I F I C A R G U M E N T : T H E P R O B L E M O F T R AU M A

But the most interesting debate from a theoretical viewpoint is prob-ably the one that relates this fourth group to specific and decidedly problematic categories. In a vertical sense, the conception of mem-ory as something linked to mourning would have a strong theoretical link to the idea of trauma. As we know, this idea has generated a bur-geoning bibliography and a host of problems that are unquestionably far from solved. Although I referred to trauma elsewhere for exposi-tory reasons,11 I did not mention certain intriguing approaches that have been formulated with regard to it, and it is worth doing so now. I am especially thinking about the North American philosopher of history Dominick LaCapra, who has approached the question of trauma in a very specific manner throughout his work,12 drawing attention to barely noticed dimensions, not only of its category but also of its doctrinal and social use. It seems clear that the increase of traumatizing approaches has to do with the parallel or previous increase in an entire series of discourses of victimization (which we began mentioning in our comments on the second group, earlier). In those approaches, trauma would be equivalent to the found-ing moment of a community, a sector of the population, or even a people—its moment of origin or constitution. That moment would serve to completely define them, instituting the basic traits of their collective identity, sometimes to the degree of exhausting them.

The operation is questionable from various viewpoints. The most reiterated objection is the censure of how such an operation functions as a retroactive projection of ethical criteria on those who suffered the presumed trauma, freeing them of any responsibility or guilt. By substantiating the entire sign of their existence in one episode, the ensuing condition of victim ends up functioning as an


exculpatory element that not only redeems and absolves such victims of any possible imputation of any other sort, but also transforms them into a particular modality of absolute innocents.

Since many readers probably have the following matter in mind, let us put it plainly: the obscene use that some political sectors (as can easily be imagined, I am referring to the Spanish right) have made of this matter has, at the very least, had the virtue of brutally revealing some of the less visible dimensions of certain arguments or part of the profound logic of many discourses—however the reader prefers to put it. What has come to the surface is something that should make almost everyone uncomfortable, though not all to the same degree. Because, in reality, no ideological sector appears to be in a position to shove the noble cause of memory in the other’s face, precisely because when it is used that way (that is, as a weapon of attack) it loses any possible nobility. We could find more or less dramatic examples to illustrate this position and some of the least would be those used in recent Spanish debates about the presence of monuments from the previous regime in public spaces (for example, statues of Franco on horseback). Paradoxically, the right, which is always so mistrustful of history, has defended maintaining their pres-ence with what I consider a rather cynical argument: they are part of our past and thus part of our memory. The left, on the other hand, tends to support their removal and thus, in a certain sense, their public oblivion. Of course, these positions are very easily reversed, and as soon as the current leftist government proposed a law of historical memory,13 the Spanish right resorted to the same argument used by the right in many Latin American countries when they found them-selves in the same situation.14 They rapidly emphasized that we must not open old wounds, adding that what matters is the future and our shared well-being. Yet the right has had no scruples about opening those old wounds when doing so was in its own immediate political interests. And, in other places, many who defended historical mem-ory because it was presumably progressive were later in favor of gag-ging it in the name of that same progressiveness (leaving the drawing up of what they called a map of pain for later),15 if doing so would pave the way for their own short- or medium-term goals.


This is not a casual oscillation or lack of direction that could only be explained as a result of the volubility of the circumstances. Such changes, and such a variation in the defense and/or abandonment of the same cause (memory), is a significant indicator of something. As I understand it, it actually signifies various things. I will discuss one here—it is the most closely linked to the question at hand—and leave the rest for later. What tends to underlie the changing claim to memory (according to the situation and the moment) is the effort to determine which trauma is truly important, which painful moment of the past is the one that truly founds our present. Such a choice is neither banal nor irrelevant: that collective suffering determines the form of our reality because, without doing so in an open, explicit manner, its permanent evocation effects a shift of the first mag-nitude. The idea of absence is shifted to that of loss,16 which is a fundamental distortion of the true nature of the historic event. But this is a recurrent mechanism in certain approaches to the problem of trauma and it explains much of the advantage certain individuals obtain from it. Following that shift, the victims—real or symbolic—of a particular trauma are legitimized in their efforts to recover what was once taken from them, what they unjustly lost.17

This retroactive legitimization has devastating effects on the pres-ent. As I said earlier, its political-discursive expression can be con-sidered a specific manner of casting oneself as the victim. It means that, in a certain sense, the present situation—what is happening now, what we can make decisions about—is practically stripped of all value. This happens to the degree that what really exists comes to be considered an epigonic effect of that powerful blast of pain—the trauma in question—whose repercussions are still a part of our reality and whose wounds are unquestioningly considered to be still open or whose repetition is, in the best of cases, considered the greatest threat hanging over us.18

One might imagine that, in this regard, it somehow does not mat-ter whether that founding traumatic moment has any meaning or not, whether it corresponds to some elaborate strategy (anthropomor-phizing evil as if it were a person) or, on the contrary, constitutes a perfect apotheosis of irrationality.19 It is true that, as LaCapra rightly


pointed out, the narratives of evil have adopted many forms. And from the viewpoint we just discussed, it is equally true, in any case, that subjects acting in the present are in a derived, subordinate position to the traumatic moment of the past, which has been con-ceded a defined ontological priority. But the fact that there is a setting in which both options are interchangeable in no way exhausts this question. In other words, the choice of one narrative or the other is followed by important consequences of very diverse orders. For now, I will set aside the option of unrationalized trauma to concentrate on the other option,20 which does not preclude understanding it.

The act of interpreting trauma as the result of planning, design, or calculation poses certain epistemological problems,21 which are not, of course, exempt from a certain practical dimension. That immod-eration, that excess of experience subsumed under the label trauma, requires adequate instruments of understanding, and these are not the same as those we use for comprehending normal circumstances. Such eminent authors as Paul Ricoeur, Hayden White, Giorgio Agamben, and Jacques Derrida have addressed this matter from dif-ferent perspectives. Generally speaking, they all agree that the fact that the traumatic nature of certain events tends to block compre-hension in no way justifies renouncing the effort to explain them. At most, it obliges us to adjust such an explanation to fit what it specifi-cally seeks to explain.

Of course, coincidence leaves ample room for discrepancy. Obvi-ously, setting out to understand something is not the same as manag-ing to do so. There are ways that, paradoxically, lead to completely unwanted outcomes. In other words, defending the need to put an end to the representational void surrounding particular traumas is not the same as accepting that such a void could be filled any old way. This is neither the time nor the place to try to reconstruct an extremely complex discussion, but I do think it is possible to offer at least a couple of summary indications about the most adequate way of addressing knowledge of a reality we think is loaded with meaning. First, proposing categories from the Kantian sphere—I am thinking of the negative sublime of Kantian origin that Agamben uses in some of his books22—as figures of historical knowledge that can be applied to


a particular trauma (for example: Auschwitz) implies drifting into crypto-teleological or metaphysical conceptions whose very nature makes them useless for analyzing concrete historical events.

Notice the prefix, crypto, which seeks to draw attention to the hid-den or veiled condition of certain suppositions. That condition can even coexist with a discursive appearance of the opposite sort. And that is what I believe happens when Agamben himself addresses those other affirmations, according to which the modern world allows itself to be depicted as an immense concentration camp.23 It seems clear that this supposed description, in all its hyperbole, runs the risk of fostering exactly what it claims to reject, that is, the unin-telligibility of that very world.

We have long known—since Hegel, at the very least—that there is a sort of statement with hyperuniversalizing intentions that ends up being absolutely useless from a gnoseological viewpoint. In a nut-shell: what explains everything actually explains nothing. At many times in the recent past, the operation of presenting specific traumas or episodes as the quintessence of evil probably served the openly ideological function of tacitly convincing us of the goodness of the present—a notion as comforting as it is unjustified. But this opera-tion, like any other of a similar nature, in no way improves diamet-rically opposed arguments incapable of distinguishing the slightest nuance in sorrow’s enormous scale of grays (as happens with the resounding affirmation that “we are all survivors after Auschwitz” and others of the sort).

A second indication of a methodological order would be the one related to the value of knowledge that should be conceded to the protagonist when reporting traumatic situations. Recently, it has become common to insist on the need to reconstruct the stories of the last survivors of the horrors of the Nazi camps. According to this argument, because of their advanced age, there is danger that the memory of the true dimensions of what happened could be lost. As if they, with their testimony, were the only ones able to furnish genu-ine knowledge of it all. As if lived experience practically exhausted gnoseological understanding of trauma. But such extreme events are also ruled by the principle of the necessary balance between empathy


and a certain distancing. And that balance runs parallel to the dis-tinction between witness and narrator, a necessary and ineluctable distinction. Forgetting or ignoring it can lead to unwanted conse-quences. Paul Ricoeur has warned of the danger that an excess of empathy, far from implying greater respect for the victims, can end up turning into an unnecessary ventriloquism of their voice. We have various examples of that sort of posture. There are those who, with-out any particular title to accredit them, assume the doubtful role of critical conscience of our time, warning their peers, or even preaching to them, about the terrible dangers that await them if they do not comply with the supposed duty of memory. And then there are those who can even fraudulently and openly claim a past they never even lived. LaCapra himself expressed this, with slight variations, when he wrote: “There is something in the experience of the victim that has an almost compulsive power and should elicit our empathy. This empathy may go to the point of fascination or extreme identifica-tion, wherein one becomes a kind of surrogate victim oneself and assumes the victim’s voice.”24

In that regard, LaCapra drew on unmistakably Freudian formula-tions, proposing a distinction between acting out and working through.25 So, the way to at last partially respond to the two methodological indications mentioned previously is to expand on LaCapra’s dis-tinction. Acting out has to do with repetition, even the compulsion to repeat, and that is its principal limitation (or danger). If someone possessed by the past (“however vicariously,” adds LaCapra) ends up having to relive those traumatic experiences,26 they will probably respond with a tragic incapacity to act responsibly. But such a limi-tation is by no means their destiny, much less their ineluctable fate. The alternative to compulsive repetition is not a presumably radical transcendence of acting out or a total transcendence (that is, annihila-tion) of the past—as if forgetting were something we could do by choice—it is working through.

Resistance to such a task comes from various places. As we have already pointed out in part, one of the most important recent ten-dencies in thought is based on a questioning of the possibility of working through. It proposes an identification with the viewpoint of the


traumatized victim, for whom the distinction between acting out and working through is out of reach, if not entirely rejected. But it is worth noting that it is not legitimate for any interpreter simply to adopt the reasons that explain a victim’s resistance. Because in the case of people traumatized by extreme events, those reasons have to do with what has been called faithfulness to trauma, that is, the melancholy feel-ing that, if they were to reconstruct the past in such a way that they could survive or return to normal life, they would be betraying those who where annihilated or destroyed by that traumatic past.

As we said, it is not at all clear that the victims’ more or less unconscious desire to hold on to trauma can be transformed by non-victims into a general criterion for discrediting any form of concep-tual or narrative development. But even more important than this epistemological objection is one of a political-practical nature (an objection that brings us back to the origin of this impasse/excursus): the consequences—and they certainly merit criticism—of an attitude that promotes a sort of withdrawal into the trauma, fostering a sort of unending mourning, a ceaseless sorrow (Derrida), a process that indefinitely delays the mourner’s return to the responsibilities and demands of social life.

This could be the beginning of a largely (though not exclusively, of course) technical discussion about the forms that should properly be adopted by a discourse of trauma. We could, for example, debate proposals like those of Hayden White, which defend the need for narratives of such extreme events to take an intermediate point of view, halfway between the first-person situation we have been dis-cussing and an objectivity this is impossible and undesirable in equal measure. The historical discourse that needs to be elaborated in each case has to begin by clarifying what suppositions it will be based on. For example, it must be determined whether the traumas in question are singular, and thus unrepeatable events, or rather, on the contrary, their extra-ordinary character specifically links them to some type of historical-social order or normalcy of which they would be the most exacerbated version.

Caution is far from irrelevant here, nor is it a mere specialist’s scruple. The choice of one attitude or the other will subsequently


determine whether a historian can carry out his proper work, analyz-ing concrete historical cases in order to clearly establish the condi-tions that allowed such events to take place. This, in turn, is what will be needed to determine how to keep them from happening again. Analysis requires an imperative degree, no matter how small, of objectivity. Without it, without the necessary distance (never to be confused with uninvolvement, which is practically inconceivable in the presence of such magnitudes of human suffering),27 it is totally impossible to advance toward a public debate (supposedly accepted by everyone) that involves society as a whole in the proclaimed task of knowing-in-order-to-avoid. Strategies that lack this distance, that opt for one or the other extreme (from declaring the trauma ineffable/incomprehensible/inaccessible to its abusive generalization, con-verting it into a gigantic metaphor of our present) end up working to block specific historical analyses. They cut off such a debate (any debate, in fact) at the root by questioning its deepest foundation, which is none other than communicability.

But setting these bases is hardly equivalent to an incipient begin-ning to talk. It is actually the beginning of an entire series of problems whose complete solution is still far away. At any rate, the quest for that solution implies an effort to draw up an intersubjective narra-tion that subjects the protagonists’ life experiences to a specific treat-ment in order to try to make them comprehensible—rather than just shareable empathetically—to others.28 In other words, a treatment intended to put these life experiences to work. For example, they can be contrasted with other similar historical experiences—and it is worth reiterating that this operation is possible because the choice has been made to consider those experiences graspable. If we wish, we can call this intersubjectivation the rationalization of trauma. Of course it is easy to see that this immediately brings up the following problem: what conception of rationality do we want to use when trying to make this type of event intelligible? But delving into this question will carry us too far from the central argument that the present digression seeks only to clarify. Suffice it to say that LaCapra’s position (with which much of our dialogue has taken place up to now) struggles to com-bine a contextual reconstruction supported by documentary research


with a self-critical reflection on the historian’s position based on readings carried out in a spirit of dialogue. Yet he does not man-age to entirely avoid accusations of one-sidedness or reductionism. One such reproach is brought by the German historian, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht. In a review of LaCapra’s book,29 History and Memory after Auschwitz, he points out that the difference between primary and elaborated memory—which ultimately derives from Walter Benja-min’s concept of involuntary memory—sometimes seems to exclude elaborations that are not based on exclusively rational procedures.30 This observation is enough to show that the American philosopher’s position leaves it open to argument on many fronts.

At any rate, justification of the importance of the questions dis-cussed here actually lies outside those questions—this is almost inevitable unless we want to risk a flagrant tautology. Once we have sketched out the suppositions on which the as yet unformulated his-torical discourse of trauma should operate, much of the argumentative undergrowth will probably clear up. This, then, brings us face to face with the imperative that subsumes and regulates all the caution and criteria we have proposed up to now: in the final analysis, the condi-tion of possibility for that discourse is precisely its clear determination not to replace other instances, in other words, its firm rejection of any ideological operation that would transform it into an alibi for devalu-ating the present (and, to the same degree, passively accepting it).

Perhaps these last affirmations fail to offer a conclusive explana-tion of the oscillating approaches to memory we discussed at the beginning of the present section. They may not definitively reflect the mentioned changes of criteria with regard to the defense or abandonment of that instance (memory) in different situations. But it could not really be any other way, given that we have yet to present the element that would allow us to explain it all. Still, we must accept that at least those affirmations indicate the direction we should fol-low. And we cannot close this section without adding that the miss-ing element is politics. Here, I would ask the reader to retain his or her spontaneous (and natural) tendency to ask: “but politics, in what sense?” Because we will deal with this question—though certainly not exhaustively—in the following section.


R E T U R N I N G T O T H E L I S T : T H E R E I S N O F I F T H E V I L ( O R I S T H E R E ?)

Of the four types of arguments in defense of memory presented up to now, we could well say that the last three share the determina-tion—or supposition—to consider it a means rather than an end. So now perhaps we could add a fifth group to the list: one that shares the instrumental consideration of the previous three but also adds another aspect worthy of mention.

Those defenders of memory could be characterized by their tendency to postulate its beneficial—and immediately practical—qualities. For them, memory serves as criticism, denunciation, rev-elation (and rebellion). From that perspective, remembrance should serve to nudge our consciences, waking them from a slumber pro-duced by the systematic cultivation of forgetting that is so charac-teristic of our societies. On occasion, such a belief is reinforced by a notably peculiar interpretation of the idea of poetic justice,31 which uses it not only to question established legal procedures but also to attempt to replace them with openly disquieting practices. One of the most illustrious defenders of this idea is Martha Nussbaum,32 who proposes it as the manifest need to humanize law (rather than basing it so much on utilitarian economic theory), introducing lit-erature as a key participant in this undertaking (a participant that is even capable of making relevant contributions to judicial decisions). When I spoke of “openly disquieting practices,” I was thinking concretely of specific forms of public denunciation such as Argen-tina’s so-called escraches. While these are both humanly and politi-cally understandable in certain circumstances, they can easily lead to totally unacceptable situations (at least from the standpoint of law and its necessary guarantees). At any rate, let us be clear that resort-ing to poetic justice as a reinforcing discursive element is not essen-tial to a defense of this concept of memory.

In one sense, we could actually understand this fifth group as a subset of the third one (the group that links memory to justice). But there is a nuance that defines its specificity and should also clarify why it cannot be confused with the first group. The first group is


characterized by a basic confidence that memory offers positive les-sons useful in dealing with the present and the future, but in the fifth group that confidence is, so to speak, a negative one. In other words, the expectation is that recalling someone’s past will automatically lead those who carry out the recollection to reconsider their attitude toward that person.

But no matter how the presumed denunciation is garbed in gran-diloquent trappings with terms like unmasking or the like, the truth is that even a minimally objective analysis of the facts will reveal that it is generally untrue that the data or circumstances—in whose mem-ory the defenders of this approach trust completely—have ever really been forgotten by the other party. The opposite is more likely to be true: members of the latter group are aware of (or at least know of ) such data and circumstances, but they do not feel obliged or impelled to act in a particular manner. Furthermore, they often feel no moti-vation to act in any manner whatsoever, which scandalizes those who had placed so many expectations on that memory.

Undoubtedly, there are many occasions when the latter group are totally justified in feeling scandalized. The dominant collective imagery of our postmodern societies can in no way be considered the unarguable basic criterion for judging the value of people’s reactions. But the fact that, at specific moments, they can turn their backs on the past is not something that can be accepted acriti-cally. It all depends on why they choose to turn their backs. In that sense, one of the most characteristic traits of our postmodern soci-eties with regard to how heavily collective memory weighs upon them is the ideological hegemony of an individualism in which a subject’s withdrawal into him or herself is substantiated in either a banality with absolutely no interest in transformation or an anxi-ety provoked by the incapacity to influence the social and political development of everyday reality on such a scale. In either case, a reference to events that could objectively constitute a political-moral instance capable of interfering with that torn behavior is liable to be set aside.

Paradoxically, that trait coexists with another that appears to be its opposite, but, in practice, it turns out to have analogous effects.


In effect, nowadays, the greater precariousness and weakness of individuals runs parallel to the renewed growth of what may well be called useless imagery. It might be exaggerated (or false) to affirm that a situation like the present one never occurred in the past, but there is no exaggeration in our surprise at the growing number of people in Western society whose belief in things that do not exist, or only exist in their heads, is so strong they are willing to die for them—Allah, God, the homeland, and so on. Unlike what may have happened in other periods of history, such beliefs no longer merely lead to a distancing from, or disdain of, reality; they promote a specific attitude toward it. Thus many current communitarianisms (especially, and not by chance, those attuned to religious sensibilities) use the attractive argument that it is necessary to attend to concrete forms of group living “tending to redirect the subject of solidarity and shared values to the center of cultural specificities,” as Italian philosopher, Gia-como Marramao, put it.33 Understandably, those who place cohesion at the very top of their particular hierarchy of values, view the pos-sibility that true memory could cast doubts on such firm preconvic-tions with very little enthusiasm.

But even if we accept that the attitude of those different types of forgetful parties has a very doubtful justification, that does not make the immense expectations placed on the potentialities of memory any more correct. What makes such faith illegitimate from a dis-cursive viewpoint is precisely the announced categorical swindle it carries out in order to avoid facing the true problem posed here. On many occasions, the fact that citizens decide not to take into consideration, for example, a public figure’s past (no matter how hard his adversaries try to dig it up) can only be explained through political analysis. That analysis will probably lead to a conclusion that is uncomfortable for the presumed critics, namely, that the episodes they want to recall in order to provoke true social alarm (“If people only knew!” tends to be their recurrent lament)—Saul’s conversion to Paul—do not carry such weight for a large part of the citizenry.

Indeed, this situation is analogous to what happens in those his-toriographic proposals that enjoy defining their specificity in terms


of how they receive the long-silenced testimony of the vanquished or disinherited—those subjected to any form of exclusion. It is as though the mere act of returning the voice to history’s voiceless consti-tuted a political gesture (and by extension, one with radical preten-sions). But such an attribution stands up rather poorly to reality. Thus, for example, a purely historiographic rehabilitation of cer-tain subjects is not, in and of itself, political. Sometimes, its only real effect is to reorder the atmosphere of an intellectual commu-nity in an academic or publicity-oriented way. A practical theory based on remembering that there have always been sectors of soci-ety that suffered some sort of injustice (as well as reminding pre-cisely those who do not belong to such sectors of this fact) does not constitute a political program, no matter how much it is dressed up in supposedly Benjamin-like terms. One could even suspect that a history of the vanquished presented that way has often wound up depoliticizing Benjamin’s proposal. What else could we expect of the presently burgeoning forms of oral history that present the loser as someone whose most characteristic trait is the fact that he left no documents, slipping into oblivion due to the very restric-tions of written culture, or for administrative reasons (he was not counted or archived)?

But if it is a matter of going with Benjamin, then it will be sufficient to recall the first words of Thesis 12 from his “Philosophy of History”: “The subject of historical cognition is the battling, oppressed class itself.” And this is the thesis that Benjamin himself placed beneath Nietzsche’s affirmation (from his On the Use and Abuse of History for Life): “We need history. But we need it in a manner different from the way in which the spoilt idler in the garden of knowledge uses it.”34 Strictly applying the logic of Benjamin’s discourse, this might mean that the history of the defeated is not something that is made, but rather something that is carried out or, more exactly, something brought up to date (although this begs the very thorny question as to what contents this update should have, contents that are barely characterized as the moment of justice).

To put this in what may be excessively vertical terms: it could be said that supporters of this concept of memory—in any of the


categories mentioned—assign it a function it does not really deserve. Fundamentally speaking, history does not really exist in order to mobilize, much less to set goals. These tasks should be carried out by politics, and from a present perspective, making as clear as pos-sible what sort of future is being sought. And here we should recall the general principle proposed by Reinhart Kosselleck, according to which the tension that pushes historical time is what links future (the world of experiences) and past (the horizon of expectations),35 or hope and memory, as Novalis put it. Koselleck specifies this gen-eral principle with a warning that the historical future cannot be completely derived from the historical past (thus clearly distancing himself from Machiavelli’s dictum: “all worldly things in every time have their own counterpart in ancient times”).36 He adds that the most characteristic trait of our time is precisely the chasm that is opening—at a growing rate, in fact—between those two spheres.

If we accept Koselleck’s diagnosis, then the reproach that mem-bers of this fifth group ignore history and assign a mistaken role to history could begin to reveal its true contents. Up to now, that reproach has been proposed in a merely programmatic way, but now we can begin to contemplate many of the suppositions and premises on which it is based, which are certainly not obvious, let alone, unar-guable. In a certain way, both suppositions and premises could be summed up as the firm belief that memory can never be a final goal. Moreover, it cannot be considered a goal unto itself. On the contrary, the logic memory obeys lies beyond memory itself.

T H E P R I O R I T Y O F P O L I T I C S T O H I S T O RY

Perhaps, as so often happens in philosophical subjects, the best way to clarify the contents of firm beliefs is to contrast them with oth-ers that occupy the same place, that is, that seek to carry out the same justifying function. The various defenders of a pseudonaive con-ception of memory, like those in Adorno’s camp who consider that “remember” has become the new categorical imperative of our time, agree to defend that capacity as if it were precisely the source of


legitimacy and meaning. But if, given all we have said, it is a matter of taking a step back from such a perspective, then perhaps it would be best to follow advice such as that offered, for example, by Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition. There, she recalls and adopts Pericles’ Funeral Oration at the end of the first year of the Peloponnesian War, maintaining that the polis is organized remembrance—or the organization of memory, if you prefer. As Arendt puts it, “the . . . function of the polis . . . was to offer a remedy for the futility of action and speech,”37 that is, for the two most valuable—yet most futile—human activities. The condition of citizens of the polis endows the initial fragility of their words and acts with the frame-work of memory. We could certainly affirm that Pericles democratizes glory. He tells Athenians that it is worthwhile to live in a polis such as Athens—a free, organized coexistence of different men—because only the polis guarantees that the deeds of those whose “adventurous spirit has forced an entry into every sea and into every land” will not be forgotten.38

Because they live in the polis, common citizens receive the same treatment as the greatest heroes. No matter whether they fall in combat or survive and carry out the greatest deeds, they will be remembered by their peers and by future generations, receiv-ing “praises that never grow old.”39 Heroes may rest in grandiose tombs, but they live forever in the songs of the Odyssey and the Illiad. From now on, proclaims Pericles, those who have lived in the polis will have the most illustrious tomb, which is “not so much that in which their bones have been deposited, but that noblest of shrines wherein their glory is laid up to be eternally remem-bered upon every occasion on which deed or story shall call for its commemoration.”40

As Antonio Gómez Ramos correctly pointed out,41 this attitude can in no way be confused with—nor does it allow us to deduce—any sort of ethical imperative of memory of the sort that are so in vogue nowadays. Nor does it imply that the polis was something like a “com-munity of memory,” of the sort defended by Avishai Margalit,42 that is, a national identity founded on shared memory, which is, in turn, the product of institutions for which the citizens are collectively


responsible. It is true that Margalit nuances his position, and at no time does he charge citizens with the task of dedicating their lives to remembrance. He only asks them to ensure that memory has an institutional existence. But even with such nuances, his proposal points in a different direction than that indicated by Arendt when she took up Pericles’ discourse.

It is the political community, as such, that takes on the task of remembrance. This implies not only reaffirming that remembering can in no way be considered an ineluctable and quasi-sacred obli-gation, or a debt that cannot go unpaid, but also that, at a particu-lar moment, the same sovereign community can determine that, in its representation of the past, certain episodes should be given less space or importance, or even forgotten by society (which is not the same as being forgotten by individuals). Far from making it safe from the damage, contradictions, conflicts, and tensions of social life, such a consideration of memory makes it one of society’s most faithful and expressive sounding boards. One could say that, in the midst of the discourse that sought to weigh pros and cons and define proper forms of memory, nuancing ways and shapes, a question has erupted in all its elemental, and all-too-often unkempt, simplicity: “To remember? What for?”

Thus, in the face of those who mythify memory by considering it an end (rather than a means) and those who mystificate it by using it merely to legitimize the present, a conception is emerging that seeks to avoid both traps by endowing memory with a plural, heteroge-neous character. That character makes it possible to avoid the danger of mystification by understanding that memory is, itself, a setting for conflict. Therefore, it cannot be used to defend a harmonious and unitary image of identity, just as it cannot be expected to offer such an image. No identity, whether individual or collective, can be con-ceived in homogeneous terms: no one (no person and no group) is of a single piece, and it is therefore impossible to expect memory to nourish such possible coherence. And, from that viewpoint, there is no room at all for memory to play a merely auxiliary role in reinforc-ing what now exists, as if the present situation were an inevitable outcome of what once was.


But we must take the next, necessary step in order to avoid all mythification, making it equally clear that if memory is a means, an instrument, it is not at all its job to replace other instances, assum-ing the capacity to determine objectives, goals, or ends. And yet that is what happens in many proposals—also very much in vogue at present—in which, with almost no previous criticism, it is taken for granted that the best thing—not to say the only one—we can apply our efforts to is the fulfillment of an incomplete, failed, past, filled with unmet promises and unachieved dreams. It will proba-bly not be necessary—we have already sufficiently reiterated it—to explain that there is nothing objectionable about trying to reha-bilitate the past . . . as long as such a project meets the elemental requirement of coinciding with our present-day concept of what is worth achieving.

That shift of emphasis is far from superficial, nor is it lacking in consequences. There are many who seek to keep the past open, indicating they see it in a positive light—as if any event from the past automatically retained a revolutionary, transformative meaning. Could that be because its emancipatory seed was crushed by the win-ners? Countering those efforts would be a matter of claiming each individual’s right to consider specific periods or episodes from the past over and done with. Notice that this is something our societ-ies have been doing for a long time. What might deserve criticism is how it takes place (for instance, when the root cause of the decision to forget is an injustice), but it is doubtful that it can be disqualified in all cases.

There is probably not much need to argue about the idea that many unfulfilled promises from the past are, if you will allow me the expression, happily unfulfilled. In other words, from our present per-spective, their failure constitutes good news. But maybe we should pay a little more attention to the suspicion that what underlies the unconditional valuing of past events is all too often an unconfessed anachronism that shoulders the past and its defeats with the pres-ent responsibility of rescuing certain hopes from oblivion. Those hopes may have been lost at some earlier date for justifiable reasons, but, this way, those reasons remain unanalyzed. It is true that this


anachronism sometimes appears critical, capable of pointing out the negativity of certain episodes from the past, but it also sees them as open episodes in which we should intervene. And how should we do that? By forgiving. Somehow, that would complete the circle: we would take charge of the pending good by reappropriating what could not be, and we would dismiss the evil that has been done by resorting to some sort of repentance. It is a pity that it is not that easy to let go of the negative weight of the past, nor to get the posi-tive to follow our will. Not to mention an obvious fact that may be the fastest way to deflate such anachronism: often, past conduct for which apologies are offered—or demanded—was not considered negative at all at the time.

Rather than the presumed need to return to the past, which we are being pushed into from all sides (with an effort to make us feel guilty of the sin of present-oriented self-involvement), it may be more urgent for us to be able to reopen debate about the future. And perhaps any historical consideration should be used to nurture that debate. The most modest (and prudent) formulation of those principles could be that there is no reason for us to let unfulfilled promises from the past become the maximum determinants of our future demands and expectations. Essentially, that is what we have been saying all along. But even such a contained formulation harbors the seeds of its development, which would be something like this: just as we have the right to demand the fulfillment of old promises, so too, we have the right to found new ones.

Simply put, it is not a matter of remembering more, but of liv-ing better. That should be the aspiration of every form of memory. Moreover, the greatest help historical discourse can offer us today may well be its usefulness in renewing our idea of the future and making it relevant again, contributing to its theoretical rehabilita-tion and helping to renew its contents. This is not the same as turn-ing the past into a mere appendage or instrument to serve the future, at least not necessarily. What it does do is connect both dimensions on the basis of a firm belief in their reciprocal need for each other. We have already sufficiently criticized those proposals that end up turning the past into the sovereign territory of an unhealthy and


sterile melancholy. So let us now add a different variant, one that seems more banal but may actually be more dangerous: the past as tourism,43 recreation, commemoration, or museum (nowadays, it is more likely to be a theme park), which is presented as disconnected from any project for the future. This past actually corresponds to an unconfessed project for the future—a subtle plan by the powerful to naturalize the future, turning it into a space for the inexhaustible reiteration of what already exists.

As we said, what combats this sort of proposal is the firm belief that what best serves the past is a robust project for the future. And that is neither a rhetorical statement nor a simple declaration of intentions. It is based on the firm belief that historical discourse can in no way be conceived in terms of heterogeneous, disjointed moments that have to be somehow linked together from outside, joined with the mortar of a presumed dialectic or some such caulk. Among other things, history informs us as to what remains, in any form or medium, including the form of an unrealized possibility,44 of course. And, to the degree that such a possibility remains open, it constitutes an opportunity—not a destiny, sentence, or obligation. The only duty that can reasonably be alleged with regard to the past is not to suffocate it, not to deny it, not to block its emergence into our present awareness like a critical instance able to strike, move, or shake our comfortable repose in the bosom of existence. But such a critical instance does not arrive with its meaning already in place, for that meaning has to be assigned from the present, like the deto-nator that triggers the explosion of such an interruption. If, as we have maintained throughout this text, a future without any idea of the past is inane, we can now complete this idea by adding that a past with no idea of the future is inert. To the degree that it remains possible, what could have been but never came to pass constitutes the building blocks for our actions and projects. At the same time, it activates the most powerful criticism of an ideological conception of history, revealing the contingent condition of all that occurs and, to that same degree, returning to humans their responsibility for the future. I do not know if that is where we are at this time. But I am convinced that it is where we should be.


A P P E N D I X : T H E A P O T H E O S I S O F M A D N E S S (A U S C H W I T Z , T H E P E R F E C T C R I M E )

Let us put it this way: in our time, the question “is it possible to write philosophy after Auschwitz?” (to paraphrase Adorno) has taken on an important rhetorical component. The answer seems clear: obviously it is possible. And I am not referring to the easily quan-tifiable objective datum, that in the last fifty or so years since Raul Hilberg published his early book, The Destruction of the European Jews,45 the production of philosophical and historical texts on this subject, far from dwindling, has continued to grow as the events themselves grow more distant. I am referring to the other, even more striking, fact that Auschwitz, as such, has become one of the most recurrent subjects of philosophical reflection in recent years—a sort of ethical testing ground for any self-respecting theoretical proposition.

As I understand it, this fact is far from obvious, even though it is generally presented as such. The enormity of its horror is all too often presented as the unquestionable evidence that nothing could be more urgent and important than to reflect on it and no practi-cal task could take priority over the effort—again following Adorno’s indications—to make sure it does not happen again. But it was the previously mentioned Hilberg who, in his time, felt obliged to recall that “the historiography of the Holocaust is, nevertheless, nothing other than historiography,”46 and it would be wise not to disregard his reminder. Instead, it should be enriched by relating it to all that has been previously discussed when distinguishing between acting out and working through.

There is certainly something suspect about a discourse or group of attitudes that do not have any possible spokesperson. It its enor-mity, Auschwitz has become the cipher and sign of a horror for which no one in their right mind would dare claim responsibility today. Perhaps that is why proposals such as the declaration of a “Holocaust Memorial Day” (to which is added: “and of prevention of crimes against humanity”) can be accepted by our society with-out any opposition at all. The same would not be true, however, if someone decided to propose a “Religious Crimes Memorial Day,”


an “Ethnic Nationalist Crimes Memorial Day,” or an “Allied Bomb-ing of Germany Memorial Day,” to mention but a few possibilities. Proposals of this sort would most certainly be attacked as politically tendentious. Yet a Holocaust Memorial Day has ended up being identified as an almost prepolitical proposal.

To start with, this different treatment seems to be telling us some-thing relevant, that is: merely invoking the victims is not enough to understand the central position attained by certain matters. The problem is not the victims—as has been repeated on multiple occa-sions, they deserve recognition, compassion, solidarity, and aid—but rather, the theoretical and practical role they are made to play, the discourse they are used to prop up or legitimize.47 And the effort to analyze that problem is what uncovers motives for reservation, rea-sons to mistrust the apparent unanimity that seems to surround the slogan never again!

Rarely has there been an occasion on which it was more perti-nent to apply these methodological precautions, commonplace for any historian or social scientist. For example, before undertaking any sort of analysis, we should ask: Facts? Yes, but with what descrip-tion? Attribution of responsibility for the events that took place? Yes, but by whom? And in the name of what? Beginning with the latter questions: it is far from evident that some of those who step for-ward in representation of the victims are specifically legitimated to assume that role. How often they exhort the rest of mortal men—sometimes as if they were revealing a new truth—to comply with a presumed duty to memory that is actually as old as Deuteronomy. Not to mention how questionable any effort to try to turn memory into an imperative actually is.

It would be easy—too easy, actually, and bordering on demagoguery itself—to attack philosophers, writers, and intellectuals of all stripes who have converted the Holocaust into the prized and practically exclusive object of their activity. Still, it is more illustrative to seek more uncomfortable examples, even at risk of generating misunder-standings or wounding certain sensibilities (but is serious thought even possible without assuming that risk?). We are thinking of how, beginning at a specific moment, the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo


movement began to drift. Their demands generated a novelty that, in my opinion, was never sufficiently brought out. As relatives of the victims, they had a right to information and legal measures. But, at least from the viewpoint of this outsider—thousands of miles from where it all took place—their movement evolved in the sense that their relation to the victims took on a different status according to which, in a political sense, those victims belonged to their relatives.

If this appraisal is true, it will be clear why I consider it new. It is hardly necessary to point out that such was not always the case. Throughout history—and this is especially clear in light of our most recent history—victims died from and for a cause, that is, an ideal. So much so, that different ideological or political groups felt authorized to claim them as their own. One could go so far as to call them their martyrs, victims whose death guaranteed the goodness of the project and the necessity of its eventual success. Now the complex and some-times confusing process through which such victims wound up without any cause that could call them its own also created the conditions—what current sociologists would almost surely call an unwanted effect—that made it possible for some relatives to consider themselves politically legitimated to speak in their name. Just as Hebe de Bonafini so strik-ingly did when, as you will recall, she spoke out in favor of the attack on the World Trade Center, arguing, among other things, that her son would have sympathized with it.

But newness is not a value in and of itself. Newness matters to the degree that it constitutes evidence of a significant transformation, which seems to have taken place in this case. For this was not simply a change of protagonists, but a true reconsideration of the inner work-ings of the spheres, with a direct impact on the political sphere. It proposed a revision of one of that sphere’s structural mechanisms—representation—whose manner of functioning in the past came to be considered obsolete. An implicit need arose to replace it with a natural one whose underlying reasoning would be: who but the family can replace those who are no longer here?48 This new link would not oppose the old one; apparently, it would inherit the positive aspects of the former collective causes. But only apparently, we must add, because in practice it turns out that this merely formal invocation of


the hopes and expectations once shared has actually served only to push them further away from our future expectations.

This question—by whom?—may well be less important, however, than the other one posed earlier: in the name of what is responsibility assigned? And this is where the discourse becomes even more compli-cated, especially when it draws on certain arguments that are not easy to apply in this case. To start with, I am thinking of all the argumenta-tive rhetoric that permanently draws on approaches vaguely inspired by Benjamin to draw a supposedly clear line between the winners and losers. Obviously, the former are considered responsible for the bar-barities they carried out. Previously,49 we said that the tip of the iceberg of this problem—in the final analysis, it refers to an entire eschatologi-cally inspired philosophy of history about which much could be said—is that those winners were finally defeated, so that it now seems futile to attempt to make them answer for their acts—beyond what trials like those of Nuremberg or Eichmann in Jerusalem signified.50

So now, let us add that all of this may have to do with how the most widespread interpretations of this period have evolved. Fol-lowing the defeat of Nazism, its horrors were initially attributed to the madness of a fanatic minority. Later, responsibility was laid at the feet of the entire German people; and now suspicion seems to be focused on all of humanity (especially if it commits the sin of forget-ting what happened). This is a speculative-metaphysical drift whose undercurrent is very familiar to those of us who come from countries with a strong Catholic tradition, that is, a firm belief in the intrinsic evil of the human being. And if we add that what has to be answered for has also been expanding—it has turned into a true crime against humanity—the opening motif of the present section, in which I called Auschwitz a perfect crime, will be more clearly understood. With all of humanity (except the Jews, of course) responsible for a crime against all of humanity, the entire affair is definitively defused. As we all know, whenever the position is that we are all responsible for some-thing, practically speaking, that means that no one in particular is responsible for anything in particular. Perhaps that is why everyone (including the most sinister characters of our time) can unblinkingly sit in the front row at this type of commemoration, because no one


feels either directly or strongly concerned. One could say that the collective memory is being subjected to a version of Lampedusa’s well-known maxim that “you have to pretend to remember a lot in order to be able to forget in an effective manner.”51

But there is still one precaution to maintain, one previous ques-tion to answer: Facts? Yes, but with what description? Perhaps the effort to answer this will bring us closest to the heart of the problem. Our considerations up to now have allowed us to make more plausible what, at first, we only suspected: that certain discourses, drawing on the great values of our Western culture and its solemn words, wind up formulating a proposal that is impossible, if not directly self-contradictory. Because the recurrent emphasis on the fact that it should never happen again, far from being accompanied by an expla-nation as to what should be done to ensure that it does not, leaves out the unavoidable matter of the necessary means. That, in my opinion, is what happens when politics are sidestepped—when they are subsumed and finally dissolved into either ethics, the philosophy of history, or, even worse, a metaphysics of evil.

In contrast with this, some clarity may be found in a comparison we would consider otiose in other circumstances. I am referring to Hiro-shima. There is certainly considerable agreement among contempo-rary historians and philosophers that Hiroshima is very difficult to analyze. To a large degree, that difficulty is due to its exceptional, absolutely unique character. After Nagasaki, nuclear arms have never again been used. Moreover, one could even speak of a worldwide con-sensus that one of humanity’s primordial goals should to prevent the proliferation of this kind of weapon by any and all means.

But the use of exceptionality as an argument is not entirely con-vincing: sensu stricto, Auschwitz has never been repeated either (unless we greatly stretch terms, using Auschwitz or Holocaust to refer to any enormous damage inflicted on humans by other humans), but that has not stopped—quite the contrary—reiterations of the warning in Adorno’s Negative Dialectic, mentioned several times previously. In fact, we have reason to be seriously concerned. For very solid reasons, many find the scenario represented by Hiroshima to be much closer to the current situation than the one represented by Auschwitz.


There are so many examples that we run the risk of ruining every-thing with our choice, but, without looking too far into the past, we could begin with the napalm bombings in Vietnam, antipersonnel mines or thousands of Iraqi soldiers buried alive during the Gulf War, and end with cluster bombs and the entire chain of monstrosities that are regularly set before us by the communications media. Indeed, the panorama we seem to be contemplating is more that of a low-intensity Hiroshima than of a world that has definitively renounced this type of terror. With different words, the slogan No more Hiroshimas is binding in a very particular way and with a very particular strength. It should not be possible—without either contradiction or flagrant cynicism—to brandish that slogan while simultaneously defending certain ideas and attitudes about analogous types of war and violence.

Of course, we could exacerbate this argument by recalling that, in the case of the destruction of Japan’s cities, the call for respon-sibilities could adopt very concrete forms (for example, political-institutions ones: one is certainly struck by the difference between one nation and the other with regard to demands for apologies and reparations). But in the case of Hiroshima, unlike Auschwitz, the winners remain the winners, and perhaps that element insurmount-ably complicates the possibility of a clarifying debate. Among other things, this could be because it would oblige the debating parties to arrive at a political definition of the sort that, as we have seen, proved avoidable in the case of Nazism.

At any rate, given how often the smallest critical comments about the hegemonic approaches to this subject are almost automatically criticized as insensitive to the pain of others, it is worth clarifying that the res-ervations I have detailed in no way seek to question the legitimacy of solidarity with the victims. And that is what underlies the decision to end this text with a modest proposal that seeks to emphasize the respect and consideration they absolutely deserve. Everyday, I am more con-vinced that it should be mandatory to read Primo Levi, but absolutely prohibited to quote him. Or, in the words of the eminent historian of the Holocaust mentioned at the beginning of the present section: “I am no poet, but the thought occurred to me that if [Adorno’s] statement is true, then is it not equally barbaric to write footnotes after Auschwitz?”52

S O M E I N D I S P E N S A B L E R E M I N D E R S

More years ago than I care to think (time is always excessive for oneself ), I ended a text with the kind of flat statement I was very attached to then: “To understand the present is to measure oneself against the past and to brave the future.”1 Now I tend to think that they may have been fine words, but rather out of place. They may not have been a suitable way of concluding; they should rather have been a way of beginning to talk, of announcing a project, of starting to sketch out a task. Later, when I persevered with these subjects, I was able to understand to what extent the discourse of history and the discourse of action refer to one another, to what extent there is no intelligibility of the past without a clear perception of one’s own project for the future, to what degree, in short, the two discourses are inseparable sides of the same coin.

It will be observed that I have not dared to speak in terms of dis-covery, which would certainly have been very bold on my part, but

chapter four

We Need to Start Defending Ourselves from the Past

76—we need to start defending ourselves from the past

in the far more modest terms of degree and extent. The point is not to present as a hypothesis something so well known (and typified, to mention just two figures among many, by Reinhart Koselleck when he called historical categories both “space of experience” and “horizon of expectations,”2 or by Ortega himself when he pointed out that the sole origin of our interest in the past which is history is “our concern for the future”),3 but to consider the possibility that what is known may have reached a scale or, in recent times, may have acquired a specificity such that we could claim, even if just as a mere tendency, that something different (not to say new) has begun to take shape in our way of looking at history.

Historians have always known (philosophers, according to Hegel’s solemn dictum, seem to have realized rather late) that history is con-structed from the perspective of the present, that the journey to the past undertaken by the historian does not end there, but inevitably returns to the starting point, that his elaborate theoretical construc-tions designed to account for what has happened are valueless unless they have something to say to people today. The cliché of the learned historian, applied body and soul to the study of a remote era (accord-ing to the cliché, the more remote the better), disinterested but also incapable of making connections between his object of study and the reality he lives in, the cliché, in short, of the historian as entomolo-gist of the past, has little to do with his real historiographical practice.4 Nor does it have anything to do with what that philosopher—almost fallen into oblivion today—would certainly have called the spontaneous philosophy of historians.

I remember all that—so well known, I insist—for methodologi-cal, or rather procedural, reasons. For if the succinct description I have given is substantially correct, then the task of trying to make the place from where we are speaking explicit, of applying ourselves to questioning the nature of the questions we ask of the past, is far more than a perfectly legitimate task: it is a totally unavoidable theo-retical obligation. Of course, we could also introduce other determi-nations to characterize such an inescapable task. We could allude to its urgency, in a world as presumably changing as the present one, or

we need to start defending ourselves from the past —77

to its difficulty. Each trait is a thread to pull on, which drags differ-entiated spheres of problems behind it. In what follows we shall be taking an interest in the ones related to the emerging ways of grasp-ing our reality and the conflicts it poses with the inherited ways of understanding human beings.

In fact, such conflicts are nothing new to the historian. His task was never an obstacle-free one. If he has learned any lesson well, it is the opacity with which the present tends to appear. So obstinate is the tendency that one might come to think that the present, as nature once did, likes to hide. But we should not be deceived: the opacity is not metaphysical but structural; it is not transcendent but immanent. Hence the solid ties that bind the historian and the philosopher of history who accompanies him on his journey, along with many social and theoretical scientists (for example, ethicists, philosophers of action . . . ) bent on gaining access to the intelligibil-ity of the human. So it is and so it should be, insofar as it proves that there is a common territory of problems and questions that does not need any programmatic exhortation to interdisciplinariness (or even to transdisciplinariness) to recognize the overlap of interest. But that does not mean that the determinations they share are situated in the same place. Many people share a concern for the present, but I would venture to say that the historian is the one to whom the problem of the present is closest.

This circumstance should make us, at least as philosophers of history, particularly sensitive to its incitements, to the transforma-tions that appear on the surface of its varied contours. After all that has been said, it will be clear that that hypersensitivity must by definition be a biased, oriented hypersensitivity, fully aware of its intention. We are not therefore suggesting turning the histo-rian into a simple chronicler of the present or a mere notary of whatever appears in it.5 The historian is obliged to notice what he guesses will affect his representation of the past and, for that very reason, his image of what exists now. For the historian, the present is, inseparably and necessarily, starting point and finishing line at the same time.


A B O U T O U R S E L F - R E P R E S E N TAT I O N ( O R : W H AT I S H A P P E N I N G T O U S ?)

There is no better antidote to the dangers that stalk the historian than a clear awareness of the situation he is in. For a long time there was a tendency to consider that the most important of them all was the danger of pastism, which in turn could take on various shapes. The least disturbing was the best known (the one we have alluded to already), that of ontologically overrating the past, regarding it as the almost privileged territory of historical discourse. The complete expression of this variant of pastism is represented by the philoso-pher of history von Ranke and his impossible expectation that the historian should give an account of past events exactly as they hap-pened (that “doctrinal realism” alluded to by Hayden White), but we would have to introduce the suspicion that some such expectation remained underlying, i.e., as a horizon, in other philosophers of his-tory—some even very critical of von Ranke—insofar as they shared with him the principle that the farther removed from events the histo-rian is, the better they are understood. The most disturbing form of pastism may well be another, not identified with the historian’s task as such (although connected with the former one, as we will show later), that has ended up impregnating the consciousness of contem-porary man. It is the form of pastism that, far from presenting itself openly, usually appears under cover of a defense, impossible to object to in principle, of memory.

But like so many other things, memory is said in many ways, and we must be warned about one of them, which, taking advantage of an ethical connotation that is far from unambiguous, ends up becoming an element that generates opacity. We are referring to that almost regulatory appeal to the past in which what was done or thought at an earlier time becomes, with no adequate explanation of the reason—merely appealing to categories such as “consistency,” “coherence,” or the like—a binding element, which it is almost obligatory to observe from then on. Obviously, the idea is not to abominate or even to disdain the coherent or the consistent. Still less, veering toward the other extreme, to apply oneself to the frivolous and opportunistic


enterprise of making an apologia for treason.6 It is rather a matter of not accepting too hastily—and, still more important, uncritically—the institution of a particular moment of the past as a founding ele-ment. Perhaps through an example, taken from the story of a film, the question we are trying to pose will be made clearer.

He had started out full of hopes and projects for regeneration. Until one day the young lieutenant could not stand it any longer and in a moment of weakness, certainly brought on by the exhaus-tion of so many sleepless nights, he confided in his veteran com-rade, hardened in a thousand battles and skeptical of any attempt to set things right, his most private anxiety: “The reason I became a cop is that I wanted to catch the guys who thought they could get away with it. It was supposed to be about truth and justice. But somewhere along the way I forgot all that.” Freed of his secret, he made bold with the question: “How about you? Why did you become a cop?” To which the veteran, after a long pause, replied: “I don’t remember.”

I would not know whether to describe the situation as tautologi-cal or paradoxical: one has forgotten, the other does not remember. And yet the most striking thing about the case is that the person watching the film L.A. Confidential, from which the dialogue is taken, does not feel he is looking at two radically different types, nor does he perceive that the difference leads them to act in quite opposite ways. The one is not totally pure and the other is not completely cynical. The young lieutenant also uses his principles to get ahead in the police force (in the end he intends to show his superiors, always inclined to turn a blind eye to certain excesses, that it is more profitable, better business to obey the rules), while the veteran detective also has his own deontological code, which leads him at a particular moment to support his colleagues or refuse small bribes when they make him feel unworthy.

From that confused situation the first consequence we should draw is that it is absolutely no help in clarifying things to accept a proposal in terms of a bald confrontation between memory and forgetting. Among other reasons—and here comes the connection with the first form of pastism—because it includes a supposition


that is totally unacceptable. The expectation of having the origins always present—that is, always in sight—in order to be faithful to them presupposes the existence of an objective memory, aside from or over and above particular subjects, something which, to say the least, we cannot accept as obvious or evident in itself. That supposition may be the one that has allowed the hijacking by conservative thought—traditionalist in the worst sense of the word—of the concept of memory. It understood it as the place where representations of the past were preserved intact. A kind of historical superego. That is also probably why it tended to consider coherence or consistency its most emblematic element.

But there are irreversible statements, genuine points of no return for discourse. The claim that memory is not a mere warehouse where recollections are kept, a neutral receptacle of our past experiences, is one of them. Memory—I hope you will allow me to surrender for a moment to the melancholy of the philosophical language of my youth—must be rather understood as a set of practices through which subjects construct their own identity or, perhaps better, draft their own biography. Someone wrote that memory is “that gift that allows us to have all our life gathered together” and was almost completely right. We say almost because, as well as gathering up our life—which is no small thing—memory has put it in order. Memory does not conserve or store, it highlights, points out, draws attention: hence the cliché of its qualitative character. It is the pencil that underlines events, moments, people who have made us what we are and made our world what it is now. In other words, when we say that someone is so important to us that he has become part of our memory, we are saying something more significant than the fact that he is installed among our best memories: we are acknowledging that he has made a decisive contribution to giving them meaning.

In any case, and if we can still draw some other lesson from the earlier example of the film, memory always enters into a specific and variable relation with forgetting. The two characters in the dialogue quoted have gradually forgotten things, each one his own. Most likely neither of them could have borne the permanent, tutelary contemplation of his own past. Could it be otherwise? It is doubtful


and, of course, it does not seem that we should regard that kind of rigid essentialism of memory as a desirable way of life. To persist in turning a distant and contingent moment of the past (an operation which in its most caricaturish form usually begins with the phrase “When I was very young I already . . . ”) into a reference point to which all later behaviors have to be accommodated can be criticized for other reasons than the ones already mentioned. To institute that time as the moment when it all began is no more than a fiction (the one that says that all the elements that justify what happened afterwards were there in nuce) . . . but a useless fiction. For, besides the almost absolute impossibility of having a perfect, razor-sharp memory of that supposedly founding moment,7 the most serious part of that pretension is that it prevents us from thinking properly about the reality of the process.

We have used the expression “essentialism of memory” in full awareness. The fact is that the procedure we are commenting on broadly recalls the one people follow when thinking about intention and action. And so the worst thing about reducing all intention to prior intention is that it forces us to blur the way in which we actu-ally act in our real life. Obviously, there are situations in which the action is preceded by a moment, clearly differentiated from the next one, of reflection and deliberation about what we want to do. In such cases, undoubtedly, the action can be understood as the execution, the materialization of an ideal design, which previously existed only in the agent’s head. But most of what we do does not correspond to that schema, so exaggeratedly reflexive, rationalistic. Most of our intentions are not prior, but simultaneous to our actions (this is what some analytical philosophers like Donald Davidson or John Searle have called intention-in-the-action).8

And so, analogously, we should say that the construction of what we are (call it personal identity, biography, or anything else) does not have a solemn, founding, original moment of which the memory could be guarantee and guardian at the same time.9 To take a decisive moment in everyone’s life, we cannot exactly recall the reasons that led us in our teens to decide to study certain subjects instead of oth-ers. If we applied ourselves with sufficient diligence to the task of


trying to reconstruct those reasons, we would probably manage to do so, and the recollection of the reality of the decision process would probably make us smile (about the confusion and feebleness we would recognize in our arguments at the time). But do things hap-pen another way? Is it not the case that in fact we gradually put our-selves in the right with the passage of time, finding increasingly refined motives for persevering with the initial decision?

We can propose all this without in the least renouncing the expectation of obtaining some knowledge about what we are: we have made the point that what we need to take a distance from is an exaggeratedly reflexive and rationalistic conception of that knowledge. Not just because it is restrictive and therefore inade-quate (as if, for instance, we did not realize what we were saying as we talked . . .) but also because it often becomes an alibi to legiti-mize frankly suspect attitudes. Suspect of hiding their authentic—and highly debatable—core arguments. It would be worthwhile carefully analyzing whether the ones that remain on either side of the memory are very different when it is used as a boundary sepa-rating the ones that remain faithful to their past and the ones that strive to break with it. For all of them have a basically similar rela-tion with that vital previous one. An almost sacred relation in which that past operates as a true value in itself—as an ultimate regula-tory reference10—so that remaining faithful to it or, on the contrary, becoming disillusioned (which is the most frequent variant used to try to justify the break) replaces explicitness and debate about the meaning of one’s own behavior.

It is probably not fair to consider the two positions symmetri-cally. For while the first easily reveals (the word faithful is revealing in itself ) its disturbing proximity to dogmatic, dubiously rational, or, at least, barely critical positions, the second often receives a less nega-tive consideration from the outset. However, from Pablo Neruda’s early “we, we of then, are no longer the same” to the more recent poem with the single line “We are everything we fought against when we were twenty” (“Viejos amigos se reúnen,” by the Mexican poet José Emilio Pacheco), which I have quoted on other occasions,


we can find a whole gamut of disappointments and letdowns that, oddly enough, seem to always fulfill the same function, i.e., to alle-viate (if not to justify) some bad conscience by transferring to the instigator of the letdown or the disappointment the responsibility for the change itself.

So much overlap is shocking, especially because it is far from nec-essary. It is strange to see how, faced with the model we have just mentioned, the people who really made certain values, principles, or ultimate goals their own, in other words, those who took charge of the whole of their own lives as a process, can reconsider former posi-tions, criticize their own attitudes in the past, return to any episode of everything they did, without suffering the spectacular pratfalls so characteristic of those who chose internalization. It is understand-able that the latter, clinging to such a fragile exterior link, as soon as they suffer the first setback, as soon as they receive the first onslaught of reality, hasten to get rid of the old schemata. Just the opposite of what the old fighter said: we have to learn to fight even when we have no hope left.11

But it would be best not to dwell any longer on an excessively per-sonalized language, lest someone think—through confusing a “who” that designates figures, not to mention categories, with a “who” that supposedly alludes to people, a supposition that is absolutely not the case—that we are moving toward an ad hominem argument. More-over, that argument does not take us very far. It is of sparse theoretical interest to denounce the existence of arrivistes in the realm of ideas. It is an exercise as easy as it is unnecessary: it is enough to realize how selective the objects of their disenchantment usually are (they are only disenchanted about ideals and values of a certain kind, never others). If we are going to refine, there is some theoretical interest in showing the dead ends of a particular line of argument or, the oppo-site side of the same thing, to warn of the consequences a bad use of memory leads to. To show, in short, that it is a big mistake, both theo-retical and practical, to handle a rigid image of the past as if it were a territory to be discovered (or a property to be guarded). When in fact it has become the ground where a new battle has broken out.12


W E N E E D T O S TA R T D E F E N D I N G O U R S E LV E S F R O M T H E P A S T

There should be no contradiction between what I have just said (the need to defend the past from certain aggressions) and what is pro-posed in the title of this section, which obviously refers to the oppo-site, i.e., to the need to defend ourselves from it. The key to undoing any possible misunderstanding was found at the beginning of the text, in what I said about the present there. It may be an exaggeration to present something that is still only a tendency as a destiny, but that must not prevent us from highlighting what is new in it, intended to alter many of our traditional conceptions about the way we should look at the past.

How can we characterize that tendency? What is the feature that best defines it? The past is certainly not what it was. Many more or less recent factors have contributed to its transformation, and their combined efficacy has eventually affected our collective imagination, the way in which we tend to see ourselves. Among them, some have intervened in the process in a particularly notable way. So Gianni Vattimo has drawn attention to the recent evolu-tion of the mass media, which,13 in his own words, have become organs of historization.

On the one hand, the statement goes beyond the emphasis—which had already been proposed by Adorno and, in his wake, by some sixty-eighters—on the extraordinary power of those media in a configuration working toward a uniformity of awareness (with the consequent risk of dictatorships and totalitarianisms) and, on the other, the counterweight provided by the cliché of their ahistorical character. It goes further because, even when we could accept that the processes of globalization in a certain sense—an enormously broad one—seem to prove Adorno right in the matter of imposing a general homogenization of society, the fact is that that homogeniza-tion is a framework in which, despite the efforts of the monopolies and the great capitalist powerhouses, “radio, television and newspa-pers have become the components of a widespread explosion and multiplication of the Weltanshchauungen: of the world views.”14


But Vattimo also rejects that lightweight commonplace accord-ing to which the culture disseminated by the media is ahistorical because it focuses exclusively on the present. As soon as it is exam-ined with some care, he says, it is clear to what extent the press, radio, and television are increasingly turning to the past. So what Vattimo pointed to as signs ten years ago have, over the time that has passed since then, materialized, come to pass and been transformed into a dynamic, irreversible object. The history of culture has become a repository from which the cultural pages of dailies and weeklies, the publishers that publish books that are sold on the newsstands to keep the new cheap collections coming, the public administra-tions when they organize exhibitions, etc., all draw nourishment. But perhaps the consolidation of the process can be seen most clearly in the audiovisual media, specifically in the place television occupies in the history of the arts. Digital platforms and cable television have brought about a spectacular proliferation of channels (and the emer-gence of thematic ones), with the consequent increase in the number of broadcasting hours. Specifically, that is obliging television, as the only way of filling up such an oversized schedule, to continuously re-present the whole history of the cinema.

This permanent return to the past generates an initial effect on our traditional way of relating to what has happened. With so much repetition, memory loses its aura. Other factors, in some way com-plementary to the previous one but important in themselves, have contributed to that loss. Technological development is enabling a renovation of material supports (in video through DVD, in music through the remastering of old recordings, in photography through the digitalization of the image . . . ) so that all trace of time has dis-appeared from specific reality. Modern techniques clean our memories of time, deactivate them by making them indistinguishable from the objects of the present. The time that had settled like a fine layer of dust on our memories, covering them with a patina of melancholy, has suddenly disappeared. The support leaves no trace whatever of memory. Yourcenar’s dictum (“time, that great sculptor”) has been called into question. If to that we add the fact that fashion itself has become a powerful industry generating permanent needs to


consume that are impossible to satisfy with novelties, the almost inevitable result is a constant revival of old aesthetic ideas which ends up confusing ages and times. Now that the sepia of the old images has vanished, now that appearances are detached from a spe-cific moment (because that has been in fashion so many times . . .), we can understand the stupor of the question “But . . . when was that photo taken?”

The scope of the change goes far beyond the mere fact that the past has acquired a new coloring: the change, if we can put it in these terms, affects its very nature. That everything is re-presented time and again, that in a sense nothing disappears completely, prevents us from continuing to think of the past in the same way as before. That past with no patina, no aura, ends up being not a past-past (that is, abandoned, left behind), but an only slightly anachronistic modality of the present. But the mass incorporation of the past into the pres-ent is also causing our experience of the present to change. Note, by way of indication, the retreat of that exaltation of the instant, the famous here and now, so characteristic of certain discourses a few years ago. In its place the dominant is now the expectation that evi-dence of everything important happening around us will remain, everything is repeated, everything can be seen over and over, which to a large extent empties the living experience of intensity, a living experience that tends to be identified with the most ephemeral, the supremely fleeting.What happened, then, does not disappear (in fact the past is disappearing less and less), no longer vanishes into thin air; on the contrary, it remains there, sometimes even at our disposal so that we can look at it when we want. The perseverance—if not the delectation—with which the media go back to what has just happened over and over again not only allows us a slow, restful, tranquil digestion of the experience; it accustoms us to it. So much so that where we have become clumsy to the point of atrophy is in living the experience when it is actually happening. That happens not only in society in general but also in the specific life of individu-als. So the compulsion to record all the important episodes of one’s life one way or another has reached such extremes that probably, if one were to ask many of the expectant fathers who go into the


delivery room with their video camera to provide evidence of that transcendental moment what they felt while being present at the birth of their child, they can only reply: “I’m not quite sure, because I was busy recording it all.”15 I might end with this: “A reply that, in turn, inevitably leads us to another question: what do people who act that way leave for memory?”

Now, it would be deceitful to suggest that in all that transforma-tion technology occupies the central place alone, to suppose that it is thanks to certain merely instrumental developments that the process has been set in motion. Technology—as always—has been the execu-tive arm of other entities, or, to put it the other way around, it has activated ideas and wishes that had probably been there in silence for a long time waiting to take shape through some material develop-ment. That is the case of another element that is having major direct repercussions in the sphere of the collective imagination. We are referring to the spectacular increase in life expectancy, an increase that, together with the direction taken by certain advances in medi-cine or research into genetic engineering, is bringing about a signifi-cant mutation in the self-representations made by individuals and society as a whole.

Today nobody is surprised that on a TV news program, in the section devoted to the new phenomena that science has given us a glimpse of, there is talk of the “horizon of immortality” as some-thing not too remote,16 or that the literary supplement of a news-paper includes the familiar survey among experts (among whom the friar recycled as an expert on bioethics is never missing) around the question “What would happen if we were immortal?” What is important to emphasize about this idea, aside from its being more or less likely, from whether it is at hand or far off, is the way it is directly affecting our view of the world. Perhaps what was once lived as an unconscious—and if conscious, shameful—reflex is now being expressly incorporated into our attitudes. We have changed from the speculative “can you imagine that . . . ?” to the predictive “there will come a day when . . . ”

I insist: the least important thing for the purposes of this argu-ment is the likelihood of the prediction; what really matters is to what


extent this attitude is an indicator, a sign in itself of a transformation of the imagination of contemporary man. The immortality that is opening up as a form of common expectation among people today is the same one that once dwelt in fiction, as a wish, an impossible (and for some, an undesirable) fantasy.17 Until quite recently, the custom in our society was not to talk about death: at this moment the con-viction that it can be avoided is spreading like an oil slick. Death is ceasing to be perceived as the absolute, insurmountable limit to be seen as an imponderable, a strong limitation, but with a sell-by date. Nobody wants to abandon the ship of life. There will come a time when (the idea will become widespread) dying will be something for the poor or those not smiled upon by fortune.

There will be no difficulty seeing that such processes have imme-diate repercussions on “second-level” notions, but operate as a requisite or condition of possibility for a certain spontaneous or ingenuous conception of history. Such is the case of a notion like handing over to the next generation, questioned today by both parties, owing to the reluctance of those who should be handing over and the loss of presence of those who should be taking over: think of the fall in the birthrate in many of the most developed Western societies or the raising of the retirement age, with the subsequent delay in the incorporation of young people into the labor market.18

As usual, in everyday language we can find clear signs of that ten-dency. Precisely because the past is increasingly incorporated into the present (or is reluctant to abandon it, as you like), it is increasingly rare, in order to refer to someone pejoratively (a politician, for exam-ple), to find the expression “X is a thing of the past” used. It is natural for that (and other similar expressions) to be falling into disuse, per-haps replaced by others with fewer historical overtones such as “X’s time has passed him by,” in which it is never quite clear whether the intention is to say that X is a dinosaur or simply that he has wasted his opportunity.19 When all is said and done, once the tendency to the instantization of the present has been overcome, and hope in the future abandoned (because there no longer is any), what we have been seeing for some time is the broadening of the present, its expansion. A broadening or expansion that feeds, to a large extent, on the past.


Obviously, that past through which the present grows is not the remote past, but historical discourse is no less affected because of that. Almost the reverse (that, you may recall, was our starting point): few things have a more direct repercussion on our concep-tion of history than a reconsideration of the present. Most of all when, as is happening these days, the reconsideration is largely the result of the mass introduction into everyday life of practices and techniques that radically affect contemporary man’s way of looking at the world. There may have been a time when it could be claimed that nostalgia is a way of setting the past to work: it was the time when memory was still, at least to some extent, in our own hands. When, while describing it, we could not help highlighting its condi-tion as selective, biased, a condition from which its own effects (like nostalgia) developed. Now the selection is given to us: with all the returning to the past we are bombarded with from all sides, there is hardly room for individuals to remember for themselves. Result: memory has been deactivated. It has ceased to belong to us, even in part. That house we once lived in is now occupied by strangers.

There are losses there is no reason to be sorry about, but oth-ers where our lives are at stake. In its exaggeration, that flat oppo-sition between memory and forgetting may have operated on all too many occasions as an alarmist scarecrow; it may have fulfilled the perverse function of diverting our attention from what really mattered. In fact, not even the most totalitarian societies have ever tried to impose generalized oblivion. Almost the opposite: as Jacques Le Goff has pointed out, “the commemoration of the past was carried to new heights in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.” The point now, as I mentioned in the preface, is the autonomy of memory. To give up remembering for oneself (whether through boredom, saturation, or any other reason) is tantamount to abdi-cating one’s right to control the selection of elements that must be conserved: to allow others—always the same ones, incidentally—to be the ones to fix the story of the past. And, serious as that is, it may imply something worse, the image that is being consolidated according to which that recurrent past is the past and, moreover, remains open in a certain way.


If that were so, if that image ended up embedding itself in the collective imagination, the operation would have been a complete triumph for its promoters. But rather than because a supposed goal long desired by power—homogenizing memory, imposing a unified story of the past20—had been accomplished because of the mirage it imposes on reality. In fact, there is no road back from reality. Any human action entails a transformation of the state of affairs in the world. We go over those images of that past event over and over again until we are sick and tired, but they will never be the event itself. However, some people seem to think it is—those who some-times present proposals of this kind: let us go back to the setting of that moment (when in year X a decision was taken that we can now see was the wrong one). A useless way of talking: the setting that is to be revisited has already been dismantled. The return is impossible because there is nowhere to return to. Over the time that has passed, material and spiritual conditions have been transformed, perhaps even completely. We can no longer decide about the decision we took in the past again: if we try to do so, it will in fact be other people who will be deciding about a different issue.

To maintain the mirage of possibility despite that is a form of induced deceit. Not everything is possible: we should apply Arendt’s reminder to the past as well. Otherwise, we run the risk of incurring a kind of metaphysical voluntarism that is as counterproductive as it is con-tradictory. What made Benjamin’s insistence on the unfulfilled promises of humanity really radical was that it was not advanced in terms of a second opportunity for the losers. He who wins makes a world, as Ortega might have said, and it is that world configured by the winners that should be transformed. To remember the losers and the magnitude of their defeat is in fact a way of impugning what exists, of pointing out the negativity that constitutes it or the sor-row on which it has been built: it can be said both ways. But in no way can it signify that those lost possibilities are still alive, that the match is still open. To believe that only serves to feed a useless illu-sion and, incidentally, to grant the winners the almost posthumous gift of innocence.


A F E W Q U E S T I O N S T O E N D T H E C H A P T E R

Perhaps all this means the coup de grâce to the idea of continu-ity and, beyond that, to the idea of progress in history. The defini-tive impossibility of thinking of history as a unitary process did not emerge from the crisis of European colonialism and imperialism, as has so often been said. Nor is it the inexorable result of the rise of the mass media, with their dissolution of worldviews, which Vat-timo has referred to. The modern project, based in the end on the hope of being able to draw history in a single line, has more or less managed to survive those episodes and a few more. It is beginning to be doubtful whether it can survive this other situation. The fact that nothing is left behind. That everything is always present. That nothing disappears. Not even the post retains any value insofar as—as we see now—it is the repressed, shameful expression of the same logic (of continuous advance). We are at last in a position to under-stand in its radicalism the famous “difficulty naming ourselves” referred to by Richard Bernstein. What is new here? What is new is that nothing is old.

In what guise, then, should we think about the future? Not, of course, in the guise of growth, development, progress, or any such thing. Perhaps we should say that what history is acquiring as it is swept away by the stream of time is a disordered and growing com-plexity. Or, better still, history is piling up, an expression that does not intend to hide its affiliation with Benjamin, but to introduce an important nuance into the well-known figure. The Angel of History no longer needs to look back: the pile of debris he fled from before is rising unstoppably before his very eyes. The future, that “imagi-nary territory where the projects, intentions or dreams of human-ity dwell,” which we referred to in the preface, has not disappeared solely because the greatest fantasies of emancipation, never before conceived, have been defeated. It has disappeared because, in the world of our representations, it has ceased to be necessary. In the end, the future as the dwelling place of utopia was to a large extent a projection into the immanent of the ancestral dream of life beyond


the world. The illusion of posterity has expired: the illusion of immortality, shameless and insolent, has begun to carve out a path. For the moment, it is true, we have to be satisfied with clawing back time from death—some people even stretch their own skin, as if by doing so they could stretch their lives—but destiny is written. And in its text we can read both what awaits us and the deep trace of what was. Without knowing it, we were running after that. The idea of progress was inseparable from the idea of death: perhaps the best way we were capable of inventing to make such overwhelming com-pany, such loathsome imminence, bearable.

But that does not put an end to all the questions. Some remain, and they should be of tremendous importance to us: And the histo-rian? And history itself? Perhaps history, and with it its discourse, should face up to a recycling similar in a way to the kind anthropolo-gists faced some time ago. To simplify the matter abruptly: they no longer travel to the remote confines of the planet to study tribes and “primitive” groups (the very concept of “primitive” has been rejected almost unanimously by the scientific community); they find their theoretical object among us, right here, when they try to think about issues as urgent and important as racism, xenophobia, multicultural-ism, tolerance, etc. Similarly (and to round off the simplification), perhaps the best service the historian can render to his society today is not to travel to remote moments of the past, but to stand firmly in the present. Trying, of course, to find in the here and now traces of the persistence of those moments, but, most of all, helping the pres-ent to defend itself from the aggression of the past, from its desire to invade it (and then appropriate it).

Working like that, the historian is not abdicating his task or renouncing any of his ideals. Rather he is adapting them to the new situation. He deploys them according to the needs of the moment. He is fulfilling the commission Tzvetan Todorov referred to: “Writ-ing history, like any work on the past, never consists of establishing facts and nothing more. It always also involves selecting those facts that are more salient or significant than others and making con-nections between them. Selection and combination cannot only be directed toward truth; they must also always strive toward a good.


Scholarship is obviously not the same thing as politics, but scholar-ship, being a human activity, has a political finality, which may be for good or bad.”21 That is still the point, although the task is moving toward a different and, in a certain sense, more basic setting.

Because the battle that has begun to rage is not so much a battle for the victory of good politics over bad as for the possibility that politics itself continues to exist, that is, so that the present recovers something of the plastic, malleable condition it should never have lost. But that was what happened as a result of the coincidence of a set of causes, and now it is no good lamenting the loss; we have to apply ourselves to the task of trying to understand what is happening to us in order to conceive some imaginable intervention. Of course, it will not be easy: first, because the disappearance of the future has filled our relation with the present with shadows (What can we say about the present when we do not know where it is leading us? is the question that arises spontaneously, especially when we come from a time full of certainties); and, second, some of our traditional catego-ries have come to fulfill a very different function from the one they were created for.

Perhaps in this context renouncing that anaesthetized and hijacked memory we have been alluding to as the most characteristic of our time has a different nature than the one it might have had in ear-lier times. Perhaps what is most fitting for us at this moment is to heighten a feature that is quite typical of contemporary Western societies, i.e., that they do not use the past as a privileged means of legitimation (the heir to a lineage, in the end), that, in the face of the unquestioned external authority of tradition, they propose a model of contract based on the express and conscious adherence of the par-ticipants. Memory has begun to be dethroned in modern societies, to the benefit not of forgetting but of some universal principles and of what we call the general will. So it may be that will is the only power that allows us in some way to dream about recasting our relations with the future. There may be no way of knowing with reasonable probability what the reality we are living in now will be like within a time, what evolution it will follow or what direction it will go in,22 but in no way is that an argument for paralysis, sufficient reason for


renouncing action. What does it matter if we cannot make reliable predictions?23 The important thing is for us to be capable of decid-ing what we want our society to be like, what, in short, we regard as a decent life to be lived.

What does not seem to be much use is all that often empty rhet-oric we are being bombarded with lately from all directions about technological innovations and scientific advances, radical transfor-mations in the access to and circulation of information, spectacular changes in our customs and ways of communicating, etc. In short: all that incessant verbiage about the imminence of a new time, whose novelty is never quite specified, should not prevent us from perceiving the deep deficit, the basic lack that seems to be trying to hide. Living is not lasting, and few things betray one’s dignity like the shameful silence about the questions What do we want all this power for? Why a time without end?

But let there be no reactive misunderstanding of the nature of these questions. For very similar reasons it will be of hardly any use to appeal to our need or our desire either, as if need and desire were the best guarantee of the existence of the thing. One of our greatest problems—together with the ones we have already mentioned—may be that some outdated languages of the future are still capable of awaking resonances in us that we thought we had forgotten, echoes of horizons and hopes definitively lost. Dirty tricks of memory, the image might be. The world was not what we hoped: there is no point in relishing the defeat or still less considering it merely a postponed opportunity. If we do that, if we feed that impossible hope in vain, we shall be confusing the residual presence in our memory of old goals with their real possibility. Perhaps we have to assume once and for all that some of them are like those distant stars that we can still see but that ceased to exist long ago. What we think we can glimpse twinkling far away in the distance of the past are our extinguished dreams, without light or heat, which survive phantasmally thanks to our stubborn desire for recollection. Or it may be that memory in turn accounts—without knowing it—for the intensity of our desire, the deep sorrow of men for what is lost. Those who have suffered it say that the worst pain, the most unbearable agony, is phantom pain,


the kind left by some limb torn from the rest of the body, which abandoned it forever, as the only trace of its existence. It is a whole symptom of our own condition that there is no pain more intense than the memory of pain.24

It is, as we said, a matter of will. Hannah Arendt was definitely right, and never has it been clearer than now: man is a being for life, not for death. But what this really means is that the human being is defined by his capacity for inaugurating,25 for beginning, for making projects bloom, for managing to bring forth hopes from that dried-up dusty nothing we are in now.26 And so, for that very reason, never did we have more need of the historian than now. Understood, yes, as the most refined critic of the present, the one who is capable of perceiving it in all its density. Or, in the terms we have been repeat-ing: the one who can best help us to defend ourselves from the past. He has the authority to reclaim forgetting, without the usual suspi-cions immediately falling on him: the unambiguous will to knowl-edge that spurs him to keep it safe from any misunderstanding. From his point of view, forgetting is a way of draining history. The forget-ting he can postulate (a postgnoseological forgetting, let us call it) can in no way pursue the same goal that same demand may pursue at some other time, i.e., the persistence of what there is or, still less, the apologia for what exists. Nor is it like the forgetting that cauterizes the relation with the past to better fantasize a nonexistent present happiness. If the historian’s forgetting is pursuing anything, it is a very simple goal: that history be. That this enormous, disproportion-ate, elephantine present that is constantly growing before our eyes does not become an insuperable obstacle, does not definitively block the flow of humanity in pursuit of its postponed dreams. To know in order to forget, then, but to forget in order to be able to pursue. His-tory has not ended. History has simply been blocked.

P L E A S A N T S U R P R I S E S

Human action has always been a mystery, even for those who per-form it. Beyond the obvious train of events, the monotonous and predictable taking of decisions (which is often no more than assum-ing one’s own destiny, what is given to us and what we can accom-modate only with decorum),1 on a very few exceptional occasions the dull cadence of action is interrupted and, with a flash of proof, with an almost luminous character of revelation, the agent is shown the emptiness of his existence, the irreparable hollowness of his existen-tial becoming.

Such moments or occasions we could call experiences, meaning those journeys to the limits of the possible for man that Georges Bataille refers to in his book Inner Experience. There are indeed experiences—extraordinary events, personal relationships of disproportionate intensity, revolutionary situations—whose main virtue is to inter-rupt the preexisting order, to impugn with shameless gratuitousness,

chapter five

More About Traumas, Calamities, and Catastrophes

98—more about traumas, calamities, and catastrophes

with the gay lightness of meaninglessness, the inherited design of the world in its basic, founding, ontological structure. They are expe-riences as strong as they are unambiguous, as powerful as they are inescapable. To express it once again in Bataille’s categories: the experiences that have a positive existence become themselves the value and the authority.

If this way of approaching the question of action is diametrically opposed to most of the dominant conceptions, it is fundamentally because an effort is made to pose the matter without recourse to the most usual expedient in the history of thought: the expedient of tele-ology. We know the enthusiastic praise that, changing authorities, Antonio Negri heaped on Baruch Spinoza for being “the founder of an absolutely original conception of a praxis without teleology,” and in that antiutopian eulogy we could also easily include Hannah Arendt herself (especially for some fragments of The Human Condition). And so what is good for society and for history is also good—perhaps with even more reason—for individuals and their lives. The person who has enjoyed a certain quality of experiences is in no doubt whatso-ever that of all the things that can happen to the human being, none has greater entity or importance than the kind whose meaning does not depend on the future, but, on the contrary, is no more than pure happening and meets the most ambitious of expectations with its mere being, with no postponements and no delays.

W H E N T H I N G S A R E T W I S T E D

But it would undoubtedly be a huge mistake to regard those state-ments as a eulogy of something like an experience in the raw, with no interpretations to run through it or narration to house it. As if, turn-ing for the moment to ordinary language, there were just a living life as opposed to the nonlife (or a lesser, less intense life) of those who are always anxious to fit everything that happens to them into pre-existing orders of meaning. Referring to a category that is extremely close to that of experience, the category of event, Nietsche wrote:

more about traumas, calamities, and catastrophes—99

“Nothing can be considered an event unless it can be integrated into a structure, that is, integrated into a story.”

With that I mean that instead of being determined to persevere with rigid oppositions, which are no use and lead nowhere (opposi-tions inspired in the end by the obsolete pair theory/reality or the like), it would probably be more useful to introduce the suspicion that what inaugurates or opens a new experience or a historical event is not so much a time freed from interpretations or stories as a time interpreted or recounted in another way. Something that becomes particularly visible at the moment when, instead of tak-ing positive episodes or ones with an enjoyable tonality as a model or paradigm, we think of negative or painful situations. Then the conceptual structure that makes the experience possible becomes more patent.

A particular case of that second kind of situation is what we call collective traumas. They are sometimes considered to be syn-onyms of calamity, although they are also frequently made equivalent to catastrophe. We should warn of the difference, from the point of view of our purpose. While calamity is the name for some misfortune, disaster, or misery that is the result of intentional human actions, the word catastrophe designates a misfortune, disaster, or misery with natural causes that are outside human control.2. The difference, to my way of thinking, is one of degree, but in any case it is still useful for the purposes of posing the question properly.3

For it seems clear that there is no place for any story about a catas-trophe as such: the story is always about events in which people play a leading part. The violence of the volcano, the shock of the earth-quake, or the indignation of the sea are just an occasion for pure aes-thetic contemplation if nobody is affected by them. So if it is the case that there are no stories other than the ones that affect human beings, the problem that arises is that of the interpretative frame-work in which such traumatic suffering should be set.

Undoubtedly the expression interpretative framework is still too broad. With it—especially if we use it in a nonspecialized sense, far removed from the technical use that professional hermeneuts so love


to make—we can refer both to the work before the investigation into the causes (in this case interpretation would function as a synonym for analysis or elucidation) and to the search for the deep intention of the underlying human behavior (interpretation here is thus interpreta-tion of action) or the values in the light of which we consider certain disasters.

We should recall something that we began to deal with earlier (in chapter 3, about the typology of memory): philosophy as such does not provide specific theoretical tools for tackling a causal anal-ysis of situations of this kind. And although at some time in the past it might have seemed that philosophers were posing quite spe-cific problems, comparable to the ones that in our time are tackled by social scientists who are concerned with such situations (let us suppose the demographers, urban sociologists, or anthropologists of today), in the end the way in which they did so pointed to a dimension—we may call it underlying or basic to try to make ourselves understood—of those problems that related the considerations it might deploy, or the conclusions it might draw, with the matters that have traditionally interested it and may still serve to make us think. In the terms we have proposed: the interpretative framework most appropriate to the philosopher is the one that takes account of the search for the meaning of human behavior and the values in light of which it occurs.

V U L N E R A B L E

The world today is a fundamentally urban one. Anything important that happens happens in cities, so that the outside of cities has ceased to be a reality that surrounds them and has now been surrounded by them. In this context we should set the extremely widespread per-ception of our vulnerability. It is true that contemporary cities seem to be more and more exposed to disaster. Facts as unquestionable as disproportionate growth, population density, or the speed of tech-nological transformations seem to have become factors generating situations that produce fear and anxiety. But, without arguing about


the reality of that perception (which, as such, is a fact in itself ), we should wonder whether earlier urban concentrations were not also exposed (to the same or to an even greater extent) to threats that equally generated fear and anxiety.4

What then is new about that perception of vulnerability? First, the perception itself, toned down in recent years (after the end of the harshest episodes of the Cold War, to give it a date) and, next, its particular profile. A profile which, unlike that of another time, no longer appears to be linked to any design or intentionality, but substantially emerges as linked almost exclusively to uncertainty, if not to meaninglessness. The traumas which give this vulner-ability substance tend to be interpreted more as absurd effects of barbarism (and, to the same extent, of unreason) than bleak manifestations of evil.

What, in the specialized jargon of theoreticians and sociologists of action, are called perverse or unwanted effects have become natu-ral in the most typical language of our society in the expression—originating from war—collateral damage. Nobody—except a couple of madmen—seems to desire calamities, but the fact is that we are sur-rounded by them, and there seems to be no human way of account-ing for the universalization of this disorder. The image of Europe as a spa resort surrounded by poverty, exploitation, and oppression is out of date, for example, just as the metaphor of the USA as a for-tress impregnable to any exterior aggression has passed into history (and here there is no doubt about the date: the attack on the Twin Towers on 11 September 2001), without there having emerged any explanatory image or concept to replace them except for the purely establishing expression risk society.

Of course, something should make us wary of this arbitrary coming and going of elements that generate uncertainty and fear, not to mention some differences that, according to the context, are not easy to interpret. And so at a particular moment politi-cal violence may produce enormous collective anxiety, a bit later gender violence (reclassified, if its importance needs emphasizing, as gender-based terrorism), then public safety, absurd traffic acci-dents, food contamination, or all the different pandemics, and so


on . . . in a long list whose hierarchy changes constantly without anyone being quite sure of the reasons, and which, furthermore, is not the same in one country and its neighbor, even though they share a host of objective circumstances. Therefore we are obliged to introduce the suspicion that this widespread state of mind is a product rather than a response.

But the fact that it is a product does not necessarily mean that it is an intentional product. I recognize that I have little sympathy with conspiracy theories of history or the host of variants of the unseen hand. I tend to believe rather that there are products that are best understood by seeing them as the result of a set of intentions, each aiming at its own specific objective. In their process of effec-tive materialization, such intentions come into contact, conflictive, reinforcing, or other, giving rise to those effects, in turn happy or unfortunate, that we alluded to two paragraphs earlier.

Some might think that renouncing any strong intentionality is the last episode to date of a chain of renunciations that have left our capacity for interpreting human events increasingly debilitated. Indeed, there seems to be a certain consensus that we cannot turn to categories such as destiny, providence, progress, and the like. Nor does one have the feeling that the key to interpreting what happens can be provided by some metaphysical transcendent entity, just as we cannot maintain our old blind trust in science either, nor does it make much sense to continue to believe in our condition as sover-eign agents, effective designers of a future that tamely allows itself to be shaped by our projects.

But the important thing about this sequence of renunciations has to do with what we were talking about at the beginning, i.e., the stories in which to set the events that move us one way or another. It could be said that the categories or concepts are the strands from which we weave the basket of interpretation, so that abandoning them makes the task of accounting, in whatever way, for what has burst into our lives extremely arduous. That may be the discursive context in which we have to set the problem of traumas.


T R AU M A I N I T S C O N T E X T ( V U L N E R A B L E O R T R AU M AT I Z E D ?)

The very fact that today we use the expression trauma so naturally is indicative in itself. As everyone knows, trauma is a term of medical origin, which adopts the psychological determination with which it has come down to us owing to its use by Jean-Martin Charcot, Pierre Janet, Alfred Binet, Josef Breuer, and Sigmund Freud to describe a lesion (wound) of the mind caused by a sudden, unexpected emo-tional shock.5 We should probably draw attention to these determi-nations to perceive the scope and theoretical consequences of the idea of the traumatic. By definition, trauma is something that was not only unexpected but is also characterized by developing specific effects in the future (it is not for nothing that the complementary technical concept of trauma is posttraumatic stress).

According to the quality of those effects, we can state that the irruption of the trauma into our usual way of relating to the events that affect us does or does not come into conflict with the domi-nant conceptions of the past. Insofar as the traumatic is something nobody expected and that has affected everyone, its mere existence severely impugns inherited discursive schemata. Specifically, earlier historical accounts. But unpredictability is not the fundamental rea-son for impugning. Still more important than that is the dispropor-tionate intensity, the unusual force of the event we call a trauma and that in its qualitative irreducibility would seem to be similar, like its other side, to the experience or event we referred to at the beginning of this section.

We certainly have no lack of contemporary traumas, but it would not be difficult to agree that the trauma that has ended up becoming the emblem and cipher of the darkest and most sinister side of our time is the Holocaust. Which is all too frequently referred to as if its naked horror invalidated any theoretical considerations, render-ing them useless, obscenely irrelevant. Poets after Auschwitz? Nov-elists after the extermination camps? Philosophers to speculate on the horror? They are questions that are all too rhetorical, especially


depending on who poses them. Of course, there seems to be only rhetoric—in the best of hypotheses—in most of those who ask Ador-no’s classic question, or some variant of it, at the beginning of their texts to use, once the ritual has been observed, those monumental episodes of barbarism as the raw material for stories, poems or essays. But this is not the place to make a sociological consideration—in the “sociology of the intellectuals” section—but to analyze the theoreti-cal problems that underlie these ideas.

We should introduce a nuance so as not to generate misunder-standings and to start the argument on the right foot. To talk about the indescribable (or the inexpressible or the unthinkable) when referring to the horror itself, or when there is an experience strug-gling to make itself visible (communicable, that is, intersubjective), is legitimate because the survival of the subject as such is at stake.6 But to do the same concerning what has already been lived by others is to turn pain into a problem of expressibility, i.e., it is tantamount to transforming it into a problem of methodology or, more or less, literary criticism. Let us therefore focus on the first, which is what really matters.

Concerning traumas of such scope, it is extremely frequent, so much so that we might think that it has become a commonplace, to come across the exhortation to remember them (or not to forget them), an exhortation often justified by the argument that if we do that they will never be repeated. That takes for granted something which is far from obvious: that there is no problem whatever in recalling such events. A conviction that is accompanied by another, not at all obvious either, that the way of recalling the traumatic is different from or opposed to the recollection that takes place in the normal historical account. In the end, both convictions can be regarded as the two sides of the same coin, just that the coin in question may be of dubious legal currency.

Such an idea is avoiding something fundamental. Not by chance is post-traumatic stress defined from a technical point of view as a dis-order of memory. The idea that there can be a memory of an isolated event, not part of a narrative fabric, is an untenable idea. Of course there can be compulsive repetition of a traumatic episode, but in no case can we classify that reiterated return as a memory, precisely


because memory is a faculty whose exercise, remembering, consists of setting the particular events recollected in ever wider narrative plots, so that in the end we can say that exercising the memory means establishing the links, of different kinds (there is no reason to always presuppose the most fluid continuity), between the different epi-sodes and moments that make up the life of any individual.

It is not by chance that I have referred so far to the individual and the group indistinctly, mixing the terms memory and history with few restrictions. The operation was perfectly acceptable from the point of view of the philosophy of traditional history, which thema-tized that hiatus with certain success (I am thinking of Dilthey and his theorization of the role of experience as the base and foundation of a specific objective knowledge, that of the sciences of the spirit), but it is not clear that it can be maintained if we introduce the idea of trauma and, most of all, we interpret it in a certain way. For the insistence, so much on the agenda now, on emphasizing as the defin-ing feature of the traumatic its “unique singularity,” to use Todorov’s expression,7 the fact that it cannot be compared with “any other event, past, present or future” gives rise to some definitely significant practical and theoretical consequences.

S U S P E C T R E H A B I L I TAT I O N S

For we have already seen that that insistence, which aims to empha-size the importance of the traumatic event in question, ends para-doxically by deactivating it completely, enclosing the traumatized in a permanent repetition with no prospects. From which one can only emerge by means of the usual strategies. One of them is the all too well-known one of turning the trauma itself into a cipher and a sign of any other traumas: the use made of the Holocaust in this respect, regarding it as the new unit of measurement for all later horrors, is clearly paradigmatic.8 Another strategy, which offers a greater appearance of practical projection into the future, but in the end turns out to be complementary to the previous one, is the one that consists of announcing a repetition of those barbarities as


the greatest of dangers, in the face of which we have a moral obliga-tion to remain extremely vigilant. No objections, as I have also said already, to the slogan Never again! in itself. But we should be wary of its tendency to amount in practice to being too complacent with what there is now,9 as if the horror had been definitively left behind and only its return is to be feared.

Marcel Proust, who knew a lot about memory, had already warned about the impossibility of drawing lessons from what has happened when “we have not the wisdom to work backwards from the particular to the general, and imagine ourselves always to be going through an experience which is without precedents in the past.”10 Now the prob-lem, to my way of thinking, is not so much that one may be making a defense of the trauma without perspective (which, in accordance with what we have said, is methodologically impossible: a trauma not set in an interpretative framework would be literally unintelligible), as that, behind the appearance of the exceptional nature of certain events, certain schemas which are not made explicit are being smuggled in.

We should be concerned most of all about the danger of a dis-course which, clinging to authors and currents which in theory are above suspicion, ended up surreptitiously rehabilitating old schemas and familiar attitudes. That happened in a not too distant past when theoretical elements taken from Marxist tradition served as an alibi for certain eschatological conceptions of history and to a large extent continues to happen when—an insufferable historical sarcasm—the memory of the atrocities of the twentieth century (with the Holo-caust at the top of the ranking, naturally) is used for the most motley purposes, including some decidedly spurious ones. That is the only way I can describe the thinly disguised reappearance of ideas like hell, salvation, atonement, sin, sacrifice,11 etc., which, although they may not always be rehabilitated in the same terms, return to play their old part in new costumes. I shall return to this point.

But another danger may be an even greater cause for anxiety, one which would point to a process which is quite typical of advanced Western societies in recent years. In his book Revolution at the Gates, Slavoj Žižek has pointed out the worrying drift they have taken in relation to understanding themselves. The successive theoretical


and practical losses, desertions and renunciations (to which we have referred in part above) have led to a situation in which, despite having no special difficulties in remembering our own past, our own history (indeed, we have many narratives which serve that purpose), we do not manage to remember the present, that is, we are incapable of acquiring an adequate cognitive map of it. It is that impotence for historicizing-narrating the present which, according to Žižek, has brought us to this dilemma: “Either we refer to some elusive trauma (like the Holocaust) whose unbearable truth is that we ourselves are (co-)responsible for it, or we construct such traumas in order to make sense of our present.”12

W R I N K L E S A N D S C A R S

Escaping from the dilemma entails doubling back on our tracks, retrac-ing our steps to see whether we took a wrong turning at some point, whether we took for granted arguments or concepts that we should never have assumed in that way, trusting that such a review would provide us with some key for finding the right way again. Perhaps, to mention just one of the elements it seems obligatory to reconsider, the definitive twilight of certain values was declared too hastily, so that acceptance of the diagnosis enormously complicates aims as basic as making our own actions plausible or—as we have been discussing—reaching a proper understanding of what is happening to us.

The point—we should perhaps hasten to clarify—is not to launch for the umpteenth time into the discussion about whether it is pos-sible to find an argumentative foundation for some virtues or others or, the perfect symmetrical correlate, if all we can do is assume the absolute impossibility of such a foundation. I understand that it is possible to escape that hackneyed dilemma if we change our starting point.13 We have to think about what is happening to us and do so taking account of the reality of that experience. But what does that mean exactly? Well, for example, that it is not true (or at least far less certain than is usually claimed) that we are living at a time of complete uncertainty, or that relativism has become our only moral


horizon. In fact, there are a host of things whose rejection we share (cruelty, pride, injustice . . . ), just as there are many others (kindness, gratitude, generosity . . . ) which arouse spontaneous admiration in almost all of us. We should not be worried about so much agreement: in the end coincidences are not the last word or the conclusive proof of anything, simply a sign that our reflection on those matters may take other paths.

Someone might object that avoiding the debate about the founda-tion is an attempt to dodge the original problem of many of the shared values. To gild the lily, they might even warn that along that way we might end up with the restoration of notions and categories which, if their genealogical tree were presented explicitly, we would tend to reject. Perhaps so, but I cannot see what is bad about that, if what is restored withstands the test of immanent criticism—materialistic, to put it in the old way (Giacomo Marramao has written an excellent book, Cielo e terra,14 arguing along the same lines).

And so, in that thinking about what is happening to us which I have just proposed we have to give pride of place to the perception we have of all of it. We are living divided—not to say torn—between the memory of the old historical past and the posthistorical pres-ent, which we are incapable of inserting into the grand narrative of the past itself. Here is the ultimate reason why the present is expe-rienced as a confused succession of fragments that quickly evaporate from the memory; here is the ultimate reason why the recollection of traumas has come to occupy such a central place in the imagination of contemporary man. To correct this situation, to put an end to this particular opacity, demands not only noting the underlying concepts and schemas that made a particular event traumatic but also explain-ing the effects of knowledge which, once it has been constituted as such, the trauma develops. In other words: it is not enough to note that trauma can only occur at the heart of a plot: we have to be capa-ble of answering questions such as: What place does it occupy in that plot? Does it found it? Does it close it? Does it consecrate it?

Nevertheless, the insistence, deployed throughout this text, on the debatable function fulfilled by traumas when it comes to rep-resenting the future itself, the cadence of the events that affect us,


should not be so biased that it induces the reader to think that there is nothing positive in the defense of the idea of the traumatic we have remarked on already. That defense is at least indicative of something: the dissatisfaction generated by other inherited ways of dealing with it. Historical discourse, characterized originally by a will to account for novelty, to throw elements of intelligibility onto the unprece-dented episodes that ceaselessly burst onto the stage of the present as a consequence of the social, economic and political development of modernity, has been transformed in such a way that at the most extreme moments it seems to have turned into a machine for cauterizing experience. We could say that the growing tendency on the part of the knowledge of history to focus on the task of detecting and identify-ing those lines of force that run through the becoming of a society, the regularities whose expectation of materialization has to provide us with the foundation for rational action, has been to the detriment of other crucial dimensions of what is happening to us.

It might be said that historical discourse has specialized in one of the brands that the passage of time leaves on the skin of our collec-tive past. It has thought of the normal, predictable, inevitable traces: it has thought of the wrinkles that are gradually drawn on us. But our body is also marked by other signs, which indicate exceptional things of a different kind. Hate, chance, or unawareness can injure us, leav-ing as visible proof, as witness to the exceptional, their own scars. Well, a trauma is the scar of our past, the almost indelible reminder of the damage done, the suffering undergone. Of the intensity of an experience that normal historical discourse is determined to sub-sume in events of another order, as gradual as they are inexorable.

We should pay serious attention to this, think carefully about the deficiencies of a discourse which does not always appear to have managed to take charge of the specific and particular way in which individuals lived certain events. If we began by emphasiz-ing the importance of what we called “pleasant surprises,” we could only conclude by symmetrically pointing out the need to incorporate into our representation of the past those qualitative dimensions so many people appear to be missing. Making it clear that the proposal is not to be understood as an amiable concession or a well-meaning


suggestion for a more or less eclectic synthesis. To fully incorporate what we have lived into our knowledge means coherently assuming the fragility of many of the schemas with which we had been operat-ing until then. The continuum that once allowed us to travel from individual memory to collective memory without conflict seems to have been broken, which thus brings back the hiatus between mem-ory and history. Every time someone impugns the public account of a historical event with the argument “I did not live it like that” or appeals to his own memories to doubt what he is being told, he is unintentionally pointing out the urgency of the impending task, the inescapable need to introduce keys of a completely different nature into the discourse that is trying to make what happens to us intelligi-ble. They should not invalidate the previous ones, but find their par-ticular manner of expression, respectful of both dimensions, since when all is said and done we have our feet planted in both worlds.

But do not let these last statements incline anyone to think that what we are proposing is a simple rehash, with some modern make-up, of Husserl’s well-known theories. The point is not to become entangled once again in endless arguments about the right method or methods for grasping past episodes as they really occurred. To struc-ture the past in its complexity and place it at the service of the spirit implies, as one of its most important moments, seizing memories just as they shone at an instant of danger, to paraphrase Benjamin’s expression, and it is this undoubtedly complicated aspect of the matter we wanted to focus on in this book. We must move forward along the road of granting the rank of knowledge, their own specificity and, why not say so, ontological dignity to those resistant elements of experience that appear and even interrupt our lives with an irresistible inten-sity.15 The endeavor would entail difficulties of all kinds, of course. But they might be less—or at least easier to cope with—if we faced them with the right attitude, i.e., with the necessary confidence in the value with which we live what happens to us, with the indispensable patience to bear the proverbial reproaches of lack of objectivity (if not of epistemological weakness), and, of course, with the irony and the charitable disposition (Davidson dixit) we need so that we do not pose more problems for ourselves than the strictly relevant ones.

In the summer of 2009 I embarked with enthusiasm on a reading of Ricardo Piglia’s novel Respiración artificial,1 convinced that it was a debt I owed myself. I was sure that, after Plata quemada and Formas breves (the two last texts by the Argentine writer that had come into my hands), the moment had come to delve into what, for many people, is his best work. I did so, as I said at the beginning, fired with enthu-siasm, not wishing to pay too much heed to certain small details that should at least have surprised (if not worried) me. And so, on the last page of the book, after the standard administrative indication of the date and place of printing, I found some notes scribbled—in the almost illegible handwriting that I have to own up to—like the ones I usually make spontaneously when I am being overstimulated by the reading of a book.

The notes in question referred to the past, to the fact of narrating or to human life in general, and they had been suggested by some of the statements that Piglia had placed in the mouths of his charac-ters. I had been given food for thought by expressions such as “we all invent different stories to imagine what has happened to us in

By Way of an Epilogue

A Future with Not Much Future (or About How the Perplexity of the Will Is Possible)

112—by way of an epilogue

our lives,”2 “the only things that are mine are the ones whose history I know,”3 “storytelling is . . . a way of erasing from the tributaries of my memory everything I want to keep away from my body forever,”4 and many others in a similar tone, which most of all emphasized the literary, not to say fictional, dimension of human existence and, to a lesser extent, the difficulties involved in setting its episodes in a col-lective story.

It may be that at some distant moment I had begun to skim through the book—without knowing the author or not being in the right frame of mind—or I had to break off for some exterior contingency, but the fact is that, reading Respiración artificial now, I had a vivid sensation that what Piglia was really doing in its pages was drawing, with the greatest possible precision, a detailed map of our present. And so it was not—as I might have thought during that first failed reading—that the novelist was confining himself to bringing out the artificial, narrative condition of our relationship with ourselves and therefore with the past—a matter on which it would be easy to agree with him—but a more sweeping ambition related to the difficulties contemporary man has in recognizing his historical condition.

The problem that seems to worry Piglia could be summed up in the terms in which Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie had already done: the capacity to think about their personal lives in historical terms was as natural for the men who took part in the French Revolution as a meditation on their own lives as a frustration of the ambitions of their youth might be for our contemporaries when they turn forty. We might add that, seen from today, that old conviction seems as ingenuous as it is unjustified. We should even admit that it was at the root of quite a few delusions and fantasies, in some cases with appall-ing results. But if that is true, it is no more or less so than its counter-point: we have lost the tie that bound us to the collective future, and that loss is the origin of countless failures and frustrations, which we must at least record, though frequently we do not manage to fully determine the meaning of such experiences. In any case, the author is not satisfied with stating the problem; he also provides a sugges-tive indication of how it can be dealt with. Piglia opens his book with

by way of an epilogue—113

a quotation from T. S. Eliot that may hold the key to tackling this question in the right way: “We had the experience but missed the meaning. And approach to the meaning restores the experience in a different form.”

If I have called the indication suggestive, it is because, accord-ing to how it is interpreted, it enables us to distance ourselves from certain points of view that usually appear with the aura of being obvious or self-evident. I am thinking of the commonplace accord-ing to which our time lives locked inside its own present, dependent solely upon itself, incapable of appreciating anything other than today, pure and simple. An affirmation that is certainly not a radical novelty in the field of thought. Indeed, we can find a poetic expres-sion of it in the famous fragment by Borges taken, if I remember rightly, from “The Garden of Forking Paths”: “Everything happens to a man precisely, precisely now. Centuries of centuries and only in the present do things happen; countless men in the air, on the face of the earth and the sea, and all that really is happening is happening to me . . . ”5

So a radical questioning of such a conviction emerges from what we have been discussing. So radical that we might even go so far as to advance the opposite thesis, that in a strong sense what does not exist for us (aside from whatever might have an existence of its own) is the present, insofar as we cannot project meaning onto it. The present is being, pure and simple. Experience in the raw, with which we can do hardly anything. So that this affirmation does not run the risk of being excessively speculative and/or impossible to verify or dismiss, we could try to point out in the sphere of everyday (or, more directly, intersubjective, if we prefer to put it in the language of our sect) reality those elements that seem to ratify our suspicion.

Recently in our big cities there has been a proliferation of estab-lishments characterized by what we might define as fake antique. Such is the case of a café located in a central avenue of my city, inaugurated in the mid nineties on premises formerly occupied by a bank, where not even the sharp eye of the most critical professional could find the slightest flaw in the reconstruction. Everything belongs to a distant time. There is not a single element that refers to the present.


It seems to me that such determination to resurrect what we have lost can be no accident, nor a matter of purely commercial interests. What is happening, both in the example I have given and in many others that could be cited (in the article I also referred to theme parks), seems to point to a change in our way of seeing our-selves in the world, in our way of perceiving and representing our-selves. That change refers directly to the past and the present and indirectly to the future. Aside from any further details, to which I shall be alluding, the upshot is that the present is void of content, devalued to the simple condition of a balcony from where we can gaze at the past. A convenient devaluation in a sense: the past has the great advantage of seeming to be someone else’s business, spe-cifically whoever made it be what it was. The future, however, is extremely inconvenient: any representation of it tells, with clock-work precision, of the present from which it is made; it is visibly a forward projection of the desires and fears of today. And perhaps that is what is to be avoided.

Of course, here too we are looking at the final episode of a pro-cess that began long ago. We must remember—and not as a learned footnote but in order to characterize our situation properly—that we had been warned. From Horkheimer to Kosselleck, by way of a thou-sand other lighter expressions, there have been many who alerted us to the tendency: nostalgia for the future is growing inside us, the horizon of our expectations has narrowed, the future is not what it was . . . We even have the right to suspect, with hindsight, to what extent Fukuyama’s much trumpeted judgment about the end of his-tory was merely expressing, in a slightly shifted key, what has ended up being obvious. To wit, that the future is dead.

Indeed, the idea of the future has disappeared from our field of vision. The time to come has lost the features and determinations of that venerable idea and has become the space of reiteration, of the exasperated projection of the present. It is no longer the imagi-nary territory where the projects, intentions, or dreams of humanity dwell, but the place where what there is perseveres in its being. The way we are spoken to about it could be an expression of this new conviction: as an inexorable (almost natural) design, anticipating the


population curves, warning us of the financial difficulties the trea-sury will be having in thirty years’ time, or other such things.

It may be because even the sectors that used to call themselves progressive have assumed this conviction—that is, they have per-ceived the nonexistent room for maneuver offered by a future understood in that way—and so their ideas have gradually turned more and more to the past. As if there were no possible proj-ect other than maintaining the best of what was. As if nothing else (except something terrifying) could even be conceived. It seems that hope passed us by without our realizing: now, too late, we have to apply ourselves to saving what was, though we did not know it, our only horizon.

But it would not be good to make do with an uncritically cozy realization, licking each other’s wounds without entering into the causes and, still more important, into the meaning of this defeat-ist perception, which is so widespread today. And we should refrain from giving ourselves up to the sad passion of melancholy, of yearn-ing for what might have been and was not, among other reasons because there are still many elements to be analyzed as we await the discovery of their rightful place in a discourse that will make the world of today intelligible and action within it plausible. We cannot rule out surprises if, ignoring the most somber consensuses, we pause to try to analyze the content of those bald statements about the dis-appearance of the future. The previous example of the fake antique café raised the idea in a way it is worth returning to now: so many resources we have in so many spheres and we can think of nothing better than the most perfect possible reiteration, reconstruction of something that already was.

If we transfer the idea to the broader sphere of present-day society, we come up against the paradox that while, on the one hand, we are invited to think in terms of the exhaustion of possibil-ity, the twilight of any minimally ambitious teleology, etc., on the other, we are being constantly reminded of our enormous capacity for destroying, for generating evil, and exhorted—quite rightly—to be aware of our responsibility to future generations. We could repeat the previous phrase almost word for word, but referring this


time to the world in general (of which the café was intended to be an effective metaphor): so much power we presumably have and the only thing we can think of is conserving what there is already.6 Or, turning to the recently introduced concept of responsibility, we could say that that responsibility for the future that authors such as Hans Jonas talk about—simplifying his ideas, of course—is a merely negative responsibility for the damage done (in this case, for the state in which we are leaving Creation to our descendents), that is, referring to a responsibility which is closer to blame, more a liability, but not envisaging that other dimension of the concept, the one alluding to merit or goodness or, which comes to the same thing, to responsibility for those successful actions that we also have the right to claim for our own. What does the neglect of that second dimension tell us?

Of course, we are now looking at a variation on the forward pro-jection of the limitations with which we interpret the present. One thing is that the survival of nature is a sine qua non for proposing any project for improving our society, and quite another that there is no task we should apply ourselves to apart from proper conservation of nature so that human life can continue to exist on the face of the Earth. Aside from the contrivance of separating the two issues (far from being independent, aggression toward nature is closely linked to capitalism in the present historical period: need we recall the atti-tude of the American government at the Johannesburg Summit in September 2002 or its refusal, in which it still persists, to sign the Kyoto protocol?), we have the right to suspect that giving up any transformation of humanity takes for granted something that is far from self-evident: the immutable nature of the historical order it has fallen to our lot to live in.

Such a commonplace, expressly (though perhaps we should say obscenely) defended by Fukuyama and his followers is, in the pres-ent circumstances, completely anti-intuitive. If our present can be characterized by any one feature, it is its fragility. To cling to the idea that the present world order will exist forever has little foundation in fact. This order that exists now is highly unstable, and we keep seeing signs of its fragility, both in the most depressed zones of the


planet and at the heart of the metropolis itself. What is shocking is that we are not only very well informed about that fragility: we are perfectly aware of it (perhaps here we should give the extreme example of the collective psychosis of insecurity that gripped the world in the weeks immediately following the attack on the Twin Towers).7 And yet, for some strange reason, we do not include either the information or the awareness into our analyses of reality. If we did, we would find it uphill work continuing to maintain abandonist or defeatist theses.

The origin of the paradox may lie in a confusion or a misunder-standing. The confusion or misunderstanding of identifying the future as such with the way we relate to it. According to what we have just been saying, it would be difficult to proclaim the disappear-ance of the former, but there would be no problem as far as the latter is concerned. So it would probably be more relevant to say that what seems to have entered into a deep crisis is something we might well call the passion for the future. That crisis undoubtedly has to do with the failure of a particular historical expectation, with the sinking of one of the most vigorous social transformation projects in human history. Indeed, it is very difficult to maintain an emancipating proj-ect if the attractive mirage of a fully functioning alternative society has faded, a mirage that operated as a (deceptive) guarantee of the viability of that project. But the failure of an alternative, however great the hopes invested in it may be, is in no way equivalent to the defeat of all possibilities.8

The problem, as we started to say before in other terms, rather seems to be our representations of the future. For a long time the vehicle through which we expressed those representations adopted the format of a utopia: a story of maximums that tended, with an almost unbreathable axiological density, to concentrate almost all our desires for perfection in a hyper-regulated structure. It could perhaps be argued that such a format has ceased to be a regulatory horizon. Exactitude, omnipotence, absolute control, or complete predictability have lost their former condition as fantasies and have become phantasms, if not nightmares. It is curious: when we were weak we dreamed of strength, and now that we have obtained it the


nostalgia for uncertainty is growing in us, even taking the shape of a defense of ignorance.9

But note that the reason that has made those utopian fantasies undesirable is not so much the fact that they mounted a new, but not very attractive, future as that they ended up making any kind of future impossible. Emptied of all magnetic force, those repre-sentations have turned into obstacles that deter any will to trans-formation, the most minimal desire for progress. Faced with the insatiable greed for knowledge, especially in its most elaborate sci-entific configurations, we have come to see clearly to what extent a prerequisite of freedom is precisely ignorance of what the future holds for us.10 Things being what they are, the point would be to find a way for the truly existing possibilities contained in our reality to become visible, to emerge before our eyes, showing their condition as desirable objects. Models of perfection, which have so often in the recent past become true pathologies of horror, cannot be the way.11 Nor can those ideas aimed at convincing us that it is better if we do nothing to achieve the aims that matter most to us, since the more we strive to achieve them, the farther they will move away from us (I am thinking, for instance, of the way in which some present-day neoliberals use Elster’s concept of a subproduct12 to argue that things such as equality should not be pursued: it is enough to defend freedom—especially of corporations—and the rest, they claim, will come naturally).13

We should be capable of relating to the future in another way, but we seem to lack both the strength and the means. The languages of the future we have inherited have become useless, and we do not seem to have any alternative ones. We need skill to represent the future to ourselves. A claim that allows us to return to the begin-ning and that might clear up the little enigma (my surprise at not remembering an earlier reading) I mentioned at the time. The quo-tation from Eliot with which Piglia opens his book contains the key to approaching this question properly, and our initial conviction should be clearer now. Let us remember the poet’s words: “We had the experience but missed the meaning. And approach to the mean-ing restores the experience in a different form.” Obviously there can


be no experience of the future as such insofar as it has not been yet, but there can be a desire, a hope for it. In the end, that is what we usually mean by the term hope. Well, it is the experience of the hope that seems to have faded away, that we do not know how to restore because we have lost the skill to find its meaning.

That loss may have to do with something observed by Piglia: with that mental shift that took place at some imprecise moment and that made us abandon the global gaze, the ambition to understand things in a wider historical framework than the one we belong to and think of ourselves in a merely biographical (not to say biological) way, a shift that gradually reversed the nature of our expectation of the future. Perhaps there was a moment when it could be thought that such a shift was the condition of possibility for the maintenance of our hopes: it was what Habermas seemed to believe when he made that statement, so often quoted for a time, that the utopias had emi-grated from the world of work to the world of life. If that was what happened, we would have to add that the utopias seem to have been defeated in that other sphere as well. More accurate than Haber-mas’s diagnosis seems to be Michel Houellebecq’s when he writes: “Economic liberalism is the extension of the battlefield, its exten-sion to all ages of life and all classes of society.”14 Nothing seems to be safe from the insatiable voracity of a means of production that no longer confines itself to being a means of economic production, but becomes a means of production (and reproduction) of life in all its facets. We need only recall the change in function undergone by the body itself. From the condition as territory of freedom that it once had, it has become a space for a new standardization, where the reiterated exhibition of bodies explicitly presented as models of perfection fulfills the function of the new superego. That, far bet-ter than hypotheses such as the reemergence of supposed waves of puritanism, may explain the withdrawal of bodies into themselves, that new concealment, that strange modesty with no conviction at all, that is far more an expression of the umpteenth defeat (now in the most intimate part) than the presence of any idea.15 Things might have gone another way, of course, but this is where we are. The melancholy with which adults live the frustration of their youthful


ambitions is not a good tool for thinking about history: it does not even allow us to accurately reconstruct the experience of the hope for a collective future that we once had.16

As usually happens with great literary works, Respiración artificial illuminates other realities as well as the ones it refers to expressly. The author’s deep skepticism about the present, which he regards as an empty place, barren of almost all experience—“in the end, what can one have in one’s life except two or three experiences? Two or three (sometimes, not even that),”17 a character in the novel says—goes way beyond radical pessimism about human nature and enters the terrain of a diagnosis of our time, in the sphere of an accurate characterization of the imaginary instruments with which we set ourselves in the future itself. A diagnosis that largely gravitates toward this thesis: the present is that past that takes place in the setting of today.

But that formal incapacity (so to speak) does not fully account for the loss of hopes, the decline of the passion for the future. Besides not knowing how to recount the future to ourselves, we do not know the content of the failed narrative either. There may have been a moment long ago when historical discourse allowed us to avoid what now has been almost dramatically foregrounded. When history seemed to offer us an immutable structure, a solid reference point for knowing and for doing, it was all easier, in a way: the point was to adapt to such supposed designs. However, if we take metaphysi-cal pretensions to be definitively discarded—even in their historicist variants—what we can hope from historical discourse is something else. If there is nothing immutable, permanent, if history is basically determined by its termination, then the present can only be thought of as the place where the unforeseeable may happen. Which is to say: the place where the past calls to us offers us the space for its own affirmation. The continuity we can establish between that collection of terminations that makes up the past, the logic we can find, has a function, a meaning. If we are pressed, a single legitimacy: to provide us with a frame of reference for taking decisions, for choosing.

It may be good to emphasize these aspects strongly, because for too long we were trapped in the mire of debates of a standardizing


or foundational kind in which, as we can appreciate more clearly now, the essentials were stranded. The progress of events itself has undertaken to reveal the exhaustion of such debates. There is no point in posing for the umpteenth time the foundation or absence of foundation for what we can propose. There is no point, especially in view of our proven incapacity for proposing anything. In the end, the question that must be tabled is not whether there is an answer to the old question What should we do?, but whether we are capable of answering the question, still older, if that is possible, What do we want to do? Although if anyone prefers expressions that refer to more immediate problems, it is always possible to put the same thing in these other terms: How is the perplexity of the will possible?

P R E FA C E T O T H E E N G L I S H E D I T I O N

1. “We live under enormous pressure to forget, to select memories,” Miguel Mora interview with John Berger, El País, 3 December 2002.

2. Andreas Huyssen, En busca del futuro perdido: Cultura y memoria en tiempos de globalización (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2002).

3. “We live under enormous pressure to forget, to select memories.”4. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998).5. Ángel González, “Glosas a Heráclito,” in Palabra sobre Palabra (Barcelona:

Seix Barral 2005).

1 . O F M E M O RY A N D T I M E

1. Cf. the notion of “personal memory” postulated by Norman Malcolm in “Three Lectures on Memory,” in Knowledge and Certainty (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1963), pp. 20321.

2. As we know, in The Bounds of Sense Strawson locates in this point what he considers Kant’s superiority to Hume in his treatment of the subject. He says:

When a man (a subject of experience) ascribes a current or directly remembered state of consciousness to himself, no use whatever of any kind of personal identity is required to justify his use of the pronoun “I” to refer to the subject of that experience. It would make no sense

notes

124—1. of memory and time

to think or say: This inner experience is occurring, but is it occurring to me? (This feeling is anger: but is it I who am feeling it?) Again, it would make no sense to think or say: I distinctly remember that inner experience occurring, but did it occur to me? (I remember that ter-rible feeling of loss; but was it I who felt it?) There is nothing that one can thus encounter or recall in the field of inner experience such that there can be any question of one’s applying criteria of subject-identity to determine whether the encountered or recalled experience belongs to oneself—or to someone else.

Peter F. Strawson, The Bounds of Sense (London: Routledge, 1975), p. 165. On the contrary, we should add that it is the very exercise of memory that makes one’s own identity emerge to awareness.

3. As occurs with the purely cybernetic use of recollection and memory. See Fernando Broncano’s book, Melancolía del cyborg (Barcelona: Herder, 2009).

4. Juan Goytisolo, Coto vedado (Barcelona: Seix Barral 1985), p. 29. Orig-inal Spanish text reads “esa sima negra de fauces abiertas que acecha a la vuelta de cualquier camino.”

5. See Pierre Bertrand, L’oubli: révolution ou mort de l’histoire (Paris: PUF, 1975).6. Not to be confused with imputation, which would have some specific

determinations of a different order.7. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (London: Routledge, 2002),

pp. 101–2.8. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. F. J.

Payne (Indian Hills, CO: Falcon’s Wing, 1958), 2:400.9. Miguel de Unamuno, “El sepulcro de don Quijote,” Vida de don Quijote y

Sancho (Madrid: Cátedra, 1988), p. 153.10. Ludwig Wittgenstein, “6.4311,” in Tractitus Logico-Philosophicus, trans.

D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961), p. 147.

11. Ludwig Wittgenstein, “8–7-16,” in Notebooks 1914–1916, ed. G. H. von Wright and G. E. M Anscombe, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, rev. ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1979), p. 74.

12. Ibid., p. 75.13. Emilio Lledó, “El prisionero de la caverna,” chapter 1 of his book La

memoria del logos (Madrid: Taurus, 1996), pp. 19–39.14. Martin Heidegger, Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens (Pfullingen: Gün-

ther Neske 1947), p. 13. Original German: “Der Schmerz verschenkt seine Heilkraft dort, wowir sie nicht vermuten.”

2. the present breathes through history—125

15. Jaime Gil de Biedma, “Después de la muerte de Jaime Gil de Biedma,” in Antología Poética (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1981), pp. 12527.

16. Debating to find an explanation for death is a dead end. What is more, the reason for that striving is not very clear either. Does it not seem perfectly normal to us to find no explanation for love, so much so that we are worried when we find one? Why then require one for death?

17. “Minute Details and Unfettered Passions,” J. L. Almira interviews Emil Cioran, El País, November 1983.

18. In that sense, nostalgia is something of a foretaste of the radical estrangement brought about by the disappearance of beings from the world. Nostalgia is a sorrow with the being still present. Our difficulty in under-standing change, movement—the horizon of all Greek philosophy—fore-shadows our helpless stupor in the face of death.

19. Probably the most serious reproach one can level at the theoreticians of the everyday is that they have been dazzled by their object. The every-day is indeed extraordinarily rich. It may even be regarded as inexhaustible. What I am not so sure about is whether it is richer and more inexhaustible than any other sphere of reality. Perhaps the fact is that the suitable theo-retical tools for this new object have not yet been made. The proposal for a “class reading” of tedium in this context would mean an attempt to make a historical reading of the everyday: to interpret its modalities of existence—tedium in this case—as determinations of historical time, figures of the pres-ent. See the book by Michel Maffesoli, founder with George Balandier of the Centre d’études sur l’actuel et le quotidien (CEAQ) at the Sorbonne, La Conquête du present (Paris: PUF, 1979).

2. T H E P R E S E N T B R E AT H E S T H R O U G H H I S T O RY

1. Karl Löwith, From Hegel to Nietzsche, trans. David E. Green (London, Constable, 1965), p. xvii.

2. See Gianni Vattimo, Beyond Interpretation, trans. D. Webb (Cambridge: Polity, 1997).

3. Friedrich Nietzsche, “Second Untimely Meditation: On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 62.

4. See Vattimo, Beyond Interpretation.5. Before the works of Reinhold Niebuhr, von Ranke, and the French his-

torical school there is no historical science strictly speaking.

126—2. the present breathes through history

6. In answer to Charles Peirce’s thesis, “our idea of the past is precisely the idea of that which is absolutely determinate, fixed, fait accompli, and dead, as against which the future is living, plastic and determinable,” Danto writes: “Peirce’s statement is false. We are always revising our beliefs about the past, and to suppose them ‘fixed’ would be unfaithful to the spirit of his-torical inquiry. In principle, any belief about the past is liable to revision, just in the same way perhaps as any belief about the future.” Arthur Danto, Nar-ration and Knowledge (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), p. 143. The past may not change, but what does suffer variations beyond any shadow of a doubt is our way of organizing it, is his option. To this rather historio-graphic consideration (quoted here solely by way of example), we could add (also merely by way of example) others that, from an openly philosophical perspective, are advanced by Gianni Vattimo in the last two chapters of The Adventure of Difference, trans. Thomas Harrison and Cyprian P. Blamires (Bal-timore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), of Le avventure della differenza (Garzanti: Milan, 1980) on the open character of the past as a possibility not consummated by its given interpretations. Or Benjamin’s classic ones as they appear in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History”: “The only writer of history with the gift of setting alight the sparks of hope in the past, is the one who is convinced of this: that not even the dead will be safe from the enemy, if he is victorious. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.” Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” trans. Dennis Redmond, Creative Commons, 2005. We will be returning to this subject later.

7. Jean Chesneaux, Pasts and Futures: What Is History For? (London: Thames and Hudson, 1978).

8. Put forward in his article “L’opération historique,” in Jacques LeGoff and Pierre Nora, eds., Faire de l’histoire, vol. 1: Nouveaux problèmes (Paris: Galli-mard, 1974) or, at more length, in The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988).

9. Chesneaux, Pasts and Futures.10. Jan Patocka, “The Beginning of History,” in Heretical Essays in the Philoso-

phy of History, trans. Erazim Kohakm (Chicago: Open Court, 1996).11. Burkhardt: “What was once joy or sorrow must now become knowl-

edge, as happens in the life of the individual. That also gives the historical phrase magistra vitae a higher, but also a more modest, meaning.”

12. Renouncing that power might well lead to images of history such as “Nothing is more conducive to a reader’s pleasure than changes of circum-stance and vicissitudes of fortune” (Cicero) or “The pleasure of history greatly resembles the pleasure we receive from travelling abroad” (Macaulay).


13. Nisbet has referred to this idea using the following fragment by Stan-ley Hoffman: “The past is becoming an object of erudition or diversion, rather than a part of one’s own being, through family or school transmis-sion. What the French called le passé vécu, the experienced past, is displaced by the past as product of specialists, a consumer product, a subject matter for scholars, or as a spectacle.” History of the Idea of Progress, rev. ed. (New Bruns-wick, NJ: Transaction, 1994), p. 327.

14. In a 2006 interview, Noam Chomsky said “In fact, if you’re a scientist, you don’t prove anything. The sciences don’t have proofs, what they have is surmises. There’s a lot of nonsense these days about evolution being just a theory. Everything’s just a theory, including classical physics! If you want proofs you go to arithmetic; in arithmetic you can prove things. But you stipulate the axioms. But in the sciences you’re trying to discover things, and the notion of proof doesn’t exist.” Science and Theology News, 1 March 2006.

15. This formulation may still command some essentialist loyalties (as if somewhere there were evidence of what we can become). Paul Veyne gives his opinion of this: “Man has a ‘will to power,’ to updating, which is indeter-minate. He does not desire happiness, nor does he have a list of particular needs to satisfy, after which he would sit quietly in a chair in his room; he is an updating animal and fulfills every kind of potential within his reach: non deficit ab actuacione potentia suae, as St Thomas said. Otherwise, nothing would ever happen.” And he adds in a note: “The notion of desire means that there is no human nature, or rather that nature is a form with no content other than the historical.” Taken from “Foucault révolutionne l’histoire” (in Comment on écrit l’histoire, a chapter added to Writing History, published by the Wesleyan University Press in 1984, which does not appear in the English translation.

16. Gianni Vattimo, “El fin del sentido emancipador de la historia,” El País, 6 December 1986. Similar claims can be found in chapter 1, “Postmoderni-dad y fin de la historia,” of his Ética de la interpretación, which we have already mentioned. Around the same time, Lyotard made statements very much along the same lines: “If no political intervention is capable of arousing feel-ings of enthusiasm, that means that politics is not giving signs of history. At the same time, however, all the other signs (melancholy, sadness, doubt) are telling us that something is happening on the stage of history, and that something is disillusion with the old ideas of the progress of humanity. And that too can be progress.” “A favor del entusiasmo,” Omar Calabrese inter-views Jean-François Lyotard, El País, 11 December 1986. The book the inter-view was dealing with was Jean-François Lyotard, Lyotard’s Enthusiasm: The

128—2. the present breathes through history

Kantian Critique of History, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Stanford: Stan-ford University Press, 2009).

17. Specifically in Francis Fukuyama, “A Reply to My Critics,” which appeared in the National Interest (Fall 1989). The text that kicked up the whole critical storm (“The End of History?”) had appeared in number 16 of the neocon magazine the National Interest in the summer of 1989. For a more fully developed and complete version Francis Fukuyama’s ideas, see his book The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Avon, 1992).

18. Without wishing to argue that it is a complementary expression, with little theoretical value; a kind of “etcetera” to cover all other possible suppo-sitions. Further on he expands on the content of the allusion in these terms: “The final competitor to liberalism is what could be called the ‘X-factor’—Gertrude Himmelfarb’s new, less benign America waiting just over the horizon with an ideology undreamt of today [sic]. Such developments are of course possible. Hegel himself did not envision the appearance of either fas-cism or communism in 1806, and while Kojève after the fact could explain them through the ‘cunning of reason,’ they delayed the arrival of the univer-sal homogeneous state by a couple hundred years.” Ibid.

19. Which would like to have the executive efficacy of statements like “I promise”: truth and reality from the very moment at which they are uttered.

20. Concerning this issue, a classic if ever there was one, the indispens-able reference is still Hans Blumenberg’s book The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983).

21. In chapter 8, entitled “Identidades,” of her book Virtudes públicas (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1990), pp. 165–91, Victoria Camps poses a few basic questions—some with analytical resonances—against which, inevita-bly, any affirmation of category must be measured, questions such as, What constitutes the unity of the self? Is there a subsistent self through my suc-cessive states? Is the idea of the self psychological? Does personal identity involve the affirmation of values like coherence, integrity, or veracity?

22. Concerning this issue, a classic if ever there was one, the indispens-able reference is still Blumenberg’s The Legitimacy of the Modern Age.

23. In his book La solidarité: Liens de sang et liens de raison (Paris, Fayard, 1986), Jean Duvignaud has shown the historical condition of that principle, simul-taneously revealing the different ties that bind men and constitute the matrix of any social organization. Different forms of solidarity (from the solidarity of knowledge of the “Republic of Letters” and the know-how of thirteenth-century corporations to the more recent modalities of industrialization and the division of labor, by way of the “wanderers” or extraterritorials, such as


exile and marginalization) in which, beyond any limits, a can-do, an antici-pation—sometimes a utopian one—of the possible is staged.

24. Benjamin wonders, in his seventh thesis on “The Philosophy of His-tory,” “with whom the adherents of historicism actually empathize. The answer is inevitable: with the victor.” Moreover, it would be a serious mis-take to suppose that a particular macrotheological perspective (the hack-neyed Judeo-Christian conception) expires when the ideal contents that sustain it go out of date. What Blumenberg has shown in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age is that the whole of modern knowledge—including the differ-ent philosophies of history—can be regarded as a series of various attempts to symbolically fill the void left by Christian eschatology, i.e., the question about the meaning of history; or, if you prefer to put it another way, the for-midable task of replacing those contents with others that fulfill an identical function, that is, to make the world intelligible—and, in a sense inhabit-able—once it has lost all transcendent guarantees. Complementary views on this issue are to be found in the books by Henri-Irénée Marrou, Théologie de l’histoire (Paris: Seuil, 1968), rev. ed. (Paris: Cerf, 2006); and Kart Löwith, Weltgeschichte und Heilsgeschehen. Die theologischen Voraussetzungen der Geschichtsphilos-ophie (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 2004). The English title would be: “The His-tory of the World and Salvation,” and the significant subtitle “Theological Presuppositions of the Philosophy of History.”

25. Raymond Aron, Dimensions de la conscience historique (Paris: Plon, 1961).26. Of course, the confrontation can never be in the raw, but through

our interpretative schemas. But, even so, certain realities confront us with the evidence of others. To put it in the words of Christopher Lasch: “We must not be deceived by the breakdown of the socialist systems of Eastern Europe about the real possibilities of capitalism. . . . Everything seems to indicate that England and the United States are prepared to tolerate high levels of unemployment, the weakening of the middle class and the growth of a society polarized between two classes, the very rich and the very poor,” in “Señores, apéense: el progreso ha terminado,” La Vanguardia, 15 May 1990. Now that it is the only thing left, we shall have to see how capitalism faces these situations—and how liberalism manages to interpret them. For the time being, the experience of the outbreak of the recent economic crisis, in the autumn of 2008, is frankly disturbing.

27. “It is no use returning to the origins because, although the landscapes remain unchanging, a gaze never repeats itself,” warns the traveler when he presents his travel diary. Julio Llamazares, El río del olvido (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1990), p. 8.

130—3. for an urgent typology of memory

3 . F O R A N U R G E N T T Y P O L O GY O F M E M O RY

1. Perhaps because it was guilty of the error already denounced by Hannah Arendt in her time: “the undeniable loss of tradition in the mod-ern world does not imply a loss of the past, because tradition and past are not the same.” Hannah Arendt, “What Is Authority?” in Entre pasado y futuro (Barcelona: Península, 1996), p. 103. And, of course, this error is mirrored in the confusion of future with progress. This Benjamin-oriented reminder will be extremely useful to us in all that follows. The reader will immediately have realized that I am referring to Harry Frankfurt’s homonymous text On Bullshit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).

2. I referred to some of these unmistakably favorable definitions of his-tory in my book, Filosofía de la Historia, 2d ed. (Barcelona: Paidós, 1996); a revised and expanded edition is currently at press at Alianza.

3. All of this was linked to an exceptional collective enthusiasm worth pointing out, which is exactly what the great journalist Ryszard Kapucin-ski did: “Such massive faith is a historic event. Because, normally, people are asleep. Then, they woke up. Furthermore, never, ever, has the estab-lishment felt so insecure and so threatened. The powerful did not under-stand what was going on, they felt completely disconcerted. Today they are secure again.” Arcadi Espada, “Entrevista con Ryszard Kapucinski,” El País, 14 August 2000. My thanks to Lucía Fernández-Flórez for drawing my atten-tion to this passage.

4. Proposed in the seventh of his “Theses of the Philosophy of History,” which has been mentioned before, it begins in the following way:

Fustel de Coulanges recommends that a historian who wants to relive a period should empty his mind of everything he knows of the poste-rior course of history. There is no better way to absorb the procedure that has been used to break down historical materialism. It is a mat-ter of empathy. Its origin lies in the heart’s indolence, in the asperity that gives up trying to master the true historical image that fleetingly shines. Among the theologians of the Middle Ages this was consid-ered the fundamental cause of sadness. Flaubert, who readily agreed with him, wrote: “Peu de gens devineront combien il a fallu être triste pour ressusciter Carthage.” The nature of this sadness becomes patently clear when one poses the question of who the historicist his-torian empathizes with. The undeniable answer is: with the winner.

3. for an urgent typology of memory—131

My emphasis; the quote appears in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968).

5. I made reference to that topic in my article “El futuro ha muerto: ¡a por el pasado!,” originally published in the newspaper El País and later included in the volume Cuando la realidad rompe a hablar (Barcelona: Gedisa, 2002), pp. 41–44.

6. This is a profound logic that is not exhausted in what is indicated here, of course. Other levels of it could still be pointed out, but that would most likely distract us from what we seek to propose here. I am referring to Hannah Arendt’s observation that the categorization of executioners and victims becomes totalitarian when those positions are exchanged at the heart of a supposedly ineluctable law of history, which reduces human beings to the mere condition of instruments—those who are now executioners will be exe-cuted tomorrow, and vice versa. To consider these positions eternal ontologies implies losing their historical specificity and thus giving up the only thing that keeps man from being the instrument of a natural or divine law he embodies: his capacity to judge the case. Or the historical specificity of an event, which demands, in the first place, that it not be frozen in time—producing, for exam-ple, eternal victims of an ineluctable law that would repeat, like a magic spell, again and again. Analyzing the historical dynamic of the role of agents capable of judgment is essential to combat such spells. For more on this matter, which Arendt discusses in The Origins of Totalitarianism, see Fina Birulés, Hannah Arendt: una herencia sin testamento (Barcelona: Herder, 2007), pp. 43–44.

7. For a critique of such practices, see Tzvetan Todorov, Mémoire du Mal, Tentation du bien (Paris: Broche, 2000). Also an interview on the subject enti-tled “Memory of Evil, Enticement to Good,” available at www.eurozine.com.

8. See Neil Kritz, ed., Transitional Justice, Laws, Rulings and Reports, vol. 2 (Washington, DC, United States Institute of Peace Press, 1995). For a use-ful historical review of this complex area of problems, it is worth consulting Jon Elster, Rendición de cuentas (Buenos Aires: Katz, 2006).

9. Pablo de Greiff, “Elementos de un programa de reparaciones,” in Cuadernos del conflicto. Justicia, verdad y reparación en medio del conflicto (Bogotá: Legis, Semana, Fundación Ideas para la Paz, 2005), p. 9. This Columbian author is the foremost specialist in the Spanish-speaking world on tran-sitional justice. With regard to the questions addressed here, the follow-ing works by him merit mention: “La obligación moral de recordar,” in Adolfo Caparro, ed., Cultura política y perdón (Bogotá: Universidad del Rosa-rio, 2002) and “Juicia y castigo, perdón y olvido. Dos medidas inadecuadas


para el tratamiento de violadores de derechos humanos,” in Francisco and Alfonso Monsalve, eds., Liberalismo y comunitarismo, derechos humanos y democracia (Bogotá: Conciencias, 1996).

10. García Lorca family press release, reported in El País, 12 September 2003. The poet from Granada, Luis García Montero, addressed the same matter in a very similar fashion: “In 1973, Ian Gibson wrote a book in which everything was made clear: the place where he was shot, who accompanied him—that land was purchased and made into a park, a place where people can go to walk and play. I agree that you have to look at things on a case-by-case basis to clarify the truth, but in his case, everything is clear. It is another question altogether to take photos of oneself with his skull and use historical memory as a consumer object.” “Babelia,” El País, 7 October 2006.

11. Concretely, in chapter 6 of my book, Las malas pasadas del pasado (Barce-lona: Anagrama, 2005), p. 181ff., which is specifically titled, “On Traumas, Calamities, and Catastrophes.”

12. Especially in his books: Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), and History in Transit: Experience, Identity, Critical Theory (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004).

13. To speak of a historical memory is a pleonasm. Beyond its redun-dancy, it indicates unawareness of the term used in the social sciences when the matter was first discussed; the first author was Émile Durkheim, who referred to the idea of collective conscience in his classic work, The Division of Labour in Society (1893, the Free Press reprint in 1997). He was followed by his son-in-law, Maurice Halbwachs, who wrote the important Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1952), that is, collective or social memory.

14. For a clarifying analysis of the Argentine case, see the work of Robert Bergalli. titled “La recuperación de la memoria colectiva (y social) en Argen-tina,” at press in L´Espurna, revista de la Fundaciò Pere Ardiaca. My thanks to the author for sharing his work with me before it was published.

15. I referred to this extreme in the newspaper article, “Traficantes de dolor,” published in El País, 2 April 2006, and now included in Manuel Cruz, Siempre me sacan en página par (Barcelona: Paidós, 2007).

16. LaCapra refers to this fallacious transition in the two books previ-ously mentioned. In Writing History, Writing Trauma it is the central theme of chapter 2, titled, “Trauma, Absence, Loss.” He also addresses it in the third chapter of History in Transit, where he writes about the vicissitudes suffered by studies of trauma.


17. In chapter 5 of Writing History, Writing Trauma, LaCapra refers to these types of discursive practices, which he calls redemptive narratives. For such practices, it makes no difference whether such narratives are presented in a positive light—for example, the characterization of Israel as the promised land (on page 168, LaCapra writes: “Another example of redemptive narra-tive is a certain kind of Zionist narrative”)—or a negative one, that is, draw-ing on the previously mentioned idea of founding traumas, except that here, they are cast as the source of irremediable dissatisfaction.

18. In 1946 Hannah Arendt wrote a philosophical critique of John Dew-ey’s book, The Problems of Man. In her critique, titled “The Ivory Tower of Common Sense,” Arendt seems set on distancing herself from Dewey’s democratic optimism, writing words it will be useful to recall here: “the myth of progress presupposes that the beginning of Humanity was hell and that we are advancing towards some sort of paradise; the myth of deca-dence presupposes that the beginning was paradise and, from then on, pos-sibly with the help of original sin, we are growing closer and closer to hell.” Hannah Arendt, “The Ivory Tower of Common Sense,” available at http://www.thenation.com/archive/ivory-tower-common-sense. If, where Arendt writes “original sin,” we were to write “trauma,” the results would be a use-ful indication of the philosophical-political orientation of each of the two proposals.

19. Referring concretely to the Holocaust, Bauman took the same posi-tion when he wrote: “There are two antithetical manners of approaching an explanation of the Holocaust. The horrors of mass murder can be studied as proof of the fragility of civilization, or they can be considered proof of its terrible potential.” Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989).

20. In 1946, Hannah Arendt wrote a philosophical critique of John Dewey’s book, The Problems of Man. In her critique, entitled “The Ivory Tower of Common Sense,” Arendt seems set on distancing herself from Dewey’s democratic optimism, writing words it will be useful to recall here: “the myth of progress presupposes that the beginning of Humanity was hell and that we are advancing towards some sort of paradise; the myth of decadence presup-poses that the beginning was paradise and, from then on, possibly with the help of original sin, we are growing closer and closer to hell.” Hannah Arendt, “The Ivory Tower of Common Sense,” available at http://www.thenation .com/archive/ivory-tower-common-sense. If, where Arendt writes “original sin,” we were to write “trauma,” the results would be a useful indication of the philosophical-political orientation of each of the two proposals.


21. Referring concretely to the Holocaust, Zygmunt Bauman took the same position when he wrote: “There are two antithetical manners of approaching an explanation of the Holocaust. The horrors of mass murder can be studied as proof of the fragility of civilization, or they can be consid-ered proof of its terrible potential,” Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989).

22. Especially in the two books of a series: Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), and State of Exception (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

23. Some believe the precedent for these affirmations can be found in Etty Hillesum’s An Interrupted Life the Diaries, 1941–1943 (New York: Henry Holt, 1996), where she writes such things as: “All of Europe is turning into a gigantic concentration camp,” or “everything is a camp.”

24. LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma, p. 146.25. See ibid., the first chapter, which has the same title as the book

(“Escribir la historia, escribir el trauma”), as well as the fifth (“Entrevista para Yad Vashem”), in which he comments on and develops some of the opening affirmations.

26. Ibid., p. 28.27. “Historiography involves work on the memory that inquires into its

operations, attempts to retrieve what it has repressed or ignored, and sup-plements it in ways that may provide a measure of critical distance on expe-rience and a basis for responsible action.” Dominick LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), p. 175.

28. A distinction similar to Benjamin’s distinction between erlebnis (pre-conceptual experience) and erfahrung (conceptualized experience). Many have interpreted this distinction as an opposition between lived experience and profound experience, but it might be better, especially with regard to the present discourse, to think of them as preconceptual and conceptual-ized experience. That makes it clear that the latter is acquired over a long period of time, requiring memory, time, and duration in order to consolidate itself; and also that it is part of collective traditions and wisdom. The for-mer, however, has to do with the strict and immediate data that are learned consciously. We should warn the reader that Benjamin himself did not always define things that way. Thus, in his work “Experience and Poverty,” in Selected Writings, 1931–1934 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), he proposes erlebnis as the experience of daily life emptied of any deeper sense.


In other words, a disillusioned routine suffering from a lack of vital con-tent, as opposed to erfahrung, which would be interpreted as the practice of a profound experience implying the need to embody one’s ideals. Benjamin’s defense of the convenience of bringing reflection into the contents of one’s life and living according to what one thinks—giving thought to the roots and depth offered by the corporality and dynamics of emotions—implies endowing those categories with an important moral weight. That weight is lessened at other moments, as when, in the essay “Critique of Violence,” in Reflections (New York: Schocken, 1986) he writes: “Experience is the unitary and continuous plurality of knowledge . . . experience, in both collective and private life, is a matter of tradition.”

29. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, “On the Decent Uses of History,” History and Theory 40, no. 1 (February 2001): 117–27.

30. Gumbrecht is thinking of forms of elaboration that LaCapra consid-ers irrational—“religious” or “eschatological”—or bordering on some notion of radical transcendence. Besides the fact that this observation could lead us back to questions already addressed earlier in this text, it is worth not-ing that Gumbrecht’s emphasis on this matter helps to reopen the debate between secular positions and all those discourses willing to give religious expression a role in the public sphere.

31. When the English author Thomas Rymer coined this curious expres-sion (poetic justice) in the seventeenth century, he was trying to express the idea that, while true justice does not always—or almost never—appear in real life, it is possible to achieve it in literature. So, in fiction, the good guys beat the bad guys, or good triumphs over evil, with considerable frequency.

32. See Martha Nussbaum, Poetic Justice (Boston, Beacon, 1995).33. Giacomo Marramao, Pasaje a Occidente (Buenos Aires: Katz, 2006), p. 186.34. Fredrich Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History, trans. Adrian Collins

(New York: Liberal Arts, 1949).35. Just as he proposes in his well-known book: Reinhart Koselleck, Futuro

pasado (Barcelona: Paidós), chapter 14. “‘The Space of Experience’ and ‘the Horizon of Expectations’: Two Historical Categories,” p. 333ff.

36. Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, trans. Harry Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2009), 302. The firm belief appearing in the Discorsi (more properly called: “Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius”) is set in the larger context of another one by the Florentine thinker, that is, the belief that the reiterative character of nature over time is also applicable, in the human sphere, to politics and


history. Thus, in both The Prince 6, and How to Deal with the Rebel Subjects of Val di Chiana, we find statements supporting the validity of the principle of imi-tating Antiquity (in the latter, for example, we find: “the world has always been the same way, inhabited by men who have always had the same passions and . . . there have always been those who obey and those who command, those who obey willingly, those who rebel and those who are punished”).

37. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1958), 197.

38. Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, trans. Rex Warner (Lon-don: Penguin, 1972), 147.

39. Ibid., p. 150. Arendt herself observed that, until then, “the possibil-ity that an event worthy of fame would not be forgotten, and would truly become ‘immortal,’ was not very large,” ibid., p. 197.

40. Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War, the second book, trans. Richard Crawley, classics.mit.edu.

41. In his work: Antonio Gómez Ramos, “La política, los otros y la memo-ria,” El rapto de Europa, no. 2 (Madrid, 2003): 69–78.

42. Avishai Margalit, The Ethics of Memory (Cambridge: Harvard Univer-sity Press, 2004).

43. See the section titled “Usuarios del pasado: turistas y nacionalistas,” in Antonio Gómez Ramos’s book, Reivindicación del centauro. Actualidad de la filosofía de la historia (Madrid: Akal, 2003), pp. 23 and ff.

44. Margalit, The Ethics of Memory.45. Raoul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (New York: Holmes

and Meier, 1985).46. Raul Hilberg, Sources of Holocaust Research: An Analysis (Chicago: Ivan R.

Dee, 2001).47. In that respect, Rafael Sánchez-Ferlosio declared: “Victims have the

right to receive compensation, support and compassion. What is abusive is to undertake the search for the guilty parties in a catastrophe in order to be able to construct a victimate. Neither the primary carelessness of excursion-ists who cause a forest fire nor the clumsiness of a Government are crimi-nal acts. But something criminal is often sought out in order to be able to constitute a moral value, the capitalization of a victimate.” Rafael Sánchez-Ferlosio interviewed by José María Ridao in El País, 22 May 2007.

48. Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews.49. See the second section of this chapter: “There are many ways to say

memory.”

4. we need to start defending ourselves from the past —137

50. Hannah Arendt discusses this in an exemplary fashion in a book of the same title: Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (London, Pen-guin, 1994).

51. Giuseppe di Lampedusa, The Leopard, trans. Archibald Colquhuon (New York: Pantheon, 1960).

52. Raul Hilberg, “I Was Not There,” in Writing and the Holocaust, ed. Berel Lang (New York: Homes and Meier 1988), p. 25.

4. W E N E E D T O S TA R T D E F E N D I N G O U R S E LV E S F R O M T H E P A S T

1. Manuel Cruz, Narratividad: la nueva síntesis (Barcelona: Península, 1986), p. 187.

2. See Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past, trans. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).

3. J. Ortega y Gasset, Una interpretación de la historia universal. (En torno a Toynbee) (Madrid: Revista de Occidente–Alianza, 1989), p. 49.

4. So, to give just one example among the countless possibilities, Paul Veyne has written: “History ought to free itself of three limitations: the opposition between the contemporary and the historical, the convention of the continuum and the factual perspective.” Paul Veyne, Writing History (Wesleyan: Wesleyan University Press, 1984), p. 287.

5. Timothy Garton Ash has taken up this discussion in his book, History of the Present (New York: Random House, 1999). In any case, his thesis in this respect is not so much a defense of the chronicler or the notary as of the need for witnesses with a historical mentality. For an introduction to the history of the present and the various problems raised by the concept, see Elena Hernández Sandoica, Los caminos de la historia. Cuestiones de historiografía y método (Madrid: Síntesis, 1995) and Julio Aróstegui’s La historia vivida: Sobre la historia del presente (Madrid: Alianza, 2004), to mention two closely related approaches among the abundant bibliography available.

6. Cf. Paolo Fabbri, “Todos somos agentes dobles,” Revista de Occidente 85 (June 1988): 5–26.

7. A host of philosophers, poets, and novelists have examined that affir-mation in one way or another. So, to give an example—selected only because of my particular aesthetic preferences—Milan Kundera has written in his

138—4. we need to start defending ourselves from the past

work Ignorance (New York: HarperCollins, 2000): “If someone could retain in his memory everything he had experienced, if he could at any time call up any fragment of his past, he would be nothing like human beings: neither his loves nor his friendships nor his angers nor his capacity to forgive or avenge would resemble ours” (ibid., p. 123).

8. Kundera has written: “Not everything we do we do intentionally, nor do we do everything we do intentionally with premeditation.”

9. When, in fact, we only retain of our past “a paltry little scrap of the past, and no one knows why just this scrap and not some other one,” as Kundera himself has pointed out (Ignorance). It is a mysterious choice, com-pletely outside our will and our interests, but does not let itself be twisted: “We understand nothing of human life if we persist in suppressing the first of all obvious things: any reality, as it was, is no longer; it is impossible to restore it.”

10. Thus omitting a distinction as clear as it was inescapable, “between the recovery of the past and its subsequent use.” Tzvetan Todorov, “The Uses and Abuses of Memory,” in Howard Marchitello, ed., What Happens to History (New York: Routledge, 2001). Probably it is also this omission that is at the base (and therefore can be criticized) of those legal propositions that penalize historical accounts that deny or minimize the importance of the Holocaust, etc.

11. I am referring to the Italian politician Sandro Pertini, whom I also quoted elsewhere, specifically in my Narratividad: la nueva síntesis (Barcelona, Península, 1986).

12. I referred to this in a newspaper article entitled “El futuro ha muerto: ¡a por el pasado!” El País, 6 January 1999, collected later in Manuel Cruz, Cuando la realidad rompe a hablar (Barcelona, Gedisa, 2001).

13. Both in Gianni Vattimo, The Transparent Society, trans. David Webb (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), and, more specifically, in his work “El imposible olvido,” included in Y. Yerushalmi et al., Usos del olvido (Buenos Aires: Nueva Visión, 1989). Later (“De la prehistoria a la his-toria,” El País, 5 May 2001) I insisted on the same idea, saying: “The most decisive element of the events that have affected us in these last twenty-five years has been the spread of the communications media.”

14. Vattimo, The Transparent Society.15. Speaking of the loss of experience, according to him (and according to

Benjamin), so characteristic of our time, Agamben gives this other example: “Faced with the greatest wonders of the earth (for example, the Courtyard

4. we need to start defending ourselves from the past —139

of the Lions in the Alhambra), the overwhelming majority of humanity refuse to acquire an experience: they prefer the experience to be captured by the camera.” Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History (London: Verso, 1993).

16. See here the work by Zymunt Bauman, “The Postmodern Version of Immortality,” in his book Postmodernity and Its Discontents (New York: New York University Press, 1997).

17. Such is the case of Jorge Luis Borges who, in his essay “La inmortali-dad” (in Borges Oral), said: “We have many desires, among them the desire for life, the desire to be for ever, but also the desire to cease. . . . All those things can be achieved without personal immortality . . . I personally do not desire it and I fear it; for me it would be appalling to know that I am going to con-tinue, appalling to think that I am going to continue to be Borges.”

18. Laslett has devoted a large part of his research to this issue. See Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost: English Society Before the Coming of Industry (London: Methuen, 1965), A Fresh Map of Life: The Emergence of the Third Age, 2d ed. (London: Macmillan, 1996), or Ageing in the Past: Demography, Society and Old Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).

19. Although the example does not fulfill the illustrative function it was called upon to do to perfection, we could easily provide others that tend in the same direction, an overabundance suggesting that in no event are we look-ing at an isolated episode; on the contrary, a kind of distorting mirror seems to have become one of the most typical features of the present. On the same subject, think of the way in which in our societies the most conservative eco-nomic and social ideas seem like the highest expression of political modernity, while those who persist in denouncing their rancid antiquity are stigmatized as intransigent nostalgics, incapable of assimilating the sign of the times. The supposition that has been broken, and which seems to allow that reversal of roles, is that a progressive idea is the kind that provides a way to the future.

20. Odo Marquard, in the laudatio to Hans Blumemberg, 1980, pointed out something of enormous importance in this respect: the idea that free-dom is not simply the capacity for political choice, but most of all awareness that the past is multiple.

21. Robert Laffont, Hope and Memory: Lessons from the Twentieth Century, trans. Tzvetan Todorov (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), p. 128.

22. Eric J. Hobsbawm concludes his book, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century (London: Vintage, 1994), with this phrase: “We do not know where we are going. We only know that history has brought us to this point.”

140—4. we need to start defending ourselves from the past

23. Alain Supiot: “Observation of the present never tells us what the future will be; it reveals imaginable futures which should be avoided or constructed.”

24. Manuel Rivas has written some beautiful pages about this in his novel El lápiz del carpintero (Madrid: Alfaguara, 1998).

25. Far from any grossly demographic consideration related to birthrates and the like, a matter that has nothing to do with what we are discussing here.

26. Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to fol-low the rules of common sense and self-interest—forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries. It is as though mankind had divided itself between those who believe in human omnipotence (who think that everything is possible if one knows how to organize masses for it) and those for whom powerless-ness has become the major experience of their lives.

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Meridian, 1958), p. 10.

5 . M O R E A B O U T T R AU M A S , C A L A M I T I E S , A N D C ATA S T R O P H E S

1. “Perhaps we only choose what we cannot avoid” (Arthur Schopenhauer).2. On this point I follow the idea of categories presented by Ernesto

Garzón Valdés in the first pages of his excellent book Calamidades (Barcelona, Gedisa, 2004).

3. If, as seems inevitable, when we refer to action in general we also include that variety traditionally known as action by omission, it is diffi-cult to conceive of a pure catastrophe, that is, a misfortune in which human intervention is not a significant factor. To put it directly: most supposedly natural catastrophes do not cause the same material and human damage according to whether they happen in a highly developed Western country or a third world country sunk in the most abject underdevelopment (we need only recall Amartya Sen’s famous work on democracy and famine). Here we can say that there is something calamitous about all catastrophes.

5. more about traumas, calamities, and catastrophes —141

4. In no case would this be a specious question. Indeed, many authors have insisted on the idea that our time has the dubious honor of having attained the highest levels in terms of calamities. And so Jürgen Haber-mas has written: “[our time] has ‘invented’ the gas chamber and total war, state planned genocide and the extermination camps, brainwashing, state security apparatuses and a panoptic surveillance of whole populations. The twentieth century has brought us more victims, more fallen soldiers, more dead civilians, more displaced minorities, more torture, more deaths from cold, hunger and mistreatment, more political prisoners and refugees than we could have imagined. The phenomena of violence and barbarism are the distinctive marks of this era.” Jürgen Habermas, “Learning from Catastro-phe: A Look Back at the Short Twentieth Century,” in his book The Postna-tional Constellation: Political Essays (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001).

5. Cf. María Inés Mudrovcic, “Trauma, memoria e historia,” in Daniel Brauer, ed., La historia desde la teoría, 2 vols. (Buenos Aires: Prometeo, 2009), 2:105–15. On the same subject an essential book is Michel de Certeau’s His-toire et psychanalyse entre science et fiction (Paris: Gallimard, 1987).

6. This is the question posed most recurrently by Primo Levi in his book, If This Is a Man (London: Abacus, 1987), and the subject he most insists on in the interview Primo Levi: Diálogo con Ferdinando Camon (Madrid: Anaya & Mario Muchnik, 1996).

7. Tzvetan Todorov, “The Uses and Abuses of Memory,” in Howard Marchitello, ed., What Happens to History (New York: Routledge, 2001). For the issue of narration as a suitable procedure, by way of the Kantian reflective judgment, for knowledge of these singularly traumatic events, see María Pía Lara, Narrating Evil (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).

8. Along a similar line to the one developed by Andreas Huyssen in his En busca del futuro perdido: Cultura y memoria en tiempos de globalización (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2002). Anson Rabinbach has written an interesting book, In the Shadow of Catastrophe: German Cultural Criticism (Berke-ley: University of California Press, 2001).

9. For such cases, Todorov has made a relevant statement: “Another rea-son for being concerned about the past is that it allows us to wash our hands of the present, as well as providing us with the benefits of a clear conscience.” Todorov, “The Uses and Abuses of Memory.”

10. Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, vol. 3: The Guermantes Way, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff (London: Penguin, 1982).

142—5. more about traumas, calamities, and catastrophes

11. We could supply abundant illustrations of all of them, but perhaps the idea of sacrifice deserves a chapter of its own, albeit only for having received this enlightening comment from Adorno and Horkheimer: “Each sacrifice is a restoration of the past, and is given the lie by the historical reality in which it is performed. The venerable belief in sacrifice is prob-ably itself a behaviour pattern drilled into the subjugated, by which they reenact against themselves the wrong done to them in order to be able to bear it. Sacrifice as representative restoration does not reinstate immedi-ate communication, which had been merely interrupted, as present-day mythologies claim; rather, the institution of sacrifice is itself the mark of an historical catastrophe, an act of violence done equally to human beings and to nature.” Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 41.

12. Slavoj Žižek, Revolution at the Gates (London: Verso, 2003), p. 277.13. See Daniel Innerarity’s book, Ética de la hospitalidad (Barcelona, Penín-

sula, 2001).14. Giacomo Marramao, Cielo e terra (Roma-Bari: Laterza, 1994). This

book develops and completes some of the issues posed in his earlier Potere e secolarizzazione (Rome: Riuniti, 1983). At all events, reconstructing the debate about the content of secularization would take us away from the main thrust of our argument in this text.

15. A major contribution to this task is to be found in the work by the Italian philosopher Alessandro Ferrara who, in books like Reflective Authen-ticity (New York: Routledge, 1998) or Justice and Judgement (London: Sage, 1999), has drawn a fertile line of work, one of the most interesting results of which is his later The Force of the Example (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).

B Y W AY O F A N E P I L O G U E

1. Ricardo Piglia, Respiración artificial (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1988).2. Ibid., pp. 34–35.3. Ibid., p. 55.4. Ibid., p. 56.5. Jorge Luis Borges, Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (London: Penguin,

2000).


6. The situation undoubtedly recalls the paradox stated some years ago by Pierre Vilar: revolution was on the agenda (to use the expression of the time) in the late sixties, when capitalism was showing signs of a greater capacity for integration, but disappeared at the end of the twentieth cen-tury, when its contradictions and destructive tendencies were manifesting themselves worldwide and no elements capable of countering them were emerging from within it.

7. On this subject a reference to Ulrich Beck’s book The Risk Society, trans. Mark Ritter (London: Sage, 1998) is almost inevitable. In it the author pres-ents a complete panorama of the insecurities of our time while developing a specific hypothesis about their structural character.

8. To put the issue in more expressly political terms: one thing is that for the left today a total rupture of current economic relations, or a change in the distribution of income in a revolutionary sense, completely ignoring the balances of the system, is almost unthinkable, and another quite differ-ent thing is that the substantial narrowing of the room for maneuver means totally renouncing any intervention in the processes that lead to inequality in our societies in order to change their nature.

9. Or, more exactly, of the right not to know. The argument to justify it is usually made by introducing the category of undesired effects: since at any particular moment a human action can lead to consequences that are as unforeseen as they are painful, one way of defending oneself from such a result is not to embark on the process, thus abstaining from obtaining the information. The counterargument to this would be to recall that noninter-vention can also be regarded as a form of action that, to the same extent, also generates its own undesired effects. The only supposition on which there can be no objection to the inhibition of knowledge is practically a self-con-tradictory one: that someone could guarantee that the practical applications of a particular piece of knowledge will solely and exclusively have effects or results that are harmful for the human race.

10. Though no doubt the claim that being free is not knowing what will happen would require more clarifications than its opposite, that is, not being free is being sure that only one thing can happen.

11. To avoid unnecessary misunderstandings as much as possible, we should point out that for some authors, far from questioning the dreams of the Enlightenment, this failure of utopian expectations is the best proof of their validity, even their triumph. It is not central to the purpose of this expo-sition to settle how much (and what) of the modern project is affected by


the twilight of the old utopias. Moreover, to enter into the issue would prob-ably make it necessary to reopen the debate—frankly annoying at this stage of the proceedings—about the validity, termination, or defeat of the modern project. A good representative of the authors mentioned is Wellmer, who has written the following on the subject:

The open-ended character of the project of modernity implies the end of utopia, if utopia means “termination” in the sense of a defini-tive realization of an ideal or a telos of history. The end of utopia, in this sense, is not the idea that we shall never be capable of fully realizing the ideal, but that the very idea of a definitive realization of an ideal state has no meaning in relation to human history. And the end of utopia in this sense, however, is not tantamount to the end of the radical impulses for freedom, moral universalism and the demo-cratic aspirations that are part of the project of modernity. . . . This end of utopia would not be a blocking of utopian energies, but rather their redirection, their transformation, their pluralization, because no human life, no human passion, no human love seems conceivable without a utopian horizon.

Albrecht Wellmer, “Models of Freedom in the Modern World,” in Endgames, The Irreconcilable Nature of Modernity: Essays and Lectures (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998).

12. In an emergency definition it could be said that the characteristic of subproducts is that they emerge from the search for—instead of being the result of—the action. For an analysis of those states that are subproducts (such as sleep, sexual potency or being in love) and whose analogy some authors apply for their own purposes to the social, see Jon Elster, Sour Grapes: Studies in the Subversion of Rationality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983) and “Deception and Self-deception in Stendhal,” in Jon Elster, ed., The Multiple Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

13. This conviction, like some of the others mentioned, is totally anti-intuitive. Indeed, the idea that markets, while doing some things well such as assigning scarce resources and ensuring choice through competition, do others, such as social equality, badly, or even very badly, as in the case of the conservation of the planet or the meaning of life, has become an almost unanimously accepted commonplace. Probably that realization gives rise to the need for markets to be regulated by institutions that can channel their wealth-creating dynamism, but that is not what is at issue here. In any case,


it is worthwhile drawing attention to Manuel Castells’s warning that our present extraordinary technological capacity can speed up the effects, both positive and negative, of the markets. For a criticism of the place attrib-uted to the economic sphere in our society, see the book by Pascal Bruckner, Misère de la prospérité (Paris, Grasset, 2002).

14. Michel Houellebecq, Whatever, English translation of Extension de la domaine de lutte by Paul Hammond (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1998).

15. The bibliography on the body is literally boundless. For the purposes of the issue here, we should mention Michel Feher, ed., Fragmentos para una his-toria del cuerpo humano (Madrid: Taurus, 1990–1992); M. Featherstone, “The Body in a Consumer Society,” in M. Featherstone, M. Hepworth, and B. Turner, eds., The Body: Social Process and Cultural Theory (London: Sage, 1991); A. J. Navarro, ed., La nueva carne: una estética perversa del cuerpo (Madrid: Valdemar, 2002); C. Shilling, The Body and Social Theory (London: Sage, 1993); or Josep Toro, El cuerpo como delito (Barcelona: Ariel, 1996). For my own part I have written on the body, placing it in the framework of the debate on dualism, in the chapter “En cuerpo y alma” of my book Menú degustación. La ocupación del filósofo (Barcelona: Península, 2009), pp. 102–7.

16. I have referred to this matter in two newspaper articles: “Nuevos tiempos, nuevas épicas,” El País, 28 May 2002 and “Vivir, sin ir más lejos,” El País, 28 October 2002.

17. Piglia, Respiración artificial, p. 34. Observe the closeness between these words and the ones used by Giorgio Agamben at the beginning of his book Infancy and History, trans. Liz Heron (London: Verso, 1993): “The question of experience can be approached nowadays only with an acknowledgment that it is no longer accessible to us. For just as modern man has been deprived of his biography, his experience has likewise been expropriated. Indeed, his incapacity to have and communicate experiences is perhaps one of the few self-certainties to which he can lay claim” (p. 13).

Absolute innocents, 51Acting out, 55–56, 69Action: history and, 75;

indeterminacy of, 41; intention and, 81; mystery of, 97–98; by omission, 140n3, 143n9; understanding, 37

Adorno, Theodor, 69, 73–74, 84, 104, 142n11

Agamben, Giorgio, 53–54, 138n15, 145n17

Age of Extremes, The: The Short Twentieth Century (Hobsbawm), 139n22

Althusser, Louis, 3Animality, return to, 1–2Anthropology, 92Anxiety, 100–1, 106Appadurai, Arjun, xiArendt, Hannah, 90, 95,

130n1, 131n6, 136n39; Dewey critiqued by, 133n18, 133n20; The Human Condition, 64–65, 98; The Origins of Totalitarianism, 140n26

Aristotle, 2

Aron, Raymond, 20Ash, Timothy Garton, 137n5Auschwitz: as ethical testing

ground, 69; as perfect crime, 72; typology of memory and, 54, 69–74

Bacon, Francis, 16Bataille, Georges, 97–98Bauman, Zygmunt, 133n19,

134n21Beck, Ulrich, 143n7Benjamin, Walter: “Experience

and Poverty,” 134n28; history and, 46, 58, 62, 72, 90–91, 110, 126n6, 129n24, 130n4; “Philosophy of History,” 62, 126n6, 129n24, 130n4

Berger, John, viii–xi, 123n1Bernstein, Richard, 91Bloch, Marc, 16, 22Blumenberg, Hans, 128n22,

129n24, 139n20Body, 1, 112, 119, 145n15Bonafini, Hebe de, 71Borges, Jorge Luis, 113, 139n17

index

148—index

Bounds of Sense, The (Strawson), 123n2

Braudel, Fernand, 15–16Brunschvicg, Léon, 15

Café, fake antique, 113, 115–16Calamity, 99, 101Campos, Álvaro de, 37Camps, Victoria, 128n21Capitalism, 40, 116, 129n26, 143n6Carr, E. H., 18Castell, Manuel, 144n13Catastrophe, 99, 140n3Caused mistakes, 36Certeau, Michel de, 19Chesneaux, Jean, 19Chomsky, Noam, 127n14Christianity, knowledge and,

129n24Cicero, 16, 44, 126n12Cielo e terra (Marramao), 108,

142n14Cioran, Emil, 8Collateral damage, 101Collective traumas, 99Collingwood, R. G., 41Communitarianisms, 61Community, of memory, 64–65Concentration camps, 54,

134n23, 141n4; see also Auschwitz

Conceptualized experience (erfahrung), 134n28

Continuism, 17–18, 39, 91Critical conscience, 55Criticism, 29Croce, Benedetto, 4Culture, history of, 85

Danger, memory at instant of, 110

Danto, Arthur, 126n6Davidson, Donald, 81Death: explanation for, 125n16;

of humanity, 31; of ideas, 12, 30; immortality and, 87–88, 92, 139n17; tedium or, 32; Wittgenstein on, 7

Decline of the American Empire, The, 32

Decolonization, xDefeat, 46–47De Greiff, Pablo, 48, 131n9Democracy, 35Desire, 127n15Destruction of the European Jews, The

(Hilberg), 69Dewey, John, 133n18, 133n20Diderot, Denis, 21–22Dilthey, Wilhelm, 105Doctrinal realism, 78Durkheim, Émile, 132n13Duty, of memory, 55, 68, 70Duvignaud, Jean, 128n23

Effect, history as, 25Eliot, T. S., 7, 113, 118Emancipation, 12, 30, 91Empathy, 54–55En busca del futuro perdido

(Huyssen), x, 141n8Enlightenment, 12, 35, 143n11Equality, 143n8, 144n13Erfahrung (conceptualized

experience), 134n28Erlebnis (preconceptual

experience), 134n28

index—149

Essentialism, of memory, 81Events: meaning of, 17; story

integrating, 98–99; will and, 38

Everyday, theoreticians of, 125n19

Evil, narratives of, 53Exceptionality, 73Executioners, 131n6Experience, 97–98, 109; loss

of, 138n15; meaning of, 112–13, 118; preconceptual and conceptualized, 134n28

“Experience and Poverty” (Benjamin), 134n28

Experienced past, 127n13

Faith, 61, 130n3Fake antique café, 113, 115–16Fascism, 35Fear: of pain, 7; trauma and,

100–1Febvre, Lucien, 16, 20–21Ferrara, Alessandro, 142n15Forgetting, viii, 5, 12, 55, 61;

cultivation of, 59; historian’s, 95; mourning and, 49; remembering and, ix–xi, 79–81

Forgiveness, 67Freedom, 143n10; defense of,

118; exercise of, 38; history and, 31, 38, 139n20

From Hegel to Nietzsche (Löwith), 12Fukuyama, Francis, 30, 116,

128n17Future: disappearance of, 93;

naturalized, 68; nostalgia

for, 114; passion for, 117, 120; past and, 67–68; piling up, 91; predicted, 35–36, 94, 140n26; produced, 36, 140n23; progress and, 130n1; representations of, 117–18; substance, viii; trauma and, 108–9; will and, 111–21

García Lorca, Federico, 48–49García Montero, Luis, 132n10“Garden of Forking Paths, The”

(Borges), 113Gil de Biedma, Jaime, 7Glory, democratized, 64“Glosas a Heráclito” (González),

xiiGnoseological effects, of

identity, 41Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von,

21Gómez Ramos, Antonio, 64González, Ángel, xiiGoytisolo, Juan, 3Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich, 58,

135n30

Habermas, Jürgen, 119, 141n4Halbwachs, Maurice, 132n13Happiness, 12Hegel, G. W. F., 7, 11, 54, 76,

128n18Heidegger, Martin, 7Heroes, 64Hilberg, Raul, 69Hiroshima, 73–74Histoire et mémoire (Le Goff ),

ix–x

150—index

Historians: adapted ideals of, 92–93; forgetting, 95; judging by, 22; obstacles facing, 77–78; present influencing, 18–19; problems of, 22–23; spontaneous philosophy of, 76; trauma and, 57

Historical discourse, wrinkles of, 109

Historical memory, 5, 48, 51, 132n10, 132n13, 134n27

History: action and, 75; ambiguity of, 23; Benjamin and, 46, 58, 62, 72, 90–91, 110, 126n6, 129n24, 130n4; blocked, 95; classical arguments about, 44; continuism and, 17–18, 39, 91; of culture, 85; defined, 5–6; as effect and responsibility, 25; end of, 12–13, 26, 31–32, 95; freedom and, 31, 38, 139n20; helping us to live, 20–22, 41; identity influenced by, 20, 32–34, 41; innocence of, 32–33; judging in, 22–23; limitations of, 137n4; losers of, 46–47, 72, 90; meaning of, 28, 32–33, 39–40; object of, 42; philosophers of, 76–77; politics and, viii, 46, 62–68; power and, 20–21, 32, 126n12; present and, 16–25, 41–42, 45–46, 76, 89, 120; refutation and, 29–30, 39; as science, 14–15, 17, 35, 46; specificity of, 14–15, 22; with

subject, 6; tasks of, 40–41, 63; totality of, 17–18, 22–23; utopias and, 27, 91, 117–18, 143n11; value of, 44; will and, 38, 40, 95; winners of, 46–47, 72, 74, 90, 130n4; writing, 92–93

History and Memory after Auschwitz (LaCapra), 58

History of the Present (Ash), 137n5Hobsbawm, Eric J., 139n22Hoffman, Stanley, 127n13Holocaust: memory and, x,

69–70, 72; trauma and, 69–70, 72, 103, 105–7, 133n19, 134n21, 138n10, 141n4; see also Auschwitz

Holy Book, 26, 33Homogenization, 84, 90Hope: defined, 119; disillusion

and, 37; liquidation of, 12; lost, 66, 120

Horkheimer, Max, 142n11Houellebecq, Michel, 119Human activity, time marked

by, 10Human Condition, The (Arendt),

64–65, 98Humanity, death of, 31Hume, David, 4, 123n2Huyssen, Andreas, x, 141n8

Ideals, 134n28; of Enlightenment, 35; historian’s, 92–93; virtue of, 28–29

Ideas: agreement over, 36; death of, 12, 30; of progress, 29, 91,

index—151

139n19; survival of, 29–30; suspect rehabilitation of, 105–7

Identity: gnoseological effects of, 41; history influencing, 20, 32–34, 41; loss of, 25; meaning and, 1–3, 8, 10, 33, 80, 123n2; memory and, 1–3, 5–6, 8, 10, 33, 80, 123n2; national, 64–65; nostalgia and, 8; self and, 1–2

Ideology: reservations about, 10; survival of, 29–30; tasks of, 21

Ignorance (Kundera), 137n7Imagined nostalgia, xiImmortality, 87–88, 92, 139n17Individual, memory of, 33Individualism, 60Inequality, 143n8, 144n13Infancy and History (Agamben),

145n17Inner Experience (Bataille), 97Innocence: absolute, 51; of

history, 32–33; of winners, 90Intention, action and, 81Interpretative framework, of

philosophers, 100Interpretive horizon, viiIntrahistory, xiIntroduction to the Philosophy of

History (Hegel), 11Involuntary memory, 58

Jonas, Hans, 116Judging, in history, 22–23Justice: memory linked to,

47–49, 59–60; moment

of, 62; poetic, 59, 135n31; transitional, 48, 131n9

Kant, Immanuel, 123n2Kapucinski, Ryszard, 130n3Kierkegaard, Søren, 33Knowing-in-order-to-avoid, 57Knowledge, 126n11; Christianity

and, 129n24; importance of, 42; inhibition of, 143n9; object of, 42; of present, 41; reality and, 23; social determination of, 19–20; of specific, 14–15; trauma and, 54–55, 141n7; volume of, 24–25

Kosselleck, Reinhart, 63, 76Kundera, Milan, 137n7, 138n8

LaCapra, Dominick, 50, 52–53, 55, 57; History and Memory after Auschwitz, 58; Writing History, Writing Trauma, 132n16, 133n17

L.A. Confidential, 79Lasch, Christopher, 129n26Legitimacy of the Modern Age, The

(Blumenberg), 129n24Le Goff, Jacques, ix–x, 89Leisure, 9–10Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel, 112Levi, Primo, 74, 141n6Liberalism, 30, 32, 128n18Life: gathered together, 80;

history helping, 20–22, 41; living, 98; Valéry defining, 34

Linear time, 8Lledó, Emilio, 7Logic, of memory, 63

152—index

Losers, of history, 46–47, 72, 90Löwith, Karl, 12Lukács, György, 14Lyotard, Jean-François, 12, 28,

127n16

Machiavelli, Niccolò, 15, 63, 135n36

Map, of pain, 51Marcuse, Herbert, 4–5Margalit, Avishai, 64–65Markets, 144n13Marquard, Odo, 139n20Marramao, Giacomo, 61, 108,

142n14Marx, Karl, 18, 34, 39–40Mass media, 84–86, 91, 138n13May ‘68, 45Meaning: of events, 17; of

experience, 112–13, 118; of history, 28, 32–33, 39–40; identity and, 1–3, 8, 10, 33, 80, 123n2; loss of, 28; of reality, 53–54

Memory: autonomy of, xi–xii, 89; community of, 64–65; deactivated, 89; defenders of, 44–50, 59; duty of, 55, 68, 70; essentialism of, 81; historical, 5, 48, 51, 132n10, 132n13, 134n27; Holocaust and, x, 69–70, 72; identity and, 1–3, 5–6, 8, 10, 33, 80, 123n2; of individual, 33; at instant of danger, 110; involuntary, 58; issue of, viii–ix; justice linked to, 47–49, 59–60; mass media and, 84–86, 91,

138n13; mourning associated with, 49–50; mystification of, 65; myth and, 16–17, 65–66; new discourses of, x; nostalgia industry and, xi; objective, 80; objects of, 3, 6; pastism and, 78–79; politics and, x–xi, 58–68; pseudonaive conception of, 63–64; reality and, 43–44, 90, 93; storytelling and, 111–12; subject and, 2–7, 9–10; technology and, 85–87, 94; time and, 1–10, 85; trauma and, 44–58, 104–5; uses of, 3–4; will and, 93; writer’s, 6; see also Typology, of memory

Metahistories, crisis of, 28–29Metaphysics (Aristotle), 2Monuments, trauma and, 51Mora, Miguel, 123n1Moralités (Valéry), 34Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo,

70–71Mourning, 49–50Mystification, of memory, 65Myth, memory and, 16–17,

65–66

Nagasaki, 73Narration, 45, 141n7Narratives: crisis of, 12; of evil,

53; redemptive, 133n17National identity, 64–65Nature, aggression toward, 116Negative Dialectic (Adorno), 73Negative sublime, 53Negri, Antonio, 98

index—153

Neruda, Pablo, 82Nietzsche, Friedrich, 4, 12, 24,

98–99Nostalgia, 125n18; for future, 114;

identity and, 8; industry, xi; rejection of, 7–8

Novalis, 63Nuclear arms, 73Nussbaum, Martha, 59

Objective memory, 80Objects: of history, 42; of

memory, 3, 6; singularity of, 14

Omission, action by, 140n3, 143n9

Original sin, 133n18, 133n20Origins of Totalitarianism, The

(Arendt), 140n26Ortega y Gasset, J., 76, 90

Pacheco, José Emilio, 82Pain: fear of, 7; insensitivity

to, 74; map of, 51; phantom, 94–95

Passion, for future, 117, 120Past: defending against,

83–90; experienced, 127n13; future and, 67–68; as incomprehensible, 23–25; overrated, 78; present and, 45–46, 52, 88–89, 93, 141n9; rehabilitated, 66–67; return to, 43–44, 67, 85, 89; sacrifice and, 106, 142n11; scar of, 109; self-representation and, 78–83; as tourism, 68; tradition and, 93, 130n1;

unfulfilled promises of, 66–67; as useless, 13–15; wrinkles of, 107–10

Pastism, 78–79Patocka, Jan, 22Peirce, Charles, 126n6Peloponnesian War (Thucydides),

15Perfect crime, Auschwitz as, 72Performative statements, 30Pericles, 64–65Pessoa, Fernando, 37Phantom pain, 94–95Philosophers: essence of, xii; of

history, 76–77; interpretative framework of, 100

Philosophical Dialogues and Fragments (Renan), 11

“Philosophy of History” (Benjamin), 62, 126n6, 129n24, 130n4

Piglia, Ricardo, 111–13, 118–20, 145n17

Plato, 5Poetic justice, 59, 135n31Polis, 64–65Political violence, 101Politics: battle of, 93; history

and, viii, 46, 62–68; memory and, x–xi, 58–68; Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo and, 70–71; primacy of, viii; remembering and, 65; scholarship and, 93; transformation in, 46; typology of memory and, 58–68, 73; victims and, 71

Possibility, mirage of, 90

154—index

Postmodernism, 12, 43, 60Power, history and, 20–21, 32,

126n12Preconceptual experience

(erlebnis), 134n28Present: as being, 113; distorting

mirror of, 139n19; elements of, viii; fragility of, 116–17; historians influenced by, 18–19; history and, 16–25, 41–42, 45–46, 76, 89, 120; knowledge of, 41; as new theoretical continent, 3; ontological superiority of, 18; opacity of, 77–78; parameters of, 43–44; past and, 45–46, 52, 88–89, 93, 141n9; theory of, 42; time and, 9, 113

Presentism, 4, 8–9, 41Progress: crisis of, 38; future and,

130n1; idea of, 29, 91, 139n19Prophecy, 30Proust, Marcel, 106Public denunciation, 59

Real capitalism, 40Reality: knowledge and,

23; meaning of, 53–54; memory and, 43–44, 90, 93; presentism and, 4, 8–9

Real socialism, 28, 39–40Reason, narration and, 45Redemptive narratives, 133n17Refutation, 29–30, 39Remembering: displeasure of, 7;

forgetting and, ix–xi, 79–81; political community taking on, 65; trauma, 105

Renan, Ernest, 11–12, 42Respiración artificial (Piglia),

111–13, 120Responsibility, history as, 25Revealed Truth, 26Revolution at the Gates (Žižek),

106–7Ricoeur, Paul, 55Risk society, 101Risk Society, The (Beck), 143n7Rorty, Richard, viiiRymer, Thomas, 135n31

Sacrifice, 106, 142n11Sánchez Ferlosio, Rafael, 20,

136n47Santayana, George, 44Sartre, Jean-Paul, 2, 31Scar, of past, 109Schiller, Friedrich, 32Scholarship, politics and, 93Science, 14–15, 17, 35, 46, 127n14Searle, John, 81Secularization, 142n14Self: identity and, 1–2; time and,

6–7Self-representation, 78–83Socialism, 28–30, 35, 39, 129n26Solidarité, La: Liens de sang et liens de

raison (Duvignaud), 128n23Spain, xi, 48–49, 51Specificity, of history, 14–15, 22Spinoza, Baruch, 98Spontaneous philosophy of

historians, 76Stalinism, 35Story, event integrated with,

98–99

index—155

Storytelling, memory and, 111–12

Strawson, Peter F., 123n2Subject: history with, 6; Kant

and, 123n2; memory and, 2–7, 9–10

Subproduct, 118, 144n12Supiot, Alain, 140n23

Technology, memory and, 85–87, 94

Tedium, 9, 32, 125n19Teleology: expedient of, 98;

foundation of, 34Thucydides, 15Time: defined, 5–6; human

activity marking, 10; linear, 8; memory and, 1–10, 85; present and, 9, 113; self and, 6–7

Todorov, Tzvetan, 92, 105, 138n10, 141n9

Tourism, past as, 68Tractatus (Wittgenstein), 6Tradition, 93, 130n1Transitional justice, 48, 131n9Trauma: anxiety and, 100–101,

106; collective, 99; defined, 103; discursive context of, 102–5; faithfulness to, 56; fear and, 100–1; future and, 108–9; historians and, 57; Holocaust and, 69–70, 72, 103, 105–7, 133n19, 134n21, 138n10, 141n4; knowledge and, 54–55, 141n7; memory and, 44–58, 104–5; monuments

and, 51; mourning and, 50; original sin and, 133n18, 133n20; rationalization of, 57; remembering, 105; as scar, 109; victims of, 46–48, 50–52, 55–56, 70–71, 105, 131n6, 136n47; vulnerability and, 100–5; wrinkles and, 107–10

Travel diary, 129n27Typology, of memory: Auschwitz

and, 54, 69–74; fifth group of, 59–63; four groups of, 44–50, 59; politics and, 58–68, 73; trauma and, 44–58

Unamuno, Miguel de, xi, 5Universality, vii, 19, 21, 29, 54Unpredictability, understanding,

35–36Untimely Meditation (Nietzsche),

24Utopias, 27, 91, 117–18, 143n11

Valéry, Paul, 34Vattimo, Gianni, 28, 84–85, 91,

126n6, 127n16, 138n13Vázquez Montalban, Manuel, xiVeyne, Paul, 127n15, 137n4Victims: categorization of, 131n6;

politics and, 71; of trauma, 46–48, 50–52, 55–56, 70–71, 105, 131n6, 136n47

Victory, 46–47Vilar, Pierre, 143n6Voice, returned, 62Voltaire, 22

156—index

Von Ranke, Leopold, 13, 78Vulnerability: perception of, 101;

trauma and, 100–5

Wellmer, Albrecht, 143n11White, Hayden, 56, 78Will: future and, 111–21; history

and, 38, 40, 95; memory and, 93; perplexity of, 121

Winners, of history, 46–47, 72, 74, 90, 130n4

Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 3, 6–7Work, 9–10

Working through, 55–56, 69Wrinkles, of past, 107–10Writer, memory of, 6Writing, of history, 92–93Writing History, Writing Trauma

(LaCapra), 132n16, 133n17

X-factor, 128n18

Yugoslavia, 49–50

Žižek, Slavoj, 106–7

NEW DIRECTIONS IN CRITICAL THEORY

AMY ALLEN, GENERAL EDITOR

Narrating Evil: A Postmetaphysical Theory of Reflective Judgment, María Pía Lara

The Politics of Our Selves: Power, Autonomy, and Gender in Contemporary Critical Theory, Amy Allen

Democracy and the Political Unconscious, Noëlle McAfee

The Force of the Example: Explorations in the Paradigm of Judgment, Alessandro Ferrara

Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence, Adriana Cavarero

Scales of Justice: Reimagining Political Space in a Globalizing World, Nancy Fraser

Pathologies of Reason: On the Legacy of Critical Theory, Axel Honneth

States Without Nations: Citizenship for Mortals, Jacqueline Stevens

The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy: Négritude, Vitalism, and Modernity, Donna V. Jones

Democracy in What State?, Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Daniel Bensaïd, Wendy Brown, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Rancière, Kristin Ross, Slavoj Žižek

Politics of Culture and the Spirit of Critique: Dialogues, edited by Gabriel Rockhill and Alfredo Gomez-Muller

Mute Speech: Literature, Critical Theory, and Politics, Jacques Rancière

The Right to Justification: Elements of Constructivist Theory of Justice, Rainer Forst

The Scandal of Reason: A Critical Theory of Political Judgment, Albena Azmanova

The Wrath of Capital: Neoliberalism and Climate Change Politics, Adrian Parr

Media of Reason: A Theory of Rationality, Matthias Vogel

Social Acceleration: The Transformation of Time in Modernity, Hartmut Rosa

The Disclosure of Politics: Struggles Over the Semantics of Secularization, María Pía Lara

Radical Cosmopolitics: The Ethics and Politics of Democratic Universalism, James Ingram

Freedom’s Right: The Social Foundations of Democratic Life, Axel Honneth

Imaginal Politics: Images Beyond Imagination and the Imaginary, Chiara Bottici

Alienation, Rahel Jaeggi

The Power of Tolerance: A Debate, Wendy Brown and Rainer Forst, edited by Luca Di Blasi and Christoph F. E. Holzhey

Radical History and the Politics of Art, Gabriel Rockhill

The Highway of Despair: Critical Theory After Hegel, Robyn Marasco

A Political Economy of the Senses: Neoliberalism, Reification, Critique, Anita Chari

The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory, Amy Allen

on the difficulty of living together: memory, politics, and history

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