History, Memory, and State-Sponsored Violence

Time and Justice

Berber Bevernage

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136634444
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: History

Modern historiography embraces the notion that time is irreversible, implying that the past should be imagined as something 'absent' or 'distant.' Victims of historical injustice, however, in contrast, often claim that the past got 'stuck' in the present and that it retains a haunting presence. History, Memory, and State-Sponsored Violence is centered around the provocative thesis that the way one deals with historical injustice and the ethics of history is strongly dependent on the way one conceives of historical time; that the concept of time traditionally used by historians is structurally more compatible with the perpetrators' than the victims' point of view. Demonstrating that the claim of victims about the continuing presence of the past should be taken seriously, instead of being treated as merely metaphorical, Berber Bevernage argues that a genuine understanding of the 'irrevocable' past demands a radical break with modern historical discourse and the concept of time.

By embedding a profound philosophical reflection on the themes of historical time and historical discourse in a concrete series of case studies, this project transcends the traditional divide between 'empirical' historiography on the one hand and the so called 'theoretical' approaches to history on the other. It also breaks with the conventional 'analytical' philosophy of history that has been dominant during the last decades, raising a series of long-neglected 'big questions' about the historical condition – questions about historical time, the unity of history, and the ontological status of present and past –programmatically pleading for a new historical ethics.

1	Introduction

One wants to break free of the past: rightly, because nothing at all can live in its shadow, and because there will be no end to the terror as long as guilt and violence are repaid with guilt and violence; wrongly, because the past that one would like to evade is still very much alive.

T. Adorno¹

In order to struggle against retribution, forgiveness finds its powerful ally in time.

W. Benjamin²

Several philosophers have noted the temporal dimensions of the relation between history and justice or ethics. The most explicitly pronounced and opposed positions in the debate undoubtedly are taken by Friedrich Nietzsche and Walter Benjamin. For Nietzsche, history always must serve life and the future; it should not strive to achieve historical justice.³ Nietzsche scorns the widespread ‘consuming fever of history’ and envies the cattle that, fettered to the moment, live unhistorically, in contrast to humankind, which is buried by the ever-increasing burden of what is past. To be able to live, he insists, humankind must abandon the hope for historical justice and must learn to forget.

In contrast, Walter Benjamin famously took an unreserved stance in favor of the innumerable victims of historical injustice still covered by the piling wreckage of the past.⁴ He defends an ‘anamnestic solidarity’ between the living and the dead, arguing that living generations should not primarily aim at the future but at preceding generations in their striving for justice.⁵ The living, Benjamin argues, possess a ‘weak messianic power’ to redress the injustices of a catastrophic past.

At the root of these opposing stances are radically different conceptions of the past and its ontological status. Within Western modernity the relationship between history and justice generally is dominated by the idea that the past is absent or distant.⁶ This ambiguous or even inferior ontological status of the past has led several philosophers, following Nietzsche, to plead against an ‘obsession’ with history and to argue instead for an ethics aimed at the present.⁷ The idea of the past as absent or distant makes it difficult to ground the frequently felt ‘duty to remember’ or alleged obligation to ‘do justice to the past’ in the (‘demanding’) past itself.⁸ History’s ability to contribute to the quest for justice, as a result, often seems very limited or even non-existent. The close relationship between this particular conception of historical time and the restricted ethical mandate of history becomes apparent when the former conception of time is contrasted with the notion of time often implied in the discourse of jurisdiction.

TIME OF HISTORY VS. TIME OF JURISDICTION

The French historian Henry Rousso noted in an interview that historians traditionally have seen the proper time for history as the inverse of the proper time for justice. While the law decrees that the possibility of prosecuting and punishing expires after a certain amount of time (with the important exception of crimes against humanity), the historian supposedly should begin work only after a certain waiting period, often after the dead are buried and the archives unsealed.⁹ Rousso rejects this notion of a waiting period but does not seem to realize that the temporal antagonism between history and justice is rooted much more deeply than appears at first sight. The conflict between the ‘time of jurisdiction’ and the ‘time of history’ (I refer here to history as a discipline or as a broader discourse) can be interpreted as an antagonism deriving from their respective emphasis on presence or absence and with the re- or irreversibility of the event at stake. Traditionally, the discourse of jurisdiction assumes a reversible time in which the crime is, as it were, still wholly present and able to be reversed, annulled, or compensated by the correct sentence and punishment. This notion of time relates to a quasi-economic logic of guilt and punishment, in which justice ultimately is understood as retribution and atonement. History, in contrast, traditionally works with what has happened and now is irretrievably gone. It stresses the ‘arrow of time,’ thinks of time as fundamentally irreversible, and forces us to recognize the dimensions of absence and the inalterability of the past.

History’s irreversible time challenges the time of jurisdiction: Retributive justice can never be speedy enough to fully reverse or undo the damage done because every crime is always already partly in the past and thus always displays a dimension of absence or distance. This makes it impossible, within history’s concept of irreversible time, to achieve complete justice after a period of time has elapsed. Whoever strives for a vaster moral mandate for history (in the name of the victims of historical injustice) will sooner or later have to confront this concept of time. Max Horkheimer used exactly this irreversible historical time as a fearsome weapon in his criticism of the eschatological and anamnestic philosophy of his friend Walter Benjamin. The idea of perfect justice, according to Horkheimer, is a recurring illusion that stems from a primitive idea of exchange.¹⁰ It is unthinkable that perfect justice can be realized within the realm of history because even a perfectly just society never can compensate for the misery of the past. The historical past is nichtwiedergutzumachende: ‘[past] injustices are over and done with. The murdered really are murdered.’¹¹

The irreversible time of history is right to criticize this ‘primitive idea of exchange’ that underlies the reversible time of jurisdiction. Both Emmanuel Levinas and, in his wake, Jacques Derrida have argued that the time of suffering and historical injustice is not quantifiable and cannot be used in a system of exchange.¹² Yet does the irreversible time of history in its turn not overstate the absence or distance of the past? Does it not neglect dimensions of persistence or haunting ‘presence’ of the past and its injustices?¹³ The emphasis on the absence and irreversibility of the past endows the irreversible time of history with something uncomfortable, something unjust, and something almost unacceptable in a moral sense. It is against such an irreversible time, which ‘threatens to destroy all morality,’ that the Belgian-Austrian Auschwitz survivor Jean Améry rebels in his notorious essay ‘Resentments’ (1966). Améry shocked his contemporaries by pleading against forgiveness and reconciliation in favor of resentment and by demanding a ‘moral inversion’ of time. He complained that: ‘the entire world really does understand the young Germans’ indignation at the resentful prophets of hate, and firmly sides with those to whom the future belongs. Future is obviously a value concept. What will be tomorrow is more valuable than what was yesterday.’ Améry encouraged resentment but realized that its backward temporal orientation is in conflict with some of the most dominant ideas concerning the irreversible nature of time:

Absurdly, it demands that the irreversible be turned around, that the event be undone. […] the time-sense of the person trapped in resentment is twisted around, dis-ordered, if you wish, for it desires two impossible things: regression into the past and nullification of what happened.¹⁴

Still, as a captive of the ‘moral truth,’ Améry demands a right of resistance against what he calls the anti-moral ‘biological’ time that heals all wounds:

What happened, happened. This sentence is just as true as it is hostile to morals and intellect. […] The moral person demands annulment of time—in the particular case by nailing the criminal to his deed. Thereby, and through a moral turning-back of the clock, the latter can join his victim as a fellow human being.¹⁵

BEYOND THE PRESENT AND THE ABSENT, THE REVERSIBLE AND THE IRREVERSIBLE: THE IRREVOCABLE

Améry is right, of course, when he admits the absurdity of trying to undo what has been done. However, I want to take seriously his complaints about the a- or even immoral character of irreversible time—seriously enough to take his complaint as one of the prime motivations for this book and to criticize and attempt to rethink this notion of time. Yet, how does one rethink the irreversible time of history with its stress on the distant or the absent without digressing into the mythical reversibility of the time of jurisdiction? How, indeed, is it possible to conceive of a third way, scrupulously resisting both poles of the dichotomous opposition of the reversible and the irreversible, or of the present present and the absent past?

A good starting point can be found in the work of the French philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch. In one of his philosophical masterpieces on time and temporality, Jankélévitch introduces an analytical distinction between what he calls the ‘irreversible’ and the ‘irrevocable.’¹⁶ Although both, according to Jankélévitch, are dimensions of the same temporal process, they refer to two radically different experiences of the past. The irreversible, a having-taken-place (avoir-eu-lieu) that should primarily be deciphered as a having-been (avoir-été), refers to a transient or fleeting past. The irrevocable, a having-taken-place most often associated with the having-been-done (avoir-fait), in contrast, is stubborn and tough. People experience the past as irreversible if they experience it as fragile and as immediately dissolving or fleeting from the present. They experience the past as irrevocable if they experience it as a persistent and massive depository that sticks to the present. Both experiences of the past, however, according to Jankélévitch, relate to an inverse impossibility: to either revisit a lost past or expel an importunate past; to bring an all-too-past past (un passé trop passé) into the present or banish an all-too-present past (un passé trop present) from that present.¹⁷

Jankélévitch’s analytic distinction is of great relevance because the concept of the irrevocable enables us to escape the seemingly compelling dichotomies we discussed above. Surely the irrevocable temporal experience, much like the irreversible time of history, stresses the inalterability of the past—what could it mean to call something irrevocable if not in the first place that it can never be revoked—but, in contrast to the irreversible time of history, it does not condemn that past to an inferior ontological status that facilitates its neglect. By referring to a past that got ‘stuck’ and persists into the present, the concept of the irrevocable indeed breaks with the idea of a ‘temporal distance’ between the present and the past that is so central in the irreversible time of history. Moreover, the irrevocable defies the dichotomy of the fixed categories of the absolutely absent and the absolutely present by referring to the incomplete and seemingly contradictory ‘presence’ of what is generally considered to be absent: i.e., the past.

This ‘presence’—or, better, nonspatial proximity—of the irrevocable should never be confused with the metaphysical notion of presence, which functions as the antonym of absence because that would lead to logical inconsistencies. Yet, denying the absolute absence of the past or rejecting the concept of temporal distance, by saying that the past is sometimes irrevocably stuck in the present, does not necessarily commit one to logical inconsistencies or absurdities—such as the idea of ‘backward causation’ or the denial of ‘path dependence.’¹⁸ In other words, the perspective of the irrevocable offers a great opportunity to criticize the irreversible time of history and to scrutinize the viability of an alternative chronosophy that would challenge the conception of the past as a ‘dead’ matter that is absent or distant and leave some intellectual space to take seriously the idea of a ‘persisting’ or ‘haunting’ past.

Yet, having said this, we should take the reasoning to its conclusions: A persisting ‘past’ does not simply deconstruct the notions of absence and distance; rather, it blurs the strict delineation between past and present and thereby even questions the existence of these temporal dimensions as separate entities. Therefore, I hope the reflection on the notion of the irrevocable will provoke us to rethink or reconsider two simple but fundamental questions: what does it actually mean for something or someone to be ‘past,’ and how do things, persons, or events become past? It strikes me that historians hardly ever (Michel de Certeau seems an important exception) explicitly raise this question about the peculiar ‘transition’ between present and past. Let us, then, briefly reconsider Henry Rousso’s comment about the ‘waiting period’ that has long been and still often is recommended to historians. Does not this long-standing taboo on the writing of ‘contemporary’ history—more than being merely a result of a practical problem relating to closed archives or the fear to work with lack of enough hindsight—primarily signal exactly this: a taboo on any practice that could bring up the tangled question of the (ontological) limits separating past and present and the living and the dead? Or formulated slightly differently, does not the relatively recent crumbling of the taboo on contemporary history and the increasing popularity of writing on an ever more recent past oblige us to start rethinking the most fundamental presumption that for so long has grounded most of academic historiography: the presumption that there is something like a ‘natural’ and ‘given’ break or distance between past and present?¹⁹ Does the past, as Chris Lorenz beautifully formulates it, have any ‘natural half-life’ as if it were a portion of depleted uranium?²⁰ Can a genuinely ‘contemporary’ history be based on the same (implicit) notions of time and temporality that for so long made many academic historians believe that they worked with a past that is ‘dead’ or ‘gone’? Because they are so closely related to the notion of the irrevocable, these questions will accompany us (although often remaining implicit) throughout the entire book.

Sadly, Jankélévitch prematurely aborts the promising opening offered by the notion of the irrevocable almost immediately after he has stated the latter’s existence as a category of experience. Jankélévitch hurries to stress the merely metaphorical or subjective character of the idea th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• Part I
• Part II
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index